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A review – The New Age of Catastrophe by Alex Callinicos

By
ROAPE
-

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

By Peter Lawrence

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

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

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

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

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

Covid-19 and the war on nature

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

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

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

Falling rates of profits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imperialism and war

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

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

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

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

The rise of the far-right

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where to from here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frontline South Africa 1973: mass strikes and beyond

By
ROAPE
-

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

By David Hemson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The counterattack – the bosses, the state and Chief Buthelezi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rising militancy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning from the struggle

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

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

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

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

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

I was optimistic our rising cadre could manage these tasks.

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

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

Rentier capitalism and urban geography in Africa

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

By Tom Gillespie and Seth Schindler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Land for sale in Accra (photo: Tom Gillespie)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Fana Gebresenbet and Yonas Tariku

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fives misreadings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To debate not foreclose

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

Foreign aid and conflict in Somaliland

By
ROAPE
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Foreign aid to Somaliland has fostered authoritarian rule and contributed towards conflict in the eastern city of Las Anod. In recent months, the apparent miracle of democracy has fractured as conflict has led to hundreds of deaths, and hundreds of thousands displaced. Jethro Norman writes there is a clear international dimension to the crisis. Those in Washington, London and Brussels are oblivious to the problem right under their nose: the consequences of their own aid and investment strategies. 

By Jethro Norman

On 18 May Somaliland marked its 32 year since independence. The date is known for being a day of colourful celebration and nationalist fervour in the capital Hargeisa, drawing in international visitors and journalists. This year, however, the celebrations were muted. Fighting in the eastern city of Las Anod has claimed hundreds of lives and displaced hundreds of thousands. The spiralling conflict has taken many international observers by surprise, and severely damaged Somaliland’s carefully curated reputation for peace and stability. It has also revealed a gaping blind spot in foreign engagement to Somalia.

From beacon of democracy to authoritarian rule

Somaliland declared its independence on 18 May 1991 following the collapse of the Somali Democratic Republic under Siad Barre. Whilst international recognition has remained elusive, Somaliland has earned the reputation of an island of peace, democracy and stability in an otherwise tumultuous Horn of Africa region. A little over two ago, as Somaliland celebrated its 30 year anniversary, a steady stream of journalistic and academic pieces heaped praise upon the de facto state, describing it as ‘a miracle on the Horn of Africa’, and ‘a beacon of democracy’.

This all started to change in December last year when a local opposition politician, Abdifatah Abdullahi Abdi, was assassinated by unknown attackers. Anti-government protests spread across the city, before morphing into an armed confrontation between the Somaliland Army and forces from the local Dhulbahante clan.

In February, the Somaliland army retreated to the outskirts of the city, as clan authorities renounced Somaliland and declared their intention to re-join Somalia. Since then, there has been a military stalemate: the Somaliland army has sporadically attacked the town, whilst forces inside Las Anod have been reinforced by clan-affiliated militias from across Somalia.

In a few short months, Somaliland’s narrative arc, carefully curated over more than three decades, has taken a dramatic nosedive. The fighting has drawn widespread international condemnation and the increasingly bellicose administration has even been threatened with US sanctions. Amnesty has called for an investigation into human rights and humanitarian law violations citing Somaliland forces indiscriminate shelling of Las Anod, including damage to hospitals and schools, and a number of civilian casualties.

How could this beacon of democracy mutate into a repressive authoritarian state, almost overnight? Quizzical analysts are finding answers in the usual suspects: from al-Qaeda linked terrorist groups to China, a dizzying array of actors are alleged to be behind the uprising. This is spurred on by the Somaliland government and its neoconservative allies in Washington who insist that the conflict is not local, but a conspiracy of international actors.

They are right – but for the wrong reasons. There is a clear international dimension to the crisis, but it is not transnational terrorism or Chinese intrigue that is destabilising the region. Those in Washington, London and Brussels are oblivious to the problem right under their nose: the consequences of their own ill-thought out aid and investment strategies.

Foreign aid fostering conflict

In its three-decade search for international recognition, Somaliland has long lamented a lack of international funding. Academics have suggested that, contrary to the conventional wisdom of the World Bank, the absenceof international aid at the crucial moment of Somaliland’s political formation may be a key reason for its success. Whilst this may have been true for Somaliland’s early years, it is no longer the case.

Emboldened by promises of peace and stability, international partners including the US, the United Kingdom, the EU, the UAE and Taiwan have all announced various infrastructure, trade and military cooperation initiatives and increased their diplomatic presence in the capital, Hargeisa. The multi-million-dollar investment by UAE’s DP World is transforming Berbera port into a 1 million container trade hub that is anticipated to reshape the regional economy. There has also been deepening security ties. The United Kingdom has funded and trained a controversial elite police unit, whilst Washington has been interested in establishing a new military base in Berbera.

This dizzying gush of international engagement intended to stabilise Somaliland has however had destabilising consequences for the whole region. Firstly, it has renewed hopes of Somaliland becoming internationally recognised as an independent state, dramatically raising the stakes, and intensifying competition amongst political elites over control.

The political crisis that emerged in summer of 2022 over delayed elections highlighted this increasingly fractious internal competition. In anti-government demonstrations in Hargeisa in August 2022, five civilians were killed in clashes with security forces, a grim harbinger of what was to come in Las Anod.

If the increased stakes of statehood have resulted in competition in the centre of the region, then it has done the opposite in the peripheries: uniting peripheral communities against Somaliland. Much of the recent infrastructural development is concentrated in the centre. The Berbera corridor for example, cuts a neat line of economic opportunity from Berbera, through Hargeisa, and into Ethiopia. This is an important dimension of the conflict in Las Anod.  The declaration to re-join Somalia made by traditional leaders in Las Anod decried an ‘economic embargo’ imposed by Somaliland designed to restrict the presence of international development agencies in the eastern regions. It is not only in Las Anod that resistance to the Somaliland state has grown. Over the last decade, movements to establish counter-administrations have emerged in three out of Somaliland’s six districts, including in the otherwise peaceful western region of Awdal.

The future of aid

This crisis highlights the need to re-design and refocus foreign aid and investment strategies. A skilful Somalilander elite, including a sizeable diaspora, successfully courted international partners and sold them a vision they desperately wanted to hear: of a fledgling state striving for peace and democracy. Aid and development has been criticised for becoming increasingly ‘bunkerised’ and securitised with international staff living in fortified compounds often sealed off from wider society and reliant on specific local partners for information. This situation makes it difficult for many international staff to travel outside of the central regions of Somaliland, and engage with the plurality of voices and political feelings within the territory.

The answer is not to cut aid. Rather, there is a need for a more careful and equitable distribution of aid. This requires aid and development agencies to be more flexible and mobile. Another consideration is to engage diaspora organisations instead of international humanitarian agencies. Whilst this comes with its own set of risks, diasporic aid is less bureaucratic and can access areas that international practitioners cannot.

This piece builds on the arguments the author made in a longer analysis in an article for African Arguments ‘Conflict in Las Anod and Crisis in Somaliland: External Investment, Intensifying Internal Competition, and the Struggle for Narrative’ (3 March 2023).

Jethro Norman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. His research and fieldwork has focused on East Africa (Somalia, Somaliland, Kenya, Tanzania, South Sudan), with expertise in humanitarianism, security, conflict and development. Jethro’s current research covers the politics of humanitarian assistance, trade and development in the Somali territories, with a particular interest in the role of the Somali diaspora.

Featured Photograph: A monument of a hand holding aloft a map of Somililand (3 May 2015).

A response to “The Pretoria Agreement: Mere cessation of hostilities or heralding a new era in Ethiopia?”

By
ROAPE
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In a response to Fana Gebresenbet and Yonas Tariku’s recent Debate piece in ROAPE’s journal, ‘The Pretoria Agreement: Mere cessation of hostilities or heralding a new era in Ethiopia?’.  Mulugeta Gebrehiwot, Alex de Waal, Martin Plaut, Jan Nyssen, Mohamed Hassen, and Gebrekirstos Gebreselassie argue that the article reproduces the central narrative threads of the propaganda of the Federal Government of Ethiopia. This is, they argue, ‘false and potentially defamatory’.

By Mulugeta Gebrehiwot, Alex de Waal, Martin Plaut, Jan Nyssen, Mohamed Hassen, and Gebrekirstos Gebreselassie

In a response to Fana Gebresenbet and Yonas Tariku’s recent Debate piece in ROAPE’s journal, ‘The Pretoria Agreement: Mere cessation of hostilities or heralding a new era in Ethiopia?’ [the Debate piece is free to read until the end of the month] asserts foreign commentators on the subject are supporters of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and that claims of genocide are a TPLF propaganda ploy. This is false and potentially defamatory. It reproduces central narrative threads of the propaganda of the Federal Government of Ethiopia. Fana and Yonas suggest that new Ethiopian voices have somehow ‘reframed’ the debate, but they produce no evidence of such intellectual reframing. The Pretoria negotiations confirm that the Tigrayan Central Command considered the human losses in case of protracted war and made the decision to sue for peace at any cost; yet the AU process does not resemble Ndubusi Ani’s formulations (2019) of any ‘African solutions’. Subsequent to the Pretoria Agreement, the Federal Government is politically shape-shifting in response to circumstance, and the people of Tigray continue to suffer extreme hardships. Fana and Yonas show little nuanced political understanding or empathy, indicating the lethargy of public discourse in Ethiopia today.

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We are writing in response to the recent article ‘The Pretoria Agreement: Mere cessation of hostilities or heralding a new era in Ethiopia?’ (Fana and Yonas 2023). We are surprised that ROAPE, which since its founding in 1974 has been a bastion of academic rigor and a commitment to scholarship in the cause of progressive social change (Review of African Political Economy, 1974), cleared this piece for publication.

