You are not alone – the quest for solidarity

July 25, 2023

ROAPE contributor, Yusuf Serunkuma, reviews a new book on the loneliness of the left. Left Alone is a highly original collection of urgent stories, reflections and short essays from around the world on the lived experiences of left loneliness from a variety of genres and left political currents. Serunkuma praises a volume that capture struggles in the trenches of authoritarianism, and on the streets of the capitalist world.

By Yusuf Serunkuma

In all struggles—before mass consciousness and awakening—strugglers, fighters, resistors or peasant/organic intellectuals have tended to start and sustain the struggles either alone or with very few comrades in arms. A few comrades. Because these moments tend to be long and winding, they come with corrosive spells of loneliness—and are often exhausting. The toll could be either mental or material or both. With the exception of openly violent exploitation (such as 1880s colonialism or earlier slave trade), where among the victims, the openness of violence itself mobilised resistance, most anti-exploitation struggles—especially against deftly disguised, fetishized and structured modes of exploitation—have fought to mobilise mass consciousness. A few inquisitive folks are able to make sense of the hidden hand of authoritarianism and extraction, which renders them enemies of the machine. On the other hand, living from amongst the oppressors—say in capitals in Europe and the United States—among the profiteers of colonialism, capitalism, slavery, apartheid, wars entrepreneurs, is even more lonesome, and outright dangerous. This is especially because the exploiters—as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman told us in 1988—tend to control the ways in which their exploitative practices are received in the public domain. This is the painful fate of Julian Assange or former UK labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

The same is true with present-day authoritarianisms across the world. Because of the violence cultivated within the public through a fear industry that includes killings, abductions, torture and arrests, entire publics are rendered helpless and afraid. In turn only a few bold individuals—almost considered reckless—are willing to stand up and fight. In the course of this, they are left alone because of the risks posed by their acts of resistance (which could be both outright activism on the streets or the intellectual radical positions they hold).

Daraja Press’ recent publication, Left Alone: On Solitude and Loneliness amid Collective Struggle covers commendable ground on this discussion of the subject of loneliness and solitude in struggles supposedly meant to be engaged in collectively. The book is a massive collection of fairly short pieces, but heartfelt, mostly personalised contributions by writers and activists from across the world: Kenya, Argentina, Italy, the UK, the United States, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Germany and several others. The contributors are from different backgrounds ranging from poets, theatre, academia (with topics such as Marxist political thought, communism, racial discrimination), and general activism. They capture struggles in the academia and public intellectualism, in the trenches of authoritarianism, on the streets of the capitalist world or all of them together at once. The book playfully but powerfully incorporates several genres of literary expression, ranging from poetry, painting to prose writing. There are strong academically written essays (such as Derefe Chevannes’s “The Problem of Pathology” or Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s “The Practicality of Utopianism”). There are poems by Lena Grace Anyuolo, Patrick Anderson, and Lena Stoehrfaktor, which although sombre and more reflective, serve to lighten up the readings. There are creative fictions (such as Leo Zeilig’s 2084), and biographical writing (such as alejandra ciriza’s “A Red Rooster Does Not Give Up”). There is an interview of Turkish/Kurdish scholar and activist, İsmail Beşikçi, which offers an even more radical reading of the subject of loneliness—as empowering!

The refrain from a poem by Lena Stoehrfaktor, summarises the ambitions of this book. She writes: “Before our outer shells can no longer hold us/ We must reach out to each other, so isolation won’t enfold us/ If we can bridge the gaps between us, it won’t be so crushing/ When the songs of exploitation tell us we’re good for nothing” (146). Indeed, written in the spirit of solidarity, the different contributors come to the subject of loneliness from different (mostly Left) vantage points, but all appealing for connections and solidarities: while some see it as a form of tiredness, fatigue, overwhelming conditions of labouring, trauma, marginalisation, disenfranchisement, dehumanisation (such as being pathologized), violent (unintellectual) defeat, or fear, others see it as the feeling that comes from holding a different radical view than assumed co-strugglers. But all these unite at that point of a quest for union and empathy.

Richard Gilman-Opalsky powerful essay wrestles with the intellectual loneliness, seeing this as that feeling “one may have whether alone or in the crowd…of being dejected, deprived of companionship, without sympathy or human solidarity (22). And later sees loneliness, of feeling “uprooted, disconnected from purpose, dejected, cut off from human solidarity,” and normally “a totalitarian government presents itself as the rallying cry against this condition” (23) as people find the imperative to create solidarities, organise and uproot this very government.

It had to be Gilman-Opalsky—a professed communist, and author of The Communism of Love—who blasts folks “generally regarded as smart and sensible – who think that the only thing wrong with the capitalist reality is that some presidents and prime ministers could be better,” (33) instead of seeking to dismantle the entire system. This view is echoed by James Martel, when fellow liberal Lefties soon realise that your views insist on dismantling the entire system, at which point they seek to keep away (94).

In a deeply personal, emotional and introspective piece, alejandra ciriza recollects the memories of struggle and exile after the 1976 coup in her home country of Argentina which brought in the murderous government of the Cono Sur. ciriza writes that the military junta that headed the coup in 1976 was so brutal that political persecution by the state included, “systematic use of terror, in broad daylight, forced disappearance, murder, confinement, and censorship, but [also] the methodical inculcation of fear” (45). Reflecting on this condition, as one of those who had been active in resisting the junta, ciriza recalls the pains of exile, the pain of brutal defeat, and hopelessness about the future: “It was a harsh isolation. The absences transformed into permanent anguish, the endless searches in the newspapers looking for a name … among the fallen” (52).

“So, this is what largely defeat is all about,” she writes, capturing the pain of loneliness when friends and comrades have been exiled or murdered. “The isolation, the rupture of the threads of collective fabric, of the connections with others, so indispensable for us to think and struggle, of loss of emancipatory horizons, which can be envisioned when the masses become conscious of their powers” (53). These different reflections on loneliness provide a spectrum of reflections covering different modes of struggle.

There is a beautiful word play with the title of this book, “Left Alone.” On the one hand, it could mean Left liberal politics—as often understood against Right wing conservative politics. On the other, simply being left alone, as used in the English language to mean, being abandoned, ignored, dejected, and alone. While both are readable as reflected in the book, the entire volume is conceived mostly as Left-identifying. This is a weakness of the book, especially for African/postcolonial/subaltern readers: it reflects a Eurocentric bias especially that most struggles across the world while being equally lonesome, fighters/activists and strugglers never identify as members of the Left. It is not our grammar. In fact, for Francophone West Africa, for example, the French Left continues to be part of the system that reproduces the CFA colonisation. And for many victims of bombing in the Middle East, Palestine or South East Asia and Latin America, it does not matter whether the leaderships in the United States or Europe are Left identifying. The pain is the same. Probably Left-identifying Barack Obama dropped more bombs on Pakistan than Right identifying George Bush—and this pattern remains unchanged.

Perhaps this overt inclination toward Left-identifying politics is a product of the lack of conceptual clarity on how struggle ought to be understood in its broader sense. It is in Leo Zeilig’s story—on the power of ground-level solidarities, traumas of no-end-in-sight, and pain of suicide—that you find a broader, more comprehensive sense of what struggles could mean, and what is normally being struggled against:

[Among] the 1300 individuals who own over half of the world’s wealth, who own the companies that dump grain into the sea to keep prices artificially high, and the politicians who order bombs to be strewn across our towns and cities, or the forest to be burnt to clear land, not for the landless, mind you, but for a few bastards who have stolen it. Perhaps you want something closer to hand, take the money wasted on military equipment which could be spent on schools and hospitals… (197).

Zeilig makes connections with the rest of the subaltern world, the postcolonial worlds suffering under the weight of bombs and capitalist extraction, while at the same time identifying with the challenges of being and living inside the western world which includes the neglect of schools and hospitals for the continued investment in endless war.

But these criticism of mine notwithstanding, it is a delightful, poignant read for whoever is involved in any struggle against capitalist exploitation and authoritarianism—especially when they find themselves alone and dejected. The message is clear: You aren’t alone.

Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichhorn and Patrick Anderson (eds) Left Alone: On Solitude and Loneliness amid Collective Struggle (Daraja Press, 2023). The collection is available for download for a small donation on the website.

Yusuf Serunkuma is a columnist in Uganda’s newspapers, 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 is also a scholar and researches topics in political economy, and teaches decolonial studies/new colonialism, and writes regularly for ROAPE.

Featured Photograph: Kimberly Chiimba is one of the artists featured in Left Alone; Kimberly is a young black British-Zimbabwean portrait painter based in London, UK. Best known for her bright, natural and hyperrealistic paintings of contemporary Black subjects.

How Hegel’s Deliberate Ignorance of African History Legitimated the Colonisation of Africa

ROAPE

July 20, 2023

Isaac Samuel is an independent researcher whose work focuses on African history and economics. His prolific output on pre-colonial African history can be found on his blog AfricanHistoryExtra, which as a collective body of extraordinary scholarship puts the lie to the still widely held belief that – in the words of esteemed University of Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Rope in the 1960s – there is no African history, “only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness”. Here, in a blistering account, Samuel shows how German philosopher Georg Hegel – one of the most influential figures of 19^th century philosophy – wilfully misinterpreted first-hand accounts of the Asante kingdom from the 18^th century. The result, both in the work of Hegel and those who followed him, was the construction of an absurdly fictional account of African society, steeped in popular beliefs of his time about the continent’s supposed backwardness, that deliberately subsumed the richness and complexity of Asante history in order to legitimate imperial expansion and colonial rule.

By Isaac Samuel

In the year 1744, a series of battles in northern Ghana marked the ascendance of a new regional power, whose legacy in the Atlantic world would greatly influence western conceptions of African history. For several months, the cavalry armies of the kingdoms of Gonja and Dagomba – heirs to the legacy of the old empires of Ghana and Mali – faced off against the formidable infantry of the Asante kingdom, an upstart state to their south which had been founded less than a century prior. Asante’s northern campaign, which was personally led by its king Opoku Ware, ended with a resounding victory in Gonja but a near defeat in Dagomba where his besieged army was only saved by the musket fire which frightened Dagomba’s cavalry.

The Gonja scholar Sidi Umar wrote of these events that “At the end of this year 1744 the infidels entered the country of Gonja, and the Gonja knew them as Imbo [i.e. Ashanti], they also invaded Dagomba and the people of Dagomba took to flight … the cursed unbeliever, Opoku, entered the town of GhGh (in Dagomba) and plundered it”.[1] When Opoku Ware died in 1750, Sidi Umar left no kind words for the Asante ruler, writing “May Allah curse him and put his soul into hell. It was he who harmed the people of Gonja, oppressing and robbing them of their property at his will”.[2]

In the decades following its northern campaigns, Asante formally incorporated Gonja as a tributary province. An imamate was created at Asante’s capital Kumasi that was populated by scholars from Gonja, among whom was Sidi Umar’s great-grandson Karamo Togma, the author of a chronicle on Asante’s history in 1807.[3]

A Scribe of Bondoukou, ca. 1897, National Archives UK. Bondoukou in north-eastern Cote d’Ivoire was one of Asante’s northern vassals.

No longer seen as an oppressor but as a protector, Gonja scholars lauded the Asante government. Karamo’s chronicle of Asante was unfortunately lost in the Anglo-Asante war of 1874, but it had been extensively used by the British envoy Joseph Dupuis who visited Kumasi in 1820. In the sixth chapter of Dupuis’ Journal of a Residence in Ashantee where he outline’s Asante’s history based on information he copied from the “moslem records”, Dupuis shows Asante to be a well-organized “empire” with an elaborate administrative system and “codes of laws”, led by a king who was elected by the “principal officers of state” and respected by his subjects.[4]

Dupuis’ nuanced but positive view of Asante is corroborated by an 1822 letter to King Osei Kwame from Karamo’s uncle named Malik, (who was also the Imam of Gonja) which read “Oh sultan of Alshati and king of this world, may Allah give you long life and good health until old age, may Allah bless your son and help him conquer the people of the land”.[5] Dupuis observed that with the exception of some bad practices, King Osei’s subjects from Gonja thought “he was a good man, and wholly underserving the name of tyrant”.[6] However, this observation was at odds with the contemporary European perception of Asante, popularized by the German philosopher Georg Hegel.

Nearly two decades after Karamo’s chronicle on Asante’s history, Hegel included the Asante kingdom in his lectures on world history and religion, delivered in Berlin in 1827.[7] While Hegel is celebrated in the West as one of the founders of modern European philosophy, he had a lacklustre reputation as a historian due to his pre-occupation with constructing philosophies of history around the concept of race.[8]

For information on Asante’s society and history, Hegel relied on the writings of Thomas Bowdich, who was Dubois’ predecessor in the role of British envoy to Asante.[9] In 1819, Bowdich published his meticulously detailed account of the Asante kingdom in his book Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee. Bowditch’s account on Asante described an African government and society so sophisticated and familiar to his Western audience that some of his peers, including Dubuis, considered it embellished.[10]

Bowdich had also seen the chronicle of Asante’s history but since he couldn’t read Arabic, he relied on oral accounts from Asante’s courtiers who, understandably, recounted an even more positive account of their kingdom’s history than what Karamo had written.[11] However, anyone who has read Bowdich’s colourful description of Asante’s society (that has proved to be an invaluable resource for specialists on Asante history) would be surprised at how much Hegel distorted it.

A house in Kumasi, ca. 1819, Thomas Bowditch, British Library.

A street in Kumasi, ca. 1819, Thomas Bowditch, British Library.

