Revolutionary movements in Africa – an untold story

November 2, 2023

While revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Europe, the United States and Latin America have been the subject of abundant literature, similar movements that emerged in Africa have received comparatively little attention. In an extract from their forthcoming book, the editors, Pascal Bianchini, Ndongo Sylla and Leo Zeilig shed new light on these political movements. They argue that Africa’s revolutionary left was extremely active in these years, and forms a vital part of global history.

By Pascal Bianchini, Ndongo Sylla and Leo Zeilig

The history of revolutionary left movements in Africa is largely ignored and disregarded among political scientists, historians and across the academic literature on Africa. Most of the existing literature consists of memoirs from former activists. However, most of the rank-and-file activists and even some of the leaders of these movements went to their graves without having an opportunity to tell their own stories.

The invisibility of the African revolutionary left in the existing literature contrasts with the situation prevailing on other continents, where we find a rich collection of books on the subject. In place of serious research on this issue, we find research and writing on related issues such as African revolutions and uprisings, invariably guerrilla warfare launched by liberation movements against colonial or neocolonial armies.[1] Other publications have focused on revolutionary regimes.[2] Still more research can be found on prominent figures, not to say tragic revolutionary heroes, such as Amílcar Cabral or Thomas Sankara who lost their lives in the struggle (and those like Patrice Lumumba who lost their lives at the start of independence). [3] Finally, some contributions have shed light on the relations developed between African activists and revolutionaries and the former state socialist countries and the attraction exerted by this model of socialism, and more recently on the relations between African liberation movements and Western communist parties.[4]

The obstacles to understanding the history of Africa’s revolutionary movements

In contrast to the rest of the world, where essays, monographs and histories have been written on radical left movements during their heyday, this is not the case for their African counterparts. [5] At first glance, the history of African revolutionary movements seems less epic. Compared to the Cuban revolution in Latin America or to the Vietnamese popular war that inspired revolutionary movements during the 1960s and 1970s, the African continent might appear unfavourable terrain for revolutionary struggles. [6]

Che Guevara, the most iconic figure of the 1960s, himself expressed reservations about the prospects of revolutionary victories in Africa. After his unsuccessful attempt in Congo, he wrote: ‘Africa had a long way to go before it achieved real revolutionary maturity.’[7]

However, many revolutionary movements around the world during the 1960s and the 1970s, even if they have been able to challenge the state, were finally defeated – for example, the Naxalites in India and the Tupamaros in Uruguay, not to mention the Black Panthers in the USA.[8] Yet their experience influenced revolutionaries from other countries. The idea of a ‘lack of maturity of the African people’ imbued with localist traditional values is still an underlying prejudice about the revolutionary perspectives in Africa among many commentators, though it is a terrible misconception, especially when it is expressed in general for a whole continent.

Moreover, the extraordinary anti-colonial struggles and the creation of new independent states occurred during the Cold War. Anti-colonial movements and radical organisations within these movements were considered by mainstream observers as Soviet proxies rather than independent actors. In this way, a well-known American commentator could write:

“The Soviet Union has supported nationalist development in Africa as part of its global strategy to create situations of instability and weakness within the Western world, to train and indoctrinate Communist leadership cadres with the expectation that by manipulating mass discontent and nationalist symbols they could seize power in African Soviet Republics, and, in general, to carry out Lenin’s dictum to attack the West through its dependent territories.”[9]

For several decades, the reference to Marxism in these liberation movements was still considered as fundamental, and according to this view, radical movements and politics could not survive the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.[10] However, such conceptions ignore the ability of African activists and intellectuals to embrace, create and adapt revolutionary doctrines for their own sake. The idea that activists and revolutionaries simply imported ready-made doctrines from a Marxist-Leninist blueprint is at best a narrow point of view, at worst a deeply patronising and colonial idea.

Of course, this position of principle must not lead us to ignore the numerous hurdles faced by left movements in Africa, whether from external or internal causes. During the twentieth century, the penetration of communist ideas in the contemporary sense of the word was linked to the establishment of colonial institutions and the labour force necessary for the colonial economy. Then, the major issue raised for the development of left-wing organisations (mainly communist) was the relationship with the emerging nationalist movements, though even when the colonial period came to an end, many areas remained out of reach for communist-inspired organisations.

If we go back to Karl Marx himself, we know that he was among the few European theorists of his generation who did not try to conceal his ‘debt’ to Africa, but celebrated such knowledge as foundational. Recent work by the Nigerian scholar Biko Agozino shows how people of African descent were central to the theory, practice and writings of Marx, including in Capital.[11] In addition to his major writings were the letters he wrote from Algeria at the end of his life, or more significantly, the articles on African-Americans during the Civil War in the United States.[12] Although it has been considered Eurocentric, his work was inspirational for many African-American and African thinkers, so that Marxist ideas have deeply influenced the ‘making of a Black radical tradition’.[13]

Even more unexpected, if we take a closer look at such an iconic figure as Cheikh Anta Diop, often associated with ‘Afro-centricity’, we note that his writings did not ignore Marxist analysis and that his own involvement in Senegalese politics with the Rassemblement national démocratique (National Democratic Rally) during the late 1970s occurred in relation with Marxist activists from the Parti Africain de l’Indépendance (PAI, African Independence Party) and from Maoist groups which joined the party he had created.[14]

In Africa, the ‘boom’ of Marxist revolutionary ideas occurred especially during the decades examined in this book. Later on, these ideas retreated from the continent, which can give the utterly false impression that it was mainly a Western fad. However, this ideological decline of Marxism is not unique to Africa, rather it was a more general and global phenomenon that goes beyond the scope of this introduction and volume.

A chronological framework for the history of the revolutionary left in Africa

In order to give an outline of the historical development of revolutionary movements in Africa, we propose a division into three periods. First, we identify pioneers who challenged triumphant colonialism in calling for Pan-Africanist solidarity (from London in 1900 to Manchester in 1944) and also for some of them in developing connections with Communist organisations during the interwar period, especially since the creation of the Soviet Union and the Third International. This early period of the revolutionary left embodied by activists often based in Europe, in the colonial metropolis, such as Lamine Senghor or Tiemoko Garang Kouyate for the French colonies or Wallace Johnson for the British colonies, is not within the scope of this book. However, these figures have been rediscovered and celebrated by the generations that followed, especially in the 1970s. The main debate for this generation was ‘Panafricanism or Communism?’, as suggested by a famous book written in the late 1950s as a reassessment of this period.[15] However, if tension has existed between the two orientations, they were not always in contradiction.[16]

We then identify a second period which is shorter and more difficult to delineate, during the late colonial era and the aftermath of the struggle for independent states. During this time, anti-colonial movements became more radicalised, especially when confronted with delaying tactics from colonial powers. In parallel, during this period, the influence of communist and progressive forces grew to the point that the centre of gravity shifted from the diaspora to African territories, even when they were not yet mass parties. At the same time, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the People’s Republic of China began to appear as attractive counter-models to Western capitalism.

Finally, we see in the 1960s and the 1970s a third wave of activism sweeping across Africa, as it did throughout the whole world, and the Global South. These ‘anti-systemic’ movements were not only directed against Western imperialist domination, but also against ‘bureaucratised’ states claiming to stand for socialism.[17] In Africa, this New Left developed during and after 1968 and jostled with the ‘old left’, still aligned with the USSR. Clandestine movements were burgeoning in every part of the continent, and a spirit of rebellion was challenging the political order.[18] This historical development has remained largely ignored for decades. However, recent publications have emphasised the role played during these years by certain ‘capitals of the revolution’ where emblematic revolutionary figures such as Che Guevara, Stokely Carmichael, Elridge Cleaver and others travelled or settled, for example in Algiers, Brazzaville, Conakry or Dar es Salaam.[19]

These countries became new bases or refuge sanctuaries for freedom fighters against the apartheid system, counter-insurgency campaigns and assassinations launched against the Black Power movement in the United States, Portuguese colonialism, and exiled nationalist activists and revolutionaries from struggles in Southern Africa. This solidarity frequently exposed these states to attacks from the South African or Portuguese armies or secret services which were waging a dirty war against their opponents, as was shown with the assassination of Eduardo Mondlane in Tanzania in 1969 and of Amílcar Cabral in Conakry in 1973.[20]

However, beside these ‘spectacular’ headline developments, less noticeable radical experiences are to be found in every African country. This book will shed light on these forgotten realities, with most of our chapters centred on this third revolutionary age.

Revolutionary Movements in Africa: An Untold Story is published by Pluto Press in December 2023 (to pre-order the book please click here).

Pascal Bianchini is a sociologist and independent researcher based in Senegal. Ndongo Samba Sylla is a Senegalese development economist and co-author of Africa’s Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story and author of The Fair Trade Scandal. Leo Zeilig is an editor of the Review of African Political Economy.

Featured Photograph: The mass of assembled strikers from Coronation Brick works, during the Durban Strikes in 1973 (David Hemson, David Hemson Collection, UCT Libraries) .

Notes

[1] Françoise Blum, Révolutions africaines: Congo-Brazzaville, Sénégal, Madagascar, années 1960–1970, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014; Willow J. Berridge, Civil Uprisings in Modern Sudan: The ‘Khartoum Springs’ of 1964 and 1985, London: Bloomsbury Press, 2015. Gérard Chaliand, Armed Struggle in Africa: With the Guerrillas in ‘Portuguese’ Guinea, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969; Basil Davidson, No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky: The Liberation of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, 1963–74, London: Zed Books, 1974.

[2] David Ottaway and Marina Ottaway, Afrocommunism, New York: Africana Publishing House, 1981.

[3] Patrick Chabal, Amilcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People’s War, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003. For a broader scope than Chabal’s views, see Antonio Tomas, Amílcar Cabral: The Life of a Reluctant Nationalist, London: Hurst, 2021. Bruno Jaffré, Biographie de Thomas Sankara: la patrie ou la mort …, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007; Ernest Harsch, Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014.

[4] Maxim Matusevich, ‘Revisiting the Soviet Moment in Sub-Saharan Africa’, History Compass, 7(5), 2009, 1,259–1,268. Eric Burton and Constantin Katsakioris, ‘Africans and the Socialist World: Aspirations, Experiences, and Trajectories: An Introduction’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 54(3), 2021, 269–278. Françoise Blum, Marco Di Maggio, Gabriele Siracusano and Serge Wolikow (eds), Les partis communistes occidentaux et l’Afrique: une histoire mineure?, Paris: Hémisphères, 2021.

[5] For the United States, see Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, London: Verso, 2002, and for a synthetic view on the revolutionary left in Latin America, see Verónica Oikión, Solano Eduardo Rey and Tristán Martín López ávalos (eds), El Estudio de las Luchas Revolucionarias en América Latina (1959–1996), Estado de la Cuestión, Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacan, 2013.

[6] Two books in particular were bedtime reading for the generation of the 1960s: Che Guevara, Che Guevara on Guerrilla Warfare, New York: Praeger, 1961, and Nguyen Vo Giap, People’s War People’s Army: The Viet Cong Insurrection Manual for Underdeveloped Countries, New York: Praeger, 1962.

[7] Che Guevara, The Congo Diary: Episodes of the Revolutionary War in Congo, Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2011.

[8] Prakash Singh, The Naxalite Movement in India, New Delhi: Rupa, 2006. Lindsey Churchill, Becoming the Tupamaros: Solidarity and Transnational Revolutionaries in Uruguay and the United States, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014.

[9] James S. Coleman,‘Contemporary Africa Trends and Issues’ , Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 298, 1955, 96.

[10] Allison Drew, ‘Comparing African Experiences of Communism’, in Norman Naimark, Silvio Pons and Sophie Quinn-Judge, The Cambridge History of Communism, Vol. II: The Socialist Camp and World Power, 1941–1960s, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, 519.

[11] Biko Agozino, ‘ The Africana Paradigm in Capital: The Debts of Karl Marx to People of African Descent’‘, Review of African Political Economy, 41(140), 2014, 172–184.

[12] Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1992.

[13] Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, London: Zed Books, 1983.

[14] Thierno Diop, ‘Cheikh Anta Diop et le matérialisme historique’, in Marxisme et critique de la modernité en Afrique, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2007, 145–175. Pascal Bianchini, ‘Cheikh Anta Diop et les marxistes au Sénégal: des relations ambivalentes entre démarcations et rapprochements, entre intégrations et scissions’,, Revue d’histoire contemporaine de l’Afrique, 4, forthcoming, 2023.

[15] George Padmore, Panafricanisme ou communisme? La prochaine lutte pour l’Afrique, Paris: Présence africaine, 1962.

[16] On this period and the relation between Pan-Africanism, Pan-Negrism and communism in the African diasporas, see: Philippe Dewitte, Les mouvements nègres en France, 1919–1939, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985; Jonathan Derrick, Africa’s ‘Agitators’: Militant Anti-Colonialism, London: Hurst, 2008; Hakim Adi, Panafricanism and Communism: The Communist International and the African Diaspora, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2013.

[17] Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘New Revolts against the System’‘, New Left Review, 18, 2002, 33–34.

[18] Heike Becker and David Seddon, ’Africa’s 1968: Protests and Uprisings across the Continent’.

[19] Elaine Mokhtefi, Algiers, Third World Capital: Black Panthers, Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, London: Verso, 2018. See Chapter 8. Amandla Thomas-Johnson, Becoming Kwame Ture, Cape Town: Chimurenganyana Series, 2020. George Roberts, Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam: African Liberation and the Global Cold War, 1961–1974, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. See also Chapters 12 and 13.

[20] George Roberts, ‘The Assassination of Eduardo Mondlane: Mozambican Revolutionaries in Dar es Salaam’, in Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam, 135–172. Peter Karibe Mendy, ‘The “Cancer of Betrayal”: The Assassination of Amílcar Cabral, 20 January 1973’, in Amílcar Cabral: A Nationalist and Pan-Africanist Revolutionary, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2019, 166–182.

Bobi Wine is no Fela, and Fela is no Bobi Wine: Comparing Africa’s Intellectuals

ROAPE

October 31, 2023

In this blog post, Yusuf Serunkuma draws a compelling comparison between Bobi Wine of Uganda and Fela Kuti of Nigeria, both of whom are recognized as among Africa’s most creative artists and courageous political activists for their resistance against dictatorship. Serunkuma emphasises that despite the possibility that Bobi Wine’s music and activism may have surpassed Fela Kuti’s, he remains underappreciated by Western observers.

By Yusuf Serunkuma

I was in graduate school exactly 10 years ago when I got introduced to Fela Anikulapo Kuti (1938-1997). As a country lad raised on local drums, storytelling music of the kandongokamu genre, Congolese Lingala and South African anti-apartheid music, I had never heard of the Nigerian Afro-beat maestro. Even when I learned about him, it was not much his musical talents but his unflinching activism and bravery that blew me off. It was Tejumola Olaniyan’s elegant writing and argumentation in Arrest the Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics powerfully introduced me to the legend. By then, I had started honing my activist antennae and had fallen in love with what could be called “rebel literature and art.” Okot p’ Bitek’s essays in Artiste the Ruler had made a wonderful impression on my restless self, as I tried to understand the ruins, and pains of eking an existence in a quintessential World Bank colonial-extractive outpost called Uganda. As a Ugandan reading Olaniyan’s magisterial book on Fela—and having come of age in the time of the singing trio in Bobi Wine, Jose Chameleon and Bebe Cool—I could not help but see Bobi Wine written all over the pages. Of the three Ugandan entertainers, only Bobi Wine had cut a distinguishable political identity in his artistry and public intellectualism—which eerily resembled Fela.

Similarities with Fela were so unmissable. Could Bobi Wine have been copy-pasting Fela? Check, for example, Bobi Wine’s Ghetto Republic—for which he had self-declared himself president— and Fela’s Kalakuta Republic! While the copy-pasting seemed obvious, Bobi Wine’s Ghetto Republic exuded an undeniable authentic lustre: He was born and raised in the slums of Kamwokya, and his entire crew—Fire Base Entertainment—were mostly residents of these slums. His brother, Fred Nyanzi, often saluted in Bobi Wine’s lyrics as ‘Chairman Nyanzi,’ was actually a local council chief in these ghettos, and his other brother, Eddy Yawe owned One Love recording studio inside the same ghetto. Undoubtedly, for his lyrical and musical genius, Bobi Wine had made the Kamwokya slums admirable to folks from posher neighbourhoods—such as fellow artiste, Navio with whom they collaborated to do the song ‘Badman from Kamwokya.’ This would make the ‘president’ label fitting and natural for Bobi Wine especially after his career kicked off fairly early. His entire packaging against his lived reality rendered him immense authenticity.

A staged play in honour of the Women of the Kalakuta republic, the home to the king of Afro beats Fela Kuti. (wiki commons)

When it came to the music itself, how could Bobi Wine craft a lyrical genius by just aping Fela?! It was not possible. I could imagine that many artists have tried to follow maestros of the past, but all they do is record a song or two before turning to something more natural to them. If Bobi Wine had really aped Fela all the while, then still, he was so good at it. But there seemed something peculiar, original, about Bobi Wine’s own craft. He had a long list of songs—so suited to the Ugandan context—that were direct commentaries and interventions on current affairs in the political-social milieu of the time, dating way back from the beginning of his career. The themes and subjects ranged from the excesses of politicians such as corruption and fakeness to matters of a sociological nature, such as gender, ageing, wasted youthfulness, hustling, and family roles and values. The list remains long and complex and spans a long period.

Sampling the most spectacular and most interventionist (from over 80 songs over a 15-year career) one cannot miss Mwekume featuring Wetherman who powerfully and skilfully tackled the scourge of HIV/AIDS in 2004 advising young people to wear condoms. This message was radical in its time. Then came Adam ne Kawa with Nubian Li done in 2005; and “Mama wa abaana, Taata wa abaana” with Juliana Kanyomozi — both done almost at the same time discussing domestic relations as the national parliament debated the controversial Domestic Relations Bill (DRB); and later doing Kiwaani in 2011, which is about fakery around Kampala, and Tugambire Ku Jenifer in 2012, which directly criticised the ways in which then newly appointed Kampala City Council Authority director, Jenifer Musisi overzealously went about “ modernising” Kampala, which terribly ruined the lives of ordinary folks who sketched an existence on the margins of city—and happened to be mostly road sidewalk vendors and owners of makeshift kiosks. Bobi Wine was challenging Kampala’s CEO, “For whom was her modernizing Kampala?” That this specific song—as happened to Kiwaani—would be temporarily banned from being played on radio and TV made his comparison to Fela Kuti even more appealing. I will not go into his later explicitly activist-political music, because this comes after my 2013 encounter and comparisons with Fela. But a recently completed Ph.D. dissertation at Makerere University by Jonathan Mugyenyi builds specifically on Bobi Wine’s music genius.