Fana and Yonas observe that foreign commentators took different and conflicting positions over the Tigray war. That is correct. Their allegation, that named critics of the Federal Government of Ethiopia (FGE) are supporters of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) is neither substantiated nor correct. The determination of those who mentioned discontent among some Tigrayans over the TPLF decision to sign the Pretoria permanent cessation of hostilities, are ‘spoilers’ is false and potentially defamatory.

Fana and Yonas claim that their own analysis somehow transcends a polemical dichotomy among non-Ethiopians, pitting commentators who support the FGE against those who support the TPLF. This is not the case. Instead, the article reproduces central narrative threads of FGE propaganda. One of these is that an unprovoked TPLF attack on the Northern Command of the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) was the cause of the war. This is a propagandist claim which an increasing volume of well referenced academic work demonstrates to be false or at least ‘disguises more than it illuminates’ (Plaut and Vaughan, 2023, Assefa Fiseha, 2023). A second is that claims of genocide are a TPLF propaganda ploy. Thus, they reject out of hand the special forum in the Journal of Genocide Research on Ethiopia (Ibreck and de Waal, 2022), presumably because they prejudged the papers to be TPLF propaganda. On the contrary, the forum editors do not come to a conclusion as to whether genocide has been perpetrated in Tigray. The forum instead includes essays on historic violence in the Ethiopian peripheries, atrocities inflicted on the Oromo in the 19th century by the expanding Ethiopian empire, massacres by Italian fascists, and the Red Terror. The aim is to connect scholars of Ethiopia to scholarship on mass atrocities, on the basis that ‘recent violence in Tigray, or elsewhere in the country, cannot be understood in isolation’ (p. 85). Regardless of the qualification (genocide or ‘only’ genocidal intent), Fana and Yonas minimize what happened in Tigray in terms of massacres and deliberate starvation of civilians.

The authors suggest that new Ethiopian voices have somehow ‘reframed’ a debate distorted by foreigners, but give no indication of who has done this, where or how. To the contrary, we see no evidence of intellectual reframing other than privileging writers who happen to agree with the FGE. We see plenty of unsubstantiated ad hominem abuse. We see a coordinated effort by those associated with the current government to decry the record of the twenty-seven years of government by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front as an unmitigated catalogue of political failures, all of them attributable to the TPLF. Again, we see no effort to undertake a critical, balanced assessment of the record of those decades.

The most detailed account of the Pretoria negotiations, backed by documentation, is that published on the Kenyan website The Elephant shortly after the deal was signed (Concerned African Scholars, 2022). What this confirms is that the Tigrayan Central Command (both TPLF and non-TPLF military leaders) made the decision that the combined forces of the ENDF, the Eritrean Defense Force and Amhara regional forces were determined to continue their offensive, regardless of the human cost on both sides, and that the international community would do nothing to stop them. Consequently, they sued for peace. Those who trumpet the Pretoria Agreement, such as Fana and Yonas, imply that ‘might is right.’ Those who approach the agreement in a critical light, are concerned that the lesson to be drawn is that mass atrocity and starvation may be effective tools of war.

The authors also suggest that their dismissal of foreign scholars is consistent with an anti-colonial, ‘African solutions’ political stance. This is at odds with the one source they cite (Ani, 2019). Additionally, the AU process does not, in fact, resemble any of Ani’s three formulations—African agency, following indigenous African principles, and African-led innovation. It has, at most, a partial resemblance to ‘African agency’, but only in the limited sense that African Union officials held tight to the control of the process. The AU did not invoke any of its norms, principles and mechanisms during almost two years of conflict and starvation.[1] The last-minute agreement it brokered raises more questions than answers when measured against the norms, principles, and mechanisms of the organization itself.

The authors claim that the Pretoria Agreement is ‘a turning point marking… the beginning of the end of ethno-nationalism’s hegemonic centrality to national politics.’ To the contrary, we submit that one of the features of the current FGE is political shape-shifting in response to circumstance, and this includes embracing the multinational nature of Ethiopia governed under a federal arrangement just in new configurations.

Some seven months after the Pretoria Agreement, the people of Tigray continue to suffer extreme hardships. Millions remain displaced. Large areas, including Western Tigray, are still occupied by Eritrean and Amhara forces, contrary to the stipulations of the Agreement. Humanitarian assistance is not commensurate with needs. Rehabilitation of the health, water and agricultural infrastructure destroyed in the war—much of it looted or wrecked by the deliberate actions of the ENDF, EDF and Amhara forces—has not yet begun. We are surprised that the editors of a journal which has long prized its solidarity with subaltern populations and their struggles for self-determination, chose to publish an article which makes almost no reference to this suffering.

There is a wider phenomenon of denying, minimizing or misrepresenting the horrors that have been inflicted on the peoples of rural Ethiopia, notably Tigray. Over the last two years, academics, journalists and human rights investigators in Ethiopia have been facing an attempt to make as difficult as possible to ascertain facts and even worse, impossible to establish an accepted minimum basis of agreed facts (Aljazeera, 2021; Committee to Protect Journalists, 2022). This is a deliberate and coordinated campaign. We shall write about this separately.

For our purposes here, it suffices to write that Fana and Yonas, based in Addis Ababa, appear indifferent to the horrors suffered by their fellow citizens in Tigray and elsewhere in Ethiopia. This stands in contrast to the lead author of this rebuttal, Mulugeta, who has been in Tigray throughout the war and witnessed firsthand the sufferings of the civilians in Tigray. Fana and Yonas show little nuanced political understanding or empathy, which is a discouraging indicator of the health of public discourse in Ethiopia today.

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

Mulugeta Gebrehiwot is the founding director of the Institute for Peace and Security Studies (IPSS), Addis Ababa University and a senior fellow at the World Peace Foundation. Alex de Waal is the Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Martin Plaut is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London. Jan Nyssen is emeritus professor at Ghent University and a physical geographer. Mohamed Hassen is a professor of history and expert in the history of the Oromo people and Ethiopia. Gebrekirstos Gebreselassie is a researcher based in the Netherlands, and the founder and chief editor of Tghat.

Featured Photograph: A man passes a destroyed tank on the main street of Edaga Hamus, in the Tigray region, Ethiopia (5 June, 2021).

References

Ani, Ndubusi, 2019. ‘Three Schools of Thought on “African Solutions to African Problems”.’ Journal of Black Studies, 50.2, 135-155.

Assefa Fiseha, 2023. ‘Tigray: A Nation in Search of Statehood?’ International Journal on Minority and Group Rights.

Fana Gebresenbet and Yonas Tariku, 2023. ‘The Pretoria Agreement: Mere cessation of hostilities or heralding a new era in Ethiopia?’ Review of African Political Economy, DOI:

Ibreck, Rachel, and Alex de Waal, 2022. ‘Introduction: Situating Ethiopia in Genocide Debates,’ Journal of Genocide Research, 24.1, 83-96.

Plaut, Martin, and Sarah Vaughan, 2023. Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War. London, Hurst.

Notes

[1] At a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council on Sudan on 11 May 2023, the Ethiopian delegate voted against a resolution calling for a ceasefire and human rights reporting, on the grounds that it was not a timely move, and an ‘African solution’ along the lines of Pretoria would be appropriate. Sudanese democracy activists demurred saying they could not wait for two years for such steps.

The June Days – Senegal’s struggle for justice

By
ROAPE
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Since the start of the month, Senegal has seen major demonstrations, rioting, and violence. In an interview with ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig, Ndongo Sylla explains what is happening. Supporters of opposition leader, Ousmane Sonko, are furious at the regime’s attempt to frustrate next year’s elections by framing Sonko on false charges. Sylla examines the social and political forces that are engulfing the country and threatening to overturn the political class and the neo-colonial settlement.

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Leo Zeilig: Senegal was rocked by protests last week after opposition figure Ousmane Sonko was sentenced to two years in prison on 1 June – yet he was not found guilty of rape. Can you briefly explain the background to the charges and what happened?

Ndongo Sylla: In February 2021, Ousmane Sonko, Senegal’s leading political opposition figure, was accused of repeated rape and death threats by Adji Raby Sarr, a young employee of a massage salon he was visiting during the curfew period at the height of the covid-19 pandemic. His arrest in March 2021 led to violent demonstrations across most of the country for five days. 14 deaths were recorded. Calm was only restored when Macky Sall decided to release Sonko. Sonko and his lawyers claim that he is the victim of a state plot. What evidence did they put forward in favour of their hypothesis? The woman who owns the massage salon, despite the intimidation she had suffered, denied the plaintiff’s accusations. To put pressure on her, during her interrogation, she was separated for several hours from her premature baby whose life was put at risk. According to her lawyer, she was offered money to change her testimony. A woman who also worked for the massage salon contradicted the plaintiff’s claim and revealed that the latter asked her to be left alone in the room with Sonko. The gynecologist who examined the plaintiff maintained that he had no material evidence to prove a possible rape. He was subsequently intimidated. The gendarmerie officer in charge of investigating the complaint found the plaintiff’s statements contradictory and suspected a political plot. He also claimed that his investigation report had been falsified with the aim of charging Sonko. He was eventually fired from the gendarmerie. The “unfalsified” investigation report that discharged Ousmane Sonko ended up with a famous Senegalese journalist, who commented on it extensively in a video that went viral. For this, he was jailed for several months.

The plaintiff herself confided about the alleged rape intrigue to her marabout (religious guide), who recorded their telephone conversations without her knowledge. These recordings were widely circulated on social media. The plaintiff admitted to having contacts with important figures in the regime who want to see Sonko fall. Before the judge, the plaintiff confirmed that it was indeed her voice that could be heard on the phone recordings  but specified that she was deliberately lying in order to cheat her marabout. She said she had also lied about her initial statement that she was “pregnant”.

