50 years since the murder of Omar Blondin Diop

May 11, 2023

Fifty years ago, on May 11, 1973, young Senegalese revolutionary philosopher Omar Blondin Diop died in detention under suspicious circumstances in Dakar. Our understanding of liberation movements in Africa tends to focus on struggles in colonial settings, yet Florian Bobin argues that over sixty years after Senegal’s independence, Diop’s life, work, and legacy reveal what revolutionary politics looks like in a neo-colonial context.

Listen to Omar Blondin Diop’s story here. Read about the story in French here.

By Florian Bobin

In June 2020, a few weeks after the murder of George Floyd, Senegalese graffiti collective Radikal Bomb Shot painted a colossal mural in the capital Dakar in memory of Black liberation fighters from around the world. Alongside renowned pan-Africanist Cheikh Anta Diop and abolitionist Harriet Tubman, Omar Blondin Diop is depicted, cigarette in hand, reading historian Amzat Boukari-Yabara’s Africa Unite! A History of Pan-Africanism.

The photograph that inspired this spray-painted portrait dates from 1970 and was captured shortly after his expulsion from France for partaking in the May 1968 protests. But five years later, the philosophy student Omar Blondin Diop was more than a radical dissident – he became a myth. When he died in prison fourteen months into his three-year sentence for “being a threat to national security,” authorities in Senegal claimed he committed suicide. Most had good reason to suspect he was murdered. Ever since, his family has tirelessly demanded justice be done, and artists alongside activists have taken the lead in holding on to his memory.

Omar Blondin Diop’s death cannot be understood as an isolated incident, but as one tragic episode in a long series of tenacious acts of state-led repression in Senegal. Decolonisation in Africa has often been the story of the birth of newly independent states in the 1960s. However, the persistence of foreign interests backed by national governments became a common sight in former French colonies. Well into nominal political independence, burgeoning autocracies largely stifled revolutionary prospects of emancipation from capitalism and imperialism.

We don’t often hear of resistance movements in Senegal during Léopold Sédar Senghor’s rule (1960-1980) because his regime successfully marketed the country as “Africa’s democratic success story.” Yet, under the single-party rule of the Progressive Senegalese Union, authorities resorted to brutal methods: intimidating, arresting, imprisoning, torturing, and killing dissidents [1].

An internationalist youth

Omar Blondin Diop was born in the French colony of Niger in 1946. His father, a medical practitioner, had been transferred from Dakar, the administrative capital of French West-Africa, to a small city near Niamey. He did not hold radical positions, but colonial authorities suspected him of “anti-French sentiment” because of his involvement with trade unionism and support of the socialist French Section of the Workers’ International led by lawyer Lamine Guèye [2]. The metropole monitored what it labeled “anti-French elements” because of their fear of growing anti-colonial movements. Once Blondin Diop’s family was allowed to return to Senegal, he spent the better part of his childhood in Dakar. At the age of 14, he settled in France, where his father enrolled in doctoral medical school [3].

For much of the 1960s, Blondin Diop lived in France. He spent most of his secondary education in Paris, where he attended a prestigious teachers’ college – l’École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud – and pursued his study of classical European thinkers, from Aristotle and Kant to Hegel and Rousseau. There, he began frequenting leftist circles. This is a time when anti-capitalist movements in Europe drew inspiration from China’s Cultural Revolution and strongly opposed American military aggression in Vietnam. Usually, Africans who pursued activism in France focused on politics from their home countries. Blondin Diop, for his part, had a foot in both worlds. Shortly after hearing about the Senegalese activist, radical filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard selected him to play in the movie “La Chinoise” (1967) [4].

In 1968, the 21-year-old philosophy student-professor actively partook in debates organized by far-left groups [5], joining at the new suburban Nanterre University the 22-March Movement, a driving force for the May ’68 protests and occupations. Inspired by the writings of Spinoza, Marx, and Fanon [6], Blondin Diop cultivated theoretical eclecticism – in and out of Situationism, Anarchism, Maoism, and Trotskyism, he never exclusively held onto one given ideology [7] – and considered internationalism as the upcoming revolution’s backbone, extensively writing on Senegal’s revolutionary youth defying President Senghor’s neocolonial rule; the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam’s efforts to counter-attack American bombings; and the rise of Rock and Roll among disenfranchised British youths [8].

***Omar Blondin Diop and Daniel Cohn-Bendit during the Sorbonne occupation in May 1968 © Vincent Meessen via INA***

In the summer of 1968, while in London as a Black Power consultant to Jean-Luc Godard’s latest film “One Plus One”, Blondin Diop met Nadia Wells, a journalist. Upon her return to New York, she wrote to him requesting an article on the French student movement’s latest developments, before going on to describe social struggles in the United Sates, from actions led by the Students for a Democratic Society against the Vietnam War to ongoing school strikes: “First, it was the teachers; then communities fighting to take control back of their schools (of course, these neighbourhoods are Black and Puerto Rican); finally, students who refused to go to school eight hours a day (to pay teachers extra because they lost money during the strike) and be even more “fucked-up”. […] All activists are not yet socialists, and capitalism is so complex that it is difficult to decide where to strike. It can’t suffer in New York: it’s the center of decadence. I have a large apartment but can’t open my windows because the air is so dirty” [9].

Counterattacking in a neo-colony

Due to his political activities, after breaking away from the elitist French grandes écoles system, Blondin Diop was expelled from France to Senegal in late 1969. Alongside other Senegalese comrades who had studied in Europe, he participated in the Movement of Marxist-Leninist Youth. The grouping later gave birth to the influential anti-imperialist front And Jëf (To Act Together), which would be forced into hiding until the early 1980s. Landing a part-time research position at the university, Blondin Diop often intervened in conferences, à la Dutch Provos, calling for students to question master-pupil dynamics within academia, inspiring a portion of the audience to gather and leave the lecture hall suddenly. He also spent much of his days walking throughout Dakar’s popular neighbourhoods alongside iconoclast creatives and his nights projecting, to the sound of Rhythm and Blues, the upcoming struggles with Black American comrades transiting through West Africa [10].

Pushing back formal structures, Blondin Diop promoted artistic performance. He developed the project of “a theater in the streets that will address the concerns and interests of the people,” closely related to Augusto Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed.” Expanding on art’s revolutionary potential, Blondin Diop writes: “Our theater will be a collective and active creation. Before playing in a neighborhood, we shall know its inhabitants, spend time with them, especially the young people. Our theater will go to the places where the population gathers (market, cinema, stadium). It is especially important that we make whatever we can ourselves. Moral conclusion: Better death than slavery” [11].

Independent Senegal was also a neo-colonial space. Senghor had initially opposed immediate independence, advocating instead for progressive autonomy over twenty years [12]. So, when he became President, he regularly called upon France’s support. In 1962, Senghor wrongfully accused his long-time collaborator Mamadou Dia, President of the Senegalese Council, of attempting a coup against him – Dia and his collaborators were later arrested and imprisoned for over ten years [13]. In 1968, when a general strike broke out in Dakar, the police suppressed the movement with the help of French troops. By 1971, Senghor’s embrace of France seemed to reach its peak with the state visit of French President Georges Pompidou, a close friend and former classmate [14]. For over a year, Dakar had been preparing for Pompidou’s two-day stay. On the official procession’s main route, authorities rehabilitated roads and buildings, attempting to invisibilise the city’s poverty.

**Front page of Senegal’s official newspaper Le Soleil on February 5, 1971 reads: “Mr. Pompidou in Dakar: Long live the friendship between France and Senegal”**

To young radical activists, Senegal’s reception of the French President was an open provocation. A few weeks prior, a group inspired by the American Black Panther Party and the Uruguayan Tupamaros set fire to the French cultural centre in Dakar and an annex building of the Ministry of Public Works. During the actual visit, they attempted to charge the presidential motorcade. But they were caught. Among those convicted were two of Blondin Diop’s brothers. He, too, believed in direct action but was not involved in planning this attack. He had returned to Paris a few months earlier, after the lift of his entry ban [15].

Distressed, Blondin Diop tried gathering the support of Samir Amin and Aimé Césaire before deciding, with close friends, to leave France to train for armed struggle. Aboard the Orient-Express, they crossed all of Europe by train before arriving in a Syrian camp with Fedayeen Palestinian fighters and Eritrean guerilleros. Their plan was to kidnap the French ambassador to Senegal in exchange of their imprisoned comrades. Two months into military training, Blondin Diop and his comrades left the desert for the city. They were hoping to garner support from the Black Panther Party, which had briefly opened an international chapter in Algiers. A split within the movement, however, forced them to reconsider. After swinging by Conakry, they moved to Bamako where part of Blondin Diop’s family lived. From there, they reorganized; meeting with sympathizers to former president Modibo Keïta’s ousted regime and unsuccessfully attempting to purchase weapons in Liberia, via Ivory Coast. In late November 1971, the police arrested the group days before President Senghor’s first state visit to Mali in over a decade. Under the control of the infamous Director of National Security Tiékoro Bagayoko, intelligence services had been monitoring them for months. In Blondin Diop’s pocket, they found a letter mentioning the group’s plan to free their imprisoned friends [16].

**Florian Bobin, Tristan Bobin, Original map for “Omar Blondin Diop: Seeking Revolution in Senegal,” Review of African Political Economy, 2020.**

“Blondin will live on”

Extradited to Senegal, Omar Blondin Diop was sentenced to three years in prison. For the more significant part of their days on the island of Gorée, detainees were not allowed to leave their cells. To minimize interaction, experience of daylight was restricted – half an hour in the morning, another half hour in the afternoon. Following the administration’s guidelines, the guards were unyielding toward political prisoners and regularly sent them to solitary cells. Between two spells in the “hole”, Blondin Diop wrote a letter to the penitentiary authority to warn about the preoccupying state of detainment: “My visits, when not suppressed, are strictly weekly and limited to my parents. Parents are not a man’s only friends. Newspapers and books of my choice are censored and do not reach me, although they are in free circulation in Senegal. Regular visits from the doctor have been interrupted. When I ask to go to the hospital, the prison administration issues exit permits with delays that can be fatal in an emergency” [17].

Omar Blondin Diop was reported dead on 11 May, 1973. He was 26 years old. The news came as a bombshell. Hundreds of young people stormed the streets and graffitied the capital’s walls: “Senghor, assassin; They are killing your children, wake up; Assassins, Blondin will live on.” Interior Minister Jean Collin, a former French colonial administrator who obtained Senegalese citizenship around independence (and additionally Senghor’s nephew-in-law), is suspected of having ordered Blondin Diop’s fatal beating after a clash between the two [18]. On the day of the funeral, Collin refused to hand the corpse over to his family, instead instructing an expedited burial by riot policemen.

From the very beginning, the Senegalese state covered up the crime. While the official autopsy presented Blondin Diop’s death as a “suicide by hanging”, the deceased’s father, a medical practitioner, issued a counter-forensic report attesting blows received to the neck, thereafter, filing a complaint for voluntary assault and battery resulting in death. Going against official orders, the investigating judge started indicting suspects – after a failed attempt at recreating the “suicide” in the detainee’s cell, he had discovered in the prison’s registry that Blondin Diop had fainted days before the announcement of his death, and the penitentiary administration had done nothing about it. Before the judge had time to arrest the remaining suspects, authorities replaced him with another judge, who ended the legal proceedings a year and a half later, claiming the case was not within his jurisdiction [19]. Blondin Diop’s father ended up being the only person convicted in the case, made to pay the symbolic sum of one franc for “spreading false news” about his son’s death. Every May 11 until the 1990s, armed forces would surround the young activist’s grave to prevent any form of public commemoration.

For decades, Omar Blondin Diop has been a source of inspiration for activists and artists in Senegal, and elsewhere [20]. In recent years, exhibitions, paintings, and movies have revisited his story – one which sadly resonates with contemporary politics. The authoritarian methods deployed by Senegal’s current administration illustrate how impunity feeds off the past. President Macky Sall’s regime has repeatedly sought to suppress freedom of demonstration, embezzle public funds, and abuse of its authority. So long as governmental accountability serves no other purpose than an attractive concept to international donors, practices from the past are bound to live on. In Senegal today, as exemplified by the state-sponsored repression of the nationwide protests in March 2021, people are still imprisoned for demonstrating; activists like Guy Marius Sagna are time and again intimidated, arrested, and unlawfully detained. In this context, fifty years on, authorities have unsurprisingly refused to reopen Omar Blondin Diop’s case. Nonetheless, as his family’s saying goes, “No matter how long the night is, the sun always rises.”

Florian Bobin is a Dakar-based researcher in history who studies liberation struggles and state violence in 1960s-1970s Senegal. This article is an introduction to his work on Omar Blondin Diop, completed by two books to be released later in 2023: a biography (Cette si longue quête. Vie et mort d’Omar Blondin Diop) and selected writings (Nous voir nous-mêmes du dehors. Réflexions politiques d’Omar Blondin Diop, 1967-1970).

This research project has been made possible thanks to the precious time and resources of Omar Blondin Diop’s family members, friends, and acquaintances, as well as activists and researchers. Sincerest acknowledgments to: Dialo Diop, Cheikh Hamallah Diop, Alioune Sall ‘Paloma’, Ousmane Blondin Diop, Papa Konare Niang ‘Niangus’, Alymana Bathily, Mustapha Saha, Jean-Claude Lambert, Bécaye Blondin Diop, Omar Blondin Diop Jr, Mareme Blondin Diop, Khaly Moustapha Leye, Antoine Lefébure, Gilbert Vaudey, Bertrand Gallet, Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, Marc-Vincent Howlett, Patrick Talbot, Roland Colin, Aziz Salmone Fall, Ndongo Samba Sylla, Karim Ndiaye, Marie-Angélique Savané, Pape Touty Sow, Amadou Diagne ‘Vieux’, Ibez Diagne, Mansour Kebe, Ousmane Ndongo, Alioune Diop, Papalioune Dieng, Ndèye Fatou Kane, Kibili Demba Cissokho, Bara Diokhane, Barka Ba, Majaw Njaay, Khouma Gueye, Maky Sylla, Alhassane Diop, Hugues Segla, Fatimata Diallo Ba, Khalil Diallo, Awa Mbengue, Vincent Meessen, Pascal Bianchini, Françoise Blum, Martin Mourre, Romain Tiquet, Omar Gueye, Armelle Mabon, Christelle Lamy, Woppa Diallo, Yannek Simalla, Leo Zeilig, David Morton, Tristan Bobin, Njoki Mbũrũ, Njambanene Koffi.

Featured Photograph: Omar Blondin Diop depicted among other African and African American activists in a mural painted in Dakar in June 2020 © Radikal Bomb Shot.

References

[1] Research on revolutionary politics in Senegal under Léopold Sédar Senghor’s rule is still underway. Over the past decade, a significant number of works have deepened our understanding of the period. As follows, a list of major ones: Ibrahima Wane, Chanson populaire et conscience politique au Sénégal. L’art de penser la nation (Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, 2013); Roland Colin, Sénégal notre pirogue : au soleil de la liberté (Présence Africaine, 2007); Alassane Diagne, Momsarew ou le pari de l’indépendance (2014); Pascal Bianchini, « The 1968 years: revolutionary politics in Senegal » (Review of African Political Economy, 2019), « 1968 au Sénégal : un héritage politique en perspective » (Canadian Journal of African Studies, 2021) & « Les paradoxes du Parti africain de l’indépendance (PAI) au Sénégal autour de la décennie 1960 » (2016); Sadio Camara, L’épopée du Parti Africain de l’Indépendance au Sénégal (1957-1980) (L’Harmattan, 2013); Moctar Fofana Niang, Trajectoire et documents du Parti Africain de l’Indépendance (P.A.I.) au Sénégal (Les Éditions de la Brousse, 2015); Ousmane William Mbaye, Président Dia (2012); Mouhamadou Moustapha Sow, « Le traitement informationnel des évènements de décembre 1962 à Dakar » (Revue d’Histoire Contemporaine de l’Afrique, 2021); Omar Gueye, Mai 1968 au Sénégal, Senghor face au mouvement syndical(Éditions Karthala, 2017); Abdoulaye Bathily, Mai 68 à Dakar ou la révolte universitaire et la démocratie. Le Sénégal cinquante ans après (L’Harmattan, 2018); Françoise Blum, Révolutions africaines : Congo, Sénégal, Madagascar, années 1960-1970(Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014) & « Sénégal 1968 : révolte étudiante et grève générale » (Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 2012); Bocar Niang and Pascal Scallon-Chouinard, « ‘Mai 68’ au Sénégal et les médias : une mémoire en questions » (Le Temps des médias, 2016); Yannek Simalla, Sénégal contestataire (2017-…); Amadou Kah, De la lutte des classes à la bataille des places : le destin tragique de la gauche sénégalaise (L’Harmattan, 2016).

[2] This information was provided by Dialo Diop (brother of Omar Blondin Diop) in conversation with Cases Rebelles (9 May, 2018), and Omar in Memoriam (11 May, 2018).

[3] This information was provided by Cheikh Hamallah Diop (brother of Omar Blondin Diop) in conversation with Florian Bobin (12 July, 2018 & 4 July, 2019).

[4] Actress and author Anne Wiazemsky describes Blondin Diop’s encounter with Jean-Luc Godard, her partner at the time, in her novel Une année studieuse (Gallimard, 2012, pp. 157-158). Upon learning that the filmmaker was looking for ‘a Marxist-Leninist student,’ her friend Antoine Gallimard suggested casting Blondin Diop, a close companion of his. Charmed by the Senegalese activist, Godard later selected him to play Comrade X—his ‘own role’—in the film La Chinoise (1967).

[5] Historian Michelle Zancarini-Fournel highlights Blondin Diop’s role in student mobilizing in 1968 (they had crossed paths a few times) in her piece ‘En souvenir d’Omar’ for the collective book Étudiants africains en mouvement : contribution à une histoire des années 1968 (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2017, pp. 11-12). “He probably didn’t go much to class that year, but he was at all the debates organized by far-left political groups,” she writes.

[6] This information was provided by Alymana Bathily (a close friend of Omar Blondin Diop) in conversation with Florian Bobin (9 July, 2019).

[7] Alioune Sall ‘Paloma’ (a close friend of Omar Blondin Diop) insists on the necessity of understanding Blondin Diop as a complex, multi-faceted being, in his testimony for the 40^th anniversary of his friend’s death (10 May, 2013).

[8] A selection of Omar Blondin Diop’s writings (Nous voir nous-mêmes du dehors) preserved by his family and edited by Florian Bobin is set to be published later in 2023.

[9] Nadia Wells’ four-page handwritten letter to Omar Blondin Diop is featured in the aforementioned selected writings.

[10] Journalist Amandla Thomas-Johnson’s Becoming Kwame Ture (Chimurenga, 2020) explores post-independence circulations of Black American activists between the United States and West Africa.

[11] Artist Vincent Meessen published Blondin Diop’s ‘Urban Theater Project’ (circa 1970) in his artist book The Other Country (Sternberg Press, 2018, pp. 38-39).

[12] This information was provided by Roland Colin (chief of staff for President of the Senegalese Council Mamadou Dia, 1957-1962) in conversation with Étienne Smith and Thomas Perrot for Afrique contemporaine (2010, p. 118).