Suffice to emphasise that these songs are not mimicries of Fela, but were powerful for their lyrics, and unmistakeable danceable beats. You couldn’t miss Jamaican influences—not Nigerian—of legends from as Shabba Ranks, Chaka Demus and Pliers, which is discernible in their mimicry of Jamaican Patois, dance rhythms, and dance beats. But also, one quickly realises Bobi Wine also relies on Kandongokamu storytelling patterns—most famously of the didactic nature embodied by local legend, Paul Job Kafeero. In the midst of this excitement, in 2014, I published an essay in The Independent magazine turning Olaniyan’s title somewhat upside down: “Release More Music! Mr Ghetto President,” I cried out as I attempted to spell out the likeness between Fela and Bobi Wine, while cheering on Bobi Wine to stress, mostly, his political-activist potential.

People Power

Later on in life, Bobi Wine intensified and expanded his reach as an activist—and public intellectual—more powerfully with the People Power Movement. With catchy slogans such as “Get your national ID” and songs for defiance, “We were crafted to be broken, but left the pottery as one piece,” Bobi Wine remarkably conscientized and inspired millions of young Ugandans, to return to politics, which they had abandoned for a long time. (Seen to be exploiting the government call for Ugandans to process their IDs—as a way of encouraging young people into political consciousness and rebel activism—the NRM government considered putting the entire exercise on a halt, yet it had been promoting the exercise itself). When Bobi Wine fully joined politics—winning the by-election for Kyadondo North seat in Parliament—and later standing for president in the 2021 Ugandan election, for a scholar working retrospectively, Bobi Wine emerged from the shadows of Fela—if he hadn’t distinguished himself already—as an original, and independent artiste. But I could not shake off this nagging feeling that Bobi Wine may have fallen in love with Fela at the beginning of his career in the early 2000s. I sought him out for this piece and learned that although he had heard about Fela, he only fully came to appreciate his stature and started to admire him fully after a 2017 meeting with Fela’s close friend and then producer, Rikki Stein. Bobi Wine tells me:

“I had heard about Fela as that Nigerian artiste who had married many women all at once, was very stubborn, and was good at jazz. Only in 2017 did I fully come to know who Fela was. This happened when I met Rikki Stein who happened to have been a close friend of Fela. Rikki is also friends with the Kabaka and had come to Kampala to attend a Kabaka event. When I walked into the room and was welcomed with cheers and whistles, Rikki asked who I was. And when he learned I was Bob Wine, he had heard about me, he made sure we spoke on the sidelines of the event. He told me I was so like his late friend, Fela and challenged me to know more about this man. I have done so over the past years, listened to his music, read what has been written about him, and now fully understand his legendary stature. In fact, I was honoured to do his song, Sorrow, Tears and Blood, at the Freedom Concert in South Africa in 2020.”

Bobi Wine told me he didn’t like the personal profile he had heard about Fela before 2017. He had not been impressed by the man’s decision to marry so many women all at once. This detail had gone viral about Fela, and many Christian-raised folks didn’t like this bit. It is also important to note that as a young man, Bobi Wine was raised on kandongokamu music, which was still the most powerful genre on the local scene, and the commonest imports were Jamaican dance hall and Congolese Lingala music. Indeed, you cannot miss the fact that many artists emerging at this moment craved to sound like Jamaica’s stars in Chaka Demus and Pliers, Buju Bunton or Shaba Ranks among others. To this end, it is difficult to make the conclusion that Bobi Wine had picked immensely from Fela—because he actually knew little about the legend. Again, if he did, then he learned from the master and took the craft to another level. What is unmistakable is that the two legends lived in different times and responded to the call of their society in almost the same way. It would be meaningless to rank them, especially since they lived in different times, and the younger of the two must have picked inspiration from the other, but they ought to be studied closely, and independently.

Mr Luyimbazi Nalukoola talks with musician and politician Hon Kyagulanyi Ssentamu popularly known as Bobi Wine (wiki commons).

The usual agonies of framing Africa

It was in the process of being commissioned by a publisher in the Western world to write a piece about Bobi Wine for a series publication, “Music and politics,” that returned me to this question—this almost unnecessary comparison—about Bobi Wine being or not being Fela. Interested in writing about six artists from across the continent (including Burkina Faso, Guinea, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Uganda) each as seen through one song, I felt the editors had, quite problematically, straight-jacketed that these artists can be summarised into one of their songs, that, as they pitched the series, “changed the situation or is very representative of a politic period of the country.” I have no idea why he thought it could be one song—and not several songs—encapsulating every single artiste of some renown on the continent. Maybe it worked for some of the project subjects.

While I would struggle to agree to a lumping of all these artists—from six different countries—into a singular project, however generous the uniting embroidery could be, my knowledge of Bobi Wine, made my objections even more immediate. It would be a relic of a piece of writing. Not in his present time. Maybe possible five years ago, but not this time. I tried to explain to my commissioners that such a narrow framing would be unfair to a man of Bobi Wine’s stature. This man recently stood for the presidency (and sections of the country believe he won the election but was cheated out by the incumbent). Presently, Bobi Wine’s political party, the National Unity Platform (NUP) is the leading opposition political party in the country. At the risk of sounding nationalistic (about Bobi Wine), I do not know of any other artiste on the African continent with such a resume—present and past—who has commanded a similar profile as this man, as a master entertainer, but also used his clout and craft of popular culture to seek to challenge the status quo—as a public intellectual and presidential candidate. I felt it would be unfair to myself as a writer, and the subject itself to be contained in such a schema at this moment in time, considering also that the man is presently still politically active. I know, something could be written, but why was it suited for this moment to write about Bobi Wine backwards (like we were in the early 2010s?) And why bundle six artists across the continent into a singular narrative schema?

Noticing that my would-be editors had heard about Bobi Wine, but didn’t know the man fairly enough for better conceptualisation, in one phone call, I referenced a more familiar artiste, Fela Kuti, so as to drive my point home. I noted, “Bobi Wine, took Fela’s craft a notch higher.” My editor on the phone threw me a line that has finally provoked this writing, “of course, Bobi Wine is not Fela, but I understand what you are saying.” We then carried on with a couple of other things and ended the call. But I could not stop wondering what my editor meant when they chose to emphasise that Bobi Wine was not Fela. Of course, he is not. These are two different men. But you could not miss the ranking of greatness in the emphasis, where my would-be editors thought to make it clear that Fela ranked alone. What did they know that I did not know either about Fela or about Bobi Wine? In the dead of the night, I returned to my love affair with Olaniyan’s lively rendering of Fela Kuti, but also my sense of Bobi Wine.

The artists and their political economies

It is my contention that when writing about the subaltern world—after all the anti-stereotyping pushbacks—western scholarship and journalistic writing, in an effort to discard its orientalist ontology (although scattered fragments of orientalism have remained), has instead decided to follow an economic “initial sensibility”: it is not less the racist stereotyping that imbues the writing—this remains a common and settled denominator with Europe sticking to its universalizing claims—but rather histories and levels of integration into the global economy, and perceptions of poverty that drive the writing. In sum, whether it is writing about peoples and cultures, literature, talents or levels of innovations, or even seemingly benign things such as kinship relations and traditions, the writers from the Western world operate on an economic scale module. Something like the more economically advanced a space (country or region) is perceived to be, the more its abilities for progress, innovation, and making culture.

The scholarship is thus influenced, seasoned and pre-conditioned by the writers’ biases and knowledge of the subject’s interactions with the global north economies. For example, scholarship about art, culture, and innovations in South Africa tends to have fairer portrayals than the same items being studied in Malawi or Burundi. This is not to say that scholars enter into their research subjects with these sensibilities, but there seems plenty of room—unconsciously created—for South African inventions over Malawian ones, for Moroccan or Nigeria over Ugandan and Kenyan. Suffice to mention that these biases are not constructed in a vacuum but are constructed over a period. This is the reminder that Edward Said makes in 2003, reintroducing Orientalism, and how these narratives are sustained. Said noted that in the United States and Europe then (and nowadays), bookstores were “filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, Arab threat and the Muslim menace.” The effect is that this forms the worldview of Arabs and Muslims. The same could be said about our views of Africans and their poverty, and how in the midst of their poverty, they cannot fancy progress and culture—and the economic scale kicks in where the supposedly wealthier, the supposedly more respected and more fancied.

I need to start this story from the beginning. As a player on the local political scene in Uganda—mostly as a loudmouthed analyst and scrawny columnist—I have become critical of Bobi Wine in the more recent past. I disapproved of his decision to join active politics (I felt he was better as the symbol of the People Power movement); I also disapproved of the decision to form the NUP political party, arguing it both instrumentalised and thereby killed People Power; and heavily faulted him for letting go of the many “revolutionary moments” that opened in the course of and immediately after the 2021 presidential election. But my criticism notwithstanding, I am fully persuaded by the man’s creative genius as an artist and entertainer, but also as a public intellectual. If he lived in a bigger economy—a more globally integrated one—he would attract incredible amounts of curiosity and study and would be winning global awards. Thus, when confronted with a framing, which I felt did not do enough justice to his artistry and political stature, I was confident in raising my objections. Unbeknownst to me this moment became one of reflection and learning, not about just how interesting but also understudied Bobi Wine’s artistic and political genius was, but appreciating and reflecting upon the reasons why some subjects are more studied, more appreciated, and elevated. This process reaffirmed the place and power of political economies in the ways in which we narrativize our world. The research/studied subject ought to be seated in a bigger economy for their genius to shine.

Hitherto persuaded that Bobi Wine—who is still musically and politically active—had already extended, if not superseded Fela’s remarkable genius, the editor’s reminder shocked me out of this arguably Ugandan-nationalist stupor. For some time, I couldn’t get my mind off the subject. Framing the puzzle differently, I asked the question: why do chroniclers, journalists, scholars, and editors from the Western world come to know more about one place than the other? My (again, arguably, nationalistic) bias was that not enough is known about Bobi Wine, especially his musically rendered activism. He has not done his craft in English, not staged shows to European audiences in the Western world; and neither does he have European production teams. Even when he became a remarkable politician, not enough has been written about him, with thorough research and in-depth study. (except that PhD cited above, and more recently, a National Geographic production, among others).

Comparatively, there is a great of scholarship and media coverage on South African and Nigerian artists, including folks with lighter talents. As I mulled over these contentions, the penny dropped: it is not the difference in the artistic and activist accomplishments of either man. It was not even necessarily that they lived in different times and inhabited different spaces. But rather the political economies in which these two men operated, which might speak to both their artistic quality and reach, but most importantly, their renown in the chronicles of history. It is about the writer, and less about the event/subject of the chronicle. To this end, it is my sobering contention that there is a close connection between the artiste, and the political economies (or their resources) of their countries, which thereby informs their renown and celebrity.

This contention operates at two levels—local and international—and encapsulates the challenges of knowledge production in a broader sense: (a) at the so-called international level, narrators/chroniclers are moved not just by the talents of their subjects, but by the economic/political interests and histories that unite the worlds of both the subject and the chronicler. In our world today, the closer in terms of resources one is to the Western world—which often constitutes the international space—the more genius and creativity will be spotlighted. And the reverse is true. It is akin to the ways the British media brands and promotes their athletes who happen to be fairly good, but within the larger pool, are comparatively of weaker talents. (b) at the local levels, chronicles and local historians are busy eking an existence, trying to find food and water, and have no time for studying and breaking down minute details about the accomplishments of their cultural producers. They are happy to harvest their cultural production but are unable to market them to the world. Perhaps it does not even matter at all. Native scholars find themselves conditioned to a position of “native informers,” (as Mahmood Mamdani ridiculed colleagues at Makerere University) when responding to questions set from outside.

Exactly because not many have the time and resources to indulge in questions about things they are gladly enjoying. To this end, these talents are buried away from the so-called international audience. Ironically, when these talents so painstakingly make the breakthrough—to the international scene—the comparisons with other more established folks are often difficult.

It is fair to say that Bobi Wine’s talents and accomplishments—whilst being inspired and enabled by his Ugandanness—have also been denied a shine for being this Ugandan. But how would the scholarship and media coverage be if he had lived and operated in an economy as big and globally integrated as Nigeria and lived the talents he continues to live: (a) a leading entertainer and public intellectual for over 15 years, (b) inspiring an entire generation with the People Power movement and (c) politician winning a parliamentary seat, starting a political party, standing for president—and almost winning. But also standing as the leader of the main opposition political party in the country. These are feats of great genius especially in a long-established autocracy. A number of his songs cannot be played on airwaves, and presently cannot stage a show in the country. He has been arrested several times, and almost got shot and killed by the state in the northern district of Arua in 2018. (The shooting instead claimed the life of his driver, Yasin Kawuma, who was seated in the co-drivers seat). He was under house arrest after the 2021 presidential election and got terribly battered through an election cycle including surviving a bomb attack. Revolutionary talents like Lucky Dube, Ken Saro Wiwa, Okot p’ Bitek, and Fela Kuti himself would be proud of this man had they met him.

Yusuf Serunkuma is a columnist in Uganda’s newspapers, a scholar, and a playwright. In 2014, Fountain Publishers published his first play, The Snake Farmers which was received with critical acclaim in Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda. He teaches decolonial studies/new colonialism and writes regularly for ROAPE.

Featured Photography: Bobi Wine campaigning with Ugandan flag (Wiki commons)

“God-fearing nations” – understanding the rise of homophobia and homophobic legislations in East Africa and beyond

ROAPE

October 26, 2023

Barbara Bompani takes aim at the dominant narrative that rising homophobia in Africa is the result of external actors, and in particular US conservative Christian groups. Drawing from more than a decade of research and analysis, she argues rising homophobia is not simply the result of external influence, but is shaped by the complex role religion has played in shaping new forms of nationalisms on the continent. What we are observing in several African countries, she contends, is the emergence of a new politics that threatens untold and profound harm to LGBT communities.

By Barbara Bompani

Learning from Uganda

After almost a decade away from the public eye, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill (AHB) reappeared in the Ugandan Parliament in early March 2023. Following parliamentary debate the Bill was voted for and passed to the President’s Office to be signed into law, opposed only by two members of the Ugandan Parliament. The new Bill was harsher than the earlier version that passed in December 2013 (‘a Christmas gift’ to the Christian community, as announced by the then speaker of Parliament Rebecca Kadaga), was signed into law by President Museveni in February 2014, and was ultimately nullified by the Constitutional Court in August of the same year.

The 2023 Bill added further criminal offenses including prosecution for ‘promoting homosexuality’, for anyone ‘supporting homosexuality’ (under such a large interpretative umbrella that even journalists writing non-critically about LGBT rights could be charged) punishable by up to 20 years in prison, and the recommending of the death penalty for certain same-sex acts. The Parliament passed it for a second and final time on 2 May with minor changes to align the Bill with Uganda’s Constitution and President Museveni signed it into law on the 29 May 2023, despite the dismay of the international community.

The Anti-homosexuality Act (AHA) 2023 emerged in a different climate from the 2013/4 attempt, benefiting from broader support from a network of national and international actors. While religious figures have always been behind the proposal and passage of the Bill, a decade ago mainly Ugandan Pentecostal-charismatic actors were at the forefront of this punitive legislation, inspired by their very public and vocal fight against what the majority of Pentecostal leaders consider the irreconcilable “a-moral LGBT community” (Bompani 2016). Along with Pentecostal premillennial visions of moral decay and their call to fight to ‘restore’ a moral Christian nation, prominent political figures were clearly associated with this Christian denomination, most notably the First Lady and Minister of Education, Janet Museveni, MP David Bahati (promoter of the very first Bill in 2009), and the then speaker of Parliament, Rebecca Kadaga.

However, with the AHA 2023 the situation is markedly different as high-profile religious leaders from all main religious groups publicly supported the legislation (see Anglican leaders and the Muslim minority), the act was promoted with funding from conservative US Christian groups, and support for more punitive anti-LGBT legislation was growing across other East African countries. Some even argue that this recent anti-LGBT campaign is fueled by Russia to push Global South countries away from the West. While Tweets of the Russian embassy in Kenya and fresh Russian attention on Africa (harking back to the Cold War) perhaps suggest this, for now these claims are not supported with evidence while Russia is deeply committed to other geopolitical causes.

The passing of the 2023 AHA highlights the multiplicity of actors, motivations, and narratives at work. It is apparent that most recent analyses and readings of the AHA place a strong emphasis on the ‘external actors’ with influence (financial and beyond) over President Museveni pushing for the passing of the law, with particular attention paid to the role played by US conservative Christian groups. Indeed, much media coverage and other analyses unpacked direct links between the re-tabling of the Bill with the renewed work of US conservative evangelical Christian networks, to which Pentecostals belong.

The promotion of the Bill even in its very first version in 2009 can be considered in part inspired by the US conservative Christian right mobilisation that emerged from a March 2009 conference entitled ‘Exposing the Homosexual Agenda’ organised in a hotel in Kampala by the Uganda based Family Life Network, the American pastor Scott Lively of Abiding Truth Ministries (then challenged by the LGBT Ugandan organisation SMUG in a lawsuit in Massachusetts) and the American Dan Schmierer of the ex-gay Exodus International (a Christian umbrella organisation that promoted the idea that gay people could change their sexual orientation).

The 2023 AHA has been depicted by many observers (academic, human rights activists and politicians) as the culmination of more than a decade of collaboration between Ugandan elite interest groups and US ultra-conservative groups. In particular, the US-registered non-profit Family Watch International, through Sharon Slater (a US citizen), brought together 150 ultra-conservative campaigners in Uganda, with the organisation apparently convening a private WhatsApp group including several Ugandan politicians (Wepukhulu in OpenDemocracy 2023). It is widely accepted that Family Watch International has, for a decade, been encouraging African politicians and religious and civic leaders to oppose comprehensive sexuality education across the continent (see for example on social media, Twitter, 10 April 2023).

LGBT people from Uganda parading at Pride in London 2016, 25 June 2016.

The US-registered Fellowship Foundation, also known as The Family in Uganda, is an active actor in the ‘National Prayer Breakfast’ which has frequently been defined as an ultra-conservative group. The same David Bahati leads the Thursday parliamentary Breakfast Prayer group modeled on the weekly prayer breakfasts that take place in US Congress and he has clear links to the The Family (along with the Ugandan Pastor Steven Langa of Family Life Network and other Ugandan religious and political leaders, including First Lady Janet Museveni). There has also been discussions around generous donations to conservative Ugandan groups from these organisations to support the promotion of anti-gender and anti-LGBT policies.