Between March 2021 and June 2023, the plaintiff and her lawyers claimed to have compromising videos. Before the judge, they produced no tangible evidence to support their accusation. According to Sonko’s lawyers, given the absence of any material evidence, the case should have been dismissed from the outset. They saw the decision to hold a trial based solely on the plaintiff’s statements and alleged traces of sperm (unidentifiable) as part of an attempt to liquidate a political opponent.

Sensing that the rape charge was difficult to establish, the prosecutor, in his closing argument, asked the judge to re-characterise it as “corruption of youth”. Sonko, having chosen not to attend the trial, was tried in absentia. As a result, his lawyers were not allowed to speak in court. The final verdict acquitted Sonko of the charges of rape and death threats, but sentenced him to two years’ imprisonment for “corruption of youth”, a charge that had not previously been brought, and which came as a surprise to everyone, including Sonko’s lawyers. This conviction comes on top of another recent one for “defamation”, which apparently renders Sonko ineligible to run in the forthcoming elections.

When the verdict was announced on 1 June, unprecedented violent demonstrations engulfed the country. Roads were blocked everywhere. Bank branches, supermarkets, petrol stations and public infrastructures were ransacked and looted. The homes and cars of certain politicians from the ruling coalition were torched, as were courthouses and public buses. The same applies to the premises and archives of the Faculty of Letters and Humanities at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. Even if a complete assessment is not yet available, the economic losses are undoubtedly colossal.

Well-equipped but small in number the Forces of Defence and Security (FDS – police and gendarmerie) were subjected to the fury of demonstrators. Some members of the FDS were killed by the demonstrators or unwittingly by their own colleagues. Demonstrators sometimes managed to seize police vehicles and set them alight. Overwhelmed, the police sometimes used young people as human shields, as attested by a viral video investigated by the Al Jazeera TV channel. UNICEF has publicly called for an investigation into the matter. The FDS also attacked the demonstrators and fired live ammunition at them, resulting in a number of deaths. Despite the claims of the Senegalese authorities, it has been established that the FDS cooperated with armed henchmen who were recruited to suppress the demonstrators. The army came in to reinforce the FDS, notably to protect a few strategic locations, but without taking part in the repression. It received a triumphant welcome from demonstrators in some Dakar neighbourhoods, as online videos show.

Can you talk us through the protests? Tragically at least 15 people were killed by the security services. Where have the protests been? What cities? Who has been in the streets, and are workers mobilising, and what has been the position of trade unions, and civil society?

Demonstrations took place in most of Senegal’s 14 regions. Dakar and Ziguinchor (stronghold of Sonko, who is mayor of the region) were the epicenters of the protests. The 23 deaths – not 14 as you report – including three children, recorded between June 1 and 2 by Amnesty International came from these two regions. The Red Cross assisted around 360 people wounded in these two regions. As in March 2021, young people mobilised in early June this year.

In my opinion, the most symbolic image of this popular uprising is that of an ordinary woman, dressed in a loincloth, dragging, with difficulty, a tire to be burned.

The trade unions were not involved in the protests. Neither did the “official” civil society organisations – those in dialogue with the government and donor agencies, which opts for other modes of action. Sonko’s party, the PASTEF, and his coalition (Yewwi Askan Wi) have called on the demonstrators to continue their “resistance”, arguing that this is a right recognised by the Senegalese Constitution. The same goes for the Y’en a Marre movement, which is now calling for Macky Sall’s resignation, and FRAPP (Front pour une Révolution Anti-impérialiste Populaire et Panafricain), a movement that has seen some of its members unjustly imprisoned.

Demonstrations in support of Sonko have also been organised by the Senegalese diaspora in several cities: Washington, Paris, Milan, etc. Following some attacks, the Senegalese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has temporarily shut consulates abroad. Social media have been an important place for information sharing (images, news and also how to circumvent state imposed restrictions on social media) and (emotional) mobilisation through the hashtag #FreeSenegal. It’s worth noting the recent emergence of diaspora-based cyberactivists who provide their numerous followers with information of varying quality on the situation in Senegal, while urging them to take to the streets to “get rid of” Macky Sall, or to orchestrate acts of sabotage against the property of those close to him or his supporters (e.g. burning down their homes). It should also be noted that, prior to the June events, hacker group Anonymous took down Senegalese government websites in “retaliation” for restrictions on liberties.

Who is responsible for the violence?

In the face of numerous destructions and the unfortunate death toll, Senegalese intellectuals who have dared to point the finger of blame at the government have been subjected to violent ad hominem attacks by its hired pens. But are these intellectuals wrong? I don’t think so. By calling for “resistance” and the law of retaliation, Sonko and his supporters have undoubtedly contributed to making things worse. But the worm was already in the fruit. Senegal would never have ended up in this situation if the current regime had behaved in a constitutional  manner, was mindful of the law and had not developed the habit of using the justice system against its opponents.

The unprecedented outpouring of violence from ‘both camps’  could have been prevented if Macky Sall managed in a fair manner, as he promised [see from 1h42], to “reduce the opposition to its simplest expression”. Instead, his regime started relentlessly hunting down Sonko’s party members as well as journalists and activists who dared to criticise his policies and rule. Before the events of June, over 400 people had been put in prison, a number that must have risen since then. Most of us know young people who, although not among the protesters, are languishing in prison because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The leader of Y’en a Marre, Aliou Sané, was arrested and put in prison for a few days by the prosecutor’s office on the grounds that he was taking part in the demonstrations. Having been lucky enough to be assisted by a lawyer and to appear before a judge, he was able to produce a video clearing him of the charges against him. But how many young people, unknown to the public and often detained in horrific conditions, are so lucky?

Against this backdrop of unprecedented government repression, freedom of expression has also been drastically curtailed. Reporters without borders released a report in early May showing a 31-place fall for Senegal between 2022 and 2023. A trend that has continued recently with the cutting off of mobile internet for several days, the suspension of the signal of the Walf TV, reputed to be “the voice of the voiceless”, and even of one of its electronic accounts where it is supposed to receive solidarity donations from ordinary Senegalese.

In French-speaking Africa, in the post-single-party context, the tendency of the regimes in power – faithful allies of Paris – is to use state power to choose their own opponents in elections. In the 2019 presidential election won by Macky Sall in the first round, his two main rivals – former Dakar mayor Khalifa Sall and President Wade’s son Karim – were eliminatedfrom the race following prison sentences handed down against them. To “rationalise” the number of presidential candidates, the regime introduced “citizen sponsorship”, which ECOWAS Justice Court considered afterwards as a violation of “the right of free participation in elections” that should end. That is still not the case. Moreover, Macky Sall has in the past years repeatedly stated that he is not entitled to a third term in office. This was confirmed in emphatic terms by his current Minister of Justice, a professor of constitutional law. But in an interview with a French magazine, Macky Sall now maintains that he has the right to do so, and that he reserves the right to decide whether or not to run for another term.

In 2020, in Côte d’Ivoire, Alassane Ouattara forced a third term, obtained an international arrest warrant for his main political opponent in exile and also introduced “citizen sponsorship” as an electoral guillotine. The same methods are still at work today. His rival Laurent Gbagbo is ineligible, having been struck off the electoral roll as a result of a well-timed judicial conviction.

When rulers abuse the law, persecute opponents and dissidents without a second thought, and restrict civil liberties, we should not be surprised to see a counter-power emerge in the form of popular protest and violence. This is not an excuse for violence, but a simple observation drawn from the lessons of history. As Mandela wrote in his autobiography The Long Walk to Freedom, “it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a point, one can only fight fire with fire.”

Many commentators have said that the movement in Senegal is the largest since 1988 (when former president Abdou Diouf declared a state of emergency as supporters of a defeated rival, Abdoulaye Wade, fought the police) – how do you measure the scale of the protest action, and how is it being organised on the ground? Can it be sustained?

Although the 1988 events sent Senegal into a state of emergency, it’s not the reference I’d choose. In terms of national scope, numbers mobilised and violence, the events of early June 2023 are, in my opinion, a repeat on a larger scale of the “five days of anger” of March 2021.

In terms of political significance, the events of early June are akin to the socio-political crisis of December 1962, which saw President Senghor, backed by France, get rid of Mamadou Dia, then President of the Council and head of the Executive. At the time, Mamadou Dia wanted to liquidate the colonial economy, and was banking on the creation of democratic rural cooperatives. His societal project collided with the interests of the dominant political class, the marabouts who controlled the groundnut economy, French capitalists and their government. These various groups set their sights on Senghor, a member of the Christian minority in a country whose population is officially over 90% Muslim.

Senghor had used the judicial system to imprison Mamadou Dia for over 11 years in inhumane conditions. With Dia ousted, Senghor had free rein to create a monarchical constitution…at the cost of forty dead and over 250 woundedfollowing the twin elections of 1963.

In my opinion, this is the same type of struggle that’s being played out right now between Macky Sall and Sonko. But there are some differences. Unlike Dia, Sonko enjoys an enormous popularity rating among young people, a social group now numbering in the millions, most of them being “idle” (not in employment, education or training) and very much present on social media, a tool that enables a better circulation of information, whatever its quality, and helps to make visible the reprehensible acts that existing powers would be tempted to hide, censor or disguise.

Some people have been arguing that Senegal is no longer the vibrant democracy it used to be. What do you make of this claim?

Comrade, let me make it clear from the outset that so-called “representative democracy” was not originally designed to be representative of any “public interest”. Its purpose was to block democracy, understood as a regime in which the working classes sit in (and numerically dominate) the sovereign bodies of legislation and control. In the 19th century, the regime we now call “democracy” (representative/liberal) was known as “republic”, “elective aristocracy” and “bourgeois government”. It was only in the 20th century that this oligarchic regime came to be equated with democracy. That capitalism and democratic government were incompatible was self-evident to the American founding fathers, some of whom regarded democracy as “the worst of all political evils”. That’s why the words “democracy” and “democratic” are nowhere to be found in the current US Constitution, which was conceived against a backdrop of serious social unrest for which a constitutional antidote was needed. For those interested in this little-known history, I refer you to my own workon the topic and to those of John Dunn, Luciano Canfora and Francis Dupuis-Déri.