Nearly one third of Bowditch’s book contained chapters on the Asante’s geography, history, constitution, laws, architecture, economy, trade, language. However, Hegel appeared to deliberately ignore this detail to focus instead on a few specific passages. Even here, the passages that attracted Hegel’s attention were misconstrued.[12]

In a section on the supposed despotism of African kings, Hegel’s evidence from Asante was that “the king inherits all the property left by his deceased subjects”, yet Bowdich had recorded that “the king is heir to the gold of every subject”.[13] In a section on the supposed fanaticism of Africans, Hegel claims that in the Asante’s pre-war preparations, the bones of the king’s mother are washed with human blood, yet Bowditch’s account mentions that bones were “bathed in rum and water”, wiped with silks, covered in gold in a brief ceremony and later re-interred.[14] In a section about the supposed sensuousness of Africans, Hegel claims that Asante festivals including the consumption of a person by the public, yet Bowditch records that it was “only whispered” that “small pieces” of the enemy’s heart were mixed in the meals of the few war chiefs but not the public.[15]

Hegel then uses the above claim of cannibalism to argue that “slavery has awakened more humanity” among Africans taken away on European ships because those left back in Africa are in a worse condition.[16] Whereas Bowditch mentions that any slave who enters Asante territory from a kingdom not tributary to it “is received as a free subject” and that in Asante, the “good treatment of slaves” is provided for by the liberty of transferring themselves to any freeman that they coerce into doing so by “invoking his death” if he refuses to take them in.[17]

The abovementioned misinterpretations of Asante society are not just anecdotes but make up the entirety of Hegel’s writing on Asante and provide the basis on which Hegel rejected the idea of instinct and respect as a universal human characteristic. Even where Bowdich had attempted to explicate the rationality of Asante’s laws, Hegel’s retelling greatly reinterpreted or simply ignored the evidence that contradicted his preconceptions.[18]

Hegel’s Africans supposedly exist at the lowest level of consciousness – immediate sensuousness – which is why he claims that Africa lies outside history. According to Hegel, it’s only by encountering the West and enduring slavery that Africa enters into the dialectical process of consciousness and thus world history. Hegel therefore surmises that it is both necessary and just that Africa be subjected to slavery and colonization.[19]

Hegel selected and deployed details from Bowditch’s account to fit with his theoretical apriorism of Africa as a place without history. This is representative of Hegel’s academic practice, in that he looked into books written about African societies and found what he was looking for, even when this meant wilful misinterpretation to construct an absurdly fictional account of African society that is steeped in popular beliefs of his time about the continent’s supposed backwardness. Hegel’s ludicrous theorizing barred him from ever admitting Africa and its people to ‘history’ as he construed it. For a continent which supposedly has no “historical interest of its own”, Hegel devoted a great deal of attention to it, primarily because Hegel’s glorification of Europe was predicated on his denigration of Africa.[20]

In his later books such as Philosophy of Right, Hegel advocated for colonial expansion as a solution to elevate the so-called barbarian nations onto the stage of history, stating that “the rights of mere herdsmen, hunters, and tillers of the soil are inferior, and their independence is merely formal”.[21]

The ideas of Hegel and his peers such as Immanuel Kant were part of the dominant discourses of colonialism which purported a racial and cultural superiority of the West over non-Western societies such as Asante. They provided a rationale for colonial expansion cloaked in the language of extending civilization and bringing Africa into history.[22]

Beginning in 1807 and continuing for nearly a century, the armies of Asante would engage in a protracted war against British colonial expansion from the coast. Ironically, Hegel interpreted Asante’s resistance against British expansionism as evidence for Africans’ “lack of respect for life”.[23] The Anglo-Asante wars were an extremely expensive undertaking that was paid for by the British government largely instigated by extremely negative reports about Asante current in the British public from the writings of Hegel and his peers.[24] Added to this were the biased reports from the British governors of Cape Coast castle on the coast of modern Ghana who even tried to block the embassy of Dupuis which advocated for peace with Asante.[25]

The 1874 Battle of Amoaful between the British and the Asante kingdom, British Library.

The armies of Asante defeated the British in several battles until an internal conflict over strategy led to the Asante’s defeat in 1874 when the British found Kumasi abandoned and the King Kofi Kakari sent a negotiating party while in retreat. The 1874 invasion had been widely covered by British war correspondents with British newspapers such as The Times publishing 415 articles about Asante in just one year.[26] This furthered the extreme contempt felt by British society towards Asante even more than the fictitious image of the kingdom invented by Hegel had done. So, when the Asante initiated a series of diplomatic exchanges with the British which saw many of their envoys travelling to London, they found the cards heavily stacked against them.

A combination of negative press about the Asante kingdom and great power competition between Britain and France culminated in the preparation for a British expedition against Asante in 1895, even as the kingdom’s envoys were in London trying to avert the looming threat. Despite the envoys’ success in obtaining a more favourable treaty to retain their sovereignty through a concessionaire arrangement, and despite their nascent efforts in public relations to document the “civilizing” improvements in Asante’s laws, the British colonial secretary, headed by the expansionist Joseph Chamberlain, authorized the invasion.[27]

Fully trusting in the efforts of his envoys, the reigning Asante King Prempeh I made no effort to resist the expedition, whose leaders’ racism against Africans was extreme even by the standards of the day.[28] Prempeh was promptly exiled to Seychelles, but the kingdom was only formally occupied by the British after a final anti-colonial war in 1900.

After the fall of Asante, amateur colonial historians begun reconstructing the history of the kingdom that was now subsumed under the Gold Coast colony. In 1915, Dr Walton Claridge, a medical officer with no formal training in history, published A History of the Gold Coast and Ashanti, a 1,287-page volume of the Gold Coast history. Claridge was a loyal imperialist whose account of Asante’s history was written to legitimize the presence of the colonial government. He wrote that the extension of British power “was the natural unavoidable outcome of the long contact of their continued presence in the country and of the long contact of a stronger and more virile race with a less enlightened people”.[29]

The racialized concept of the British as a “virile race” and a leading force in world history was popularized by Joseph Chamberlain,[30] the aforementioned colonial secretary responsible for the most aggressive colonial wars. Claridge’s account of Asante history focuses almost exclusively on its interactions with the British and the latter’s eventual victory over Asante.[31] By inscribing Chamberlain’s racialized notions of British superiority into the history of Asante, and solely focusing on British interactions with Asante, Claridge was championing a Hegelian conception of African history.

Later writers such as William Balmer’s 1925 book A History of the Akan Peoples of the Gold Coast and W.E.F Ward’s 1935 book A Short History of the Gold Coast made little improvements to Claridge’s work, even as Ward’s account of Gold Coast history went through many editions and became a standard text in local schools.[32] As late as 1967, Ward was paying homage to Claridge as a source of inspiration, writing that “everyone who writes on Gold Coast history should begin, after the fashion of the country, by pouring a libation and sacrificing a sheep in honour of D. Claridge”.[33] The colony had since gained its independence and been renamed the Republic of Ghana, and professional historians such as Ivor Wilks were beginning to challenge the previous writing on Asante society and history by Western scholars and colonial writers who had been pre-occupied with rationalizing imperial expansion and its subsequent establishment of colonial rule.[34]

Using the vast corpus of internal and external accounts of Asante’s society, Ivor Wilks published his celebrated account on Asante history, Asante in the Nineteenth Century. Wilks relied on several primary sources including; oral traditions which had been documented by the deposed king Prempeh in 1907; the 19th century chronicles by Muslim writers such as Karamo and his peers; as well as the detailed accounts of European visitors such as Bowditch, Dupuis and the missionaries who succeeded them.[35] Wilks’ work was improved upon by other specialists of Asante history such as Tom McCaskie[36] and Emmanuel Akyeampong[37], which combined with the rise of postcolonial historiography was influential to contemporary African writers.

Among the most prominent post-colonial African writers is the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. In a 1994 interview with the Paris Review where he explains the source of his interest in storytelling, Achebe recounts the stories he read as a student at school about European encounters with remote people and strange lands. He adds that “Then I grew older and began to read about adventures in which I didn’t know that I was supposed to be on the side of those savages who were encountered by the good white man. That was the way I was introduced to the danger of not having your own stories. There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail—the bravery, even, of the lions”.[38]

Achebe’s often cited proverb metaphorically describes how dominant groups such as colonialists inscribe power through historical narratives, and his solution was to tell the story which reflected the lion’s bravery rather than the hunter. Achebe’s call to shift modern African historiography away from its Eurocentric foundations was emblematic of the prevailing movement of decolonization in post-colonial studies, which sought to move beyond the colonial library by interrogating the internal sources of African history including those written by literate Africans like Karamo.[39]

However, the documented history of Asante shows that the kind of history which glorified the British was not a result of the Asante not having their own stories, but that their stories had been deliberately subsumed in order to legitimate imperial interests. Furthermore, the writers of Asante’s own stories such as Karamo and Bowditch recorded a fairly accurate account of Asante’s history, despite falling into Achebe’s metaphorical camps of the ‘lion’ and the ‘hunter’ in relation to Asante.

Hegel and the colonial writers who succeeded him weren’t lacking accurate information about African societies, but deliberately ignored the stories of the African ‘lion’ to glorify the European ‘hunter’. The so-called ‘facts’ and ‘truths’ that Hegelian and colonial discourses often claim to embody are instead simply a projection of how the colonizers envisioned and sought to legitimate their rule. They were misconceptions deliberately invented by particular understandings of the world as well as by particular configurations of power. We therefore ought to read them extremely critically to reassess their world view as well as their claims to authenticity.

Stories of African history don’t just reflect the agony and bravery of the lions, but they reveal the boasts of the wily hunter to be nothing more than a farce.

Isaac Samuel is an independent researcher whose work focuses on African history and economics. He currently runs a blog called AfricanHistoryExtra which focuses on the pre-colonial history of Africa.

Featured Photograph: A portrait of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) (Jakob Schlesinger).

[1] Akwamu 1640-1750: A Study of the Rise and Fall of a West African Empire, Ivor Wilks, p. 123.

[2] The History of Islam in Africa by Nehemia Levtzion, ‎Randall L. Pouwels, p. 104.

[3] Asante in the Nineteenth Century, Ivor Wilks, p. 346.

[4] Consul Dupuis and Wangara, Ivor Wilks, pp. 58-63; Journal of a Residence in Ashantee, Joseph Dupuis, p. 229.

[5] Consul Dupuis and Wangara, pp. 64-65.

[6] Journal of a Residence in Ashantee, p. 98.

[7] Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Georg Hegel (University of California Press, 1996), p. 5.

[8] Hegel and the Third World, Teshale Tibebu; Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, Susan Buck-Morss; Hegel, Critique de l’Afrique, Pierre Franklin Tavares.

[9] Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, p. 188.

[10] Journal of a Residence in Ashantee, p. xxv.

[11] Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, T. Bowditch, p. 288.

[12] Exiled from History: Africa in Hegel’s Academic Practice, Tom C. McCaskie, p. 20.

[13] Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, p. 187; Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, p. 254.

[14] Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, p. 188; Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, p. 420.

[15] Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, p. 220; Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, p. 300.

[16] Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, p. 183.

[17] Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, p. 255 & p. 260.

[18] Exiled from History: Africa in Hegel’s Academic Practice, p. 20.

[19] Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti, Robert Bernasconi, p. 29 & pp. 50-53.

[20] Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti, p. 41.

[21] Philosophy of Right, Georg Hegel (Cosimo Inc, 2008), p. 202.

[22] Hegel and the Third World, pp. 119-123 & p. 144; Hegel and Colonialism, Alison Stone.

[23] Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, p. 185.

[24] While Hegel was popular in late 19^th century Britain, he was only one among many Western thinkers who contributed to the dominant discourses of colonialism, see e.g., Hegel in England: Victorian Thought Reconsidered, Tibor Frank and Hegel in Britain: A Brief History of British Commentary and Attitudes, James Bradley.

[25] The Fall of the Asante Empire, Robert B. Edgerton, pp. 73-74.

[26] Wolseley and Ashanti: The Asante War Journal and Correspondence of Major General Sir Garnet Wolseley 1873-1874, Ian Frederick William Beckett.

[27] Asante in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 640-650.

[28] Clarke Musgrave’s 1896 book To Kumassi with Scott uses the n-word at least 35 times to refer to the Asante and their king, which doesn’t appear at all in accounts written by Bowditch and Dupuis in the early 19th century.

[29] A History of the Cold Coast and Ashanti: Second Edition, W. W. Claridge, p. 536.

[30] Racism After Race Relations, Robert Miles, p. 68.

[31] A History of the Cold Coast and Ashanti: Second Edition, pp. 180-182.

[32] The History of Ghana, Roger Gocking, pp. 299-300.

[33] Preface of A History of Ghana, W.E.F. Ward.

[34] One Nation, Many Histories, Ivor Wilks, pp. 6-10.

[35] Asante in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 344-350.

[36] State and Society in Pre-colonial Asante, Tom McCaskie, pp. 12-20.

[37] The History of Ashanti Kings and the Whole Country Itself and Other Writings, edited by Emmanuel Akyeampong et al.

[38] https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1720/the-art-of-fiction-no-139-chinua-achebe, accessed 15 July 2023.

[39] The Invention of Africa, VY Mudimbe, p. 181.

“Let the politician die, and the Poet live!” – Senghor’s vision of political power

ROAPE

July 18, 2023

David Tonghou Ngong writes about the importance of understanding Leopold Senghor’s poetry when thinking about his perspective on political power. Senghor’s 1951 poem “Chaka” captures his own situation as a person torn between his duties as poet and politician. Ngong argues that from this perspective, we should see Senghor as a complex figure who was neither saint nor sinner.

By David Tonghou Ngong

A portrait of Senghor marking the 60^th anniversary of Senegal’s independence in 2020 was critiqued for implicitly praising Senghor’s leadership as first president of Senegal, as one “whose pen mattered more than his sword.”[1] The brief film was taken to task for showing only Senghor’s sunny side, for showing him as poet-president who led the people “as a teacher, with method and organizational spirit,” but failing to show his shadow side, such as how Senghor was beholden to France and the brutality that characterized his regime (1960-1980).

The critique portrayed Senghor as one who was never comfortable with independence, preferring instead to remain under French tutelage. It catalogued the brutalities of Senghor’s regime, among which was his enforcement of a single-party political system, the jailing of opponents, the putting down of student revolt, and orchestrating the death of activists. For the critic, Senghor was not as radical as he should have been.

My goal in this piece is neither to defend the short film nor Senghor. Rather, it is to argue that to understand Senghor, we need to begin with his theory of political power. When we look at his theory of political power, we would realize that his leadership style, both as an anticolonialist and as president mirrored his view of political power. From this perspective, we would see that Senghor saw himself as a complex figure who needed neither to be portrayed as saint or sinner. Speaking of his leadership, Senghor noted that human beings are neither saints nor heroes.[2] This is not to say that we should not condemn him where such condemnation is deserved nor praise him where such praise is needful; rather, understanding his theory of power would prevent us from simplistically presenting him as one thing – and only one thing. In Senghor’s view, I argue, political power is inextricably linked to violence.

I make this argument by noting that the place to look for Senghor’s theory of political power is not in his philosophical corpus or even his acts as president but rather in one of his poems that have received little attention over the years. The poem in question is “Chaka” (also spelled Shaka), which was written in 1951, when he was still involved in anticolonial struggle. I argue that this poem was his way of coming to terms with his conception of political power that served both his anticolonial work and his work as president of Senegal. The vision of power enunciated in the poem captures his life as politician and poet. Writing to the American scholar of African literature Donald Burness in 1971, twenty years after the poem was written and over ten years after he became president of Senegal, Senghor confessed to the importance of this poem in his thinking about power when he said that “Chaka” captures his own situation as a person who is a poet and a politician, a person torn between his duties as poet and politician.[3] The poem is found in Senghor’s poetry collection, Ethiopiques (1956).

