From January 2024 all ROAPE’s work will be available on ScienceOpen with no paywalls. There will be equal access for all researchers, activists, and readers, wherever they are based in the world, and for the foreseeable future. Here, ScienceOpen CEO Stephanie Dawson discusses why ScienceOpen exists, how it differs from the corporate publishing landscape, and what ROAPE readers can expect from next year, in terms of how they will be able to access and engage with ROAPE journal content.
You have been in your role as Managing Director of ScienceOpen for around a decade now. Before we get into discussing Science Open, could you tell us a little bit about your own background, and what led you to join ScienceOpen as its CEO back in 2013?
I joined ScienceOpen in 2013 for the opportunity to rethink scholarly publishing from within a fully digital context. Before ScienceOpen I had been working at a publisher that was founded in 1749. I worked in the Science/Technology/Medicine department in Biology and Chemistry at De Gruyter for 12 years and saw a lot of changes but was also sometimes frustrated at the ways that the paper still dictated many workflows and processes. I grew up on a ranch in California but have been living in Berlin for over 20 years. I have a degree in Biology from Yale and a PhD in German Literature from the University of Washington. I think I had just the right background to think outside the box.
Turning now to ScienceOpen, can you tell us why it exists, and what it is trying to achieve?
From the beginning we felt that the network potential of a digital environment could provide a richer context for research articles in terms of knowledge transfer but also evaluation and impact assessment. It felt like there were some big issues looming on the horizon and open knowledge sharing could help to solve them faster as a community. ScienceOpen was developed as a freely accessible discovery environment with now over 85 million records for articles, books, chapters and more. We have built an interactive layer that encourages open reviews of preprints and published articles, as well as providing tools for researchers to easily and attractively share their research with a global audience. Our current business model is to provide services to publishers and institutes, from discovery and promotion to open access hosting, metadata support and full publishing solutions. We work with journals but also, increasingly, with book publishers as well.
As an aggregator of academic content we have a lot of experience in machine-readable metadata. We want our customers to have data that not only works well on our platform but across all digital platforms to maximize impact. We work closely with Crossref for Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for articles and books. Our author profiles have been integrated with ORCID from the beginning. ORCID, which stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, a global, not-for-profit organization is a great example of an open, community infrastructure. ORCID strives to enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and their affiliations by providing a unique, persistent identifier.
You spoke there of open knowledge sharing. The corporate academic publishing industry also talks of moving journals towards an open access model for publishing and knowledge sharing. How are these two visions for open access – ScienceOpen on the one hand, and Taylor & Francis, Wiley, Elsevier etc. on the other – different?
Shifting business models is not easy in any industry and Open Access poses a particular challenge for large corporate publishing houses with a different set up of financial incentives and responsibilities. Of course, they were slow to make changes and tried to lobby against free access to their journals and books. But academics increasingly demand immediate and free access; they want to retain their own copyright. Smaller academic-led operations can be both more idealistic and more agile and offer attractive publishing channels with new models for open access. Born-open publishers and platforms like ScienceOpen have the advantage of tailoring their business models to an open economy and finding out what works.
ScienceOpen CEO, Stephanie Dawson.
ScienceOpen was founded in 2013, and you have been there from the start. How difficult has it been, to swim against the tide of the corporate publishing model? How do you assess the progress that has been made – both by ScienceOpen and other like-minded initiatives and organisations – over the last decade, towards a radically different alternative to the one on offer by the corporate publishing houses?
In 2013 we truly thought that it was just a matter of a few years and the entire paid-access subscription model would be obsolete. The arguments for open access seemed so overwhelmingly convincing – research paid for by public money should be accessible to the public and new digital models could deliver on that better than the library subscription. It was the heyday of the open access ‘megajournal’ – the Public Library of Science (PLOS )was extremely successful with PlosOne, a broadly multidisciplinary journal that was committed to publishing all research that was based on sound science and not on importance or potential impact which really stretched the concept of the journal into a platform. Many new publishers were experimenting with different Open Access workflows.
At ScienceOpen we wanted to create a publishing platform based fully on author-driven post-publication peer review. We weren’t alone – F1000Research (now Taylor&Francis) kicked off the same year with a similar model. It felt like a revolution – but the industry proved to be remarkably stable and resilient. The fabric of research evaluation, career-progression, funding, and university rankings is dependent on a perceived reputational pyramid in the scholarly publishing industry that is difficult to break.
And yet a lot of progress has been made. Open Access has become increasingly standard and a new ecosystem has grown up around it. Journals like ROAPE now have opportunities, tools and infrastructure for making a radical break with corporate publishing and still offer high quality publishing. But it will be important going forward as a community to ensure that big publishing corporations do not suck up all of the library funds with Read and Publish agreements. We need more independent open access publishers and journals!
What can readers of ROAPE expect from the new partnership with ScienceOpen going forward, in terms of how they will be able to access and engage with the content of the journal?
We are really excited to host ROAPE on the ScienceOpen platform. The first thing that readers can expect is full and direct access to all of the volumes of ROAPE in a rich search and discovery environment. With such a large volume of back content readers will want to search for particular keywords or topics, to sort their results by citation, alternative metrics or date to find what they are looking for and to be inspired by related articles. We have an interactive interface for readers and authors that encourages participation in the scholarly discourse. Readers with an academic background and at least 5 published articles can write a review, but anyone can recommend an article or share with their social networks with just one click. Usage and other article metrics are displayed on the journal and article pages for transparency. We strive to put the journal articles in context – Who did they cite? In which journals were they cited? What else has this author published? Although we are called ScienceOpen we have a great deal of research from the humanities and social sciences on the platform and we learn from each new community that joins.
Lastly, for those involved with other academic journals who want to learn more about making a shift away from their current publishing agreement and towards ScienceOpen, how can they go about this and who should they contact?
We would love to help more journals move to open models. Whether a journal is ready to go full open access or just wants to experiment with our open discovery environment, we have services for every level of engagement. We are happy to provide metadata consulting and explore different solutions. Interested journals can just get in touch with me at stephanie.dawson@scienceopen.com or with our global business development manager Stuart Cooper at stuart.cooper@scienceopen.com.