The so-called Western democratic countries have oligarchic governments (the rich make the sovereign decisions; note that it’s a mistake to consider the election of representatives  as a “delegation of power”, it is rather a way of influencing the formation of a sovereign body), but they have managed to achieve democratic performance (the conquest of important freedoms and better living conditions for the majority) due to historical factors that cannot be reproduced in countries under imperialist domination, and which I cannot dwell on here for lack of space.

The point here is to say that the idea that Senegal is a “democracy” is farcical. If the Western countries that are supposed to be “models” are not, how can “mimicking student” Senegal be? As in most French-speaking countries, which have imitated the French Constitution of the Fifth Republic, the one that General de Gaulle carved out for himself, the Senegalese political system gives excessive powers to the president, who is a kind of monarch by electoral right for the duration of his term.

However, with that said, it has to be acknowledged that Senegal has succeeded in forming a nation: ethnic and religious pluralism has not been a source of discord as in some countries on the continent. So far, there has been a culture of tolerance, peace, and hospitality among the people. These laudable aspects have nothing to do with – and do not derive from – the nature of the political regime, which has been and remains fundamentally despotic in its current practice.

Anger at President Macky Sall’s tenure is intense across the country, with very little support. What does Sall represent, and who does he represent. What is the balance of international (and specifically western) influence and power across Senegal and how are these dynamics impacting the political crisis?

For his supporters, Macky Sall is the president with the best economic record in Senegal’s history. They cite economic growth rates of around 6% on average per year before the pandemic, visible through modern infrastructures – such as a toll highway, a regional express train, a new airport, etc. – and social programs such as cash transfers, a measure recommended by the World Bank, particularly with a view to making poor households more “resilient”, and presumably preventing a social explosion driven by popular frustrations. But there is another way of looking at it.

Senegal’s economic growth has been driven by foreign currency debt, which has more than doubled since 2012 as a proportion of GDP. It has not generated any net creation of decent jobs, one of the main demands of the Senegalese people. Interestingly, the French Treasury noted in 2020 that Senegal’s Development blueprint – the Plan Sénégal Emergent  – has been highly beneficial to the French economy.

Assessing Macky Sall’s economic policy from the point of view of economic and monetary sovereignty, I’d say he’s mainly been concerned with defending foreign interests. He agreed to sign the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with the European Union, despite the fact that (i) most of the existing studies carried out by independent Senegalese experts and by ECOWAS [Economic Community of West African States] showed a significant negative impact, and (ii) Senegal’s status as a Least Developed Country (LDC) meant that he was under no obligation to sign them. Better still, he defended the signing of such agreements by other West African countries. Another example is the trade and financial sanctions against Mali. In January 2022, the ECOWAS member countries, under the auspices of their French-speaking counterparts, themselves under the orders of France, decided to sanction Mali officially to put pressure on the military government to hold early elections. An unspoken motive was that the French government also wanted to punish the new Malian regime, which had resolved to drive out the French military troops present on its soil. As a result, the Malian government, a member of the CFA franc zone, was no longer able to access its accounts at the common central bank and to its domestic financial system. It had to default on its debts. The problem was that these commercial and financial sanctions were illegal under domestic law, franc CFA monetary union and ECOWAS provisions.

Worse still, in Senegal’s case, imposing sanctions against Mali was tantamount to punishing itself. As an export destination for Senegalese products, Mali is more significant than all the EU countries combined. No government concerned with legality and its economic interests would have agreed to sanction a neighbouring country just to please France and the EU.

A final example: the government of Senegal awarded oil and gas exploration licenses to Total, despite the fact that Total had initially not even been considered in the call for tenders, and that its late bid was apparently not advantageous for Senegal. Shocked by such an outcome, the then Minister of Hydrocarbons, Thierno Alassane Sall, resigned and subsequently accused President Macky Sall of “high treason” in a book.

With the imminent exploitation of oil and gas, Senegal has become a popular destination for world leaders. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, President of the EU Commission Ursula Von der Leyen, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and others have all made the trip to Dakar. Each of them see Macky Sall as a valuable guardian of Western interests.

Unsurprisingly, the communiqués by Western countries in response to the recent uprising were as timid as those issued by ECOWAS and the African Union. They called for calm, but refrained from denouncing the government’s handling of the crisis, unlike organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Can ‘the streets’ – and the extraordinary history of social movements in the country – win out? Previously efforts to remake Senegal from below have failed, with (opposition) politicians, riding a wave of popular mobilisation, from opposition into government. Is there an alternative emerging from within the radicalising support base for Sonko?

The “streets” can never win outright because the people – the popular and dominated classes – do not participate in the exercise of “institutional power”, State power. Others must decide for them within the framework of the representative system. At best, the “streets” can act as a brake on despotic excesses and, if necessary, redistribute the cards within the political game. So far, this force has saved Sonko from prison on two occasions, in March 2021 and early June 2023. So far, Sonko enjoys “popular immunity”.

Let me give you an example. The Secretary General of his party, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, was arrested without a warrant and put in prison for posting a text on Facebook in which he spoke of the “beggarisation of the judiciary” (clochardisation de la justice – in French). Sonko took the same text and posted it on his Facebook page. Nothing happened. Because the government knows what will happen if it tries to put him in prison. At the moment, even though he has been convicted by the Senegalese courts, he still hasn’t been arrested…he is rather, according to his lawyers, ‘illegally sequestered’ at his home by the FDS since the end of May, without the possibility of leaving his home, receiving his lawyers, his party members, and so on. The ultimate aim of the demonstrators is for Sonko to be the victorious candidate in the next presidential election scheduled for February 2024. There are fears of a new cycle of violence when the government tries to stop him or his candidacy. For the time being, a temporary peace will likely be “bought” in exchange for the pursuit of a regime of impunity. But for how long?

What sort of alternative does a Sonko government offer the poor?

Sonko currently represents the hope of change for Senegalese youth and a significant part of the diaspora. Assuming he emerges from his legal troubles and becomes Senegal’s fifth president, he will be placed between the hammer of powerful enemies – the privileged inhabitants of the neo-colonial order and possibly the social groups and countries whose economic interests might be threatened – and the anvil of demands from the working classes, who expect an improvement in their living conditions, and from his own militants, who will want to be rewarded for their “sacrifices”.

To be frank, I fear that Senegal is heading for political instability. Why? Contrary to the “rosy” and apologetic analyses that extol the unshakeable strength of Senegal’s “social contract”, I understand Senegal’s relative political “stability” in two ways.

Firstly, until now the ruling class (including most intellectuals) has been satisfied with the neo-colonial pact with the French elites. As long as political struggles do not challenge this neo-colonial pact, the country can aspire to neo-colonial political stability. This is the same type of “stability” found in countries such as Cameroon, Gabon and Côte d’Ivoire (until the death of Houphouët Boigny). Before Sonko, the only challenge to this neo-colonial pact came from Mamadou Dia.

Secondly, Senegal’s political stability depended on one thing it didn’t have: strategic resources such as oil. All the oil-exporting countries that use the CFA franc have heads of state who are presidents for life: there are no presidential term limits (Gabon, Cameroon and the Republic of Congo), and often the simple majority system (one round) prevails.

A democratic jolt is therefore needed to prevent an undesirable scenario. However, I don’t see it coming from the “political class” or the intelligentsia, the vast majority of whom continue to demonstrate their inability to divorce themselves from the liberal thinking of Thomas Hobbes and Montesquieu, with a view to original, endogenous socio-political reflection.

As for young people, who make up the reality of the demos, the gerontocratic political system excludes them from decision-making bodies that decide their future. This leaves them only with the “streets” and social networks. And yet, beyond the partisan conflicts of the moment, we Senegalese should all listen carefully to the words of a young demonstrator (my translation from Wolof):

President Macky Sall […] we don’t even have enough to treat our poor sick mothers. We are socially marginalised people! Our little brothers and sisters no longer go to school. Life is expensive: a loaf of bread costs 175 CFA francs, a kilo of sugar 700 CFA francs. What is the price of a bag of rice? What’s the price of gas? Macky take pity on us! We have resources like oil, gas, zircon, gold. We have everything we need to develop our country! As soon as the gold from Sabadola [located in south-eastern Senegal] is extracted, its destination is France. France is one of the countries with the largest gold reserves. Yet they have no natural resources […] How many years has our oil been exploited? Our zircon? Our phosphate? We love our country! We believe in it!

Admittedly, the official destination of gold mined in Senegal is often Switzerland rather than France. But the message is unequivocal and straightforward: Senegalese youth aspires to an economy that serves the needs of the masses.

Ndongo Samba Sylla is Research and Programme Manager for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. He is the editor and author of a number of books including Africa’s Last Colonial Currency and a long-time collaborator and comrade of ROAPE. 

Featured Photograph: Protests against the arrest of opposition leader and former presidential candidate Ousmane Sonko in Dakar, Senegal, 5 March, 2021 (Leo Correa).

Forgotten drafts of Walter Rodney’s third visit to Cuba

By
ROAPE
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ROAPE’s Chinedu Chukwudinma, unearths two previously unknown draft texts by Walter Rodney in the archives in Atlanta. He writes how Rodney was inspired by the lessons of the Cuban revolution, and that during a prolonged visit to Cuba between 1968-1969, he began to imagine a world without racism and inequality. Rodney argued that black people in Jamaica and the US could build a socialist society through a guerrilla revolution. Both texts concern radical development and class struggle which lay at the centre of Rodney’s work after 1970. Chukwudinma examines an incredible seven month visit to Cuba by the Guyanese revolutionary.  