While “Chaka” was inspired by the legendary Zulu strongman and empire-builder, King Shaka (1787-1828), Senghor’s portrait of Shaka is actually inspired by a work of fiction, the novel Chaka, originally written in the Sotho language by Thomas Mofolo and published in 1925. Senghor’s depiction of Shaka however departed from Mofolo’s portrait of the man because Senghor’s Shaka was influenced by Negritude. In fact, Senghor’s Shaka is a reaction to Mofolo who is believed to have slandered African cultures and the king in his own portrayal. In Mopholo’s Chaka, as the translator of the novel Daniel Kunene has noted, Mofolo invented traditions that did not exist among the Zulus and characters that did not exist in the life of the actual Shaka.[4] For example, early in the novel, Mofolo says that there is a tradition among the Zulus that a woman found to be pregnant out of wedlock is to be killed.[5] Mofolo creates a Diviner called Isanusi who would lead Chaka to sign a pact with him in his violent quest for power, and a woman, Noliwa, with whom Chaka would fall in love, and whom Shaka eventually murders in his quest for power. Mofolo’s Chaka, it is suggested, portrayed Chaka as a violent person who sought power for its own sake and destroyed everything that stood in his way to achieving that power.

Mofolo was a Christian and is therefore believed to have been influenced by missionaries to slander both African culture and a revered African leader. Many scholars in the Negritude movement sought to challenge Mofolo’s view of Shaka, including Senghor. Senghor’s portrayal of Shaka was therefore intended to redeem his character. Senghor’s portrayal of Shaka however was scandalous at the time it was written because the world was just coming out of wars believed to have been orchestrated by people with violent characters such as Shaka’s.[6]

“Chaka” is a dramatic poem made up of two songs (Chant I & II) that interrogate and at the same time praise Shaka’s actions, developing theories of political power in the process. The central question in the poem is why Shaka wanted power? Did he want power for its own sake or did he want it to achieve some higher purpose? In Senghor’s hand, Shaka becomes a figure who wanted power not just for its own sake, as Mofolo portrayed him, but rather to serve a higher purpose – to rescue his people from oppression and create a more humane world, a new world.

Thus, Senghor presents Shaka as a kind of Christ figure who dies for love of his people, a martyr who dies for a worthy cause. In fact, the poem is dedicated to “the Bantu martyrs of South Africa,” suggesting that the poem should be read from the perspective of the martyrs among whom Shaka is included. In other words, Shaka’s death should be understood as the death of a martyr. While Mofolo presented Chaka as a tyrant who would not let anything, not even his love for a woman, stand in his way to achieving absolute power, Senghor presents him as one whose quest for power is motivated by love, the love for his people, the love for Black people – as one whose quest for power is motivated by his Negritude.

Yet if Shaka is motivated by love, the love of Black people, by his Negritude, as the poem suggests, why did he kill his lover, Noliwa, whom Senghor calls Nolivé, and a host of other people? Shaka’s response is that he killed her because of love, the love of his people. He kills her not just because he wants power but rather because he wants power “as a means” (“un moyen”) to serve his people, to rescue his people from oppression, the oppression of Europe.

It is at this point that we see Senghor at his most realistic when it comes to how to obtain power and keep it. For Shaka to obtain absolute power, as the Diviner, Issanoussi, tells him, he must give up something important. As the Diviner states, “Power doesn’t come without sacrifice/ And absolute power requires the blood of the most cherished.” (“Le pouvoir ne s’obtient sans sacrifice, le pouvoir absolu exige le sang de l’être le plus cher.”) Here, we see that Shaka does not flinch from sacrificing the love of his life to obtain power. If sacrificing her is what he needs to do to obtain power, “Then she must die,” he concludes. “Il faut mourir enfin, tout accepter….”

Thus, in “Chaka,” Senghor is suggesting that the one who seeks political power should be motivated by love, the love of people, their people. The African who seeks power should be motivated by love for Africans. This is indeed a rare claim to make about why an African leader should seek power. But we also see that this love for the people is fraught as it could also be used as a pretext – the pretext for murderous acts! What kind of love is this that does not hesitate to massacre in order to obtain the power to rescue one’s people? Should love seek power through the murder of the very ones purported to be rescued? Given that Senghor indicates that the poem is his way of coming to terms with political power, did his claim that the politician should be motivated by love shape his own political life? If so, how? If not, why not?

Reading “Chaka”, we see that Senghor’s theory of political power is a problematic one that could sponsor the brutalities that happened under his regime. While he sees love for one’s people as an ultimate reason to seek political power, it also seems that this love may sometimes be used as a pretext, as a reason to do whatever it takes to sieze power, even to the point of killing one’s intimate partner and people.

Senghor’s “Chaka” should therefore lead us to interrogate the kind of leaders we idolize. Do the people we idolize stand for lifegiving politics? Does the remaking of Shaka in the image of Negritude lead Senghor to pass over in silence a murderous view of power that was in turn replicated in his political life as first president of Senegal?

In his paper “Representation of Violence in Two African Epic Heroes,” Konate Siendou of Université de Cocody-Abidjan takes Africans to task for idolizing leaders whose view of power is rooted in violence.[7] This, he suggests, is found in how the stories of leaders such as Shaka and Sundiata have been narrated. These narratives often present the violence of these figures as essential to their rise to power so that they might save their people. Should we accept such violence as central to political power? If so, can we blame politicians for relying on it in their rise to, and execution of, power?

Modern African politics has been characterized by leaders who identify with the violence of animals such as the leopard or the lion, such as Mobutu of former Zaire (leopard) and Paul Biya of Cameroon (“l’homme lion”). Senghor’s “Chaka” helps us interrogate the relations between power and violence. How is it possible for violence to bring about a new world (“monde nouveau”), as Senghor intimates in the poem? Has African leaders’ use of violence not only brought death and destruction to the people?

Perhaps it is this aporia of the relation between power and violence that led Senghor to finally give up the quest for political power in “Chaka.” Thus, in the poem, the politician gives way to the poet. “Let the politician die,” we read, “and let the Poet live!” (“Bien mort le politique, et vive le Poète”). The poet here is one who wants to provide a salutary vision for life, a vision of fraternity and peace. But seeking these things seems to be intimately linked to violence. Could this be why Senghor gave up power, why he resigned the presidency? Did he give up power because he was disillusioned with the life of a politician and preferred the pensive life of a poet? Could he then be described as poète de l’action (poet of action) as the title of one of his books suggests?

Whatever the case, in “Chaka”, we see the struggles of the poet-politician. The poem provides us with a window into Senghor’s vision of power and how this pans out in his political career and it should be central to any study of Senghor’s praxis of political power.

David Tonghou Ngong is Professor of Religion and Theology at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and author of the forthcoming book on Senghor, Senghor’s Eucharist: Negritude and African Political Theology (Baylor University Press, 2023)

Featured Photograph: Independence Day in Senegal, President Léopold Sédar Senghor (centre) is walking to N’Gor beach with a crowd of spectators in the background (4 April 1962).

Notes

[1] See Florian Bobin, “The Senghor Myth,” Africa Is A Country, June 9, 2020. Florian Bobin previously published the piece as “Poetic Injustice: The Senghor Myth and Senegal’s Independence,” Review of African Political Economy, May 5, 2020, and “Le Mythe Senghor à l’épreuve du souvenir de l’indépendence,” Seneplus April 6, 2020.

[2] Léopold Sédar Senghor, La poésie de l’action: conversation avec Mohamed Aziza (Stock, 1980), Loc 2064, Kindle edition. Senghor writes: “Les homme ne sont, hélas! ni des saints ni des héros.”

[3] Donald Burness, Shaka: King of the Zulus in African Literature (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1976), 30, 40 n 8. In a letter to Donald Burness, Senghor writes that “c’est ma situation que j’ai exprimée sur la figure de Chaka, qui deviant, pour moi, le poète homme politique dechiré entre les devoirs de sa fonction de poète et ceux de sa fonction politique.”

[4] Daniel F. Kunene, “Introduction,” in Chaka, xiv-xix.

[5] Thomas Mofolo, Chaka, a new translation by Daniel F. Kunene (Oxford: Heinemann, 1981), 5.

[6] For more on the reception of Senghor’s “Chaka”, see Alexia Vassilatos, “A Misreading of Poetic Proportions: Thomas Mofolo and Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Chaka(s): Two African Texts in Conversation,” English Studies in Africa (2011): 136-153.. Also see, Burness, Shaka.

[7] Konate Siendou, “Violence in Two African Epic Heroes: A Comparative Study of Chaka and Sundiata,” Revue Scientifique the Lettres, Arts, et Sciences Humaines (2020).

Wagner in Africa – political excess and the African condition

ROAPE

July 13, 2023

In an analysis of the Wagner group in Africa, Graham Harrison argues that Western coverage on the group’s activities on the continent characterises it as an extension of the Kremlin’s violent and venal cronyism and a disrupter of African-Western partnerships dedicated to the building of liberal sovereignties through aid, peacebuilding, and policy advice. Yet, Harrison explains the commentary from Western circles share a deep and significant misreading of African politics.

By Graham Harrison

Wagner and its affiliates’ presence in Africa follows a faultline. Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Central African Republic, Burkina Faso, Sudan, and Mali each possess a present or recent history of loss of sovereign territorial control to insurgencies, recent coups or unstable regime changes, and failed or troubled interventions from Western organisations. Wagner and associated projects also led by Yevgeny Prigozhin have trained African militaries and militias in counter-insurgency, served as private security for heads of state, directly carried out counter-insurgency, secured (and exploited) mineral resources, and provided spurious but legitimating observation of elections. In essence, Wagner has acted to privatise state security, fight ‘dirty’ wars outside of established liberal codes of combat, and produce propaganda for insecure incumbent regimes. Until the march towards Moscow, Wagner had worked in Africa with background support from the Russian government.

Western reportage on Wagner in Africa characterises it as an aberration, a globalisation of the Kremlin’s violent and venal cronyism. It is also characterised as a spoiler: a purposeful disrupter of African-Western partnerships dedicated to the building of liberal sovereignties through aid, peacebuilding, and policy advice. One can readily agree with the former characterisation. But the latter is based in a kind of ideational sleight-of-hand, one that has proven remarkably durable in official Western circles when the question what to do about Africa? comes into focus.

Liberalism and Western elites’ misreading of Africa

Commentary from Western governments, diplomatic cadres, and a good number of consultants share a deep and significant misreading of African politics. This is that African governments have not yet properly learned the best and/or right modes of rule. This misreading was initialised during decolonisation, a period in which decolonising powers discussed independence within a singular framing: are African elites ready for statehood? The corollary of this question was that postcolonial African politics was defined by its inabilities. Up to the present-day, various tropes concerning corruption, state failure, peacebuilding, development aid, policy-based lending, election monitoring, technical assistance, and good governance refresh this very Western anxiety.

This framing is unified by a liberal counterposition. If African politics is too corrupt, violent, inefficient etc., then the solutions should be sought within the codes of liberal governance: liberalised markets, strong enforcement of property rights, an open national economy, civil society, accountability and transparency, pluralistic and deliberative political processes often based in partnerships, and multi-party democracy.

Again and again, facets of this doctrine anchor Western commentators’ representation of African politics as undeveloped in some fashion or other. And this allocates African politics to a specific relation with Western agencies: paternal tutelage.

Real politics is about how you make the right kind of compromises and the right arrangements so that you arrive at a better system for your country, and I think… [Somalis]… are discovering that they can’t have everything that they want and that’s just a basic rule.

This was the European Union’s Special Representative to the Horn of Africa, commenting on the inauguration of Somali Parliament in 2012. Think about that. A foreign diplomat characterising a newly-constituted parliament in which members are supposedly just now discovering that politics is about choice of action under conditions of constraint. The infantilising implication that you can’t have everything you want, and that you have just now learned this.

Political excess: Africa’s political overdevelopment

Basil Davidson’s brief history of decolonisation and the sovereign state in Africa, The Black Man’s Burden, characterises the winning of independence as ‘a transfer of crisis’ and, as a general leitmotif, this seems apt. The struggle for statehood was deeply intertwined with colonial failure: the brief, violent, and extractive experience of colonialism meant that newly-sovereign ruling elites did not ‘attain state power’. Rather, independence meant gaining control of projects of state construction, projects that had been previously executed in highly traumatic fashion. For new ruling elites, decolonisation involved immediately facing major-order and even existential challenges concerning the exercise of authoritative rule over peoples.

African elites have struggled to manage what might be described not so much as an undeveloped politics but rather an excess of politics: a succession of strategic, social, and material difficulties that would overwhelm any cabal of EU policymakers, consultancies, or UN institutions. None of this is to excuse the sometimes abysmal failures and predations of many post-colonial elites. It is simply to say that the challenges of governing states that were a product of a highly traumatic colonisation, thrown into world-systems heavily overdetermined by the Cold War, and (from the early 1970s) defined by generalised economic instability set post-colonial governance in a condition of complex and urgent political strife. The core political resources of manoeuvrability, resilience, innovation, ideological bombast, patronage, accommodation, repression, conciliation, deception and hypocrisy, institution-building, and the seeking of legitimacy were ever-present and ever-pressing.

The more detailed one’s investigation into specific cases, the more apparent this political excess seems. The EU’s talking suit was profoundly wrong about Somalia for example. Somalia has faced complex and existential challenges from the late 1980s onwards: the balancing and changing of Cold War patrons, the creation of a national development strategy in a society over which the state had almost no institutional presence in some places, invasion by Ethiopia, the rise of a secessionist movement in the north, the emergence of clan-based autonomous political formations, the rise of a massive informal economy in which piracy, finance, and international trade in bananas and khat produced new conduits of power and wealth. Two massive military interventions, the second of which dissolved into a US-led war. The formation of an exile government; the constant negotiation with donors concerning Somalia’s post-conflict future. A successful secession, leading to the creation of a genuinely original form of national assembly that has largely maintained civic peace even in the absence of juridical recognition of its sovereignty. All this in sixty years.

What is most interesting for our purposes is why Western politicians and diplomats get African politics wrong. The key reason is that they all deploy the same simplified liberal paradigm as a way to make African politics legible. Discourse on Africa is strewn with fatuous advice about free and fair elections, decentralisation to bring government closer to the people, the benefits of economic liberalism as a hotbed for entrepreneurialism. And so on. This Liberalism 101 ostensiblyserves to render African politics as undeveloped but substantially what it reveals is the continued naiveté of Western observers who have repeatedly failed to generate even the minimal cognitive sophistication to recognise that African politics is, if anything overdeveloped: defined by an excess of politics.

We have the answers… what’s the question?