Stephanie Dawson, CEO ScienceOpen, grew up in northern California, studied Biology at Yale University and received a PhD in German Literature from the University of Washington. She spent over 10 years at the academic publisher De Gruyter in Berlin in the fields of biology and chemistry in both journals and book publishing. In 2013 she joined ScienceOpen as managing director. With ScienceOpen she has been exploring scholarly communication in a digital environment, experimenting with open access publishing, discovery, preprints, open post-publication peer review, community curation, metadata enrichment, and alternative metrics.
The Kenyan government has proposed a compulsory housing levy from workers salaries to support contractors to build affordable homes for the working class. As incomes are squeezed and living standards collapse, Ambreena Manji and Jill Cottrell Ghai argue that the case for asking workers to bear the cost of housing development has not been made.
By Ambreena Manji and Jill Cottrell Ghai
The proposal in section 76 of Kenya’s Finance Bill 2023 to amend the Employment Act 2007 so that employers will compulsorily deduct 3% from workers’ salaries and send that, plus a further 3% contributed by the employer, to the National Housing Development Fund has met with widespread consternation.
The levy is expected to raise around £460 million a year for the National Housing Corporation that administers the fund. Following legal action, earlier proposals for a housing levy under the previous regime had been made voluntary and set at a lower rate of 1.5%. Now, the 3% levy will begin with civil servants before being extended to other parts of the formal and non-formal sectors.
The money will be used both to support developers and building contractors to build 200,000 affordable units and to subsidise mortgages for low- and middle-income households who would be offered an interest rate of 7%, half the market rate. By some calculations, affected employees’ net monthly salaries will be cut by about 52% when all statutory deductions including tax, the National Health Insurance Fund and the National Social Security Fund, as well as this new deduction, are taken into account.
Trade unions have spoken out against the levy, arguing that a variation in employment law cannot be imposed without consultations. The Kenya Constitution of 2010, Article 118, says that Parliament must facilitate public participation in its legislative work.
According to the 2022 Kenya Economic Survey, there were 2,907,300 employed in the formal sector and an annual rate of affordable home construction by the national government of around 500 units a year. It is not clear under the Constitution that the national government has this responsibility, as opposed to the devolved government at county level.
Kenya’s skewed land ownership
Whilst there is manifestly a need to address Kenya’s dire shortage of affordable homes, it is important to diagnose fully the reasons for this. Land shortages and the high costs of building materials are important causes as Steve Biko Wafula has argued. Kenya’s skewed land ownership is attributable to long-term land grabbing, going back to the colonial period. Importantly, one constitutional provision designed to address this – which calls for the development of minimum and maximum land ceiling laws – has been studiously ignored, especially the setting of a maximum holding. The housing levy will not address this problem: it cannot increase the supply of land for housing.
The levy is designed to encourage developers to enter the affordable housing market by offering them lower land and construction costs and providing tax exemptions, as well as guaranteeing contracts with the government. However, Wafula has also pointed out that the administration of the housing fund is not clear because it relies ‘on a complex system of collection, allocation, and disbursement of funds that could be prone to errors, delays, and fraud’.
Moreover, Kenyans have seen funds such as the National Housing Development Fund used as a revenue kitty. The 2005 Ndung’u report on Illegal and Irregular Allocation of Public Land detailed how state corporations were in effect forced into buying grabbed land, as ‘captive buyers of land from politically connected allottees’. The primary state corporation targeted to purchase land was the Kenyan workers’ pension scheme, the National Social Security Fund (NSSF). It spent Ksh30 billion (£175 million) between 1990 and 1995 on the purchase of illegally acquired property.
At a time when the government is desperate to increase its resources through raising taxes, Kenyans are also understandably suspicious that some of this money, at least, will end up in general government coffers rather than in the fund for which it is statutorily earmarked – other than that which ends up in party or private pockets, of course.
Household incomes
Whilst some prospective home-owners may be lured by the offer of lower interest rates and longer repayment plans, the proposed fund is also being seen as an unwelcome compulsory saving scheme. Funding can be drawn down after seven years or at retirement whichever is the sooner. But with standards of living being severely squeezed by inflation and with longstanding constraints on wages, as well as existing deductions which yield little benefit, many households will struggle to take a further cut to their take home pay.
Indeed, government workers were not paid their salaries earlier this year due to cash flow problems caused by the country’s mounting debt. It is ironic then that the proposal is in effect asking Kenyans formally to agree to defer a portion of their wages. Furthermore, because contributions are payable from income that has already been taxed and are taxed again when the funds are drawn down, workers are exposed to double taxation.
Workers are being asked to stake their long-term security on the success of a housing fund about which many have unanswered questions. If the promised housing materialises, how can we be sure that it will not be developers and landlords who benefit rather than the intended beneficiaries? There are real prospects that the housing units will be taken up by landlords and that Kenyan workers – having already accepted lower wages because of the housing levy deduction – could still find they have to pay high rents to access housing. What guarantees will there be that the housing will not be financialised in such a way as to put the notion of housing – as shelter and personal security – at grave risk?
Building on Serap Saritas Oran’s work on the financialisation of pensions in Turkey which theorises pensions from a political economy perspective and argues that pensions are fundamental to working class standards of living, we can see how the housing levy proposal similarly financialises a right to housing. Housing is a critical factor in social reproduction, that is, in how life is maintained and labour power reproduced. Turning housing from what Oran calls ‘a social right’ into an individualised personal investment, the levy creates opportunities for speculation and extraction. In this schema, there is a real risk that some who should be the beneficiaries of affordable housing will find that because of interest rates or the accrual of high rent arrears, they in fact become debtors.
Progressive taxes
We recognise that providing affordable housing is an important goal but we believe other, much fairer ways of raising much needed revenue for housing should be considered.
Might the time have come to have a well-informed national conversation about Land Value Taxation? Given Kenya’s worsening gini coefficient which demonstrates how skewed the country’s wealth is, why should workers bear the brunt of the government’s house building programme?
Land Value Taxation is a progressive tax which ensures that the tax burden is instead borne by landowners who can well afford it. Because land ownership generally correlates with wealth and income, it is much fairer to require those already advantaged to fund the needs of those who do not yet have homes.