[13] Since Senegal’s independence in 1960, President of the Council Mamadou Dia had been increasingly calling for decentralizing public administration and empowering peasant communities. Towards the end of 1962, tension mounted within the ruling party (Progressive Senegalese Union), between sympathizers to Senghor and Dia. Among the former, some decided to table a vote of no confidence against Dia’s government. At the time, every decision went through the party first, provided that it was the only recognized political force. Dia opposed a motion he deemed illegitimate and Senghor accused him of ‘attempting a coup against him.’ On December 18, 1962, Senghor ordered the arrest of Dia, alongside ministers Valdiodio N’diaye, Ibrahima Sarr, Joseph Mbaye, and Alioune Tall. They were incarcerated in the arid region of Kedougou until 1974. Mansour Bouna Ndiaye (a young official within the ruling party in 1962) and Roland Colin (chief of staff for Mamadou Dia, 1957-1962) offer two thorough first-hand accounts of the ‘December 1962 crisis’ in their memoirs Panorama politique du Sénégal ou Les mémoires d’un enfant du siècle (Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1986, pp. 136-154) and Sénégal notre pirogue : au soleil de la liberté (Présence africaine, 2007, pp. 253-293). Colin also testified in Archives d’Afrique (Radio France Internationale, 2019). Additionally, see Mouhamadou Moustapha Sow’s article Crise politique et discours médiatiques au Sénégal. Le traitement informationnel des évènements de décembre 1962 à Dakar.

[14] Léopold Sédar Senghor and Georges Pompidou met in 1928 at the prestigious secondary school lycée Louis-le-Grand. Maintaining a strong friendship throughout the years, they later collaborated politically, practically non-stop, between 1962 and 1974. While Senghor was Senegal’s President (1960-1980), Pompidou became France’s Prime Minister (1962-1968) and President (1969-1974). When Pompidou visited Dakar in February 1971, Senghor declared on the airport apron: “The Senegalese people feel particularly honored to receive the President of the French Republic. […] Because the French-Senegalese friendship dates back to nearly three centuries. […] I am pleased to host in my country an old classmate from high school, and a friend.”

[15] Senegalese authorities prided at President Senghor’s involvement in the reversal of Blondin Diop’s ban from the French territory (The White Book on the Suicide of Oumar Blondin Diop, Republic of Senegal, 1973, pp. 14-15). Historians Françoise Blum and Martin Mourre expose his possible motivations in their article Omar Blondin Diop : d’un monde l’autre (Centre d’histoire sociale des mondes contemporains, 2019): “Police sources explain this intervention by Senghor’s wish to rid Senegal of the very active Omar Blondin. He would have preferred knowing he was in France. For our part, we instead think that Senghor was concerned that the student pursued the brilliant studies he had started to become one of the flagships of Senegal’s future elite.” Evidently, Senghor saw himself in Blondin Diop: both were Senegalese, French-educated, and classically trained in the humanities. Perhaps, he believed that his younger compatriot could pursue his political agenda. But Blondin Diop famouslydisapproved of it in the strongest terms. By the late 1960s, the authorities had been closely monitoring him; it seemed apparent that they preferred to have him out of the country.

[16] This information was provided by Alioune Sall ‘Paloma’ in conversation with Françoise Blum and Martin Mourre for Maitron (8 May, 2019).

[17] In this striking letter to the penitentiary authority before his death in custody (featured in Nous voir nous-mêmes du dehors), Omar Blondin Diop denounced the drastic measures limiting detainees’ access to daylight, before concluding in a request for a general improvement of living conditions in prison.

[18] This information was provided by Roland Colin (chief of staff for President of the Senegalese Council Mamadou Dia, 1957-1962) in his memoir Sénégal notre pirogue : au soleil de la liberté (Présence africaine, 2007, pp. 324): “Oumar Blondin Diop, imprisoned at Gorée prison, received Jean Collin’s visit with whom he had an altercation. The Interior Minister, we later learned, would have ordered the guards to punish him. The next day, he was found hanging in his cell.”

[19] This information was provided by Moustapha Touré (chief investigating judge of the High Court of Dakar, initially in charge of Blondin Diop’s case) in conversation with La Gazette (21 December, 2009). In this interview, he recounts the state’s efforts to intimidate and coerce him during his investigation: “I had made the decision to indict the prison officers who had custody of detainee Oumar Blondin Diop. There were three of them, but I had only charged two of them, waiting for the third. At the time, we were in the absolute reign of a single party. The order that was in place left little room for maneuver for senior officials like us. And yet, I had responsibly and fairly fulfilled my duty as a judge, where others would have chosen to do something else, by obeying orders emanating from the political authority. I naturally refused and came to the decision to indict, because I was convinced, against the advice of my department and the state, that the detainee could not have committed suicide. This was impossible under the conditions in which the autopsy report sought to accredit the thesis of suicide. I was reinforced in such a belief by the prison logbook [registry]. It carried edifying mentions in this regard. This logbook did indeed mention that detainee Oumar Blondin Diop had fainted during the week in which he was pronounced dead by suicide. Nowhere was a medical examination mentioned in this same logbook, in order to determine the causes of the recorded fainting. The circumstances revealed credible and consistent evidence, tending to prove that the suicide, officially mentioned to justify the death of Oumar Blondin Diop, was in reality made up. So, I decided, in the secrecy of my investigative office, to indict. After this indictment, deemed bold at the time, I was immediately transferred. Ten days later, I was promoted to president of the Court of Dakar and adviser to the Court of Appeal. Let’s say that at the time, it was like a kind of a promotion-sanction which tried to hide its true nature.”

[20] Accounts of Blondin Diop often focus solely on his activism, and not so much on his art (see Omar Blondin Diop : un artiste et militant ouest-africain en mouvement). When he became a martyr figure, deeply traumatized activists, as well as artists, held on to his memory. Before his assassination, he had nurtured strong connections with artists who would later form the Laboratoire Agit’Art. In 2019, artist Mbaye Diop painted a mural of its members (Issa Samb ‘Joe Ouakam’, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Bouna Medoune Seye, Mame Less Dia, Mamadou Diop Traoré) on the wall of the Ngor Yaadikon Complex, and included Blondin Diop in it. As follows, a list of major pieces influenced by Omar Blondin Diop: Portrait d’Omar Diop (Issa Samb ‘Joe Ouakam’, 1974); Degluleen mbokk yi (El Hadji Momar Sambe ‘Mor Faama’, 1975); Omar Blondin Diop (Heldon, 1975); Lettre de Dakar(Libre Association d’Individus Libres, 1978); Afrik (Seydina Insa Wade, 1978) ; Le Temps de Tamango (Boubacar Boris Diop, 1981); Le lait s’était caillé trop tôt (Issa Samb ‘Joe Ouakam’, 1983); Omar 4.0. Hommage à Omar Blondin Diop (Bara Diokhane, 2013); Le malheur de vivre (Ndèye Fatou Kane, 2014); Congrès de Minuit (Laboratoire Agit’Art, 2016); L’enterrement d’Omar Blondin Diop (Issa Samb ‘Joe Ouakam’, non-daté); Omar B.D. (Issa Samb ‘Joe Ouakam’, 2017); Omar in May (Vincent Meessen, 2018); La Cloche des Fourmis (Laboratoire Agit’Art, 2018); Hommage à Omar Blondin Diop (Lebergedeliledengor, 2019); Omar Blondin Diop, le laborantin (Mbaye Diop, 2019); Juste un Mouvement (Vincent Meessen, 2018-2021); The Wall the ñuulest (RBS Crew, 2020); Omar Blondin Diop pour le Frapp (Chics, 2021); URICA (RBS Crew, 2021); Omar Blondin Diop, un révolté(Djeydi Djigo, 2021).

Who are you really (originally)?

ROAPE

May 9, 2023

Using Fanon’s work, Benjamin Maiangwa, Gillian Robinson and Ethan Oversby ask if questions of origin and geography are racist and discriminatory, with harmful and belittling connotations. Does the question ‘where are you from’ contain in it white supremacy, entitlement, and racism. Surely, the authors ask, no-one should have to constantly affirm their existence.

By Benjamin Maiangwa, Gillian Robinson, and Ethan Oversby

“I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects“

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

I (Ben) published a piece in the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) titled: “Where are you really from?” I argued in this piece that whether in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and elsewhere, the “where are you really from” question engenders micro-aggressive elements about one’s sense of (un)belonging. I shared various anecdotes from Nigeria, South Africa, Japan, and Canada to underscore this nervousness of belonging, emanating from that question. In all cases, I concluded that the question, despite its assumed harmlessness, favors whiteness as a standard for judging other people’s sense of being and origin.

Various anecdotes in my ROAPE story have spurred interest about the nature of the question and whether it is naturally rooted in micro aggressive elements, being intentional or unintentional discriminations, some not so subtle, with often harmful and mal-intentioned undertones. Some of my students asked whether the ‘where are you from’ question can broadly be marked up to white supremacy, entitlement, and racism at its core.

I (Ben) was at a grocery store with my friend, lining up to check out our items. I was conversing with my friend in English, when I realized a man on the queue was eavesdropping on our conversation. As I was about to pay for the groceries, I heard the man uttered “Jambo” (hello – in Swahili) and looked up as if he was talking to someone in the air. I looked at him, but he kept his gaze upward. I was certain that I heard him say “Jambo”, and to be sure I asked, “sorry, did you say something?” He quickly said “no”, and for good measure, added, “Habari Yako” (how are you – in Swahili), and then looked away again. I’ve had it at this point! “Why is he uttering phrases in Swahili to no one in particular?” I thought it was the “white gaze” already dissecting me like Fanon said in Black Skin, White Mask. So, for what it was worth, I decided to engage him. “Nzuri” (everything is fine – in Swahili), I said directly to him. He smiled with some sense of satisfaction, and then responded “my grandfather lived in Kenya.” “I am not from Kenya,” I quickly interjected. “But I have many friends from there which was why I could respond to you even though I didn’t know you were talking to me.”

As we said our goodbyes, I kept wondering, whether the man judged me based on my accent and placed me—wrongfully—in Kenya. Did he think because of the way I spoke English that I couldn’t possibly be from Canada? Or is Kenya his only frame of reference for the source of any shade of blackness? Or is it just his way of breaking the ice with someone who looked different? If that were the case, why didn’t he just speak English with me?

I wouldn’t necessarily say that the ‘where are you from’ question is a marker of white supremacy, entitlement, or racism, depending on where, when, and how it is asked. Ethan (the third author) asked some acquaintances what they thought of the “where are you from” question seeing they’re from different countries themselves. They felt that it wasn’t necessarily a problematic question, but it definitely has better alternatives and requires a certain level of trust. For example, a better alternative would be to ask, “where did you grow up?” However, in my case with the man who spoke Swahili to me, I consider the manner in which the question was asked as deeply insulting. The question was posed in a way as to categorize me as the “other” with roots anywhere else, but here. It was the case of the dominator culture deciding my fate, and placing me and, probably, anyone that looks like me, in the place it believes I belong. For as Fanon says, “the colonist and the colonized are old acquaintances [without the humanist commitment]. And consequently, the colonist is right when he says he ‘knows’ them. It is the colonist who fabricate and continues to fabricate the colonized subject.” Nobody should have to live in this existential wreckage of always affirming their existence to counter its fabrication by others.

On the anecdote about the woman in Canada in my ROAPE article, who repeatedly asked where I was before I came to Canada, and before then, and before then…when I was clearly not making it simple to access the information while subtly and politely communicating my discomfort, is it possible that she missed those intonations? Is our social awareness so different depending on where you are in the world that we are sometimes unable to grasp cues that would indicate someone does not want to be pushed further? Or is the assumption of expecting an answer so ingrained that she feels she has the right to keep at it until she gets what she wants? Is the fact that this happens in non-white settings as well means that everyone is employing whiteness as a norm?

The question’s origins seems to come from an accusatory white supremacist viewpoint, even if it has since evolved into a question of curiosity. Fanon knew full well what adopting colonial behavior was like, so it can be the embodiment of whiteness. A predominant goal of colonization within Canada was to completely assimilate, and I (Ethan) grew up with people that embodied “whiteness”, in an ideological sense. They had the self-hatred that Fanon spoke of which led them to criticize their peers for any behavior they deemed wrong.

Another contention had to do with the man in Ben’s ROAPE article whose parents came from Pakistan. He clearly (from his disgusted response to Ben’s questioning him where he is from) had an awareness of the potential effect of that question. Unless he never gets asked that question because when someone speaks to him, he sounds like he is “from here”. He wants to know when I (Ben) came to Canada, but how dare I ask him. Is that an indication that he has embodied white supremacy? Is it inherent in a country like Canada, which was industrialized by an ethnically diverse population, that it is your skin colour, or your accent which prompts further inquiry, or both? And if one looks or sounds “Canadian”, “English” (Or Ojibwe or French), then is the other ignored and is it assumed that you “belong”?

Fanon once stated “To speak a language, is to take on a world, a culture.” Speaking English and sounding Canadian makes a minority person “belong”, whereas people that speak English but have “foreign” accents are often asked the question “Where are you from.” The way we sound has much to do with the question as looks do. When I (Ethan) returned to Campus after Christmas break, I met my new roommate who is Chinese with an Australian accent. I would be lying to say that his appearance and sound didn’t make my brain lag for a bit, and in the spur of the moment I asked him where he was from. Even though he didn’t apparently take offence because he understood that his accent could be misleading, I regret asking the question because I made assumptions about race and language.

What comes up repeatedly for the students in Ben’s classroom while discussing the ROAPE story are questions of human’s natural tendencies to be curious about someone that looks, sounds and is obviously from somewhere else, or who is different. In this sense, can we say the question is rooted in white supremacy or is rooted in human nature? Isn’t it inbuilt in us to be inquisitive of, wary of or fearful of strangers? For instance, when children ask, “why is that person black?” which Gillian’s own children have recently BLURTED out in the grocery store towards a man next to them in the aisle, and she (hopefully appropriately), said “because humans are all different colours!” Was her child indicating an innate desire to know more, to understand, to make sense of themselves in relation to others and the nature of the world, absent of malevolent or repressed racist intention?

Children’s curiosity may be excused for obvious reasons, but it is a different story with adults. Unlike the man at the grocery store who concluded that I (Ben) was Kenyan, I met another lady at the same store who started off well in terms of her approach to unearthing the source of my blackness. I had bought cassava, among other items. Out of curiosity, I guessed, the lady asked how I’d cook it. I said, “just like potatoes.” “Ah, and how do you eat it?” “Same as potatoes,” I said. Then I went on about the different types of sauce with which one could eat cassava. And she went for it: “Where are you from?” I paused, and bystanders looked at me, as if they too had been expecting an answer. I felt at that moment like I had been put on trial! The woman might have interpreted my pausing as some sort of a resistance and went on to tell me she’s lived in South Africa for four months, among other exotic places on the African continent. “I lived in South Africa as well”, I managed to chip in. “Oh really?” she said and then added, “my sister married a South African, and you don’t have the accent.” “I am Nigerian”, I finally said, and it made sense to her.

I thought the lady was clever to use the cassava prelude to unravel my blackness. But I also thought she should have stopped at that, and maybe at “South Africa” since we had both lived in the country. But it felt to me that she really wanted to place me somewhere; to get to the source of my blackness. To paraphrase Fanon, I felt “I can’t go to the grocery store without encountering myself!”

Another relatable question arising from the ROAPE article acknowledged that those who frown against the “where are you from question” is because of a state of being perpetually ask this question throughout one’s life; being essentially accused of not belonging here or there. This is so much so that the state of self-inquiry when “where are you from” is a constant, requires one to eventually turn inwards and ask, “who am I?” But the question arises: doesn’t it seem completely inauthentic, ignorant and is the exact opposite of acknowledging someone’s very important differences to not ask the question, as we’re not supposed to be colour, culturally or ethnically “blind”, because that is also a form of racism?

It is not ignorant, and there’s certainly a place for the question depending on one’s familiarity with the ‘other’. Yet in my (Ben) experience, the framing of the question has often been discriminatory even by people considered to be from the same country. I was in the grocery store again with a friend, and a woman came and greeted us: “Hi, where are you from?” My friend looked at me because we’ve had this conversation over and over again, and he was wondering how I’d respond. I simply told her, “Nigeria”. She seemed happy to have found her brothers because she quibbled in pidgin, “na we we na.” We all laughed, as she proceeded to say, “I’m from Delta State.” Incidentally, my friend was from Delta state, and this revelation made the woman ecstatic to the point she didn’t ask where I came from in Nigeria. Then I chipped in for good measure, “I am from Kaduna state.” “We’re all one”, she said in a consolatory tone. I couldn’t help but to wonder why she needed to assure me of the oneness I had already taken for granted. I stopped wondering when she introduced my friend to her “non-Nigerian” friend as someone from her region in Nigeria and said nothing about me. Again, this may not be racism, and given the colonial configuration of Nigeria, the ‘head count’ remains acutely relevant in social relations. But one would think those who have traveled and mixed up with a mosaic of people and, perhaps, being tormented by the ‘where are you from’ question themselves would or should know better.

I (Gillian) acknowledge that I cannot have the experience of being treated as though I am an outsider based on ethnic or geographical heritage. I have never been outside of North America. I certainly do not feel entitled to know more about someone than they care to share, and I would hope that I would be able to pick up someone’s hesitancy before it became awkward or harmful. I’m just not sure we can expect that everyone will know the difference. I don’t think not asking the question makes you blind to culture or ethnicity, but rather, encourages the pursuit of knowledge of the world further. Learning about the world, cultures, and ethnicities is interesting and framing the question around that could transform the question. Framing our similarities like love for food or sport can make the framing of questions more genuine and intimate. The question acknowledges that we are different, but simultaneously leaves out the reality of our similarities, which are as important in forming a humanist or admirable stance.

The reader may be convinced that this question is completely off-limits, that people do not appreciate being asked where they come from or where their land of origin is. If this is true, and people stop asking and being asked, do we succeed (at least partly) in further insulating ourselves from the diverse realities of others, arresting our inquisitive nature and further othering? On the other hand, does the resentment of having our ethnic heritage as a point of constant inquiry leaves us with an ever-evolving sense of existential loci?

Where do any of us belong? Where are any of us from? Who are you, really (originally)? Is that a more appropriate question? Often the simplest answer is the best one that can be provided. Ultimately, we are all human, from far and wide we each have unique experiences regardless of our background. To paraphrase Fanon again, we as a people, want but one thing: may we never be instrumentalized. May the subjugation of people by people cease. May we be allowed to discover ourselves and desire others wherever they may be.

Benjamin Maiangwa teaches in the department of Political Science at Lakehead University. Maiangwa’s research focuses on the intersection of politics, culture, and society. His publications use storytelling to explore notions of contested belonging, mobility, and how people experience conflict and peace in everyday life. Gillian Robinson and Ethan Oversby are Political Science students at Lakehead University.

Featured Photograph: Black community in Chicago’s West Side in the early 1970s (June 1973).

Amílcar Cabral’s life, legacy and reluctant nationalism – an interview with António Tomás

ROAPE

May 3, 2023

Last month, ROAPE re-posted a collection of essays from 1993 to mark the 50^th anniversary of Amílcar Cabral’s murder in 1973. Continuing our tribute, Chinedu Chukwudinma interviews António Tomás, who wrote Cabral’s biography in the 21^st century. Tomás speaks about Cabral’s political development as well as his abilities as a teacher, revolutionary diplomat and leader. But he also discusses his insecurities, shortcomings and the myths surrounding national liberation in Guinea-Bissau.

What motivated you to write a biography of Amílcar Cabral in the 21st century?

When I wrote the first version of the biography on Cabral, I was in Portugal, and I wrote the book in Portuguese. The introduction is different from the one in English. I don’t see Amílcar Cabral: the life of a reluctant nationalist (2020) as a translation. I prefer to say that it is the English version of the book that was written in Portuguese. When I started working on this book project in the early 2000s nobody, at least from my generation, was talking about Cabral in Portugal.

