Black liberation after racial inclusion

February 20, 2023

Marcel Paret’s new book, Fractured Militancy, illuminates connections between processes of formal racial inclusion and the popular resistance that emerges in its wake – from South Africa to the United States, from service delivery protests to Black Lives Matter. Paret introduces an extract from his book for roape.net.

By Marcel Paret

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, shortly after the transition from apartheid to democracy, rosy images of South Africa as a progressive beacon and a harmonious “rainbow nation” predominated. Nearly three decades after the democratic transition, however, such optimistic descriptions are long out of favor. Extreme and racialized inequality, rampant unemployment and poverty, reoccurring xenophobic attacks against foreign-born residents, government corruption scandals, and rolling electricity blackouts tarnish the country’s image.

Two alternative narratives of South Africa have emerged. One narrative portrays the democratic transition as a failure, reflecting how the post-apartheid state caters to the narrow interests of either capital or political elites. A second narrative highlights the political agency of the Black poor and working class, finding hope in widespread protest and resistance.

In Fractured Militancy: Precarious Resistance in South Africa After Racial Inclusion (Cornell University Press, 2022), I affirm these alternative narratives while seeking to move beyond an opposition between flawed elites and a virtuous Black working class. I do so by showing how the logics and practices of the former infiltrate the latter. Rather than glorify struggles from below, I aim to demonstrate their political complexity as well as their limitations.

My account draws on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the impoverished townships and informal settlements around Johannesburg, including 287 interviews with activists and ordinary residents. Focusing on precisely those areas where so-called “service delivery protests” were taking place, I found that resistance was rampant but also shot through with divisions. Local organizing reinforced cleavages based on wealth, urban geography, nationality, employment, and political views. I refer to this duality – the simultaneous proliferation and fragmentation of resistance – as fractured militancy.

To explain the simultaneous reemergence of popular mobilization and its fragmentation, I emphasize the dynamic interaction between class struggles from above and class struggles from below within the process of formal racial inclusion. My central argument is that the elite-led reorganization of South African capitalism, secured through racial inclusion and the transition from apartheid to democracy, both animated popular frustration and sowed the seeds of division. The reorganization failed to bring about fundamental changes to the distribution of wealth and income. For most Black residents, economic insecurity persisted, and feelings of betrayal provided a common foundation for the explosion of local protests. At the same time, though, the politics of capitalist reorganization encouraged narrow and competitive struggles over access to state resources. Residents isolated themselves from each other, antagonized workers and migrants within their own neighborhoods, and pursued divergent political projects.

In developing this argument, I draw on Antonio Gramsci’s theory of passive revolution, which refers to an elite-led reorganization of society that preserves the existing order through demobilization and limited reform. In South Africa, passive revolution took place through the process of racial inclusion. Racial inclusion facilitated passive revolution, encouraged strong feelings of betrayal, and ultimately helped to both generate and fragment popular resistance.

Scholars have increasingly deployed the concept of passive revolution to understand how elites absorb and thwart radical challenges. Rather than focus primarily on elites, however, I show how passive revolution represented both an elite response to popular mobilization under apartheid, and a source of fractured militancy in the post-apartheid period. On the one hand, passive revolution produced resistance by dangling the possibility of deeper change and then preserving economic inequality and insecurity. On the other hand, passive revolution fragmented resistance by demobilizing popular organizations and redirecting popular aspirations toward the government delivery of public resources.

Emphasizing a view from below, this is a story about precarious resistance, which has a double meaning. Against pessimistic accounts, I show that economically insecure groups do have the capacity for autonomous collective action. Their struggles, however, are often weak, localized, or fragmented, and they may waver between inclusionary and exclusionary positions. In short, if agency may emerge from precarious living conditions, that agency itself often remains precarious.

In the following passage from the “Preface” of the book for roape.net, I draw a parallel between racial dynamics in South Africa and the United States. In both places, formal racial inclusion brought continued economic insecurity and Black resistance. In the Conclusion of the book (not shown here), I argue that the “passive revolution through racial inclusion” took different forms in the two places and, in turn, produced divergent movements. Indeed, the persistent, localized, and fragmented community protests in South Africa look very different from the national Black Lives Matter movement that exploded in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd.

“Preface” from Fractured Militancy: Precarious Resistance in South Africa After Racial Inclusion (Cornell University Press, 2022)

By Marcel Paret

Black liberation implies a world where Black people can live in peace, without the constant threat of the social, economic, and political woes of a society that places almost no value on the vast majority of Black lives. —Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

So you’ve come to see our horrible lives. This horrible place. This dirty place. It’s a pigsty. — Passerby in Motsoaledi informal shack settlement, Soweto, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2013

South Africa is a hotbed of protest. In April 2013, residents of the Elias Motsoaledi informal shack settlement—situated in the heart of Soweto, a previous epicenter of antiapartheid resistance—took to the streets. They demanded the provision of a formal housing development, which government officials had promised but failed to deliver. Later that year, residents of Bekkersdal, a township on the West Rand, followed with their own protests. Here the upsurge was a response to various grievances, including high grave tariffs, poor sewer infrastructure, and infrequent waste collection. The following April, residents of Tsakane Extension 10 (Tsakane10)—an informal shack settlement located on the East Rand—protested as well. They wanted the government to develop the area, and especially to relieve severe overcrowding. Three months later, back in the south of Johannesburg not far from Motsoaledi, residents of the Thembelihle informal shack settlement barricaded roads after the state removed their illegal electricity connections, which they relied on to cook, watch television, and light their shacks.

All four episodes took place along the historic Witwatersrand, a fifty-six-kilometer rock scarp where prospectors discovered gold in the late nineteenth century. The gold mining industry laid the foundation for what eventually became a massive metropolitan area of more than eight million residents, including the city of Johannesburg.[1] Stemming from the colonial and apartheid legacy, extreme and racialized inequality define the area. It is marked by a contrast between rapidly diversifying affluent neighborhoods on the one hand and almost exclusively Black poor neighborhoods on the other.[2] Each of the episodes described above revolved around slightly different specific grievances, but they shared one fundamental similarity: they all emanated from predominantly Black urban residential areas ravaged by poverty and unemployment.

Far from aberrations, the protests reflected a much broader surge of popular resistance throughout South Africa. Local protests accelerated dramatically in the wake of the 2008–2009 global economic recession. Media outlets reported an average of close to one local protest per day, and police incident reports suggest that the true numbers were much higher.[3] The dramatic increase in South African protest resembled the rise in protest globally between 2009 and 2014. Following the Arab Spring, which included revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and uprisings through-out the Middle East and North Africa, the global protest wave spawned anti-austerity protests in Greece, Spain, and Portugal; the Occupy movement in the United States; and popular revolts in Ukraine, Brazil, and Turkey. Some scholars likened the global protest wave to previous surges in 1848, 1905, and 1968.[4] In 2011, Time magazine declared “The Protester” its Person of the Year.

There were important parallels between South Africa’s protests and those taking place elsewhere.[5] Unemployment and economic insecurity loomed large, as did frustration with government institutions that protected elites at the expense of ordinary people. Further, in South Africa as elsewhere, traditional organizational vehicles, such as trade unions and political parties, often played only peripheral roles. Beyond these similarities, however, a comparison is more of a stretch. One clear difference was their class basis. Scholars often traced the global protest wave to the declining fortunes and frustrations of middle classes and educated youth. Conversely, in South Africa the protesters were more economically insecure. They often scraped by through survivalist activities, small government cash transfers, and sharing through kinship networks. In South Africa, as well, the historical legacy of apartheid and national liberation shaped protests in a way that did not have a clear parallel in the iconic examples of the new global protests.[6]

Protests by Black residents in Ferguson and Baltimore, which shook the United States in 2014–2015, represented a closer parallel to South Africa’s local protests. Police killings of Black men—Michael Brown in Ferguson, Freddie Gray in Baltimore—provided the immediate triggers for resistance. The killings activated long-standing resentment, frustration, and anger. Like local protests in South Africa, the Ferguson and Baltimore protests emanated from Black residential areas marked by concentrated poverty and disproportionate levels of unemployment. The Ferguson and Baltimore protests also reflected a parallel history of racial inclusion, marked by the abolition of legalized and state-sanctioned racial exclusion. The shared images and memes that circulated through the networks of Egyptian revolutionaries, Spanish indignados, and American Occupy protesters hardly penetrated the townships and informal shack settlements surrounding Johannesburg. Neither were they major reference points in Ferguson and Baltimore. What mattered more in Johannesburg, Ferguson, and Baltimore was the failure of racial inclusion to deliver liberation.

Scholars have long emphasized parallels between the United States and South Africa with respect to racial domination and resistance.[7] In both places, the state implemented explicit and overt systems of legalized racial exclusion in the twentieth century, which in turn spawned vibrant Black movements for racial inclusion. In the United States, the civil rights movement challenged the legalized racism of Jim Crow, while in South Africa popular struggles challenged the racist apartheid state. The civil rights and anti-apartheid movements were, of course, very different, as were their targets and their eventual consequences. In South Africa, where Black residents represent approximately 80 percent of the total population, racial inclusion led to a major racial transformation of the state. The predominantly Black African National Congress (ANC) assumed power in 1994 and remains in power today. Conversely, Black residents in the United States, who only account for about 13 percent of the total population, never achieved the same measure of political power. Despite these contrasts, however, the parallels are instructive.

During the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King famously dreamed of liberation from racial oppression in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, DC. Half a century later, in places such as Ferguson and Baltimore, the daily realities of unemployment, economic insecurity, police surveillance, and mass incarceration demonstrated the gap between the ideal of liberation and the realities of everyday life. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor puts it, “The young people of Ferguson had great reverence and respect for the memory of the civil rights movement, but the reality is that its legacy meant little in their everyday lives.”[8] In his classic poem “Harlem,” published in 1951, Langston Hughes famously posed the question: “What happens to the dream deferred?” In Ferguson and Baltimore, the deferred dream of liberation exploded in protest, as Hughes prophetically anticipates: “Maybe it just sags like a heavy load? Or does it explode?” [9]

In South Africa, the transition from apartheid to democracy brought a new constitution that abolished legalized racism and treated Black residents as full citizens with equal rights. On top of these legal changes, the ANC’s promise to provide a “better life for all” encapsulated the dream of Black liberation. As inequality and economic insecurity deepened, however, the better life proved elusive for many Black residents. With apartheid-era restrictions on movement lifted, the Black poor increasingly concentrated in peripheral urban areas where unemployment, poverty, informal housing, and limited access to water and electricity marked everyday life. For these residents, racial inclusion had severe limits. In the South African case, deferred liberation proved even more explosive. Widespread local protests became a staple of the post-apartheid landscape, and they show little sign of disappearing. The struggle for liberation continues, just as it did in Ferguson and Baltimore.

A further parallel revolves around the role of previous movement heroes. In the Ferguson protests, and later in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement that they helped to spawn, young Black activists sometimes clashed with such established Black American leaders as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and representatives of the Congressional Black Caucus. Some BLM activists felt that the older generation had sold them out and had little understanding of their everyday struggles. This dynamic loomed even larger in South Africa, where former heroes of the anti-apartheid movement led the government. A deep sense of betrayal permeated the impoverished Black townships and informal settlements. Many resented that politicians appeared to pursue their own narrow interests, while the Black poor continued to await the promised better life. In South Africa, feelings of betrayal and resentment underpinned the consistent surge of local protests.

Police surveillance and mass incarceration did not define life in South Africa’s impoverished Black urban areas in the same way that they did in the United States. Issues of police brutality certainly arose in South Africa’s local protests, most often in response to police repression, but they were less central. Whereas the protests in Ferguson and Baltimore emerged through opposition to state violence, local protests in South Africa called on the state to provide resources, such as housing and electricity—what residents called “service delivery.” Race represented another crucial difference. Protests in Ferguson and Baltimore thrust racial disparity to the forefront. They highlighted how law enforcement disproportionately targeted and attacked Black residents and communities. Race did not figure as prominently in South Africa’s local protests, even if it always lurked just beneath the surface. Protesters referenced class identities as often as racial ones. References to “the poor” were prominent.[10] To be sure, racial inequality remains extreme in democratic South Africa. The urban poor are well aware that poverty remains concentrated among Black residents. In a situation, however, where Black politicians dominate the state, and where the Black middle class outnumbers the white middle class, race does not illuminate the challenge at hand in quite the same way.

The differences between the struggles for Black liberation in the two places came into focus in 2020, as the coronavirus crisis swept across the globe. In the United States, the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis reignited the BLM movement. Following the local uprising in Minneapolis, in which protesters burned down a police station, protests quickly spread across the country. Marking possibly the greatest mobilization in US history to date, the BLM protests of summer 2020 were remarkable for the wide geographic scope, the extension of protests beyond major cities and into small conservative towns, the widespread participation of fifteen to twenty-six million people, and the racial diversity among protesters.[11] Indeed, white participation in the protests surpassed what it had been during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Each protest had its own inflections, and specific demands varied. Still, the resistance suggested a shared national opposition to police killings of Black residents and to what those killings implied about the unfinished character of Black liberation in the United States.

Meanwhile, in South Africa, local protests continued to proliferate. By one estimate, there were more than six hundred local protests in 2020.[12] In contrast to the American case, however, they remained highly localized and isolated from each other. There was no evidence of converging national resistance around a project of Black liberation. The following chapters attempt to explain the fragmentation of resistance in South Africa and, in turn, the lack of a broader social movement to address unfinished Black liberation. In South Africa, where the transition from apartheid to democracy was so dramatic and where economic inequality is so extreme, it is impossible to understand popular struggles separately from capitalism and the legacy of struggles for national liberation. My account emphasizes the importance of capitalism and its articulations, or entanglements, with the politics of national liberation and racial inclusion. I place specific emphasis on political dimensions of class struggle, from the compromises and maneuvers of elites to the collective formations of the economically marginalized. Three decades into the democratic period, these class struggles have continued to operate on the terrain of racial inclusion.

This book is about the ongoing quest for liberation, after racial inclusion. The quest for Black liberation in South Africa began long before apartheid and continued in its wake. Local protests for service delivery carry on the legacy of Black liberation struggle by asserting that Black lives matter and have value, even if protesters do not frame their struggles in racial terms. I tell this story through the lens of the four residential areas that feature in the opening paragraph—Motsoaledi, Bekkersdal, Tsakane10, and Thembelihle. My account is not celebratory. It is as much about the challenges that confront Black movements in South Africa as it is about their valiant resistance. History is crucial. The ways in which South Africa resolved—only partially—the contradictions of apartheid capitalism help us to understand why current struggles remain so fragmented. I draw a comparison to the United States not to suggest South Africa’s essential similarity. My aim, rather, is to highlight the historical dimension of racial inclusion. The advances and limits associated with racial inclusion shape Black movements today, from Ferguson to Johannesburg. They often do so in contradictory, and not necessarily fruitful, ways. Nonetheless, the struggle for liberation persists, seeking to realize dreams deferred.

Marcel Paret is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah and Senior Research Associate in the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg. He is co-editor of Southern Resistance in Critical Perspective and Building Citizenship from Below.

Featured Photograph: Housing Protest in Cape Town (19 September, 2012).

Notes

[1] This includes the Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni (East Rand), and West Rand municipalities.