Land Value Capture should also be considered. This taxation can be used for example if a road is built or other infrastructure such as a park is improved, causing a rise in the value of neighbouring properties. The principle is that these property owners should share some of their unearned gain with the public.
Elsewhere in the world, funds raised in this way have been used to build lower-cost housing. In addition, the money raised could also be used to fund ongoing operational costs such as maintenance of local roads, schools, and parks. Wouldn’t that be a fair and – given the infrastructure boom of recent years which has bestowed windfall gains on many property owners – very effective way to tackle the shortfall in affordable housing?
A raid on wages
Speaking on Kenya’s NTV news channel Mercy Nabwire, Kenya Medical Pharmacy and Dentistry Practitioners Union National Treasurer, recently described the proposed housing levy as ‘a raid on workers’ wages.’ The economy is in bad shape and public services are threadbare, but the case for asking workers to bear the cost of righting this – especially when their incomes are squeezed and their standard of living plummeting – has not been made. Still less the case for compelling them to surrender their already precarious wages for some nebulous future promise.
Ambreena Manji is Professor of Land Law and Development at Cardiff School of Law and Politics. Manji is a regular contributor to ROAPE. Jill Cottrell Ghai taught law at universities in Nigeria, the UK and Hong Kong for over 40 years. Since 2008 she has been involved in educating about, and pushing for the implementation of, the 2010 Constitution of Kenya. Jill and Yash Ghai authored Kenya’s Constitution: An Instrument for Change(Katiba Institute, 2021 – second edition).
Featured Photograph: A worker installs a kitchen at a construction site in Kenya (25 May, 2012).
Jos van Oijen writes about the release of Paul Rusesabagina – the ex-hotelier of ‘Hotel Rwanda’ – from prison in Kigali at end of March. He argues that with very few exceptions, the media use the Hollywood movie, Hotel Rwanda, as factual information. Yet the story is largely fictional. Van Oijen argues that journalists (and many researchers) are as ignorant about genocide today as they were in 1994.
By Jos van Oijen
‘If we are ever to have any hope of ending genocide and similar atrocities,’ researcher Kjell Anderson wrote, ‘we must first understand them.’ Anderson’s remark may state the obvious but as history keeps repeating itself, it cannot be said often enough.
In the first week of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, from 7 April 1994 onward, foreign journalists dutifully reported the systematic, one-sided nature of the violence: elite units of the Rwandan army aided by youth militias going from house to house killing unarmed Tutsi civilians; separating groups of people to kill the Tutsi, killing Hutu with a stereotypical Tutsi appearance, etc.
The violence was nevertheless interpreted as chaos, anarchy, and flared-up tribal strife. Such explanations echoed the propaganda of the extremist leaders who washed their hands in innocence by portraying the acts of genocide as random violence committed by angry mobs and disobedient soldiers who escaped their barracks. It was as simple as it was effective. No foreign power wanted to risk its soldiers in yet another chaotic tribal war in Africa. The United Nations pulled out their peacekeeping force and the world averted its gaze. By the time everyone realized what was taking place, most of the victims were already dead.
Today’s journalists know as little about genocide and propaganda as their colleagues in 1994. They are not familiar with the key elements of genocide, are unable to distinguish genocide from traditional warfare, do not recognize subtle forms of genocide denial, and recycle extremist propaganda as ‘the other side of the story’. Craft journalism is no longer a priority. Present-day news coverage is a matter of suggestions and emotions, opinions and judgments, political preferences, and activism. Structured research and a rational approach to the evidence, have become the exception rather than the rule. Depictions of historical events in popular culture replace reality, at least with this subject matter.
Hôtel des Mille Collines
“It’s truly a shame what happened to the ‘Hotel Rwanda’ hero,” an investigative journalist wrote on Twitter during the controversy surrounding Paul Rusesabagina last year. The tweet referred to a background article on a public broadcaster’s website expressing the same sentiment. It caught my attention, not because it was stitched together from unverified assumptions and emotions, but because it mixed up the chronology of historical events even more than usual.
The law of cause and effect had apparently gotten in the way of a good story, so the sequence of events was adjusted instead of the narrative. In science fiction, the timeline is frequently manipulated as well, but in those cases, the hero will spend the rest of the story desperately trying to correct the unforeseen consequences. In the real world, there are consequences too, but when it affects the lives of ordinary people in faraway Africa, as in this case, nobody loses sleep over it.
To journalists, history does not exist. Only the movie exists. Hotel Rwanda, a 2004 Hollywood film, runs for two hours, long enough to internalize the message displayed at the start: ‘This is a true story’. Ironically, the scene that follows is entirely fictional, but it convinced most journalists that the movie was a historically accurate documentary. It demonstrates the magic of Hollywood as well as the gullibility of (not only) journalists.
What matters is not the facts but the beautiful actress Sophie Okonedo who says, in a romantic scene in the film set in South Africa, by candlelight and with a glass of wine, to her handsome co-star Don Cheadle: “You are a very good man, Paul Rusesabagina”. A true story. One that happened in Johannesburg ten years after the genocide but when you’re in a dark movie theatre, participating in the shared experience of a cinematic illusion, you don’t think like that. It feels real, therefore it is true.
To the chagrin of many, the rescued hotel guests contradicted the illusory truth projected on the screen. The ‘ungrateful’ extras of the hero story remind us of the fact that the hotel manager was an actual person, not Don Cheadle in the movie, but a man of flesh and blood whose character traits included some unpleasant ones. The survivors were joined in their criticism of the film by other witnesses such as Romeo Dallaire, the commander of a few hundred UN peacekeepers in Rwanda who refused to abandon the mission. Some of these men were stationed in the hotel at the time.
The facts are documented. They were reported by experienced war correspondents. Dallaire described them in his situation reports. Correspondence has been preserved. There is too much to mention and verifying the information requires little effort. On 15 May 1994, for instance, journalist Mark Huband reported in The Observer that the hotel manager ‘threatened to throw his guests out, because they have not paid any bills’. Other newspaper articles mentioned the real heroes: the small group of peacekeepers and United Nations military observers who camped out in the lobby.