But Cabral, his generation and all the people fighting for the independence and liberation of Africa were students in Lisbon. Most of them lived in Lisbon. Cabral was married to a Portuguese. So he was pretty much part of the debate about blackness in Europe, and blackness in Portugal as a student. When I started writing about Cabral in Portuguese (O Fazedor de Utopias – Uma Biografia de Amílcar Cabral (2007) I was just trying to understand, as a black man, how to think through and engage with Cabral and his struggle in the context of race, not so much that of independence, which is the kind of stuff I became interested in after I went to the United States and did my PhD at Columbia University. I was trying to understand, the place of race and blackness in Lisbon in the context of black Portuguese or African immigrants.

António Tomás, Amilcar Cabral’s biographer

Many years after, I changed a few things in the English version of the book. The initial debate on race and racism is less there. But what is interesting now is that the Portuguese version is sold out in Portugal. It has been sold out for many years. I’m now preparing a new edition where I bring back the debate on race because we have a lot of developments: A right-wing party in Portugal and an emerging and very strong black movement, formed mostly by people who want to bring debates on racism and the legacies of colonialism to the national agenda. It is a good moment to get back to these original questions that drove me to the quest of Cabral’s legacy.

In what ways do you think Amílcar Cabral’s life and work have relevance to the young people developing their racial and political consciousness in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protest?

He’s a very important figure, either you like him, or you don’t like him. If you compare him with Walter Rodney, they both moved back to Africa and they were involved with questions of societal transformation, and racism. It was not just about critiquing imperialism and critiquing colonialism. Particularly for Cabral, it was about how to create new societies, and how to go about creating societies that go beyond the ways in which these countries came into being through colonialism. It is important to appropriate these figures and to bring them into discussions about what is going on now with issues such as Black Lives Matter, structural violence and racism.

But it is important to put these thinkers in their very particular context and to do the sort of exercise that David Scott did with Conscripts of Modernity when he says we have to find not the answer, but the question that they asked in relation to their context. But it’s very important to engage with these figures and to learn, but also to understand that they were fighting in different times using different resources like Cabral using armed struggle and so on.

One thing I like about your book is your refusal to tell Cabral’s story in retrospect as if everything he did since a child was destined to turn him into a revolutionary leader. Can you tell me a bit about who was Cabral? How did he become politicised and politically active?

I’m from Angola and I grew up in Angola during Communism. People of my generation (I was born before 1975, the year of independence) grew up with all these traditions of big men, like Agostinho Neto, Brezhnev, Tito, and Che Guevara. Even today the toponomy of the city (Luanda) reflects that, with streets named after Kwame Nkrumah and Amilcar Cabral. The biographies of these figures have been recorded in a very problematic way. They are talked about as if their lives were linear. They don’t have challenges, they don’t have doubts, and they know from the outset what they are going to do. They have a destiny and they fulfil it. But what you see in my book on Cabral, is that life is not like this. Leaders like Cabral had to make really hard choices. Most of the time they were thrown into situations that were not of their choosing. It’s the conflation of circumstances that brings them to this these moments when they have to make hard choices.

Cabral was born in 1924 in Guinea-Bissau to Cape Verdean parents and moved back with his family to Cape Verde in 1932 and then to Lisbon, in 1945. Cabral was not the most politicized of his generation of African-born students in Lisbon. Agostinho Neto, who later became the first President of Angola, was by far more politicized than Cabral. He was already in prison by the Portuguese secret police even before Cabral knew anything about what he would do as a nationalist. Cabral was just trying to do the best he could in the circumstances that he found himself. He had his radical friends; he was trying to help his friends. By the time his friends were being harassed and arrested by the police, he was the only one that had a formal job working as an agronomist for the colonial state. So, he could travel in the Portuguese empire; go to Angola and Guinea-Bissau, link people, and distribute money and letters. But it reached a situation where he could no longer do that. So, he had to take a stand. And that was in 1959 or 1960 in London when he wrote these very famous documents, Facts against Colonialism, which is how he introduces himself as a nationalist.

What is interesting is that because he was not as politicized and devoted to politics as many others in his generation, like Mário Pinto de Andrade or even Agostinho Neto, he had time to draw from other resources, such as his training as a scientist and his writings. All of these allowed him to do the kind of stuff that nobody had done in any other place fighting Portuguese colonialism, such as creating the liberated zones during the anticolonial war in Guinea-Bissau and promoting an approach to gender equality throughout the struggle. Because he pushed back the moment to become a full-fledged nationalist, he had time to bring much more to the fight.

My descriptions of what Cabral was doing in 1959 convey the sense of hope that Africa’s time had arrived. It was the time for Africans to show the world what they could do. It was the time for Africans to build societies that could deal with and go beyond all the structures that colonialism and imperialism imposed upon them. And then there was the 1960s–a wonderful decade in Africa. Of course, things get worse in the 1970s and particularly the 1980s with the IMF and structural adjustment. but it is a very important time in Africa and I think we should revisit that formative moment and perhaps try to re-capture a little bit of the optimism of the 1960s.

Your book points out the discrepancies between the myths and the actual reality of the national liberation struggle. I remember when I was learning about Guinea-Bissau’s struggle at university, I enjoyed reading Lars Rudebeck who paints a very idealistic picture of the struggle, and Basil Davidson as well. What are the discrepancies that we should know about?

This is a very important question. Reading authors, such as Lars Rudebeck and Basil Davidson and getting to know how the struggles in Africa were understood in the context of global struggles for freedom. But this comes with a problem. These liberals and progressive writers were so involved with the struggle, particularly Basil Davidson, that they lost objectivity. For them, these struggles for liberation in Africa were seen as part of ideological struggles going on in Europe. For them, it was sort of mandatory to make the case that everything was going well and that the national liberation movement would prevail. About the critical decisions that had to be made, you won’t find much in their writings. But the struggle is a very tough business. Whenever violence needs to be used to liberate a country, there will be people dying. In the case of struggle in Guinea, which you don’t see in the writings by these authors, that war was conducted in the context of historical rivalries between Cape-Verdeans and Guineans within the national movement, the PAIGC (Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde). So, the questions were then: who was fighting and who was leading?

Cabral’s decision to start the war was a very heavy one to take. First Cabral did not have any military training. If he could, he certainly would have pursued the liberation of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde in a non-violent way. He resisted pressure to start it in 1961 when the anticolonial war was starting in Angola. It was only when his men were caught smuggling military equipment by the authorities in Guinea-Conakry and his companion was imprisoned by Sekou Touré in 1962 that he had no other choice than to show the uses of the smuggled guns. If he had not shown Sekou Touré that the weapons and military equipment were to fight the Portuguese, Touré would certainly have thought that it was a way to feed one of the groups against him.

To come back to your question, I think the ways in which liberal and progressive writers were engaging with the struggle have also contributed to obscuring our knowledge of the killing of Cabral. A lot of people who were writing about Cabral were people that were invested in Cabral’s theory and practice, Cabral’s ideology. So, they were not paying much attention, or they were not interested in understanding the killing of Cabral in relation to the contradictions that the national liberation movement had brought to the fore. The idea that António de Spinóla, the Portuguese governor in Guinea-Bissau, had ordered the killing, or that the PIDE (Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado) had plotted it, was a good explanation. However, I also think that this explanation prevented a lot of these scholars from really engaging with the contradictions of colonialism and the contradictions of post-colonialism. And this is part of what I tried to do in my understanding of Cabral.

There is a contradiction between those petty-bourgeois Cape Verdeans, some of which lead the PAIGC, and the Guinean masses who are much poorer comparatively. How does this contradiction play out throughout the liberation struggle and at independence?

Cabral tried to think through this issue with what he proposed as the class suicide of the petty bourgeoisie. He knew that there was a contradiction, and he knew it was very difficult for people to overcome these contradictions. Cabral proposed that the petty bourgeoisie had to transcend who they were. They had to put aside all the privileges and they do embrace the masses. But how do you do this in practice? when you have very deep structures that put people against others, in terms of language, in terms of culture, in terms of the mechanisms that the Portuguese created to differentiate people, such as the native laws. These laws fostered the overwhelming distinction between natives and civilized. The central idea behind this legislation is that a group of people were given privileges because they were able to assimilate a way of life that the Portuguese deemed civilized: they could eat with utensils, they could speak Portuguese and dress like Europeans. Those who could not demonstrate these abilities were placed under the statute of native.

It was for Cabral a difficult task to bring these groups together. Guineans would resent Cape Verdeans because they considered them agents of colonialism. Many Cape Verdeans would not be comfortable around Guineans because of their different languages, customs and traditions. For Cabral, it was how to dilute these cultural differences. And then there was the Portuguese colonial power finding ways to exacerbate these differences to create even more problems in the national liberation movement. If the suicide of the petty bourgeoisie was something difficult to consider during the struggle, it was even harder after independence when the postcolonial states became machines for accumulation. So, you start to have a sort of differentiation between the haves and the have-nots.

I called the Portuguese version of this book O Fazedor de Utopias ‘The Maker of Utopias’ because of the odds of making the national liberation movement a functional and operational machine. It was hard to bring different people together. Reality is too complex for that. People are too complex for that. Humans are for the most part comfortable with what they have. This is one thing. But the other thing is that we must give credit to those who think that transcending difference is possible. It is difficult, of course, but it is worth dreaming about and aiming for. We still need to believe that a world without racism and discrimination is possible.

Can you talk about Cabral’s political identity? You called him in the English version of your book a reluctant nationalist. What does that actually mean?

Cabral was reluctant on many issues, and he hesitated on a lot of issues. The Cubans wanted Cabral to finish the anticolonial war by invading Bissau. He had numbers. But to do that, you would have to bring more people, more violence, more killing and more blood. So, he was hesitant. In terms of the ‘reluctance’ of his nationalism, there are two reasons to consider. When he started to get involved with political activism, the notion of nationalism, for black Portuguese, was not there. Cabral was married to a Portuguese, Maria Helena, in their correspondence that was recently published there is something to allow us to understand Cabral as the product of a different identity. He is a black Portuguese. He was Cape Verdean, which was a culture, not a nationality. The whole idea of non-longer being a subject of the Portuguese Empire could give you a nationality that was not Portuguese was not conceivable as a second-class citizen Portuguese because, in 1951-52, Portugal changed the Constitution to get rid of the notion of the colony and replace it by an older one, overseas provinces. So, there was the idea that Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde were provinces of Portugal. Those born in these territories were Portuguese, but they were not like white Portuguese, they were second-class Portuguese. If you read Cabral in Portuguese, what he wrote at that time, he considers himself black Portuguese and there is an important tradition of black Portuguese since the 1920s. So, this is the first idea behind Cabral being a reluctant nationalist.

The second idea is that when Cabral has the chance to put forward a notion of nationalism, he did not have any. He was not talking about a nation. He didn’t believe in nations. He believed that he could create a by-nationality bringing Cape Verdeans and Guineans together because he thought that Cape Verdeans originated from Guinea–their ancestors had been brought to the island of Cape Verde during the Slave Trade. Unless you can convince me otherwise, the kind of nationalism that Cabral was proposing, is not in any form a traditional nationalism that Benedict Anderson would write about in Imagined Communities, around the culture and language.

What place does Pan-Africanism have in Cabral’s mind?

He was highly influenced by this movement. And if you are black Portuguese you knew what went on in New York during the Harlem Renaissance. All these wonderful poets, such as Langston Hughes, were part of the conversations that African students were having alongside Jazz music. Because Cabral could speak French, he could read what was coming from Paris with the Négritude. In the w thinking and writing of black students in Lisbon from Africa, there are all these influences. You see the influence of Aimé Césaire, you see the influence of Du Bois, of Garvey’s going back to Africa.

But what is interesting about Cabral and many of these authors, Du Bois, Nkrumah and Senghor is that they are on both sides. Because they were the ones writing about ‘imagine what an independent Africa would be like!’. Then they were on the other side as leaders trying to come to terms with the formation of these new countries and new nationalities. It was a very difficult position to be in. Guinea-Bissau only became independent in 1973. Cabral was certainly thinking about how to avoid dictatorship and one-party rule because he was watching what was going on in Africa, with the spread of coup-d’états and political violence at the time.

What was the influence of Marxism on Cabral?

The Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) was very strong in Portugal and it was a great part of the resistance to Estado Novo, the fascist regime in Portugal. PCP the most organized illegal opposition to Estado Novo was the Portuguese Communist Party. So, it was just natural that, everyone that was against the Estado Novo would gravitate around the PCP. Cabral and many other students were seduced by Communism and Marxism. In almost everything, Cabral has written you see the mark of this intellectual tradition, with a lot of contradictions as well. The Communist Party were against Estado Novo but they didn’t side with the independence of African countries. It took a long time for communists in Portugal to have a clear position about independence in Africa.

Amílcar Cabral, the revolutionary diplomat, meeting with Romanian leader Nicolae Ceauşescu in June 1972

To what extent were Cabral and his guerrilla army influenced by the Soviet Union, China and Cuba?

The Soviet Union with Lenin had the struggle against imperialism as central in their policies. Lenin and Mao have written about imperialism, Fidel Castro was interested in the liberation of Latin America from the yoke of imperialism. It was clear, they would support any national liberation movement fighting against any form of colonialism and imperialism in Africa. What Cabral did, in coming to terms with his insurgent strategies was to use all these experiences. The influences are clear for instance in the kind of support he received throughout the war. In the early stage of the war because of the geographical conditions of Guinea, based for the most part on rice production, the nature of mobilization was based on China’s Maoism. But towards the end of the insurgency, in the late 1960s, the whole organization leans more towards the Soviet-Cuban model, in which you have the separations between the structures of the whole organization and the cadres. So, the cadres, those doing political work, were above the military elements in the PAIGC. This structure was also handy for Cabral. He was not a soldier. Throughout the war and until his death in 1973, he was always trying to find ways to subsume the power of the military under the power of civilians.

Reading your book and thinking of Cabral’s actions and internationalism, he gives the impression of being more of a revolutionary diplomat than a soldier. Someone who is able to manage complex relationships with leaders of other nations. How accurate is that depiction?

The most interesting trait of Cabral’s personality was his penchant for diplomacy. Because it was a very crazy world. With the Cold War, it was very easy for many leaders just to take sides. But Cabral didn’t take sides. He tried to use his diplomatic skills to bring everyone together or to bring everyone behind his movement. He had very good relations with the left Portuguese people fighting against Estado Novo. He had very good relations even with the Vatican. During this in the 60s and so on, he had very good relations with northern Europe, countries like Sweden and Norway. He received humanitarian support from the religious denominations around the world. He got a lot of support from associations and groups in France as well. Towards the end of his life, he was trying to get the hardest group to convince to support his struggle against colonialism: the Americans. He made a few trips to the United States. He spoke at the Congress. It is always fascinating to see how Cabral dealt with diplomacy in the Cold War. One day he was giving a speech at the anniversary of Lenin at a congress in the Soviet Union and a few days later, he was talking at the Congress in the US. There are not many revolutionary leaders that have done that. Diplomacy was very important as a tool to get things done. It was the strongest side of Cabral. And even bringing together Cape Verdeans and Guineans was also part of his diplomatic effort to work through differences.

What I liked about Cabral from reading your work was his quality as a teacher. Especially in how he trains the PAIGC recruits and spends a lot of time helping them understand, the society they are trying to change. What can you say about that ability of Cabral?

Through the years, there is a lot of effort and a lot of people trying to see Cabral as the Theoretician of the revolution. But Cabral was not like that. He was an organiser, but he was particularly, as you say, a teacher. He was very, very good at explaining, very complex ideas, scientific ideas, to people that didn’t have any sort of education. A s great part of what has Cabral written, that we now read as theoretical contributions are in fact teachings. Almost everything is Cabral talking to his soldiers, his companions. He’s someone who had been to Portugal and had the opportunity to learn. And trying to explain all these very complex ideas to people that hadn’t been exposed to anything. Besides his diplomatic abilities, the teaching and the sharing of knowledge was the strongest part of Cabral.

I wonder what you think can be generalisable from Cabral’s writings and speeches for today.

That is a good question, it is such a different time. That is the difficulty. It is easier to read Fanon and to engage with Fanon because there’s all the psychoanalytical side and he was a brilliant writer. He was part of a very profound philosophical school, and if you read Fanon, you’ll find all the resonances to everything that was going on in French literature and French philosophy with Jean-Paul Sartre and Existentialism. You find none of this in Cabral. Unlike Fanon, Cabral was not a speculative writer. He was really trying to write about the day-to-day in Guinea at that time. In that regard, it’s very hard to find things in Cabral that you can easily use and easily apply to the struggles that we have today. Even in terms of the post-independent state, how to think of it, and how to understand it, you will not find in a lot of instances in which Cabral would talk about how he imagined Independence. He talked about unity he wanted to create a country bringing together Cape Verdean and Guinea. But the whole stuff about how that would function is not to be found in Cabral’s writings.

A huge part of his personality was his ability to learn from the mistakes of others. He started the war in Guinea and didn’t want to replicate the same kind of mistakes of other movements and national liberation struggles. That gave him a lot of space to do stuff to push forward something very original. But this raises questions: What kind of post-colonial leader would Cabral have been? what would Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde be with Cabral as a leader? We will never have answers to these questions.

António Tomás is the author of Amílcar Cabral: the life of a reluctant nationalist (available here) He teaches at the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. He has worked as a journalist in Angola and Portugal and has written on issues related to Lusophone Africa.

Featured Photograph: Amílcar Cabral giving a speech (9 June 2007).

The return of recession, debt and structural adjustment

ROAPE

May 2, 2023

ROAPE’s Peter Lawrence argues that there are strong echoes across Africa of the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The reappearance of recession, debt and structural adjustment to the continent reminds us of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism. Based on his editorial in the forthcoming ROAPE issue 174, Lawrence concludes that there are alternatives to the continent’s enduring entrapment in a global financial system that works for the global financial corporates that dominate it.

By Peter Lawrence

A world recession induced by pandemic and war, a consequent boom in energy prices and a cost-of- living crisis with rising inflation especially of food prices, is threatening to reverse the progress that many African economies made during the ‘commodity super-cycle’ of the 2000s and the first part of the 2010s. Indeed, there are strong echoes of the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s, itself induced by a twelvefold increase in the price of oil and in Africa, by famine and war. In both cases, these appearances of crisis disguise the fundamental contradiction of capitalism – the relentless pressure to increase profits facing the limits of realisation as consumption is squeezed and the state is restricted in its powers of intervention, even in limiting the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on its already impoverished population.

While much attention has been focused on the oligarchs of Russia and Ukraine, these plutocrats as they should be called, exist all over the world. Their increasing influence is evident everywhere. They acquire their wealth by hoarding the economic rent they receive from highly valued products and paying as low wages as they can get away with to largely non-unionised labour. They then secure that wealth and economic power from any government intervention by first, capturing political parties, and not only of the right, but also the self-styled left, and then play a crucial role in funding their election campaigns. Then after those parties win elections the government is captured and liberal democracies or countries moving towards such democracy morph into shades of oligarchy or even autocracy, as we observe most obviously in countries such as India, Hungary, Turkey and in Africa, Uganda.

Once again, the chief beneficiary of this war-induced recession is US imperialism and its dominant financial-security complex (if not oligarchy) based on oil, gas and arms. Not only has the US been able to benefit as an oil producer from the increase in the oil price, but also from the increased demand for its liquid petroleum gas (LPG) as Europe reduces its demand for Russian gas following that country’s further invasion of Ukraine. The potential axis of Brussels-Moscow-Beijing, which would have been a serious threat to US global interests has been averted. The US has been able to reassert its hegemony over Europe through its mobilisation of economic and military support for Ukraine and has also underlined its hegemony in the Far East with its clear assertion of its support for Taiwan’s independence, reaffirming its strategy of, and belief in, a unipolar world.