Ugandan Christian Nationalism

Although those connections and influences are relevant, it would be overly reductive to assume that such a complex, contested and symbolic legislation was primarily the result of US Christian conservative interference or the (still weak) influence of Russian foreign policy. Homosexuality was, after all, already punishable through the Ugandan Penal Code 1950. In a globalised world and through world religions such as Christianity, actions, ideas, people, and resources interact, coexist, and influence simultaneously at any given time. In recent analyses, for example, few blame Catholic organisations for promoting conservative interpretations of family values in the build up of the AHA 2023, although organisations such as CitizenGo, a movement of Catholic activists, undertake advocacy work for the promotion of family values in Uganda and across the continent. Similarly, little attention is paid to Ugandan conservative churches actively involved in so-called ‘crusades’ to implant Ugandan Pentecostal churches in other African (and beyond) countries (for example in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and South Africa), promoting their own values and morally inspired agendas in new places and contexts.

Drawing from more than a decade of analysis of the politicisation of sexuality in Uganda and beyond, I argue that posing the question ‘were US conservative Christian groups behind the Ugandan AHA 2023?’ is problematic, as it over emphasises the role of external actors in shaping Ugandan religion and politics. The AHA did not pass because a handful of US conservative groups funded or organised a series of events in the country, or because of intercontinental religious networks, or as a result of the existence of WhatsApp groups. It passed with wide support because of complex social changes taking place in the country that require careful unpacking and insight into social imaginaries, particularly in relation to dynamics of inequality and possibilities for the future.

Ugandan society is not at ease with the unmet promises of development brought in with the postcolonial (1962) and post-war(s) (1986) projects of progress. A heavily overseas development assistance-dependent country that struggles to flourish economically and meet the promises of development coupled with a gerontocratic political leadership aggressively controlling decision areas of power, leaves little space for imagining transformation or change. Preoccupations of a different and better future are real and material, especially among the very large Ugandan youth population, as data from a recent Afrobarometer survey attest.

In this context, since the beginning of the 21^st century, Conservative Ugandan Christian forces have influenced society, offering answers to social anxieties and proposing a vision of a better future through moral regeneration – something that political forces have not been able to deliver, especially to a very young, globally connected, dissatisfied population. Pentecostalism is an active religious expression that fights to establish itself in society and ensure that its own theological markers (among them the fight against homosexuality) are accepted and supported in society and protected by politics. This is true also in other contexts beyond Africa (see the US and Eastern Europe).

Ugandan Pentecostalism has been successful in ‘Pentecostalizing’ the socio-political sphere through its own active public action and connections with circles of power (Bompani, 2022); so much so that Pentecostal priorities became national priorities. In fact, if the AHA 2014 can be read as a legislation desired by Pentecostal forces, the AHA 2023 has been supported by Pentecostals but also by many other religious and non-religious groups that have embraced the Pentecostal idea that the Ugandan nation needs to regenerate from a moral point of view in order to build a better future. This change was possible because of Ugandan Pentecostal work in the everyday, in the community and in the public sphere where the formulation of a collective transformation of society through a moral regeneration of the nation are consistently reiterated and absorbed.

This moral Christian nationalism is the milieu that must be understood if we want to understand the emergence of broad-based support for anti-LGBT legislation. Understanding the emergence of this new moral Christian nationalism is necessary to understand growing anti-LGBT attitudes. The wide support that Ugandan society gives to the AHA can be understood as the slow convergence of Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal spheres of the imagination of a different future for the Ugandan nation.

Sexual anxieties that are close to Pentecostal conservative theological interpretations and readings of the Bible are in line with and encapsulate other sets of social anxieties and worries for the future are readily absorbed by non-Pentecostals. In moments of social pressure and change, with a lack of secure points of reference at a national as well as at an international level, sexuality and the body become intertwined with the idea of future through reproduction.

In many public narratives the imagining of the future increasingly belongs to ‘moral citizens’, with conservative Christian morality becoming capital for social differentiation between a regenerating nation versus corrupted (secular) Western countries depicted in those narratives as dangerously immoral. This increasingly feeds into a culture war with the West, a tension expressed by religious and non-religious politicians alike. We can see Christian nationalism operating as an influential political force in Uganda, and elsewhere in Africa.

Conditions for rising public homophobia

Through Pentecostal readings, the spiritual condition of the family determines the spiritual condition of everything else in society as the family represents the building block for the nation in its covenant with God. If families are healthy, then the nation will be. In Pentecostal narratives families (conceptualised as heterosexual families adopting traditional roles) are under attack by many forces, including LGBT rights, individualistic aspirations and pro-choice policies. The intense work of Ugandan Pentecostals brought these anxieties to the fore in national policies, resonating with important changes already happening to gender roles and family compositions in Uganda (Boyd, 2014). The family is constantly discussed in public and political spaces, including in the legal space in the build-up to the signing of the AHA. In 2013 a prominent Ugandan anti-LGBT pastor asked the Government to create a special body to protect the family and all issues concerning this institution (although this request remained formulated in very general and vague terms). According to Pastor Ssempa, ‘Issues of the family are more crucial than oil…[so] I propose that the Government also constitutes a department for the family called Uganda Family Authority’ (New Vision, 08 April 2013), a proposal that fell through as forces instead focused on the passing of the Anti-homosexuality Bill that year.

In neighbouring Kenya in 2023 anti-LGBT sentiments began to rise with lawmakers pushing for tougher anti-LGBT legislation (an anti sodomy law is already present in the Kenyan Penal Code), with the focus of many debates revolving around the need to protect the ‘traditional’ heterosexual family from the dangers constituted by pro-choice, pro-gay and pro-liberal forces. New anti-LGBT legislation proposed in April 2023 is entitled the ‘Family Protection Act’, de facto a set of very tight measurements against LGBT communities with penalties ranging from a minimum of ten years in prison to the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” (defined as “engaging in homosexual acts with a minor or disabled person and transmitting a terminal disease through sexual means”), and a total ban on any activities “that promote homosexuality”, such as wearing flags or emblems of the LGBTQ community with repercussion for the growing LGBT communities of refugees and displaced people seeking UN High Commissioner for Refugees protection in Nairobi. The parallels with Uganda are striking.

A Pentecostal church in Mombasa, Kenya, 30 March 2010.

Meanwhile in Ghana, where homosexuality is already punishable with up to three years in jail, lawmakers have been debating an anti-LGBT Bill since August 2021 and in July 2023 the Supreme Court rejected an appeal moved by civil society organisations seeking to block the parliament to pass the Bill. This new Bill is framed around the idea of protecting the Ghanaian family from possible negative forces of change, reflected in the title ‘Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values’. If passed, this Bill would criminalise being transgender, same-sex relations and advocating for LGBTQ+ rights, as well as further reducing freedoms.

More recently in Ethiopia (where homosexuality is punishable by up to 15 years in prison or up to 25 years if an offender uses violence, intimidation, coercion or fraud), the Addis Ababa City Peace and Security Administration Bureau announced that it is “taking action” against venues where LGBT people were gathering, calling Ethiopians to report homosexual activists to the nearest police station, adding that “the office has announced that it will continue to take consistent measures”. Police raided several locations and across social media there is a growing campaign to humiliate and persecute Ethiopian LGBT individuals, highlighted as a threat to the Christian, moral fibre of the nation. There are indications that other African countries may follow this path.

Given developments within several Africa states, it is important to try to unpick the emerging perception of homosexuality as a threat to the national agenda of a country. While some studies have been conducted in the US, there are specificities related to the African state that require further investigation. In all of those cases mentioned above, there has been a growing domestic Pentecostal community that on the basis of their demographic prominence and/or links to political power, began to promote their own agenda, primarily focused on moral and family concerns. There is a political elite keen to support Pentecostal causes. In some instances, such as in Kenya, the political elite may already belong to Pentecostal cadres, as for example the Kenyan President William Ruto and his wife Rachel Ruto, as well as the Vice-president and his wife, who made Pentecostal agendas clearly central to their political call in making Kenya a ‘God-fearing country’.

In Uganda those personal connections may be less clear and more pragmatic. For example, president Museveni never professed to be a Pentecostal, but maintains strong interests and connections with the Pentecostal community as a hub of potential voters during increasingly more contested elections and diminishing popularity in addition to his personal links through the first lady Janet Museveni, a leading Pentecostal figure. In Ethiopia, where Pentecostalism is still a minority denomination, Abiy Ahmed, a Pentecostal, was appointed as Prime Minister in March 2018, ecstatically proclaimed by many Ethiopians as a new prophet who would save the country from disintegration.

It is also worth noting that Pentecostal support in any country would revert to any political ally embracing their cause for moralising the nation. Pentecostal support comes no matter their track records, political reputation or personal integrity, or their own religious beliefs. In short, the cause of promoting morality is stronger than any assessment of the moral status of the political candidate. There are social and economic conditions (high unemployment rates, dissatisfaction with the current status quo, a lack of trust in the capacity – moral and tangible – of the political elite to promote positive transformation) and large young populations that see their future jeopardized and seek ways to bring change in economically stagnant countries. Finally, this sense of dissatisfaction not only links to distrust in the political elite, but also to distrust of the West and its (failed?) promises of development and a better future.

In conclusion, it is important to recognise that the emergence of this identarian dichotomy (Us vs Them) is not simply the result of external influence, rather it is shaped by the complex role religion, for now conservative Christianity, has played in shaping new forms of nationalisms by pulling together religious, political, cultural and social realms in new ways in response to inter-generational unhappiness, development delayed, unmet expectations of change, and broken political promises. What we are observing in several African countries is the emergence of a complex, new politics that threatens untold and profound harm to LGBT communities (and possibly other communities as time passes) as agendas shift, and power waxes and wanes.

References

Bompani B. 2016 ‘For God and For My Country’: Pentecostal-charismatic Churches and the Framing of a New Political Discourse in Uganda’ in van Klinken A & Chitando E (eds) Public Religion and the Politics of Homosexuality in Africa, Surrey: Routledge [chapter 1].

Bompani B. 2022. ‘The memory of persecution is in our blood’: documenting loyalties, identities and motivations to political action in the Ugandan Pentecostal Movement’ in Journal of Modern African Studies vol 60, issue 4 (December), pp. 479-501.

Boyd L. 2014. ‘Ugandans born-again Christians and the moral politics of gender equality’ in Journal of Religion in Africa vol 44, issue 3-4, pp. 333-354.

New Vision, 08 April 2013 [print newspaper].

Wepukhulu K. S. (5 May 2023) ‘Calls for US anti-rights groups to face action over Uganda anti-gay law’ in OpenDemocracy: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/uganda-anti-gay-law-sharon-slater-tim-kreutter/ [accessed on Friday 18 August]

Barbara Bompani is a Reader in Africa and International Development at the Centre of African Studies (CAS), School of Social and Political Science, the University of Edinburgh, UK and Research Associate to the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Featured Photograph: Marching in solidarity with Uganda’s LGBTI community (19 April 2018)

Climate cynicism: fossil fuel growth in Africa

ROAPE

October 23, 2023

Kola Ibrahim argues that Africa is being tricked by global climate change politics, the same people who claim to be fighting climate change are the ones promoting fossil fuels. The reality is that Africa has become a new frontier for fossil fuel development. This is being carried out by global finance capital, multinational corporations, governments of developed economies, and worse still multilateral organizations that claim to be spearheading the funding for climate actions. Ibrahim exposes the reality of the green transition in Africa.

By Kola Ibrahim

While Africa is being conned by global climate change politics, the same people who claim to be fighting climate change are the ones promoting fossil fuels, globally and in particular, in Africa. Indeed, Africa has become a new frontier for fossil fuel development. This is being carried out by global finance capital, multinational corporations, governments of developed economies, and worse still multilateral organizations that claim to be spearheading the funding for climate actions. Of course, this is done with the active connivance of the African political elite and big business class, which serves as local junior partner.

While the Paris Agreement was reached in 2015 and put into effect in 2016, investments in oil, gas and coal development increased across Africa, especially between 2016 and 2021. A research report by a group of NGOs, found that there are 964 fossil fuel projects in Africa, 782 of which are currently in operation or were under construction (as at 2022), and 111 others approved. The report also noted that, out of over US$132 billion that was committed to 58 fossil fuel projects and 24 fossil fuel companies in Africa, 54.8% came from Global North countries (Australia, Europe, and North America), while 31.4% came from Asia (mainly China).

In fact, the top 10 of the 24 national financial institutions providing finance for fossil fuel development in Africa between 2016 and 2021 were located in China, the United States, Japan, Korea and the United Kingdom. These ten institutions were responsible for 94.6% (US$23.7 billion) of fossil fuel funding in Africa by national financial institutions. Also, 81.4% (US$16.8 billion) of the US$20.4 billion committed by private financial companies (banks and financial businesses) to 58 fossil fuel projects in Africa came from North American, European and Asian companies. Furthermore, 88.8% of over US$44.4 billion general financing of 24 biggest fossil fuel companies in Africa comes from European, American, Australian, and Asian multinational financial companies, with only 10.8% from African companies (mostly South African companies). Yet, between 2016 and 2019, G-20 public financial institutions and multilateral organizations only committed US$13 billion to investment in renewable energy in Africa.

Indeed, nine multilateral institutions committed US$4.8 billion to fossil fuel investment between 2016 and 2021, with the African Development Bank (AfDB), World Bank Group and Africa Ex-Im Bank contributing the lion share (63%). Interestingly, AfDB and World Bank currently have different programmes and projects on clean energy and climate mitigation and adaptation in Africa. Yet, they are committing more and more resources to fossil fuel. This underscores the reality that these institutions of global finance capital are serving the interests of global corporates whose main aim is to maximise profits at all costs. They are not prepared to commit much needed capital and resources to transition to clean and climate friendly energy and production systems. It is important to note that oil exploration financing in Africa increased from US$3.4 billion in 2020 to US$5.1 billion in 2022, while 18 out of 45 countries where oil and gas are being prospected are frontier-countries, i.e., countries where oil and gas in being produced for the first time.

Half of the 20 companies developing the largest oil and gas upstream projects (12.27 billion barrel of oil equivalent BBOE) are from China, Japan, United Kingdom, France, United States and Italy. These companies, together hold 6.56 BBOE, (53%). Even those projects being developed by African state-owned companies like Nigeria’s NLNG, Algeria’s Sonatrach, Libya’s NOC, Mozambique’s ENH and Ghana’s Springfield, are mostly jointly owned or have foreign debt, or equity funded. Between 2021 and 2022, new projects have been added which include the Tanzania LNG Liquefaction Project (US$30 billion), Rovuma (Mozambique) LNG Terminal Project (US$30 billion), Etan and Zabazaba (Nigeria) oil fields (US$13.5 billion), Algeria’s Berkine Basin Gas development (US$4 billion). Twenty-five percent of the TotalEnergies’ fossil fuel production in 2021 came from Africa, while its new discovery in Namibia has fossil fuel reserve of 3 billion. The French multinational, which has been branding itself as promoter of the energy transition, is adding 2.27 billion barrels of oil equivalent to its investment in Africa in the short term.

The increasing investment in fossil fuel will increase Africa’s carbon emission and raise the share of Africa’s contribution to global climate change. In 2021, Africa contributed 3.9% (1.45 billion tonnes of CO₂eq.) of global carbon dioxide emission from fossil fuels and industry. According to a report by a group of NGOs, if the largest upstream oil and gas projects worth 12.27 BBOE come on stream, it will add 4.54 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent (tCO₂eq); more than three-time Africa’s 2021 emissions. New coal projects are expected to add 105,000 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent. Furthermore, some seven million BBOE/day will be produced in Africa in 2025, which will add 3.01 million tCO₂ eq per day (or 1.08 billion tCO₂eq per year). It will subsequently increase global emission and make it difficult to reverse climate change and its terrible consequences. This is dangerous for Africa, which already is bearing disproportionate impacts of climate change, a situation that will become ultimately irreversible if the global temperature rises to 1.5⁰C or 2⁰C.

Besides, large scale oil exploration and production is associated with environmental degradation and pollution: the destruction of natural forests, air and ocean pollution and the displacement of indigenous people. Several reports have highlighted various impacts on health, livelihood and environment in Africa.

Moreover, the economic implication of fossil fuel production puts the continent on the road of another round of economic crises. This is because some of the oil and gas projects will turn oil producing Africa countries, whose main public revenues come from fossil fuel production to be more oil-wealth dependent. This will mean that the global transition to clean energy, even on the basis of the current slower scale, will lead to serious strain, if not collapse, of the economies of these countries. Seven African countries (Nigeria, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Algeria, Gabon, Libya and Republic of Congo), depend on oil and gas as source of revenue for between 35% to 82% of their governments’ revenues; while the oil and gas share of GDP of at least eight countries (Nigeria, Ghana, Republic of Congo, Algeria, Chad, Angola, Gabon and Libya) ranges between 10% to 64%. A fall in oil and gas price and demand will seriously affect their revenues and GDP. This will lead to a new debt burden, the introduction of austerity, and a social crisis. It will also make it difficult for them to exit the fossil economy. This will also impact on their ability to withstand and adapt to climate events, which are expected to amplify the climate emergency in the coming period.

Furthermore, oil and gas investments in Africa pose serious financial risks for the countries of the continent. Some of the finances for oil and gas projects are secured by national governments, especially those sponsored by governments themselves. Some of these projects have a tendency to be abandoned, especially when the crude oil price falls. This was witnessed during the Covid-19 period and led to a steep fall in crude oil and gas prices, and to fiscal and balance of payments problems for many oil exporting countries (lower revenues, higher debts, foreign exchange crisis, etc.). The Covid-19 economic crisis led to a downgrade of Africa’s oil and gas growth from a 32% increase to a 24% decrease. It also led to a capital loss of US$25 billion in the sector, as some of the projects on stream were cancelled or postponed.