However, the media did not respond to reason. Oblivious to the paradox in their argument, they speculated that the criticism was a smear campaign organized by the Rwandan government. This assumption overlooked the fact that the information of the witnesses already existed before the film, a fact that excludes the possibility of the information being generated, for whatever purpose, after the film premiered in 2004. Even today, the international media collectively recycle the irrational assumption that 19 years ago served to retain a false belief. In the minds of these journalists, the history of 1994 still begins and ends in 2004.
The irrational accusation levelled against the former hotel guests is more than just an insult to the people concerned. It shows that the members of the media who suspended reality in 2004 to accommodate a Hollywood script have yet to return to earth. Another consequence of the knee-jerk reaction of ‘ulterior motives’ to rationalize the information of the survivors is that it has become the default attitude whenever a journalist is confronted with substantiated criticism. I will provide a few examples of this behaviour from my own experience. Again, note the blunders with chronology and causality.
Some events
On 7 September, 2021, I published a review of the book ‘Do Not Disturb’ by British journalist Michela Wrong. She responded in a South African newspaper on 18July, 2021. That’s right: seven weeks earlier. I had not written a single word yet, but Wrong already claimed that my review was ‘part of a very efficient state propaganda campaign’ of the Rwandan government. The journalist who interviewed Wrong did not question the accuracy of her accusation, published it, and afterwards resisted the reality that the review did not exist and that my work concerns the facts of history, not contemporary politics. I was forced to lodge a complaint with the South African Press Council to be granted a rebuttal.
In the Netherlands, we have media watchdogs too, but their attitudes are more like Wrong’s and that of the Hotel Rwandafans, than their African colleagues. A case I submitted to the ombudsman of the Dutch public broadcasters last year, about a pattern of serious ethics violations in programmes related to the genocide against the Tutsi, was ‘solved’ by replacing the entire case file with an unrelated question I had sent by email two months earlier. As weird as this may sound, more relevant to the discussion of this article is that the written defence of the criticized broadcaster contained no less than twelve accusations of the ‘state propaganda’ kind.
My response to such accusations is always the same: Would it matter? Would the facts change? Facts have no ‘side’; they are what they are. Anyone can look them up and judge for themselves.
But therein lies the problem, apparently. To give alternative histories an appearance of plausibility the facts must change, the chronology of the events must be reversed, historical footage must be manipulated, official documents must be misrepresented, and fake experts must be presented to confirm the illusory truth. Otherwise, such stories would stop making sense.
And then what? Would these journalists start consulting the archives, reading the academic literature, doing some actual research themselves, and informing themselves about the elements of genocide? Would they learn a few lessons from the past instead of moulding it to fit a false belief? Oh my, what a crazy idea!
Jos van Oijen is an independent researcher from The Netherlands who publishes on genocide-related issues in various online and print media. His writings on Rwanda, genocide, and research on roape.net can be found here.
Featured Photograph: Hotel des Milles Collines, Kigali, Rwanda (5 February 2006)
In this blogpost, Yusuf Serunkuma slams the cowardice of intellectuals today, who display self-censorship and contentment with the status quo, in contrast with an earlier generation of activists and subaltern scholars. Serunkuma argues that this did not happen overnight, rather it has taken years of manufacturing conformity and consent.
By Yusuf Serunkuma
There is a less discussed component about the profiles of earlier generation of anti-colonial, subaltern scholars and public intellectuals: their activism and militancy, and above all, community organising. Take Frantz Fanon, Mahatma Gandhi, Ramji Ambedkar, Kwame Nkrumah, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sédar Senghor, Julius Nyerere, Amílcar Cabral, Steve Biko, Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya, Walter Rodney, and several others of this earlier generation, their intellectual output was intimately entwined with their interaction with the struggle of their compatriots, which they ceaselessly sought to end.
These comrades were not just authors and theorists but were public intellectuals in the organic sense of the term: community organisers, activists. Their scholarship and life-stories—which is standard reading to this day—as author and activist Leo Zeilig, among others, has so committedly demonstrated—reveals a complete immersion and investment in seeking to identify, expose, and resiliently fight the exploitation and colonialist power. Whatever they touched, whatever angle they approached the world, fighting foreign exploitation and control (in its many forms, things that have continued to ruin our wretched lives to this day) was the air they breathed. Whatever micro manifestation they focused their intellectual abilities—whether it was the struggle for gender parity, literature, domestic violence, local land wrangles—all these were approached and connected to the wreckage of the violent global capitalist machine. They were convinced the ways in which events within the superstructure played out, directly impacted the ways in which the more localised manifestation of the adjunct problem played out.
Even subsequent scholars—whose work and activism would become more prominent in the 1970-1990s onwards—such as Ngugi wa Thiongo, Samir Amin, Ama Ata Aidoo, Christopher Hope, Robert Serumaga, Byron Kawadwa, Wole Soyinka, Okot p’ Bitek, Ken Saro Wiwa and several others of this time—there was militancy and active engagement with their communities and scholarship. Reflecting on and documenting their life-stories—again as folks such as Zeilig, António Tomás among others, have done – reflects so poorly on the ways in which today’s scholars are emasculated, and rendered almost useless to their communities.
Today’s scholar has so wholeheartedly, cowardly, acquiesced to colonialist-capitalist tyranny, and in many cases has volunteered their services to the same folks that their grandparents died fighting to depose. It is not that today’s scholars aren’t issuing radical statements, but rather (with minor exceptions), that they are terribly detached from the struggles of the ordinary folks, and are too tame, and too cowardly. While a great many of them appear to be doing “good scholarship”—by the standards of their peers—they have only gotten more entangled into a web of obfuscated realities, focused on terminologies, representation and micro-manifestation of phenomena, and terribly afraid of confronting the biggest elephant in the room, which imbues every aspect of their scholarship. Their partial involvement, and obsession with safety away from (anti-exploitation, anti-capitalist) trouble, not only pays well (or so they are convinced) but it also guarantees them a material buttress against their more wretched compatriots. But in a word, this is cowardice.
I try in this essay to map the history of this cowardice, self-abasement, censorship and contentment with the status quo. In truth, this did not happen overnight. It has taken years of cobbling, manufacturing and manipulating. The present condition thus represents, on the one hand, the thoroughness of new colonialism (subtle, comprehensive and apparently friendly, and distractive), and on the other, the complacence and cowardice of today’s mostly southern intellectuals.