For the countries of Africa, the last decade has seen a large increase in sovereign debt in the wake of the extremely low interest rates that followed the financial crisis of the late 2000s. The encouragement of African economies’ entry into global capital markets mainly through issuing Eurobonds, was regarded as something to be celebrated as part of the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative. Not that capital markets treated African economies in the same way as those of the Global North. Instead, they placed a premium on interest rates reflecting what they saw as the greater risk in lending to African countries. Borrowing on global capital markets when interest rates were low seemed a good way to finance development or even restructure existing debt. However, the downturn in the world economy both before and especially during the Covid-19 pandemic together with the effects of the Russia-Ukraine war has now placed some 22 countries in the position of actual or potential ‘debt distress’ and needing, or likely to need, IMF and World Bank support. Such initiatives as the G20’s Debt Service Suspension and the Common Framework for Debt Treatment have relieved very little of the pressure on the debtor countries.

African countries’ debt now averages over 60% of GDP and in the case of Mozambique 100%, ratios not high in comparison with some countries of the Global North but servicing this debt diverts resources away from investment in productive activity as increasingly borrowing is directed to repayment of previous bond issues. In the case of Mozambique, Zambia and Ghana, ‘debt distress’ has led to default on some of their debts and attempts to restructure them including negotiating deals where effectively a large part of the debt is written off as the lenders take the proverbial ‘haircuts’. In Ghana, these problems of integration into global financial markets have led to bank failures putting even more pressure on weak financial systems. Ethiopia’s war with Tigray has had devastating effects on its economy and increased its level of debt distress resulting in a rescheduling of its debt to China (a third of its total external debt) and so reducing the risk of default. In North Africa, Egypt and Tunisia have been racking up huge external debts and have now agreed new credit arrangements with the IMF.

China has become a major lender to Africa, mainly for infrastructural investments and now holds 12% of Africa’s debt, and for several countries in Africa is its biggest creditor. Debate around the motivations for Chinese lending abound, with some observers seeing China luring key African states in debt-traps while others see China being drawn into a trap of its own as the risk of default heightens. Perhaps because of this risk, the last two years has seen China sharply scaling down its lending to Africa. Unlike its willingness to reschedule Ethiopia’s debt, and that of some other African countries, China is now delaying a rescheduling of Zambian debt arguing that the multilateral organisations such as the World Bank and IMF should also take haircuts as well. This is of no help to Zambia which needs support from all its creditors. The IMF’s agreement to grant an Extended Credit Facility of $1.3 billion in August 2022 is contingent on Zambia effecting its ‘home grown’ adjustment strategy which involves restructuring and rescheduling China’s external debt as well as the other usual ‘adjustments’ in the IMF’s playbook, to which we return later.

How far repayment of current external debt by African economies is feasible will depend on its foreign exchange earnings. These are still for much of Africa, some 60 years after the end of colonial rule, highly dependent on the export of primary products. The latest data tells us that these products, predominantly fuels and minerals, comprise 77% of Africa’s export income. Some countries are more dependent on primary product exports than others and in some cases their export income is dominated by just one product, as in the case of copper in Zambia which produces 70% of its export income, Botswana, heavily dependent on its exports of diamonds and Angola and Nigeria, almost completely dependent on oil. Recent discoveries of new sources of gold, oil and gas has led to export concentration in an increasing number of countries.

Such dependence and concentration leaves countries vulnerable to swings in commodity prices which can affect both the capacity to import and the management of windfall gains in export income. However, research carried out to examine the effects of commodity prices on economic growth in African economies has suggested that there is no clear positive relationship which may have to do with the volatility in commodity spot prices not being reflected as sharply in actual export earnings. Commodity prices are normally set by long-term trading contracts incorporating expectations about the future, so the prices at which commodities are actually traded do not fluctuate as wildly as spot prices such that the effect on economic growth will be more muted. Where a country exports more than one commodity, all prices may not always move in the same direction.

Diversifying out of dependence on primary commodity exports was always a policy objective of post-colonial governments in Africa and elsewhere. While there has been considerable growth in industrial and service activity, primary commodity production has also grown as global corporates with active support from African governments have sought to diversify their sources of high-value commodities. The ’commodity super-cycle’ of the 2000s petered out in the course of the 2010s and especially during the pandemic-induced decline in global growth, but now there is talk of a new super-cycle as economies recover and demand especially for precious metals increases. The Ukraine war’s effect on oil prices has strengthened primary commodity prices but this will not offset the large increases in debt interest payments following the tightening of money supply generally in the wake of the rapid rise in inflation resulting from the steep increase in energy and cereal prices triggered by the Russia-Ukraine war.

A return to structural adjustment

The combination of rising indebtedness and a slowdown in global growth, if not another world recession has seen the return of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). These sets of policies spawned from the 1980s neoliberal revolution succeeded in halting the transformation of African economies from producers and exporters of primary products to industrialized manufacturing economies despite the less than perfect implementation of their industrialisation strategies. Now once again, indebted countries seeking assistance from the international financial institutions (IFIs) are to be subject to a set of economic policies intended to restore domestic and external balances to some degree of equilibrium (see suggested further reading below for more background to the first phase of SAPs).

Current SAPs, whether ‘homegrown’ or not, involve government budget restraint, increasing efficiency in tax collection, abolishing many price subsidies, improving the management of public enterprises, and facilitating greater private sector investment. The major plank of previous SAPs – devaluation – is no longer a requirement where, as in most cases, foreign exchange markets are liberalized and currency values find their own level dependent on market assessment based on the trade and payments balance and its anticipated movement. However, in the case of Egypt, there is a specific requirement to liberalise the exchange rate. Paradoxically, exchange rates tend to appreciate when an IMF support package is agreed and financial inflows increase, which is the opposite of what is theoretically required to increase exports, but that seems to matter less than the fact that a country’s economic policy is being supervised by the IMF and gives greater confidence to potential foreign investors even if the trade balance goes even more in the red.

The most noticeable difference with the SAPs of the 1980 is the requirement that governments protect the vulnerable. Here is the IMF Mission Chief for Ghana announcing the agreement with the Ghana government for an extended credit facility of $3 billion over three years:

Key reforms aim to ensure the sustainability of public finances while protecting the vulnerable. The fiscal strategy relies on frontloaded measures to increase domestic resource mobilization and streamline expenditure. In addition, the authorities have committed to strengthening social safety nets, including reinforcing the existing targeted cash-transfer program for vulnerable households and improving the coverage and efficiency of social spending. (IMF, 2022)

Help for ‘vulnerable households’ is also a key requirement for the Egyptian loan package. With the benefit of hindsight, the IMF and the World Bank recognise the political difficulties for governments in pursuing an austerity agenda which leaves more and more people living below what passes for the poverty line. The solution to avoiding bread riots and other manifestations of public discontent is to target ‘vulnerable households’ with cash transfers so that they can eat. But it is not to support government investment in economic activities that will generate employment and structurally transform African economies, support which is badly needed to build the economic and social infrastructure that will generate growth in other sectors and the linkages develop.

However, as has been pointed out many times before in ROAPE the activities of the IFIs are not about growth and development, let alone protecting the vulnerable, but about control of global south economies by the global north and the hegemon-in-chief, the US which lest we forget appoints the head of the World Bank, while Europe chooses the head of the IMF.

An alternative strategy and politics

While the IFIs return to making policy in some African countries, there is also pressure on them to finance a green agenda for the Global South in the face of the climate emergency. Where such financial transfers from the IFIs to support green policies or compensate countries for the losses from following these policies take place this will offer the IFIs yet another opportunity to exert their leverage on policymaking in general. Dressed up as getting countries to ‘take ownership’ of policies which have been imposed on them, yet again we will see that African countries, and indeed all countries of the global south, will come under the tighter control of global capitalism.

There have always been alternatives open to African governments as we have often argued in ROAPE for decades. The ‘introverted’ strategy advocated by Samir Amin has been much maligned and misrepresented as autarky but, like Clive Thomas’s strategy of seeking the convergence of domestic resources with domestic needs, offers countries a way out of what appears to be their enduring entrapment in a global financial system that works for the global financial corporates that dominate it. This system ensures uneven development with some countries or regions of countries developing faster than others. But it does offer opportunities for rapid development through a relatively coherent industrial and agricultural policy. The alternatives calling for a domestic oriented industrial strategy argue for taking more distance from this system, but still exporting wherever possible to earn the foreign exchange needed to import capital goods while prioritising domestic production for the needs of the majority. This is surely a better way forward than being trapped into permanent debt and cajoled to ‘own’ policies made in Washington DC.

A note on further reading

Readers wanting to follow up on this blogpost might like to look at the many editorials and articles that have appeared in ROAPE on the International Financial Institutions’ structural adjustment policies and their impact on African economies. A good start is John Loxley’s 1983 review of the Berg Report, ‘The Berg Report and the mode of accumulation in sub-Saharan Africa’ (no. 27/28), followed by the special issue, no. 42 in 1990 What Price Economic Reform? by Peter Lawrence and David Seddon, the issue includes several pieces relevant to our times, as well as an analysis of the SAPs of Ghana and Zambia. Later contributions by Gavin Williams in 1994 (no, 60) and Sarah Bracking in 1999 (no. 80) are well worth reading.

A very useful analysis of the current indebtedness of countries of the global south is The Coming Debt Crisis: Monitoring Liquidity and Solvency Risks by Charles Albinet and Martin Kessler of the Finance for Development Lab. For statistical information, there is the regular Regional Economic Outlook from the IMF and its later update of the World Economic Outlook.

Peter Lawrence is an editor on ROAPE, and a founding member of the review in 1974. 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 (some of his work can be found here).

Featured Photograph: Worker engaged in palm oil production (19 March 2022).

Restitution of looted artefacts – a Marxist approach

ROAPE

April 27, 2023

Elias Aguigah looks at the restitution of looted objects from Africa by colonial troops and plunderers. Aguigah discusses the debates which have located restitution in questions of identity, representation, and memory politics. However, these debates ignore the crucial political-economic context, or only pay superficial attention to these issues by reducing centuries of colonialism to art theft. Aguigah provides an alternative framework for understanding restitution.

By Elias Aguigah

In December 2022, the German minister of foreign affairs Annalena Baerbock accompanied by minister of culture Claudia Roth travelled to Nigeria to give back 20 of at least 1,100 art pieces known as Benin Bronzes that had been looted by British troops from the palace of Benin City in 1897 and stored in German museums for over 100 years. This diplomatic event was a result of decades of sometimes more, sometimes less intense debates, about colonial looted art in Europe and the struggle for its restitution.

While claims to give back the stolen objects are as old as the lootings themselves, the recent debates have largely been fuelled by Emmanuel Macron’s speech he held in Ouagadougou in 2017. The French president had presented himself as a pioneer in restoring memory of the colonial era, acknowledging European colonial crimes and, above all, promising “temporary or definitive restitutions of the African patrimony”. Consequently, he commissioned the art historian Bénédicte Savoy and the Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr with writing a report on the holdings of African cultural heritage in French museums. The key issue to them was not whether the objects should be restituted – this is the premise underlying the report – but how restitutions could be made possible. Among other things, they should be accompanied with a commitment for a ‘new relational ethics’ in Euro-African policy.

Since then, debates around the issues addressed in the report have taken up more and more space in the European feuilletons. The scholarly restitution debates in the UK, France or Germany, have been dominated by disciplines such as cultural studies, ethnology, art history or critical legal studies (cf. Sandkühler, Epple, and Zimmerer 2021), locating restitution debates in broader political questions around identity, representation, and memory politics. But stakeholders frequently ignore the political-economic context, or, at most, consider it superficially by reducing centuries of colonialism to art theft. In contrast, scholars working on colonial theft and extraction in Africa in the field of international political economy usually deal with natural resources. In order to highlight the political relevance of the subject of restitution, I want to connect these two threads: What does the mass extraction of spiritual, religious, political and symbolic artefacts, or even everyday belongings from former African colonies have to do with political economy? And in which international political and economic relations are these belongings, their restitution, and debates about them embedded today?

Functions of colonial looting

The violent extraction of material cultural property was an important building block in making African societies available to the capitalist world market. For instance, the German Empire used collections looted during the colonial era to establish itself as a colonial power, epistemically and economically. The simple act of placing the objects in a museum and constructing around them a narrative of racial hierarchy and distinction between the colonisers as ‘civilised people’ and the colonised as ‘primitive peoples’, under the guise of anthropological science, contributed substantially to the genesis of scientific racism that was a political strategy for the legitimisation of colonial rule and economic domination (Zimmerman 2001: 153f.).

Beyond the ideological function of so-called ‘ethnographica’, looting often followed clear strategic motives. One aim in the plunder of the Benin kingdom was to hit the Oba and his realm at the heart of their identity and the self-representation of their power, stealing the symbols of his rule – which also happened to be his wealth for that matter – in order to diminish his political power and legitimise colonial rule (Hicks 2020: 136). The motivation for trade companies to support and individuals to participate in military expeditions and lootings were clear: The flourishing European art market promised huge revenue to be made out of objects from the colonies that were sold as commodities. Conforming to capitalist market logic, the most valuable objects were often those not for sale or exchange – consequently, appropriation was frequently violent. For colonial powers, colonial museums and individual colonialists, looting was a win-win situation, at the cost of African lives and societies.

The political economy of colonial looting – interrogating Marx

The structural entanglement between military campaigns and the commodification of looted objects has led me to the conclusion that the mass extraction of weapons, spiritual, religious, political, or everyday belongings can be seen as a process of primitive accumulation.

Karl Marx ([1867] 1887: 505f.) introduces the concept of primitive accumulation to describe the process ‘that clears the way for the capitalist system’. Using the transformation from feudalism to capitalism in England as an example, he characterised primitive accumulation as a violent process of expropriation of farmers from their land. In this way, the capitalist class forced the English rural population into wage labour. The colonial system, for him, was one of the ‘chief momenta of primitive accumulation’ establishing a capitalist world market:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. (Marx [1867] 1887: 531)

In addition to hunting human bodies and their remains for museums, the colonial system with museums in the background turned Africa into an enclosure for hunting material cultural goods with the purpose of accumulating symbolic and economic capital. Because in addition to the political value of manifesting tyranny, these objects had a monetary value for the colonialists. ‘The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital’, wrote Marx ([1867] 1887: 533). Thus, the looting and commodification of African material goods served as a means of capital accumulation for colonisers, museums, and their home economies.

At the same time, the colonial looting helped to integrate African colonies and their inhabitants into the global capitalist system fit for further exploitation. Marx ([1867] 1887: 506) defines primitive accumulation as

the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms […] the social means of subsistence and of production into capital […]. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process.

In the case of European colonisation, expropriating indigenous peoples from their land on the one hand and looting their material belongings on the other were part of the same logic. Through the violent theft of weapons, cultural, spiritual, religious, or personal belongings, colonial powers not only physically separated the producers from the products of their labour and their means of subsistence but stripped a part of their history, culture, and knowledge about pre-capitalist modes of production from communities.

The very act of looting thus followed a system from which certain actors clearly profited. It became a means of expanding and legitimising power, as well as of private enrichment. For the most part, the looted objects became valuable goods or capital and were embedded in the international political-economy of colonialism. Today, claims for restitution and repatriation cannot be thought without these relations and how they shape a neo-colonial world.

Restitution of looted artefacts

Various actors involved in restitution, including those with decision-making power over the future of cultural heritage, each pursue their own interests. The documentary Restituer? directed by Nora Philippe (2021) sheds light on how the first major wave of restitution demands was thwarted by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, among others. The Structural Adjustment Programmes in the 1980s degraded cultural capital infrastructure in Africa (Philippe 2021: 51:40-52:20). Nowadays, though, as calls for restitution cannot be ignored any further, the return of prominent objects would mean a loss of symbolic and economic capital for museums, cities, and states.

Museums, for example, increasingly try to incorporate critical debates in their programmes making ‘restitution’ and ‘decolonisation’ their sales model to keep up with the zeitgeist and prevent the loss of relevance. As the curator and former director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, Clémentine Deliss (2020: 88), fittingly wrote, ‘restitution has become both the central bone of contention and the most effective commodity to characterise the future of ethnological museums’.

The central question in the field today seems to be the following: which museum, or even which European state, can distinguish itself by becoming the most progressive and self-critical. The race is on, and, according to Dan Hicks (2022), it uncannily resembles the 1884-1885 ‘scramble for Africa’, when imperialist powers competed for colonial territories and the most efficient system of exploitation. In this comparison, Hicks coined the term ‘scramble for decolonisation’ for qualifying the current zeitgeist. The stakes at hand are: can these dynamics of competition actually lead to postcolonial justice and change the current conditions of museum holdings?

The French restitutions that have taken place since Macron’s speech in 2017 suggest otherwise. As Europe is increasingly losing geopolitical influence on the African continent, politicians have recognized that the presence of treasures from Africa in their collections can become a valued currency. France ceremoniously loaned the sword of El Hadj Oumar Tall to Senegal for five years in November 2019. Nora Philippe’s 2021 documentary relates this ‘return’ to quid pro quos in French interests: ‘In exchange for the return of a single sabre, France negotiates an arms sale worth several hundred million euros. Measures to curb migration from sub-Saharan Africa are outsourced’.

Secondly, since Macron’s speech, France has overseen the restitution to the Republic of Benin of twenty-six royal symbols from King Béhanzin’s palace in Abomey. In order to compensate as much as possible for the loss of these belongings, which had been on display at the Musée du Quai Branly since its foundation, the restitution process became an event, both in France and in Benin. The museum exhibited the objects again separately before returning them. Furthermore, the place where they are exhibited in Cotonou (and not in Abomey, where they have been looted from) is financed with a loan of 20 million euros from the French development agency AFD, and administrated by a private foundation led by a French magnate, the Fondation Zinsou.

Unravelling the anticolonial potential of restitution

In summary, what we are witnessing is not a sudden philanthropic turn of European politicians and museums, but rather European attempts to maintain African dependency on Europe in times of increasing awareness for European colonial crimes on the one hand, and rising Chinese and Russian influence on the continent on the other.

This blogpost – a shortened version of a longer article that will appear later in the year in ROAPE’s journal – should be read as a strong urge for scholars and activists to continue critically examining the place of restitutions in a neo-colonial political economy. Already for 20^th century decolonisation thinkers like Kwame Nkrumah, a conceptual return of African culture, was essential to achieve Africa’s economic independence. Restitution already emerges in this context. Nkrumah called for the ‘restitution of Africa`s egalitarian and humanist principles’ (Nkrumah 1970 [1964]: 76) in order to overcome European (neo-)colonial and capitalist structures in Africa and to establish an African version of socialism.

In the great mass of objects stored in European museums and archives, there is knowledge about past African societies that can be invoked while pursuing political and economic decolonisation. Restituting objects with Nkrumah’s vision in mind thus has the potential of serving a decolonisation process on a larger scale. But without further critical examination and a genuinely anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist vision historic restitutions risk degenerating into empty performances from which only European and African elites profit.

Elias Aguigah is a researcher at the Technische Universität Berlin. Elias’ full article on the political economy of restitution will appear later in the year in ROAPE’s journal.

Featured Photograph: Benin royal shrine head from 15th century (Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, 24 February 2017).

References

Costa-Kostritsky, Valeria. 2021. “French restitution to Africa” | Apollo Magazine. (accessed 16.05.22).

Deliss, Clémentine. 2020. The Metabolic Museum. Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH & Co KG.

DesRoches, Davina. 2015. “The Marketized Museum: New Museology in a Corporatized World.” The Political Economy of Communication 3(1).

Hicks, Dan. 2020. The Brutish Museums: The Benin bronzes, colonial violence and cultural restitution. London: Pluto Press.

———. 2022. “The Risks That Lurk in Europe’s “Scramble for Decolonization”.” Hyperallergic, 06.07.2022. (accessed 02.08.22).