[2] Owen Crankshaw, “Race, Space and the Post-Fordist Spatial Order of Johannes-burg,” Urban Studies 45, no. 8 (2008): 1692–1711.

[3] Peter Alexander, Carin Runciman, Trevor Ngwane, Boikanyo Moloto, Kgo-thatso Mokgele, and Nicole van Staden, “Frequency and Turmoil: South Africa’s Com-munity Protests 2005–2017,” South Africa Crime Quarterly 63 (2018): 35

[4] Mike Davis, “Spring Confronts Winter,” New Left Review 72 (2011): 5–15.

[5] For a comparison of South African and global protest, see Marcel Paret, Carin Run-ciman, and Luke Sinwell, Southern Resistance in Critical Perspective: The Politics of Protest in South Africa’s Contentious Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2017); Marcel Paret and Carin Runciman, “The 2009+ South African Protest Wave,” Journal of Labor and Society 19, no. 3 (2016): 301–319.

[6] For more on the contrast, see Marcel Paret, “The Politics of Local Resistance in Urban South Africa: Evidence from Three Informal Settlements,”International Sociology 33, no. 3 (2018): 337–356.

[7] George Reid Andrews, “Comparing the Comparers: White Supremacy in the United States and South Africa,” Journal of Social History 20, no. 3 (1987): 585–599; John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Anthony Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Howard Winant, The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

[8] Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter, 161.

[9] Langston Hughes, “Harlem” (1951), accessed September 13, 2018, original emphasis.

[10] Ashwin Desai, We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (New York: Monthly Review, 2002); Prishani Naidoo, “Struggles around the Com-modification of Daily Life in South Africa,” Review of African Political Economy 34, no. 111 (2007): 57–66.

[11] Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal K. Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Times, July 3, 2020; Douglas McAdam, “We’ve Never Seen Protests like These Before,” Jacobin, June 20, 2020.

[12] This estimate refers to the number of protests by “residents,” as calculated by Kate Alexander and Lefa Lenka using the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) database and provided via personal communication. See figure 1 in the introduction for further details.

Varieties of rentier capitalism in Africa

ROAPE

February 16, 2023

In a contribution to ROAPE’s long-standing debate on Capitalism in Africa, Thomas Bierschenk and José-María Muñoz foreground the concept of rentier capitalism as a useful analytic for the case of Africa. While the empirical range of this concept has to this point retained a strong focus on the global North, Bierschenk and Muñoz introduce a collection of open access, free-to-download papers that suggest its relevance for understanding ongoing dynamics related to capitalist development on the continent.

By Thomas Bierschenk and José-María Muñoz

Recently, there has been a lively debate generated in Marxist-inspired political economy around the concept of rentier capitalism – an economic formation dominated by rentiers, rents, and rent-generating assets. This debate has concerned the Global North but – taking inspiration from recent empirical work that we have curated – we propose that the concept of rentier capitalism is a useful analytic for the case of Africa as well. In fact, few figures have captured global imaginations around the prowess of entrepreneurship in the African continent as Aliko Dangote. Yet, the irony that Dangote’s fortune was built on an economic sector where anticompetitive behaviour has been so prevalent and gross profit margins routinely reach 50% is often lost in popular portrayals of the Nigerian magnate.

Authors such as Piketty, Mazzucato, and Christophers argue that Marx underestimated the long-term importance of rents in capitalism, and that he was mistaken (as was Keynes) when he predicted that their importance would decline over time under the increasing influence of the market and competition. This literature understands rent as income derived from the control of scarce assets under conditions of no competition, and a rentier is the recipient of this income. The definition of rent and its distinction from what it is not – capitalist profit produced under conditions of free market competition – have been central to Western economic thought.

A Dangote outpost in Yagoua, a border town in northern Cameroon, May 2021. Copyright, José Munoz Martin.

Marx considered only landed property and interest-bearing capital as sources of rents; however, other rent-bearing assets have evolved and grown in importance over time: intellectual property rights, mineral resources, platform assets, long-term service contracts and infrastructures for the delivery of communication, energy, transportation, and similar services. With the growing importance of these rents, the economies of the Global North contain rentier capitalist elements to varying degrees; in extreme cases, they dominate to such an extent that entire economies, such as the UK’s, have been described as rentier capitalisms, characterised by a proprietary rather than an entrepreneurial ethos.

Rentiers are in a position to extract long-term payments for the use of scarce resources in the absence of relevant competition. They are inclined to sit on and sweat their income-generating assets rather than innovate, and in this regard they are not entrepreneurs in the Schumpeterian sense. Therefore, it is not surprising that, in spite of prominent efforts to identify contexts in which rents can be productive not only politically but also economically, the term continues to carry a stigma with it. Few people would like to be characterised as a rentier.

While in the Global North it is companies that hold the bulk of society’s rent-generating assets, in Africa individuals play a relatively larger role, perhaps unsurprisingly given the comparatively low numbers of incorporated businesses there. Also, not all the types of rents mentioned are equally relevant to African economies. On the other hand, many African economies evolve around rents that are not given prominence by authors writing on the Global North or are mentioned only in passing. We are thinking here of financial transfers in the context of so-called development aid and of relational capital.

By this term, we mean privileged access to political elites who decide, for example, on the privatisation of state enterprises and on infrastructure contracts. Christophers refers to asset creation here as “simply knowing how to win contracts”. He also distinguishes analytically between “protecting assets” (e.g. from taxation, customs fees, and bribes), which is often a function of relational capital, in African countries and elsewhere, and “active lobbying by major owners of rental stock”. Lobbyists are thus key individuals in rentier capitalist contexts.

These theoretical considerations would also widen the empirical range of the “varieties of capitalism” debate which so far has retained a strong focus on the Global North. Many of the businesspeople’s practices dissected in our recent special issue of the journal Anthropologie et Développement can readily be related to the concept of rentier capitalism. For example, during Mozambique’s transition to a liberal market economy and the privatisation of state enterprises, the state became highly dependent on development aid. It is in this context that the national employer’s association (CTA) was founded with the help of development agencies. This is an institution in which the interests of the ruling political elite, businesspeople and donors intersect, and which predominantly creates opportunities for national business elites and international capital, with little spillover into the rest of the private sector.

Anésio Manhiça proposes the term “entrepreneur-broker”, which he translates from the emic Portuguese term homens de contacto (contact men), to designate actors who use their political contacts to gain privileged access to business opportunities. These contact men often have no equity and little business knowledge; they react opportunistically to business openings produced by state policy and the programmes of development agencies. For their part, the vast majority of small and medium entrepreneurs feel excluded from these networks and complain that their interests are poorly represented by the CTA.

Gérard Amougou describes a similar conflict between insiders and outsiders in Cameroon. The policy context here is one of “emergence”, a term used locally to encapsulate the ambition to make Cameroon an industrial, middle-income country by 2035. The resources and rhetoric of “emergence” as a platform are captured by state operators allied with a certain type of economic elite, which Amougou, adopting a term inspired by Jean-François Médard, labels entrepreneur-politiciens, actors who “straddle” the economic and political domains.

In other words, “emergence” does not represent a rupture. Rather, continuities with pre-existing political practices prevail, the central aim of which is to maintain the hegemony of the regime. However, many small and medium-sized entrepreneurs are excluded from these networks and demand a different definition of emergence that is more in line with their own interests.

In both Mozambique and Cameroon, the conflict between rentier capitalists and a group that feels excluded from political access lies at the centre of the analysis. Access is also the key concept for Sidy Cissokho. In his finely grained ethnography, he is interested in members of a regional organization at the interface of the public and private sector that aims to set the agenda for regional trade and transport in West Africa.

In a nod to Sylvain Laurens’ “brokers of capitalism”, Cissokho calls them courtiers de libre échange (brokers of free trade). Membership of this organization and participation in its regular meetings create a social proximity between entrepreneurs and state representatives; this entre-soi élitaire (a notion also used by Charlotte Vampo, which could be translated as the secluded sociability of elites) enables the former to fabriquer son accès (conjure one’s access), as Cissokho’s interviewees put it.

Meetings are occasions that make it possible to establish contacts with well-positioned public-sector actors and international development agencies that can then be used for personal goals, for example, in case of problems with customs or other authorities. The association and its meetings provide the opportunity for collective lobbying and propagation of the principles of free trade frontstage, while in the wings, they also allow for private lobbying.

In her analysis of the Association des Femmes Chefs d’Entreprises du Togo (AFCET), which was founded in 2001 with impetus from the International Labour Office (ILO), Vampo identifies a very similar tension between discourses and social dynamics. The members’ presentation refers to internationally fashionable progressive discourses on empowerment and defines their association’s goal as the promotion of women in the economy and society. De facto, however, the women active in the association are an economically, sociologically and ethnically restricted circle of well-connected entrepreneurs who are the heirs of an older generation of Nana Benz traders. They use their membership to gain and safeguard access to the government and guarantee their own economic interests as well as promoting the economic visibility of women. Despite all their discourses on the innovative character of entrepreneurship, therefore, these entrepreneurs are politically and socially rather conservative – their main concern is not to rock the boat with regard either to the government or to conventional gender roles.

The Chamber of Commerce in Douala, Cameroon, May 2021. Copyright, José Munoz Martin.

Agnès Badou and Thomas Bierschenk point to a similar collusion politico-économique in their analysis of the sprawling landscape of business associations of all shapes and sizes in Benin, where the larger business associations in particular follow the political strategies of their leaders rather than a logic of services for the benefit of their members. These organizations are in effect actors in regime politics, in la politique politicienne, as the government seeks to control them through a policy of divide and rule and co-optation to generate party political support and minimise opposition.

This continues a historical tradition to which we referred above, whereby successive governments have sought to capture and control the private sector, a continuity that is also observed by Amougou in Cameroon and Manhiça in Mozambique. In addition, it reveals a comparable tension between the official policy objective of developing the private sector and the government’s manoeuvres to control it, which ultimately greatly weakens these associations’ function of representing collective interests.

The numerous smaller associations, on the other hand, are closely interwoven into the social arena of international development policy. The establishment of these associations is often supported by development agencies (as described by Vampo for Togo and Manhiça for Mozambique, and alluded to by Cissokho in the case of regional trade organizations). In Benin, this has resulted in a high degree of fragmentation and thematic overlap. In addition, the limited duration of development programmes means that associations lose momentum when projects end, while others lose state support with a new government.

The concept of rentier capitalism competes with other terms with which it forms an overlapping discursive field. In recent decades, in addition to Polanyi’s overarching concept of “embedded capitalism”, terms such as “political capitalism”, “crony capitalism”, and “patrimonial capitalism” have been proposed. Political capitalism describes an economic and political system in which the economic and political elite cooperate for their mutual benefit – an exchange relationship that benefits both sides. The term political capitalism has been used primarily to describe Eastern European transformation processes after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Crony capitalism was initially associated to South-East Asian contexts but Cissokho, Manhiça and Vampo apply it (or rather, its French equivalent of capitalisme de connivence) to the African countries they are studying to underscore the role of social networks among political and economic players. Recently, there has also been mention of patrimonial capitalism, meaning a type of political economy in which power over it is highly personalised and economic exchange is particularistic and involves a high degree of relational capital.

We argue for the relative advantages of the concept of rentier capitalism when studying the economies of Africa. It is less colloquial than crony capitalism and does not have as strong normative associations as the alternatives. Crucially, it is not part of a typology that fundamentally sets Northern and Southern capitalisms apart, insofar as variants of rentier capitalism are found everywhere. Furthermore, it offers obvious connecting points to older debates on the rentier state and neo-patrimonialism.

Whichever one ultimately prefers, it should in any case be understood as an analytical term (an ideal type in the Weberian sense) that depicts aspects of a dynamic reality and does not claim to fully capture this reality within the framework of an essentialising, totalising and static typology. With these reflections, which can only be very brief here, we hope to open up a space for debate, to bring different research traditions into dialogue and to inspire further research perspectives.

However, we also would like to add a note of caution: As ethnographers, we remain sensitive to the difficulty of deciding empirically in given structural and situational contexts where exactly the boundary between capitalist profit and rent lies. Alexander Bud’s analysis of the commodification of domestic space in Nigeria and its coalescence with the hotel scene, on the one hand, and with film production, on the other hand, is a case in point, as he adds a welcome nuance to the theses on African variants of rentier capitalism.

He shows that in a rent dominated economy such as Nigeria’s, there may well be sectoral cases of entrepreneurial innovation and autonomous capitalist development. The innovative entrepreneurs being addressed in no way need to be found in manufacturing, as expected and demanded by supporters of active industrialisation policies. Rather, the focus on industrialisation policy may block the view of a potential interplay between consumer tastes and producer techniques that can be understood as genuinely capitalist while taking us away from a purely production-oriented understanding of economic value.

Abiriba, one of the most celebrated rural towns in Abia state, southeastern Nigeria. Copyright, Alex Bud.

Bud traces how film producers in Nigeria linked Nollywood with the housing and hotel sectors, and describes the innovative potential of these entanglements. This has produced a popular new architectural style for Nollywood houses, the transformation of homes and hotels into film locations and infrastructure, a star culture that enabled business activities in hotel bars and the emergence of entirely new types of space that merge film sets and residences in novel ways.

Remarkably, these dynamics have played out independently of state and international funding; in Bud’s account, this is a private sector developed without an active policy to promote it, comparable to the development of cocoa production in West Africa in
the early 20th century, which happened, as it were, in a blind spot of colonial policy. Bud thus challenges the frequently cited thesis that there has been no significant economic structural change in Africa since 1973, and he invites us to reconsider traditional understandings of economic sectors. He also challenges widespread views on houses and hotels as unproductive assets and shows them to be integral parts of such celebrated drivers of economic transformation as the film industry.

However, as Helmut Asche points out in his afterword to this special issue, whether the dynamics in the Nigerian film and hospitality sector represent a better escape route from an economic environment that, in spite of recent ambitious investments by Dangote and others, is still marked by a lack of manufacturing and agricultural diversification remains an open question. We may also wonder whether experiences akin to that of the creative industries in Nigeria can be found or reproduced elsewhere in the continent.

‘Ethnographies of entrepreneurs, business associations, and rentier capitalism in Africa‘, Anthropologie et développement (Volume 52, 2021).

Thomas Bierschenk is Professor of Anthropology and Modern African Studies at the Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany. He has published widely on development and the state in French-speaking countries of West and Central Africa.

José-María Muñoz is a senior lecturer at the University of Ediburgh’s Centre of African Studies. Throughout his career, he has put his training in anthropology and law to the service of a better understanding of economic dynamics in West and Central Africa.

Featured Photograph: The Chamber of Commerce in Douala, Cameroon, May 2021. Copyright, José Munoz Martin.

What is the role of the radical intellectual in Uganda ?

ROAPE

February 13, 2023

In early January 2019, Ugandan activist, and University of Cornell doctoral student Bwesigye Mwesigire was violently attacked on a bus in Uganda and sent into a three-day coma because of his political work. Four years later, he explains what led to the attack and makes some observations on the role of the intellectual in the Ugandan situation. Through this piece, he informs us about the importance of international solidarity, the challenges facing opposition to dictatorship in Uganda, and how radical intellectuals can potentially relate to the masses.

Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire

The Beginnings

In autumn 2017, during the first semester of my PhD at Cornell, I began to seriously think about the role of the intellectual in revolutionary times while partaking in the Post-colonial Studies and the Black Radical Imagination course. My comrade Zeyad and I were assigned with preparing a presentation on that topic for that class. We read C.L.R James’ wonderful Montreal Lectures, You Don’t Play With Revolution and secondary material about him. At the same time, we looked at how Gramsci’s concept of Organic intellectual or Grant’s Vernacular intellectual could help us better understand the life and work of black revolutionaries like CLR James. More importantly, as a PhD student committed to “making revolution”, the course led me to ask myself what does it mean to not play with revolution, today?

A year later, this line of questioning drew me to the practice of left-wing international solidarity. On one occasion, Zeyad, who had become my friend, asked me to give a talk at the Geneva (New York) Branch of the Party for Socialism and Liberation after I told him about the arrest of my friend and comrade Dr Stella Nyanzi. The purpose of the conversation would be to raise international awareness about Dr Stella Nyanzi’s incarceration and persecution. The party held a monthly “Peace Talk” series. After he had consulted with his comrades, it was confirmed that I would address the Geneva branch of the party about “United States Imperialism and Uganda”. I would weave Stella Nyanzi’s incarceration into the larger narrative of the US exploitation of Uganda through the puppet presidency of Yoweri Museveni. In the talk, I mentioned the mass-based formations of the People’s Government then led by Kizza Besigye, and the then new People Power movement led by Robert Kyagulanyi, alias Bobi Wine. I sought to put Stella Nyanzi’s persecution and these movements in conversation but more importantly, to frame them as Left-leaning, or worthy of the ideological solidarity of the Western Left and the Black International Left.

I understood my role, as a PhD student located in the United States, as that of mobilizing solidarity with the mass movements of the Ugandan people. Stella Nyanzi, as an incarcerated intellectual and writer-activist figure, was an entry point to dissecting how contemporary tyranny in Uganda is still primarily about United States Imperialism. One could say that the Marxist anti-imperialist analysis of the Uganda situation was an entry point for seeking solidarity with the cause to free Stella Nyanzi, from the International Black and Western Left. That peace talk was delivered on November 30, 2018. I went home to Uganda, about a week after that.

The Attack in Uganda

The attack came as I travelled by bus from home in the southwestern part of the country, to the capital, to arrange my return to the United States for the Spring 2019 semester. Over a hundred people from all walks of life who knew about me and my anti-dictatorial work in Uganda and abroad mobilised a support fund to cater for my medical costs. Some people who have never met me in person, but knew of my political work, of the conditions in which the attack happened were very essential in drumming up support for my treatment. I emphasise this because we started with the role of the intellectual in a situation ripe for revolution. Correct or incorrect, I had seen my role as a PhD student in the United States as seeking solidarity with the struggle in Uganda, from that location. I believe the attacks I suffered on January 19, 2019, were because of this work.

After I physically recovered, on a visit to Stella Nyanzi in jail, she was so convinced that the reason I was attacked was because of my cultural and intellectual work. She particularly noted that my work bringing together artists, academics, writers, and other intellectual and cultural workers was a threat to the Museveni tyranny. As I further recuperated, I stayed in Uganda and coordinated an online and offline solidarity movement around Stella Nyanzi’s persecution and incarceration. With many comrades, I will list as many as I can, elsewhere, we continued to talk about her imprisonment. We wrote we petitioned, and we agitated. We spread her words, including releasing poems she had written while in jail. First to celebrate her birthday, and second in a collection that came out ahead of her eventual acquittal and release.

The question of the role of the intellectual in a situation ripe for revolution didn’t go away when Stella Nyanzi was released. I was already in the United States, and it was the early days of the Covid19 pandemic when Stella Nyanzi was released. After a brief hesitation, it was announced that the 2021 periodic Ugandan national elections would happen despite the pandemic. It was obvious to every eye, ear, nose, skin and tongue that Museveni would lose if the election were fair, even if his main opponent was a cow or even a rock. The point of periodic elections in Uganda is to satisfy the nominal requirements of liberal democracy. They are a staged spectacle and not a measure of the people’s will or the majority’s choice of who to lead them.

A Tyrant’s Massacre

Even by their own macabre standards, Museveni’s tyranny outdid itself in cracking down on the masses during the election. When Bobi Wine was arrested on allegations that he had flouted COVID-19 guidelines, protests erupted and to contain them, Museveni ordered (overtly or by omission) a massacre of protesting and non-protesting civilians. The actual number of the dead and injured in the massacre is unknown. Museveni says they killed about 50 people. The numbers are much higher. This massacre happened in November 2020. A lot of violations had taken place before the massacre. Slightly over a year before the massacre, Makerere university students staged a strike protesting tuition fee increment. They called the protest #FeesMustFall. It was led by women students. The leader was not only brutalized into a coma but also expelled from the university. Male-only student halls of residence were raided by the military and hundreds of residents were beaten, to the point most were hospitalized.

Beyond question, the winner of the 2021 election was Bobi Wine just as Kizza Besigye won 2001, 2006, 2011 and 2016 elections and Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere could have won the 1996 election. The choice of the masses, the majority of Ugandans, has never been Museveni. It doesn’t matter the qualities and attributes of the alternative. Even a cow or a rock can poll better than Museveni. The masses can’t forget about decades of murder and brutalisation, not to mention enabling the economic exploitation of the country, even the continent when it comes to polling day. If we consider the use of Museveni family-owned security companies in Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States, the geographical scale of the complicity becomes transcontinental. The masses know of this reach of his brigandage. He can never win over the masses. He can never get earnest domestic favour. The masses are not stupid. The masses are wise. The collective is always right. The masses know that Museveni is not good for them. They have suffered the direct brunt of his tyranny.

But the question remains, what is the role of the intellectual in this situation? A situation where there’s extreme suppression of the masses, and extreme exploitation of their resources, is a situation ripe for revolution. What is the intellectual’s role in this situation?

The role of the intellectual

Does the intellectual, on paper draw out the plan for the perfect revolution? Does the intellectual counter the efforts of those seeking to end tyranny by pointing out how imperfect they are? Does the intellectual agonise over the ideological correctness or incorrectness of the rock or cow that the masses vote for?

Bobi Wine has shown himself to be allied with US imperialism through his “ill” or arguably well-calculated gestures on the international scene. The first note of this ideological leaning was obvious after he endorsed Juan Guaidó, US puppet-in-chief in Venezuela. The second of these loud declarations was his endorsement of the NATO and Ukrainian side in the current conflict with Russia. It takes no rocket scientist to see that Bobi Wine’s strategy for ending Museveni’s tyranny is a US-backed revolution.

A US-backed revolution was earlier attempted during and after the 2011 election by Besigye who directly used Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy as a key text for political education among activists of the age. It didn’t work. The radical intellectual in the C.L.R James model discerns an ideological crisis with US-backed revolutions. No change that directly involves the masses or that works to their benefit could occur through such a revolution. Exploitation is bound to persist. They do not resolve the primary contradiction. It would only be a matter of time before the direct military brutalisation returns or worse. Some may say that a US-backed revolution would give them a minute to catch their breath as superficial reforms would happen to prove the liberalism of the US-supported revolution.

However, the idea that a US-Backed revolution provides short-term relief is a dangerous one. I think that there’s a need for mass political education at all layers of society so that connections between the Museveni tyranny and the United States Imperialism it serves are made and contended with. The intellectual, therefore, needs to create study groups, to popularise radical ideology, and other such activities that can constitute what Gramsci called a counter-hegemony.

The difficulty for the radical intellectuals operating in the current circumstances concerns relating to Ugandans oppressed by Museveni’s regime, incarcerated, disappeared, brutalised, and murdered. Far too often political mobilisation by intellectuals has slipped into a shallow political contest of who has the best buzzwords, slogans and ideological line. But this contest fails to address that people bear physical scars. People are still suffering symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. We have lost friends, comrades, colleagues, and relatives. The ideological analysis is important as it enables us to understand the nature of our problem and guides us towards action. However, opposition to Museveni has too often slipped into sloganeering by those who pose as the real representative of the masses while failing to take the question of imperialist intervention in the country seriously. The intellectual who engages in phrase-mongering in the face of the mourning masses further gets alienated from them. The masses know when intellectual criticisms serve no revolutionary purpose.

Before radical intellectuals proselytise, they should engage in concrete action to relate to the masses. Can they first get life-saving medicines and treatment for their suffering? Can those under direct threat from the regime first get out of the country? Can the traumatised get therapy to deal with their PTSD? And then perhaps get into a program of political education and consciousness-raising. Finally, can radical intellectuals pause and listen to what the masses are demanding?

Does it take an intellectual to know that someone who was fired from a job because they are a threat to tyranny has no source of income and needs actual financial support? I do not think so. It takes a human being. Che Guevara said everyone who trembles at injustice is his comrade. Let us first be humane comrades, and then intellectuals later. We must remain informed about the stage of the struggle from those most impacted and react accordingly. The wounds are still bleeding. Let us do what is necessary. The struggle continues.

Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire was born in Uganda. He is an instructor in the Institute of African Studies at Emory University, while working towards defending his PhD (English) dissertation titled “Afro-Nationalism: The Transcontinental Poetics of New African Diaspora Fiction” at Cornell University. He is a member of the Ubuntu Reading Group publishing collective.

Lessons to Africa from Africa – reclaiming early post-independence progressive policies

ROAPE

February 9, 2023

ROAPE’s Ray Bush reviews a collection of essays which grapple with early post-independence development projects and policies in Africa. Bush argues that the lessons in this collection are relevant for understanding the constraints and opportunities for radical African transformation in the 21^st century.

By Ray Bush

The new year ushered in the usual array of tropes on Africa. They include why the continent is failing, what it should be doing better and why it has so much resilience in dealing with its own frailty. One recent ‘take’ that does little more than repeat tired mantras of the international financial institutions comes from Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). Displaying limited astuteness, the EIU notes the challenges ahead for Africa in terms of internal and external shocks although most of the continent will ‘weather the storm and continue to grow’. It seems that the limited number of resource rich economies will benefit from high commodity prices but the usual list of chaotic consequence for the continent remains – somewhat undifferentiated – high debt servicing costs, political instability because of election cycles, geopolitics and war, and food insecurity ‘caused by conflict and adverse weather conditions’.

It is a great pity that the EIU, and other western organisations, ignore the analysis of African scholar-activists and the historical backdrop to the continents contemporary crises. Wilful neglect of such analysis leads to the failure to understand why and how different African countries are in the mess that they are and why the mess has structural continuities and conjunctural discontinuities.

The antidote to western ‘think tanks’ and journalists is the superb collection of essays in the quarterly bilingual journal of CODESRIA. The issue emerges from the Post-Colonialisms Today project that is a research and advocacy initiative ‘recovering insights from early post-independence Africa, and mobilising them through a feminist lens to address contemporary challenges’. The project began in 2017 with a collective of African activist intellectuals from across the continent. There were six in the working group, six advisors, eight researchers and three in the secretariat. The outcome of the collective, its range and insight is difficult to capture in a short review but there are two continuous themes among contributors: the importance of revisiting the historical past and the significance of sovereignty, or the absence of it.

The collection challenges ‘the continued hegemony of neoliberalism in policymaking in Africa’ (p. 4). The detailed and expansive introduction by Tetteh Hormeku-Ajei, Aishu Balaji, Adebayo Olukoshi and Anita Nayar notes the amnesia about how early post-independence leaders tried to secure the ‘newly-won freedom of their countries through policies that were designed…to promote autonomous development processes anchored on the demands and needs of a home market’ (p. 1).

Julius Nyerere, for example, rebuked the International Financial Institutions (IFI) when they accused him of failure, noting that at independence, Tanzania had just two trained engineers, 12 medical doctors and 85 per cent of the country were illiterate – after 43 years of British colonial rule. Tanzania under Nyerere’s leadership, in contrast, ensured 91 per cent literacy, all kids were in school and per capita income grew dramatically. After reluctantly accepting IFI diktats, key social and economic indices plummeted. Nyerere had asked the IFI representatives to have some humility yet as the authors here remind us, the heart of the neoliberal project was to discredit the first 20 years of African post-independence development.

In discrediting the early policy and strategy of many African states, the IFIs provided a narrative to explain the importance of what became the ruinous years of structural adjustment. The IFIs critiqued the foundational values of autonomous and autochthonous development. Yet while the neo-liberal project discredited African strategy and practice, often to try and disengage from the deleterious consequences of post war international capital, this collection highlights that the idea of African post-independence failure was manufactured and ‘deliberately misleading’ (p. 2).

Compared to the lost development decades of structural adjustment in 1980s and 1990s, the first twenty years of post-independent Africa had promise and was influential in trying to reverse the colonial inheritance. African, mostly radical leaders, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Ben Bella, Kenneth Kaunda, Hastings Banda and Jomo Kenyatta were often successful, although sometimes for only a brief period of time, in addressing political and economic fragmentation and especially reliance on primary commodity exports for income generation.

The authors in the six chapters of this collection explore how several African leaders recognised their country’s subordinate position in the global system and understood the importance of assembling African agency to address and change that relationship. A unifying theme in the collection is that ‘Decolonisation across Africa brought about historical changes; it was a moment of solidarity, optimism, and radical rethinking of political and economic systems’ (Sara Salem, p. 160). That contemporary rearticulation of colonial relationships has reproduced the problem of earlier independence leaders.

Yet the early leaders deployed different approaches to reduce dependence upon former colonial powers and did so by promoting nation building, industrialisation, economic and agricultural diversification, pan-Africanism and the development of a new economic order. Ultimately, however, as Nkrumah noted the new ‘independent’ state may have had the trappings of power but it was independent only in theory. It did not have meaningful sovereignty that could confront the externalisation of policymaking and prevent the stalling of industrialisation. The newly independent states were hollowed out vehicles for the extraction of Africa’s wealth and resources to enrich the global north.

One vehicle to challenge northern economic imperial domination was the emergence of a pan-African agenda. This theme is examined by Jimi Adesina who reviews variations and similarities of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Julius Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah in their approaches to socialism, pan-African unity, nationhood, economic development, epistemology and democracy. He concludes that there was the need in the early post independence period, and again today, to develop and mobilise the full range of domestic resources to reduce dependence on external interests. In doing this it is crucial to generate a ‘macro vision’ to coordinate resources and maintain sovereignty. In their different ways the three African leaders discussed by Adesina tried to do this, with variable success.

Adesina’s review is important and necessary. He reminds us of the crucial Nyerere leitmotif ‘unity’ (p. 49) and the obstacles to it. These include the variable capacity across the continent to challenge imperialism. He also reminds us of the importance of not reifying African leaders and the importance of the ‘diversity of postcolonial imaginations’ and quoting Nyerere again, ‘the sin of despair would be the most unforgivable’ (p. 54). So too however, would be an equally foolish optimism that is not grounded in material analysis of existing radical social forces and the power of imperialism. This latter is not a much used term in African studies but it is clear that unless imperialism is understood and challenged, new agendas for pan-Africanism or the reconstitution of sovereign national projects and policy autonomy will wither on the proverbial vine.