The scholars is a community organiser
If the intellectual is meant to give their compatriots homogeneity, awareness and influence the course of history, the anti-colonial intellectuals of the 1950 and 1960s lived true to the definition of the term. As Steven Feierman writes in 1990 book, Peasant Intellectuals, “they got involved in socially recognised organisational, directive, educative or expressive activities” as Feierman has noted, and their scholarly production was mediated within the fabric of their society. To retain their independence and be “capable of elaborating dissenting discourse without losing valued occupations,” they never sought to see their intellectual production as a means of subsistence, even when the opportunity presented itself.
Thus they did not write for peer reviewed journals in the pursuit of impact points, plaudits among peers or promotion. Neither did they write in coded incomprehensible language, problematically called rigour, and long-winding theorisation. They wrote more creatively, angrily, and simply. To quote the secretary in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, they wrote in isand was. Thus, they published mostly in newspapers, pamphlets and magazines, which was ideal for mass audiences. Rajat Neogy’s magazine, Transition now curated at Harvard is an outstanding example (whatever the politics of its creation and existence). Most of the time, knowledge production was not the job, but something they felt they needed to do as their contribution to their collectively wretched lives.
And if these intellectuals ever wrote books—scholarly or creative fictions—the publishers were normally indigenous, self-published, or church outlets—but these were mostly located on the continent: Tanzania Publishing House, and later Mkuki Na Nyota in Dar-es-Salaam, East African Publishing House (EAPH) in Nairobi and later Fountain Publishers in Kampala. Heinemann Educational Publishers, which published the Heinemann Africa Writers Serries edited by renowned editor and publisher, Henry Chakava, and would soon become East African Educational publishers (EAEP). There was also the East Africa Literature Bureau, which took a great deal of pride in publishing texts in the local languages. Together with the Penguin Africa Writers Series, these became the major outlets. These intellectuals rarely obsessed with the rankings of the western world. Even when publications were in foreign languages—because of the tragedy of colonial enlightenment as David Scott has so succinctly demonstrated in Conscripts of Modernity—they tried as hard as they could to have their knowledge reach their homebred compatriots, by making sure these books sold on the streets and sometimes, freely photocopied and distributed.
These eminent Africans lived on the streets, and among the peasants. They were involved in the daily lives of their compatriots. They not only participated in protests and other actions and community organising, they offered themselves for political positions as soon as need arose. They were present in local public meetings discussing cleaning of markets and protecting the environment, for example. They appeared on local radios stations to explain big and small issues. You would find them at the National Theatre curating a political play, or in the market square doing Theatre for Development or speaking to audiences such as market women and taxi touts—not just de gratis, but they took pride in these engagements. Their scholarship directly derived from and disseminated amongst their compatriots. This is especially true of Ngugi’s work with the Kamirithu Theatre group, Okot p’ Bitek’s work at the National Theatre in Kampala, not to mention Nkrumah who would become first president of Ghana. And poet, Ken Saro Wiwa was a committed environmental activist and died fighting Shell in the Niger Delta. The list goes on and on.
Don’t look, don’t see scholars
This quality of their militancy and activisms blossoms more powerfully when cast against the current crop of intellectuals, specifically the ones operating mostly in the fields of decolonial, and postcolonial studies. Or any other discipline seemingly insulated away from new colonialism. Here, you find folks preoccupied with discourse, framing, language, ethics, and theorisation (all of which are undeniably wonderful things). But rarely do these scholars aspire to confront the subject of their theorisation head-on. Firstly, these folks are not only selfishly walled away from the rest of their compatriots, they are also endlessly producing scholarship, which ironically (sometimes, unbeknownst to them), only reproduces exploitation. These scholars of today have decided to spend entire careers and productive lifetimes quarrelling with their equally conflicted peers from the western world—the ‘New Intellectuals of Empire’—about how they have wrongly framed the discipline, and whether they are willing to listen to the subalterns. The idea of “studies” has replaced the urgency of activism and conscientisation. This gulf between academics and their communities has become more pronounced with scholars seeing themselves as too polished to mingle with their dirty wretched compatriots, but also see themselves simply as chroniclers of events. (Makerere University recently completed a huge high-rise wall around their over a hundred acres of the land—a long, long winding wall—so as to keep the scholars away from their unwashed compatriots, whom they accuse of stealing side mirrors off their second-hand Japanese-made vehicles, and wearing down the public infrastructure i.e., paid for by these same unwashed taxpayers, who wish to use it with unauthorised entry).
With the stark exception of political economists, the majority of other scholars (in disciplines such as human rights, democracy, historical studies, medicine, literature, culture, gender studies, postcolonial studies, conflict and peace studies), all of them—be they Europeans or Africans—do not see, nor seek to integrate continued colonisation into their analyses. While they might agree that colonialism is alive and well, they see no reason to practically confront it—as their predecessors did—neither do they even aspire to expose it as the bedrock around which everything else falls in place. They see their different departments and disciplines as only slightly linked to the economies in which they operate (and many Euro-American funding organisations marauding the continent appear very friendly and have often gifted them with a few peanuts, they would themselves have gotten either as taxes or endowments from the juggernauts of corporations maiming the continent).
For example, conflicts are studied mostly as products of local agency: so, things such as corruption of local elites, Islamic extremism, autocratic tendencies of leaders, tribalism are common. Which are often clearly undeniable. The historian, or political scientist will spend endless pages knitting the story together, showing the mistakes and overzealousness of the autocrat and other local actors; their dangerous pronouncements, the monies stolen, etcetera. But while this is undeniable, it is outrightly the smallest part of the story. They’ll not tell or see as a key factor, that autocracies across the African continent after the 1980s onwards, have been mostly emissaries of Euro-American banks and corporations (see here, and here, and here for example).