In a response to recent interest in Wagner’s presence in some African countries, the United Sates Institute of Peace (USIP) worries that America is losing its influence in Africa. It argues that the West needs to win back Africans from the illiberal influence of Russia. It needs to make its case, a case that is not as judgemental or tainted by colonialism as it used to be. In summary, its liberal case to win back Africa is:

Intensify diplomacy and dialogue with Sahel states […]

Work not just with governments, but with whole societies… Support and seek guidance from opposition, civic, religious and communal groups, women and youth leaders — and critically, the business sectors — on specific steps in each country to better meet populations’ needs through democratically elected governments.

Demonstrate to Sahel nations the opportunities to build their economies through the rule of law that invites domestic and foreign investment.

Dialogue, partnerships with civil society organisations, the market economy. This ‘re-evaluation’ (USIP’s phrase) of the Western case for Africa could have been written in the mid 1990s and it could have come from all kinds of UN, Bretton Woods, OECD, EU, bilateral government aid departments, or consultancies. It is in this sense an encapsulation of the rudimentary and unchanging nature of the Western liberal optic in relation to African politics. Yet, its iteration in this specific circumstance is perhaps revealing.

Tempting though the figurative might be, Wagner’s presence in some African countries is not virus-like. That implies that it is a morbid symptom, a dysfunction. Something that can be flushed out in order to return politics to order. Wagner is, rather, part of a repertoire of techniques of governance in the context of continuous and radical instability: of lived-in crisis. The fragmentation of territorial sovereignty, the use of the state as a resource-in-itself, the ‘extraversion’ of elite enrichment into tax havens and property held by family groups, the use of militaries as a mode of plunder, the contracting out of core government services to international actors through opaque resource deals, the ambiguous relationships between governments and criminal organisations… all of these things are what Africa’s post-colonial politics looks like in an age of crisis. The activities of Wagner in Africa are extreme but not exceptional.

The politics of lived-in crisis

Lived-in crisis has spread through many African states from the 1980s. Jane Guyer encapsulates the nature of lived-in crisis as follows: ‘existential precarity, moment-to-moment, and the long processes of a structure in crisis’ A day-to-day precarity locked into a secular precarity. Crisis and instability does not undermine normal politics; politics is crisis and instability.

It is instructive that international attention on Wagner in Africa emerges in the wake of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow. Perhaps Russia and many parts of Africa share something. In Adam Curtis’s documentary Hypernormalisation (2016), a representation is made that Russia’s shadow elite straddles many venues in which power is produced: business, government, military, intelligence, and media. And, the documentary suggests, these elites are not interested in any kind of ‘new normal’; it is a constant state of instability that allows them to flourish or perish. They are equipped to survive in the midst of permanent chaos. The exception is, for them, the norm. Multiple citizenship, multiple cliques of associates, hidden money and property. Ready to grab opportunities not as investments but as short-term enrichment.

This condition profoundly affects the nature of governance. Elites also have their shadow cliques, militias, secret international links. Often, an incumbent elite cannot know their future once they have left government. Elite politics in much of Africa requires a kind of super-charged Machiavellianism, a nimble fox, a smart thief, a flexitarian horizon watching. A political skill-set way more advanced than the stolid mechanics of many Western governments during the 1990s for example.

In 2000, Botswana’s President, Festus Mogae, said ‘We’re very proud of how dull our elections are. It proves that our democracy is working.’ Botswana’s politics is relatively boring and this is sign that the immense political work many other states have to undertake are largely absent. In many of its regional siblings—Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa—politics is defined by major-order questions of political survival, the absence of successful nation-building, severe deficits in legitimacy, extreme volatility, insurgency, and unbalanced and recessionary economies.

In this context, some African countries share something else with Russia. Sam Kriss writes that: ‘Russia is the only country where old-fashioned events still take place, and those of us trapped outside Russia can barely see it.’ But Russia is not alone. This phenomenon is inscribed into many parts of Africa. The deep realities of politics—the project of nation-building, the establishing of uncontested authoritative power, the construction of institutions that secure a basic predictability to social life, the founding of a basic legitimacy claim that the state and its nation can aspire to a good polity—manifest themselves in many parts of Africa as partial and contested phenomena.

This is perhaps why Wagner is present in Russia and parts of Africa. It is a symptom of the fact that many states seek ways to enforce state power, eradicate armed opposition, deploy resources, and establish international networks that evade, shortcut, or refuse the liberal mantras that has proven over decades not up to the task.

Many African governments perform a dynamic and improvised hybridity, combining liberal, nationalist, and vernacular political strategies. Every national strategy and vision cohabits with clientelist manoeuvre, with considerations of territorial security, with venal ambitions to capture resources, with the secretive transnationality of wealth accrual. Private security is part of this hybridity, along with transnational corporations, tax havens, and shadow elite brokers and fixers.

Time to learn from Africa

In an age in which liberalism in Western political cultures seems severely weakened by populisms, integralisms, and deglobalisations, one has to wonder how long the West can keep its global Liberalism 101 going. This endless repetition of liberal desiderata—we have the answer now what’s the question?—now faces a disposition in much of Africa in which the political foundations of the national project are eroding, there is no liberal ‘new normal’ in view. Transnational nexus of violence, resource grab, trafficking, and privatising state patrimony leaves a prospective for Africa that liberalism is ill-equipped to make sense of.

Recognising this and seeking more troubling but more relevant political analysis is the first step that those who are interested might take if they are to respond to the thoroughly modern and sophisticated political of Africa. After all, one cannot assume that Africa might hold in its present some auguries of the West’s own future. It is striking how, after seventy years of expectation that the world economy would converge through economic growth in the Global South, it is global crisis that seems to drive convergence in all nations.

Graham Harrison teaches political economy at the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University and is on the editorial board of ROAPE. His recent book Developmentalism: The Normative and Transformative within Capitalism is published by Oxford University Press.

Featured Photograph: Russian mercenaries on 25 May 2019 in the Central African Republic (Florence Maïguélé for CorbeauNews).

Debating Somaliland – lack of recognition and conflict

ROAPE

July 11, 2023

Continuing our discussion of Somaliland, Jamal Abdi argues that the country is an unrecognized state, operating in the shadows of international relations. The country has never been eligible for direct foreign aid. Abdi argues that the recent conflict is caused, in part, by lack of economic development in eastern Somaliland. As a result, the so-called international community bears considerable responsibility for the conflict.

By Jamal Abdi

Having unilaterally declared independence in 1991, Somaliland has functioned as a de-facto sovereign state for the past three decades. What makes Somaliland particularly interesting is that its post-war peace and state building trajectory is characterized by lack of external intervention in the political process. Differently put, groups that fought on opposing sides of a lengthy, bloody, and bitter civil war voluntary negotiated and, in this way, created peace, stability, democracy and forged an inclusive state from scratch with virtually no external assistance.

On 6 February, 2023, an armed conflict broke out in the city of Laascaanood, the administrative capital of Somaliland’s eastern Sool region. According to the government, Somaliland’s security forces are facing a mixture of misguided local residents, elements of Al-Shabab terrorists and militias from the semi-autonomous region of Puntland. Not surprisingly, the competing narrative is that Laascaanood is being defended by local residents who have taken arms up against a state whose legitimacy they now reject.

The precipitating cause of the conflict is that Cabdiftaax Cabdillahi Cabdi, a young and popular member of Somaliland’s main opposition party was gunned down on 26 December 2022. While the perpetrators are still at large, it appears sound to suggest that Somaliland was most likely not behind the assassination of Cabdi. The logic underpinning this assertion is straightforward: both Cabdi and many of those who have been assassinated before him in Laascaanood were pro-Somaliland. Therefore, it appears unlikely that Somaliland has systematically targeted those who were promoting the legitimacy of the state in a region where the imagining of Somaliland is limited.

Foreign aid fostering the conflict?

Commentators have suggested that the international community, through increasing engagement with Somaliland, has fostered the conflict in Laascaanood. We are, according to this line of reasoning, asked to believe that accelerating external engagement is turning the state into a lucrative source of income, causing internal competition for control of the state. As will be seen shortly, this line of reasoning is problematic for a multitude of reasons.

First, postponement of a general election, which was initially scheduled for November 2022, constitutes the sole evidence marshalled in defence of the contention that accelerating external engagement and foreign aid has led to internal competition for control of the state. It should be readily evident to anyone who has studied Somaliland seriously that all presidents since 1993 have had their term in office extended.

Before we can accept that postponement of the latest general election is indicative of internal competition for control of the state, caused by external engagement and foreign aid, one must explain what caused the postponement of previous elections. It is worth noting that the postponement of the latest general election was, as in previous cases, sanctioned by both Somaliland’s upper house of parliament and the supreme court, challenging the idea that it can be construed as an example of increasing authoritarian tendencies.

Second, as an unrecognized state, operating in the shadows of international relations, Somaliland has never been eligible for direct foreign aid. Furthermore, it is paramount to stress that the bulk of the funds that Somaliland receives, on paper, are often allocated to the salary of foreigners who do little more than occasionally deliver workshops on gender equality, good governance and the like.

According to the World Bank, Somaliland’s national budget increased threefold to about $130 million in the period between 2009 to 2012. The question must therefore be raised of why significant increase of the national budget in the past did not raise the stakes, leading to internal competition for control of the state?

A united Somaliland issued a communique to the United Nations in 1993, stressing that the organisation should keep it forces out of Somaliland and that Somaliland did not stand in need of external assistance in terms of reconciliation and peacebuilding. Representatives of all communities in Somaliland also stressed that they did not need the UN to offer food aid protection convoys as Somaliland was not receiving aid. By rejecting UN-led peace and reconciliation, social and political leaders in Somaliland also rejected foreign aid. It is indeed an empirically verifiable fact that Somaliland, at its darkest hour, recovering from a devastating civil war, rejected international assistance, including foreign aid.

Yet we are asked to believe that the influx of external money is currently destabilising Somaliland by turning the state into a lucrative source of income. The suggestion that international engagement, intended to stabilise Somaliland, has had destabilising consequences is an untenable contention, devoid of evidence.

The deep cause of the conflict

The deep cause of the conflict in Laascaanood is best grasped through the intersection of limited state capacity and lack of economic development in eastern Somaliland, eroding the legitimacy of the state. As a result, the so-called international community should recognize that it, indirectly, bears a part of the responsibility for the conflict in Laascaanood.

The treatment of Somaliland by the international community is deeply disappointing and raises doubts about the sincerity of the West in promoting so-called liberal values in the developing world. Somaliland has on its own achieved what the West claims to champion and is allegedly willing to wage wars for, e.g., democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

Yet, the so-called international community appears unwilling to grant Somaliland de jure recognition, thereby denying Somaliland access to global financial institutions. At the same time, Somaliland does not receive sufficient financial aid. In my opinion, the ongoing conflict in Laascaanood could have been avoided if Somaliland had been granted de jure recognition or had access to international funding bodies. A legally recognized Somaliland would be able to enhance the provision of public goods and services, thereby remedying the perceptions of marginalization in eastern Somaliland that have led to the questioning of the legitimacy of the state.

The recent developments in Somaliland should prompt the so-called international community to seriously reconsider its engagement with Somaliland and it is evident that more rather than less engagement is needed. The question of Somaliland’s political future must also be seriously considered. Disregarding the aspirations of most Somalilanders for independent statehood is simply unsustainable. Anyone who is intimately familiar with Somaliland, will know that voluntary reunification with Somalia is considered beyond the realm of plausibility by most Somalilanders.

Jamal Abdi holds a MSc in European and International Relations from Linkoping University. He is currently a PhD Candidate in Politics and International Relations at Keele University. Abdi’s research focuses on peace and state building in Somaliland.

Featured Photograph: An aerial photograph of Hargeisa, Somaliland’s capital (8 April 2020).

From London to Kigali – deportations, asylum policy and state brutality

ROAPE

July 6, 2023

ROAPE’s Hannah Cross writes that the UK government’s policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda has been ruled unlawful by the Court of Appeal. Asylum seekers, the court argued, risked being returned to their home country and could face inhumane treatment and persecution. Paul Kagame’s Rwanda, with the complicity of Western media and international financial institutions, has been presented as a successful developmental state, but in reality it is a place of systematic state brutality.

By Hannah Cross

A major contradiction of free market capitalism is that, for all its ‘imperfections’, it is supposed to end feudalism, creating free circulation in the labour market and bringing political equality to people ruled by an impartial market. Yet as it accelerates, these market relations can only hold with authoritarian state intervention, repression, and more imposition of feudal relations. Hence a government that has no interest in controlling the destructive profiteering of the private sector, while growing numbers of people lose access to the necessities of life, does all it can to elevate aristocratic rule, stimulate divisive nationalism, and intervene heavily in the movement of people.

The force of the UK governments fascist-inspired efforts to remove political freedoms has advanced with the force of economic chaos facing the majority. Recent developments suggest some of its efforts are failing, but it will fight on. The House of Lords, including Conservative peers (from the governing party), brought wrecking amendments to the illegal Migration Bill last week. These would require the government to abide by international human rights conventions, allow unaccompanied children to claim asylum, and stop potential victims of human trafficking from being detained or deported before their cases are heard. Further amendments passed on Monday concerning deportation, detention and processing limits for LGBTQ+ migrants, pregnant women and children, and asylum seekers in general.

Unlawful

The government’s policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda has been ruled unlawful by the Court of Appeal. After the High Court had ruled that Rwanda was a ‘safe third country’, this case brought by asylum seekers and Action Aid reversed the decision, finding that asylum seekers risked being returned to their home country and could face inhumane treatment and persecution. The Home Office itself, with the remit of enforcing the policy, has found it unworkable. This week, it reported that the plan would cost £169,000 per person, significantly higher than the cost of housing asylum seekers in the UK.

Lawyers at the Court of Appeal argued that the High Court showed ‘excessive deference’ to the Home Office leadership’s assurances that deportees would be protected. The material provided by the Rwandan authorities was lacking in credibility, with ‘blanket denials and clear contradictions.’ It is barely credible that the successive Home Secretaries leading the Rwanda policy are assured of the safety of the policy.

Last year, the Public and Commercial Services Union, which represents Home Office members, joined asylum seekers, Care4Calais and Detention Action in a case which prevented the deportation of eight asylum seekers and showed that Rwanda was an unsafe country, with the possibility of forced conscription for those sent there after fleeing war-torn countries. Home Secretary Priti Patel was found to have ignored the Foreign Office warning of human rights abuses.