Attempts to formulate a national project that might challenge imperial interests is explored by Kareem Megahed and Omar Ghannam. They review Gamal Abdel Nasser’s attempts to industrialise Egypt’s economy. Despite many achievements they argue that the project was limited by the amount of cultivated land and the needs for increased investment. Much of the undeveloped industrial sector needed to be built from scratch and the capitalist class was weak. They do concede that Nasser’s land reform and new tenancy laws transformed large sections of rural Egypt empowering the fellahin even though the reforms did not erase the power and influence of old feudal elites. Their main argument, however, is that while the new incumbents of Nasserist state often used words like ‘socialism’ and ‘planning’ they did ‘not actually, as is commonly believed, implement a central planning nor a socialist approach’ (p. 67). Capitalist property and the rights for the bourgeoisie were untouched. The domestic capitalist class was weak in the pre-1952 period and dominated by imperialism. The failure of the local capitalist class to make long-term investments in productivity accelerated a state-led strategy to industrialisation.

Megahed and Ghannam provide a useful reflection on the external and internal limitations of Nasser’s post-colonial project. They note Samir Amin’s observation regarding the difficulties of effective planning if there are a number of independent centres of power and the various centres of decision-making, resulting in the prevalence of different criteria of implementation and quality’ (p. 88). The inherited and restricted industrial base limited the development of broad-based industrial strategies and there was only a limited stock of skilled cadres.

The biggest critique however, and probably the most controversial, although not entirely new, is that Nasser ‘attempted to give workers a measure of economic freedom and progress without giving them the political means to protect these very gains’ (p. 89). One of the reasons why the project fell apart, despite many gains in productivity and improvement in the well being of the poor ‘was the lagging of democratic workers’ representation, which allowed the project to be highjacked’ (p. 92). But perhaps here was a real bind for Nasser, soimprovement in living standards for farmers and the industrial working class may not have been possible at the pace it was achieved without the strong arm of the Egyptian state amid the challenging global and regional context that threatened Nasser’s Egypt. Nasser tried to break from the imperialist system but he failed. Upon his death in 1970 economic liberalisation accelerated and this leads to an important conclusion: ‘if we seek to overturn or to merely reshape the capitalist totality, created and maintained by imperialist powers, we cannot fight it piecemeal’ (p. 91).

Akua Britwum draws attention to the still under-researched importance of agricultural transformation in challenging uneven incorporation into global capitalism and in trying to plot a strategy for sovereignty. She explores this topic in the cases of Ghana and Tanzania reflecting on the need for national self-sufficiency and development planning as a mechanism linking all sectors of the economy. She reminds readers of not only the historical significance but also contemporary relevance of the key strategic potential of the state in production, distribution and employment creation. She notes the problem in Ghana and Tanzania, that stretches across Africa, of dependence upon cash crop production for (limited) income creation and the marginalisation of women. The contrast between Nkrumah’s seven year development plan and Nyerere’s Arusha Declaration raises questions of what was seen to constitute development. It also begged the question whether the rhetoric deployed by both leaders that viable development alternatives were possible based on ‘a brand of socialism that they identified as African’ (p. 110).

Britwun’s analysis goes beyond her detailed case studies. She makes important observations about contemporary constraints on development in Africa. She effectively notes how the absence of sovereignty continues, and this is evident in the ‘failure to fully delink national economies from the global capitalist political economy that [had] positioned African countries as primary producers’ (p. 128). This meant there was no end to the dependence on ‘earnings from cash crop exports to finance development expenditure’ and any influence the state may be able to exert over productive resources was limited by the way national economies were part of the broader capitalist system.

Britwun is scathing about the failure of independence to reduce patriarchy and how the Ghanaian and Tanzanian development plans failed to recognise that gendered stratification is ‘inimical to national development’ (p. 133). She does make clear that there were positive lessons for development planning that resulted from the Ghanaian and Tanzanian experiences. The strength of the development plans was ‘their sturdy ideological focus that led them to prioritise domestic needs’ the state was a ‘principal economic actor’ and agriculture was central to development planning’ (p. 130). Nkrumah and Nyerere’s imperatives of African socialism provided an important, although not long lasting, ‘ideological grounding in the imperative of African socialism’ (p. 131).

This collection of outstanding essays is constantly grappling with how was it possible to promote development plans in a post-colonial Africa dominated by imperialism? The limitations of beginning from scratch or dealing with the hand that colonial exploitation had dealt is noted in the Egypt case, in Tanzania and Senegal, and Ghana in the context where political leadership became a substitute for limited means of production to liberate states from imperialism.

In Tunisia, Chafik Ben Rouine reminds us how before neo-liberalism the country’s central bank helped mobilise resources to facilitate post-independent agrarian reforms and industrial strategy. He highlights the historical experience of a central bank succeeding in mobilising, controlling and channelling credit to the needs of the national economy. Ben Rouine notes how the 1960s was a period where the state tried to develop a vision of decolonisation and self-centred development with a ten year plan which ultimately floundered on ‘trust in external financial support, an overly centralised bureaucracy’ that didn’t understand the specificity of Tunisian agriculture with a ‘vision of development too focused on the West’ (p. 156). Tunisia’s limited, but important attempt at great autonomy from the world capitalist system floundered after structural adjustment in 1986 and neo-liberalism’s tenet of central bank independence – or rather securing the interests of capital.

The volume is tied together by Sarah Salem’s excellent contribution on radical regionalism, feminism, sovereignty and the Pan-African Project. She argues that sovereignty in the immediate post-independence period was seen as a regional, pan-African and internationalist project of decolonisation. As we have noted, however, and as the volume instructs, the capacity of newly independent African states to generate a sovereign identity and practice was, and continues,to be, shaped by their subordinate position in the world economy.

Salem highlights the role that African feminists had in shaping policy that challenged colonial structures of global capital including policy of industrialisation and nationalisation to promote independent development. She highlights the important role that ‘regionalism’ played in doing this, which is a term she deploys to ‘refer to a state policy of continentalism across Africa’. Regionalism for Salam refers to ‘the Third Worldist belief in various decolonised regions coming together to confront capitalism’ and is part of emerging Pan-Africanism (pp. 160-161). Salem creates an analysis that pushes the debate about Pan-Africanism to explore ‘radical regionalism’ and feminist contributions to generate agency and sovereignty that ‘incorporates gender into debates around African independence’ (p. 162). Here she addresses concerns about methodology – how to access what it was that women and women’s organisations said, approaching archival material to ‘look for clues between the lines’ (p. 163). Salem explicitly addresses and problematises formal sovereignty or legal decolonisation noting as other contributors do that sovereignty actually requires economic and political independence.

The lessons revisited in this collection apply to understanding the constraints and opportunities for meaningful African sovereignty in the 21^st century. It is salutary and somewhat depressing to reflect on the ways in which attempts at autonomous post-colonial development were constantly knocked back by the forces of imperialism. Yet they also provide the tools for understanding and confronting contemporary imperialism, of the need to interrogate the foolish mantra’s of the IFIs and the triad of the US, EU and Japan. The contemporary crisis of global capitalism offers opportunity to challenge imperial hegemony and to do so with radical political and social mobilisation by farmers and workers in Africa.

‘Lessons to Africa from Africa. Reclaiming Early Post Independence Progressive Policies’. Guest Editors – Teteh Hormeku-Ajei and Adebayo Olukoshi, Africa Development (vol 47 no. 1, 2022).

Ray Bush is Professor Emeritus of African Studies at the School of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Leeds. He is also a leading member of the Review of African Political Economy’s Editorial Working Group.

Featured Photographs: Akosombo Dam on the Volta river in Ghana spilling water through floodgates (20 November 2010).

“Whoever wins we must continue to fight” – Nigeria’s coming election

ROAPE

February 7, 2023

ROAPE speaks to Nigerian socialist and activist, Alex Batubo, about the elections this month, and the political and economic situation in the country. Batubo focuses on the struggle of labour, and the possibilities of a radical alternative emerging from the challenges (and opportunities) of the present.

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ROAPE: Can you please describe the situation in Nigeria at the moment, the major political and economy fault-lines and divisions? Also, if possible, describe last year’s strikes, and the situation for the labour movement.

Alex Batubo: As in many countries across the world, the common people in Nigeria have suffered from the ravages of neoliberalism over the last two decades and more. The economy has certainly grown since the end of military rule in 1999. In real terms the GDP is now at least three times bigger than it was two decades ago. In addition, the economy has been transformed. The government now depends for less than half of its income on the export of crude oil. The manufacturing sector of the economy is currently around 13% and is larger than the oil and gas sector.

Despite this huge economic growth and transformation, most people are now poorer than they were two decades ago. A recent survey by the National Bureau of Statistics found that 63% of the population or around 130 million people are now ‘multi-dimensionally’ poor. Half the population do not have access to safe drinking water or electricity. Most power stations are powered by gas and yet suffer from intermittent gas supplies when gas flaring is common across the Niger Delta (this is the largest contribution to climate change across sub-Saharan Africa).

Abject poverty for the majority continues with unbelievable wealth accruing to the rich minority. Whilst the majority of the population are poorer, the rich are now rich beyond their wildest dreams. Dozens of executive jets arrive for society weddings. Purchases of properties by the Nigerian elite has a significant impact on the cost of housing in London, for example. Aliko Dangote, the richest of the elite is now richer than anyone in Africa and almost anyone in Britain.

The rich elite have stolen all of the oil wealth, so most people are as poor as anywhere across Africa and the quality of public education and health is one of the lowest. Certainly, government spending on health and education is significantly below the average for governments across sub-Saharan Africa.

This poverty, inequality and corruption is the reason for rise of rampant insecurity. Crime, kidnapping and cattle rustling have exploded since the restrictions arising from the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the informal sector. The trade unions have been active but have not provided a successful alternative. So, a minority of the desperate poor have turned to individual violence.

Yet since 2000, we have seen a wave of strikes including several general strikes. Unfortunately, in most cases, these strikes have been tightly controlled by the trade union leadership and have not actively involved individual trade union members. They have been ‘stay at homes’ rather than the militant active strikes that are needed to terrify the government and the ruling class.

So, for example, last year, the university lecturers were on strike for eight months, closing all the public universities. The workers at all the government research institutes were also on strike for more than a year. In each case they were striking over the failure of the government to implement previous agreements. Both of these strikes ended in defeat because the trade union federation, the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) failed to provide the necessary solidarity.

The frustrating thing is that we know what is necessary for the movements to win. The NLC organised impressive rallies in solidarity with the striking university lecturers last year, in all 36 state capitals at the end of July. At the rally in Abuja, the general secretary of the NLC even announced a realistic strategy to win. He said that if the government did not act within two weeks a three-day general strike would be called. If the government then failed to act in the following two weeks, he warned, an indefinite general strike would be organised. Unfortunately, the NLC took no steps to implement this strategy, so finally the lecturers returned to work defeated and never received their monthly salaries for the period of the strike.

In May 2021, the NLC organised a three-day general strike in one of the states. This was an active strike involving all the workers in the state. The electricity was cut off, the schools and banks, for example, were all closed. In addition, daily demonstrations took place in the streets of Kaduna led by the president of the NLC.

But then, after three days, the NLC called off the strike immediately it was invited to talks by the government. Over the next year the governor who had been forced onto the ropes by the strike action, regained his confidence and once again sacked thousands of teachers including the national president of the Nigerian Union of Teachers (NUT). No action was taken by the NUT nor the NLC over these attacks.

The trade union leaders have similarly failed to provide adequate political leadership. Though the trade unions established the Labour Party, they then failed to adequately ensure a consistent leadership in the party. This resulted in a split and a series of court cases. A former vice-presidential candidate of one of the two main political parties then joined the Labour Party and became its presidential candidate within four days. He was Peter Obi.

However, the NLC is still not providing consistent support for the Labour Party candidate and in return Obi is not openly supporting the NLC’s Charter of Workers Demands. An NLC leader is standing as a state governor under the ruling political party. Similarly, the NLC leadership in Lagos, the business capital, has come out in support for the ruling party. Total disarray.

As a result, Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) is likely to win the presidential elections taking place in late February. Tinubu was the governor of Lagos State for eight years from 1999. He might have been less corrupt than many other governors but led attacks on the workers and their trade union leaders.

We hope that the new leadership of the NLC, to be elected at their four-yearly congress later in February, will reflect on these issues. However, we know that it will require pressure from the member trade unions and the rank-and-file of these unions to ensure that we have the active strikes and the solidarity that is necessary to win our demands.

And whoever wins the presidential elections we will need a militant trade union movement to start to reduce poverty, inequality, and corruption. No president will just give us a decent minimum wage with regular increments. We will have to force them to fund public education, health, electricity, and water for all.

Ahead of the elections, can we chat about some of the party-political developments? The PDP (People’s Democratic Party) was the ruling party from 1999 until 2015, after which the APC came to power with Muhammadu Buhari as president, with much fanfare and promises to stamp out corruption, to deal with insecurity, and tackle poverty and poor service provision etc. Can you talk us through Buhari’s tenure?

In 2015, Buhari and the APC provided an optimistic manifesto. He promised to reduce corruption and use the money to adequately fund public education and health. As a result, he claimed he would eliminate insecurity, which at that time was largely limited to the North East. Many people hoped that Buhari would win the elections and implement his promises.

These hopes were completely dashed. Poverty, inequality, and corruption have all increased significantly in the last eight years. The resulting despair and the economic desperation of the majority of the population is the reason for the major rise in insecurity.

The value of the minimum wage has reduced to less than US$50 a month, one of the lowest in Africa. It has only been increased once since Buhari came to power, despite inflation at around 15 – 20% each year. This increase has not even been implemented in some states.

The proportion of the federal budget dedicated to education and health are now lower than when Buhari became the president. In 2015, more than 12% of the budget was to be spent on education, by 2021 this had fallen to less than 6% and it has not significantly increased since then.

Buhari promised change and he has certainly delivered that, unfortunately in the wrong direction. Most people are now poorer than they were eight years ago whilst the corrupt ruling class are laughing all the way to their banks in London.

Tinubu, the most likely next president, paid tens of thousands of US dollars to each delegate at the APC primaries to become their candidate. This money came from his continued draining of money from Lagos State, where his consultancy company still collects massive revenue, in his media empire.

There is limited hope that the next government will be any better and the opposition from the NLC still needs to be organised. The new president of the NLC will be elected unopposed at their congress later in February – he’s Joe Ajaero. He comes with a good reputation, but this is hardly deserved. He is from the electricity workers’ trade union – the General Secretary of the National Union of Electricity Employees (NUEE) – who have suffered privatisation since 2013 with very limited fight back. In addition, Ajaero led a five-year split from the NLC when he failed to be elected president in 2015.

Interestingly, and some would say, positively these elections are being contested by Peter Obi of the Labour Party. Many young Nigerians seem very excited about the candidacy of Obi. Can you talk us through the emergence of Obi, the history of the Labour Party and his programme for change in the Nigerian elections?