Thus, studying a men such as Yoweri Museveni, Paul Biya, Mobutu Sese seko or even the Kabila family in DRC for their contribution to the mismanagement of their countries, branding them “monsters” is clearly unhelpful analysis. Because these men are workers of a superior power which continues to set their terms of work. The big Pharma (say as spelled out in Prof. Peter Mugyenyi’s book) will not be mentioned, but instead will be told how local countries and their leaders are unable to invest in local manufacturing of medicines. They’ll discuss underdevelopment of Africa and throw about pompous theories about the failure to build structures and institutions as “what makes nations fail”. Or they’ll tell you, the tribalism of the African elite in Robert Mugabe, or Yoweri Museveni or the autocracy of President Amin. And they’ll knit a wonderful story together—often with good evidence.
But all of this is absolute nonsense. They’ll never discuss debilitating sanctions say against Robert Mugabe, Fidel Castro or Idi Amin. They will never integrate in their analyses, the blatant investment in violence and corruption by major Euro-American extraction agencies, such as Glencore Plc. or Dan Gertler International (DGI), Africom, which are well spread across the African continent doing dirty work and failing these countries. While these stories are blasted all over news outlets, scholars have tended to see very limited connection between them and their work. But more importantly for me is are scholars uninterested in organising with the rest of the wretcheds.
Standardization as stupefaction
What has happened over the years is that knowledge production and its subsidiary chain (gathering evidence, publication, and dissemination) have all become aligned to a sophisticated colonial packaging: First, knowledge production became a job for the subaltern intellectual. This was quickly followed by standardisation: gathering knowledge, publishing it, and disseminating it—even if not for monetary gain—all became legitimated by the university. Only through the university (its journals and presses, and its people with titles behind their names) is knowledge validated as scientific. At the face of it, the guidelines look logical benevolent: Knowledge has to be “scientific” to avoid “fake news,” they say, to argue. Then journals and university presses become the vanguards of “scientific knowledge.” Data has to be “ethically” gathered and presented in a particular grammar and ordering. But what do they mean by an abstract concept such as “scientific knowledge” or even “ethics”? Journals and publishers have to have impact, and texts have to show rigour. But what do these things mean in the life-threatening quest for freedom from violent exploitation from colonial control? As critical race theory scholars have demonstrated, the quest for fairness and liberation becomes obscured or (colour) blinded by claims of science and demands of “de-personified” “passive” neutrality or “objectivity,” which in effect glosses over the histories of violence, racism and exploitation behind that which finally becomes labelled scientific.
Like genetically modified tomatoes or apples, which have to look the same from Saigon to Nairobi, everything has been coded and standardized in the false claim that we live in a “global commonwealth of knowledge” and all of us contribute to the same pool, on an even turf. So, you find African scholars producing endless publications about being negated in African studies; about not being cited; and not being acknowledged—all by the white universities! At the centre of the clamour for this validation is the assumption of a benign knowledge commonwealth, a thing which is simply a delusion.
Ever wondered why universities rushed to bestow prominent African intellectuals with PhDs and professorships, without these people actually studying for those things? Yes, to gentrify them and take them away from the streets. After succeeding with the intellectuals of the 1970s and 1990s, the current crop is yearning for being locked into the university, far away from the madding crowd of their compatriots, and in the end, we have scholars completely unconnected to the masses.
Yusuf Serunkuma is a columnist in Uganda’s newspapers, scholar, and a playwright. In 2014, Fountain Publishers published his first play, The Snake Farmers which was received with critical acclaim in Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda. He is also a scholar and researches topics in political economy, and teaches decolonial studies/new colonialism, and writes regularly for ROAPE.
Featured Image: Mubarak hiding behind his tanks during the first days of the Egyptian revolution (30 January 2011).
Fifty years ago, on May 11, 1973, young Senegalese revolutionary philosopher Omar Blondin Diop died in detention under suspicious circumstances in Dakar. Our understanding of liberation movements in Africa tends to focus on struggles in colonial settings, yet Florian Bobin argues that over sixty years after Senegal’s independence, Diop’s life, work, and legacy reveal what revolutionary politics looks like in a neo-colonial context.
Listen to Omar Blondin Diop’s story here. Read about the story in French here.
By Florian Bobin
In June 2020, a few weeks after the murder of George Floyd, Senegalese graffiti collective Radikal Bomb Shot painted a colossal mural in the capital Dakar in memory of Black liberation fighters from around the world. Alongside renowned pan-Africanist Cheikh Anta Diop and abolitionist Harriet Tubman, Omar Blondin Diop is depicted, cigarette in hand, reading historian Amzat Boukari-Yabara’s Africa Unite! A History of Pan-Africanism.
The photograph that inspired this spray-painted portrait dates from 1970 and was captured shortly after his expulsion from France for partaking in the May 1968 protests. But five years later, the philosophy student Omar Blondin Diop was more than a radical dissident – he became a myth. When he died in prison fourteen months into his three-year sentence for “being a threat to national security,” authorities in Senegal claimed he committed suicide. Most had good reason to suspect he was murdered. Ever since, his family has tirelessly demanded justice be done, and artists alongside activists have taken the lead in holding on to his memory.
Omar Blondin Diop’s death cannot be understood as an isolated incident, but as one tragic episode in a long series of tenacious acts of state-led repression in Senegal. Decolonisation in Africa has often been the story of the birth of newly independent states in the 1960s. However, the persistence of foreign interests backed by national governments became a common sight in former French colonies. Well into nominal political independence, burgeoning autocracies largely stifled revolutionary prospects of emancipation from capitalism and imperialism.
We don’t often hear of resistance movements in Senegal during Léopold Sédar Senghor’s rule (1960-1980) because his regime successfully marketed the country as “Africa’s democratic success story.” Yet, under the single-party rule of the Progressive Senegalese Union, authorities resorted to brutal methods: intimidating, arresting, imprisoning, torturing, and killing dissidents [1].
An internationalist youth
Omar Blondin Diop was born in the French colony of Niger in 1946. His father, a medical practitioner, had been transferred from Dakar, the administrative capital of French West-Africa, to a small city near Niamey. He did not hold radical positions, but colonial authorities suspected him of “anti-French sentiment” because of his involvement with trade unionism and support of the socialist French Section of the Workers’ International led by lawyer Lamine Guèye [2]. The metropole monitored what it labeled “anti-French elements” because of their fear of growing anti-colonial movements. Once Blondin Diop’s family was allowed to return to Senegal, he spent the better part of his childhood in Dakar. At the age of 14, he settled in France, where his father enrolled in doctoral medical school [3].