Paul Kagame’s Rwanda, with the complicity of Western media and international financial institutions, has been presented as a successful developmental state, working with donors to achieve high development indicators. From 2015 onwards, researchers in ROAPE challenged this narrative and the claims of a ‘Green Revolution’ in which neoliberal agrarian modernisation had brought widespread benefits to the country’s rural populations. Some of the researchers had to publish anonymously for fear of reprisal by the state in Kigali, while the veracity of their data was followed up by a Financial Times investigation into the country’s poverty statistics. The terrible finding that there had been a true increase in poverty did not only damage the credibility of the state’s top-down developmentalism, but also of the World Bank, which endorsed its data, the IMF, and bilateral donors.

As for the politics of the regime, its bureaucratic state apparatus and spatial planning lends itself to the outsourcing of detention centres, while state violence has included the killing of refugees. An investigation last year found that a 13^thCongolese refugee had been shot dead at the hands of state authorities, months after 12 protestors from the Kibiza camp were killed in 2018.

Human and economic cost

Suella Braverman, who praises the opportunities offered for asylum seekers entering Rwanda, is backed by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as she fights back for her flagship policy. The fightback is built on further unsubstantiated claims and deceptions. The idea that the human and economic cost of the Rwanda plan is justified because it would deter channel crossings might have a twisted logic if France were a safe country for refugees and onward migration were a choice.

However, it is not: if asylum seekers are coming from countries outside Europe and are racially identified, they find themselves destitute and suffer physical violence, humiliation and the destruction of shelter, food, and water supplies by the French authorities.

Brexit opened up the possibility of asylum in the UK because the Dublin convention, which allows governments to return people to the European countries they have passed through, could no longer be enacted; thus, English-speaking refugees and those with potential connections to the country might have some chance here of finding safety, building a tolerable life and supporting their families, no matter how risky and hostile their reception.

This forced condition of migration exposes the emptiness of Braverman’s repeated suggestions that all the world would come to the UK if it could, so harsh penalties are necessary. Her argument shows an arrogance that ignores the ways that people are uprooted from their lives in specific circumstances, are torn from their families and struggle to find safety anywhere. Britain has a role in many of these upheavals, including in Sudan’s counter-revolution. Moreover, it has contributed significantly to Fortress Europe and its militarised borders, as well as to its failure to find a workable asylum policy, and this has created the conditions for irregular migration.

Lies and more lies

Because most migration is not by choice, the closure of legal and safe routes does not deter people or fundamentally reduce numbers. It makes the journey unsafe and kills people. This is borne out by the terror that the Rwanda policy announcement brought to refugees in Calais in early June 2022, yet the channel crossings increased in the summer and have continued in their thousands this year, with Afghans becoming the largest nationality.

Nor are there any grounds to the repeated claims that the Rwanda policy would be ‘the will of the people’: this government and its new programme is not even elected by the people. And one further lie, that the Labour Party – the country’s main opposition party – has been particularly complicit in, is that the fight against ‘illegal immigration’ is a fight against the traffickers and smugglers, when in reality it is migrants and their dependants who suffer the brunt of it, and smugglers are often in a similar situation. Considering the layers of deception on which the policy flounders, it is remarkable that an opposition party led by a barrister has done little more than mock the failure of the policy to reject the people arriving in boats.

If government’s appeal for the Rwanda policy succeeds, the main victory for the Tories will be that they are no longer restrained by international law or a functioning democratic state in its narrowest sense, and this will embolden their suppression of any threats to their survival, domestic and international. The decisions of the Court of Appeal and House of Lords, and Home Office scrutiny, might give the sense of having the ‘good governance’ and democracy that British policymakers claim to offer the Global South.

However, the terrible conditions of indefinite detention that asylum seekers face and the failure to protect children, the ‘unfree’ labour that British production relies on, and the prosecution of dissenters, all coexist with military and economic imperialism in parts of Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. The Rwanda policy would be a further step to an illiberalism that is already deeply embedded in the state and most evident in its external relations. We can find surprising alliances in its resistance and must retain the internationalist class perspective in the first instance.

A version of this blogpost was first published as ‘Floundering in the depths of deception – new blows to the government’s deportation policy’ on the Counterfire website.

Hannah Cross is author of Migrants, Borders and Global Capitalism: West African labour mobility and EU borders, Routledge 2013 and the new book Migration Beyond Capitalism. She is a senior lecturer in International Relations at the University of Westminster, and the Chair of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group.

Featured Photograph: Activists in London participating in a protest against racism, holding a Care4Calais banner, an organisation which provides essential basics and legal support for asylum seekers in Belgium, France and the UK (19 March 2022).

A review – The New Age of Catastrophe by Alex Callinicos

ROAPE

July 4, 2023

In this review essay ROAPE’s Peter Lawrence discusses Alex Callinicos’ new book The New Age of Catastrophe. Callinicos has written a book that admits to the mind-numbing scale of the catastrophe that confronts humanity but provides enough ammunition to those who want to see a more optimistic future. Lawrence argues that Callinicos makes a strong case for socialism as the solution and mass mobilisation from below of the organised working class as the only way to achieve it.

By Peter Lawrence

Capitalism is in crisis everywhere and hanging over us is ‘the shadow of catastrophe’. The Covid-19 pandemic, the Russia–Ukraine war, increasing inequality, rising levels of poverty between and within nations, together with the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of powerful individuals and corporates are all topped by the looming catastrophe of climate breakdown. Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Catastrophe started with the First World War followed by the Great Depression, the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy and ended with the Second World War and the Holocaust. Callinicos’s New Age of Catastrophe in which we have been living for at least a decade could end with destruction of life on the planet either by climate breakdown or war or both. Pessimism of the intellect indeed, knocking the spirit out of the optimistic will.

Of course, it was capitalism what did it. “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets” (Marx, 1970:595). The need for capital to grow and in doing so seek more and more resources, whether precious minerals in the ground or fish in the sea, drives the capitalist system and increasingly destroys the livelihoods and health of populations around the planet and especially in the Global South. The power of global capital, and its institutional representatives such as the IMF and World Bank, to capture the state or at least heavily influence the direction of government policy, making left-wing political parties powerless to change anything, feeds a pessimism that the situation Is hopeless. However, as Slavoj Žižek proposed in 2017, having the courage to admit this hopelessness could paradoxically help generate radical change. Alex Callinicos has written a book that admits to the mind-numbing scale of the catastrophe and provides enough ammunition to those who want to see a more optimistic future.

His approach aims ‘to integrate the different aspects of our situation into a structured totality’ (p.7). As might be expected from a Marxist and a Trotskyist activist, he makes a strong case for socialism as the solution and mass mobilisation from below of the organised working class as the way to achieve it. Capitalism and its driving forces are of course at the root of all the problems that add up to the catastrophe. The book gives us some historical perspective to understand the drivers of the first age of catastrophe and the golden age before the effects of neoliberalism sent us into the new age. This is followed by chapters on the environmental crisis, the global economic situation, the geopolitics of a multipolar world, the different directions, both right and left, of the popular reaction to imperialism and racism and economic decline, finishing with a chapter that looks to the future and for the forces that might effect radical socialist change.

At the root of the first age of catastrophe was the rivalry of different national and imperialist capitals in a globalised world of relatively free trade which ended in 1914 with a war that saw the triumph of British and French imperialism and the humiliation of Germany. This fuelled popular discontent which was harnessed in Germany and Italy by Hitler and Mussolini with consequences ending in the assertion of German imperialism and another world war. The formation of the USSR and the rise of Japan together with the eventual realisation in the US that the future of Europe and the Far East was a matter concerning its own imperialist interests created after 1945 a bi-polar world. The USand USSR mapped out their spheres of influence while the ‘Global South’ formally decolonised and tried to resist the hegemony of their previously imperial rulers by asserting their non-alignment with the imperialist blocs and also playing off one bloc against the other, with the Soviet bloc and the emerging China offering material support to many of the liberation movements in Asia and Africa. That bi-polar world continued through the post-war boom and the relatively stable world economy of Keynesian economic policy and international cooperation until the contradictions of the system resulted in the collapse of the post war settlement. A ‘neoliberal’ world of freer trade, floating exchange rates, financial liberalization developed, becoming another turn of the century’s globalisation, this time organised into trading blocs regulated by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and dominated by ever larger and concentrated global financial and producer corporates.

The big difference this time around is the climate emergency. Fossil capitalism, as Callinicos argues, is the main driver of ‘the progressive destruction of nature’ (p. 30). Fossil extraction is at the centre of the system of capital accumulation and fossil producers with their investment in exploration financed by the banks have a strong hold on governments whose environmental policies inevitably reflect the producers’ interests. There are geopolitical consequences to both global warming and the rise of the production of renewables. Global warming opens the Arctic region both commercially and militarily expanding geopolitical rivalries while the rush to renewables puts China in a powerful position as a manufacturer of batteries and solar cells and a miner of the minerals needed to produce them. Either way the destruction of nature is guaranteed. As Callinicos points out, Marx argued that capitalist agriculture had a deteriorating effect not only on the workers but also on the soil. Of course, chemicals and mechanisation helped to slow down or even reverse both processes but with unintended consequences for the pollution of rivers and seas from the resulting seepage of chemical fertilisers, as well as the desertification effects on the soils and their capacity to hold water because of the over-tilling of the fields.

Covid-19 and the war on nature

The effects of human activity on nature were no better demonstrated than by Covid-19. Callinicos has an especially interesting section on the effects of the ‘disgusting’ (Marx’s word) factory farming in the 19^th century let alone its much more intensive versions that followed. He references the work of the epidemiologist, Rob Wallace, who has rooted Covid-19 in climate change causing some animal life to cluster close to areas of human settlement thus increasing the risk of disease spreading from animals to humans, as it appears to have done in this case. The immediate response to the virus induced pandemic was to find a vaccine and this bring us neatly back to corporate capitalism and the race between the corporates of big Pharma to develop an effective vaccine.

The story of its roll-out is a perfect example of corporate greed, state capture and global inequality. Big Pharma corporates like Pfizer made a fortune out of the vaccine because they sold at a profit, unlike the Oxford Astra-Zeneca vaccine which was sold at cost (although not for long thanks to Bill and Melinda Gates, as Callinicos explains). Not surprisingly the supposedly less effective Oxford-Astra-Zeneca vaccine was soon pushed out probably because of the bigger corporates’ capture of the state health services.

The greater level of inequality that has developed both nationally and globally resulted in greater infection levels nationally the lower household income and internationally, the poorer the country the less the availability of the vaccine. The effects of the measures to protect people from the virus inevitably involved much tighter control of their lives, especially during the lockdowns, and no more explicitly than in China, whose policy of zero transmission did effectively keep people locked up. This greater degree of government control has been meat and drink to conspiracy theorists but is more likely to be another example of bureaucratic authoritarian tendencies which have since been reversed or at least limited by an assertion of popular action, even in China, or even ignored as in the infamous case of the British Prime Minister at the time.

Falling rates of profits

Events such as the Covid pandemic have challenged the neoliberal orthodoxy’s support for a minimal state and led to a form of demand management governed by the central banks (‘technocratic Keynesianism’): maintaining low interest rates and printing money (‘quantitative easing’) to maintain economic activity at a level that maintains the public services essential to private sector activity and to keeping the people who provide the labour for these services fed and watered.

The pandemic, and now the Russia-Ukraine war have obscured a deeper crisis for capitalism and that is our old friend the falling rate of profit. Relying on the work of Michael Roberts, Callinicos shows how the decline in the global profit rate appeared in the 1960s and was followed by a crisis of profitability in the 1970s, a recovery in the neoliberal 1980s,1990s and early 2000s followed by the financial crisis of 2007-8 and a fall in the rate of profit in the following decade before the next shock of Covid-19.

Of course, these global rates of profit do not tell us anything about their distribution. But we know that banks and financial institutions have become powerful actors across all global corporates driving the shift of economic activity and especially manufacturing activity to areas where labour is cheaper and where productivity is high thanks to the use of the latest advanced technology.

As Callinicos points out, the engine of capitalism has become the credit supplied by the banks, apparently unlimited until the economic downturn causes loan defaults, as happened in 2007-8. Then the interdependence of financial institutions is exposed causing the weaker ones to fail, threatening the whole system. it was the technocratic Keynesian rescue of the money markets by the central banks which ensured the system’s liquidity and continued credit creation, essential for the system of capital.

Does technocratic Keynesianism mean the end of neoliberalism? This is the question raised by Callinicos in concluding his chapter on the economics of the new age of catastrophe. The answer is complicated. In laying out this complexity he sees neoliberalism as comprising a specific conception of freedom: strengthening institutions to preserve markets, enabling capital accumulation to thrive and ensuring the protection of the accumulating capitalist class. It is also a set of monetarist economic policies which theoretically control the quantity of money supplied so maintaining a stable price level.

However, in practice what is really controlled is the demand for money, chiefly using the interest rate. In addition, reducing government expenditure, privatising public services, and increasing unemployment to dampen wage growth eventually brought inflation under control but also weakened the trades unions especially when anti-strike legislation was added to unemployment.

While neoliberalism appeared to call for a smaller state, all of this required much more state intervention to make sure that markets worked ‘efficiently’ restoring higher rates of profit. However, the emergence of technocratic Keynesianism does suggest a possible pushback against neoliberalism with an increasingly key role for the state in getting economies performing again. As Callinicos argues, this pushback will only be successful if it comes from below (and the increasing strike activity that we now see especially in the Global North gives some hope of this happening), otherwise, neoliberal policies will continue to impoverish the working class and the precariat.

Imperialism and war

The climate emergency and the perpetual economic crisis could be made irrelevant by the catastrophe of a nuclear holocaust. After 1945, when the US’s atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki introduced us to weapons of mass destruction, the USSR’s development of its own bomb produced the deterrent of mutually assured destruction. It did not stop US imperialism from asserting its hegemony over much of the world, especially that previously controlled by British and French colonialism. The long post-WW2 boom in the Global North and the formation and expansion of what became the European Union (EU) challenged but did not undermine US hegemony, secured through NATO and other such alliances around the globe, its military power challenged in Indochina but re-asserted in the two Iraq wars and in Afghanistan. It promoted economic globalization, including bringing China into the WTO to ensure that it played by the rules.

Yet such an inclusionary policy was not offered to Russia, a country historically divided between those who looked to Europe and those to Asia. Getting Russia into NATO and the EU would have not only furthered the interests of global capital but also challenged China. The likely outcome now, especially given the Ukraine war, is greater cooperation between China and Russia with the former moving west and further challenging Washington’s unipolar view of the world. However, as Callinicos also notes, the war has brought Europe and the US closer together, not only in terms of boosting and expanding NATO, but also in reorientating Europe’s dependence on gas from Russia to the US.