A specific example is that of the Dangote oil refineries in Nigeria, conceived and started in 2013, expected to be completed in three years, but extended to 2023, and now not fully operational until 2025. The delay was occasioned by a series of global and local economic crises including two national economic recessions. The project cost increased from US$9 billion to US$20 billion and will possibly increase further in the coming years for the refineries to fully come on stream. Though partly funded locally by banks and Dangote businesses, the Nigerian government insured the projects and had to commit billions of dollars in public funds to support it, including a US$2.76 billion commitment as equity in the refinery (obviously to save the company from a liquidity problem). Yet the majority of Nigerians still pay heavily for fuel, while only about 54% of the population have access to the very unstable power supply. The state-owned refineries under the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) have been grounded owing to corruption, deliberate sabotage, and mismanagement and are only able to refine less than 10% of their installed capacity.

If the political pressure on climate change mounts on governments of developed economies, and compels a shift towards renewable energy, this will affect oil prices and lead to collapse of some, if not all, of the many oil and gas projects in Africa. This will have serious impact on finance of African countries, which include but are not limited to the loss of revenue, capital, the increasing cost of borrowing and debt overhang. About US$245 billion of gas investments on stream until 2030 are at risk of becoming stranded assets, even if minimal efforts are taken towards climate change. Even for projects that are not abandoned, an increased shift towards renewable energy may affect access to capital for such projects, which will lengthen their completion time and increase the size of loans incurred for them.

Beyond the financial and fiscal problems to be unleashed by the oil and gas projects and investments in Africa, is the adverse impact on the transition towards clean energy and climate stability. With increased oil investments, oil and gas producing countries are locked into the fossil economy. This will make a transition towards clean energy difficult. Given also that most of the oil and gas projects in Africa are owned and controlled by global energy corporations and financial institutions, with governments of developed economies and multilateral organizations playing key roles in securing these projects, it is expected that clean energy and climate action policies in Africa will be undermined and sabotaged.

The continuous investment in fossil fuel again knocks a big hole in the purported and much touted climate action commitments of developed economies, multilateral institutions representing global finance capital, and global multinational corporations. Their climate funding in Africa, is grossly inadequate. Yet, their commitment to fossil fuel remains strong. Therefore, it will be self-delusion to expect global finance capital, developed countries and their multilateral agencies, genuinely to play any serious role in climate sustainability in Africa. Rather, they will use climate change to exploit Africa’s resources even further, and plunge the countries of the continent into deeper debt and underdevelopment.

Further reading:

Isabelle Geuskens and Henrieke Butjin, Locked out of a just transition – fossil fuel financing in Africa (2002).

Bronwen Tucker and Nikki Reisch, The sky’s the limit – the case for a just energy transition from fossil fuel production in Africa (2021).

Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser, Green house gas emissions (2020).

Kola Ibrahim, an author and scholar-activist, is a public intellectual and climate justice researcher and campaigner. He can be reached at: kmarx4life@gmail.com.

This blogpost is an edited excerpt from Kola Ibrahim’s new book, Climate Imperialism in Africa (2023). A full review of Ibrahim’s book will appear in the forthcoming ROAPE climate emergency special issue.

Featured Photograph: An oil exploration rig waiting to be loaded onto a ship bound for Mozambique (5 August 2019).

Truth and Justice for Omar Blondin Diop!

ROAPE

October 19, 2023

Revolutionary philosopher Omar Blondin Diop’s tragic death on May 11, 1973, at Gorée prison remains unresolved 50 years later. According to the government’s version, he committed suicide in his cell. We, Senegalese, Africans, justice-seeking citizens of the world, alongside Omar’s family, friends and comrades, DEMAND Truth and Justice for Omar Blondin Diop. ROAPE encourages our readers to sign this important call for justice.

On June 6, 1973, Omar’s father, the late Dr. Ibrahima Blondin Diop, filed a lawsuit for “intentional assault causing death without intent” and “non-assistance to a person in danger” which resulted in an order of incompetence by the Correctional Court of Dakar on June 12, 1975. Read more, here, for a detailed account of the state cover up.

Today, new elements reinforce this demand for truth and the need to reopen the case.

Firstly, the recent appearance of the late judge Moustapha Touré in the documentary film Omar Blondin Diop, A Rebel by Djeydi Djigo, who, after an on-site reconstruction, confirms his firm conviction that it was materially impossible for Blondin Diop to commit such a suicide.

Then, the exclusive testimony of Jean-Pierre Biondi, former audiovisual adviser in the cabinet of President Léopold Sédar Senghor, in the podcast series “Omar Blondin Diop, rather death than slavery”, produced by Clémentine Méténier and Florence Morice for Radio France Internationale, who describes the official version of Blondin Diop’s death as a “state lie”. He also reveals that Senghor’s closest associates all knew that the revolutionary philosopher had died at the hands of his prison guards.

We, Senegalese, Africans, justice-seeking citizens of the world, alongside Omar’s family, friends and comrades, DEMAND Truth and Justice for Omar Blondin Diop.

50 years on, we still firmly believe in the African proverb: “However long the night, the sun always rises in the end.”

Add your name to our growing list here. Have already signed:

Boubacar Boris Diop, author (Senegal);

Aminata Dramane Traoré, former minister of culture/tourism, essayist (Mali);

Youssou Ndour, musician (Senegal);

Antoine Gallimard, editor (France);

Pierre Sané, former Amnesty International general secretary (Senegal);

Bailo Teliwel Diallo, former minister of culture (Guinea);

Felwine Sarr, academic, writer (Senegal);

Amy Niang, political scientist (Senegal);

Anicet-Georges Dologuélé, former Prime minister (Central African Republic);

Ndongo Samba Sylla, economist (Senegal);

Fatoumata Seck, literature professor (Senegal/USA);

Amzat Boukari-Yabara, historian (Benin/Martinique);

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, novelist (Sénégal).

The Omar Blondin Diop Foundation was founded by the late revolutionary philosopher’s family and comrades following his 50^th death anniversary, commemorated in Dakar in May 2023. For any queries, please contact: info@omarblondindiop.com

Will a green transition benefit Africa?

ROAPE

October 17, 2023

Ralph Callebert asks whether a green transition can reshape the global economy in ways that benefit Africa and the Global South. Examining projects already underway across Africa, Callebert argues that climate adaptation mirrors the enclaving logic of fossil-capitalism. Can a so-called green transition really be mobilised for Africa’s benefit?

By Ralph Callebert

It is no exaggeration to say that cheap fossil fuels have shaped the world as we know it. Our globalised economy would not exist without incredibly complex global networks of production and consumption that are only made possible by the incredible efficiency of global shipping. The political world order of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries revolves in no small part around securing strategic access to oil and gas reserves, as Europe’s recent struggles to replace Russian gas have highlighted. As Andreas Malm has shown, fossil fuels weren’t just cheaper and more abundant than other sources of energy – in fact, they weren’t necessarily at first – but they crucially also allowed for greater control of capital over labour and production.

Fossil capitalism didn’t only shape a global political economy. James Ferguson argues in “Seeing Like an Oil Company” that oil extraction in Africa has given rise to extractive enclaving. This particular “combination of privately secured mineral-extraction enclaves and weakly governed humanitarian hinterlands” has created a geography that reflects some of the worst tendencies of fossil capitalism. Secure extractive enclaves, in their most extreme forms, stand in almost complete economic and social isolation from the societies and economies that surround them. Africans, their labour, and local economies and societies thus matter little in the calculations of petro-capital – they are ‘l’Afrique inutile’.

Fossil capitalism thus exemplifies much of the injustices of uneven development and dependency, as well as what Ashley Dawson and others have called ‘climate apartheid’. Considering this major role that fossil fuels have played in shaping our current world order, it seems pertinent to ask whether a (hopefully inevitable) green transition may reshape the global economy, maybe even in ways that benefit Africa and the Global South. After all, if Africa has gotten the short end of the stick in the current order, could a new order be less unjust?

Let me immediately get one important point out of the way: Africa and other parts of the Global South are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Therefore, every serious effort put into mitigation is undoubtedly a positive for the continent. Every 0.1˚C of warming avoided is crucially important, especially in the Global South. At the same time, fledgling green tech and green energy sectors may very well replicate some of the enclaving and exclusionary logics of the fossil fuel economy, as well as the tendency to look at Africa as little more than a source of cheap land and abundant sunshine as the new resources for a new energy regime.

We should thus avoid romanticization: just because a company is involved in renewables doesn’t mean that their modus operandi is inherently more ethical or just. Douglas Rushkoff argues that the rise of the internet and online culture once promised a more inclusive and egalitarian future, a space for counterculture to flourish, but then it became a business opportunity and Wall Street took over. Now, tech entrepreneurs perfect surveillance, the casualization of work, while skirting anti-monopoly legislation. There is no reason the same wouldn’t happen with green tech and renewables.

Adaptation and enclaving

Before I dive into some of the dynamics of green tech and renewables on the continent, I want to briefly reflect on adaptation. The cost of adaptation to climate change by building seawalls, updating infrastructure for handling more extreme weather, or developing more drought resistant crops can be beyond the reach of many African countries. This is why a Loss and Damage Fund has been such an important and long-standing demand of the Global South. A particular irony arises, however, when an adaptation project becomes an excuse to create private playgrounds for the rich whose consumption patterns contribute significantly to the climate emergency.

This is the case for Eko Atlantic in Lagos, an artificial peninsula on reclaimed land as part of a seawall to protect the city. Its developers have the ambition to turn the reclaimed and gated development attached to Victoria Island into a global destination and the new financial capital of Africa – the Dubai of Africa. It is sold as a city within the city: a clean, modern, and privatised smart city with round-the-clock private security and its own power and water infrastructure. It is billed as a sanitised version of the Global South megacity, a refuge from the poverty, crime, crumbling infrastructure, and overcrowding of Lagos.

Some question whether the seawall will do much to protect the city, but assuming that it will, it would only do so by creating an oasis for the rich – buffered from the many socioeconomic and infrastructural problems that plague the megacity and that will undoubtedly be exacerbated by climate change. What we see here, then, is a certain vision of adaptation, one where the rich — including the corporate elites of the fossil industry — eke out livable enclaves and the rest is left to fend for themselves. Climate change then also becomes a lucrative opportunity for developers. Climate adaptation can easily mirror the enclaving logic of fossil-capital. Adaptation, as necessary and useful as it undoubtedly is, does not preclude climate apartheid. Even technically effective and properly engineered projects may further inequality and exclusion if they are built as playgrounds for the rich.

Techno-optimism and the enduring myth of empty land

Where adaptation can fall into the trap of an exclusionary logic, many mitigation projects are marked by techno-optimism. Techno-optimists provide a one-word solution, innovation, to a complex and multifaceted problem. As such, they often ignore or underestimate the complexities of political and socioeconomic contexts – that is, they fail to understand the lived realities in which such technologies need to be implemented. I discuss some of these problems elsewhere.

Of course, innovation is not a bad thing, but as the history and failure of Desertec has shown: what seems great on paper may be more complicated in practice. Desertec was a plan conjured up after the European energy crisis of 2006-2009 to build a network of Concentrated Solar Plants and windfarms throughout North Africa and the Middle East. A consortium of industrial and financial heavyweights hoped to export this electricity and provide 20% of Europe’s energy by 2050. The falling prices of renewables, the high cost of transmission, internal disagreements, and political factors ultimately led to the consortium’s demise. More fundamentally, as German politician Hermann Scheer has pointed out, the project represented “technology without sociology,” where backers understood the technological complexities but not the political, economic, and social difficulties such a project would face.

The land eyed for these expansive projects was mostly desert and semi-desert, and as such it was assumed to be empty and up for grabs. That people lived there and that livelihoods depended on such land was scarcely considered. Yet, it is not just those who want to use new technology for mitigation who consider land that is not under cultivation, urbanised, or used for infrastructure, as underutilised. In 2019, an article in Science argued that our planet has the potential for 1.2 trillion more trees than it currently has, which could sequester a huge amount of carbon. The article got plenty of media traction, but critics pointed out that approaches to afforestation and reforestation from above are ineffective when not rooted in an understanding of local socio-ecological contexts. Tree planting without local knowledge can threaten water supplies and biodiversity, increase fire risk, undermine food and land security, and exacerbate social inequality.

Just as Desertec’s planners looked at deserts on a map and assumed that nobody lived there or used that land, the Science article looked at satellite images and assumed that most land where trees can grow could be turned into woodlands. Indeed, tree planting initiatives for carbon sequestration all too often target areas that never were forests and aren’t necessarily suitable for afforestation. Similarly, the vast amount of land required for biofuel crops or for bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) can threaten local biodiversity, livelihoods, and food security. Both the biofuel economy and BECCS have raised concerns about land-grabs, frequently justified with the assumption that the land is idle, marginal, or un(-der-)used.

Exporting the sun

That arid and desert land isn’t necessarily barren and unused is part of what made the world’s largest Concentrated Solar Plant in Ouarzazate, Morocco, controversial. To build the plant, 3,000 hectares of communally-owned land was sold to the state well below the market price and with very limited consultation. This dispossession not only relied on colonial-era laws, Karen Rignall notes, but also on colonial discourses that undervalue pastoral land uses as non-productive. She quotes a local activist who notes that “the project people talk about this as a desert that is not used but to people here it is not desert; it is pasture. It is their territory. The future is in land. When you take my land, you take my oxygen.”

The cheap sale lacking transparency also meant that the local community would have no claim on the rents that the plant will generate for decades to come. Despite claimed economic and employment benefits, there are understandable concerns about the amount of water from the local Mansour ad-Dhabi reservoir used for cooling the plant.

The Ouarzazate plant was initially included in Desertec’s export vision, but now mostly supplies the domestic grid. The dream of exporting renewable electricity to Europe, however, has not died. TuNur, for example, wants to build a similar Concentrated Solar Plant in Tunisia, except much larger. Many of the concerns are similar — land, water use, employment — but this project is explicitly for export, despite the country’s regular blackouts and dependence on Algeria for its own energy needs. Even bigger are Xlinks’s plans for more than 10GW of solar and wind farms in Morocco for export to the UK. The photovoltaic solar alone would cover about 200km². Both of these projects require the construction of high-capacity undersea interconnectors, something Egypt is also planning as part of its push to become a regional energy hub.

Of course, a solar plant is undoubtedly less destructive than oil or gas extraction, but old dynamics remain. Africa remains mostly a source of cheap resources – sun and wind — and rents and ownership over the projects typically do not accrue to local populations.

Africa and the green transition

There are many other projects I could bring up here. Companies engaged in carbon capture also eye the continent, for example. British startup Brilliant Planet is building a demonstration plant in Akhfennir, Morocco, that pumps ocean water into coastal ponds to grow algae that sequester carbon. The company already has access to 6,100ha of land for future expansion and plans to license its model globally. Turning 500,000km² of coastal deserts worldwide — about the size of Spain — into algae ponds would allow them to remove 2bn tons of carbon every year. They describe these coastal deserts predictably as “barren”, “unused”, and having no “agricultural or economic use” based on GIS modelling.

Climeworks, the world leader in Direct Air Capture (DAC), also eyes expansion in Africa in a joint venture with Kenya – based Great Carbon Valley. They hope to use the country’s potential for plentiful low-carbon energy to eventually capture and store 1m tons of carbon per year. Few details are available at this time, but it should be noted that so far few if any carbon capture plants have come anywhere near their promised capacity. In fact, Climeworks’s own biggest plant, and the biggest in the world, currently captures a mere 4,000 tons per year, or about three seconds worth of global emissions. Moreover, DAC is very energy-intensive and critics argue that the green energy needed for this process could be better used to support the local grid.

Whatever the arguments for these projects, it seems clear that many green tech, renewable energy, and climate adaptation projects adopt at least some of the negative tendencies of the petro-economy: tech and energy investors often see Africa as little more than an empty space to try out their technological fantasies without needing to be bothered with local society and economies, or a source of cheap resources for export to the Global North — except that the resources are now sun and wind. Enclaving and lack of local ownership too risk becoming part of the dynamics of the green economy. Not all of these problems are inherent to green energy and tech, and better practices could in many cases be developed. However, just because a company invests in decarbonisation doesn’t mean that it is less exploitative or won’t replicate some of the unsavoury patterns of fossil-fuelled globalisation. Like the internet didn’t turn out to be inherently more egalitarian, the green transition too will not be inherently more just, even if it is undoubtedly better than continuing to dig ourselves deeper into the hole of fossil-dependence.

Of course, green energy can be a great boon for Africa and elsewhere. Better practices for a green energy regime do already exist. In fact, off-grid renewables and microgrids have tremendous capacity to electrify much of rural Africa with a dramatically smaller ecological footprint than fossil fuels. Mega-projects like the long-proposed Grand Inga will do little for the 80% of the DRC’s population that is not connected to the expensive infrastructure that is a national grid. Nevertheless, small-scale projects provide smaller profits and fewer opportunities for rents, explaining at least in part a continuing preference for mega-projects by many governments and large investors.

Ralph Callebert teaches at the University of Toronto and is a historian of South Africa whose current research focuses on the intersections of labour, citizenship, and climate change. His book, On Durban’s Docks, is published by the University of Rochester Press (2017) and a review essay reflecting on his teaching about climate change was recently published in Capitalism Nature Socialism.

Featured Photograph: Eko Atlantic, Lago, Nigeria (Koutchika Lihouenou Gaspard, 1 October 2017).

Amilcar Cabral Speaks

ROAPE

October 13, 2023

ROAPE’s Mike Powell introduces a selection of Amílcar Cabral’s writings, speeches, and interviews. Cabral was one of the most important revolutionaries of the 20th century who led and founded a movement which not only led to the liberation of Guinea Bissau but prepared the ground for a revolution in the colonial power itself. This selection of Cabral’s speeches and interviews, and other writings, is provided in the hope that some readers will find in them inspiration and hope for the revolutionary struggles to come.

By Mike Powell

In this author’s opinion, Amilcar Cabral was one of the most important figures of the 20th Century. He created and led a revolutionary movement in his country which not only led to its liberation against almost impossible odds but did so in a way which prepared the ground for the subsequent democratic revolution in the colonial power itself. For the purpose of this struggle, he developed and shared profound and original understandings of the process in which he was engaged and what, in terms of social and cultural progress, was necessary, both during the liberation war and beyond it, for the struggle to be ultimately successful.

Cabral was assassinated in January 1973 by disaffected members of his own party, the PAIGC, in collusion with the political police of the Portuguese dictatorship. The subsequent history of the struggle was not without its successes but an (essentially internal) coup in 1980 or, depending on your opinion, the demise of the subsequent revolutionary council in 1984 effectively saw the end of Guinea Bissau’s efforts to become a revolutionary new society. The history of that period is well covered in the books by Carlos Lopes and Antonio Tomas and is not covered further here.