We live by hope, many, especially the youth, have now placed their hope in Obi of the Labour Party. This is the optimism of the will, promoted by Gramsci. The pessimism of the intellect is that Obi is unlikely to be successful. He is a business tycoon who was the governor of Adamawa State for eight years. This background and his open support for neoliberalism does not really justify the faith that millions are placing in him.

what is more, Obi has not created a strong or broad enough coalition to win victory in the polls, let alone to become the next president. Until recently he was a leading member of the PDP that ruled Nigeria from 1999 to 2015. His alliance with the trade union movement has not been consummated, neither is it based on his actions when he was a state governor. However, the Labour Party leadership retreated, late last year, voting firmly and clearly to support the NLC’s Charter of Workers Demands. But no mention of this document is made in Obi’s manifesto. Similarly, this manifesto does not mention the Nigerian Labour Congress nor the need to implement a decent minimum wage.

Perhaps as a result, the NLC leadership are not providing consistent support for Obi as the Labour Party presidential candidate. The NLC support for the Labour Party has always been lukewarm and the NLC president is rumoured to have been a card-carrying member of the ruling party, the APC.

Despite this, Obi, as the candidate for the Labour Party has created a level of enthusiasm especially amongst the youth not seen for some time. This resulted in a series of mass rallies in many cities. These were largely attended through conviction rather than people being paid to attend, as is the tradition for the two major political parties. Plus, several opinion polls have indicated that Obi leads in terms of public support.

Whether this support is enough to bring victory is yet to be seen. Tinubu of the APC appears determined to use his stolen wealth and political support to win. His party holds both the Federal Government and most of the state governments and this power will probably determine the outcome, no matter who people actually vote for.

If, as you say, Obi does not fundamentally offer an alternative for Nigerians hungry for real change, can you tell us what needs to be done, and the state of the radical left across Nigeria, and regionally?

The organised left is small and is split over the elections. The moderates are calling for support for Tinubu of the ruling party. They claim his is less committed to privatisation than the PDP candidate. Other parts of the left are calling for support for Omoyele Sowore who also stood in 2019 under the African Action Congress. He would need to receive 50 times as many votes to win this time.

Somehow, we need to be able to unite the left to argue and push for the NLC to lead an active and sustained campaign against poverty, inequality, and corruption, whoever turns out to be the next president.

In the medium term, we need to patiently re-build the radical left and attempt to create a viable electoral platform.

In the last two years or so Socialist Labour has begun to build a left current based on the need for the working class to lead active opposition to neoliberalism. We now have several hundred members on our supporters WhatsApp group. This is still small in a country with well over 200 million people, but it is significantly larger than the more established left groups.

International experience has shown that building a progressive or left electoral alternative faces considerable challenges. There are all too few successes from which we can learn. But it seems to me that we need to start from the grassroots and build some electoral success at the local level, rather than first demonstrating our weaknesses at the national level. We also need to build alliances with other progressive organisations, other radical groups and progressive civil society organisations.

The recent alliance between the African Action Congress (AAC of Sowore) and one wing of the northern based Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) provides some medium-term hope. This could be built as a militant alternative to the Labour Party. But it would be even better if all three (and more) of these parties came together in an electoral alliance. There was talk of an alliance between the Labour Party and the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) of the former Governor of Kano State, but this did not come to fruition.

However, there is a history of party hoping. Several governors in past were elected as Labour Party candidates or supporters only to leave after being elected. All the Labour Party candidates in Jigawa State recently left to join the ruling APC.

I believe strongly that the future, as the Polish socialist Rosa Luxemburg said, is socialism or barbarism. We have had more than our fair share of barbarism across Africa. The immediate economic prospects in Nigeria look poor, with a declining price of oil, government revenue is likely to fall, and all three leading candidates have promised to end the subsidy of the price of petrol by June. In these circumstances we need a robust, active, and sustained campaign by the labour movement. We all need to unite to try and deliver this.

Alex Batubo is a member of Socialist Labour and a trade unionist. He is now based in Abuja but comes from the Niger Delta.

Featured Photograph: Protesters at the end-SARS protest in Lagos, Nigeria (13 October 2020).

Lives invisible to power – an interview with Victoria Brittain

ROAPE

February 1, 2023

ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig interviews the radical journalist, campaigner, and writer Victoria Brittain. Brittain has spent a lifetime exposing the lies and destructions of Western imperialism and celebrating the resistance and hope of those who fight back. For decades, Brittain worked and lived in Africa, and struggled to get the voices of the oppressed heard, and their lives seen.

Leo Zeilig: We are delighted to be able to interview you on roape.net. Speaking personally, your journalism and writing on Africa was a revelation to me in the late 1980s and 1990s, as I became aware of the world – providing extraordinary and radical coverage of the plunder and resistance on the continent, amid the narrative of coups, war, famine on Africa presented by most media outlets.

Can you tell us a little about yourself, and how you started writing, and your own politicisation? How did you become the radical writer and campaigner you are today?

Victoria Brittain: Thank you, Leo, for your interesting questions and for pushing me to take time to think about the past and to explain things I didn’t expect to.

Actually, it is all about luck, and the kindness of strangers. I was helped too by being an outsider, as a woman reporter then was, plus the timing of working in a period of journalism on a small canvas, unimaginable in todays’ transformed media world with the huge commercial pressures, plus the mass output in social media, blogs, podcasts etc.

My first job was in a weekly magazine, The Investor’s Chronicle – not a very likely place for someone no good at maths and with no interest in The City, but it happened because it was the only paper that replied to my many random letters to editors asking for a job. I think the editor gave me the job out of pity when he saw me for an interview – I was on crutches after a bad riding accident. In Tehran my horse slipped and fell with my foot still in the stirrup and I could barely walk for a couple of years. It was by chance and in desperation to find an independent life that I tried journalism – I had never read newspapers and had no knowledge of politics or the wider world.

Can you take us through your political background, and explain some of the formative moments in your work, writing and activism? I am thinking of the time you spent in Vietnam, reporting – along with others – on American imperialism, and resistance to it.

In fact, I had no political background. I was the under-educated product of a poor boarding school and a silent home life. It was my good luck to arrive in Washington DC in 1968 and to find myself in an unimaginable new world of high drama as anti-Vietnam war demonstrations and violent police reactions played out on the streets of the capital and in cities and campuses across America. I shyly joined the crowds in Washington.

Gradually I learned new names of academics, poets, priests, and others who I heard speak out against the war: Professors Noam Chomsky and Richard Falk, Dr Spock (already my guru as a new mother with a baby), the Berrigan brothers Daniel and Philip, Jesuit priests and poets. I found the New York Review of Books with its elegant, scathing articles on the war, and I F Stone’s wonderful weekly newsletter with its extraordinary exposures of wickedness in US domestic politics. I was surprised by the emotion which hit me at the assassination of Martin Luther King, just a year after his blistering speech in Riverside Church condemning the immorality of the Vietnam war. Exposure to the issues of the Vietnam war and the US civil rights movements had opened doors of curiosity that my rural conservative background had kept sealed.

By chance the well-known New Statesman correspondent, Andrew Kopkind, who I didn’t actually know, asked me to cover his weekly column for a few weeks or months for reasons even then unclear to me. Had I perhaps met one of his friends in a demonstration? In early 1969 for the New Statesman, I found myself sitting on a bench in the street outside the White House with Ron Ridenhour, the young helicopter door gunner who had tried unsuccessfully to get US authorities and major media to report and investigate the US soldiers’ massacre of an entire Vietnamese village of women, children and old men at My Lai, or Pinkville as the US soldiers called it. He finally got Seymour Hersh, then of Pacific News Service to publish the first incendiary story, which Hersh followed with much more research in articles and books for many years.

Listening to Ridenhour it seemed that hours went by, and I was overwhelmed by the unimaginable horror of the scenes he described. I was out of my depth and staggered at the scale of the official coverup as he explained it all to me and I put it in my notebook for the Statesman. I was frankly clueless (I certainly didn’t know the word imperialism). But I really wanted to go to Vietnam and see this extraordinary world of America in Asia. I read and re-read Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, and I still didn’t understand it, but I was hooked.

A little later, back in London, the ITN News editor decided on the then radical idea of hiring a woman reporter, in fact two, and, oddly, he came to my house and asked me to do it. I didn’t like the camera and I was too shy to be any good, but I needed a job. One day he sent me on a three-week stint in Vietnam – my old dream. I went, entirely guided on the ground into soft short stories by my experienced and kind cameraman – he was Canadian and markedly different in his attitude from the patronising and hostile reactions I got from some of the British contingent. I wanted to stay in Saigon.

Another outsider, Louis Heron, foreign editor of The Times whom I knew slightly from Washington days gave me a chance when I approached him hearing his staff man was leaving. Louis took me to lunch, offered me a small monthly retainer and told me, “Remember, no story is worth dying for.”

I left London, with my small son and one-way tickets to Saigon. Two things made my Vietnam a different experience from other Western journalists, who were nearly all men. Living with my son meant I was with Vietnamese and French mothers and children at school and at the swimming pool – another world away from the male journalists’ social life.

Then, in the greatest stroke of luck, Mark Frankland, the distinguished, long-time Observer correspondent, passed on to me his exceptional translator and fixer, Mr Loc, to show me a Vietnam far from Western military and diplomatic briefings. Mark told me later that Mr Loc was hard to please, he would not work for a French or American journalist, he spoke French but no English, and he really only wanted to work with quiet, discreet, knowledgeable Mark Frankland. Mark promised Mr Loc I had the first two qualities and he, Loc, could work on the last.

Behind Mr Loc, riding pillion on his motorcycle, Vietnam’s people, not just the war, opened up for me. I sat and listened to Vietnamese villagers and farmers, schoolteachers, monks, ousted politicians, displaced widows with their families, lost and wounded children and their carers. I had found what I wanted to hear and write about – oppressed people, the majority, whose lives were invisible to those in power. Later, the struggle to get those voices themselves heard unmediated was central to my work.

Everywhere I saw great natural beauty and America’s unthinking destruction of place and people. I heard despair and what I would later learn to think of, in Southern Africa, as Dennis Brutus’s Stubborn Hope.[1]

You were a direct witness, and fellow traveller, to some of Africa’s liberation movements, not least the struggles in Angola against Portuguese colonialism (but also, of course, South Africa). Can you tell us about this period, and your experiences? What did reporting and writing over these years teach you about the role of British and American imperialism on the continent, and the experience of national liberation – not least the ways this liberation was terribly constrained?

I came to Africa in the late 1970s and spent two years in Algiers in the time of President Houari Boumédiène when Algeria was a central player in the Non-Aligned Movement and the Organisation of African Unity. After what I had seen of American horror in Vietnam, I was ready to embrace the steep learning curve of Cold War politics in Africa, where America and its allies – notably neighbouring Morocco, busy with a military takeover of Western Sahara from Spain – were always in the wrong. The Polisario delegation in Algiers liked to perch in the Reuters’ office where I often was too, to watch the news ticker-tape for news of the World Court ruling on Morocco’s claim to their territory. We became friends, and when their declaration of independence of the Saharoui Arab Democratic Republic (RASD in its French acronym) was announced in Addis Ababa at an OAU summit, it was my birthday and their delegation insisted on a touching joint celebration. Visiting the desert refugee camp in Tindouf in southern Algeria, ignored beyond the Global South, later was an experience that combined the Saharoui inspiration at miraculous creativity in making a dignified life for those in the camp, with shock at the overwhelming injustice they faced. The thought came to be familiar to me among the Southern Africa liberation movements: MPLA, FRELIMO, ANC, and SWAPO.

When we left Algiers one Algerian minister, hearing we were moving to Nairobi said, with a sly smile, “perhaps you will enjoy life more in the perfect neo-colonial setting.” He was right – five years in Kenya was privileged living, and between the beauty of the place and exceptional new friends cemented my love of the continent. The work, in the nearby countries of Uganda, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, and even the Seychelles, covered coups, wars, famine and dramatic U turns in geo-political alliances of the Cold War which were huge changing stories with so much to try to understand.

I was lucky again after Nairobi with a part time dream job in London at the Guardian in the 1980s editing an experimental page called Third World Review (TWR) where almost all the writers were from the Global South. I have written elsewhere (Radical Moments at the Guardian) about that unique experience which educated me on other continents beyond Africa and Asia, by people who lived, or were exiled from, them. As in Saigon, my, by then two, children gave me a different pattern of work from most journalists. I was at home in the evenings and many of these people came to talk to me there, long talks, not formal interviews. Some, like Mohamed Babu the Zanzibari Marxist, insisted on doing the cooking, others, like Abdul Minty, then leading the World Campaign against Military and Nuclear Cooperation with South Africa from exile in Norway, brought me a cooking pot.

It was a historical moment when revolutionary movements flared in countries of the Global South such as Nicaragua, Grenada, Ghana, and Burkina Faso and found resonance beyond the South in TWR. Ambitious US covert interventions, notably in Ghana in the Rawlings era, were revealed, and, obviously, denied. The experienced Cuban ambassador in Ghana, Niel Guerra, once warned me that there is a price for disturbing imperialism, but it is worth paying. He arranged an invitation to Cuba, among other things to see the various schools in the Island of Youth for children from the liberation movements, and newly progressive countries such as Ghana and Ethiopia.

At the same time, I was educated about a Britain beyond the small bubble of my past experience when the ANC in London and the Anti-Apartheid Movement sent me, reluctantly, to speak about Angola’s grim realities to small audiences in British cities I wouldn’t have known where to place on a map. There I met and listened to trade unionists and activists, often, and still sometimes today, people told me they were keen readers of TWR. And on cold nights of demonstrations outside the South African embassy in London I listened to a cross section of people I had never seen before and discovered how solidarity was built.

For the first time, because of who and what came to me through TWR’s open door, and what I knew from Angola visits, I felt at home in London as a city of radical exiles and their politics.

It was a decade when in the Global South neo-liberal dominance, austerity and repression fired revolt against dictatorship, oppression, and economic crisis. Political prisoners, academics, opposition politicians, journalists, guerrilla fighters and writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Mohammed Babu from countries I knew became my friends. The modest Committee for Kenyan Political Prisoners produced small pamphlets and leaflets in late night work sessions in the Finsbury Park home of Caribbean activist, poet and publisher John La Rose’s New Beacon Books.

A host of South African household names, some resident exiles, others passing through, were my world to listen to: Adelaide Tambo worked in a care home in Hampstead; Frene Ginwala (later First Speaker of Parliament) was assistant to Oliver Tambo; the unknown heroine of early underground action Eleanor Kasrils confided her terror as Conservative politicians publicly demanded the expulsion of her and her sons because of her husband, Ronnie Kasrils’ leading role in the ANC’s armed struggle against the apartheid regime. I met him in Angola and decades later we became, as we still are, close colleagues and collaborators on many projects, including Palestine.

Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis, and other Arabs came to TWR as the first Intifada and then the first Gulf War upended their world. Unsurprisingly, and following the Cuban ambassador’s warning in Accra, TWR came under constant attack from the Israeli, South African, Kenyan, American and other diplomats in London and their many friends in the media, including inside the Guardian. The editor Peter Preston finally decided the page was “dated” and had to go.

Luckily, I had by then a link with AfriqueAsie the radical magazine in Paris, close to liberation movements. They published all my articles, initially under the more suitable name Alexia Ahmed, and gave me an intellectual and political home from home and the dear friends and colleagues who have been central to my life ever since.