While an economic bloc that allied Europe with Russia and China would have been a major threat to US hegemony, the rise of China itself to the status of a world power is now seen as the greater one. As Callinicos notes, globalization was supposed to make these kinds of national rivalries redundant as the economic interdependence between the major powers solidified with the rise of global capital. But once such factors as the concentration of the manufacture of semi-conductors in Taiwan and of the special gases required for them found abundant in Ukraine, these countries become strategically critical for the major economies. When China regards Taiwan as one of its lost provinces, such economic and geopolitical factors lead to the same result: a potential military conflict over resources.

Callinicos is right to argue that ‘the world is becoming a much more dangerous place’ (p.114). He is also right to point to the way in which the US and its allies are increasingly describing current conflicts as a battle between liberal democracy and autocracy, taking us back to the discourse of the Cold War.

The rise of the far-right

There is certainly a struggle within bourgeois democracies to preserve hard won liberties against the growing threat of the far-Right. As Gramsci famously wrote of times like ours, they are moments of the old dying and the new unable to be born resulting in the appearance of ‘a variety of morbid symptoms’ (quoted on p. 119). One of those symptoms is the rise of the populist Trumpian far-Right in the US threatening liberal democracy. He shows the way in which this far-Right has succeeded, with a strong overlay of racism, in mobilising those who have suffered from neoliberalism against the political ‘elite’, migrants and refugees. Callinicos’s argument is that the neoliberal order is disintegrating and that ‘workers’ struggles from below’ are as yet not powerful enough to offer the alternative to produce the socialist ‘new’ which leaves that space open to the vacuous promises of the far-Right. Taking a more global view Callinicos joins up developments in countries like the Philippines, Brazil, India, and Egypt where a pattern emerges of failed neoliberal policies combined with corruption and mismanagement, resulting in new right wing or military governments riding on the back of the harnessing of cultural nationalism and involving especially anti-Muslim tropes.

Callinicos’ survey of the far-Right in Europe shows it following a similar path combining racism and the xenophobia of Euroscepticism, most obviously in the UK where the mainstream Conservative Party in an act of self-preservation adopted some of the policies and attitudes of the far-Right parties especially by committing to Brexit. As Callinicos notes, while these parties have been successful at harnessing popular discontents, they do not have coherent economic policies to substitute for the neoliberal ones.

For those who often feel that we are back in another version of the 1920s and 1930s, he points to the differences, the most obvious being the absence of a powerful and revolutionary left against which the far-Right can mobilise, and the current far-Right’s lack of an alternative economic strategy to neoliberalism while the Italian fascists in the 1920s and the German Nazis in the 1930s had very clear policies of state intervention and direction of the economy, geared to re-armament. Nonetheless the levels of discontent are such that they offer the far-Right significant political influence with the possibility of fascist elements gaining some purchase as political movements. Callinicos illustrates these tendencies with a discussion of the far-Right in the US, rather surprisingly described as the possible weak link in advanced capitalism.

The notion of the most advanced and powerful state in the world being the weak link is prompted by the far-Right’s attack on the Capital in January 2021. Callinicos identifies three ‘determinations’ of this event: first, the effects of neoliberalism, especially the contrasting fortunes of the large corporations with their huge profits and excessively rewarded senior executives, and the large section of the population on falling or stagnant real wages or without jobs; secondly, political structures such as the Electoral College system of choosing a president that can result – as in the case of Trump – in the loser of the popular vote being elected, a Senate which under represents the more populous states; and thirdly, the racial divide which sees Afro-Americans over-represented at the lower end of the income distribution, and most evidently over-represented in police shootings.

Callinicos, relying heavily on the analysis of the US Marxist, Mike Davis, explains the social basis of Trumpism, a capitalist class based on ‘real estate, private equity, casinos, and services ranging from private armies to chain usury’ (p. 135). Trump is able to present those at the bottom of the income distribution as the victims of a political elite more concerned with helping other countries than its own.

As Callinicos suggests, Trump’s relationship with the large US corporates is ‘ambivalent’ but policies of low taxation and less regulation did them no harm although the election of Biden has re-instated a government with which corporate America can happily do business. However, the US is still a divided country with the possibility of a civil war breaking out especially in the wake of major climate disturbances. Even if Trump is not allowed to stand again as a presidential candidate, Trumpism will remain and as the number of unemployed and the unorganised working class grows, support from these lumpen elements will help Trumpism to grow. The book might have said more about working class support for the right both now and during the Nazi era and what the organized working class could have done and can do to deal with this.

Where to from here?

So where does the Left go from here? What indeed is to be done? In his final chapter, Callinicos gathers Raymond Williams’ ‘resources of hope’ as he again turns to Gramsci’s notion of the ‘antagonistic forces’ as the agent of radical change. He roots them, as did Gramsci, in the organized working class, but recognizing that this class today has been subjected to a series of defeats under neoliberalism, discusses the possibilities of the current struggles over gender and race as ones that might help to form ‘the new working-class subject of emancipation’ (p. 151).

The discussion of gender politics focuses on the emergence of the trans movement asserting the right to choose one’s own gender. This view has been subject to critiques from critical feminists as well as the political right and far-Right. What they have in common is their separation of the biological from the social yet as Callinicos argues, these are inextricably interconnected. The importance of the reproduction of labour power, not to mention the power of religion renders the family as the norm and preferences heterosexual relationships. But other reproductive family structures can exist with same-sex and transgender relationships thanks to progress in medical science, this allowing for gender re-assignment. All these developments challenge not only the gender norms which have been so important to the reproduction of labour power under capitalism, but capitalism itself.

The movements against racism which as Callinicos notes, is ‘institutionalized throughout global capitalism’ (p.158), are also routes through which activists can move from a specific campaign to a more generalized struggle against the system. People of colour’s long experience of precarious living standards is now spreading to other (especially professional) sections of the working class who have never lived precariously or seen a decline in living standards. The globalization of production creates a coincidence of interest between the working class of the Global North and South, the world working class of the Communist Manifesto which ‘could thus begin to emerge as a collective agent in this age of catastrophe’ (p.163).

The digital age presents all kinds of possibilities for planning democratically rather than by the relatively rigid past attempts at central planning under state socialism (Callinicos’s term given his political allegiance is ‘state-capitalism’). Marx, he reminds us, conceived socialism as self-emancipation, so that planning has to be a bottom-up process. Digital platforms such as Amazon and Facebook collect enormous amounts of data on individual consumption behaviour that could be fed into a process of negotiation with production units, led from below. Above all, planning will require, nationally and globally, managing the climate emergency: markets and the quasi-markets of carbon trading won’t do it.

Callinicos consults a wide range of literature on the subject, though surprisingly does not refer in this instance to the work of Paul Mason on the ways in which capitalism is already indicating its post-capitalist future again largely through digitalization and the reduction in the possibilities of realizing profits as the prices of so many goods and services trend to zero, and in the case of some digital services are already free.

Where Callinicos does reference different work by Mason, it is in the final section of the book where he argues strongly against a popular front style coalition of Left and Centre to combat the resurgence of the far-Right and the prospect of fascism. He argues, contrary to Mason, that the original popular front was not successful in defeating fascism in the 1930s. He points out that reference to class interests is crucial to understanding effective alliances: the Left largely comprised the organised working class while the liberal (bourgeois) centrists represented sections of capital whose interests were fundamentally not those of the organised working class. The defence of bourgeois democracy requires solid class action by the organised Left, not collaboration with the class enemy. Only a United Front, unifying left political forces connected to the organised working class, can be successful in mobilizing opposition to fascism to confront it everywhere it appears.

Organized resistance to capitalism building to a socialist revolution is the only viable alternative to the catastrophe that lies in wait. Although Callinicos presents us with a Trotskyist Marxist view of successful political activity, you do not have to be a Trotskyist to agree with most of his analysis. This is a book that tries to put together the different strands of our current predicament into a coherent and intelligible whole and does it in a highly readable way. The future may look pessimistic, but this book gives us plenty of material to feed the optimistic will.

Alex Callinicos’ The New Age of Catastrophe can be ordered here.

Peter Lawrence is an editor and founding member of ROAPE, he is also an Emeritus Professor of Development Economics at the Business School at Keele University and has taught in Tanzania, Uganda, and Canada and spent periods of research in Tanzania, Hungary, Spain, and India.

Featured Photograph: The climate emergency is dramatically impacting Africa (25 October 2018).

Frontline South Africa 1973: mass strikes and beyond

ROAPE

June 29, 2023

This year we celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the wave of mass strikes of 1973 in Durban, South Africa. Early that year Coronation brick workers followed on the dock strike of October 1972 and unleashed a movement of one strike rolling on to the next. One of the major activists of the strike wave, David Hemson, writes on a human wave that arose from the depths of the apartheid barracks, factories and mills; spontaneous, irrepressible, powerful and momentous. The challenge of 1973 has yet to be fulfilled.

By David Hemson

This year we celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the wave of mass strikes of 1973 in Durban in conferences, workers meetings and exhibitions. Early that year Coronation brick workers followed on the dock strike of October 1972 and unleashed a movement of one strike rolling on to the next. By April that year 61,410 black workers were recorded as striking in 146 workplaces, the number of strikers rising to well over 100,000 by the years end. No workplace in the region and beyond was unaffected.

Breaking through the darkest days of apartheid when repression led to the African National Congress being regarded “almost dead”, this uprising for wages burst against the cheap labour system of barracks, police, passes and short term contract labour in an explosion of resistance with far-reaching impact.

This rising struggle has still not set, as the living wage with permanent decent work sought has yet to be achieved.

These Durban strikes arose as part of a regional movement of workers’ resistance to apartheid. In a galvanizing strike in Namibia in late 1971 to early 1972 against the apartheid contract system led the way. In response wages in some sectors were raised 60% from desperately low levels.

Strikers in Durban demanded immediately double or treble their existing wages and equal wages for women. This was a concrete vision for society not in the platform of any liberation movement. Anticipating victimization, workers refused to elect representatives as demanded by employers, instead they shouted demands, raised their hands in a “high five” for a Rand-5 increase and jeered down concessions until employers conceded more.

This improvised strategy protected the leadership from below and demonstrated public bargaining with a collective voice and a veto from workers. As in all strikes there was a limit to resistance in hunger but also unprecedented opportunities.

While many were flash strikes, many lasted longer and grappled with power: some 23% of the strikes lasted a day or less, 34% continued between more than 1 day to 2 days and a further 23% struggled over 3-7 days.

**David Hemson speaking at a mass meeting of textile strikers in 1973.**

Strikers ignored or repudiated the formidable array of apartheid laws prohibiting strikes, spontaneous demonstrations and picketing; those of “riotous assembly”, “Bantu labour regulation”, “public disturbance”, “industrial conciliation”, pass laws regulations as well as the security legislation on sabotage, terrorism and other repressive laws.

Racing from the docks to the brickyards, then to textile mills, small companies, metal foundries, transport companies, sugar mills and onwards, the shifting terrain and momentum disoriented the police. There were rumours of a rail boycott and the police raced at dawn to the township stations; then of textile workers marching down Umgeni Road and the police then rushed there too.

The police were armed and widely present; additional militarized police with battle experience in the then Rhodesia were flown in as reinforcements. Some marches were baton charged, others teargassed, some arrested and charged but over time the police were paralyzed by the human wave of strikes and abandoned enforcing the anti-strike laws.

Although termed the ‘Durban strikes’, the movement swirled inland to Pietermaritzburg, up the coast to the aluminium smelters of Richards Bay, on to textile mills in East London and then again to the Rand gold mines. Wave swept over wave as strikes overlapped, reaching a peak in February but driving outwards and deeper into the sugar plantations, into every workplace in the region and to many beyond.

Within spontaneous action, incipient organization grew. Reciprocal relations developed between the young union leadership experienced in wage agitation from the student Wages Commissions and the rising “illegal” mass action out of the frame of industrial conciliation.

As a union official organizing textiles I compiled a list of 15 demands (for an immediate wage increase, ending sexual abuse, yearly bonus, etc.) from a meeting with miserably oppressed black women mill workers in January 1973 and placed these before the notorious cheap labour textile monopoly, the Frame Group.

**Mr Frame, the textile magnate, was derided for making riches from cheap labour.**

When organizing then at this Consolidated Woolwashing and Processing Mill, the workers from Smith and Nephew across the road demanded we come and organize them too. Both sets of their demands were reinforced by strike action.

Unorganized and organized workers, African and Indian, poured into the union Bolton Hall in spontaneous strike meetings to have free ranging discussion away from the gaze of the armed police. There was an outpouring of consciousness of capitalist exploitation: “We cannot afford the blankets we weave”.

There was strategic value in moving from spontaneity to organization and then back to spontaneity; the aura of spontaneity was a stimulus unifying action in depth and hardening a new worker leadership. To employers faced with unpredictable spontaneity it drove home the historical necessity of recognition of officially “unauthorized” organization.

These strategies led on directly to unionizing the mass of African workers in clothing and textiles, the abattoir, docks, metal and chemical sectors.

The strikes made immediate advances in wages; in some 70% of the strikes, unplanned increases were forced from employers. Wages were increased by fractions not the 100% demanded in virtually all strike-bound workplaces. There were expectation of more to come.

The experience of brutality of the barracks combined with growing confidence in their own concentrated power in the docks, brickyards, massive textile mills and transport hubs. When a Coronation worker confidently took up the red flag used to ease a truck into the traffic and led a march down the streets, in response, a traffic policeman held back the traffic. Migrant workers were key to the port’s operations and municipal engineering and in other sectors.

They had growing awareness of their productivity and specific weight in production and services and of the growing crisis of capitalism as economic conditions worsened. This consciousness combined with a sense of the sharp increase in inflation in food, rail fares and necessities drove workers into action and then to organization.

The mass action impacted other classes. The strikes swept up a new mood in society, winning support for their action and shame to the despised the Frame group company for their ultra exploitation. Even the brutal Prime Minister John Vorster felt compelled to make the declaration that black workers should be treated as “human beings with souls” not as “labour units”.

The force of a powerful non-violent movement brought sections of white society to the side of the workers: 88% blamed low wages and 65% felt black workers were entitled to organize trade unions.

Instead of a predicated racial war there was the social mobilization of tens of thousands which not only succeeded in raising wages, forcing public collective bargaining and also winning over sections of the white population.

The counterattack – the bosses, the state and Chief Buthelezi

Employer organizations rallied the capitalist class with advice on how to resist the pressure of strikes and hold the line against granting wage increases. The Natal Employers Association (NEA) flourished in holding the line against concessions.

Behind the liberal rhetoric in calls on the regime to allow black unions to be legalized was a bitter counter-offensive. Employers combined to hold the line against giving recognition to black unions and breaking rank. Leading shop stewards and strike leaders were eventually identified and rooted out of the factories.