Cabral will retain recognition as an historical figure and a driving force of the revolutions in Guiné and the Lusophone world more widely. The fate of his ideas and their continuing relevance to revolutionary change in Africa and beyond is far less secure. The purpose of this primer is to give a brief taste of the breadth of Cabral’s ideas along with some reference to how they have been understood or experimented with.

As stated in the related interview, Cabral’s work is little known, especially in the Anglophone world. It may not have helped that it was not really designed to be read in any organised form. What exists is a mix of speeches he made at major international events, which were thoughtfully scripted in advance (with parts of one sometimes used in another), recordings of political orientation sessions with party members (again with parts used from previous talks), which probably followed a planned structure but were, according to witnesses, spoken live, some formal party documents and some interviews. Some were originally in Creole, some in Portuguese, some in French, others were presented in English and published in various versions and permutations in a series of collections in Portuguese, French (Éditions Maspero) and English.

Much of the work I refer to is no longer in print, little is well curated in libraries or online collections, it is rare to find it given prominence in the curricula of even quite specialist courses. It therefore seemed a good idea to offer a direct insight into his words, and those of some of his contemporaries, on a spectrum of those issues which have the greatest continuing relevance.

Obviously, I have had to select the quotes that I think will contribute best to that aim and have provided some brief linkages between them. Occasionally, I have quoted more recent commentators for what I see as relevant contextualisation. The main focus, however, is on the words of Cabral himself in the hope that some readers at least will find them as inspirational as I did, one afternoon in a quiet, sunlit library in Cambridge, 48 years ago.

Cabral’s Thought

General Approach

‘Tell no lies, claim no easy victories’, (Cabral, Revolution in Guinea, 1974, p.70)

‘Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children…’ (Cabral, Revolution in Guinea, 1974, p.70).

‘Above all, we want to decentralise as much as may be possible. That’s one reason why we’re inclined to think that Bissau will not continue to be our capital in an administrative sense. In fact, we are against the whole idea of a capital. Why shouldn’t ministries be dispersed? After all, our country is a small one with passable roads, at least in the central areas. Why should we settle ourselves with the paraphernalia of a presidential palace, a concentration of ministries, for clear signs of an emergent elite which can soon become a privileged group?’ (B. Davidson, 1969, quoting Amilcar Cabral, p.137).

And, for those of us behind our screens many lifetimes away, who may struggle to imagine the dynamic of isolated militants confronting the realities of guerilla war on a daily basis:

‘But this means that everything has to be explained not by “staff appreciations” or other written briefings, useless amongst a largely illiterate people but useless anyway as a means of invoking active and intelligent participation: it has to be explained by oral statement and debate. For this is the kind of warfare in which individual thought and action count for more than anything else and count all the time. This is a kind of warfare in which the volunteer….is there not only to fight for himself but also to think for himself. This is a kind of warfare, accordingly, in which orders which seem to make no sense will probably be ignored.’ (B. Davidson, The Liberation of Guinea: aspects of an African Revolution, 1969, pp.130-131).

Gender

The rules for governance in the liberated areas, established at the first party congress, in February 1964, stipulated that at least two of the five members of every tabanca (village committee) must be women. Women played many military support roles, including as members of local area militias, but were not fighters in the regular armed forces. Several, including Carmen Pereira and Titina Sila, served as political commissars on the various fronts.

‘We are not fighting for a piece of the pie. The men control the pie. We don’t want men to give us a piece of their pie. For if we accept something that is given to us, even if it is half, we will never have the same power as those who gave it. They will still control it. What we want to do is destroy this pie so that men and women, together, can build a new pie where women will be totally equal with men.” Maria Santos, young PAIGC cadre (quoted in Urdang, 1979, pp.283-284).

Process: realism, complexity, flexibility, and emergence

‘We can proceed to discuss the following principle of our party: we advance towards the struggle secure in the reality of our land (with our feet planted on the ground)…It is impossible to struggle effectively for the independence of a people, it is impossible to establish effective armed struggle, such as we have to establish in our land, unless we really know our reality and unless we really start out from that reality to wage the struggle.’ (Amilcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle, 1980, p. 44)

‘Man is part of reality; reality exists independently of man’s will. To the extent to which he acquires consciousness of reality, to the extent in which reality influences his consciousness, or creates his consciousness, man can acquire the potential to transform reality, little by little. This is our view, let us say the principle of our party on relations between man and reality.’ (Amilcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle, 1980, p.44)

Some of the key texts in which he expounds on the reality they are acting upon are ‘The Agricultural Census Of Guiné’ (written by Cabral when he was working as an agronomist for the colonial government in the early 1950s) and ‘Unity and Struggle’ (both in the Unity and Struggle book), ‘Brief analysis of the Social Structure in Guinea’ (Revolution in Guinea) and ‘Analysis of a Few Types of Resistance’ (in Resistance and Decolonization).

‘But only during the struggle, launched from a satisfactory base of political and moral unity, is the complexity of cultural problems raised in all its dimensions. This frequently requires successive adaptations of strategy and tactics to the realities which only the struggle is capable of revealing.’ (Cabral, ‘National Liberation and Culture’ in Return to the Source, 1973, p.53)

Modes of production

‘The ideological deficiency, not to say the total lack of ideology, within the National Liberation movements – which is basically due to ignorance of a historical reality which these movements claim to transform – constitutes one of the greatest weaknesses of our struggle against imperialism, if not the greatest weakness of all.’

‘Those who affirm – in our case correctly – that the motive force of history is the class struggle would certainly agree to a revision of this affirmation to make it more precise and give it an even wider field of application if they had a better knowledge of the essential characteristics of certain colonised peoples, that is to say peoples dominated by imperialism. In fact, in the general evolution of humanity and of each of the peoples of which it is composed, classes appear neither as a generalised and simultaneous phenomenon throughout the totality of these groups, nor as a finished, perfect, uniform and spontaneous whole. The definition of classes within one or several human groups is a fundamental consequence of the progressive development of the productive forces and of the characteristics of the distribution of the wealth produced by the group or usurped from others. That is to say that the socio-economic phenomenon class is created and develops as a function of at least two essential and interdependent variables – the level of productive forces and the pattern of ownership of the means of production. This development takes place slowly, gradually, and unevenly, by quantitative and generally imperceptible variations in the fundamental components; once a certain degree of accumulation is reached, this process then leads to a qualitative jump, characterised by the appearance of classes and of conflict between them.’

‘This leads us to pose the following question: does history begin only with the development of a phenomenon of class, and consequently of class struggle? To reply in the affirmative would be to place outside history the whole period of life of human groups from the discovery of hunting, and later of nomadic and sedentary agriculture, to the organisation of herds and the private appropriation of land. It would also be to consider – and this we refuse to accept – that various human groups in Africa, Asia and Latin America were living without history, or outside history, at the time when they were subjected to the yoke of imperialism. It would be to consider that the peoples of our countries, such as the Balantes of Guinea, the Coaniamas of Angola, and the Macondes of Mozambique, are still living today – if we abstract the slight influence of colonialism to which they have been subjected – outside history, or that they have no history.’(Cabral, ‘Weapon of Theory’ in Revolution in Guinea, 1974, p.75).

He goes on to argue that the common element between periods of class struggle and periods before and after class struggle is indeed the mode of production, that is the dialectic relationship between the level of productive forces and the patterns of ownership of the means of production. (Cabral, ‘Weapon of Theory speech’ in Revolution in Guinea, 1974, pp.75-77).

Philosophies of Knowledge

Identity, culture and an (ecological) ontology

‘We are in a flat part of Africa…the manuals of guerrilla warfare generally state that country has to be of a certain size to be able to create what is called a base and, further, that mountains are the best place to develop guerrilla warfare… obviously we do not have those conditions in Guinea, but this did not stop us beginning our armed liberation struggle. As for the mountains, we decided that our people had to take their place, since it will be impossible to develop our struggle otherwise. So, our people are our mountains.’ (Cabral, Our people are our mountains, 1971, p.11).

This is quoted in ’Meteorisations: Reading Amilcar Cabral’s Agronomy of Liberation’ by Filipa Cezar. As she writes:

‘In Guinea, the PAIGC had succeeded in uniting the people within a horizontally organised anti colonial movement that prioritised education and humility as weapons of militant struggle; where peasant work and intellectual labour were of equal value instead of being submitted to a hierarchical valorisation. The mountains were the people made potent, the multitude. Furthermore, and less metaphorically, this pattern – looking at masses of militants and seeing the potential strategic force of mountains – reflects his understanding of the world in “ecosophical” terms, i.e. a holistic understanding of ecology. This resonates with the less known and often neglected dimension of Cabral’s practise as an agronomist and how his research on soil and erosion informed his political formation’, and ’In Cabral’s thought the geological is not separated from human history, the soil is not an inert and static ground subjected to human agency, but rather has a dynamic relation to human social structures, evident in its different responses to forms of colonial extractivism.’ (Cesar, 2018, p.255).

One of the key texts of Cabral’s thinking about culture and struggle actually appears in two forms. It was first published in English in the Return to the Sourcebook of selected speeches of Cabral as ‘Identity and dignity in the context of the National Liberation struggle’, which was a speech delivered at Lincoln University in October 1972. That is essentially a lengthy extract of longer speech, ‘The role of culture in the struggle for independence’, given to UNESCO in June 1972. These notes come from the UNESCO version, which is translated and published in Resistance and decolonization edited by Dan Wood, except for my preference for ‘source’ to ‘origin’ in the translation of what it is that is being returned to.

Part one of the speech discusses the cultural impact of colonialism on the colonised peoples and explains the nature of a colonial state. The fact that we are talking here of political colonialism rather than settler colonialism, means that there is relatively little cultural impact outside the urban centres.

‘Repressed, persecuted, humiliated, and betrayed by various social groups that have compromised themselves with the foreigner, taking refuge in the villages, the forests, and the minds of generations of victims of domination, culture weathers every storm until, encouraged by the liberation struggles, it can burst forth again in its full flower. This is why the problem of a return to the source, or a cultural renaissance is not posed, nor could it be posed by the popular masses: indeed they are the bearers of their own culture, they are its source, and at the same time, they are the only entity truly capable of preserving and creating culture – in a word of making history’. (p.164).

He continues with a description of the experience of those Africans who become semi-assimilated into the colonial reality, civil servants, employees of various bits of the new economy, some liberal professions, and some property owners and how this native petty bourgeoisie is both moulded by foreign domination and indispensable to the system of colonial exploitation but also constrained from fully joining and being accepted into a colonial elite. It cannot surmount these barriers and it lives in a marginality, as Cabral says:

‘This marginality is the stage on which the sociocultural drama of the colonial elites or native petite bourgeoisie is played out, both in the colony and among the diaspora, a drama experienced more or less intensely according to material circumstances and the level of acculturation, but always individually, never as a collective thing.’ (p.165).

He then goes on to talk about ways in which members of this petty bourgeoisie can attempt to re-orient themselves towards their roots and what this means politically. As he states later, p. 171:

‘When the pre-independence movement is set into motion by the actions of a minority of the native petty bourgeoisie aligned with the popular masses, these masses have no need to affirm or reaffirm an identity about which they have never been unclear, nor could they ever be, nor have they confused it with that of the colonial power. A need of this kind arises only among the native petty bourgeoisie, the elites, who in this phase in the evolution of the contradictions of colonialism are forced to take a position in the conflict setting the popular masses against the colonial power.’

He writes about the difficulties of the reintegration of that part of the petit bourgeoisie that seeks to distinguish itself from the colonial power with the culture of a popular masses. This is both about content and communication, individual angst, and collective organisation. Members of the petty bourgeoisie integrated into the pre-independence movement:

‘…draws on the artefacts of a foreign culture to express, above all through literature and art, more the discovery of its identity than the aspirations and sufferings of the popular masses from which it draws its material. And since it uses the written and spoken language of the colonial power for this expression, it is only rarely that it succeeds in influencing the popular masses, who are generally illiterate and used to other forms of artistic expression’ (p.171).

This all, clearly, has a lot to do with identity. So…

‘The dialectic nature of identity rests in the fact that it identifies and distinguishes, for an individual (or a human group) is identical with some individuals (or groups) only if he (or) it is distinct from others. The definition of identity, individual or collective, is thus at once an affirmation and a negation of a number of characteristics defining individuals or groups as a function of historical (biological and sociological) coordinates at a given moment in their evolution. Indeed, identity is not an immutable quality precisely because the biological and sociological facts that define it are in permanent evolution. Neither biologically nor sociologically, no two beings (individuals or groups) exist in time that are absolutely identical or absolutely different, for it is always possible to find in them some traits that distinguish them and others they have in common. Moreover, the identity of a being is always a relative quality, an imprecise, even accidental thing, for its definition requires a more or less rigorous or restrictive selection for biological and sociological characteristics of the being in question.’ (p.168).

He goes on to argue that, for the present identity of an individual or group, the sociological factors carry more weight than biological factors and also argues:

‘the identity that counts at any moment in the development of a being, individual or group is present identity, and any evaluation of an individual or group made solely on the basis of original identity is incomplete, partial, and laden with prejudices, since it overlooks or neglects the crucial influence of social reality (material and intellectual) on the form and content of identity.’

‘If we postulate that culture is the dynamic synthesis of the material and intellectual reality of society and expresses relations both between man and nature, as well as between the different groups of men within the same society, we can say that and at the individual and collective level, and at the same time beyond economic reality, identity is an expression of a culture.’

‘It is culture that has the ability (or responsibility) to elaborate or enrich the elements that make for historical continuity and, at the same time, for the possibility of progress (and not regression) of the society. Thus, we see how imperialist domination, as the negation of the historical process of a dominated society, is also necessarily the negation of its cultural process. And the liberation struggle is also an act of culture, above all because a society that is truly in the process of liberating itself from a foreign yoke must make its way back along the paths of its own cultural heritage, thriving on the living reality around it and rejecting all baleful influences and all subjugation to foreign cultures.’

‘Culture is therefore not, nor can it be, a weapon or a method for collective mobilisation against foreign domination. It is much more than that. It is in the concrete knowledge of local realities, particularly cultural realities, that the choice, the organisation, and the development of the best methods for the struggle lie.’

‘In assessing the role of culture in the liberation movement, one must not forget that culture, which is both a product of and a determining factor in history, consists of both essential and secondary elements, strengths and weaknesses, virtues and faults, positive aspects and progressive factors, as well as factors of stagnation and regression, contradictions, and even conflicts.’ (p.169).

‘Culture, the foundation and source of inspiration for the struggle, begins itself to be influenced by the struggle; this is reflected in the conduct of social groupings and individuals, as well as in the unfolding of the struggle itself. Both the leaders of the liberation movement, for the most part from the urban centres (petite bourgeoisie and wage earners), and for popular masses (the vast majority peasants) improve their level of culture; they acquire more knowledge about the realities of their country, free themselves from class complexes and prejudices, extend the horizons of the world within which they develop, break down ethnic barriers, reinforce their political consciousness, become a more integral part of the country and the world, et cetera.’ (Cabral, in Wood, 2020, pp.173-175).

Finally, the cultural struggle also influences the metropole as was particularly the case in the liberation movements of Portuguese Africa…

‘In accepting the identity and culture of the colonised people, and hence its inalienable right to self-determination and independence, as a fact, metropolitan opinion (or at least an important segment of this opinion) achieves a significant cultural advance of its own, freeing itself from one negative aspect of its culture: the prejudice of the supremacy of the colonising nation over the colonised nation. This progress at the cultural level may have some important, even fundamental, consequences for the political life and development of the imperialist or colonial power, as has been amply demonstrated by the facts of recent and current history of the popular struggles against foreign domination.’ (Cabral, in Wood, 2020, pp.177 & 178).

The local, colonial, universal dynamic

Another major text, published in Cabral’s lifetime was that of a speech delivered in February 1970 as part of the Edward Mondlane memorial lecture series at Syracuse University, New York. It overlaps to quite a degree with the ideas of class differentiation within the liberation struggle, of identity, and of culture that are quoted at length above. It mixes a general argument of culture as a battleground between colonialism and resistance with some more pointed remarks about how attitudes towards popular culture reflect and shape political choices. Given this weaving of themes, it is hard to summarise in linear form. These quotes aim to give a flavour of a speech which really requires study in its entirety. The references are to Return to the Source. The same text, including some additional introductory remarks also appears in Amilcar Cabral: Unity and Struggle.

‘Culture is, perhaps, the product of this history just as the flower is the product of a plant. Like history, or because it is history, culture has as its material base the level of the productive forces and the mode of production. Culture plunges its roots into the physical reality of the environmental humus in which it develops, and it reflects the organic nature of the society, which may be more or less influenced by external factors. History allows us to know the nature and extent of the imbalances and conflicts economic, political and social which characterise the evolution of a society; culture allows us to know the dynamic synthesis which have been developed and established by social conscience to resolve these conflicts at each stage of its evolution, in the search for survival and progress…Just as happens with the flower in a plant, in culture there lies the capacity (or the responsibility) for forming and fertilising the seedling which will assure the continuity of history, at the same time assuring the prospects for evolution and progress of the society in question.’ (p.42).

‘Without any doubt, underestimation of the cultural values of African peoples, based upon racist feelings and upon the intention of perpetuating foreign exploitation of Africans, has done much harm to Africa. But in the face of the vital needs for progress, the following attitudes or behaviours will be no less harmful to Africa: indiscriminate compliments; systematic exultation of virtues without condemning faults; blind acceptance of the values of the culture, without considering what presently or potentially regressive elements it contains; confusion between what is the expression of an objective and material historical reality and what appears to be a creation of the mind or the product of a peculiar temperament; absurd linking of artistic creations, whether good or not, with supposed racial characteristics; and finally, the non-scientific or a-scientific critical appreciation of the cultural phenomenon.’ (p.51).

‘It is important to be conscious of the value of African cultures in the framework of universal civilization, but to compare this value with that of other cultures, not with a view of deciding its superiority or inferiority, but in order to determine, in the general framework of the struggle for progress, what contribution African culture has made and can make, and what are the contributions it can or must receive from elsewhere.’ (p.52).

‘They [the leadership] discover at the grassroots the richness of their cultural values (philosophic, political, artistic, social, and moral), acquire a clearer understanding of the economic realities of the country, of the problems, sufferings and hopes of the popular masses. The leaders realise, not without a certain astonishment, the richness of spirit, the capacity for reasoned discussion and clear exposition of ideas, the facility for understanding and assimilating concepts on the part of population groups who yesterday were forgotten, if not despised, and who were considered incompetent by the colonisers and even by some nationals…’ (p.52).