For much of the 1960s, Blondin Diop lived in France. He spent most of his secondary education in Paris, where he attended a prestigious teachers’ college – l’École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud – and pursued his study of classical European thinkers, from Aristotle and Kant to Hegel and Rousseau. There, he began frequenting leftist circles. This is a time when anti-capitalist movements in Europe drew inspiration from China’s Cultural Revolution and strongly opposed American military aggression in Vietnam. Usually, Africans who pursued activism in France focused on politics from their home countries. Blondin Diop, for his part, had a foot in both worlds. Shortly after hearing about the Senegalese activist, radical filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard selected him to play in the movie “La Chinoise” (1967) [4].
In 1968, the 21-year-old philosophy student-professor actively partook in debates organized by far-left groups [5], joining at the new suburban Nanterre University the 22-March Movement, a driving force for the May ’68 protests and occupations. Inspired by the writings of Spinoza, Marx, and Fanon [6], Blondin Diop cultivated theoretical eclecticism – in and out of Situationism, Anarchism, Maoism, and Trotskyism, he never exclusively held onto one given ideology [7] – and considered internationalism as the upcoming revolution’s backbone, extensively writing on Senegal’s revolutionary youth defying President Senghor’s neocolonial rule; the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam’s efforts to counter-attack American bombings; and the rise of Rock and Roll among disenfranchised British youths [8].
In the summer of 1968, while in London as a Black Power consultant to Jean-Luc Godard’s latest film “One Plus One”, Blondin Diop met Nadia Wells, a journalist. Upon her return to New York, she wrote to him requesting an article on the French student movement’s latest developments, before going on to describe social struggles in the United Sates, from actions led by the Students for a Democratic Society against the Vietnam War to ongoing school strikes: “First, it was the teachers; then communities fighting to take control back of their schools (of course, these neighbourhoods are Black and Puerto Rican); finally, students who refused to go to school eight hours a day (to pay teachers extra because they lost money during the strike) and be even more “fucked-up”. […] All activists are not yet socialists, and capitalism is so complex that it is difficult to decide where to strike. It can’t suffer in New York: it’s the center of decadence. I have a large apartment but can’t open my windows because the air is so dirty” [9].
Counterattacking in a neo-colony
Due to his political activities, after breaking away from the elitist French grandes écoles system, Blondin Diop was expelled from France to Senegal in late 1969. Alongside other Senegalese comrades who had studied in Europe, he participated in the Movement of Marxist-Leninist Youth. The grouping later gave birth to the influential anti-imperialist front And Jëf (To Act Together), which would be forced into hiding until the early 1980s. Landing a part-time research position at the university, Blondin Diop often intervened in conferences, à la Dutch Provos, calling for students to question master-pupil dynamics within academia, inspiring a portion of the audience to gather and leave the lecture hall suddenly. He also spent much of his days walking throughout Dakar’s popular neighbourhoods alongside iconoclast creatives and his nights projecting, to the sound of Rhythm and Blues, the upcoming struggles with Black American comrades transiting through West Africa [10].
Pushing back formal structures, Blondin Diop promoted artistic performance. He developed the project of “a theater in the streets that will address the concerns and interests of the people,” closely related to Augusto Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed.” Expanding on art’s revolutionary potential, Blondin Diop writes: “Our theater will be a collective and active creation. Before playing in a neighborhood, we shall know its inhabitants, spend time with them, especially the young people. Our theater will go to the places where the population gathers (market, cinema, stadium). It is especially important that we make whatever we can ourselves. Moral conclusion: Better death than slavery” [11].
Independent Senegal was also a neo-colonial space. Senghor had initially opposed immediate independence, advocating instead for progressive autonomy over twenty years [12]. So, when he became President, he regularly called upon France’s support. In 1962, Senghor wrongfully accused his long-time collaborator Mamadou Dia, President of the Senegalese Council, of attempting a coup against him – Dia and his collaborators were later arrested and imprisoned for over ten years [13]. In 1968, when a general strike broke out in Dakar, the police suppressed the movement with the help of French troops. By 1971, Senghor’s embrace of France seemed to reach its peak with the state visit of French President Georges Pompidou, a close friend and former classmate [14]. For over a year, Dakar had been preparing for Pompidou’s two-day stay. On the official procession’s main route, authorities rehabilitated roads and buildings, attempting to invisibilise the city’s poverty.
Front page of Senegal’s official newspaper Le Soleil on February 5, 1971 reads: “Mr. Pompidou in Dakar: Long live the friendship between France and Senegal”
To young radical activists, Senegal’s reception of the French President was an open provocation. A few weeks prior, a group inspired by the American Black Panther Party and the Uruguayan Tupamaros set fire to the French cultural centre in Dakar and an annex building of the Ministry of Public Works. During the actual visit, they attempted to charge the presidential motorcade. But they were caught. Among those convicted were two of Blondin Diop’s brothers. He, too, believed in direct action but was not involved in planning this attack. He had returned to Paris a few months earlier, after the lift of his entry ban [15].
Distressed, Blondin Diop tried gathering the support of Samir Amin and Aimé Césaire before deciding, with close friends, to leave France to train for armed struggle. Aboard the Orient-Express, they crossed all of Europe by train before arriving in a Syrian camp with Fedayeen Palestinian fighters and Eritrean guerilleros. Their plan was to kidnap the French ambassador to Senegal in exchange of their imprisoned comrades. Two months into military training, Blondin Diop and his comrades left the desert for the city. They were hoping to garner support from the Black Panther Party, which had briefly opened an international chapter in Algiers. A split within the movement, however, forced them to reconsider. After swinging by Conakry, they moved to Bamako where part of Blondin Diop’s family lived. From there, they reorganized; meeting with sympathizers to former president Modibo Keïta’s ousted regime and unsuccessfully attempting to purchase weapons in Liberia, via Ivory Coast. In late November 1971, the police arrested the group days before President Senghor’s first state visit to Mali in over a decade. Under the control of the infamous Director of National Security Tiékoro Bagayoko, intelligence services had been monitoring them for months. In Blondin Diop’s pocket, they found a letter mentioning the group’s plan to free their imprisoned friends [16].