Marx, Karl. 1887 (1867). Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital. Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers. Access through Marxists Internet Archive.

Macron, Emmanuel. 2017. Discours d’Emmanuel Macron à l’université de Ouagadougou. Ouagadougou. (accessed 04.04.22).

Nkrumah, Kwame. 1970 (1964). Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization and Development with Particular Reference to the African Revolution: Monthly Review Press.

Philippe, Nora. 2021. “Restituieren? Afrika fordert seine Kunstschätze zurück:” ARTE F.

RFI. 2021. “Les œuvres de l’ancien royaume du Dahomey exposées à Paris avant leur restitution au Bénin,” 25.10.2021. (accessed 11.04.22).

Sandkühler, Thomas, Angelika Epple & Jürgen Zimmerer, eds. 2021. Geschichtskultur durch Restitution? Ein Kunst-Historikerstreit. Beiträge zur Geschichtskultur 40. Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag.

Sarr, Felwine & Bénédicte Savoy. 2018. The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics.

Savoy, Bénédicte. 2021a. “Accumulation primitive: La géographie du patrimoine artistique africain dans le monde aujourd’hui.” In Dossier “Les images migrent aussi”, De Facto, vol. 24., edited by Elsa Gomis, Perin E. Yavuz & Francesco Zucconi S. 40–48.

tagesschau. 2022. “Raubkunst aus Nigeria: Deutschland gibt Benin-Bronzen zurück.” 20.12.2022. (accessed 03.01.23).

Zimmerman, Andrew. 2001. Anthropology and antihumanism in Imperial Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The reconquest of economic sovereignty in Africa

ROAPE

April 25, 2023

Caroline Cornier argues that economic and financial turmoil in Africa could be a favourable moment for fundamental monetary reform. Cornier reflects on a conference held in Dakar that focused on the challenges facing the continent in the context of ecological, economic, and political crisis.

By Caroline Cornier

Africa, like the rest of the world, is in crisis. Yet Africa is particularly ill-equipped to deal with it, as it grapples with external public debt reaching new records at a time when the central banks of the countries of the North are continually increasing their key rates, African monetary systems’ rigidity or predisposition to inflation paralyzes political action, and, finally, parts of the continent remain plagued by various conflicts.

But a crisis can also open up new horizons. The current economic and financial turmoil could represent a potentially favourable moment for fundamental monetary reforms. Similarly, the energy crisis coupled with the global need for green energy could provide a new basis for negotiations for Africa.

With the support of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs) and Politics of Money Network, the second edition of the Conference on African Monetary and Economic Sovereignty was held in Dakar from 25-28 October 2022 under the motto of “Facing the Socio-Ecological Crisis: Delinking and the Question of Global Reparations.” In the wake of the first edition held in Tunis in November 2019, the organizers Ndongo Samba Sylla, Maha Ben Gadha and Kai Koddenbrock invited participants to analyse the monetary and economic constraints faced by countries of the South, particularly Africa, and devise strategies to overcome them. The focus was on pan-Africanist and internationalist responses to the current socio-ecological crisis based on the mobilization of heterodox economic approaches. Indeed, the collapse of public policies inspired by mainstream, neoclassical economics was a widely shared observation.

Broadcast online and translated simultaneously into French and English, the conference brought together 100 researchers, activists, and representatives of national and international organizations. The debates focused on the concept of delinking, the ills of the global financial system, its role in the ecological crisis, and the need for global reparations.

The need for delinking

The basic concept animating the conference was that of “delinking” developed by the French–Egyptian economist Samir Amin in his 1985 book, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World. The concept comes from dependency theory, which originated mainly in Latin America and seeks to explain the inequalities in economic development between the centre of the capitalist system and the periphery. The state and the local bourgeoisie have control over the process of internal accumulation in the core of the system, whereas in the periphery the logic of economic accumulation is subject to external forces and their demands.

Faced with this situation, Amin’s delinking agenda consists of a reconfiguration of the economic relations between the peripheral countries and the countries of the centre. This process does not imply autarky, but rather aims to make self-centred development possible in the periphery through policies oriented around having greater control over the conditions of internal accumulation, that is, policies that work to subject global logics to domestic priorities.

As the Senegalese economist Demba Moussa Dembélé noted at the beginning of the conference, this “re-conquest of sovereignty” concerns three key sectors: the monetary and financial sector, the energy sector, and the food sector. According to Dembélé, the African continent imports 80 percent of its basic products while African governments often spend more than 10 percent on them. This not only creates considerable financial dependencies, but also great vulnerability to shocks affecting supply chains, as recently demonstrated by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

Delinking is not just an intellectual utopia but a primary necessity to bring about real change. According to Dembélé, three additional pillars of delinking in Africa will have to be the acceleration of regional and interregional integration, the reconstruction of developmental states that pursue a policy of industrialization based on the use of domestic resources, and the restoration of sufficient fiscal space to finance this industrialization, notably through the cancellation of external debt considered illegitimate and the fight against illicit financial flows.

The relevance of delinking today

Several participants recalled the limits of dependency theory in a world that has evolved considerably since the current peaked in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, several so-called “emerging” countries have managed to join the ranks of the “semi-periphery”.

Nevertheless, other speakers were keen to draw attention to the particular context of countries such as Taiwan and South Korea, which for geopolitical reasons were strongly supported by the US and thus benefited from a rather favourable international environment. Moreover, the question of whether these countries (including China) have really succeeded in freeing themselves from the particular constraints faced by the periphery was raised. Indeed, economist Andrew Fischer reminded attendees that, contrary to popular belief, countries like South Korea had recurring trade deficits during the early stages of its industrialization. This led him to argue that dependence (particularly on imports of technology and equipment) is not so much a relic of the colonial past as a dynamic that is perpetually reinforced with industrialization. Moreover, he continued, the ecological transition will require the countries of the South to import a large number of technologies that are invoiced in foreign currency.

South African economist Fiona Tregenna of the University of Johannesburg supported the notion that dependence remains relevant for studying the economies of the South as well as the functioning of our global economic system, using the issue of industrialization as a concrete example. Similarly, Ingrid Kvangraven, a researcher in economic policy in London, called for the reintegration of this perspective from the 1970s into economics at a more theoretical level. It was at this time, during the implementation of structural adjustment programs under the aegis of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the failure of the attempt by the countries of the South (the “Third World”) to create a new, more egalitarian international economic order, that Samir Amin developed the concept of delinking.

Reconnecting with this project and its theoretical foundations — which also apply to the European periphery, as Portuguese economist Alexandre Abreu reminded participants — implies integrating it into the core of contemporary economic discourse. Unfortunately, mainstream, neoclassical economics has not only served the northern part of the planet — it also continues to ignore a number of structural economic mechanisms and dissident voices from the South. It seems more urgent than ever to decolonize economics in order to make the discipline more relevant to the countries of the South and their populations. Hence, the importance of building endogenous knowledge production institutions in Africa — a need that justifies the project of some of the participants to set up an African Heterodox Economics Network (AHEN).

Using the 1929 novel Banjo by African-American writer Claude McKay on the precarious life of a group of black dockworkers in Marseilles, historian Peter James Hudson deftly reminded the conference that the expansion of the dollar-based global monetary system is, in essence, an expression of imperial white supremacy and one major cause of global inequality. Giving the example of the dockworkers he argues that for many peoples, money is not a sign of wealth but a symbol of their economic subjugation. According to him particularly striking examples of monetary oppression, such as Haiti, should therefore be taken as a starting point for understanding the role of monetary hierarchies today and for articulating an agenda for global reparations.

One of the lessons of the conference was therefore that delinking is not just an intellectual utopia but a primary necessity to bring about real change, or even, in the case of countries facing monetary sanctions, a reality that must be overcome with intelligence. It was also noted, especially by Senegalese economist Ndongo Samba Sylla, the main organizer of the conference, that such a political endeavour requires a better appropriation of African history as well as a break with the narrative that trade liberalization based on comparative advantage is beneficial to all countries.

Areas in need of delinking

During conference discussions, participants identified the agricultural sector and tax policy as two areas where a delinking from the global system is important. For example, by becoming more oriented towards local demand, the agricultural sector could help boost the local economy and deploy the foreign exchange reserves saved to further stimulate domestic productive capacities. This sector enabled many Asian countries and China in particular to finance its industrialization in the 1960s, although it should not be forgotten that the size of China’s domestic market is incomparable to most African countries.

With regard to tax policy, Souad Aden-Osman, director of the secretariat of the African Union High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows (IFF), stressed the need to better regulate financial flows that impede the sovereign right of states to tax and which, contrary to the dominant narrative, are more the result of the practices of multinationals and criminal networks than of the corruption of African elites. She also noted that, for the time being, several multilateral and bilateral actors such as the OECD, the EU, and the GIZ [the main German development agency] seem to want to prevent a resolution on this issue reaching the UN at all costs.

In terms of agriculture, Max Ajl, a researcher at the Observatory of Food Sovereignty and Environment in Tunis, emphasized the need for an “ecological delinking” through agro-ecological methods, pointing to China, Vietnam, and Cuba in the 1970s as examples, and reinvestment in heavy industries. This last point was met with some scepticism, however, as recent history has shown that small countries are often unable to achieve economies of scale without strategic South–South partnerships. At the same time, however, Andrew Fischer insisted that where there is a will, there is a way, as shown by the example of some Asian countries.

Finally, in terms of ideas, many argued that too much ground had been ceded to neoliberal economic thinking. Jomo Kwame Sundaram called for an “intellectual insurrection” able to confront the de-industrialization underway in many countries of the South. This will have to be institutionalized. He argued that any delinking project would have to take into account that the service sector is now much more important than the manufacturing sector in most countries of the South. It would also have to take into account the fact that the African continent exhibits great diversity in terms of national productive capacities.

Constraints to delinking

For a government, achieving greater monetary sovereignty means having more fiscal space and increased capacity to spend in a non-inflationary manner to guide the trajectory and performance of the national economy. This point was illustrated by Chafik Ben Rouine based on the presentation by Fathimath Musthaq, Professor of Political Science at Reed College, on the origins of our current monetary system, as well as by Jamee Moudud’s interventions on the link between monetary sovereignty and legal systems, and finally by Jean-Michel Servet’s overview on the social dimension of money.

The level of monetary sovereignty is determined by the type of currency a government uses in combination with its level of foreign currency debt. The African countries of the CFA zone are therefore at the bottom of this monetary hierarchy, given that the exchange rate of their currency is linked to that of the euro and that all the countries of the zone have significant foreign debt. As Ali Zafar of the UNDP also showed, the pegging of the CFA franc to a currency as strong as the euro is not justified from a developmental point of view, as it leads to its chronic overvaluation. Consequently, this peg acts as a tax on the exports of countries using the CFA franc and as a subsidy to their imports.

With this type of monetary system, governments find it impossible to use the exchange rate as an instrument to adjust to external shocks, which makes it difficult to make local production more competitive and therefore more attractive than imports. Moreover, since the central banks of the two CFA franc blocs are obliged to defend a fixed parity, they tend to accumulate foreign exchange reserves and ration credit, which is the bedrock of capitalist economies. According to Zafar, the franc zone is trying to “run a marathon with a refrigerator on its back”. One concrete method of delinking could be to replace the franc’s indexation to the euro with a peg to a basket of currencies.

In addition to these regional obstacles to a more self-centred monetary policy, there are false solutions to the financial dependence and instability of the countries of the South. This is the case of “macro-prudential regulation”. As Indian economist CP Chandrasekhar explained, this concept refers to the preference for market-mediated stabilization interventions instead of structural interventions such as capital flow controls and foreign exchange regulation. The result of such intervention is a structural weakening of state capacity, aggravated, according to Daniela Gabor, a specialist in critical macro-finance, by the logic of “de-risking”.

According to this logic, the lack of “development” in the countries of the South is above all a question of financial risk. Consequently, state interventions, especially those aimed at the so-called “green” economy, must above all adjust the risk-return profile of assets invested by private capital. The problem with this “green de-risking state” is that while it is ostensibly beginning to reassume more responsibility for domestic development, in reality it is delegating the pace and nature of transformation and the management of public goods to the private sector. Gabor pointed out that this arrangement ultimately reinforces a form of neo-colonial extractivism that keeps the countries of the South in the position of generators of financial returns for global financiers and consumers of technological products from the most industrialized countries.

Hamza Hamouchene of the Transnational Institute illustrated this fact by taking as an example the so-called “green projects” promoted by European countries in North Africa. Moreover, as Kenyan environmental activist Ikal Angelei pointed out, the globalized private sector perceives the current ecological crisis as a new profit opportunity, which in turn creates new dependencies.

A final major obstacle to monetary sovereignty that received a lot of attention throughout the conference was external debt. Due to the liberalization of financial markets, the volatility of commodity prices, and the declining trend in development aid, debt is reaching increasingly worrying levels.

Pathways out of this threat to the economic transformation of the countries of the South include, on the one hand, the mobilization of domestic financing in national currency line with the ideas of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). On the other hand, there is the possibility of repudiating what Eric Toussaint calls, in the words of Alexander Sacks, “odious debt”, i.e. debt that has not benefited the population and that creditors agreed to in full knowledge that it would not serve its stated purpose.

This system and the place given to Africa in it will not change without the pressure of blocs formed on the basis of broad alliances between different social forces at national and international levels.

According to Toussaint, a significant proportion of Africa’s debt can be characterized as odious. Sometimes it is the result of exogenous circumstances over which African countries have very little influence, such as climate change, the war in Ukraine, or interest rates hikes by Western central banks. On the other hand, the continent’s external debt could be significantly reduced if its savings were not transferred abroad through illicit financial flows, for instance, and if African economies were more oriented towards domestic demand.

Even if some African leaders, notably Macky Sall, the current president of Senegal, have called for the renegotiation of African debt, the path will not be easy. Indeed, according to Eric Toussaint, Africa has little weight in international financial institutions. For example, it has only four percent of the votes in the World Bank.

More fundamentally, debt is a primary mechanism for the control of Northern countries over the resources of Southern countries — not to mention that the expansion of foreign debt also benefits African elites. On the one hand, recourse to external debt is an alternative to raising tax rates in their countries. On the other hand, they can invest in the securities of this external debt, which are not only “de-risked” by the state but also offer particularly high interest rates. Éric Toussaint was therefore one of the few speakers at the conference who demonstrated that in order to conceive structural changes in the global monetary system, the role and interests of local actors must also be taken into account.

Overcoming constraints

Another topic that was discussed mainly from the African–American experience but also from a feminist perspective, notably by Crystal Simeoni of the Afrifem Macroeconomics Collective and Lebohang Liepollo Pheko of the Trade Collective in Johannesburg, was that of global reparations. According to Pheko, global reparations from North to South are more than an economic necessity to rebalance the global economic system. They would allow for a concrete recognition of past injustices, including the fact that what is represented as “common wealth” is in fact a case of “common theft”, and would make the affected populations feel that they have finally been recognized as sovereign subjects.

Following presentations by Franklin Obeng-Odoom of the University of Helsinki and Lisa Tilley of SOAS, who made a point to highlight the link between colonial extractivism and the current ecological crisis, Keston Perry of Williams College reaffirmed this overarching lesson, which in some ways was the foundation of the entire conference. Using, just like James Peter Hudson in relation to monetary imperialism, Haiti as an example, he demonstrated that slave plantation economies and environmental degradation are intimately linked. Therefore, the ecological crisis today represents the material basis for renewed demands for reparations. Given previous failures at the international level, these will have to be carried by a pan-African popular movement anchored in community-based organizations rather than by nation-states.

While supportive of this agenda, Matthew Robinson, a research fellow and doctoral student in the Department of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, offered a caveat. Referring to the preparations for reparations that have been undertaken by and for the African–American community in Kansas City, he emphasized the need to “fix the plumbing before you turn on the tap”, that is, to put in place structures that will be able to ensure that the money will be invested in a way that is useful and sustainable for the recipients.

Broader proposals for delinking were also made by Nancy Kachingwe, a feminist from Zimbabwe, who suggested changing the patriarchal and neo-colonial status quo through a form of feminist delinking. Dzodzi Tsikata from the University of Ghana proposed a revaluation of social policies instead of focusing only on economic policies, and German researcher Matthias Schmelzer defended de-growth in the North as a way to do justice to the countries of the South.

Peter Doyle, an independent macroeconomist, complemented this claim with two concrete demands aiming to ensure that the 1.5°C goal will be achieved while guaranteeing greater global economic equality. First, he suggested that the least developed countries should be entirely free of any CO2 emissions limits until they have reached per capita income parity with the OECD. To this end, he proposed the introduction of an emissions inefficiency tariff for OECD countries. He further suggested the establishment of a Global Rainy Day Fund financed by a recurring tax on the world’s billionaires to fund the necessary technologies.

From why to how

All of these innovative suggestions bring us back to the question of how these alternative structures will be put in place. At the end of the conference, a local participant remarked that the fundamental problem for Africa was that while Asia has become the world’s factory and South America its orchard, Africa has remained its mine, i.e. a site of pure extraction.

The purpose of the conference was to reflect on how to get Africa out of this extractive servitude, how it could put its currency at the service of its people, and how it could produce wealth and keep it at home. The global economic and financial system clearly does not serve this purpose. On the contrary, the mechanisms at work continue to serve an extractive system that contributes to keeping part of the world’s population in poverty and to depleting the planet’s resources for the benefit of a small, privileged minority.

It is essential to keep in mind, however, that this system and the place given to Africa in it will not change without the pressure of blocs formed on the basis of broad alliances between different social forces at national and international levels. Or, in the words of Souad Aden-Osman, as long as these visions are not heard at the table, those they defend will continue to be on the menu.

What remains to be done, then, is to link the structural analysis of the current monetary and economic system to the identification of political forces — external and internal — that can change the situation and find language and proposals that anchor the conversation in concrete realities, especially those of the younger generations who continue to be excluded from the discussion.

Caroline Cornier is a PhD student at the University of Bayreuth, where she is part of the comparative research group, “Economic and Monetary Sovereignty in West Africa.”

Featured Photograph: West African participants march at the Second World Festival Games. Banner reads: “West African Youth Greets [the] Youth Fight[ing] Against Imperialism [and for] National Independence” (Budapest, Hungary, 1949).

Remembering Cabral

ROAPE

April 20, 2023

In the final essay to mark the fiftieth anniversary of national revolutionary leader Amílcar Cabral’s murder in 1973, first published in the ROAPE journal thirty years ago, Basil Davidson provides a personal portrait. Davidson’s piece contains fascinating detail and insight on Cabral’s principles of organising, as well as how Cabral and his comrades started their successful anti-colonial struggle in the early 1950s, all of which retains its relevance in the context of ongoing struggle and revolt across the continent today.

By Basil Davidson

It becomes tempting to wonder, in this period of moral reduction and political decline, just what it is which causes positive change to begin, and then enables this change to become a route of escape so manifestly valid and worthwhile that persons — ordinary persons, everyday persons, persons such as myself — will follow that route as though it might be as dear as life itself.

I was pondering this elusive question while present at Eritrea’s celebration on 24 May 1993 of the winning of its independence after 30 years of anti-colonial struggle. For the winning of this freedom, so vividly felt in Eritrea now, was the work of a remarkable self-mobilisation in sacrifice and effort for the common good. But how did this come about? Leave aside the instrumental explanations — the traditions of Eritrean social solidarity, the pressures of a malignant and ferocious enemy (as the Ethiopian dictatorship had long become), the brilliance of individual leaders, the courage of those countless volunteers who made the army of the EPLF, much else besides — and the elusive question still remains: just what it is that set this people on its route of escape?