He goes on to say that the experience of participating in the liberation struggle also provides opportunities for cultural progress among the working masses, in particular the peasants. Part of this development in his view offers the opportunity to experience the wider world:

‘They realise their crucial role in the struggle; they break the bonds of the village universe to integrate progressively into the country and the world; they acquire an infinite amount of new knowledge, useful for their immediate and future activity within the framework of the struggle, and they strengthen their political awareness by assimilating the principles of national and social revolution postulated by the struggle. They thereby become more able to play the decisive role of providing the principal force behind the liberation movement’ (p.54).

‘When we consider these features, we see that the armed liberation struggle is not only a product of culture but also a determinant of culture’ (p.55).

‘It can be concluded that in the framework of the conquest of national independence and in the perspective of developing the economic and social progress of the people, the objectives must be at least the following:

development of a popular culture and of all positive indigenous cultural values

development of a national culture based upon the history and the achievements of the struggle itself.

constant promotion of a political and moral awareness of the people of all social groups as well as patriotism, of the spirit of sacrifice and devotion to the cause of independence, of justice and progress

development of a technical, technological, and scientific culture, compatible with the requirements for progress

development on the basis of a critical assimilation of man’s achievements in the domains of art, science, literature et cetera of a universal culture for perfect integration into the contemporary world in the perspectives of its evolution

constant and generalised promotion of feelings of humanism, of solidarity, of respect and disinterested devotion to human beings.’ (p.55).

It is worth noting that whilst both a scientist and a modernist and referring to humans as ‘foremost being’ in nature, Cabral is very clear of the limited value of forcing new concepts on people and generally sought policies where such changes would occur organically from within local cultural processes, which, essentially in his view, included the process of achieving national liberation as a collective endeavour. He also, as explained well in Filipa César’s Meteorizations article, had a very forward looking and ecological understanding of his science (agronomy) as a dialectical interaction between soil, climate and people. He also regularly used natural images of seeds, sowing, harvests, rivers, and mountains to illustrate his political arguments. As Wood argues, he also extends: ‘the concept of struggle to the realm of nature, the earth, and the environment. The land must really be liberated’ p.59.

‘So, our point of view is that we should make resistance in our culture in order to conserve what is in fact useful and constructive, but in the certainty that – to the extent that we move forward – our clothing, our manner of eating, our manner of dancing and singing, and everything else has to change bit by bit. This is even more the case in regard to our minds, our sense of relations with nature, and even our relations with each other.’

Decolonial Thought

‘Cabral argues that imperialism causes a stagnation, paralysis, and at times regression of local histories. In other words, certain aspects of colonised space time – such as productive forces and cultures – slow down, are paralysed, and stagnate when shoved within the inertial frame of colonialist or imperialist space-time………Colonialism does not bring a singular world history to non-historical beings but stifles and suppresses a plurality of already existent histories’ (Wood, 2016, p. 51).

Coloniality ‘refers to longstanding patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labour, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations.’ (Wood, 2016 p.61, quoting Nelson Maldonado-Torres ‘On the coloniality of being: contributions to the development of a concept’ p. 97).

There is a lot more on this and how it relates to Cabral (and Fanon) in Dan Woods, Epistemic Decolonization.

The international domain

Lusophone world

‘Our peoples make a distinction between the fascist colonial government and the people of Portugal: they are not fighting against the Portuguese people. However, the objective situation of the large popular masses in Portugal, oppressed and exploited by the ruling classes of their country, should make them understand the great advantages for them which will flow from the victory of the African peoples over Portuguese colonialism.’ (Cabral, Revolution in Guinea, 1974, p.150).

‘We must reaffirm clearly that while being opposed to all fascism, our peoples are not fighting Portuguese fascism: we are fighting Portuguese colonialism. The destruction of fascism in Portugal must be the work of the Portuguese people themselves: the destruction of Portuguese colonialism will be the work of our peoples.’ (Cabral, Revolution in Guinea,1974, p.16).

In 1961, the PAIGC, along with representatives of liberation movements from Mozambique, Angola and Sao Tomé, founded the Conference of Nationalist Organizations of the Portuguese Colonies. Mario de Andrade was its first president and Marcelino dos Santos (later Vice President of Mozambique) its secretary general. Aquino de Braganca, who attended the founding meeting representing the Goan Peoples Party and (much) later set up the Centro de Estudos Africanos in Maputo, was another active member. Most of these key members had originally met through their involvement in African cultural and anti-colonial activities in Lisbon. The CONCP had an important role both diplomatically and, through the intellectual reputation and contacts of its key members, in shaping opinion in academic and UN circles.

African Unity

‘My own view is that there are no real conflicts between the peoples of Africa. There are only conflicts between their elites. When the peoples take power into their own hands, as they will with the march of events in this continent, there will remain no great obstacles to effective African solidarity.’ (Cabral quoted by Davidson in introduction to Amilcar Cabral: Unity and Struggle, 1967, p.xvii).

‘The building of independent nations must be the prelude to the building of larger constellations of independence. And this too, he saw as the necessary evolution of an African history which regains command of itself and is therefore able, with due time and effort, to move forward into a fully post-colonial society. With time and effort: for this process, in his thinking, could never be achieved by any extension of the colonial heritage, whether political or economic or cultural. It would come, on the contrary, only through a continued process of social and structural revolution capable of drawing whole peoples into an arena of active participation: an arena thereby freed of old servitudes, old inferiority’s, old miseries. Then, but only then, would Africa realise its potentials.’ (Davidson, in introduction to Amilcar Cabral: Unity and Struggle, 1967, p.xvii).

Guinean sociologist, and subsequent executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, Carlos Lopes has argued that Cabral and Andrade, with their awareness of wider diasporan and pan-African discourses, particularly in Andrade’s case the francophone world, developed a distinct philosophical, cultural and political approach to African unity, which remains an active current of thought to this day.

Worldwide

‘I should just like to make one last point about solidarity between the international working-class movement and our National Liberation struggle. There are two alternatives: either we admit that there really is a struggle against imperialism which interests everybody, or we deny it. If, as would seem from all the evidence, imperialism exists and is trying simultaneously to dominate the working class in all the advanced countries and smother the National Liberation movements in all the underdeveloped countries, then there is only one enemy against whom we are fighting. If we are fighting together, then I think the main aspect of our solidarity is extremely simple: it is to fight – I don’t think there is any need to discuss this very much. We are struggling in Guinea with guns in our hands, you must struggle in your countries as well – I don’t say with guns in your hands, I’m not going to tell you how to struggle, that’s your business; but you must find the best means and the best forms of fighting against our common enemy: this is the best form of solidarity.’ (Cabral, Revolution in Guinea, 1974, p.61).

Return to the Source includes a transcript of a meeting in October 1972, attended by over 120 activists from black political organisations in the United States. Cabral had asked for such a meeting to be organised. Entitled ‘Connecting the Struggles’ it consists of a short speech by Cabral, followed by a question-and-answer session. It demonstrates the strong mutual interest in each other’s struggles between Cabral and his audience. (Return to the Source, 1973, pp.75-92).

Some notes on liberation, intellectual labour and pedagogy

Education was a massive priority of the PAIGC and, arguably, the area in which it adopted its most radical and innovative policies. It was seen, both in the content of the curriculum and in the use of the Portuguese language, to be a force for explaining the objectives of the struggle and building national understanding and unity. It was intended to be a route for the empowerment of women and girls in social and economic terms. It was seen as essential to developing the skills – both technical and relational – if independence was to lead to a sustained economic transition.

There were a multitude of competing demands on very scarce resources. At independence there were several hundred rudimentary schools that had been established in the liberated areas, often with untrained teachers and little in the way of teaching materials. There was the urban educational system inherited from the Portuguese, which had more teachers and materials but tuned to a highly reactionary approach. There were a series of boarding schools, for orphans of the war, pilot secondaries and technical formation, which had been the fulcrum of new methodologies. There was the wish to continue to offer practical education to adults, especially in the armed forces, to help people achieve the fruits of liberation. Finally, there were the many programmes with other countries offering university and professional scholarships which both offered new capacity but also took relatively skilled people out of the country. This was not an easy mix to manage.

The resultant policies tried to operate on some basic principles:

Education should be of value in and of itself to students at any level. The idea that the sole purpose of primary was to get to secondary, then to tertiary and then to the elite was rejected
Education should be free, to make it a route to social integration not differentiation.
Education should connect students to the social realities of their societies rather than divide and impose hierarchies on manual and intellectual labour – and, in the process aim to make at least the boarding schools self-sufficient in food.
Education should reinforce the democratic development of society by practicing open, collective decision making with representation from all relevant parties, including students.

For the early 1970s, this was quite radical! I don’t know how much of what happened has been formally studied. There is useful contemporary description in chapters in Guinea Bissau: 3 Anos de Independencia and in Sowing the First Harvest. Here, I offer first some quotes and comments from Paolo Freire’s work in Guinea Bissau, followed by some reflections of my own on the challenge of linking high quality technical research to the actual realities’ African societies face.

Pedagogy in process

The book Pedagogy in Process is based on a series of letters written by Paulo Freire to Mario Cabral, who was the secretary for education in Bissau in the mid 1970s and to various other colleagues in the ministry about a collaboration between Freire’s team at the World Council of Churches and the efforts to promote adult literacy in Guinea Bissau. There is a lot of very rich material, but I will try and summarise some core points below.

• The aim of the whole exercise is not the mechanical-bureaucratic one of teaching basic literacy reading and writing to illiterate adults but to enable them to read their own reality.

• This requires a respectful relationship between the teachers and the learners. There is no place for class or gender superiority, or for thinking higher education produces more superior people. For this reason, teachers take their place alongside learners in productive work, such as in the fields. Teachers who do not learn at the same time as they are teaching are not doing their job.

• The work is valid in its own right. It is not the first step on an assumed journey to an assumedly more valuable higher education. As President Nyerere said in his work Education for self-reliance:

‘the education offered in our primary schools should be an education complete in itself it should not continue to be simply a preparation for secondary school…The activities of the primary school should constitute preparation for the life which the majority of children will lead.’

‘The theory of knowledge that serves a revolutionary objective and is put into practise in education is based upon the claim that knowledge is always a process, and results from the conscious action (practice) of human beings on the objective reality which, in its turn, conditions them. Thus, a dynamic and contradictory unity is established between objective reality and the persons acting on it. All reality is dynamic and contradictory in this same way’.

From the point of view of such a theory and of the education which grows from it, it is not possible:

to separate the act of knowing existing knowledge from the act of
creating new knowledge

to separate theory and practise

to separate ‘teaching from learning, educating from being educated’ (p.89).

‘Education as an act of knowing confronts us with a number of theoretical practical, not intellectual questions: What to know? How to know? Why to know? In benefit of what and of whom to know? Moreover, against what and whom to know?’ (p.100).

He goes on to stress that these are political not technical questions.

• The method is based on the identification of a limited number of ‘generative’ words which are chosen for their capacity to unlock wider discussion and understanding of the learner’s realities. For example, one word chosen here was rice. There is then the choice of a channel of communication to be used to code the word chosen. This could be visual, auditory, tactile, or audio-visual. The learners are then asked to analyse what they are presented with so, for example, if there is a photograph of men and women working in the fields, the questions may be asked as to why are they working? Who are they? The aim is to teach the reading of the superstructure around the coded elements. He stresses the need to defend against two risks. One is that we may,

‘reduce the coding simply to a message to be transmitted when it is, in reality, an object to be known, even a challenge, a problem to be revealed. The second danger is that we may transform the code into some kind of puzzle to be solved.’ (p.89).

‘The task of evaluation is a means of training and, as such, is intimately linked to the search for new forms of action. Looking at one’s own practise as a problem provides the critical moment in evaluation. The subjects of a practise can then go back over what has been done in order to confirm or to rectify it in this or that aspect, enriching subsequent practise and being enriched by it.’ (p.97).

He goes on to say that,

‘the important thing is, first, that there be ongoing evaluation of work being realised and, second, that the evaluation never become a type of fiscalisation’. (p.98).

‘The basic challenge is not simply to substitute a new programme for an old one that was adequate to the interests of the colonisers. It is to establish a coherence between the society that is being reconstructed in a revolutionary way and the education as a whole that deserves that revolutionary society. And the theory of knowledge which the new society must put in practise requires a new way of knowing that is antagonistic to colonial education.’ (pp.102-3).

Or, to put it more positively,

‘When persons are active subjects of their own existence, their daily life is oriented toward reality…..The fundamental point is that people not only see the world as “the base from which they carry out their own lives” but they also see daily life as the object of an ever more rigorous knowledge and this knowledge should clarify and illuminate their practical and emotional existence that takes reality as its base’ (p.135).

‘the process of liberation of a people does not take place in profound and authentic terms unless this people reconquers its own Word, the right to speak it, to pronounce it, and to name the word: to speak the word as a means of liberating their own language through that act from the supremacy of the dominant language of the colonisers.’ (p.126).

As indicated above, the PAIGC (and Cabral, and many other African countries), believed that in the context of Guiné (with 28 languages spoken in a small country) the unifying force of having a single national language outweighed the benefits of the process Freire describes. (Personally, I am not sure it has to be so binary and that hybrid options could be considered).

Technical higher education, modernisms, and choice

As a (former) nurse who has worked in modern hospitals and in rural areas in Africa and Brazil, I am aware of the massive difference in skill sets required in each environment. The former requires the knowledge to choose and interpret the many hundreds of diagnostic aids available, the latter depends on communication with the patient and relatives (often via an interpreter), deep knowledge of local disease patterns, and hoping that the necessary people and materials for the small laboratory and single x-ray machine to operate are, for once, in place. Elite capture means that most medical training is geared towards the former and the financial rewards of such practice are much higher. The health needs of most of the world’s population are still met, if at all, by the latter.

This is but one example that questions the purpose of higher technical education/ training, how it can advance the struggle, how it can be supported in ways that support developmental aims, whose interests it is supposed to serve.

At one level these are political issues, relating to the dangers of elite formation and also of conflicting individual and societal interests. These were very real in post-independence Guinéa (and in Mozambique) and remain alive to this day. As President Luis Cabral (Amilcar’s half-brother and also founder member of the PAIGC) said in his address to the National Assembly in April 1976:

‘The school is like a double-edged knife because the pupils must be taught what to do when they’re older. If this is not done, things would go on as before, with each individual who learned to read up to the third or fourth year no longer wanting to be a worker, only wanting to go to the city, not to stay in the country. If we allow this to continue as before, our schools will constitute a vast factory of unemployed, for we have not enough jobs for people in the city!’

and

‘Our comrades in national education… are studying ways of providing a programme of studies which will serve our country, instead of a programme designed to form people who will despise our country, despise the very work of their people, their country. We do not want this in our land. We want every individual to study so as to raise the level of our people, each individual who studies more, who learns more, serves his country and his people better. Not to serve his own interests placing himself above his people in his country…We are finding that there are many comrades who do not show this consciousness. Many of them who were educated in the struggle, who were with us in the struggle, after taking a college course are returning to our country as ‘visitors’ and even expect us to give them another scholarship to go and take another course!’ (Cabral, 1976, p.26).

But this also raises questions of research agendas, academic funding, and institutional bias. It is not just a question of traditional versus modern. There are choices in the forms of modernism pursued their ideological underpinnings and the social relations they seek with the society they intend to create. These are all implicit in Cabral’s reflections on his work as an agronomist. He did not question the science he was taught but the social, economic, and ecological contexts of its application.

ROAPE’s own Reginald Cline-Cole has examined this issue more explicitly within an academic context, exploring divergent motivations and aspirations, national and international research priorities (and related hierarchies and funding) and largely external processes of disciplinary definition and control.

In Cline-Cole’s ‘Blazing a trail while lazing around: Knowledge processes and wood-fuel paradoxes?’ he tells the story of his (eventually successful) efforts to apply his research skills and knowledge to a real problem (sustainable wood-fuel supply) experienced by real people (in his case a family bakery and domestic household use) in Sierra Leone. I refer to it here because it is a rare effort that looks at the detail of the often absent links between societal need and the organisation (and, increasingly, business models) of intellectual labour and, as such, is directly related to the struggles of Cabral and his comrades to make knowledge and technical capacity communicate with the masses, as a weapon of liberation.

Featured Photographs: all of the photographs are provided by Mike Powell, and they include PAIGC campaign photos, children sorting through rice, work rota from a secondary school, and a montage of publicity photos of Cabral from the 1970s.

Reading

Cabral, Amilcar, 1969, 1974, Revolution in Guinea: An African People’s Struggle, stage 1, London

Cabral, Amilcar, 1971, Our People Are Our Mountains: Amílcar Cabral on the Guinean Revolution, Committee for Freedom in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea, London,

Cabral, Amilcar. 1973, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral, Monthly Review Press, New York and London

Cabral, Amilcar. 1980, Amilcar Cabral: Unity and Struggle, Heinemann Educational Books, London

Cabral, Amilcar. 2016, Resistance and Decolonization, Rowman and Littlefield, London and New York

Cabral, Luis, 1976, ‘Speech to the opening session of the National Assembly, Bissau, April 1976’, published in People’s Power, 1976, MAGIC, London

César, Filipa, 2018, ‘Meteorisations: Reading Amilcar Cabral’s Agronomy of Liberation’ Third Text 32:2.3

Cline-Cole, Reginald, 2006, ‘Blazing a trail while lazing around: Knowledge processes and woodfuel paradoxes?‘ by Reginald Cline-Cole is the final version (2006) of an article, mistakenly published in draft form in Development in Practice 16(6), 2006, pp. 545-558

Davidson, Basil, 1959, Old Africa Rediscovered, Gollanz, London

Davidson, Basil, 1969, The Liberation of Guinea: Aspects of an African Revolution, Penguin, London

Basil Davidson, 1980 ‘Special Operations Europe: Scenes from the Anti-Nazi War’ Gollancz, London

Freire, Paolo. 1987, Pedagogy in Progress: The Letters to Guinea-Bissau, ‎ Writers and Readers Ltd, London

Gjorstad, Ole & Sarrazin, Chantal, 1976, Sowing the First Harvest: National Reconstruction in Guinea Bissau, LSM Information Centre, Oakland

Kimble, Judy, ‘The Struggle within the Struggle’ Feminist Review, No. 8 (Summer, 1981), pp. 107-111, Palgrave Macmillan Journals.