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

Little is known about Walter Rodney’s visit to Cuba from November 1968 to June 1969. When I explored the Walter Rodney Papers in the Atlanta archive in the autumn of 2022, I only stumbled upon one correspondence about his stay on the island. It was a letter dated 4 July 1969 from the University of Dar Salaam (UDSM) to Pinar de Rio, the capital city of the most western province of Cuba. Its author thanked Rodney for his mail on 10 May, in which he applied for a “lectureship in African history”.

I can only imagine Rodney walking down the streets of the provincial capital named after heroes of Cuban independence, Jose Marti and the Afro-Cuban General Antonio Maceo. Perhaps his interest in the history of African slavery in Cuba led him to Pinar Del Rio’s tobacco plantations, which sprawled over plains surrounded by limestone mountains on the horizon. After all, it is the site of the world’s finest cigars. However, I can only say with certainty that the letter failed to reach the Afro-Guyanese historian in Pinar del Rio; he had already made up his mind and left Cuba for Dar es Salaam.

In this essay, I aim to bring attention to the details and motivations surrounding Rodney’s obscure journey to Cuba. I then shed light on the significance of his visit for his political development by presenting two unpublished drafts I suspect he wrote from Cuba. I argue they represent an expansion of Rodney’s case for guerrilla revolution in Jamaica and the United States in the aftermath of 1968, the year of global revolt.

Returning to Cuba again and again

It was not the first time Rodney had visited Cuba. During his undergraduate years at the University of the West Indies (UWI), he first visited Cuba only a year after the revolution of 1959 and again in early 1962. He returned from his journeys with literature, including Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare. A decade later, Rodney remembered his travels with the utmost enthusiasm. “Because I was with Cuban students”, he wrote, “I got some insight at an early period into the tremendous excitement of the Cuban Revolution. One must live with a revolution to get its full impact, but the next best thing is to get there and see a people attempting to grapple with real problems of development”.

To live with the revolution, he planned a longer visit to Cuba in November 1968. But this third visit was motivated by peculiar circumstances. Only a month before his departure, the Jamaican government had banned Rodney from Jamaica upon his return from the Montreal Black Writers Conference. Rodney, who had spent nine months lecturing history UWI, had gained the respect of radical students, Rastafarians and unemployed youth for his Black Power agitation on campus and off-campus while raising the fears of Jamaica’s elite. So, when news of his ban spread, the masses rebelled against the Jamaican state from 15-16 October.

Brian Rodway’s banner to commemorate Walter Rodney’s birthday.

“The Rodney Riots” and “Rodney affair”, as they became known in newspapers, had raised Rodney’s international profile making him famous among activists, but notorious among governments. Forced to linger in Canada, Rodney arranged his travel to Cuba in between his frantic schedule of speaking at rallies and community meetings against his ban and giving interviews to the Canadian press. “He wanted a break and to do some writing,” said Patricia to me when reflecting on her husband’s banning. She continued with more information on his state of mind. “He was unsure whether he wanted to go back into academia”. Rodney had suffered a profound existential crisis. His time in Jamaica had left him bitter towards pretentious ivory tower academics, satisfied with learning and teaching for the sole sake of it. He was of a different breed. He was devoted to learning and teaching for the oppressed working masses who could change history. Doubting whether academia could support his aims, he went to Cuba to find himself.

There may have been a more pressing reason for his departure in November 1968. An acquaintance of Rodney’s in Montreal, Afro-Canadian activist Raymond Watts claimed he learnt about an urgent threat to Rodney’s life from the Montreal-Based Haitian socialist Dr Max Chancy, who was in touch with Cuban intelligence. In this scenario, the Guyanese historian left for Cuba because he received a tip that his life was in danger. This rumour, which is unfounded, somewhat satisfied my soul. I  have found Walter’s decision to leave his family for Cuba puzzling – he left between his wife’s near miscarriage and the end of her pregnancy. Although Walter had arranged for his wife and three-year-old son to accompany him, his family could not obtain a visa. When the Rodneys reunited in late October 1968 in London, Patricia was recovering from the tremendous hardship she suffered after her husband’s expulsion from Jamaica. Whilst in the middle of her pregnancy, Patricia had joined the UWI student protest to reinstate her husband. Because of police tear gas and repression, she was hospitalised almost losing her unborn daughter.

In December 1968, the tireless seven-month-pregnant Patricia moved her family to Tanzania to live with friends in a city she knew and adored. She has always praised her husband for performing his share of household chores, encouraging her to pursue her studies, and being a good and loving father. I found countless examples in Rodney’s life supporting her assertions. But, in those days, could the young historian have shown an aloofness toward family responsibilities at the expense of his own wants and desires? This would not be uncharacteristic of most men of his time and most today. Or did the couple agree that Rodney should leave for his safety? In March 1969, Patricia gave birth without a husband by her side. The couple’s second child was three months old when Walter returned from Cuba in June 1969.

Fragments of Rodney’s activities in Cuba

I found few details of Rodney’s third visit to Cuba. They begin with a strange, declassified CIA document from 1969. The document is a newspaper article that shares the information of a Cuban whistle-blower, once employed at the Cuban Consul in Paris. The Cuban defector had alerted the Americans that Rodney had travelled to Havana in November 1968 via Paris and Prague. The document underscores the international notoriety Rodney had acquired after the riots of October 1968, but says no more about his journey.

Next, we have the memories of the Jamaican scholar-activist Horace Campbell. This close friend of Rodney told a Cuban scholar, Samuel Fure Davis, that Dr Armando Entralgo was the main contact of the Afro-Guyanese historian in Cuba. In the late 1960s, Dr Entralgo was on the path to becoming Cuba’s most reputed expert on African affairs, history, and culture. In 1963, he opened Cuba’s first African embassy in Accra to forge relations with national liberation movements. He worked as the ambassador to Ghana until Nkrumah’s overthrow in 1966. Upon his return to Cuba, Dr Entralgo became a professor of African history. He worked toward the establishment of a specialisation module in African and Asian history within the School of History at the University of Havana. Amongst these efforts, Dr Entralgo had invited Rodney to Cuba to write something on African history and its ties to Europe. “Walter told me the Cubans inspired him to write How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, wrote Campbell to me. He explained that the Cubans had asked Rodney to recommend a good book on African history, but he could not think of a title worthy of being read. Aside from Dr Entralgo, Rodney befriended Osvaldo Cardenas­, a young Afro-Cuban sociologist who would later become the ambassador to Jamaica. Some years ago, he had told Afro-Cuban Scholar Zuleica Romay via email that “Walter Rodney studied Spanish, did research and read a lot”.

Finally, Patricia remembers some information about her husband’s activities in Cuba which she followed from Tanzania. “He was very excited about the Cuban revolution” she told me remembering Rodney’s letters to her. As Patricia was a nurse, Rodney shared with her his fondness for the reorganisation of Cuba’s health care system. However, his journey was tainted by his silence as shown in Patricia’s letter from  6 January 1969. “Still no word from Walter”, she wrote to her Guyanese friends in London, Jessica and Eric Huntley, whom she had stayed with from late October until she departed for Tanzania in December 1968. She was alluding to Walter’s lack of communication two and a half months after he had landed in Cuba.

 “Walter was doing a lot of writing and reflecting,” Patricia told me. She implied elsewhere that Walter had to overcome stationery shortages and broader material scarcities bought on by the imperialist embargo on Cuba: “He wrote in whatever paper he had in his hands, mainly on napkins”, she specified to Zuleica Romay. The result of this diligent labour was a manuscript, which none can find today. “We’re still looking for the manuscript. It’s called Black Struggles… somehow it got misplaced” Patricia said to me, “lots of things got lost along the way”.

Encounters with two powerful drafts  

Today, I have come to the conclusion that the completed manuscript is lost and perhaps will remain so forever. I had often daydreamed about going to Cuba to locate this precious item before some scholars warned me about the troubles of accessing Cuban archives. Six months ago, during my visit to the Atlanta archives, my hopes turned towards finding something there that Rodney could have written from Cuba.

A few hours before the end of a routine visit to the archives, I caught sight of two strange documents that awakened my curiosity and excitement. Entitled Africans Abroad in Jamaica and African Abroad in America, they looked like two draft chapters of a larger manuscript at first glance. “Perhaps they were parts of speeches that Rodney made”, I then wondered to myself, pondering over their casual prose. Although they seem to fit nicely with the lost manuscript his widow told me about, nowhere could I find a reference to the title Black Struggles. Rodney had typed out 41 pages of the first chapter and 31 pages of the second draft. But he had not concluded the American document, which ends abruptly. Rodney edited sections of the unpolished document. Sometimes he crossed out words, sentences, and even entire paragraphs towards the end of both manuscripts. Sometimes he retyped those very paragraphs or enhanced them with handwriting on extra pages.

Walter Rodney and Bill Strickland of the Institute of the Black World (IBW) which was based in Atlanta, Georgia.

From my reading of the documents, I suspected that Rodney had written them from Cuba in early 1969. The only explicit date I found was a reference to Guyana’s “fraudulent election in December 1968”, which combined with an allusion to Hugh Shearer as the “present” prime minister of Jamaica. On several occasions, Rodney appears to educate a foreign audience: “Until today many blacks in Jamaica will tell you that Garvey is not dead physically”, he writes before explaining how Garvey remains a symbol of resistance in Jamaica. The text also bristles with references to Cuban history, culture and praises of the 1959 revolution. Plunged into frenzied thoughts over what I had encountered, I began pacing up and down the archival room, until realising that I annoyed the poor staff member left with me that evening.