Given that some of your work was in Lusophone Africa, can you talk about the colonial legacies in that part of the continent, and how these legacies were a handicap for post-independence politics, and continue to be? Many of us, including in ROAPE, had high hopes for liberation in Portuguese ex-colonies – the continent’s great second wave of ‘radical independence’ – and have been bitterly disappointed with the experience. Can you also speak of these disappointments, and how we can explain them?

Portuguese-speaking Africa, and Angola in particular, was the most intense part of my work in the 1980s. But for me it was not the appalling dehumanising colonial legacies of Portuguese settler economies, racism and fascism that were central, but rather the ruthless US-led war to control independent Angola’s future, and with it apartheid South Africa’s future. The US military project of the Reagan years in Africa, supported by Margaret Thatcher, was to use its client state Zaire, mercenaries from Western countries and South Africa’s army to install Jonas Savimbi as a client leader in oil rich Luanda in 1975 as the Portuguese left. The goal was to safeguard Western economic interests in South Africa in particular, keeping apartheid alive, and Namibia maintained under South African occupation. A blind eye was turned to South Africa’s military campaign of targeted assassinations, economic destruction, and destabilization of the FLS (Frontline States) and the death of the high hopes of independent states across the continent. Without Cuba’s historic intervention and its people’s enormous sacrifices and courage beside the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in Angola, Washington would have succeeded.

Western journalists were not often welcomed in Luanda, but in an act of kindness and trust, the radical historian of Africa Basil Davidson, who did not then know me personally, but knew some of my work, wrote letters to three Angolan leaders introducing me as someone who should write about the US/South Africa devastation being unleashed to cripple Angola’s independence.

**Lucio Lara was one of the founding members of the MPLA (Augusta Conchiglia, Soyo, 1976).**

Those letters gave me extraordinary access to remote places and, in time, to friendships with remarkable people. I was able over the years to visit towns and cities besieged by UNITA, the rival movement supported by South Africa and the CIA. They were scenes of battered hospitals full of legless peasant victims of landmines, with infrastructure bridges, dams, roads, schools, blocks of homes built by the Cubans all reduced to rubble, and hundreds of thousands of hungry despairing people on the move. Think of more recent images of Faluja, Raqqa, Aleppo, Grozny and giant refugee camps in Pakistan, Jordan, Lebanon.

In remote Angola I saw handfuls of Cuban and sometimes Vietnamese school teachers, doctors, nurses alongside the MPLA keeping humanity alive as the West tried to crush it. I met Angolan doctors and scientists later assassinated as UNITA targeted the local intellectual leadership. In Luanda I listened to MPLA leaders and Cuban generals talk of the shape of the social, economic, military, and diplomatic challenges aimed at the progressive advances of the post-independence years were targeted.

After months of fighting around Cuito Cuanavale in south-east Angola from October 1987 a 40,000 Cuban and Angolan and SWAPO [South West Africa People’s Organisation] force, with Soviet supplies, confronted and defeated the South Africans in March 1988. Cuban engineers and Angola’s new generation of army officers laid down two airstrips towards the border with Namibia, giving Cuban pilots air superiority. The epic battle around Cuito Cuanavale and in the neighbouring province of Cunene was won against the most powerful army on the continent. It changed African history.

This is the context that was followed by the political disappointment you talk about – decades of struggle for life against years of utter destruction, death and loss imposed by apartheid South Africa and the West. Angola and Mozambique opened their countries to the resistance of the ANC, SWAPO, and ZANU and ZIPRA from what was then Rhodesia; Mozambique implemented Commonwealth sanctions on Rhodesia to the total detriment of the economy. Heroism and principle came with an incalculably high price.

Your work, books, and journalism highlight the role of imperialism. Can you talk about imperialism today, and how it manifests itself in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South? Are we correct to identify other imperialist players, including China, alongside the United States?

I don’t think of my work as ‘highlighting’ the role of imperialism. That sounds too purposeful and theoretical. I would say rather that I was for a long time living and reporting from inside countries being systematically wrecked by US imperialism’s drive to maintain world control.

In Vietnam and Angola, the military aspect was then the most obvious. But control of financial systems, of science and technology, of communications, of information wars, of the systems of influence and funding which operate through NGOs, think tanks, diplomacy both inside the countries of the Global South and well beyond, all shaped, and continue to shape, the history, which has so disappointed you, and so many others, in the context of Southern Africa’s political outcomes. (It could of course have been very different, as the examples of Cuba and Vietnam’s social welfare systems of education, health and care of the elderly illustrate today.)

I believe these Western systems aim to keep most of the Global South in labour intensive production – and poverty. Let’s remember that resistance across the Global South continues despite defeats – see Latin America and India, for instance. China, with its extraordinary successes in poverty reduction, can rightly be criticised for many things, but for me, it is not “an imperialist player” as you suggest.

Working on the continent, and meeting some of the giants of political struggles and liberation, can you tell us of these experiences and personalities? Who stands out, and what characteristics did you note specifically, in some of these political activists and politicians?

It was my great privilege to know Julius Nyerere, Lucio Lara, Thomas Sankara, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o as political activist in London, and to meet others, like Oliver Tambo and Namibia’s Toivo ya Toivo, with the same characteristics. What stood out was their integrity, their modesty, their habit of listening to the powerless, and their ceaseless hard work.

I remember watching President Nyerere once in his garden standing for a long time intently listening to the gardener who was sweeping the path. (And on his visits to London in the mid 1980s there was always an invitation to breakfast, and he would ask me for every detail of my visits to Luanda, so crucial for the Frontline States to understand through the language barrier.)

Similarly with Lucio, at his house in Luanda there were always humble people sitting waiting to talk to him. He always had time for everyone. Once, in two days spent travelling with him in Malange in 1984, driving round cooperative farms with local MPLA officials and seeing how South Africa and UNITA were encroaching on this rich agricultural province I noted: “through hours of sitting in farm courtyards Lara barely spoke, but listened as the complaints came thick and fast with no fear of the man in authority. The peasants were angry and asking for more military action against UNITA, against the South Africans….it was a vision of what the party meant to people. Here the MPLA was the centre of people’s lives, their security, their entry into a new world of organised farming, and their faith in the leadership was touching and unmistakeable.”

I knew the private Lucio and his wife Ruth too. Pictures in my mind are of Lucio feeding his pet monkeys in Luanda or walking on the beach with his dog, Lucio on rare visits to London reading Le Monde for hours, walking for miles on Hampstead Heath and wanting to go to the ballet.

And sitting in his house in Ouagadougou with Sankara, at a different stage of life, I witnessed the energy and optimism, his thirst for knowledge, the piles of books he was reading, his torrent of questions, his urgent requests to have his speeches translated into English and given to Nyerere, to the ANC in Robben Island, Lusaka and London.

I knew Sankara because he had met Maurice Bishop of Grenada at the Non-Aligned summit in Delhi in 1983 and despite having no common language the two men had bonded, recognising the parallels in their bold projects of transformation for their tiny countries. Maurice’s assassination in October of that year horrified Sankara, and mutual friends who knew that I had been in Grenada as the coup unrolled, and that I spoke French, invited me to Ouagadougou to explain to Sankara the treachery of a long-time close colleague – which would then be his own fate. In the four febrile years of social revolution until the same scenario ended his life Thomas invited me several times – always with his agenda of work, translations, and discussions, plus presents of hand printed Indigo dresses.

Recently, in the last twenty years, your work has focused on Palestinian liberation and justice. Please tell us something about your current work, activism, and writing.

Nowhere better illustrates the power of imperialism than Palestine’s shameful betrayal over more than a century. It was inevitable that after leaving Africa and coming back to live in London I would be drawn to Palestine’s escalating drama. Palestinian writers and photographers were prominent in TWR, and Palestinian artists and filmmakers were central in my London world of exiles. I first went to Gaza at the invitation of its first and leading psychiatrist Dr Eyad Saraj who wanted me to write a pamphlet on his organisation, the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP), for fundraising in the Gulf. I had interviewed him in London when he had talked in particular about his work with adolescent boys traumatised by witnessing their fathers’ humiliation and impotence in the face of violent arrests, house demolitions, disappearance into Israeli prisons.

It was 23 July 2002 and Hamas military leader Salah Shehadeh had been assassinated the day before by a 1-ton bomb dropped on his home in a crowded neighbourhood of Gaza City. Fifteen people were killed, including eight children and infants, more than 100 wounded, the area devastated. I spent the following days shadowing Eyad’s staff in homes of the traumatised near the massive crater. Several were social workers who were veterans of Israeli prisons, quiet men bringing practical aid with food, water, clothes and above all emotional empathy in the horror they knew so well. Palestinian experience of injustice could never then be an abstraction for me.

After that terrible night 27 Israeli pilots signed a letter refusing to take part in such “illegal and immoral” targeted killings in civilian areas in the West Bank and Gaza. International condemnation went as far as a case brought under international jurisdiction in 2005 in Spain for Israeli war crimes by the New York based Centre for Constitutional Rights. In the end, as with the US soldiers in My Lai village, or the CIA and South Africans who devastated the lives of Angolans and Mozambicans (along with their own majority) over decades, there was largely impunity, forgotten history, indifference.

But Palestinians’ resistance has only grown stronger, more visible, internationally supported over these decades. One of my activities on this front was 11 years of running the Palestine Book Awards from their inception. It was a period when more and more books came to us every year, new small publishers emerged, and the winners became overwhelmingly Palestinians – academics, poets, novelists, cooks, artists, photographers and writers of children’s books. Nothing gives me more pleasure and optimism than the strength and creativity of young Palestinians. I am still close to GCMHP and other Palestinian projects and individuals. And I still study Arabic.

Palestine overlapped with my work during the years of the “war on terror”. Post 9/11 in the UK the jailing or putting under house arrest of Muslim men, deportations of some to US prisons, collaboration with US torture and detention in secret prisons across the world, and Guantanamo, I was writing and speaking in protest meetings constantly. It was my privilege to become close to many of the families involved in this tragedy, several of whom were Palestinians. I co-wrote Moazzam Begg’s Guantanamo memoir Enemy Combatant, plays, other books, notably Shadow Lives on wives and daughters of men imprisoned in the US and UK in which the Palestine connection emerged clearly for me. Those women and their now grown children are still in my life, as are political prisoners in many places, including those still in Guantanamo.

But I have never lost sight of Africa, which has a special place in my heart, and I am happy today to be part of the editorial collective of Afrique XXI where we publish exceptional articles, interviews, video, and audio testimonies in French. One day we hope to publish in English too, like our older sister, Orient XXI which appears in French, Arabic, English and Persian.

Obviously, a life of activism, campaigning and investigative journalism never ends, but can you tell ROAPE readers some of the lessons you have learnt from a lifetime of radical engagement? What are some of the immutable(s) you have found, and that a new generation need be aware of, for example?

Given how very much better educated and generally informed today’s generation such as ROAPE’s readers are, this is hard to answer. Let me give you words of others who inspired me decades ago, and whose historic actions still have unending resonance. And of course, actions of resistance, organising, tangible solidarity behind every popular struggle for justice, education, health, and food are obligations that can never end.

Ron Ridenhour, the Vietnam vet who exposed My Lai, wrote this in March 1993 in the Los Angeles Timeslooking back 25 years. “There were several important lessons in this for me, personally. Among the most important and disappointing of them was that some people – most, it seems – will, under some circumstances, do anything someone in authority tells them to. Another is that government institutions, like most humans, have a reflexive reaction to the exposure of internal corruption and wrongdoing: No matter how transparent the effort, their first response is to lie, conceal and cover up. Also, like human beings, once an institution has embraced a particular lie in support of a particular coverup, it will forever proclaim its innocence.”

Other words reverberate from Martin Luther King speaking in New York’s Riverside church in 1967 (just replace Vietnam with Palestine): “We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.”

Let me end with a last quote, from a conversation with Lucio Lara in Angola in the mid 1990s. He said: “I don’t have illusions about many things anymore. In the Angolan struggle perhaps, we didn’t have philosophers or sociologists, but we had these words of Neto’s, ‘the most important thing is to solve the people’s problems’. Once in the Council of Ministers I heard someone say that we should stop using this phrase. I thought that maybe he was right, because no one spoke out against him. In my opinion this was when the Party began to collapse. That was the time when the leaders felt they all had the right to be rich. That was the beginning of the destruction of our life.” Lucio sent my book, Death of Dignity, from which I quoted him, to Thabo Mbeki when he became South Africa’s president. It was a warning of how political visions can be lost. Lucio died in 2016.

The historical work on the anticolonial archives of the MPLA in exile and in the bush until independence in 1975, is meticulously carried out, in Lucio’s old house, first by his wife Ruth then by the family and close friends (creating the Tchiweka Documentation Centre). After Ruth’s death the work was led by Lucio’s son Paulo, who died last year, and whose life course was set by those days. Paulo at 19 was in the military front line in repulsing the South African invasion in 1975 and he became a general in the long years of post-independence war until the death of Jonas Savimbi. Lucio’s daughter Wanda now runs it. There is also a treasure trove of filmed interviews by Paulo in the remotest of provinces with the people who lived those years. This website is a jewel, the richest record of a people’s successful years of struggle against all that imperialism could devise to have them fail.

Victoria Brittain is an activist, writer and journalist who has spent years reporting in Africa, and campaigning internationally.

Featured photograph: Victoria Brittain, Luanda 1986 (Augusta Conchiglia).

Notes

[1] Stubborn Hope: Selected Poems of South Africa and a wider world, by Dennis Brutus, Heinemann 1978. Dennis Brutus was one of Africa’s greatest poets, political organiser, veteran of Robben Island and 30 years of exile in US academia. When he died in South Africa in 2019 Noam Chomsky called him “a great artist and intrepid warrior in the unending struggle for justice and freedom…a permanent model for others to try to follow.”

The Dakar Declaration – Pan-African cooperation & global solidarity

ROAPE

January 26, 2023

Scholars and activists from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, came together to draft the Dakar Declaration last year. The declaration condemns the constraints to Africa’s economic and monetary sovereignty. Against the multifaceted crises of capitalism, climate breakdown, speculative finance, war and inequalities, the Dakar Declaration calls for Pan-African, South-South cooperation and global solidarity.

In the spirit of the Arusha Declaration and the Porto Alegre Declaration we have come together in Dakar from all corners of the world to face a world in crisis under the theme of African Economic and Monetary Sovereignty.

We are a group of scholars, policy-makers, and activists from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, some of us economists, others political scientists, historians, sociologists and anthropologists. We address this declaration to African governments, African institutions and external actors and agencies that constrain Africa’s economic and monetary sovereignty.

Our existing international economic order is at the heart of the contemporary crises. The Global South suffers disproportionately from these multiple crises. Africa’s adverse incorporation into the capitalist order is the problem. We are integral to the system which could not thrive without our exploitation. We dissent from the dominant paradigm in economics which conceptualizes the economy in almost quasi-natural terms and describes a benign world devoid of unequal power relations.

Our global crises are multifaceted: climate breakdown, biodiversity depletion, pollution, speculative finance, war, and rampant inequalities. There is a general crisis of the neoliberal capitalist order with a turn to a resistant form of imperialism. Geopolitical turmoil is a dangerous symptom of both.

We do not accept this set of crises but confront and seek alternatives to it in solidarity with workers, the landless, peasants, women, climate activists and similar groups. For these reasons, we launch the Dakar Declaration with the aim of initiating lasting and trusting cooperation with initiatives and movements that share its spirit.