The question is by no means new to readers of this journal, and various answers have come to hand. Addressing it on Eritrea’s smiling day of independence — formal independence, for the reality had been reached in 1990 — President Issaias Afewerki told us that they had been able to win only by having evoked ‘a solidarity of effort’ across every rivalry (in Eritrea) of religion, ethnicity, or other claims on installed privilege. And the facts bear him out. The Eritreans have won against odds piled mountains high against them because they have been able to reach a nationwide unity of effort and objective. In their recent and internationally supervised referendum (see ROAPE 57), 98.52 per cent of registered voters used their vote, and of those who used their vote 99.805 per cent voted for independence. No one from any quarter of opinion has doubted the honesty of that vote.

How this unity was achieved through many years of difficult and often violent conflict — conflict also among Eritreans themselves — is part of a history that now awaits to be told. Excellent books could be written about that history, and we can hope that they will be. When they are they will have much to say about the means and methods of mass mobilisation: about just what it is that leads a people to become able to save itself from grim disaster. While thinking about this in Asmara, I was led again to thinking about another liberating figure whose name and achievement are known and respected by Eritreans, and not least because of his wisdom and leadership precisely in the means and methods of mass mobilisation.

It is just over twenty years since the death of Amílcar Cabral; and ROAPE’s initiative in celebrating this anniversary makes a fine occasion to celebrate Cabral’s achievements. And to note, moreover, that Cabral and what he achieved has not become lost in the turmoil of the passing years. I see, for example, that Edward Said gives due recognition to Cabral in his deeply impressive Culture and Imperialism (1993). Or else, for the English-reading academy worldwide, there is Horace Campbell’s still more recent memorial of Cabral in The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World (1993), where Cabral is defined as ‘the pre-eminent theorist and guerilla fighter in the period of the decolonisation of Africa’. Cabral’s achievement, writes Campbell, ‘sped the decolonisation of Africa in a very fundamental way’. Beyond that, ‘Cabral’s writings and speeches have provided the basis for a new direction in the study of Africa’.

These are sound judgements; and yet the question remains as to how it became possible for Cabral to be given the loyalty of a ravaged people, whose level of literacy stood at about one-half of one per cent, in a colony where the authority of power had long become synonymous with contempt or indifference, and where law had appeared and usually had been a force of blind oppression. Where any sense of patriotism was a bad joke, and social solidarity outside the family or clan an empty form of words.

Cabral and his handful of companions, four decades ago, had to find answers to despair. Where should they start, what should they do? Cabral started with five others in the Portuguese colony of Guine. That was in 1956, long before they had a party or a movement in anything but name, or any detailed programme, or any clear perspective. What they had, very consciously, was a burning sense of the justice of their anti-colonial cause, and a conviction that others would recognise this justice once the embers of revolt could be brought alight. What they also had, above all in Cabral’s unwavering clarity of mind, was the advantage — the very dangerous advantage — of an implacable enemy. Compromise with colonialism might be attempted; it would fail. Reconciliation might be wished for; the fascism of Portugal, whether at home or in the colonies, knew no such thing. So that there must arise for everyone — everyone regardless of preference or opinion — an unavoidable choice: are you for us or are you against us?

Any revolt would have to be the product of profound conviction. Any war of liberation, if it could come to that, would have to be a long one fought through ‘to the end’. It came to that in 1963, seven testing years since the six beginners had found each other, and had opted for a resistance that might have to become an armed resistance; and the core of their later success is to be found in those seven years. It turned, as would be seen later, upon a single principle of action and organisation: colloquially, in Guine Creole, que povo no mania nasi cribeca (meaning that people have to do it for themselves, you have to do it for yourself). Otherwise there is no self-development, there is only a calculation of personal gain, a squabbling bid to jump the queue.

**Statue of Amílcar Cabral at the Amílcar Cabral International Airport in Sal, Cape Verde (19 December 2015).**

That may sound so very obvious, now in the aftermath. But in those years, it could and did sound revolutionary. Rebellious thought in those times — creative thought, contestatory thought — still carried old burdens: from one source, a severely condescending Eurocentrism that had shuffled down the decades from the slaving years, and then, from another source not much less unhelpful although more recent, an authoritarian Marxism — or ‘Marxism?’ — according to which an effective blueprint for action must be handed down to actors as holy writ, without which those actors would be helpless. In their various ways these legacies would be tremendous handicaps to innovating thought and action, and Cabral had to measure himself against them: whether as a schoolboy in Cape Verde, where a primitive racism governed by way of pigmentational absurdities; or later as a university student in Portugal itself, where creative thinking had been crushed out of existence save for a clandestine communist party within which, however, the rigours of secrecy had duly opened the gate to the rigidities of a kind of Stalinism. Cabral and his handful of like-minded friends rejected both the racism and the Stalinism. Standing in a void, as it were, they looked for a posture of their own, and this they found in a deliberate process of re-Africanisation from the alienations of Portuguese colonial culture. Their Angolan comrade, Viriato da Cruz produced his masthead slogan, vamos descobrir Angola, and it became for all of them a whole programme of self-development. Let’s discover ourselves!

This was certainly the message that Cabral took back with him to Africa early in the 1960s, and what he afterwards taught, using whatever different ways and words, to all who would listen to him. Even in this tensely distraught territory of Portuguese Guine, lost somewhere between Senegal and Liberia and deprived in every conceivable dimension, the blacks could and would save themselves if only they themselves were led to take the saving work in hand. ‘Were led to take’, I think, was the kernel of Cabral’s ideas on political mobilisation. For this was the accent of his teachings in all the obscure and lonely years — the 1950s — when he was finding out ‘how to begin’ and with whom to begin. Later, when the beginning was well and truly made, he formalised these ideas and his teaching of them in his handbook for militants, the Palavras de Ordem Gerais composed in 1965, and then, orally and variously, in a series of forest seminars. These evolved as intimate ‘conversations’ when no limits were set to what could be raised and argued (partial texts of some of these seminars will be found in Cabral’s collected writings published as Unity and Struggle, London and New York, 1980, in an excellent translation by Michael Wolfers).

To the moral thrust of Cabral’s ideas on revolutionary change, in short, there was added this severely practical stress on the analysis of immediate reality and circumstance. It was to be one of his strengths that he knew his country and its peoples thoroughly, and usually better than anyone else: those early years which he had spent as a government agronomist, tramping from one region to another and living in their villages, at home within languages that others seldom spoke save in fragmentary phrases, became for him a living source of encouragement and inspiration. When he said que povona manda na si cabeca he was speaking, one can say, from inside the heads of the peasants from whom the slogan had initially come.

This was no doubt what gave his programme its simplicity of conviction. Facing a barbaric colonial oppression, always coercing or corrupting as it was, Cabral presented the ‘simplistic’ belief that humankind is good by nature, a view of things so outrageously stupid in the eyes of a distant Europe, as to set him beyond the boundaries of orthodox notice. Yet that is what he believed: so much so, I think myself, that he would never have been murdered if he had believed otherwise. For it stands sorely on the record that at least three among his murderers were men punished for one or other crime inside the fighting movement (PAIGC) but forgiven and released from prison by Cabral and kept close to his person, ‘so that they could make good their errors’. His chief bodyguard, whom I knew myself, was one of those three; afterwards, this man shot himself in horror at what he had helped to do.

The principles of Cabral’s organising action can be studied in the published writings (Wolfers, 1980). Their practicality had to depend on the sufficient recruitment of fighting personnel, and stiff training in the military disciplines of what had to be done. Here there was nothing new or original! – successful guerilla warfare having few and simple rules. The real — and enormous — difficulty came at the point where sufficient fighters had to be accumulated: precisely, that is, in the actual process of mobilisation. His practice in this respect, I think, can be boiled down to a broad conclusion: political mobilisation is always specific to time and circumstance. But it is a process; it has stages of development: essentially, two stages. One stage is to evoke sympathy with what you mean to do, overcoming (in this case) the deep ingrained scepticism of this rural audience — ‘you want to throw out the Portuguese, but you can’t even make matches’ — with its contempt for its own abilities: ‘Take up arms against the Portuguese? But what fool was ever going to do that?’

This was where the young ‘fighters of the first hour’ came into their own, attacking a police post, destroying a bridge: small actions, but successful ones. Sympathy with anti-colonial sentiments could then be got to take a step further: into feeding these young fighters — maybe a dozen in number, or fewer still — and then hiding them, bringing them useful information about the nearest garrison, or something of that kind. All this was possible and was done. But all of it would end in flight or extermination at the hands of the colonial state if this first stage were not followed by a second. Sympathy must be developed into participation. ‘People must do it for themselves’.

This second stage was entered at the end of 1963 and increasingly established in the year or so after that. In 1967, as we were coasting by night along the southern fringe of that country’s mangrove creeks, Cabral recalled for me the meaning of this crucial achievement:

First of all, as you know, we liberated the southern and a little part of the north-central regions of our country. Then, in 1964, we began to say to our guerilla fighters in the south that the time had come for them to go into the eastern region. Otherwise, we said, if the struggle remains only in the south and north, the Portuguese will be able to concentrate on those regions and eliminate us there. But we found that our guerillas were not at all of this opinion. We’ve liberated our own country, [they said to us], now let those others [in the east] liberate theirs. Why should the Balante go and help to liberate the Fula? Let the Fula do their own work…

We didn’t force the issue. We waited until the Portuguese did in fact begin to redouble their attacks in the south, just as we’d said they would, and then we argued our case all over again. This time it worked, and we could form a regular army that would move, and not stay, like guerillas, in their home zones. We said, free uniforms, better arms, good equipment and so on for everyone who joins; but everyone who joins will go where he’s sent. Two thousand young men volunteered. For a start, we chose 900 (Davidson, 1969).

Once sympathy had developed itself into participation — social and political as much as military participation — then it began to be seen, and Cabral made sure that it was seen, that the struggle against oppression had become a movement with its own inner dynamism.

**Party HQ of PAIGC, situated at the central Praça dos Herois Nacionais square in Bissau (3 November 2017).**

Then it became a matter of persistent leadership in the sense of ensuring that the currents of self-development should stay unclogged (as little clogged as possible; Cabral was no Utopian) by collapsing into this or that personal vanity or distraction, while, at the same time keeping up the pressure for onward action. The general and in the end overwhelming success in these tasks was what the history of this liberation war would demonstrate, but it should go without saying that the success could never be invariable or complete. Here was a leadership — as I think must always happen in enterprises of this kind — that could never be free of personalist distraction and corruption, if only because these failings feed upon success. But the general success in this context of mobilisation was high, even as I think extraordinarily high. I used to walk about that country of forests and creeks and hillside pastures with a handful of fighters bent on this or that objective, or on simply looking after me; and the success was patent. Here you would find a peasant guarding or watching all canoe traffic on the waterways, quite by himself and usually keeping out of sight, unsupervised, unwatched, unguarded; but his work was to know about and report on everything that moved on the water, and this work he simply carried out. Here was a school in dense bush with two or three young teachers responsible literally ‘for everything’. Here was a makeshift ‘hospital’ for a clutch of wounded, with an itinerant surgeon who was virtually a saviour for these wounded but himself depended for food and safety on the nearest village activists. And so on up and down the line of useful action.

Once the movement could impose its own self-discipline — roughly, sometime after early disasters in 1963 — there thus evolved a community across age, or across age-groups in these often age-defined societies, that was in evolution from colonially oppressed objects to socialised — self-regulating? — subjects: at various levels of consciousness, with various back-slidings into self-inflation, of course. But very much had been done to promote an essential unity of attitude and action by the time, late in 1973, that the Portuguese dictatorship was faltering to its fall. A fall, one can add, that was crucially accelerated by the achievements of Cabral and his movement, the PAIGC. It was certainly the case that the young Portuguese officers who would bring about that fall, in 1974, had learned their own lessons from those same achievements. “The colonised peoples and the people of Portugal are allies”, ran one of those young officers’ pronouncements of 1974. “The struggle for national liberation has contributed powerfully to the overthrow of fascism and, in large degree, has lain at the base of the armed forces movement” (which overthrew the dictatorship) (Davidson, 1981). The smooth men and women who would come to govern the Portugal of the 1980s would offer a very different view; the fact remains that overthrow of the colonial dictatorship in Africa was an essential preclude to overthrow of the dictatorship in Portugal itself.

Yet if much had been done to promote a post-colonial society in Guine, much else remained to be done; and there were those at the time (myself among them, if I may add) for whom the liberation war was at a level of virtual standstill (so far, that is, as major hostilities were concerned) but might have usefully continued for a few more years. As others have explained, what remained to be done, even to be launched, were transformations in the sphere of economic reorganisation. These could not be tackled while the Portuguese were still able to fight on offensive positions; but they might have been tackled after 1973 when the Portuguese were fighting in retreat. As it was, things fell out differently and by 1978, in peacetime, ‘doing things to people’ had taken the place of ‘people doing it for themselves’ (Dowbor, 1977).

In remembering Cabral, however, one thinks above all of the process of social change set in motion during the years of political innovation and expansion. One thinks, in Cabral’s own phrasing, of the armed liberation struggle not as a mere instrumentality, much less as an adventure, but as a ‘determinant of culture’, a penetratingly social determinant of cultural progress that ‘is without doubt, for the people, the prime recompense for their efforts and sacrifices.’ For

the leaders of the liberation movement, drawn from the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ (intellectuals, employees) or from the background of workers in the towns (labourers, drivers, salaried workers in general), having to live day by day with the various peasant strata among the rural populations, come to know the people better. They discover, at its source, the wealth of their cultural values (whether philosophical or political, artistic, social or moral). They acquire a clearer awareness of their country’s economic realities. They see the difficulties, sufferings and aspirations of the mass of the people… the leaders thus enrich their culture: they cultivate their minds and free themselves from inhibitions (imposed by colonial history). So they strengthen their ability to serve the movement in service of the people.

Meanwhile, the same cultural determinant had another field of action ‘out there in the bush’ about which the leaders who had mostly derived from the towns had known little or nothing, and had feared much:

On their side, the mass of labourers and, in particular, the peasants who are generally illiterate and have never moved beyond the confines of their village or region, come into contact with other categories; and in doing this they shed the inhibitions which had constrained them in their dealings with other ethnic or social groups. They understand their position as determining elements in the struggle. They break the fetters of the village universe. They gradually integrate with their country and with the world. They acquire an infinity of new knowledge useful to their immediate and future activities within the framework of the struggle. They strengthen their political awareness by absorbing the principles of national and social revolution postulated by the struggle.

Summarising, Cabral went on to say in one of his well-remembered phrases that ‘the armed struggle therefore implies a veritable forced march along the road to cultural progress’ because:

We should add these inherent features of an armed liberation struggle: the practice of democracy, of criticism and self-criticism; the growing responsibility of populations for the management of their own life; literacy teaching; the creation of schools and health care; the training of peasant and other cadres. And this is how we find that the armed liberation struggle is not only a product of culture, but also a determinant of culture (Endnote 1).

Looking back from these our 1990s [this article was written in 1993], when banditries and corruptions and vile external interventions have gone far to wreck or utterly destroy the harvests of progress that Cabral and his companions were able to promote and produce, I am sometimes met with reproaches by those, today, who tell me that Cabral and his companions failed. To those who tell me this from an honest standpoint, and not from any mealy-mouthed or merely calculating collapse into reaction, I can reply that the charge of failure is morally and historically baseless. I respect their prudent scepticism but ask them to think further. For the record shows that the principles upon which Cabral and his companions acted remain as valid today as they were valid thirty years ago and more. They are the same principles and ideas that may now be heard expounded, in a score or more African languages and as many different African situations, with the terminologies of democratic decentralisation, mass participation, cultural renewal, post-colonial restitution. New men and women will apply these principles and ideas, no doubt with the genius of creative innovation that history will unfold. But the same mandatory directive will apply. Que povo na manda na sicabeca.

Basil Davidson was a founding member of ROAPE, and a historian of Africa. He died in London in 2010 (read Lionel Cliffe’s obituary here). Mike Powell was the editor of the original special issue in 1993 which can accessed here.

Featured Photograph: Cabral’s birthplace in Bafatá in Guine Bissau (13 October 2019).

Endnote

These extracts are from one of Cabral’s principal political lectures, National Liberation and Culture, 1970, and available in the Unity and Struggle volume.

Bibliographic Note

Many and some of the most important of Cabral’s writings are in English in Unity and Struggle, translated by Michael Wolfers (Heineman, London, 1980/Monthly Review Press, New York, 1979); French readers have the advantage of being able to refer to a wider selection in two volumes of Maspero’s Cahiers libres, (Paris, 1975); Basil Davidson, The Liberation of Guine (Penguin, London, 1979:74), long out of print but since reprinted in an enlarged volume, No Fist is Big Enough to Hide the Sky (Zed Books, London, 1981:74,161); For a valuable retrospective of what happened after 1977, see Ladislau Dowbor, Guine Bissau: a busca da independencia economica, (Editora Basiliense, Sao Paulo, 1983) and specifically on Cape Verde, Basil Davidson, The Fortunate Isles (Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ and Hutchinson, London 1989); Edward W Said, Culture and Imperialism, (Chatto & Windus, London/Knopf, New York, 1993).

The geopolitics of debt in Africa

ROAPE

April 18, 2023

Massive exposure of some African economies to Chinese-owned debt is making it difficult for Beijing to sustain official narratives that suggest equality with African countries. Tim Zajontz, Ricardo Reboredo and Pádraig Carmody show that the response of the Chinese government to political “backlashes” over debt has been to emphasise alternative vectors of engagement with the continent. The deepening African debt crisis is directly linked to inter-capitalist competition at the expense of the working people of the continent.

By Tim Zajontz, Ricardo Reboredo and Pádraig Carmody

We are now in an era when many media pundits and international relations experts tell us that geopolitics, conventionally understood as competition between great powers, has returned with a vengeance after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yet beyond Russia, concern also runs high in Western policy circles about China’s geopolitical and economic positionality and its revisionist and hegemonic ambitions, particularly in the countries of the so-called developing world, or “Global South”. Two memes have gained traction in relation to this; namely the supposed Chinese “debt trap” and also “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy, the latter referring to a particular type of aggressive, coercive style of statecraft. There are now extensive literatures on these (for example, see Brautigam, 2020; Carmody, 2020; Martin, 2021).

While the myth of “debt trap diplomacy” as a deliberate strategy to entrap countries has now been debunked, China has nonetheless been implicated in substantial debt accumulation in Africa, in some cases leading to or contributing to excessive, unserviceable debts, as in Zambia for example, which became the first African country to default on its external debt early in the COVID pandemic.

China is now the largest lender to low-income countries and some of its loans have been criticised for their opacity, with details often kept secret. Such agreements have made it difficult to keep track of when political elites act irresponsibly, for instance by signing finance agreements with Chinese (or other) lenders without long-term debt management plans or due diligence.

Zambia’s debt-financed “development-through-infrastructure” agenda for example, was made possible by the extensive disbursement of Chinese loans, a number of which were for overpriced projects negotiated in opaque procurement processes. Combined with the proliferation of the “debt trap” meme, there is now widespread suspicion across Africa regarding Chinese-linked loan agreements. In Kenya, a media frenzy erupted in November of last year with the release of three separate loan contracts related to the country’s new Standard Gauge Railway (SGR). Likewise, in Uganda, reports from unreliable sources surfaced in 2021 that China Exim Bank would take over the country’s only international airport (Entebbe) should the country fail to pay back a loan. While government officials from both countries dismissed the reports, in a sense, they proved the staying power of the “debt trap” narrative.

Beyond cases like these, the fact that some of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects, including the Kenyan SGR, have failed to perform according to expectations has also contributed to substantial resistance or “blowback” from populations and politicians across the continent.