Lopes, Carlos. 1987 Guinea Bissau: From Liberation Struggle to Independent Statehood, Zed Press

Lopes, Carlos, 2005, Africa and the Challenges of Citizenry and Inclusion: the Legacy of Mario de Andrade CODESRIA, monograph series

Pereira, Luisa & Moita, Luis, 1976, Guinea Bissau: 3 Anos de Independencia, Edicao CIDA-C, Lisbon

Rudebeck, Lars. 1988. “Kandjadja, Guinea-Bissau 1976-1986: Observations on the Political Economy of an African Village.” Review of African Political Economy 41: 17-29.

Rudebeck, Lars.1990, ‘Structural Adjustment in Kandjadja, Guinea-Bissau’, Review of African Political Economy 49

Rudebeck, Lars. 1997, ‘’To Seek Happiness’: Development in a West African Village in the Era of Democratisation’, Review of African Political Economy 71

Sivanandan, A., 1994, ‘A Celebration of Basil Davidson’, Race and Class, 36:2, Institute of Race Relations, London

Urdang, Stephanie. 1979, Fighting Two Colonialisms: Women in Guinea-Bissau, Monthly Review Press, New York

Thiong’o, wa Ngugi, 2012, ‘Globalectics: theory and the politics of knowing’, Columbia University Press

Tomas, Antonio, 2008, O Fazedor de Utopias: uma Biografia de Amilcar Cabral, 2^nd edition, Tinta-de-China, Lisbon

Wood, D.A. 2020, Epistemic Decolonization, Palgrave Macmillan

Cabral and the demands of practice – an interview with Mike Powell

ROAPE

October 10, 2023

In this wide-ranging interview with ROAPE’s Mike Powell, Leo Zeilig asks him about Amílcar Cabral’s revolutionary activism. Powell talks about Cabral’s relentless focus on actual political dynamics of struggle, the purpose of theory, and his focus on the mode of production. For Cabral, Powell argues, nothing was static, everything was in a process of dialectical change, processes which could be consciously influenced by people acting together. Powell also discusses Basil Davidson’s collaboration and friendship with Cabral.

Leo Zeilig: Could you please tell roape.net readers about yourself? Your political background, your work and involvement in ROAPE in the 1970s, and after?

Mike Powell: I was a history student in England in the mid 1970s. It was a time of radical change, with women’s liberation sweeping across the university, and our politics being shaped by the anti-imperialist wars raging across the globe. I managed to focus my studies on these struggles and, in the process, came across the first editions of ROAPE and issue 45 of Transition magazine, then edited by Wole Soyinka, which had a special feature on the revolution in Guinea Bissau.

The emphasis of both on the practical effects of politics led me away from academia to train as a nurse and then to work in Primary Health care and humanitarian responses in Latin America and Africa for several years. This experience illustrated large gaps in the knowledge of international development agencies about the social realities that they were aiming to change and between academically produced knowledge and those working for social justice on the ground. Thinking about and trying to develop new intellectual practice to overcome those gaps has been the focus of my work and politics for the last 30 years.

I did my nurse training in Sheffield, where I first came across Lionel Cliffe, Jan Burgess and Jitendra and Judy Mohan of ROAPE and the West Indian activist Basil Griffiths through the Sheffield Southern Africa solidarity group. When I returned to Sheffield in the late 1980s, I became more involved in the journal, at first in its development as a cooperative business. Over time this morphed into an interest in what sort of knowledge the journal was producing and for what purpose.

The Cabral special issue in 1993 was my first effort at producing content for the journal, after which I was invited to join the editorial collective, as one of only a few non-academic members. I stayed on the group for about 12 years and still contribute where I can.

You have been fascinated by the work, activism, and politics of Amilcar Cabral. Recently on roape.net we have serialised your 1993 special issue on Cabral, which you put together twenty years after his murder. Can you talk us through your interest in Cabral, and what elements of his activisms, his revolutionary politics, originally caught your attention?

Coming across Cabral the first time was a complete revelation. He was really the first person anywhere I had come across who seemed to be able to understand the interaction of political, cultural, and social processes, analyse them, and develop ideas for effective political practice. It was also obvious that, whilst he was informed by and able to engage with wider political and intellectual currents, he was unusually able to recognise when these did not meet the demands of the Guinean struggle and to develop original thinking, based on detailed knowledge of local social, political, and environmental realities. And all of this was before one took into account the incredible achievement of starting a revolution in a small and almost entirely illiterate country and defeating the 35,000 strong colonial army of a NATO member.[1]

It wasn’t until after Cabral was murdered, that you visited liberated Guinea-Bissau later in the 1970s. What were your impressions of the country, the liberation movement – PAIGC (Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde) – that was now in power and its leadership?

It was quite disappointing really. I spent most of the time in Bissau itself, in the bit the Portuguese had built. It was a very sleepy place with bored youth hanging out on the street and complaining that nothing happened. There was some society wedding taking place in in the cathedral and much of the party leadership turned up in suits in a succession of new Volvos. It was hard to imagine anything less revolutionary.

I had, though, a series of meetings which were more encouraging. It was definitely still possible in 1977 to work progressively. There were some very creative experiments in education for example.

I met Carmen Pereira, chair of the National Women’s Commission, and she and her office were clearly trying to build on the important roles that women had taken up during the struggle. However, it was also clear that much of the development work was fairly technocratic. The growing health service was concentrating on hospitals and doctors and was nothing like as tailored to the needs of the rural majority as the health system developed in Mozambique.

Leaders and functionaries seemed to be embedded in the city, spending their time in meetings in the ministries and losing touch with the people they had fought with in the jungle. I spent an incredible afternoon with Mario de Andrade, the Angolan poet and founder of the MPLA, who argued that the biggest danger for a socialist government was the growth of social divisions between the people and the leaders. He was referring to the Eastern bloc, but he must have been aware that there was a similar process underway in Bissau.

I think this process continued until the coup in 1980. There were other problems, in particular with the different social and political realities between Guinea Bissau and the Cabo Verde islands and the actual practical difficulties in the same party trying to run two countries, with very different socio-economic realities, and planning a union between them, which created further divisions.

The process of a growing loss of communication between leaders and the (especially rural) masses is well described by Carlos Lopez in his book Guinea Bissau: from liberation struggle to independent statehood which was published in 1987. Early post-independence history is also covered in Antonio Tomas’ book O Fazedor de Utopias: uma biographia de Amilcar Cabral’, which has since been translated into English. Both make for fairly depressing reading. A different perspective, albeit one also illustrating growing problems, comes from a series of articles by Lars Rudebeck published in ROAPE no’s 41, 49 and 71. What is very interesting – and unusual – about these is that they document a series of visits to the same village by an external researcher over many years.

In the ways that national liberation movements and parties have degenerated across the continent, what are the lessons we need to draw about state power, imperialism, and the failure of national liberation in the Global South, and Africa in particular?

Well, the problem always encountered is that of economic progress. The choice is either to de-link from the global economy or to try and negotiate a better position within it. Delinking is very difficult. It carries many hidden costs and often attracts violent opposition from imperialist forces, be they states or financial institutions. Negotiation can generate some extra income for social programmes but does nothing to challenge unequal structural relationships. Zimbabwe, post land reform, Mozambique, immediately post-independence, and, at some stage, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in Ethiopia have all tried the former.[2] Zimbabwe, to start with, South Africa and Lula’s Brazil have tried the latter. None were that successful. I think that is because it is a very difficult problem.

A problem which is more in our hands to deal with is that of internal political relationships. As indicated by Mario de Andrade and Carlos Lopez, a growing post-liberation gap between the leaders and the masses seems a common phenomenon. How it happens varies according to the local political context. It can happen slowly over quite a period of time. For example, the internal democracy of Frelimo in Mozambique functioned quite well for at least a decade after independence. There can be many factors in play. Greed and ambition play their part but so also do the distractions of administration, of operating in a more technical environment, of having to pay attention to a mass of new external relationships. But also, there are the hidden social dynamics of moving from a period of all pervasive struggle, of 24/7 engagement, to whatever is possible in terms of a normal life.

I remember talking to Eritrean fighters, still in intense struggle, about the transition process to government which I had witnessed in Mozambique. People, even leaders, do not adapt at the same pace or in the same direction. Political and social dynamics change. If this is not openly recognised and discussed, new political tensions emerge. Claiming to be the authentic voice of a liberation movement whose achievements are in the distant past has less and less meaning and does not I think, nor should, cut much ice with the younger generation.

Linked to this are the politics of gender. All the liberation movements I have seen have paid at least lip service to the idea that liberation will be for everyone. In Eritrea and Guinea Bissau, forging new gender roles was an integral part of the struggle itself. However, nowhere has this been a serious and developing priority post liberation. This is obviously frustrating for women militants, but I believe it also has a damaging general effect on the possibility of maintaining progressive and inclusive social dynamics in the new phase of the struggles.

Can we usefully compare Cabral’s revolutionary theory, and his contribution to national liberation and the dynamics of social movements, with Frantz Fanon’s work, for example? Cabral was much more firmly rooted in Marxist debates, and writings.

I haven’t read much Fanon for a long time. Cabral, because of his role, gave more attention to the actual political dynamics of struggle, the purpose of theory, and, in his focus on the mode of production as the key dynamic of pre and post capitalist societies, made an important and necessary contribution to Marxist theory. I don’t think, though, that he was that bothered about how Marxist he was. For him, the most important element of theory was whether or not it helped the struggle he was engaged in. He was interested in and sought to learn from the experiences of other liberation movements such as the Vietnamese and the Cubans. He also needed to tend to his relationships with communist countries who, particularly when it came to arms, were vital allies of the PAIGC.

Where I think Fanon and Cabral’s work can be most usefully compared is in their deep reflection on the psychological experience of being colonised and what this meant for different groups within African societies. In this their views were quite closely aligned even though they seemed to arrive at them through different routes and with different emphasis. Both made important contributions to the class analysis of emerging independent nations, the local dynamics of neo-colonialism, and the implications of unresolved ontological questions for decolonial thought and action. This is discussed in detail by Dan Wood in his recent book Epistemic Decolonization.

In terms of Cabral’s work, his significance, and relevance, what do you think remains to be written, researched, and debated? What should activists and researchers be studying of Cabral’s writings, and politics?

Well, the first thing is for him to become much better known, particularly in the Anglophone world. Even those few who do refer to his work, such as Mamdani and Ndlovu Gatsheni, do not appear to have read his work in full.

As I wrote 30 years ago, the first step is to be aware of the historical record. What the PAIGC achieved in Guiné was just remarkable. We all need reminding that such victories are possible. We also need to understand why it was possible: the level of organisation, the clear communication with the fighters and the populations in the liberated areas, the attention to the role of women, to agriculture, to health, to education. What was actually done was sometimes rudimentary, but it demonstrated a commitment to address people’s needs, to make people believe that it was a freedom worth fighting for.

With regard to current debates, I believe Cabral, with Fanon, should be the starting point for work on epistemic justice and the decolonisation of knowledge. Cabral’s was an entirely un-academic approach. As with all theory, his interest was in how it could advance the struggle. With regard to knowledge, he was aware of and open to learning from the deep understanding that the rural masses had of the realities – natural and social – in which they lived. He could also be critical of what he regarded as misplaced and unhelpful traditions which had become detached from current realities. As a trained agronomist, he was proud and optimistic of what his acquired knowledge could do for the socio-economic development of his country. But he was very aware of the racist attitudes and the deep colonial ignorance which prevented modern science being effectively used to help local farmers in Guiné. Where this led him was not into a set of binaries, a talking shop of what knowledge was colonial or Eurocentric, but what was needed to make things go forward. Both in his professional area of expertise, as with political discussion, this would involve a process of respectful dialogue between the lived experiences of the rural masses and the new technical experts which the PAIGC was keen to train, training which, when done in country, would include involvement in village discussions and co-operative farming plots.

The vision was of a people who would regain the capacity to act on their reality, to make their own history. This capacity would be based on people’s understanding of their own realities, their own cultural achievements plus whatever they decided to adopt and adapt from – as well as contribute to – what Cabral described as universal knowledge. This vision seems to me to be almost identical to that proposed by Ngugi wa Thiong’o in his book Globalectics. That is one where every society on earth should build confidence in its own knowledge, taking from and contributing to a universal knowledge, which is universal in its value to and acceptance by the people who want to use it, not by the dictat of cultures still crippled by an unreformed coloniality.

Secondly, Cabral’s approach to knowledge had ecological foundations, which are of particular relevance in our current times. Being an agronomist, being a political leader in a country where nearly everyone was a farmer, gave Cabral an ecological understanding which was almost ontological in nature. For him, the natural environment was an integral and dynamic part of the realities in which socio-economic relations between people played out. Again, this was not an academic conclusion that he came to but was an understanding of life formed by seeing the effect on his family of serious droughts in Cabo Verde, followed by his experience of studying and talking to farmers in Portugal, Angola, and Guinea Bissau.

As Dan Wood and Filipa César have shown in more detail, this ecological understanding did inform his intellectual work, but it was also very evident in his conceptualization of people as part of their environment and in the actual language he used to talk about the struggle. His talks and his writing are full of references to planting, to harvest, to seeds, to the cycles of agricultural life, of things coming to fruition and to decay. For Cabral, nothing was static, everything was in a process of dialectical change, processes which could be consciously influenced by people acting together on the basis of well-grounded theory and continuous, open reflection. By definition, ‘Cabralism’ could not be a dogma. It remains, in my view, an essential approach to the challenges we face, intellectually, practically and in terms of the relationships, with people and with nature, necessary to go forward.

As a socialist interested in Africa in the early 1990s, I was intoxicated by the writing of the great historian Basil Davidson. You knew Basil personally, and he was intimately involved in the struggles in Portugal’s colonies, and admired Cabral deeply. Can you describe Davidson’s contribution to ‘rewriting’ African history, and his own engagement in Guinea-Bissau?

The key point about Basil is that he wasn’t an academic. He was an individual who took a keen and intelligent interest in the world around him and, following his experiences in the Second World War fighting fascism, wanted it, in ways which seemed quite loosely conceived, to be a fairer and more equitable place. Not being bound by discipline gave Basil licence to look more broadly and more openly than many academics at what was going on. In particular, his focus on people, on how events were affecting them and how they responded, their motivation, brought a liveliness to what he was describing. This was greatly enhanced by the quality of his writing. You may or may not agree with everything he wrote, but it was never less than clear and never dull.[3]

Like many of his generation, he found it hard to find a role for himself after the war. He became interested in Africa in part because of his anti-colonial politics but also because, in a stopover in Kano during the war, it had grabbed his imagination. He very quickly realised, from his own observation and from reading the output of the small number of historical and archaeological researchers working on Africa’s past, that received wisdom about African societies, both historical and present, was seriously wrong. This had it that Africa had no history, no culture, no philosophy, no experience of governance at a large scale, no technological innovation. Basil was keen to challenge this ignorance because of his interest in and respect for the actual historical record, but he also, explicitly, saw the necessity to do so for the process of building support for decolonial movements. If we recall that his first book on African history, Old Africa Rediscovered (1959), was greeted by Hugh Trevor Roper, professor of history at Oxford University, with the comment that there was no history of Africa except that of the European in Africa, we can see how trailblazing and important his work was.[4]

It also illustrates the point that for Basil, as for Cabral and, as it happens, also for some of the other founder members of ROAPE, there was always a purpose to his intellectual labour. Some supposed intellectual purists throw up their hands in horror at such an approach, claiming that it promotes bias and even propaganda. Cabral’s response is evident in his famous instruction: ‘Tell no lies, claim no easy victories’. As the example of African historiography shows very well, Basil would have seriously undermined his purpose if his historical writing had been shown to be false. Instead, nearly 75 years later, its core premises may still not be widely known, but they are accepted by all serious historians.

Cabral visited London in February 1960, which is when he and Basil first met. They remained in close contact, including visits to the liberated areas by Basil, up until Cabral’s assassination. I wish I had asked Basil more about their friendship and what they talked about. Recently, re-reading Old Africa Rediscovered, the sketch of the relationship of African knowledges to external ones in the introduction and the vision for the future in the final chapter, ’History Begins Anew’, I was struck by the massive confluence of Basil’s thoughts with those expressed by Cabral in his Return to the Source speeches. I have no idea if one was taking from the other or both arriving at the same point independently. What is clear is that there was a deep mutual admiration and solidarity between them. Basil was very active in building external political support for the PAIGC’s struggle, and those of FRELIMO and the MPLA, and was a leading member of the Committee for Freedom in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea in the UK.

They would also have talked a lot about guerrilla war. These conversations would have covered tactics and strategy, of which Basil had had experience in Yugoslavia and Italy. They would, I am sure, have gone further. There is a section in his book Special Operations Europe, where Basil describes his time with Yugoslav partisans in contested areas far away from their ‘liberated areas’, including being hidden from German patrols by sympathetic farmworkers.

Cabral must have had similar moments as he prepared for the armed struggle. This shared experience, of utter dependence on strangers who you hoped were your comrades, must have provided an additional and almost unique bond between them. Both were intellectual giants. Both remained fully alert to the demands of practice, in all their manifestations.

On Thursday, 12 October, roape.net will be publishing Mike Powell’s primer on Cabral’s speeches and writings to give our readers a brief taste of the breadth of Cabral’s ideas.

Mike Powell is a long-standing member of ROAPE’s editorial collective and was involved with ROAPE first as a co-operative business advisor and then, from 1994–2010, as a member of the Editorial Working Group. He is currently a Contributing Editor.

Featured Photograph:Culture center in João Galego, Cape Verde (12 April, 2011).

Notes

[1] In the 1993 issue I put 70,000. I now think this referred to the total Portuguese military strength in Africa at some time during the wars. The correct maximum figure for Guinea Bissau was 35,000.

[2] I am referring here to the ideas proposed by the Marxist Leninist League of Tigray in 1985.

[3] A 1994 issue of Race and Class, celebrating Basil’s 80^th birthday gives a better picture of the full range of activities Basil pursued to shape intellectual and political perspectives on both contemporary and historic processes in Africa – see A. Sivanandan’s editorial, 1994.

[4] BBC interview 1965, quoted by Kwame Anthony Appiah ‘Africa: the hidden history’ in the New York Review of Books, December 17, 1998.

Liberia’s President Weah Must Go

ROAPE

October 6, 2023

Robtel Neajai Pailey writes that after six years in power, President George Weah has proven he is not up to the job. For the sake of Liberia’s future, he must be removed in next week’s elections. There is a hunger and need for change across the country. As Pailey explains,”there is little doubt that 10 October will be a referendum on the president. [Weah] boasts of his ‘pro-poor agenda for prosperity and development’, yet … consistently evaded public debates about his overall record in office.”