Capitalists drew on the state to effect control. In round after round of banning orders, the regime had organizers house arrested and prohibited from union work or writing; there were police raids on their homes and union offices. Employers used “liaison committees” of workers and managers to try to seal off workers from unionization.

In the docks, Chief Buthelezi’s uncle and personal representative, the reviled “welfare officer”, J.B. Buthelezi succeeded in weeding out militant workers. They were taken off ships during working hours, fired, and using pass laws, immediately deported from the dockyards and Durban itself.

This repression forcibly “neutralized” much of the new leadership but also hardened resilience. Despite wave after wave of bannings which tended to break up the developing cadres of leadership and accumulated collective learning, the unions survived and developed structured defenses such as union locals.

Repression was anticipated and union cadres regarded themselves as expendable and replaceable; forced out of union offices they supported the resistance from the shadows. Unions grew more slowly as international labour solidarity faltered in Britain and Europe and was stifled in the USA.

The period also saw new forces brought to bear. The Wages Commissions were particularly effective in publicizing the appalling wages of black workers in the wattle plantations who were earning Rand 1 a week and a handful of maize meal as their wages. This research became front page material of the Guardian’s exposé of wages paid by British companies and led on to a Parliamentary enquiry.

**The Guardian carried headlines about the Wage Commission research on starvation wages on British owned wattle farms.**

Rising militancy

The young organizers understood the organic connection between capitalism and the elaborate state apparatus of passes, police, officials and chiefs. The facts showed this was monstrously effective: on the mines research had shown this apparatus and monopoly power had kept black wages lower in 1973 than they were in 1911, reaping massive profits to Anglo American and local capitalists.

State intelligence feared this rise of Marxism and a subsequent workers’ revolution.

The Schlebusch Commission which investigated and coordinated the onslaught on the open legal resistance characterized the rising union and student leadership as follows: “They are opposed to the entire existing order in South Africa, including …the capitalist system, existing moral norms and any form of relationship of authority…they reject liberalism as a political approach.”

The state feared that wage agitation would be the fuse igniting the power of black workers to revolution.

The fear was well founded. The strike movement was essentially the opening of the social revolution in South Africa; forcing the urgent social demands of the black majority on the political agenda of the regime and liberation movements. Among union leaders this was envisaged as the strategy to achieve liberation and socialism. The foundations of a workers’ movement were being built to form a mass workers party and a socialist revolution, as feared by Schlebusch, was what was intended.

The mass strikes established the industrial centres and working class communities as the Frontline of resistance to apartheid. While the guerilla movement was struggling to “reach home”, mass strikes demonstrated the struggle was already maturing in the industrial centres “at home”.

The working class had spontaneously moved into action despite the South African Communist Party (SACP) abandoning economic exposures, wage agitation and unionization in the 1960s and beyond to focus solely on a guerilla strategy which was not succeeding. In addition, mass strikes in the strategy of the ANC adopted in Morogoro in 1969 had been ruled out because they would be “suppressed with the utmost vigour”, three years later they were now rolling.

These strikes continued beyond 1973 pounding as the basis of the cheap labour system and fighting and driving back the militarized police trained for guerilla warfare. Black working class cadres of resistance were rising through the unions; June-Rose Nala, Wiseman Mbali, Gugu Biyela, Isabel Shongwe, Rossina Phiri, Bhekisana Nxasana, Alpheus Mthethwa, Thizi Khumalo and others unrecorded in histories. Many would be banned and detained and struggle to maintain themselves and their families.

**June-Rose Nala (now Nala-Hartley) was a weaver, then general secretary of the textile union, a lecturer and later founded the Workers College in Durban.**

For me, a young activist, the strikes confirmed the line of advance from fruitless student protest to the agitation of the Wages Commission and then on to the formation of mass independent unions and the opening to a party built on this foundation.

The mass strikes were the dramatic propaganda of the deed, of successful defiance of oppressive laws on a mass scale and an opening to organization which laid the basis for the insurrectionary youth and worker movement of 1976 continuing into the 1980s and still not dead today.

A generation had learned the skills of trade unionism by reading Marx in a focused manner and then the voluminous details of wage and labour law, forcing concessions and a range of new technical and political skills.

For me the challenge then became political; how to survive and grow when we faced the state, employers and Buthelezi?

Learning from the struggle

We faced a curriculum that no university in the world could set and teach and a demanding field practice. Reading on the shop stewards movement in Britain and the upsurge in the workers and youth movement internationally gave certainty we were not isolated.

I shed tears of rage when banned from the union offices and the first creative political work in my life but was still young and buoyed by the “very heaven” of breaking through the barriers of race and language and organizing the energy of the class.

**Hemson picking up the glove covered stone used to smash his car, late 1973.**

The incapacity of the racist regime to enact reforms drove the idea that the unions would be in a constant state of radicalism and could not slide into bureaucracy and reformism. With police at the door and facing hostile employers, we were building a union movement under the control of members, training shop stewards and a black leadership to take the workers movement forward.

Along with survival and the unions’ progress we still needed to link in the demands of working class communities and set out the political tasks involved in preparing a workers party in conditions of ruthless repression.

I was optimistic our rising cadre could manage these tasks.

David Hemson is a socialist, a researcher and a social historian. He founded the student Wages Commissions in South Africa in 1971, wrote on the national strike in Namibia 1971-72 and edited research bulletins and workers’ newspapers. He actively participated in the Durban mass strikes in 1973 and addressed mass meetings of strikers. He organized African and Indian workers and helped found the unauthorized non-racial textile, furniture, dock and metal unions before being banned and house arrested in February 1974. In exile he wrote on racial capitalism with Martin Legassick and pioneered the slogan: ‘Sanctions against Capital, Solidarity with Labour’, when the rising unions and strikes had little support from anti-apartheid movements and the ANC.

Featured Photograph: The mass of assembled strikers at Coronation Brick and Tile factory in early 1973. Note that the copyright for the images used in this blogpost lies with the copyright holder David Hemson. Please get in touch for permission to use any of the images.

Rentier capitalism and urban geography in Africa

ROAPE

June 27, 2023

Tom Gillespie and Seth Schindler argue that infrastructure megaprojects in Kenya and Ghana have driven rapid urbanisation processes in historically rural areas. Drawing on the concept of rentier capitalism, they show how infrastructure initiatives created opportunities for the appropriation of rents by various actors, contributing to urbanisation without industrialisation. If policy initiatives to socialise and redistribute land rents are to be successful, Gillespie and Schindler conclude, they must be accompanied by political movements to challenge the vested interests that benefit from rentier capitalism in Africa.

By Tom Gillespie and Seth Schindler

Recent years have witnessed an abundance of critical political economy research on rent, rentiers and rentiership. This scholarly interest reflects a recognition that global capitalism is increasingly dominated by accumulation through the control of scarce rent-generating assets rather than productive activities. This shift has been enabled by processes of ‘assetisation’ through which an ever-expanding range of things, from natural resources to intellectual property, are transformed into financial assets from which rental income can be extracted.

These tendencies are captured by the concept of ‘rentier capitalism’, popularised by geographer Brett Christophers in his recent book of the same name. To date, rentier capitalism has primarily been associated with highly financialised post-industrial contexts in the OECD. For example, Christophers argues that the entire UK economy has undergone a process of ‘rentierisation’ as a result of neoliberal reforms since the 1970s, and that rents are now the primary basis of growth in the world’s sixth largest economy.

Writing in ROAPE’s Capitalism in Africa series, anthropologists Thomas Bierschenk and Jose-Maria Munoz argue that the concept of rentier capitalism is also useful for understanding African political economy. In particular, they highlight how this concept can inform ethnographic understandings of the practices of African businesspeople and their reliance on access to political elites as a key source of rents. In contrast to alternative concepts for understanding these political-economic relationships, such as ‘crony’ or ‘patrimonial’ capitalism, Bierschenk and Munoz observe that rentier capitalism is less normative and is not premised on the assumption that capitalism in the global North and South are somehow fundamentally different.

Bierschenk and Munoz’ argument resonates with recent innovations in urban studies that seek to bring capitalist development processes in the global North and South into comparative dialogue. As urban geographers, we draw on our own research on infrastructure megaprojects in Ghana and Kenya to demonstrate that the concept of rentier capitalism can generate insights into the dynamics of urbanisation in Africa. In particular, we contend that these projects have hastened urbanisation processes in historically rural areas. This is a direct result of infrastructure initiatives creating opportunities for the assetisation of land and the appropriation of rents by various actors. Building on Bierschenk and Munoz’ anthropological focus on the agency of African businesspeople, we show that urban rentiers include actors situated at a range of scales, from global real estate developers to local land speculators. In addition to broadening the scope of actors engaged in rentier activities, our analysis explains how rentierism is incentivised by development regimes whose stated purpose is to augment industry.

Highrise rental accommodation under construction close to Thika Superhighway, Nairobi (photo: Tom Gillespie)

The class politics of urban land rent has been a central concern of Marxist urban geography for nearly half a century. Neil Smith’s theory of the ‘rent gap’, first proposed in 1979 to understand gentrification in US cities, has become widely used to understand uneven development at the urban scale in diverse contexts globally. In his 1982 masterpiece The Limits to Capital, David Harvey observed the capitalistic tendency for land to be treated as a ‘pure financial asset which is bought and sold according to the rent it yields’, anticipating subsequent debates around the financialisation of urban development.

The early 21^st century saw calls from postcolonial scholars to shift the geographical focus of urban theory production away from the North Atlantic cities in which Harvey and Smith formed their concepts. In the context of this Southern shift in urban theory, there is now a growing body of research that employs and extends land rent theory to examine how practices of rentiership are shaping urbanisation dynamics in Asia. For example, geographers Helga Leitner and Eric Sheppard draw on Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall to develop a multi-scalar ‘conjunctural’ approach to comparing urban land transformations in Jakarta and Bangalore. Arguing that these transformations are shaped by the dialectical relationship between the general and the particular, they propose the concept of ‘inter-scalar chains of rentiership’ to analyse ‘how the assetisation and financialisation of land emerges from a diverse set of actors and instututions, operating at scales ranging from the global to the local, each seeking to appropriate land rent’. In sum, studying the rentier practices of actors operating at various scales can inform a conjunctural analysis of urban change under conditions of global capitalism.

In our recent ROAPE paper on infrastructure megaprojects in Ghana and Kenya, we demonstrate that inter-scalar chains of rentiership is a useful concept to understand the relationship between rentier capitalism and urban geography in Africa. In particular, this concept reveals how grand initiatives to enhance infrastructural connectivity and foster structural transformation have ultimately created opportunities for land rent appropriation by actors operating at global, national and local scales. This has resulted in what urban scholars refer to as “extended urbanisation,” which is best characterised as the urban transformation of historically rural and isolated places (rather than the growth of cities). While cities remain centers of gravity in urban networks, an emergent geography is taking shape that includes urbanisation on resource frontiers and along transportation corridors. In contrast to the geographical expansion of cities, extended urban landscapes commonly cohere into transnational urban agglomerations.

In the case of Ghana, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is coordinating the ongoing Abidjan-Lagos Corridor (ALC) initiative to upgrade the coastal road network that connects the country to Cote D’Ivoire, Togo, Benin and Nigeria into a 1000km six-lane highway. Funded by the African Development Bank (AfDB), the Corridor is primarily intended to enhance regional integration and trade and enable the growth of labour-intensive industry. For example, the project is intended to complement Ghana’s national strategy to achieve structural transformation through ‘industrialization especially manufacturing, based on modernized agriculture and sustainable exploitation of [the country’s] natural resources’. However, manufacturing value added as a proportion of GDP has remained stagnant since the ALC was launched in 2014.

Although the ALC initiative has had scant impact on Ghanaian industry to date, it is clear that the planned highway is already creating opportunities for rentiership by actors operating at multiple scales. The resulting construction boom is contributing to the emergence of a transnational ‘mega-city region’ of 30 million inhabitants along the West African coast. For example, a master-planned new city is currently being constructed on the route of the highway in the rural district of Ningo-Prampram 50km east of central Accra. This public-private partnership has created opportunities for rent extraction by Brazilian real estate capital through the construction of ‘affordable’ housing units. National political actors have also been accused of engaging in illegal land grabbing and leasing in the project vicinity. In addition, local traditional land custodians have taken advantage of rising land values to enrich themselves, leading to resentment and resistance from dispossessed indigenous youths.

In the case of Kenya, the launch of the Vision 2030 national development strategy in 2008 has seen the government embrace investment in large-scale connective infrastructure as a central pillar of achieving social and economic modernisation. Vision 2030 flagship projects include the Lamu Port, South Sudan, Ethiopia Transport Corridor (LAPSSET) that seeks to enhance both domestic and international connectivity through an extensive network of ports, highways, railways, pipelines and industrial zones. In addition, the government has invested in a series of major road building projects to transform Nairobi into a ‘world class African Metropolis’ by 2030. As with the case of Ghana, there is little evidence to date of structural transformation. The Kenyan government’s ambition was for infrastructural upgrading to foster flagship projects in agro-processing, textiles, leather, construction services and materials, oil and gas, mining services and IT related sectors. According to UNIDO, however, manufacturing value added as a proportion of GDP decreased from 10.4% in 2011 to 8.5% in 2020.

Land for sale in Accra (photo: Tom Gillespie)

Although infrastructure projects have not catalyzed structural transformation in Kenya to date, they did precipitate a real estate boom. For example, international developer Rendeavour is building a 5,000-acre private new city close to the Chinese-financed and constructed Superhighway that connects Nairobi to the town of Thika in Kiambu County. Rendeavour lease plots to commercial developers and individual homebuilders within a master-planned enclave that boasts secure land title, reliable infrastructure and services, and special economic zone status. Road building has also benefited national political elites, and the decision to expand Nairobi’s Eastern Bypass was allegedly influenced by former president Uhuru Kenyatta’s plans to build another new city on 11,800 hectares of land owned by his family. At a smaller scale, wealthy Kenyans are participating in the assetisation of land by building highly profitable tenement housing in areas serviced by Nairobi’s new roads, such as the Mathare Valley informal settlement. In addition, local speculators have taken advantage of peri-urban road building to acquire large parcels of agricultural land and subdivide them into plots of highly valuable real estate.

These examples demonstrate that the concepts of ‘rentier capitalism’ and ‘inter-scalar chains of rentiership’ are useful tools for analysing the emergence of new urban geographies in Africa. Infrastructure-led development is primarily justified in terms of catalysing economic development and structural transformation by addressing Africa’s ‘infrastructure gap’. The infastructure megaprojects discussed above remain a work in progress, and our research does not rule out the possibility that such initiatives will contribute to industrialisation in Africa in the future. However, Tom Goodfellow observes that many African countries are characterised by political-economic incentives, such as weak property taxation and poorly enforced planning regulations, that encourage speculative investment in real estate rather than productive activities.