Ten strategic aims serve as our yardstick for action:

Most of our governments will not implement the transformations we need. We need to become the masses that always push for more.

Yet, we need strong states, democratic and responsible states. But even more than that, we need stronger peoples to defend those states and push them to always do more for the majority. African states can and should mobilize African labor and resources to meet Africa’s own needs, resuscitating the developmental ambitions of the early post- independence period.

With a world breaking apart into more regional trade blocs, building regional alliances becomes necessary and possible. The reassertion of our economic and monetary sovereignty and the subjection of foreign interests to our internal needs and interests becomes easier. This growth in policy sovereignty to structurally transform our economies and societies can enable us to fundamentally tackle long standing issues of poverty, social development, and democratization.

We must work to build a new multilateralism where global policy fora and institutions are inclusive, democratic, and reflective of the concerns of the Global South’s populations.

Militarism and imperialism cannot continue to politically mould the world system. We defend a positive neutralism with respect to the historic colonial-imperial bloc, and non-cooperation with their interference in African affairs.

Global inequalities arising from ecological breakdown and exposure to volatilities in finance and commodity prices put the Global South at a particular disadvantage which we need to overcome.

Recurrent debt crises have to end. We need to develop a global approach to correct the harmful impact of excessive foreign currency debt — including that issued by the IMF — and odious debts. Widespread, deep, and swift debt write-downs are essential. They must be focused on supporting economic transformation.

We need to stop the ongoing theft of wealth, committed by transnational corporations (TNCs), which flows into the Global North when TNCs transfer their earnings in tax havens and then invest them in financial markets, all this clothed in the harmless language of “Foreign Direct Investment”. To that end, measures such as capital controls, restrictions on tax evasion and illicit financial flows and fair taxation of TNCs must be actively promoted and implemented.

We have to tackle historically persistent inequalities rooted in the emergence and global expansion of the capitalist system. We also need a global reparations agenda to address in a fair manner the multifaceted ecological crisis. We must seek to elaborate this agenda technically, legitimize it, advocate it, defend it, and implement it. We support the efforts of our African American and Caribbean sisters and brothers in their specific labors for reparatory justice.
We act, teach, research, and mobilize in our local and national contexts, regionally and transnationally. We do these with the aim of building a lasting movement and acquire real influence in our political processes.

We are calling for a Pan-African, South-South cooperation and global solidarity for our collective cause. We invite you all to our gatherings during which we share our experiences, evaluate our progress, and plan the next steps.

The time is now!

Signatories

Charles Abugre, Ghana
Souad Aden-Osman, Ethiopia
Max Ajl, Tunisia/USA
Alexandre Abreu, Portugal
Asghar Adelzadeh, South Africa/USA
Dereje Alemayehu, Ethiopia/Germany
Ikal Angelei, Kenya
Broulaye Bagayoko, Mali
Hanene Bergaoui, Tunisia/Germany
C.P. Chandrasekhar, India
Horman Chitonge, South Africa
Carla Coburger, Germany
Caroline Cornier, Germany/France
Demba Moussa Dembélé, Senegal
Ndeye Fadiaw Diagne, Senegal
Dialo Diop, Senegal
Henriette Faye, Senegal
Andrew Fischer, Netherlands
Daniela Gabor, Romania/United Kingdom
Maha Ben Gadha, Tunisia
Hamza Hamouchene, Algeria/United Kingdom
Jason Hickel, United Kingdom
Nimi Hoffmann, United Kingdom/South Africa
Tetteh Hormeku, Ghana
Florian Horn, Germany/Belgium
Peter James Hudson, USA
Fadhel Kaboub, Tunisia/USA
Nancy Kachingwe, Malawi/Zimbabwe
Mary Karimu, Ghana
Rasmane Kientega, Burkina Faso

Ingrid Kvangraven, Norway/United Kingdom
Kai Koddenbrock, Germany
Imen Louati, Tunisia
Jamee Moudud, USA
Godwin Murunga, Kenya/Senegal
Fathimath Musthaq, Maldives/USA
Alvin Mosioma, Kenya
Kaba Nabe, Guinea
Redge Nkosi, South Africa
Jane Obuchi, Kenya
Franklin Obeng-Odoom, Ghana/Finland
Adebayo Olukoshi, Nigeria/South Africa
Keston Perry, Trinidad and Tobago/USA
Lebohang Liepollo Pheko, South Africa
Stefano Prato, Italy
Matthew Robinson, USA
Chafik Ben Rouine, Tunisia
Arif Rüzgar, Germany/Belgium
Ebrima Sall, Senegal
Matthias Schmelzer, Germany
Jean-Michel Servet, France
Howard Stein, USA
Crystal Simeoni, Kenya
Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Malaysia
Ismaïla Malick Sy, Senegal
Ndongo Samba Sylla, Senegal
Lisa Tilley, United Kingdom
Eric Toussaint, Belgium
Fiona Tregenna, South Africa
Dzodzi Tsikata, Ghana/United Kingdom

The Dakar Declaration is available in French and Swahili.

The Dakar Declaration came out of the Conference on Economic and Monetary Sovereignty, ‘Facing the socio-ecological crisis: Delinking and the question of Global Reparations.’ Dakar, Senegal, October 25-28, 2022 (read more here).

Featured Photograph: Kwame Nkrumah on Ghanian independence postage stamp 6 March 1957 (25 December 2014).

Student activists recall the uprisings of May 1968 in Dakar, Senegal

ROAPE

January 24, 2023

May 1968 in Dakar was a defining moment in the political history of Senegal. Dakar University students went on strike and blockaded the campus. The protests were violently suppressed, sparking a short-lived but intense nationwide revolutionary uprising against the ruling class. Over the last several years, videographer Yannek Simalla has compiled a collection of filmed testimonies from activists involved in the protests. Here, he introduces his collection, the creative process behind it, and how memories of May 1968 inform us as much about the present of Senegalese society as they do the past.

In 2017, with two friends, we started a biographical film project about Issa Samb, a Senegalese artist and agitator known by the alias Joe Ouakam. Reading an article by François Blum took Issa to the events of May 1968 in Dakar, Senegal, when several hundred students from the University of Dakar were rounded up and then transferred to Camp Archinard.

Issa wrote a poem asking for their release, and he recites it for us. I discover with him a student movement with its own demands that was close to youth movements in France and other industrialized countries, and was notable for its aspirations to freedom (Amadou Doucouré translates this double characteristic, explaining how he was revolted in the face of a colonial situation made up of regular humiliations within the university and at the same time fascinated by Jimmy Hendrix – he went on to take musical classes at Berkley College in the US).

The collection of testimonies has been an ongoing project since 2017. The decision to make portraits allows the events of May ‘68 to become embodied by individual trajectories, from students of prestigious families ‘aspiring to lead the country’ (Mamadou Racine Bathily), to people of more modest origins such as the trade unionist Birahim Ba and the apprentice shoemaker Pa Diagne.

The choice to give the floor to the this cast of characters, those who have not subsequently known the bright lights of political success, makes it possible to observe raw material that has not been the subject of multiple reconstructions during its formulation.

However, it is not a question of saying here that we would reach something more real because it had been less worked by memory, a kind of nugget of truth unearthed late. The individual stories that have been little produced and little repeated are not fossilized. They are still the subject of modifications during discussion and during the meetings before filming begins.

Birahim Ba’s account of the attack on the university by the security forces (the level of violence involved in particular) has changed over time, as meetings and interlocutors progressed, as if all this memory still hadn’t stabilized 50 years later. Similarly, an informal discussion, often off-camera, can bring up explanatory elements not previously mustered. This was the case with Mamadou Diop-Decroix, who related stories about Luis Cabral (the brother of Amilcar Cabral) and the war of liberation waged in Guinea against the Portuguese colonizer.

By summoning the memories of May ‘68 in Dakar, I have the acute impression of observing people who share between them the nostalgia of an era. It’s a bit like watching the French moved to see the spire of Notre Dame fall in flames. Their emotion reflects to a certain extent their feeling about the supposed state of present-day France (in distress) compared to the time when cathedrals were being built.

Similarly, listening to the testimonies of Senegalese activists informs us more about the present of Senegalese society in terms of the hope and energy that these ‘years of embers’ (Mao Wane) contained. The nostalgia for this era is often expressed directly (Birahim Ba) or more implicitly when speakers enthusiastically agree to devote a considerable amount of time to an interview (Mamadou Diop-Decroix).

In order to better contextualize these testimonies, it was necessary to understand the sequence of events, the history of the regime presided over by Léopold Sédar Senghor, its difficulties in moving towards democracy, the succession of political repressions and their intimate relations with the former colonial power. But it was also necessary to show a theorization of the events which brings out lines of interpretation without which we fail to understand what was at stake at the time. For this, archival research and the work of Pascal Bianchini, Françoise Blum, Omar Gueye and Abdoulaye Bathily were of huge help and guidance.

May ’68, having given birth to young children and youth and student movements (but not only), bloomed thereafter. The one-party regime could not provoke anything other than protest and clandestine organization. The spontaneous tendency (the Marxist-Leninist Youth Movement embodied by Mao Wane) or the more organizational tendency of those who would later form the And-Jeff party (‘Acting Together’ in Wolof) forced the Senegalese political regime to open up and, little by little, become more democratic.

Here again, the repression initiated at the time by the regime, the tortures endured, constituted an essential element of their narrative (‘the police torture people’, Ismaëla Diakhaté) that sometimes had to be brought out through questions or that sometimes were immediately imposed as a central moment of their understanding as to what power is (Eugénie Aw). This brutality was constitutive of the regime since the prohibition of the PAI (African Independence Party) in 1960, with the colonial legacy also expressing itself in these practices.

Finally, and it is a question of wondering about the reasons which lead us to do certain things and not others, to make known or recall the importance of these left-wing movements through their small and large actors in the advent of democracy in Senegal is for me a way of giving back to this country the welcome it has given me for more than 20 years.

Yannek Simalla works at the Lycée Jean Mermoz in Dakar, where he has been teaching for more than 20 years. He studied economics at La Sorbonne in France. His grandmother was a worker and trade unionist in the textile factories of the Roanne region of France.

Featured Photograph: A screenshot from Yannek Simalla’s ‘Joe Ouakam -Trois témoignages‘.

The myth of 1994 – women, resistance and power in South Africa

ROAPE

January 18, 2023

Roberto Sirvent interviews Koni Benson about her new book Crossroads: I Live Where I Like, that draws on decades of research, to tell a sidelined story of the creation of the city of Cape Town, and the role of movements led by African women who were central in campaigning for public services. Benson speaks about how today there are over 2 million people in informal settlements or shanty towns, in a so-called ‘World Class’ city in the ‘Rainbow Nation’.

Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help readers understand the current political and social climate?

Koni Benson: Police repression is on the rise for movements for black lives across the world – including in South Africa where the city of Cape Town has earmarked millions for private security to demolish and evict shack dwellers from ‘occupying’ land for shelter, social distancing, and growing food in the midst of the global Covid pandemic. Crossroads: I Live Where I Like draws on decades of archival and oral history research, to tell a sidelined story of the creation of the city of Cape Town, foregrounding the central role of movements led by African women who were, and still are, at the forefront of organizing for what should be public services (food, shelter, water, land, safety) – basic human needs that have systematically been stolen and denied through processes of racist, sexist, colonial violence here and everywhere. Through the story of women’s organized resistance for housing in Cape Town the book tries to show how the current austerity of neoliberalism – the privatization of social services/the commons, has been constructed through an ongoing historical process that has been highly racialized, highly gendered, and highly contested.

Crossroads challenges the normalization of the current set up, shows how it was constructed, how it was challenged, how it can be deconstructed and reconstructed. South Africa has a brutal history of land dispossession whereby over 3.8 million forced removals took place between the 1960s and 1980s in order to engineer social and geographic segregation through a process of divide and rule. In the matrix of 87% of the land being reserved for the 13% of the population, the cities were designated as white areas. Forced removals were not considered in the famous 1994 Truth and Reconciliation Process.

Today there are over 570 000 families (which is about 2 million people) live in informal settlements or in overcrowded township housing, on official waiting lists for social housing, in a ‘World Class’, ‘Rainbow Nation’ city that builds between 11-16 000 low cost units a year. So if you do the math, you may get what they call a ‘housing opportunity’ in about 50 years time. So really, to quote Willie Baptist of the Black Panthers and National Union of the Homeless, ‘you only get what you are organized to take.’ In fact, recently the Minister of ‘Human Settlements’ said that anyone under the age of 60 did not ‘suffer from apartheid’ and is therefore not eligible for social housing today. So you can see what is at stake in the narratives that celebrate anti-apartheid organizing against evictions, but deny the need for and criminalize organizing for land and housing in the present. I think there are likely parallels with historical narratives that celebrate Black Power/Civil Rights movements in the 1960s while denying the ongoing brutalities of systemic racism in the USA today.

Roberto Sirvent: What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?

Koni Benson: The book tries to provide a history as an opening into conversations about mobilization, demobilization, and remobilization in the face of power. Once pieced together, the story in this book was then workshopped with activists and community organizers over a five year period, so to a large extent it was activists and community organizers who picked key themes to highlight for both education, mobilization, and debate in movements. This includes: the details of colonial and apartheid dialectics between experiences and structures often airbrushed into neat nationalist narratives; complexities of alliance politics across race, class, and issue; the internal dynamics of movements, particularly the gendered and generational dynamics; and it included questions of authority and individualization that often overtake collective narratives.

As the only informal settlement to successfully resist the apartheid bulldozers, thanks to the organizing of the Crossroad’s Women’s Committee, the book goes into detail of both the victories, and the unglamorous hard work of how women in Crossroads turned the building of shacks into a highly visible political campaign using posters, plays, pickets, direct actions, media campaigns, alliance building, and vigils, to the point where, in 1978 over 22 Congressmen stood up in United States Congress to appeal the demolition of Crossroads in Cape Town. All of this can be useful in honoring and inspiring struggle. But as Amilcar Cabral said, claim no easy victories, which here would include ‘ending the story’ at this high point, rather than seeing it as an important victory, in an ongoing war. The book therefore follows these movements past their heyday, and looks at how momentous gains were pushed back through a reconfiguration of power and politics.

The apartheid state employed counter-revolutionary guerrilla warfare strategies which were developed and used across the world at the time, from Vietnam and Colombia, to undermine community protest ‘from within.’ In Crossroads in 1986 state-sponsored vigilantes (known as witdoeke), set the Crossroads camp on fire and chased out 70,000 residents deemed “squatters” by the apartheid state. The Women’s Committee was then dismissed and housing allocation militarized over the subsequent decade in the area.

After apartheid officially ended, women in Crossroads were again at the forefront of initiating one of the first and most prolonged protests for undelivered housing and public services. Yet their 1998 four-month sit-in on City Council Housing Offices, like other occupations and protest movements today, was criminalized by the state, vilified and oversimplified by the media, and disconnected from the more complicated legacies of colonialism and anti-apartheid organizing. Again, women’s leadership was demobilised, depoliticised, and dislocated from the issues they stood up for and from the celebrated history of women’s mobilising in Crossroads during apartheid.