By Robtel Neajai Pailey

If a blind man threatens to stone you, assume he already wields the first pebble.

This local adage permeated national politics in Liberia six years ago when George Manneh Weah, the proverbial ‘blind man’ in question, was elected president amidst a tidal wave of anti-intellectualism.

Since then, the football-phenom-turned-politician has pelted my country and its people with subpar leadership. Were he to secure a second mandate in Liberia’s fourth post-war general and presidential elections on 10 October, there will be nothing left of the country to salvage.

It will shrink into a hollow shell of its former self.

During his inaugural speech, President Weah vowed to transform “the lives of all Liberians” yet he failed to convert his clunky campaign slogan, “Change for Hope”, into concrete wins. Liberia’s disaffected citizens are now hoping for (regime) change through the democratic process and they are justified.

Weah’s gaffes are so numerous that a member of the opposition urged voters to issue him a red card for abysmal performance. The president refused to publicly declare his assets upon taking office and ignored calls for his political appointees to follow suit. He prioritised loyalty over competence by populating key government agencies with sycophants who have no track record of delivery, particularly in the strategic areas of finance and economic planning, foreign and maritime affairs, port management, commerce and industry, public works and energy. And rather than confronting Liberia’s decades of ‘negative peace’, President Weah neglected to establish a war and economic crimes court despite empty pledges to do so.

His administration’s mismanagement compelled Liberia to adopt International Monetary Fund (IMF)-backed austerity measures, euphemistically referred to as ‘harmonisation’, that slashed civil servant salaries. Even before the economic shocks catalysed by COVID-19 and Russia’s war in Ukraine, Liberia’s ballooning debt and currency depreciation left most citizens in the lurch.

Although our cash-based national budget increased from US$570 million in 2018 to US$783 million in 2023, the lion’s share was earmarked for recurring expenditures such as government salaries and operations, with most growth projections based on resource extraction without value addition. Weah’s administration defied environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles by pursuing dubious contracts shrouded in secrecy, the most recent being a proposed carbon credit dealwith the United Arab Emirates that will pawn 10% of the country’s territory.

He promised to “weed out the menace of corruption”, however greed and graft have become the hallmarks of his presidency. For example, Weah’s ruling Coalition for Democratic Change (CDC) is fronting two candidates for the national legislature who were sanctioned by the US Department of Treasury for “ongoing public corruption” during their stints as heads of government agencies. Auditors have died mysteriously under Weah’s watch and he conspired with members of the legislature and judiciary to unceremoniously impeach a dissenting Supreme Court justice, thus holding the highest court captive.

In effect, Weah has weaponised the Supreme Court and NEC against Liberia’s citizenry. It is no wonder, then, that the top four opposition presidential candidates I interviewed in July have lost faith in the neutrality and credibility of these two so-called arbiters of electoral disputes.

Acquitted by the Supreme Court for starting voter registration without demarcating electoral constituencies as stipulated in a 2022 national population census, the NEC has proven to be nothing more than a personalist mouthpiece of the president.

Questions continue to linger about the validity of a biometric voter registration (BVR) process marred by severe delays and technical glitches, especially after the NEC’s decision to uphold manual voting in October. Equally concerning was its announcement about funding gaps for a probable rematch between Weah and former vice-president Joseph Boakai in a run-off. Long before the NEC came under fire for stalling the release of a final voter registration roll prior to elections, which is a statutory obligation, public confidence in the institution had already waned.

The electoral referee’s antics may indicate Weah’s intention to use the power and purse of the presidency to massage election results in his favour.

Tellingly, we have witnessed how the recent spate of coups in West and Central Africa reveal a rot from the top, of leaders who cling to power illegitimately when they should bow out gracefully. Yet, while military take-overs rarely end well, the machinations of an embattled head of state in Liberia could be equally destabilising, as political coups in neighbouring Guinea, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Sierra Leone have demonstrated.

Amidst electrifying euphoria, Weah’s die-hard supporters expected him to transform his fancy footwork on the football field into a presidency that fulfils promises. They expected him to translate the rhetoric of being Liberia’s first self-professed ‘feminist-in-chief’ into advancements for women and girls. They expected him to take one for the team by admitting his errors and reversing course, especially after bruising losses in mid-term senatorial elections and a botched referendum.

Instead, President Weah squandered practically every opportunity to score the country’s most important goal of socio-economic transformation. He heaped all of the challenges inherited from predecessor Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a controversial darling of the West, and dug Liberia into a deeper hole of poverty and inequality.

Weah is a cautionary tale of the dangers of populist leaders who have emerged across the globe. Although Liberia’s opposition failed to coalesce under one ticket to defeat the incumbent decisively, they all agree he is undeserving of a second term. With rhetorical vows to ‘rescue’, ‘fix’, ‘sweep’, and ‘renew’ Liberia, these candidates have characterised Weah as an existential threat.

And, so, there is little doubt that 10 October will be a referendum on the president. While on the campaign trail, he boasts of his ‘pro-poor agenda for prosperity and development’, touting successes such as the elimination of high school exam and public university fees, the paving of roads and building of hospitals. Yet, Weah has consistently evaded public debates about his overall record in office, no doubt because he would be found wanting.

A popular song in Liberia, ‘Dumyanea’, aka ‘that’s my area’, celebrates individuals’ proficiencies in specific domains of life ranging from the mundane to the consequential. Weah demonstrates an aptitude for sport and music, yes, but the presidency is clearly not his area.

I hope Liberians remind him of this on 10 October. Because when a blind man threatens to stone you, he most likely will.

A version of this blogpost has appeared on African Arguments and Africa at LSE.

Robtel Neajai Pailey is a Liberian academic, activist and author of Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Featured Photograph: Children selling on elections day in Liberia (10 October 2017).

Liberia’s 2023 election – the more things change, the more they stay the same

ROAPE

October 5, 2023

In an excoriating attack on Liberia’s political and economic class, George Gerake Kamara argues that fate of the masses cannot lie in the hands of the frontline political parties who seek only to advance the interests of big bosses and international financial institutions. What is needed Kamara argues is a force that will mobilize the people around transformative ideals against the existing system.

By George Gerake Kamara

Once every six years the Liberian people are required to decide on the question of the political governance. This singular decision as practiced in most forms of liberal democracies is often considered to be the most decisive moment that determines how far a nation-state will advance in all facets of its material development. What is interesting for the determination of political leadership is that, in an underdeveloped, dominantly illiterate, and poverty-stricken society like Liberia, the humble and unsuspecting masses are expected to elect honest, knowledgeable, and nationalistic leaders, competent enough to govern a complex and modern state from an enlightened, informed, and rational perspective, irrespective of their pitiful living conditions.

The scenes during these voting processes are so humiliating as the people are summoned and lined up in long queues under the scorching sun or humiliating rain. The poor masses are condemned to material poverty as a result of the elites that dominate the political spectrum, they are considered historical objects indispensable to the advancement of democratic governance during the few minutes it takes to cast their ballots, though soon after they become simple subjects for domination and exploitation once the votes are counted and winners announced.

If this is not a mockery of any form of democratic governance, what more can we call it, as the people must survive another six years in pain and misery, while they wait for another election after six years to be consulted on the question of state building.

The dispositions of our elites – ignoble thinkers, indiscreet apparatchiks, and domestic agents of international private capital – as they sit at the edges of their seats in their luxuriating offices are unutterable. The scorched-earth socioeconomic policies and programs imported from the Global north often masquerade as popular democratic elections in Liberia and other Third World nations, become the master plan for national development and political governance.

The tragedy is that none of the “popular parties and candidates” dare question or challenge any of these “development frameworks” from IMF, World Bank, WTO, or any multilateral financial and trade institutions during election debates. They remain silent in an effort to assess their viability in the context of the society in which their implementation is recommended if not a requirement to obtain financial assistance.

The ill-informed and unsuspecting masses, seeing no earthly end to their material misery watch with bemusement as participants or spectators in this theatrical spectacle. The political spectacle that unfolds before their eyes is intended to entertain rather than deal with the question of the economic and political governance of the Liberian republic. The tragic reality is that the material contradictions that result from this political mockery set-up the nation-state for violent social eruption as the political misfits and agents of international private capital become incapable of providing any progressive change to the material condition of the suffering poor.

The people, in their frustration, resort to brute lawlessness, which threaten the security of both domestic and foreign private and public investments. These conditions mounts pressure from both the people who demand to live in peace irrespective of their material poverty and the owners of domestic and foreign private capitals who seek returns on their investments.

In most instances, the political elites in power, unable to serve both the interests of their foreign masters and the masses of the people at the same time turn politics into a minefield of sectarianism and bigotry that borders on ethnic and religious stereotypes. This explains the senseless slaughtering of one tribe or religious group by the other during periods when the nation-state degenerates into absolute anarchy as was the case in Liberia from 1989 to 2003.

Understanding the Post-War Political Economy of Liberia

Events are expressing themselves more violently than ever before, the economic quagmire besetting Liberia is overwhelming; reduced student enrollment in both private and public schools and high prostitution are graphic displays of the nation’s economic turmoil as 10 October election approaches. The dire economic conditions in the little plot of land in West Africa – Liberia – is once again assuming the responsibility for democratic regime change.

Beginning in 2005 after the brokered peace accord in Accra, Ghana, in 2003, an intellectual initiative that ceased the nation’s 14 years of civil upheavals which decimated the lives of over 250,000 Liberians, ruined properties worth hundreds of million and bruised the nation’s economy in such a manner that I cannot describe.

Since 2005, elections in Liberia have only been a process yielding benefits for unprincipled politicians and their colleagues. This period conditioned a shift in the consciousness of Liberians who felt that the logjams of Liberia’s underdevelopment was gender related – men have failed, so let’s try a woman. This banal conceptualization of nation-building created an egregious impact on the Liberian economy after the cessation of the fourteen years of carnage.

The election of Liberia’s and Africa’s first female president – Ellen Johnson Sirleaf – was never going to be an end to the economic woes of the country, rather it was the very beginning. Her era, which many saw as the light at the end of the tunnel of economy paralysis, witnessed a vicious pattern of privatization and deregulation that afflicted and continues to afflict incurable economic wounds on the standard of life in Liberia.

The cravings of many Liberians for socioeconomic prosperity after a protracted period of living on humanitarian aid was now at the mercy of foreign multinational corporations. To revive the country’s economy and grow its GDP, which at the time stood at US$897 million, by means of attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), there was a widespread liberalization, deregulation, and privatization of the Liberian economy towards that end.

Although the initiative yielded dividends and saw Liberia’s GDP grow from US$897 million (World Bank, 2004) to US$2.4 billion (World Bank, 2011) as a direct result of foreign investments, the masses of the people still shouldered the crushing weight of poverty and unmitigated illiteracy. For the few who were fortunate to attain employment during this period – 2006-2011 – and even beyond, given that the model hasn’t changed, their salaries and wages were disproportionate to their labour, thus incapacitating them from financing their basic socioeconomic needs.

Liberia foreign debt portfolio was estimated at U$4.6 billion dollars when the administration of Sirleaf sought to save the nation from the crushing weight of foreign debt. The IMF, under its Enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative, released Liberia from the weighty hammer of foreign debt. Yet the Annual Public Debt Management Report of 2018-2019 revealed that the regime of the ex-soccer connoisseur in George M. Weah incurred an estimated debt of U$942.6 million dollars from his predecessor in 2018. At the time of writing, Liberia’s debt portfolio is hovering around U$2.03 billion.

How this astronomical growth in public debt has occurred in little over five years is one of the central questions that the regime of Weah must answer to regain the confidence of the Liberian electorates in coming election or be consigned to the dustbin of history if he fails to provide a plausible response.

The Struggle for National Leadership

There are now visible political marriages being hatched between varying members of the elite who are themselves nothing more than the slaves of international finance capital. These wannabes are united against nothing but the wretched masses, the majority of whom eke out a living on the margins of society, while a few, absorbed by the neoliberal capitalist labour market, are being exploited by foreign multinational corporations on the mines and plantations.

So, it does not matter what shape these political arrangements take, like all African ruling classes, the Liberian political class has no intention of waging a frontal assault against economic backwardness conditioned by the brutal policies and programs doled out by the IMF and World Bank through their structural adjustment programmes. While they spout anti-poverty slogans, the system continues to churns out social misery.

The more things change, the more they remain the same!

The ruling Coalition for Democratic Change

The ruling party, the Coalition for Democratic Change (CDC), which is headed by erstwhile soccer player, George M. Weah, tags itself as pro-poor but has rolled out every conceivable measure that is anti-poor. The party ascended to national leadership after two unsuccessful attempts at winning the confidence of the people on the vague and ambiguous mantra of “Change for Hope”. With the patent ambiguity of this slogan, the people, out of anger for the feckless establishment led by Sirleaf, thrusted political power into the hands of the nation’s most deplorable human being.

Yet, a little over one year later, in 2019, the masses saw through the farce and drew the conclusion that the nation was on an odyssey for something cataclysmic; given the brazen display of wealth and the construction of duplexes by protégés of the president.

The support base of the ruling elite have dwindled over the last five years due to brazen corruption, incessant mysterious deaths, the repertoire of violence against dissent, and the struggling economy which has caused huge unemployment, high prostitution, etc. Liberia has been turned into a hell on earth, or an open prison. With all the enumerated vices in sight and mind, events are expressing themselves at lightning speed, so the ruling party is headed for a colossus defeat in the impending presidential elections.

The Alternative National Congress

As is the case with all liberal democracies, there are many opposition politicians who have expressed their interest in redeeming the republic from these economic quagmires. One of them is the successful businessman, Alexander Benedict Cummings, the political leader of the Alternative National Congress (ANC). The ANC consists of a group of Liberians who propagate the myth that the panacea to an ailing economy is a Successful Businessman. The crux of their argument is that because Cummings once headed a cell of the internationally acclaimed beverage company Coca-Cola and blossomed its finance, he is qualified to be the only alternative, savvy enough to perform an economic miracle.

What this sect has not been able or is deliberately negating is the fact that there exists a gulf between a corporation and a state. They have not been able to discipline themselves to perform an objective scrutiny of the work that goes on within a corporation and a nation-state. The hysteria that is generated when one encounters a wealthy man especially in a backwater society, is so powerful that reasoning becomes a burdensome task. But we shall assist in this regard.

For a corporation, the sole aim is to maximize profits, and this, by every necessary means. This sharply contrasts to the running of a state. In running the state, one deals with conflicting interests beyond profit maximization. It also entails the making of sound economic policy and programmes and the effective management of resources to achieve development for all members of the population. In a corporation, when wages of workers are reduced, it is meant to reduce cost and maximize profits. In the context of the state, when government slashes spending, the consequences are devastating for workers and poor.

By these dichotomies, the idea of leadership for the governance of a state requires something more than maximizing profits and calculating loses. Just as its illogical for any reasonable human being to argue that being an inveterate politician is the best preparation for the effective management of an economy than being a businessman, it’s also banal for anyone to reason that being an adroit businessman is a sufficient qualification for the resuscitation of an ailing economy.

In March 2021, during one of Cummings’ many radio appearances, he made an assertion which he believes will earn for him political capital. On one of the nation’s most revered local radio stations, Cummings promised to increase the Liberia’s national budget to over one billion dollars. This statement would go on to take the front and centre of Cummings’ ANC’s campaign promises. For the many who have studied and understood the political maneuverings of capitalists turned politicians, this pronouncement didn’t come across as a surprise. What came across as a surprise was Cummings’ failure to enumerate steps that will be taken to realize his ambitious plan as president, and how the billion dollars will be used to impact the lives of over five million Liberians.

When Cummings asserted: “I know how it can be done and I know how to do it…” it was an obvious expression that Cummings – a politician in a developing countries, where the means and factors of production are in the hands of foreign corporations and big financial institutions – had read from the same text book, same page and paragraph on economy growth as all the others.

But let’s be clear, that by the assertion, “I know how it can be done and I know how to do it…” Cummings meant the application of brutal austerity measures – increments in taxes, reduction in pensions for redundant civil servants, reduction in salaries for active civil servants, cutting back on government programs, such as education, healthcare etc. In a highly privatized economy, there can be no budgetary increment or economic growth without wages being assaulted. And so, the one billion budgetary growth pronouncement was a beautiful and brilliant public declaration of war against labouring men and women. It would be a farce for anyone to think that an avid capitalist crusader is the solution to the problems faced by the workers and peasant masses.

The erstwhile governing party, the Unity Party

Amid all these developments what is more unfortunate but seems not to be surprising about this national drama is the degree of support for the former ruling party – the Unity Party – headed by the former Vice-President, Joseph N. Boakai, now wields from the masses. It is unfortunate how the popular classes now hail the former ruling establishment after all the pains and sufferings meted against their material lives for twelve years successively in a very short period.

The Unity Party which presided over the governance architecture of Liberia was deeply engrossed into nepotism, corruption, and the servicing of the interests of foreign multinational corporations – this course was effectively pursued for twelve unbroken years.

The question now is: To what extent can these desperate figures who are now parading as patriots be trusted with leadership? The difference between Liberians of this political configuration and the ones currently at the helm of power in their pursuit to deprive the Liberian masses of the necessities of life, is just the difference in degree.

The urgent need for an alternative

The fate of the masses cannot lie in the hands of these three frontline political institutions, for they seek to advance not the interests of the people but the big bosses and international financial institutions. For as long these three parties are collectively united against the people both in principle and practice, there must be a force powerful enough to stand with and for the people both in principle and practice. There is a need for the establishment of a viable alternative for the masses to be mobilized and led by a force that sees politics simply as an instrument for self-advancement.

Liberia needs a force whose policies and programmes will mirror the general wishes and aspirations of the wretched masses. A force that will mobilize the people around transformative ideals and against the existing structures. The mobilization of the masses must be the task of those who see society far from the circles of the individual person and who believe that Liberia’s development begins when the wealth of a given society is equitably distributed to satisfy the material interests of all.

I stand for a force inextricably tied to ideals that are people-driven as the only viable alternative capable of repelling the full-scale assault on working men and women in Liberia and beyond.

George Gerake Kamara is a student at the University of Liberia where he reads Public Administration. George belongs to the Movement for Social Democratic Alternative (MOSODA) in Liberia.

Featured Photograph: A queues in Monrovia, Liberia during elections (10 October 2017).

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