As we have argued in a recent article published by Global Political Economy, the massive exposure of some African economies to Chinese-owned debt has made it increasingly difficult for Beijing to sustain official narratives that suggest horizontality or equality in China’s relations with African countries. However, Chinese foreign policy is multifaceted and adaptive. As we show in the article, the response of the Chinese government to political “backlashes” over debt has been to emphasise alternative vectors of engagement with the continent. Among these are a renewed focus on aid, a push for “soft power” via vaccine diplomacy, educational programmes, people-to-people exchanges and professional training, and a more assertive stance against Western powers that builds on two decades of “South-South” developmental narratives and many more years of anti-colonial and anti-imperial discourses.

These initiatives have kept China’s foreign policy visible across Africa even as trade volumes between the two fell in the commodity price bust, stocks and flows of new Chinese foreign direct investment on the continent plunged, and new lending collapsed. Even as we enter a (perhaps transitory) era of “post-peak China in Africa”, trade flows between Africa and China (which are still tilted in favour of China, both in terms of export-import volumes and value addition) have rapidly bounced back following the pandemic. At the same time, the African continent and its societies are increasingly turning into central arenas of geopolitics again.

This applies not only to intensifying great power intrusions in the traditional security realm, for instance in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, but also to novel mechanisms and spheres of great power competition. What Lee, Wainwright and Glassman (2018: 417) have argued in the context of China-US rivalry in Asia seems apt for Africa as well: ultimately the geopolitical and geoeconomic “logics of power must be grasped dialectically – i.e. as a unity-in difference – in order to provide a full geopolitical economic explanation”. The current intensification of competition between Western and Chinese political and economic actors across Africa is emblematic of how intricately geopolitical and geoeconomic interests intertwine in a capitalist global political economy.

The scramble between the “West” and China for Africa’s “strategic” resources, such as lithium and cobalt required for e-mobility or renewable energy sources, is well underway and likely to intensify, as decisionmakers in the “West” appear desperate to decrease dependencies on China-controlled global value chains, some of which originate in African mines. Chinese and Western firms also compete to provide the infrastructure and hence set the norms and standards for Africa’s information technology. Broadly then, what we are seeing is the emergence of new forms of great power competition, built on politico-economic landscapes shaped by prior initiatives, engagements and patterns of exploitation. Systems of debt management are one of the novel arenas in which this geopolitical rivalry manifests.

The geopolitical deadlock in the Common Framework

African sovereign debt has arguably become the most “geopoliticised” current affair in the continent’s external relations. Multilateral debt restructuring efforts have hitherto failed to deliver substantial reliefs for highly indebted African nations, mostly because of starkly diverging interests among Western and Chinese (state) capital. The G20 Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) has essentially postponed the problem.

While the initiative suspended $12.9 billion in debt-service payments of participating countries, it gave private creditors a free pass, with even the World Bank remarking that “[r]egrettably, only one private creditor participated”. Already during the DSSI which ended in December 2021, Chinese and Western lenders squabbled about whether certain Chinese loans (for instance non-concessional loans from China Development Bank which are widespread in some African debt portfolios) should be treated as official or private lending.

Negotiations over debt restructuration under the so-called Common Framework, the DSSI successor instrument under which countries like Chad, Ethiopia, Zambia and most recently Ghana are seeking assistance, are charged with even more geopolitics-cum-geoeconomics, as lenders are now urged to accept “haircuts” on their debt investments. No longer is it only Chinese top officials engaging in “debt diplomacy” across Africa. In January, US Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen toured Senegal, Zambia and South Africa, calling Beijing a “barrier” to the resolution of Zambia’s debt conundrum. The Chinese reaction was prompt and not very diplomatic: The Chinese embassy in Lusaka called upon the US government to “act on responsible monetary policies, cope with its own debt problem, and stop sabotaging other sovereign countries’ active efforts to solve their debt issues”.

In a sense the debt squabble highlights contradictions that have emerged in the wake of the BRI. As Breslin (2009: 822) noted, during the 2000s, Chinese state actors largely sought to portray the country as a “responsible great power”, in essence constructing a reputation as a “good global citizen”. However, China’s more assertive stances and emphasis on bilateral engagement and “club diplomacy” in the Xi Jinping era (manifesting via the BRI and the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation [FOCAC]) have now made prior narratives impossible to sustain. Even countries outside of the “West” that support China on a number of other issues have taken notice. India’s representative at the G20, for example, recently pressured Beijing to change its position, stating: “You can’t settle the debt bilaterally. You have to sit together with the IMF and other creditors”.

Meanwhile African governments and societies are left in limbo by these geopolitics of debt – at real human costs, considering that ever more portions of public budgets are used on debt service. African presidents, finance ministers and treasury secretaries are engaged in a “multi-level negotiation game” to manoeuvre different interests among the IMF, the Paris Club, private creditors, various Chinese lenders and ordinary citizens.

Growing increasingly impatient over deadlocks in the G20’s Common Framework, in February the finance minister of Ethiopia, which owes no less than $13.7bn to Chinese lenders, travelled to China to demand concessions from Beijing. There have been repeated demands from the political opposition in Lusaka calling on President Hichilema to travel to China to discuss Beijing’s role in Zambia’s debt restructuring at the highest possible level. China owns about a third of Zambia’s debt.

Yet, the problem is not solely to be found in China but is rather systemic, as we have previously argued in the Review of African Political Economy. Deborah Brautigam rightly points out that across the 73 countries that qualify for debt restructuring under the Common Framework, the World Bank and other multilateral lenders remain the biggest source of debt (holding 41 percent of debt in these countries), followed by bondholders and private lenders (23 percent), with China holding 21 percent and Paris Club members 11 percent. Hence, current African debt crises and their geopoliticisation are directly linked to inter-capitalist competition for what is left after the 2010s, which has been a decade of reckless lending by a diverse set of external creditors that was motivated by raking in profits – at the expense of ordinary African citizens.

Tim Zajontz is a lecturer in Global Political Economy at the Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, a Research Fellow in the Centre for International and Comparative Politics at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and a Research Associate in the Second Cold War Observatory, a global collective of scholars committed to understanding how great power rivalry will influence societies, economies, and ecologies worldwide. Ricardo Reboredo is a lecturer in International Relations at the Metropolitan University, Prague, Czech Republic. Pádraig Carmody is a Professor in Geography at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Featured Photograph: The First China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo held in Changsha, Hunan, China (29 June 2019).

Works cited

Brautigam, D. (2020). A critical look at Chinese ‘debt-trap diplomacy’: the rise of a meme. Area Development and Policy, 5(1), 1-14.

Breslin, S. (2009). Understanding China’s regional rise: interpretations, identities and implications. International Affairs, 85(4), 817-835.

Carmody, P. (2020). Dependence not debt-trap diplomacy. Area Development and Policy 5(1): 23-31.

Lee, S.-O., Wainwright, J. and Glassman, J. (2018). Geopolitical economy and the production of territory: The case of US-China geopolitical-economic competition in Asia. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50(2): 416-436.

Martin, P. (2021). China’s Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Helmi Sharawy, the African – a celebration, a life

ROAPE

April 4, 2023

Habib Ayeb and Abeer Abazeed celebrate the life of Helmi Sharawy. Born in Egypt in 1935, Sharawy saw Africa as one with all its own coherence, but with cultural, historical, and geopolitical diversities. He spent his life campaigning for African unity, with empirical knowledge of Africa he was a committed anti-racist and anti-colonial scholar and activist. The idea of two Africa-s was a colonial and racist lie – the continent was one and must unite.

In memory of Helmi Sharawy (1935-2023)

By Habib Ayeb

Egypt and Africa have lost, on Monday 20 March 2023, the academic and tireless “activist” of African causes professor Helmi Sharawy (1935-2023). He was undoubtedly one of the best specialists on sub-Saharan cultures and the geopolitics of Africa as a whole.

At the beginning of his biography, recently published in Arabic in Cairo, he quoted his great friend and accomplice, the economist Samir Amin (1931 – 2018), who said, addressing him during a tribute organized in his honor:

I am not only a companion in the struggle; much more than that, you and I were among the first Egyptians to realize that our national struggle is an integral part of the struggle to restore the independence of all the peoples and nations of Africa’[1].

Born in 1935 in the Egyptian city of Giza, Helmi Sharawy entered the University of Cairo in 1958 and began his postgraduate studies at the Faculty of Arts of Cairo University in the Department of Sociology. From October 1959, Helmi Sharawy was hired as a civil servant in the Office of African Affairs attached to the Presidency of the Republic. He was there, in charge of the follow-up of the East African countries with the task of general coordinator of the 23 offices of the African liberation movements in Cairo.[2] He remained there until 1975.

Sharawy participated in the composition of official delegations representing Egypt and Africa and was part of the delegations celebrating the independence of the newly independent countries. He was politically active during the period of Gamal Abdel Nasser. He also served as a liaison between Nasser’s government and the various African liberation movements based in the Egyptian capital. He later became a consultant to the Ministry of Sudan – Egyptian Integration Programme (1975-1980). Helmi Sharawy was well known for his role with Gamal Abdel Nasser but also for his sometimes full-frontal opposition to Nasser’s two successors Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak.

Sharawy was able to build relationships with some of the great African leaders he had met during his work at the African Affairs Office, which later enabled him to develop a wide network of relationships with political actors on the continent, but especially with African academics and intellectuals, which he continued to expand and develop until his last days. He had known and engaged with Samora Machel, Amilcar Cabral, and Nelson Mandela.

This solid experience in African issues was used to produce more than 13 books in Arabic and four in English, most of which were devoted to African issues. His books, published since 1970, included: Angola Revolution (1978), Arabs and Africans Face to Face (1985), Israel in Africa (1986), Culture of Liberation (2002), Africa in Transition for 20-21st Century (2008), and The Sudan: On the Cross Roads (2011). He had also translated African scholarship, including Kwesi Prah’s African Languages for the Mass Education of Africans (Dt. Stiftung für Internat. Entwicklung, 1995), and Mahmood Mamdani and Ernest Wamba dia Wamba’s classic African Studies in Social Movements and Democracy (CODESRIA, 1995).

With his empirical knowledge of Africa and the various political issues at stake, as well as his anti-racist and anti-colonial convictions, Helmi was one of the first to question the idea of two Africa-s: a sub-Saharan and black Africa and another north of the great Sahara which would be more Arab-Berber and white. For him, Africa was one with all its own coherence but with cultural, historical, and geopolitical diversities that are its primary wealth.

He taught “African Political Thought” at Juba University, South Sudan (1981-1982). Then he was selected as the expert for Afro-Arab Cultural Relations at Arab League ALECSO in Tunisia until 1986. In 1987 he was appointed professor at the Arab and African Research Centre (AARC) in Cairo, where he was director from 1987 to 2010. It was during his tenure at AARC that CODESRIA, of which he was an executive committee member from 2011 to 2015, alongside Samir Amin, developed the partnership that led to the organisation of the Gender Symposium in Cairo for several years, and to the joint publication series entitled Afro-Arab Selections for the Social Sciences. This series selects and translates CODESRIA publications into Arabic. Helmi’s passing gives meaning to the phrase ‘end of an era’.

During a discussion on the hydro-politics of the Nile and especially on the relations between Ethiopia and Egypt, Helmi Sharawy, whom I had met for the first time in Cairo at the end of the 1980s, replied with this beautiful sentence that has remained engraved in my memory: “Ethiopia is the beating heart that provides the vital sap to Egypt. Without this heart, Egypt would never have existed. For this reason, these two countries do not have the luxury of being enemies”.

Habib Ayeb is a Geographer and filmmaker. He is the founder of l’Observatoire de la Souveraineté Alimentaire et de l’Environnement (OSAE) and a regular contributor to ROAPE.

Helmi Sharawy – a storyteller, an activist, and a scholar

By Abeer Abazeed

‘Egypt is an African country or not’ this ongoing debate about Egypt’s position in African politics and scholarship was transcended by Helmi Sharawy. His academic work and activism transferred to us – young Egyptian researchers – the African identity of Egypt and how to analyse Egyptian social phenomena through Africanist lenses. Personally, I digested African knowledge through his talent of storytelling, his scholarship and his persistent activism at national and continental levels.

A storyteller

Nasser’s regime and the question of Africa is a common issue in many studies covering Egypt’s engagement in the continent’s affairs. Under Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rule, Egypt used to be a supporter to liberation movements and newly independent countries as well as the founding of the non-aligned movement and the Organization of African Union. I used to read about Nasser’s role in Africa as a historical event without any real sense of its significance. But listening to Sharawy narrating such historical events, I became conscious of the anti-colonial struggle and politics of building African solidarity in the 1960s.

Prof. Sharawy worked as a coordinator for African Liberation Movements Office under the auspice of the President’s Office of African Affairs from 1960 to 1975. From his close interaction with Nasser, I realized for instance that the marriage of Nkrumah and Fathia is not just a sentence to read in a study showing the Ghanaian-Egyptian relationship, rather, it is a story of how and why Nkrumah proposed to her through Nasser.

In the last phone call with Sharawy, he told me about the dog of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie when he visited Egypt and how the pet walked in front of the emperor and its collar’s bell was like an alert to others that the emperor was coming. Such a story encouraged me to read more about Haile Selassie and his obsession with animals. This talent of telling stories was supported by his educational background in sociology and his early research interest in folklore. Prof. Sharawy travelled through villages across Egypt to document folklore. In the African sense, he believed in the significance of orality to transfer knowledge and wisdom.

Furthermore, his way of narrating the past did not only provide us with information about the event or interaction, it also encouraged us to think critically about what happened and generate research questions. For instance, in the group of Africanists that he founded as a sub-research group for young researchers in the Arab and African Research Centre, he motivated us to do research on historical topics that reveal Egypt’s connections with the continent. As in the following post on his Facebook post in 2016, Sharawy suggested topics such as the Forty Days’ Road, the Cairo-to-Cape route or the role of Kamal Al Din Salah, the Egyptian diplomat who was assassinated in 1957 in Somalia or the role of Abd Al-Aziz Ishaq and the African Association.

A scholar

Prof. Sharawy did not let his rich experience with African leaders fade without documentation. Oral history needs to be recorded otherwise history would easily vanish. Sharawy wrote academic books and articles demonstrating Egypt’s engagement in African affairs in the time of independence besides analysing the anti-colonial struggles. Additionally, in his volume of Heritage of African Languages Manuscripts in Ajami he illustrated the cultural interaction across Sahara. In 2019, he published his autobiography Sira Misriyya Ifriqiyya: Mudhakkirat Helmi Sharawi (in English: An Egyptian African Story: The Memoirs of Helmi Sharawy) where the reader can enjoy his tales documenting phases of Egypt’s position on the continent. Reem Abou-El-Fadl wrote a synthesis of the autobiography, she also translated into English some of his interviews and analysed his role in Nasser’s time.

However, Prof. Sharawy’s scholarship was not only centred around his unique experience with liberation movements, he constantly mobilized us as young researchers to engage with African scholarship namely through CODESRIA. Starting in May 2012, Sharawy held meetings with me and other colleagues to establish a network of Egyptian researchers to actively participate in CODESRIA’s activities and publications. At that time Ebrima Sall, the former executive director of CODESRIA aligned with Sharawy’s vision of enhancing Egyptian participation and kept us connected to CODESRIA’s activities. Furthermore, to bridge the language barrier, Sharawy, with Sall, used the Arabic language in CODESRIA’s announcements as well as accepting papers written in Arabic in conferences and workshops to encourage the involvement of Arabic-speaking researchers.

While Sharawy mobilized us to connect with other African scholars, he advised us on how to produce original research. Sharawy usually told us not to reproduce the western view by relying only on Western scholars and negating African writings and publications. African researchers know better about their countries, so read and cite them, he argued. Therefore, we read and discussed in the monthly meeting of the Africanist group the works of Archie Mafeje, Samir Amin, Mahmood Mamdani, Heider Ibrahim Ali and other Africanist scholars.

Another key piece of advice he gave us was to consider Egypt’s affairs when we submit a paper to an African conference or journal; in other words, engaging in African academia does not mean adopting the colonial classification and studying a ‘sub-Saharan’ country. Moreover, he enlightened us that politics is not to analyse only conventional power structure i.e. political parties and formal policies but our analytical scope must look at cultural and social dynamics.

An activist

The spirit of struggle and resistance was part of Sharawy’s personality. He cofounded different civil initiatives and organizations that struggled against imperialism mainly after he left the President’s Office of African Affairs in the 1970s. He was a member in the consulting committee of the Socialist People’s Alliance Party, and he actively joined the masses in demonstrations that took place after the 2011 revolution. What I witnessed closely was how he was a ‘committed intellectual’ who was concerned with, as Issa Shivji has written, ‘politics as a mode of people’s self-expression’.

Prof. Sharawy taught us – maybe unconsciously – the meaning of scholar-activism. For example, in 2013 when a new constitution was being drafted in Egypt, Sharawy encouraged us in the Africanist group to search how African identity is addressed in other African constitutions and to write a statement to the constitution committee urging them to affirm the African identity of Egypt. This idea evolved into a public conference with the Ministry of Culture about African identity in the programs of Egyptian political parties and social forces.

Besides Egyptian dynamics, Prof. Sharawy invited guest speakers from Sudan to the monthly meeting of the Africanist group to share with us what had been happening in the 2016 and 2018 uprisings. Through that, we could keep our eyes open to the voice of people on the ground and not simply focus on media coverage.

Prof. Sharawy did not transfer African knowledge to us in a mechanical manner, rather he was a humane and amiable mentor who cared about young researchers. Though I barely knew him at the time, I remember in a CODESRIA conferences in Accra how he took pictures while I was presenting my paper as a gesture of support in an international conference. In addition, he introduced me to other African scholars at the conference.

Another situation that confirmed his nobility was when our dear friend Mohamed Hagag passed away in a car accident in 2018. Hagag was a promising researcher who participated in CODESRIA’s activities and coordinated the Africanist group. Prof. Sharawy generously pushed for collecting Hagag’s writings of academic papers and op-ed articles in a printed book which was a further reflection of his belief in the agency of young researchers.

As valuable as the experience of knowing Prof. Sharawy, we never felt he played the role of gatekeeper of African studies in Egypt. On the contrary, his engagement with the liberation movements, his scholarly connections with CODESRIA and his thorough activism provided us with analytical approaches and tools to research Africa as a whole.

Your voice and support will be deeply missed Prof. Sharawy!

Abeer Abazeed is assistant professor of political science at the Faculty of Economics and Political sciences in Cairo University.

Notes

[1] Shaarawi had published an autobiography, entitled Helmi Sharawy’s “Egyptian African Biography” (Sira Misriya Afrikiya). Dar Al-Ain for publishing and distribution. He was about to publish the second part of the book, the final manuscript of which he had reviewed himself a few days before his departure. Sharawy wrote in his important memoirs about accompanying Joshua Nkomo, who came to Egypt to open the Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) office for the African National Congress and about his rare meetings and recordings with the leaders of Eritrea at the height of their struggle for independence from Ethiopia, then his interviews with the Zanzibaris and their leader, Sheikh Ali Mohsen Al-Barwani, who asked for help to achieve independence from Britain, with whom he began a long friendship.

[2] At the time, Cairo had become, at the instigation of the former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, the capital of the African liberation movements of almost all the countries of the African continent which were still colonised and which obtained their independence successively between the 1950s and the 1970s (Algeria in 1962, Tanganyika (Tanzania) in 1961, Zanzibar in 1963, and Angola and Mozambique in 1975.)

Amilcar Cabral’s thought & practice: some lessons for the 1990s

ROAPE

March 30, 2023

In the second of three essays to mark the fiftieth anniversary of national revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral’s murder in 1973, first published in the ROAPE journal thirty years ago, Shubi Ishemo celebrates Cabral’s original contributions to revolutionary theory and practice. He argues that Cabral importance as a thinker is found in his creative application of Marx’s method to understand the local and international economic, social, and cultural realities of imperialism while stressing the importance of building solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles across the world. His ingenious approach to understanding and mobilising against imperialism remains relevant in the neo-liberal era.