This lip service, and these unresolved complicated dynamics of movement demobilization impact current attempts to mobilize for housing, water, education, etc. and are important to acknowledge and study in order to subvert, for strategic purposes, as well as for facing questions of how do we (want to) operate, amongst ourselves, in the face of neocolonialism, racism, and patriarchy in the present.

We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?

Different readers will have different take aways, but there are a number of ideas about borders, boxes, and boundaries that the book tries to challenge. The first is to challenge the denial of ongoing apartheid: the myth that 1994 was a key turning point. This is the so-call South African miracle, Rainbownationism – where the ANC led us to the end of apartheid and that there is no need to drudge up calls to decolonize and call attention to white wealth, now. The book tries to show how the negotiated settlement, first experienced in Crossroads and then in South Africa as a whole undermined community organization and shows how post 1994 organizing is conveniently disconnected from colonial legacies and anti-apartheid era organizing, and instead criminalized today.

The 1994 divide keeps us from seeing the liberation struggle as unfinished, as an urgent priority that requires drastic measures, immediately. While Crossroads is an iconic piece of anti-apartheid struggle history in South Africa which captured local, national, and international attention at the peak of the apartheid regime, two decades later, when 300 African women – the 1998 Crossroad’s Women’s Power Group – organised in the same place, again publicly and politically against some of the same male figures in authority, they were vilified.

These moments of women-only organizing are rarely connected in public debate and never taught in schools where anti-apartheid struggle history is limited to learning about Mandela and ends in 1994. In the main, Crossroads Women’s Committee women are treated as disposable footsoliders, freeze framed in the 1980s and ignored today, and the Women’s Power Group, one of about 10 000 protest moments per year in post 1994 South Africa, are framed as undeserving, impatient troublemakers dislocated from the celebrated history of women’s mobilising in Crossroads. Listening to them speak their much more complicated truths to power in this book challenges the 1994 narrative that tells us we are in good hands.

Second, the book attempts to go beyond exposing or juxtaposing the extremes of Cape Town and the wealth gap that characterizes South Africa as the most unequal society in the world. Apartheid translates into separateness, but in fact, apartheid then and now is about a set of relations, a deep, exploitative, personal and structural dependency on racism and sexism – a playing out of what Walter Rodney called underdevelopment in his history of colonial dynamics between Europe and Africa. If this is understood then it becomes clear that liberal ideas or projects that attempt to address ‘black poverty’ without challenging white privilege will never disrupt the current status quo.

Third, I hope to raise questions about who counts as a struggle ‘or ‘leader,’ and what counts as the women’s movement and as women’s history. Beyond ‘retrieving’ women leaders from the ‘silences’ of history to compete with or compliment the better known individual male nationalist leaders of liberation struggles, Crossroads is a collective biography of two women-only organizations. And within these gender-based formations, as is the case with most local women-led collectives, women were not fighting for ‘women’s rights’ per se, but for basic human rights and public services, in a word the commons, for all. As such it attempts to unsettle the ideologies that underpin conventional nationalist historiographies and liberal feminist practices of women’s histories.

Fourth, related to the ideology of the individual heroes is the idea of the individual expert, the historian, researching and writing history. I want to challenge the practice of just adding new, albeit badly needed, content to history books without changing the form that both research and writing takes. It is an experiment with creative collaborative re-presentation of the past. So this book was illustrated by the Trantraal Brothers and Ashley Marais, local political cartoonists by drawing on over sixty life narratives and a decade of archival research I had conducted and workshopped with contemporary housing activists and women’s collectives who chose the most urgent and ongoing themes they felt spoke to and clarified some of the ongoing challenges against segregation, racism, violence, and patriarchy standing between the ongoing colonial and apartheid past, and a future we are still fighting for.

Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?

As explained best by Paolo Freire, I don’t see intellectual work as limited to those who author books or lead movements, and even those who do author books or take leadership positions are products of larger environments. But I can share some of the works or ways of working that represent some of the main threads that shaped my thinking and practice behind the experiment which became this book.

Feminist organizers of ever evolving formations and collectives that have actualized compasses that lead our way, for me, would include Ottilie Abrahams, Grace Lee Boggs, the Combahee River Collective, Dora Tamana, the Crossroads Women’s Committee, and Awra Amba. On the work of radical political education, I am led by Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Domitila Barrios de Chungara, Training for Transformation, the Highlander Institute, and the many comrades whom I have learned from in movements in action over the last 15 years in Cape Town.

On creative and poetic history as political engagement, I am grateful for the works, ways of being, and words of Yvonne Vera, Ayi Kwei Armah, V. Geetha, Nehanda Isoke Abiodun, Nawal El Saadawi, June Jordan, Patricia McFadden, and the cultural work/ers of Medu Art Ensemble and the Rhodes Must Fall Writing Subcommittee. Relatedly I am inspired by the radical archiving initiatives of the Mosireen Collective’s 858.ma An Archive of Resistance and Interference Archives and the radical history education work of Know Your Continent.

The political and intellectual work of activist historians who I turn to over and over again, include Walter Rodney, Neville Alexander, Robin Kelley, Susan Geiger, CLR James, Jacqui Alexander, Amilcar Cabral, Amrit Wilson, Manning Marable, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot. This intersects with the strands of oral history and feminist collaborative praxis where Richa Nagar and Chandra Talpade Mohanty have blazed trails for anti-disciplinary border-crossing.

On graphic non-fiction, this book has been inspired by Joe Sacco’s Palestine, Chester Brown’s Riel (2006), Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s This Side, That Side, Stavans & Alcatraz’s Latino U.S.A, and D’bi Young’s Shemurenga, and by the Just Seeds Collective.

In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?

Women in Crossroads have gifted us with a history of organized resistance and alternative visions of what Robin Kelley writes about in his classic book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination: “In the poetics of struggle and lived experience, in the utterances of ordinary folk, in the cultural products of social movements, in the reflection of activists, we discover the many different cognitive maps of the future, of the world not yet born. Recovering the poetry of social movements, however, particularly the poetry that dreams of a new world, is not such an easy task.”

These ‘poetics of struggle,’ or what Silvia Federici describes as a ‘joyful militancy’ that comes from connectedness and courage to collectively confront the world are evident in life histories of activists involved in the struggle for Crossroads. Amidst the layers of brutalities women in Crossroads refused another forced removal and organized until the end of the infamous apartheid pass laws. Their strategizing, their stories, their alliances, their tensions, their humor, their pain, their planning, recalibrations over time, and reflections decades later all comes through in their narratives pieced together through oral histories and archival materials and drawn by the sharp eyes and skillful hands of the Trantraal Brothers.

For those of their generation still on earth, this book is a retrospective photo album of days remembered. For those of us who were not there, this history is a doorway into an alternative future that has yet to become present. It is an invitation to imagine forms and prospects of organizing, of collaborative scholarship, of storytelling, and of writing that can challenge the artificial and colonial built boundaries between activism vs. academia, and the classroom vs. the community, and unsettle conventions of exclusive readerships and expert authority and authorship in alienated academic knowledge production. We want to imagine manifesting new approaches to some of the old impasses of history writing and make space to experiment with collective and creative approaches to engaging history.

Koni Benson’s Crossroads: I Live Where I Like was published in conjunction with PM Press and Jacana Media. A version of this interview was published by the Black Agenda Report here.

Koni Benson is a historian, organiser, and educator. She is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. Roberto Sirvent is editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.

No imperialist peoples, only imperialist states

ROAPE

January 13, 2023

Adam Mayer praises a new collection, Liberated Texts, which includes rediscovered books on Africa’s socialist intellectual history and political economy, looking at the startling, and frequently long ignored work of Walter Rodney, Karim Hirji, Issa Shivji, Dani Wadada Nabudere, A. M. Babu and Makhan Singh.

By Adam Mayer

Liberated Texts is a magnificent, essential, exciting tome that feels like a bombshell. This incredibly rich collection is a selection that is deep, wide, as well as entertaining. The book focuses on twenty-one volumes from the previous one hundred years, with a geographical range from the UK, the US, Vietnam, Korea, the Peoples Republic of China, the Middle East, Ireland, Malaysia, Africa (especially East Africa), Europe, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union, focusing on books that are without exception, foundational.

The collection is nothing less than a truth pill: in composite form, the volume corrects world history that Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of the United States offered for the sterile, historical curriculum on domestic (US) history. The volume consists of relatively short reviews (written by a wide collection of young and old academics and activists from every corner of the globe) but together they reflect such a unified vision that I would recommend Liberated Texts as compulsory reading for undergraduate students (as well as graduates!) Although the text is a broad canvas it speaks to our age (despite some of the reviewed book having been written in the 1920s).

Each review is by default, a buried tresure. The writer of this very review is a middle-aged Hungarian, which means that some of the works and authors discussed were more familiar to me than they would be to others. For example, Anton Makarenko’s name was, when the author grew up in the People’s Republic of Hungary, a household word. Makarenko’s continued relevance for South America and the oppressed everywhere, as well as his rootedness in the revolutionary transformations of the Soviet experiment, are dealt with here marvellosly by Alex Turrall (p. 289). In loving detail Turrall also discusses his hero the pedagogue Sukhomlinsky’s love for Stalinist reforms of Soviet education (p. 334).

There is one locus, and one locus only, where death is given reign, perhaps even celebrated: in a Palestinian case (p. 133) the revolutionary horizons are firmly focused on the past, not on any kind of future. The entire problematic of Israeli society’s recent ultra right-wing turn (a terrible outcome from the left’s point of view) is altogther missing here. Yet it is difficult to fault the authors or editors with this (after all, they painstakingly included an exemplary anti-Nazi Palestinian fighter in the text, p. 152) but it might be in order to challenge a fascination with martyrdom as a revolutionary option on the radical left.

In every other aspect, Liberated Texts enlightens without embarrassment, and affirms life itself. Imperialism is taken on in the form of unresolved murders of Chinese researchers in the United States as a focus (p. 307), and in uncovering the diabolical machinations of the peer-review system – racist, classist, prestige-driven as it is (p. 305).

The bravery of this collection is such that we find few authors within academia’s tenure track: authors are either emeriti, tenured, very young academics, or those dedicated to political work: actual grassroots organizers, comrades at high schools, or as language teachers. This has a very beneficial effect on the edited volume as an enterprise at the forefront of knowledge, indeed of creating new knowledge. Career considerations are absent entirely from this volume, in which thankfully even the whiff of mainstream liberalism is anathema.

I can say with certainty regarding the collection’s Africanist chapters that certain specialists globally, on African radical intellectual history, have been included: Leo Zeilig, Zeyad el-Nabolsy, Paul O’Connell, Noosim Naimasiah and Corinna Mullin all shed light on East African (as well as Caribbean) socialist intellectual history in ways that clear new paths in a sub-discipline that is underfunded, purposely confined to obscurity, and which lacks standard go-to syntheses especially in the English language (Hakim Adi’s celebrated history on pan-Africanism and communism stops with the 1950s, and other works are in the making).

Walter Rodney, Karim Hirji, Issa Shivji, Dani Wadada Nabudere, A. M. Babu, Makhan Singh are the central authors dealt with here. Rodney is enjoying a magnificent and much deserved renaissance (but this collection deals with a lost collection of Rodney’s 1978 Hamburg lectures by Zeilig!) Nabolsy shows us how Nyerere’s Marxist opposition experienced Ujamaa, and Tanzanian ’socialism’. Nabudere – a quintessential organic intellectual as much as Rodney – is encountered in praxis as well as through his thought and academic achievements in a chapter by Corinna Mullin. Nabudere emerges as a towering figure whose renaissance might be in the making right at this juncture. Singh makes us face the real essence of British imperialism. Nabudere, Babu and even Hirji’s achievements in analysing imperialism and its political economy are all celebrated in the collection.[1]

Where Shivji focuses on empire in its less violent aspect (notably NGOs and human rights discourse) powerfully described by Paul O’Connell, Naimasiah reminds us that violence had been as constitutive to Britain’s empire, as it has been to the Unites States (in Vietnam or in Korea). An fascinating chapter in the collection is provided by Marion Ettinger’s review of Richard Boyle’s Mutiny in Vietnam, an account based entirely on journalism, indeed impromptu testimony, of mutinous US soldiers tired of fighting for Vietnam’s landlord class.

Many readers of this anthology will identify with those veterans (since the collection appears in the English language) perhaps more than with East Asia’s magnificent, conscious fighters also written about in the book. Even in armies of the imperialist core, humanity shines through. Simply put, there are no imperialist peoples, only imperialist states.

Zeilig’s nuanced take on this important matter is revealed in Rodney’s rediscovered lectures. Also, the subtlety of class analysis in relation to workers versus peasants, and the bureacratic bourgeoisie profiting from this constellation (p. 219) brings to mind the contradiction that had arguably brought down Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso’s anti-imperialist president who nevertheless found himself opposing working class demands. Rodney’s politics in Guyana invited the same fate as Sankara, as we know.

Nabolsy’s review on Hirji’s The Travails of a Tanzanian Teacher touches on very interesting issues of Rodney’s role especially in the context of Ujamaa and Nyerere’s idiosyncratic version of African socialism. Nabolsy appreciates Nyerere efforts but analyses his politics with great candour: Ujamaa provided national unification, but failed to undermine Tanzania’s dependency in any real sense.[2] The sad realization of the failure of Tanzania’s experience startles the reader with its implications for the history of African socialism.

On an emotional and personal level, I remain most endeared by the Soviet authors celebrated in this text. So Makarenko and Sukhomlinsky are both Soviet success stories and they demonstrate that this combination of words in no oxymoron, and neither is it necessarily, revisionist mumbo-jumbo. Their artificial removal from their historical context (which had happened many times over in Makarenko’s case, and in one particular account when it comes to Sukhomlinsky) are fought against by the author with Leninist gusto.

Sukhomlinsky had not fought against a supposedly Stalinist education reform: he built it, and it became one of the most important achievements of the country by the 1960s due partly to his efforts. The former educational pioneer did not harm children: he gave them purpose, responsibility, self-respect, and self-esteem. The implication of Sukhomlinsky and Makarenko is that true freedom constructs its own order, and that freedom ultimately thrives on responsibility, and revolutionary freedom.

As this collection is subtitled Volume One, it is my hope and expectation that this shall be the beginning of a series of books, dealing with other foundational texts, and even become a revolutionary alternative to The London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, both of which still demonstrate how much readers crave review collections. Volumes like Liberated Texts might be the very future of book review magazines in changed form. A luta continua!

Louis Allday and Mahmoud Najib (eds) Liberated Texts: Collected Reviews (Volume One) Ebb Books, Oxford, 2022

Adam Mayer is a researcher and writer and currently works at the American University of Iraq in Baghdad. Adam is the author of Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria (Pluto Press, 2016).

Notes

[1] Pluto Press is preparing a volume on revolutionary movements in Africa for later in 2023, where many of the authors here will also have their own chapters, elaborating on the penetrating analyses of the texts reviewed in this collection.

[2] Indeed, the author of this review has unpublished interviews with an agricultural engineer and socialist Hungary’s agronomist who (after building collectivized agriculture in Hungary) went on in the early 1970s to help design Ujamaa villages in the country. This he did with the participation of Canadian and even West German technical advisors (to his own initial utter bewilderment as a Communist).

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