The cases of Ghana and Kenya suggest that unless this incentive structure is addressed, large-scale infrastructure projects are likely to encourage rentiership, and contribute to further urbanisation without industrialisation. Indeed, in many instances the announcement that a large-scale infrastructure project is planned is enough to precipitate a flurry of land speculation as investors big and small flock to secure assets in anticipation of future rents. Thus, rentiers appear on cue in proximity to large-scale infrastructure projects, while investment in capital goods and manufacturing is rarely so forthcoming. Instead, industrial transformation remains a long-term objective that is perpetually postponed.

If capital that could be used to boost industrial capacity is used for speculation in land, then it stands to reason that urbanisation is taking place at the expense of industrialisation. The implication is that policy makers should discourage rentierism, and instead incentivise productive investment. Here we follow Franklin Obeng-Odoom who argues that constraining the power of the rentier by socialising and redistributing land rents is necessary to addressing inequalities and achieving inclusive urban development in Africa. For example, Ambreena Manji and Jill Cottrell Ghai advocate land value taxation as a progressive tool to fund affordable housing construction in Kenya. However, previous studies have found that powerful landowning elites, such as those discussed in the examples above, are an obstacle to effective land value capture policies. If policy initiatives to socialise and redistribute land rents are to be successful, therefore, they must be accompanied by political movements to challenge the vested interests that benefit from rentier capitalism in Africa.

Tom Gillespie is Lecturer in Global Urban Development and Hallsworth Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. His research sits at the intersection of urban geography, political economy and development studies, and is driven by a commitment to understanding and addressing global urban inequalities. His work has been published in journals such as Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

Seth Schindler is Senior Lecturer of Urban Development and Transformation at the University of Manchester. He is the Co-Director of Research with the African Cities Research Consortium, and the co-founder of the Second Cold War Observatory. He previously coordinated the Global Studies Programme at Humboldt University of Berlin.

Featured Photograph: Land for sale in Accra (photo: Tom Gillespie)

Neither a response nor a debate: five ways to misread our article on Ethiopia

ROAPE

June 23, 2023

In a passionate defence of their article in ROAPE’s journal, Fana Gebresenbet and Yonas Tariku argue that Ethiopians will benefit from building a viable, effective, democratic, and accommodative state, not from its dissolution. If the Ethiopian state collapses, it collapses on the Ethiopian people. Gebresenbet and Tariku argue that their critics have resorted to sensationalist distortions of their argument to garner support for their partisan positions.

By Fana Gebresenbet and Yonas Tariku

When we received ROAPE’s decision to publish our work on 14 January 2023, we were not under the illusion that the argument would be acceptable to all. However, as it was accepted for publication in ROAPE’s Debate section, we thought it would be a much needed contribution to discussion on the war and its aftermath. Conclusively establishing anything beyond debate will not help academic pursuit.

We were not surprised when we got a response from a not-so-surprising corner, from Mulugeta Gebrehiwot et al. What was unexpectd is the lack of engagement with our argument and the extent of misquoting and the mis-characterization. Let us first present our position as students of conflict and security studies, as Ethiopians and Ethiopianists.

Mulugeta et al. attack our personal character by stating that we are insensitive to the suffering of our fellow Tigrayans. We mentioned the extreme suffering of Tigrayans, but did not elaborate on it. Criticising us for not going into detail is one thing, but misinterpreting to mean that we are insensitive to suffering is an intentional mischaracterisation.

We are also mis-represented as biased towards the Federal Government of Ethiopia (FGE). Mulugeta et al. also criticize us for not undertaking a ‘critical, balanced assessment of the records’ of TPLF/EPRDF’s rule, although our central argument is to investigate the CoHA -(Cessation of Hostilities Agreement), not what lead to it. Unlike some of our critics, we have never held public office and political party memberships, nor are we insiders to the FGE nor any rebel movement. The only professional identity we have is as scholars.[1]

In terms of positionality, we should perhaps have explicitly stated that the centre of our ethical concern in our professional work is the state and society not any particular government. As we stress below, we differentiate between regime and state, as much as we differentiate between the TPLF and Tigray.

With the above two caveats, let us briefly highlight the five major misreadings presented in the Mulugeta et al. rejoinder to our debate piece which we believe shows that they did not engage with our arguments, but rather constructed a strawman argument which they then criticised.

Fives misreadings

First, our critics accuse us of being ‘indifferent to the horrors suffered by their fellow citizens’ and showing ‘little nuanced political understanding or empathy’. The war in Northern Ethiopia which affected the three regions, yet disproportionately harmed Tigray and Tigrayans, and ongoing violence in Oromia perpetrated by both the OLA and government forces are the realities in which we are living under. All sides of the war are accused of atrocities, ranging from executions, sexual violence, ethnic cleansing, destruction and stealing of property and public/private assets. Sadly, all forms of atrocities have happened and these are facts.

We accept the facts and we took them as non-debateable. We are against any instrumentalization, exaggerations, denials or reductions. As such, we did not write at length about this.

Mulugeta et al. also state that we argued ‘…claims of genocide are a TPLF propaganda ploy’. There is no such statement in our article. What we pointed out was that foreign experts, particularly Alex de Waal, published a special issue in an academic journal that focuses on genocide as part of their partisan and polarising role during the war. While the timing and theme of the special issue in itself is telling, the selective reading of Ethiopia’s undeniably atrocious past reflected is simply unbelievable. Most notably, in their introduction to the special issue, the authors conveniently skipped, for instance, the well-documented atrocities committed by the TPLF/EPRDF led-regime in Somali (2007-2008) and Gambella (2003-2004) regions—which human rights organisations reported as amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Clearly, mentioning these atrocities does not serve the intended messaging.

Their assertion that we minimized ‘what happened in Tigray in terms of massacres and deliberate starvation of civilians’ is simply false. As Ethiopians and scholars, we believe that the violence and atrocities committed in the war should be determined by qualified independent investigators, not by the propaganda machinations of the warring sides. The purpose of this work is to help Ethiopians overcome the effect of the war and ensure justice, accountability, reconciliation and non-recurrence. We do not overlook minimizing, exaggerating or instrumentalization, which will simply breed further division and violence. We sincerely hope to see the signing of a comprehensive peace agreement that will settle all outstanding issues including justice and reconciliation, once the urgent matters are adequately addressed.

Second, Mulugeta and his colleagues claim that our article ‘…reproduces central narrative threads of FGE propaganda. One of these is that an unprovoked TPLF attack on the Northern Command of the Ethiopian National Defence Force (ENDF) was the cause of the war’. Yet we did not write about the causes of the war which we know very well are more complex than the single event of the 3 November 2020 attack. We view the attack—which Mulugeta and other pro-TPLF individuals justify as a “pre-emptive operation”—as a triggering factor that unleashed the war as we know it. We are aware that there is an attempt to construct a new narrative which presents the attack as if it is inconsequential.

Accusing us of ‘reproducing’ the government’s narrative is a familiar way of trying to silence those who point out the fact that both sides have contributed to the outbreak of the war but the TPLF should take the responsibility for firing first.

When it comes to the signing of the CoHA, we consider it as an outcome of several factors. Mulugeta et al. complain that ‘those who trumpet the Pretoria Agreement, such as Fana and Yonas, imply that ‘might is right’.” Yet, ours is simply a scholarly interpretation of facts on the ground, with no relationship to any of the warring parties. Our critics argue that the TPLF signed the agreement because its central command decided to ‘sue for peace’ after assessing the looming ‘human cost on both sides’ which contradicts the available evidence. Neither the TPLF nor its supporters were keen on an AU-led mediation. Mulugeta et al. were effectively supporting TPLF’s position of pushing away the peace process through most of 2022, with Mulugeta (2021) himself asserting as early as October 2021 that an AU-led mediation is a ‘plan that failed before it even began to roll.’

So, why would the TPLF ‘sue for peace’ through a process that already failed? Moreover, the TPLF dropped all its preconditions and changed its stance vis-à-vis the AU through a public statement made on 11 September 2022, weeks after the start of the third round of war. If one carefully analyses these dynamics along with the advances made by the ENDF and its allies on the ground, there is little reason to doubt our initial assessment that military losses are central to TPLF’s decision to come to the negotiation table.

Third, as they fail to engage the different arguments in our article, Mulugeta and his collaborators ignored the whole section on the state and national security by simply dismissing our central argument that the CoHA is a turning point, marking the beginning of the end of ethno-nationalism’s hegemonic centrality to national politics. Their reason is that the incumbent regime is simply ‘shape-shifting’ and ‘embracing the multinational nature of Ethiopia’. We do not equate ‘embracing the multinational nature of Ethiopia’ with ethno-nationalism’s hegemonic centrality in Ethiopian politics. The two are conceptually and practically different. We are surprised how a team of six authors misses this distinction. For instance, we embrace and celebrate the multinational and multireligious nature of Ethiopia without necessarily subscribing to ethno-nationalism. The likelihood of imagining a future multinational federal Ethiopia with a reduced centrality of ethno-nationalism as an ideology of major political parties is not necessarily farfetched.

Ethiopia cannot be stable without embracing the diversity of its people, not just in terms of ethnicity but also other markers of identity and plurality. As such, our view of the Ethiopian state and society is that it will be more secure if it is geared toward building a cohesive, accommodative, and just state—society relationship based on democratic principles in which Ethiopians live in peace and dignity. Unlike de Waal (2021) who wrote amidst the raging war—perhaps prompted by ENDF’s defeat in June 2021—that it is ‘…valid to see Ethiopia as an empire’ and ‘its dissolution long overdue’, we view the survivalist instinct of the Ethiopian state and society as valid.

Ethiopians will benefit from building a viable, effective, democratic, and accommodative state, not from its dissolution. If the Ethiopian state collapses, it collapses on the Ethiopian people. As we have seen in the Horn of Africa and elsewhere, it is the people who will suffer—not those who are insensitive to the disastrous consequences of their anti-state positions. As we admitted at the outset of this response, this is our fundamental position which we do not feel in the slightest bit ashamed to plainly state as Ethiopian scholars.

Fourth, Mulugeta et al. denied that ‘…named critics of the Federal Government of Ethiopia (FGE) are supporters of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) is neither substantiated nor correct’. We have presented sufficient evidence showing how the named foreign experts—supporting either side—were not impartial ‘critics’. The tweets and articles of some were frequently echo chambers of the propaganda machinations of the respective sides.

In playing this role they have helped to polarize the narratives that accompanied the war. We would like to invite readers to look at, for example, the partisan pieces produced by Alex de Waal and Ann Fitz-Gerald on various platforms. Moreover, our critics misquote us by saying ‘new Ethiopian voices have somehow ‘reframed’ a debate distorted by foreigners.’ They also falsely quote us when stating that our ‘dismissal of foreign scholars is consistent with an anti-colonial, “African solutions” political stance’. Here, they do not only misread our argument but also confuse two separate issues—decoloniality and AU’s ‘African Solutions’. We view this as a sensationalist distortion of our argument to garner uncritical followers.

Nowhere did we link our critique of the role of foreign experts with anti-colonialism or African Solutions. Our argument is that, in the context of the mis/disinformation, Ethiopians on both sides have wrestled the power of framing the situation in their country from foreign experts thanks to social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook (see p. 6). We consider this challenge to the ‘foreign experts’ framing power as a new and exciting development rarely seen, if at all, in Ethiopia’s past. It is a de-colonial moment of knowledge production which could help give birth to new paradigms of thinking and research.

Yet, as we both work and collaborate with several foreign scholars, we did not and will not advance and tolerate anti-foreign expert sentiment. We just made an observation that foreign experts in general and the named partisan experts in particular have been seriously challenged by Ethiopians themselves.

Fifth, our use of ‘African Solutions’ is in reference to the CoHA and the AU’s role. We stated the agreement ‘gives meaning to’ the principle (p. 1). As Mulugeta et al. note, African agency is one of the crucial components of the African Solutions theme (Ani, 2019). African agency in the Pretoria Agreement could be discerned by noting the extent of references made to AU norms and principles in the CoHA and the extent of involvement of the AU. As Mukondeleli Mpeiwa stresses, despite functioning ‘within a context of scarce-to-none budget, staffing and even more limited operational support’, the commitment of the parties to peace and the support of partners enabled the AU to deliver.

Despite the contested nature of AU’s leadership, reducing its role to ‘last minute brokering of peace’ or limiting it to only AU officials ‘holding tight control of the process’ or labelling the agreement as ‘non-African’ is inaccurate. Examinations of AU’s involvement should consider the early appointment of envoys and later in August 2021 the appointment and shuttle diplomacy of former President Olusegun Obasanjo. This again should not be interpreted as romanticisation or simplistic understanding of African Solutions.

To debate not foreclose

In conclusion, the debate should be about asking critical questions and creating new ideas, not to foreclose the possibility of critical engagement. It would be more productive to engage with the arguments and messages, both in academic terms and for peace and stability in Ethiopia. No one would benefit from constricting the space for critical debate and exchanges – surely our critics do not want that. However, Mulugeta et al. spent some time asking why ROAPE has even published our piece. Given the failing to engage with our arguments and the pervasive misreading and misquoting it is difficult to seriously call this either a response or a debate.

The new era is only beginning after the end of the war: TPLF’s eclipse is ascertained now, while the Prosperity Party and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed are consolidating their power. We are not making a value judgement on the nature of the emerging new era, we are only stating its imminent birth. As much as the post-1991 period was applauded by some and denigrated by others—the post-CoHA period will see a similar fate in the years and decades to come. We will be willing participants to this critical debate too.

Fana Gebresenbet and Yonas Tariku’s recent Debate piece in ROAPE’s journal is available to read for free here: ‘The Pretoria Agreement: Mere cessation of hostilities or heralding a new era in Ethiopia?’

Yonas Tariku is a lecturer and academic coordinator of the MA programme at the Institute for Peace and Security Studies of Addis Ababa University. His primary research focus is on national and regional security in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa.

Fana Gebresenbet is Director and an associate professor of peacebuilding and development at the Institute for Peace and Security Studies of Addis Ababa University. He co-edited two books, Lands of the Future (Berghahn, 2021) and Youth on the Move (Hurst, 2021), and numerous journal articles and book chapters on development, conflict and migration in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa.

Featured Photograph: Internally displaced people during the recent war in Ethiopia (April 2021).

Notes

[1] Two of our critics are clearly politically partisan, who have skin in the game: Mulugeta (as a TPLF veteran and still an insider) and Mohammed Hassan (an Oromo Liberation Army [OLA] negotiator).

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