African abroad in Jamaica: A sequel to The Groundings

In these powerful unpolished drafts, Rodney reveals his optimism at the possibility of a Black Power revolution led by guerrilla fighters in Jamaica and the United States. Part one, Africans Abroad in Jamaica, reads like a sequel to Rodney’s The Groundings with my Brothers ­– a collection of the speeches he made during his time in Jamaica, published by his London comrades. In the same polemical style as Groundings, Rodney offers a more vivid account of Jamaican underdevelopment under neo-colonialism than any of his prior writings. In poetic prose, he tells us how the collusion between the local elite and Western companies through foreign investment in development programmes has increased wealth inequality on the island:

Black people in the Kingston slums can glance up and see the private mansions which the local capitalists are building on the hillsides, each at the cost of thousands of immoral pounds, luxury hotels are never very far from the shacks of the local population in the tourist resort areas; American cars of the latest model pass by as workers in the hot sun and the hot tar are waiting on the inefficient capitalist bus; whites roll up in their limousines and photograph the peasant on his donkey; peasants heroically cultivate little patches of rock land clinging to the hillside while beneath them the level fertile land is monopolized by sugar estates and other lesser capitalist.

Although Rodney’s class anger runs through Africans abroad as it does in Groundings, his concerns in the draft diverge from his Black Power manifesto. Africans abroad reveals a shift in Rodney’s main political priorities after his departure from Jamaica. Rodney devoted much of Groundings to challenging African history and attacking the multiracial character and politics of Jamaica’s elite to empower black minds. Yet, he moves the theme of black empowerment into the background in Africans Abroad to focus on the class struggle, (under)development, and the question of revolutionary violence.

His new focus partly came from what he witnessed in Cuba during his visit. Fidel Castro’s state had launched the Revolutionary Offensive of 1968, responding to the failures of its previous self-sufficient development model. The Offensive was an aggressive campaign of industrialisation and expansion of export agriculture. It also nationalised small businesses to increase state control over agricultural production. Rodney believed that Cuba’s industrialisation enabled farmers and workers to “control their own destinies” by raising living standards. Consequently, he argues in Africans abroad that Jamaica’s path out of underdevelopment should follow Cuba’s example by breaking with imperialism, ending unequal divisions of wealth and modernising through technology. Furthermore, he praises the ban on prostitution and gambling in Cuba, which Castro completed under the “New Man” ideology that accompanied state-led development. This state ideology promoted an identity that glorified rural life and devotion to the revolution while attacking religion, Afro-Cuban anti-racist agitation, and everything the regime considered heresy. In Africans Abroad, Rodney does not mention such acts of oppression in Cuban society, as he appears blindsided by his enthusiastic support for Castro’s state-led socialism.

Although he spends time praising Cuba’s free health care and education in his draft, Rodney stresses that these benefits are the fruits of armed struggle. And yet, the theme of violence has been so often overlooked by those who have studied Rodney’s activity in Kingston. But luckily for us, the Guyanese historian provides his explanation for his ban from Jamaica in his Cuban manuscript.

It turned out that Rodney was regarded by the government as a threat because he put himself at the service of a black power movement both within the university and outside, and because he was prepared to discuss the question of revolutionary violence as a means of ending injustice.

Perhaps, Rodney’s reference to himself in the third person underlines that he was writing objective history, not a memoir. It conveyed his commitment to presenting the real course of events leading to the “Rodney riots” of 1968, and that exercise required him to include his role as a Black Power agitator keen to discuss armed struggle.

Throughout the draft, Rodney adamantly argues that violence is not a foreign concept to Jamaican society. It stands at the heart of historical acts of resistance to imperialist oppression and is part of the contemporary class struggle flourishing in all corners of society. He illustrates this fact throughout the document with examples from the peasant Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 to the Caribbean labour unrest of 1938 which bought the colonial system to a standstill. In his analysis of the October riots in 1968, he conceives them as a step forward in deepening revolutionary consciousness in the country. He argues that the uprising and its brutal repression helped bring students and academics out of their idle embrace of non-violence to consider other possibilities. He praises black youth for leading the way in moving from the theorisation of violence to its concrete application. “For some hours, on October 16, the city of Kingston was in the hands of black youth who showed a high degree of creativity and organisational ability. Those brothers took a step forward from theory to practice” writes Rodney. This spontaneous riot, he argues, represents the culmination of the efforts of individuals and small groups who hitherto promoted a theory of armed struggle.

Walter Rodney and his friend Harald Sellin in Hamburg, May 1980.

In his praise of spontaneous action, Rodney rejoices at the formation of independent trade unions outside of the elite-led organisations, calling these workers’ initiatives “the most outstanding development in the labour movement since 1938”. He thereby considers the rivalry between the two major unions, Bustamante Industrial Trade Union and National Workers Union and their respective parties, the Jamaica Labour Party and the National People’s Party, as dividing workers and pulling them away from the struggle against the elite. He compliments these new unions for trying to unite workers by building their own educational classes and newspapers while suggesting that they might be “the kind of organisation upon which worker power will be based”. Rodney, however, hardly mentions strikes and their importance in bringing down the state. The worker’s struggles stood far behind the strategy of guerrilla warfare of the urban youth in the coming revolution.

Rodney then elaborates on how a guerrilla war might unfold in Jamaica. While he supposes Jamaica’s insurgency will take inspiration from Vietnam and Cuba, he thinks its practical application will diverge. The island is not big and mountainous enough to accommodate long-term guerrilla camps. “Consequently, the confrontation will have to be both urban and rural at the same time”, he writes. Rodney’s intelligence as an independent thinker is summed up in that quote. When discussing the strategy of armed struggle, he considers that accounting for the geographical and historical peculiarities of Jamaica and connecting with the urban workers is of the utmost importance for victory.

African abroad in USA: The conditions for guerrilla struggle

When I read Africans abroad in the USA, the second manuscript unearthed in the Atlanta archives, I instantly felt the impact of the Black Power uprisings that swept American cities in the spring of 1968 on Rodney. Rodney’s chief concern in the draft is to discuss the strategies for building successful guerrilla warfare in the United States. Rodney first proposes the creation of an independent black political organisation and a black united front. He argues that black people should have their own organisation where they can meet one another without any interruptions while stating that whites have too often attempted to lead black people into reformism. He offers an illustration from his experience at the Black Montreal Congress in October 1968. “Many black delegates retired from the main conference hall to hold a special session. While gathered in another room, they had to defend the doors against a mob of whites who wanted to come inside” he writes.

Make no mistake Rodney was not against interracial alliances, yet he was frustrated with white activists who failed to understand that sometimes it is best to move out of the way. Rodney’s points reiterated the reasons that pushed the Black Panther Party and many other Black nationalist groups to refuse membership to white Americans. His second suggestion is that organising armed struggle should rest on building alliances with other oppressed groups in the United States, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, and creating bonds of solidarity with anti-imperialists in the Global South.

Rodney then offers the third and vital condition for a triumphant armed struggle: a political strategy for the creation of links with white progressives in the United States and the West. “Most fundamental of all the black revolution will have to define a political perspective in relation to white workers”, he writes. This was not his sentiment when he spoke at the Montreal Congress back in October 1968. On the contrary, he argued for black people to focus on themselves rather than work on a strategy to convince or “impress” whites. That contention rested on his assumption that white workers in metropolitan capitalist countries are complicit in the oppression of black people alongside their ruling class. His pessimism on interracial alliances is still apparent in Africans abroad when he observes that the condition for racial solidarity do not exist in the USA as no white workers have joined the anti-racist and class struggle. However, these ideas are overhauled by passages where Rodney includes the prospect of white workers joining the struggle against racism and capitalism to defend their class interest:

When white workers join the movement against racism in the USA they will do so not out of love of blacks but because of their own awareness that their best interest as workers can be served by taking over the means of production in the state, which means an end to capitalism and racism.

Back in Montreal, Rodney had only mentioned that whites might join black people for profound anti-racist reasons. But the quote above shows that he had come to explain those profound reasons as rooted in objective class interests. It is not an accident that Rodney writes such a hopeful statement from Cuba in 1969. He had found a clear image of what a multiracial socialist society should look like:

The whole of Cuba is reaching out to grasp its total cultural heritage, including that which derived from Africa, but the African descendants are no longer just ‘African abroad’ they are black Cubans who can afford to walk proud because they have their ‘thing’, which they utilised to make the revolution, and which they keep to defend the revolution alongside their fellow Cuban citizens.

Cuba reinforced Rodney’s belief that a united armed struggle can create an inclusive society that empowers black people, instilling in them a complete sense of pride and belonging. In the earlier pages, he argues that Cuban society managed to free itself from the effect of slavery and racism, which has fostered the inequality between races in the United States. He perceives that imperial oppression had united black and white Cuban over their interest enabling them to join ranks during the Cuban War of Independence and the revolution of 1959. So perhaps Rodney inferred that capitalist oppression would one day bring American workers together. That might partly explain his optimism in those months of 1968-1969.

Another more important reason for his optimism is related to his developing theory of revolution, which rests on the idea that the black community is the revolutionary vanguard of American society. Not unlike Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton, Rodney argues that the black struggle will destabilise capitalism and create the conditions for winning over other workers to the revolution. In his scenario, black revolutionaries play the leading role, yet the success of the revolution depends ultimately on racial solidarity. He even criticises Black Nationalists who think that organising the black minority is an end itself:

There are black militants who believe that blacks will carry through a ‘minority revolution’ from start to finish because within the USA they do not expect to win the support of white workers. However, this view underestimates the kinds of changes, which are possible once a revolutionary situation comes into existence, and it also gives very little weight to trends of revolutionary interracial alliance.

Rodney saw in the Vietnamese armed resistance to US intervention and the ensuing multiracial American anti-war movement a sign confirming his optimistic theory. The Vietnamese struggle had done more than inspire the oppressed; its sustained challenge to imperialism created conditions whereby white workers in the West are forced to take a stand on a murderous and costly war. Rodney illustrates his argument by quoting a conversation between two conscious white workers. ““The blacks got the real resistance going against the machine”” Rodney quotes, ““if we want to help ourselves, it’s time we helped them by getting our lily white ass into their fight, the most meaningful anti-war struggle in this country”” With this example, Rodney advances the idea that black and white workers can forge an alliance through the anti-war campaign. Yet, his main argument is black people must follow the example set by Vietnamese fighters by starting a resolute struggle in America that will awaken the passive white workers.