By Shubi Ishemo

Recent issues of ROAPE have carried timely articles on the post-cold war developments and their effect on the economic and political processes in Africa, on the debt crisis, on the so-called structural adjustment programmes, the consequent crisis manifest in the fall in the living standards of the popular masses and the erosion of achievements in health, education etc. The gap between the rich and poor, the gap between the South and the North are ever widening. Dependence on external handouts has increased and external agencies — the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and some NGOs — and western governments are increasingly setting the agenda for Africa. Pessimism in the West on the future of Africa is all pervasive. The sovereignty of African states has been gravely eroded (Hanlon, 1991,Tandon, 1991). Already in the advanced capitalist countries, particularly the US, imperial arrogance has reached an all-time high. D G Dubois (1993) cites examples in The New York Times Magazine. It asks whether Africa is fit to govern itself — whether it is not yet opportune to recolonise:

Colonialism’s Back — And Not a Moment Too Soon … [and] Let’s Face It: Some Countries Are Just Not Fit To Govern Themselves.

In light of the current crisis, this brief article seeks to reflect on some aspects of Amilcar Cabral’s thought. It proposes that Africa, and indeed the third world, are not devoid of ideas or the dynamism to rethink and work out solutions to their current problems. Models developed elsewhere, with little or no relevance to the social and economic realities of Africa are being imposed on Africa. Far from stifling debate on these issues, the changing global balance of forces and western pressures have stimulated a very healthy intellectual and political debate. Shivji (1991:83-84) has correctly noted that this debate is not new. It ‘was always on the agenda so far as the popular forces are concerned … our debate’, he continues,

should not be diverted. It should focus on the larger question of democracy and should be rooted in our own historical experience —frankly owning up to our past ‘mistakes’; drawing lessons for the future and being courageous enough to propose what may have been unthinkable only a few years ago. This is not to say that other experiences can or should be ignored. But their relevance has to be established. We must approach other experiences honestly with a view to understanding and examining our own situation rather than rationalise and justify some preconceived prejudices. Ultimately though, our point of departure and reference should be our own political practices over the last three decades of independence, not only in eventually arriving at any specific decision, but in forging the methods of making that decision.

This approach has also been carried in new journals such as Africa World Review and publications of new political parties of the left in Africa (see, for example, Foroyaa and other publications of the People’s Democratic Organisation for Independence and Socialism (PDOIS) of The Gambia). Elsewhere in the South, particularly in Latin America, a similar debate is taking place. Tomas Borge (1992:98-99), a Sandinista leader, poses the same question.

Instead of looking at ourselves, instead of analysing our own reality, our thinking, our myths, we are intent on testing to see if what we do is in accordance with European values. Just like nineteenth-century liberals who totally denied colonial culture, we have in general tended to be textbook Marxists, seeking to fit concepts derived from manuals into our disproportionate view of reality … [we adopt] new schemes and ideologies when we have not yet finished absorbing previous ones.

These issues were being debated by the left in Latin America in the 1980s (Bollinger, 1985) and of late by the recent Conference of Parties of the Latin American Left held in Havana, Cuba. The Latin American left has also turned to history, to recoup the most positive ideas and practice. This is more so in Cuba where, since the beginning of the rectification process of the 1980s, lessons drawn from the ideas and practice of Che Guevara have energised the revolutionary process. President Fidel Castro (1987, in Tablada 1990:45) has defined rectification as a way of

looking for new solutions to old problems, rectifying many negative tendencies that have been developing … we’re rectifying all the shoddiness and mediocrity that is precisely the negation of Che’s ideas, his revolutionary thought, his style,his spirit, and his example.

Africa is not short of such positive ideas and practice. Amilcar Cabral’s ideas and political practice, formulated during the concrete experience of national liberation struggle, hold relevance to understanding the current situation in Africa. Cabral’s stature as an agronomist, as a revolutionary theoretician, and as a political strategist and historian is well known in Africa, the rest of the third world and among progressive humanity elsewhere. In 1983, an International Symposium on Amilcar Cabral, attended by intellectuals and activists from Africa, Western Europe, the Soviet Union, Cuba and North America was held in Praia, Cape Verde. At that symposium, Basil Davidson (1984:29) posed a set of fundamental questions

What will be the further impact, generally in Africa or elsewhere, of the practice and theory of Lusophone liberation movements? Can they be seen to have introduced a new trend toward effective self-development? Do they indicate a qualitative advance on the road to progressive change? Will they appear, in twenty years’ time or so, to lie at the start of new African modalities of struggle, organisation, understanding of sociocultural and economic needs and possibilities?

He noted that even then ‘there seemed to be reasons for thinking so’. Indeed all the contributors to that symposium were in no doubt (PAICV,’1984).

A statue of Amilcar Cabral was erected for the 20 years of national independence at Assamoda, Santiago in Cabo Verde

On Class

In his revolutionary practice, Cabral started from the position of understanding the social, economic, cultural and political realities of Guinea and Cape Verde, and how these were situated in the wider realities of the world. His Agricultural Census of Guinea detailing the material conditions of the various ethnic groups has been compared with Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia. He worked from the premise that knowledge was crucial to under- standing the complexity of the ethnic composition of the Guinean people, the precapitalist formations, and the role of chiefs. This was essential for preparing the ground for popular mobilisation and raising the consciousness of the popular masses.

Cabral’s main point of reference was history. It was important to understand the history of the people in order to develop an effective strategy against imperialism. To him,

the ideological deficiency, not to say the total lack of ideology, on the part of the national liberation movements — which is explained by the ignorance of the historical reality which these movements aspire to transform — constitutes one of the greatest weaknesses if not the greatest weakness, of our struggle against imperialism (1980:122; see also Aquino de Branganca, 1976).

It was his formulation on classes that aroused controversy. He used historical method: ‘Does history begin only with the appearance of classes and consequently class struggle?’

While agreeing with this in broad terms, he cautioned against it because it placed certain societies in Africa, Asia and Latin America outside history. For him, the basis for understanding the specificity of class in Africa must be the concrete reality of Africa. ‘Our refusal’, he argued.

based as it is on detailed knowledge of the socio-economic reality of our countries and on analysis of the process of development of the phenomenon of class… leads us to conclude that if class struggle is the motive force of history, it is so in a specific historical period.

He stressed that the motive force of history in each human society is the mode of production. To him, ‘the level of productive forces, the essential determinant of the content and form of class struggle, is the true and permanent motive force in history’.

The historical and social context of Cabral’s formulation has been misinterpreted. In his ‘Social Structure’ he sets out to examine the social formation of different ethnic groups in Guinea. For example, he made a distinction between the social structure of the Balanta and the Fula. Whereas the former had a horizontal (stateless) structure, the latter had a vertical structure dominated by chiefs. From this he extrapolated the political potential of each group in the course of national liberation. Equally important, Cabral was addressing not only the purveyors of colonial racist historiography, but also those on the left who held the view ‘that imperialism made us enter into history at the moment when it began its adventure in our countries. This preconception must be denounced: for somebody on the left, and for Marxists in particular, history obviously means class struggle (1980:56). But Cabral was not contending against Marxism. Rather, he was seeking to apply it to the concrete realities of the colonial situation. He urged a deeper knowledge of the ‘essential characteristics of the colonized peoples’ (1980:123) based on ‘a rigorous historical approach’ (1974:56).

Imperialism, to Cabral, had not fulfilled its historical mission. It had not developed the productive forces towards the ‘sharpening of class differentiation with the development of the bourgeoisie and the intensification of class struggle’ (1980:127). Thus in the case of Guinea and other African countries, it was only the petty bourgeoisie who were ‘the only stratum capable both of having consciousness’ of imperialist domination and of handling the state apparatus inherited from imperialist domination (1980:134). The petty bourgeoisie were an unpredictable class. It contained two sectors of what he referred to as a revolutionary petty bourgeoisie and those who vacillate or are hesitant in the national liberation struggle. Cabral demonstrated a profound knowledge of the petty bourgeoisie in neo-colonial situations. They had the tendency of becoming ‘bourgeois’ of ‘[allowing] the development of a bourgeoisie of bureaucrats and intermediaries in the trading system, to transform itself into a national pseudo-bourgeoisie, that is to deny the revolution and necessarily subject itself to imperialist capital’. In this situation, they constituted a ‘betrayal of the objectives of national liberation’ (1980:136).

In order to strengthen its revolutionary consciousness and the liberation struggle, Cabral argued that the petty bourgeoisie had to ‘commit suicide as a class’. Jean Copans (1985:36) has taken issue with this. He doubts that African political leaders are Gramscian organic intellectuals. ‘The a-patriate, “floating” intellectual who may commit suicide, whom Cabral dreamed of, is an historical nonsense. It is not possible to transcend by any means whatsoever one’s origins and class barriers.’ Copans continues,

Without — in the case of the political leader — a definition of the relationship between the intellectual and masses and … a definition of the relationship between the exteriority of theoretical consciousness and social processes, class analysis will remain a victim of dogmatism, voluntarism and idealism.

Copans grossly misrepresents Cabral. Cabral was neither idealist, nor dogmatic. Far from being ‘historical nonsense’, Cabral’s formulation of the petty bourgeoisie was Gramscian. What he refers to as the petty bourgeoisie who ‘commit suicide as a class’ are in reality the ‘organic intellectuals’ or in Cabral’s terms, the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie who, in the colonial and neo-colonial situation, show ‘the capacity for faithfully expressing the aspirations of the masses in each phase of the struggle and for identifying with them more and more’ (1980:125). Cabral would have agreed with Copans suggestion that Marxism ‘must be appropriated theoretically and practically, and this can only result from a process of reflection linked to the social practice of

the exploited classes’ and ‘the reading of Marx in the context of specific historical situations’ (Copans, 1985:37). This is what Cabral set out to do. In all his work, there is a richness of originality. His ‘Social Structure’, ‘Party Principles and Political Practice’, ‘Weapon of Theory’, etc., reflect his engaging questioning of every situation and his rejection of ready-made models.

The subsequent neo-colonial situation clearly bears out Cabral’s analysis. We have in the past decade, seen the defection of some of the ‘organic intellectuals’ of the 1960s and 1970s. These are what Petras (1993:107-109; see also Petras and Morely, 1992) has characterised as ‘institutional’ or ‘memo writing’ intellectuals. Here, Petras is referring to intellectuals like Che Guevara who were involved in theoretical, analytical work and political practice. They formulated their politics, as did Gramsi, by breaking from their class back- ground, immersing themselves in mass struggles’. Cabral was such an organic intellectual. He foresaw, in the neo-colonial situation, the contention between two groups of intellectuals under conditions dictated by agencies of imperialism (the IMF, World Bank, etc). It is those third world and western intellectuals who since the 1980s have retreated to serve imperialism that Cabral referred to as ‘a service class’.

Today, the ‘organic intellectuals’ in Africa, as in Latin America, are challenging the neo-liberal agenda. Political parties based among the popular classes have emerged. Such parties are, in a Cabralian way, basing their political practice on an ongoing study of the internal and external realities. Cabral’s method is as relevant in the 1990s as it was in the 1960s and early 1970s. Today, the neoliberal triumphalist make hollow promises to the popular classes. Cabral always emphasised honesty. He never made extravagant promises. In his discussion with combatants, he demonstrated profound knowledge of the concerns of the people, their beliefs and aspirations. ‘Always bear in mind’, he urged PAIGC cadres,

that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children … (1980:131).

He suggested that ‘tribalism’ was not an invention of the people. Rather, it served the interests of frustrated petty-bourgeois opportunists who strove for political office as a means to accumulate wealth and exploit the popular classes (1980:61-62). These, he suggested, constitute an internal enemy mat is ‘all the social strata of our land, of classes of our land who do not want progress for our people, but merely want progress for themselves’. For Party cadres, he strongly advised against the tendency of feeling indispensable to the struggle, against bigmanship and the fear of losing power. He foresaw and educated PAIGC cadres to draw lessons from the experience) of others: ‘Many countries have come to ruin because the rulers were afraid of losing the lead’ (1980:97).

Portuguese aircraft shot down by PAIGC guerrillas — Photo taken by Roel Couthino of Portuguese aircraft shot down by PAIGC guerrilla in 1974

On Culture

Cabral’s analysis on the role of culture in national liberation enlarges on his earlier work: ‘Social Structure’ and ‘Weapon of Theory’. ‘Our struggle’, he wrote, ‘is based on our culture, because culture is the fruit of history’ (1980:58). It is also ‘a determinant of history, by the positive or negative influences which it exerts on the evolution of relationships between [humanity] and [the] environment’ (1973:41). Culture has its material base at the level of the productive forces and the mode of production. Culture was a valuable instrument in the resistance against foreign domination. In discussions with combatants, he enthused about culture. ‘We must enjoy our African culture, we must cherish it, our dances, our songs, our style of making statues, canoes, our cloths’ (1980:57).

The colonial forces, he noted, create a pliant indigenous petty bourgeoisie which take on the cultural values of the colonisers. This group becomes alienated from the popular masses. In the liberation struggle, this group had to undergo what he called a ‘reconversion of the minds’, a ‘re-Africanisation’ (1973:45,47,64). But this ‘re-Africanisation should not be confused with ‘Negritude’, the ‘uniqueness of the African soul’. If he opposed the racist underestimation of African cultural values, he equally opposed the ‘absurd linking of artistic creations, whether good or not, with supposed racial characteristics (1973:51). ‘It is important’, he argued,

To be conscious of the value of African culture in the framework of universal civilization, but to compare this value with that of other cultures, not with a view of deciding its superiority or inferiority, but in order to determine, in the general framework of the struggle for progress, what contribution African culture has made and can make, and what are the contributions it can or must receive from elsewhere (1973:52).

There is, therefore, no absolute or closed culture. All cultures evolve historically. Doors must be opened for other positive influences. These would, in turn, enrich the positive elements in African culture. In this respect, Cabral spoke of a scientific culture, of a universal culture, free from domination (1973:55). Cabral’s interpretation of people’s beliefs reflect his deep insight into the relationship between society and nature. ‘Certain of our dances’, he wrote,

Represent [a] relationship of [humanity] to the forest; folk appear clothed in straw, in the shape of birds, and others like great birds, with a huge beak, and folk run in fear .We can do many such dances, but we have to go beyond this, we cannot stop there (1980:59).

Humanity had to take charge of nature. It was counterproductive to talk down on the peasantry. Beliefs that instil fear had to be interpreted and transformed to heighten the people’s political consciousness. Culture, was, therefore, a dynamic force. But when manifested in passive resistance, it constituted wasted energy. Passive resistance could not challenge the enemy. This could only be effectively done through the creation of a Party.

Since the 1970s, the debate between the advanced capitalist countries and the third world countries on the ‘new international economic order’ and the ‘new world information and communication order’ has shown the inseparable link between economy and culture. The widening economic imbalances between North and South, the commoditisation of culture in the advanced capitalist countries and the use of advanced communication technology to disseminate these across the globe are a manifestation of the supranationalisation of capital. The imperialist countries’ relentless pressure to have unlimited access to the markets of the South have had consequences on the culture of peoples. Cabral’s formulation on the relationship between culture and social structure has been clearly borne out by the consumption pattern of such cultural commodities disseminated from the North. They are class specific, and they serve the petty bourgeoisie and other privileged strata. In this connection, some ‘institutional’ intellectuals no longer refer to imperialism. They have replaced it with ‘globalisation’, ‘interconnection and interdependency’ — that is ‘the end of capitalism’. The implication of these hollow formulations is to dehistoricise the people’s experience, to make them ashamed of their history, individualise their consciousness and to blunt their potential for political mobilisation. Cabral’s view of history and of culture is as relevant today as it was in the earlier phase of national liberation struggle.

On Internationalism

Cabral always emphasised the interconnectedness of the struggles of African Asian and Latin American peoples against imperialism. He was an uncompromising fighter for African unity. He strongly advocated solidarity with ‘the people of Cuba who were able to overcome reaction and imperialism in their land, to establish a just system which is encircled and threatened by im- perialists’. This call for solidarity with the Cuban Revolution is a relevant in the 1990s as it has been since 1959. Cabral was a fighter against racism. He urged the African people to show ‘solidarity, real solidarity’ with the African diaspora. ‘We have to give courageous support to their struggle, without pretending that we are going to wage the struggle for them’ (1980:81).

Conclusion

In commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the death of Amilcar Cabral, it is important to recognise his contribution to revolutionary theory and political practice. The world balance of forces has changed since his time. But the principal contradictions which he so eloquently analysed have never been resolved. If anything, they are as sharp as they were. That is where, despite the changing terrain for political practice, his ideas and practice hold great relevance. His understanding of the historical, social, economic, political and cultural realities in a given struggle, his rejection of ready-made models, but his readiness to learn from other experiences provide a sound methodology for political struggles in the 1990s. We should not be ashamed of our history. It has strengths which inform and enrich current and future practice.

Bibliographic Notes

Amilcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle, London, Heinemann, 1980; Cabral, Revolution in Guinea, London, Stage 1,1974; Cabral, Return to the Source, New York, Africa Information Service, 1973; Cabral, Analise de Alguns tipos de resistencia, Lisbon, Seara Nova, 1975. William Bollinger, ‘Learn from Others, Think for Ourselves: Central American Revolutionary Strategy in the 1980s’, Review of African Political Economy 32,1985; Tomas Borge, ‘The Reality of Latin America’, Race and Class, 33, 3,1992. Luis Cabral, Cronica da Libertacao, Lisbon, Edicoes O Jomal, 1984; Fidel Castro, ‘Che’s Ideas are Absolutely Relevant Today’ in Carlos Tablada, 1990 (below); Ronald H Chilcote, Amilcar Cabral’s Revolutionary Theory and Practice: A Critical Guide, Boulder &London: Lynne Rienner, 1991; Jean Copans, ‘the Marxists Conception of Class: Political and Theoretical Elaboration in the African and Africanist Context’, Review of African Political Economy 32,1985; Basil Davidson, ‘Revolutionary Nationalism’, Latin American Perspectives, 11,1 (1984). This issue of LAPs was dedicated to the work of Amilcar Cabral — see other contributions. Aquino de Branganca, Amilcar Cabral, Lisbon, Iniciativas Editorials, 1976; D G Dubois, ‘Erasing the Color Line’, Essence (New York) 24,6,1993; Joseph Hanlon, Mozambique: Who Calls the Shots, London, James Currey, 1991; Carlos Lopes, Guinea Bissau: From Liberation Struggle to Independent Statehood, London, Zed, 1987. PAIGC, Continua Cabral, Simposio Internacional Amilcar Cabral. Cabo Verde, Grafedito/Prelo — Estampa, 1984. This is a comprehensive collection of articles in Portuguese some of which were translated and published in LAPs (see above); James Petras, ‘Reply to Carlos Vilas, “The • Defection of the Critical Intellectuals'”, Latin American Perspectives, 20,2,1993; James Petras & Morris Morley, Latin America in the time of Cholera, London, Routledge, 1992; Issa Shivji, The Democracy Debate in Africa:`Tanzania’, Review of African Political Economy 50,1991. Carlos Tablada, Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism, New York, Pathfinder, 1990; Yash Tandon, ‘Political Economy and the Struggle for Democracy and Human Rights in Africa’, Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay), XXVI, 25,22 June 1991.

Mike Powell, Editor of the Original Special Issue

Featured Photograph: A stamp of Amílcar Cabral from the German Democratic Republic, produced in 1978 to commemorate the fifth anniversary of his death (12 February 2011).

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