One of the shortcomings in Rodney’s case for interracial alliances is he cannot conceive of them going beyond a coalition or taking place within a single revolutionary organisation. Could black people not sometimes caucus between themselves while working within an integrated political party? Would they not be better positioned to ensure that white comrades remain accountable to them and the demanding task imposed by the anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggle? He nevertheless had made a shift in his thinking. However, his optimism towards multiracial alliances appears to have vanished from his later work. In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, he develops his stance that the white working class is an accomplice in the oppression of blacks. He might have returned to the subject of racial alliance during his many visits to the United States in the mid-1970s when black radicals quarrelled over ideology after the defeat of Black Power. By then, he was preoccupied with the divisions between the Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese workers in his homeland.

From November 1968 to June 1969, Rodney found the time to reflect upon the year 1968 in Jamaica and the United States by writing Africans Abroad. Inspired by the lessons of the Cuban revolution, he could imagine a world without racism and inequality. Therefore, he argued with optimism that black people in Jamaica and the USA could build that socialist society through a guerrilla revolution. These drafts that I encountered with their concern for radical development and the class struggle lay the foundations for Rodney’s future work.

Leaving the archive for the last time,  I could only imagine the 27-year-old Rodney’s departure from Pinar del Rio for Dar es Salaam with a newfound determination for producing intellectual and activist work that would inspire anti-imperialist movements in the Global South.

Chinedu Chukwudinma is a socialist activist and writer based in London. He writes on African politics, popular struggles, and the history of working-class resistance on the continent.  Chinedu is a member of ROAPE’s editorial board, and an editor of roape.net. 

Please click here to read the Chukwudinma’s A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney  serialised on roape.net. To order Chinedu’s book, A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney from the publisher, Bookmarks, click here. 

Featured Photograph: Walter Rodney speaking at a public meeting with Rupert Roopnaraine and Clive Thomas.

Dissecting an imperial activist – Tariq Ali on Winston Churchill

By
ROAPE
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In an interview with Victoria Brittain, Tariq Ali speaks about Winston Churchill, the subject of his latest book. Ali has produced a searing critique full of little known detail, of a long and powerful British life which did untold damage at home and abroad. Ali exposes Churchill’s crimes against freedom fighters in Kenya. As the reputations of empires are being dissected, Ali and Brittain discuss the crimes of an imperial activist.

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Tariq Ali has been a fearless radical since the 1960s. He is a prolific writer on politics, plus novels and scripts for theatre and film – all deeply engaged in the global political moment and fiercely critical of Western attitudes and warmongering in particular. He is a long-standing member of the Editorial Committee of New Left Review, a much respected bi-monthly journal established in 1960. His latest book, Winston Churchill, His Times, His Crimes soon to be published in France, is at first sight a surprise choice for someone whose interests, and writings, have always been in the widest of world contexts.

Victoria Brittain: What made you choose the subject of Churchill, “an imperial activist” as you call him, at this time? Was it a response to Back Lives Matter and the rising current of resistance to the legacies of empire in the US and UK? Or was it related to this period of UK politics in which the small leadership clique is so markedly imbued with imperial attitudes of British exceptionalism?

Tariq Ali: All this, but also, the late radical West Coast academic Mike Davis, my colleague of decades, was very insistent that our publishing house Verso had to produce a Churchill book and I should write it. I thought about this for many months and finally decided to do it in this particular form: a history of the times, a contextualisation in terms of the rise of the British working class whose militancy Churchill hated so much. And I wanted to write the book for a younger generation. I’m told that quite a few young people, sixth form upwards are reading and enjoying it. That is very pleasing. The cult of Churchill has become such a joke that a backlash is bound to come from below rather than the existing political parties.

How do you understand the powerful myth of Churchill, the hero and his outsize presence in our national story when, as you recount, he failed repeatedly in so many endeavours, including as architect of the bloodbath in Gallipoli in the First Word War,  and even in his supposed heyday, World War 2.

The British ruling class operates in strange ways. Some of them appreciated Churchill because he was one of them. Others knew how badly he was treated by his father. And his mother was determined to push him as high as she could and by any means necessary. So his own desire to be a great military leader was greatly encouraged by family and friends but he never got there or anywhere near. This was one reason why he was extremely jealous of both Charles de Gaulle and Trotsky. One was well versed in military history, strategy, was actually serving in the army, while the other was a Jewish revolutionary and founded the Red Army that broke the backbone of the Third Reich in the 1940s. I didn’t dwell on this in the book.

Let’s start by talking about Churchill in the last three years of the 19th century to set the scene of how you saw him then.

He was in Afghanistan as a young soldier (1897); in the major imperialist event of the battle of Omdurman in Sudan (1898) as a freelance soldier, only there through his scheming and using of family contacts; then in the Boer war (1899) with a ringside seat as a freelance journalist at the showdown between the British army and the Boer guerrillas. He was an ambitious politician determined to make his name via journalism in the war zones and be of some service to his state. He has his mimics today: Bernard Henry-Levy in France and Rory Stewart in Britain. Neither are as intelligent as Churchill. Whatever else, he wasn’t dumb.

Was Churchill’s arrival in politics (1906) as an MP and Under Secretary for the Colonies, and later but not for long, Home Secretary, an inevitable step? Or unlikely? He seems not to have been popular with many of his colleagues, rather as with the military chiefs he courted before, who simply could not bear him. 

Churchill’s first loyalty was to the State, the Monarchy and the British Empire. He always felt he would play a role in serving all three institutions. This meant that his attitude to political parties was largely instrumental. Speed was essential. So yesterday a Tory, today a Liberal and then head of a Con-Lib-Lab coalition, then a Tory again. If that is how you operate then making friends in various governments is not a priority. He wasn’t popular with his Generals either!

Could you explain his interventions which are so revealing of Home Secretary Churchill’s deep class-based violent attitudes towards working class organisers such as the Welsh miners, and the dockers and railwaymen strike leaders in the industrial north of England (1911). All this repeated in his response to the 1926 General Strike.

He was not too different from other conservative and right-wing social-democratic politicians in Europe. Hostility to the working class was a shared feature of the Right throughout Europe and the United States. Churchill saw militant workers as ‘the enemy within.’ Unlike his equivalents in France, Italy, Germany he liked boasting about it and this was one reason for the hatred felt for him. As Home Secretary he crushed the Welsh miners strikes in the 1920s. They never forgave him. Not a single Welsh council contributed any money to help build his statue. And as I stress in the introduction of my book, Churchill was loathed by sections of the country throughout the war. The personality cult of him as we know it today was introduced by [Margaret] Thatcher to help her out in the Falklands War. She also used him as a model when she decided to the crush the National Union of Miners and destroy the coal industry in 1984.

Can you talk about how you see the origins of the First World War lay in Empire, and the early spark of the German navy visit to Algeria 1911, which you mention?  And also about Churchill’s responsibility for the disastrous failure in Gallipoli (1915-16) which got him sacked from the government and, as you put it, into the political wilderness.

The changing political climate in Britain over the last few decades has meant the total discouragement of a critical culture on every level. World War One was constantly attacked and denounced by poets, playwrights, liberal intellectuals, etc. Joan Littlewoods’s Oh What a Lovely War that began life in a small East End theatre [and then] took the West End by storm and was filmed by Richard Attenborough. That spirit no longer exists.

World War One was commemorated in chauvinist style. The Germans were the baddies. The fact is that the late development of the German state led to demands for imperial equality. The carving up of the African continent was a conciliatory move by Britain, but set a precedent as well. Why shouldn’t the Germans get more of the share in other continents, including Europe?

The war was, despite the immediate causes, a war between Empires: three of them collapsed. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were buried. More damaging for the Entente side was the Russian Revolution that toppled the Tsar and later took Russia out of the war. Lenin’s victory marked the beginning of an epoch of wars and revolutions. That is why Churchill insisted on sending a British expeditionary force to Russia to help the Tsarist remnants to take back the country. It was not a small business, a minor affair. There were mutinies and a senior, highly decorated South African officer in the British army, refused to obey orders when asked to gas Bolshevik villages. It’s a history not often discussed, but the facts are quite amazing and I provide many details.

Could you talk about the link between Ireland and India in the fraying of Empire? The Irish war of Independence (1919-21) saw Churchill send in the brutal Black and Tans (1920) to crush the Irish, with one unforeseen result in the mutinies of Irish troops based in India. You mention that this fascinating event, which you describe in some detail, unsurprisingly goes unmentioned in Churchill’s own extensive writings.

The mutiny of the Connaught regiment in India is hardly ever discussed, let alone by Churchill. The epigone historians may not even know about it and the Irish/Hollywood film industry has ignored this incredibly dramatic event completely. And, of course, it was linked to Churchill’s despatch to Ireland of the Black and Tans, a death squad par excellence, to exterminate the IRA.

Was Churchill’s election defeat in 1945 the revenge of the British working class for WW2’s devastating cost to them while he was Prime Minister in the National Government? Why was it so short-lived?

Not just WW2 but the previous assaults on Welsh and Scottish workers, the crushing of the General Strike, his class viciousness in general and, above all an overwhelming desire for change. Nothing changed as far as British foreign policy was concerned. Labour created the NHS. It did not reform education. But they defeated the wartime leader or rather, the people voted him out.

Back in power in 1951 for four years Churchill ended his 60 year career in Parliament with two standout crimes which changed the course of history: the 1953 coup in Persia against the nationalist Mohammed Mossadegh, and in 1954 Operation Anvil against the nationalist Mau Mau movement in Kenya when 50,000 Kenyans were arrested in two weeks and placed in brutal concentration camps by the British army.

Do these illustrate how ruthless the empire mentality remained in British power circles?

The toppling of Mossadegh and Operation Anvil were crimes. Churchill supported both and even boasted about them. What is interesting is how so many British historians have ignored the Kenyan dimension. It needed a US historian from Harvard to research and expose the atrocities against the Kenyan people. Carolyn Elkins, Professor of History and African American Studies, referred to Kenya as a British gulag.

How do you see today’s changing balance of forces in the political narrative of Empire, once controlled broadly by the West, now challenged on so many fronts, including by new books some of which you refer to?

There is only one Empire in the world today. No military rivals. That is the United States. It acts on its own, has used a UNSC (United Nations Security Council) fig leaf where possible and increasingly NATO to show its command of the Western bloc. Britain and Australia are little more than stooge-states. Germany is under heavy pressure. Elsewhere, the Japanese are not permitted to have a foreign policy and South Korea remains occupied by US troops. The principal target of the US is China and this would have been the case even if China had been a Western-style democracy and treated its minorities better than the US treated its native and black populations. This century will witness some form of clash between these two states since the US seems determined to contain, if not crush, the People’s Republic. Churchill’s ghost in the White House will be watching eagerly.

Victoria Brittain is an activist, writer and journalist who has spent years reporting in Africa, and campaigning internationally. Her conversation with Tariq Ali can be read in French on AfriqueXXI here. Read ROAPE’s interview with Brittain here.

Featured photograph: Winston Churchill discussing battle plans in Italy with the Commander of the Eighth Army, Oliver Leese (left) and the Supreme Allied Commander of the Mediterranean, Harold Alexander (26 August 1944).

Death of a hero and the coronation of a parasite

By
ROAPE
-

This year marks sixty years since Kenya’s independence in 1963. Gathanga Ndung’u is scathing of the cabal of wealthy turncoats who have led Kenya’s independence. Ndung’u celebrates a real hero of liberation, Mukami Kimathi, who died in Kenya as the coronation of a royal parasite was being marked in the UK. 

By Gathanga Ndung’u

Amid the chaos and randomness of life, sometimes we are served with stark synchronicities that must not be ignored.  These windows of opportunities, give us a moment to pause, reflect and see the connection between two seemingly unrelated events.

A case in mind is the recent passing on of Mukami Kimathi, the wife to Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi who was largely the face of the anti-colonial war in Kenya which culminated with the fall of the Union Jack on 12 December, 1963. Kimathi’s death coincided with the coronation of King Charles III who is inherited the scepter of power from Queen Elizabeth II. While pomp and glamour rocked Westminster Abbey earlier last month, gloom and somber reflection filled the small town of Njabini  as Kenya mourned one of its independence heroines.

The hoisting of the Kenyan Flag in Uhuru Gardens ushered in a new era of self-rule in 1963. Finally, the fruits of the protracted struggle that had started in the early 20th century by warriors such as Samoei Arap Koitalel, Muthoni Nyanjiru, and Mekatili wa Menza, finally paid off. The air was pregnant with expectations from the new Kenyan-led government with the promise of a democratic state, of the people, for the people, and by the people. The land and freedom that was at the center of the struggle was now controlled by one of our own. This meant that we could now chart a path to prosperity determined by the people. Tragically, as we know, the dream was quickly broken by a cabal of rapacious political turn-coats.

As history would later unfold, the first prime minister and president of Kenya, Johnson Kamau Ngegi (Jomo Kenyatta), and his clique turned against the dream at the expense of the newly formed nation. Impoverished by over-exploitation by the British Government, Kenya was in dire need of visionary and pragmatic leadership to steer the country from agriculture to a more diversified economy that would ensure the growth of a non-agricultural sectors such as manufacturing and public services.

The dream to eradicate diseases, ignorance, and poverty was shelved to allow the elite to buttress and consolidate wealth for their families and friends. The political and economic elite embarked on a looting spree of whatever was relinquished by the colonialists: white highland farms and other properties across the country through the infamous One Million Acre Scheme in which Kenya received a milti-million pound loan to buy land from white settlers living the country. This was a tactic to diffuse the danger of a radical land redistribution movement.

The power had been transferred from a foreign oppressor to a homegrown oppressor who was hellbent on using state machinery to maintain the newly acquired wealth and status. Together with their close allies and family, they formed a comprador class which continued to rule on behalf of the former colonial master.

Fake independence and resistance

Kenya’s independence sixty years ago this year  was reduced to a mere flag which had to a large extent, no socio-economic impact on the majority of Kenyans. With a meagre 12% high potential farming land, most Kenyans worked as casual labourers on white owned-farms. These farms grew cotton, coffee, tea, pyrethrum and horticultural produce for exports.

Fully conscious of the betrayal, some  KLFA warriors led by Musa Mwariama and General Baimunge, went back to the forest to continue fighting for land. The president did not lift the ban on KLFA and proscribed and labelled it as terrorist. What ensued was a crackdown of our independence heroes who felt cheated by the independence settlement. This marked the beginning of the assassination and exile of some of the leaders and fighters. To fortify the new power, dissidents were silenced too through imprisonment and assassination such as the shooting of the fiercest critics, Pio Gama Pinto in 1965. Having established the foundation of the newborn state on the rubble of cronyism, nepotism, betrayal, and corruption, Kenya’s second president perpetuated this grubby legacy.

After the fall of the apartheid government in South Africa, Nelson Mandela – who claimed to have been inspired by the leader of the armed struggle in Kenya  – visited Kenya hoping to meet Dedan Kimathi’s Mausoleum or grave site.  To his dismay, the two governments which had ruled for more than thirty years had not bothered to locate Kimathi’s remains from Kamiti Maximum Prison which is believed to hold his remains although in an unknown location.

Just as Kimathi was forgotten, other heroes still alive were forgotten and continued to wallow in abject poverty with only a few former fighters being given small parcels of land. Despite their active campaigning to secure the state’s recognition and support, they never felt the warmth of an independent state as the dream was hijacked and individualized by a few.

Mukami Kimathi – a freedom warrior

During the KLFA war, Mukami organized the women battalion, helped in administering oaths, coordinated spies in the Mount Kenya Forest and also ensured mobilization of resources for fighters and other logistical issues. Her contribution in the struggle spanned both the pre and post-independence period.

 All these sacrifices were ignored too, by the different independence governments until Mwai Kibaki recognized the KLFA movement and offered a small amount of land to her but which still was not a recognition befitting the role she played in the country’s independence. Most freedom fighters continue to die without any recognition from the government or compensation.

Yet the government failed to fulfill her only dream of being able to bury the remains of her late husband. Every year 20 October when we celebrate Mashujaa Day (Heroes Day), it is always an opportunity for the government to pay lip service to war heroes. This continues as the elite continues to acquire illicit wealth while consolidating political power to propagate their vast and unquenchable interests in various sectors of the economy. Through this, the country has become what J.M. Kariuki foresaw as a country of ten millionaires and ten million beggars.

Royal rituals, visits and reparations

On the other hand, the British Government has been reluctant to compensate war heroes in Kenya despite many calls for reparations. Instead there are only a few instances with only a handful benefitting from ‘reparations’.

An example was the £19.9 million payout to three KLFA veterans granted by the British High Court. Despite this unwillingness, the British Government has continued with its grandiose coronations, royal weddings and burial rituals. It has also continued to participate in invasions, wars and conquest, whose cost would have otherwise helped to compensate the KLFA and other victims of Britain’s atrocities around the world.

The state rushed to give Mukami Kimathi a state burial ‘befitting’ her status, yet she lived a spartan life. Her burial was an attempt by the Kenyan government to redeem itself and avoid any backlash from the public. Unsurprisingly, the Kenyan Flag was not hoisted half-mast even for an hour to honor her courage, sacrifice, and commitment to the country’s independence, yet it was hoisted half-mast for three days following Queen Elizabeth’s death last year. Kenya continues to betray the collective dream by not recognizing our history while also erasing significant parts of our history.

Mukami’s burial ceremony, which was attended by political honchos, was turned into another elite parade where the leaders in both government and opposition exchanged insults without taking time to let the family and other mourners reflect on the rich legacy which she was leaving behind. Outrageously, the cost of her state burial would have been enough to provide for her and her family when she was alive.

King Charles III has announced, his plans to visit Kenya later in the year to deepen ties that date to the colonial era. For activists we should use this visit to push for reparations for the many victims of atrocities committed by the colonial government in the concentration camps that were set-up across the country. His visit should only be permitted if his agenda is to provide a way for restoration, compensation, and healing to the broken families and individuals who were incarcerated, tortured, maimed, and killed.

The UK King’s visit should be largely centered on ‘undoing’ the dispossession which his family and country orchestrated. The government cannot claim to be putting the interest of its citizens first when it is clearly not interested in fighting for the justice of its people. Before we embark on trade deals, military cooperation, and knowledge exchange, let us first heal our historical wounds rather than covering them up.

As we celebrate 60 years since independence this year, Oginga Odinga’s  – Kenya’s first vice-president – autobiography,Not Yet Uhuru, reverberates strongly to the current state of the nation which was sadly foreseen.

Gathanga Ndung’u is a community organiser with  Mathare Social Justice Centre which is under the Social Justice Centres’ Working Group. He is also part of Revolutionary Social League brigade that organizes political education in different political cells in the respective centres in Nairobi.  

Featured Photograph: Mukami Kimathi died on 5 May 2023 and is buried in Njabini, Kinangop, Nyandarua County (5 May 2023). 

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For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers pathbreaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive.
Subscribe
Donate
We use cookies to collect and analyse information on site performance and usage, and to enhance and customise content. By clicking into any content on this site, you agree to allow cookies to be placed. To find out more see our
Privacy Policy