Florian Bobin, Tristan Bobin, Original map for “Omar Blondin Diop: Seeking Revolution in Senegal,” Review of African Political Economy, 2020.
“Blondin will live on”
Extradited to Senegal, Omar Blondin Diop was sentenced to three years in prison. For the more significant part of their days on the island of Gorée, detainees were not allowed to leave their cells. To minimize interaction, experience of daylight was restricted – half an hour in the morning, another half hour in the afternoon. Following the administration’s guidelines, the guards were unyielding toward political prisoners and regularly sent them to solitary cells. Between two spells in the “hole”, Blondin Diop wrote a letter to the penitentiary authority to warn about the preoccupying state of detainment: “My visits, when not suppressed, are strictly weekly and limited to my parents. Parents are not a man’s only friends. Newspapers and books of my choice are censored and do not reach me, although they are in free circulation in Senegal. Regular visits from the doctor have been interrupted. When I ask to go to the hospital, the prison administration issues exit permits with delays that can be fatal in an emergency” [17].
Omar Blondin Diop was reported dead on 11 May, 1973. He was 26 years old. The news came as a bombshell. Hundreds of young people stormed the streets and graffitied the capital’s walls: “Senghor, assassin; They are killing your children, wake up; Assassins, Blondin will live on.” Interior Minister Jean Collin, a former French colonial administrator who obtained Senegalese citizenship around independence (and additionally Senghor’s nephew-in-law), is suspected of having ordered Blondin Diop’s fatal beating after a clash between the two [18]. On the day of the funeral, Collin refused to hand the corpse over to his family, instead instructing an expedited burial by riot policemen.
From the very beginning, the Senegalese state covered up the crime. While the official autopsy presented Blondin Diop’s death as a “suicide by hanging”, the deceased’s father, a medical practitioner, issued a counter-forensic report attesting blows received to the neck, thereafter, filing a complaint for voluntary assault and battery resulting in death. Going against official orders, the investigating judge started indicting suspects – after a failed attempt at recreating the “suicide” in the detainee’s cell, he had discovered in the prison’s registry that Blondin Diop had fainted days before the announcement of his death, and the penitentiary administration had done nothing about it. Before the judge had time to arrest the remaining suspects, authorities replaced him with another judge, who ended the legal proceedings a year and a half later, claiming the case was not within his jurisdiction [19]. Blondin Diop’s father ended up being the only person convicted in the case, made to pay the symbolic sum of one franc for “spreading false news” about his son’s death. Every May 11 until the 1990s, armed forces would surround the young activist’s grave to prevent any form of public commemoration.
For decades, Omar Blondin Diop has been a source of inspiration for activists and artists in Senegal, and elsewhere [20]. In recent years, exhibitions, paintings, and movies have revisited his story – one which sadly resonates with contemporary politics. The authoritarian methods deployed by Senegal’s current administration illustrate how impunity feeds off the past. President Macky Sall’s regime has repeatedly sought to suppress freedom of demonstration, embezzle public funds, and abuse of its authority. So long as governmental accountability serves no other purpose than an attractive concept to international donors, practices from the past are bound to live on. In Senegal today, as exemplified by the state-sponsored repression of the nationwide protests in March 2021, people are still imprisoned for demonstrating; activists like Guy Marius Sagna are time and again intimidated, arrested, and unlawfully detained. In this context, fifty years on, authorities have unsurprisingly refused to reopen Omar Blondin Diop’s case. Nonetheless, as his family’s saying goes, “No matter how long the night is, the sun always rises.”
Florian Bobin is a Dakar-based researcher in history who studies liberation struggles and state violence in 1960s-1970s Senegal. This article is an introduction to his work on Omar Blondin Diop, completed by two books to be released later in 2023: a biography (Cette si longue quête. Vie et mort d’Omar Blondin Diop) and selected writings (Nous voir nous-mêmes du dehors. Réflexions politiques d’Omar Blondin Diop, 1967-1970).
This research project has been made possible thanks to the precious time and resources of Omar Blondin Diop’s family members, friends, and acquaintances, as well as activists and researchers. Sincerest acknowledgments to: Dialo Diop, Cheikh Hamallah Diop, Alioune Sall ‘Paloma’, Ousmane Blondin Diop, Papa Konare Niang ‘Niangus’, Alymana Bathily, Mustapha Saha, Jean-Claude Lambert, Bécaye Blondin Diop, Omar Blondin Diop Jr, Mareme Blondin Diop, Khaly Moustapha Leye, Antoine Lefébure, Gilbert Vaudey, Bertrand Gallet, Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, Marc-Vincent Howlett, Patrick Talbot, Roland Colin, Aziz Salmone Fall, Ndongo Samba Sylla, Karim Ndiaye, Marie-Angélique Savané, Pape Touty Sow, Amadou Diagne ‘Vieux’, Ibez Diagne, Mansour Kebe, Ousmane Ndongo, Alioune Diop, Papalioune Dieng, Ndèye Fatou Kane, Kibili Demba Cissokho, Bara Diokhane, Barka Ba, Majaw Njaay, Khouma Gueye, Maky Sylla, Alhassane Diop, Hugues Segla, Fatimata Diallo Ba, Khalil Diallo, Awa Mbengue, Vincent Meessen, Pascal Bianchini, Françoise Blum, Martin Mourre, Romain Tiquet, Omar Gueye, Armelle Mabon, Christelle Lamy, Woppa Diallo, Yannek Simalla, Leo Zeilig, David Morton, Tristan Bobin, Njoki Mbũrũ, Njambanene Koffi.
[2] This information was provided by Dialo Diop (brother of Omar Blondin Diop) in conversation with Cases Rebelles (9 May, 2018), and Omar in Memoriam (11 May, 2018).
[3] This information was provided by Cheikh Hamallah Diop (brother of Omar Blondin Diop) in conversation with Florian Bobin (12 July, 2018 & 4 July, 2019).
[4] Actress and author Anne Wiazemsky describes Blondin Diop’s encounter with Jean-Luc Godard, her partner at the time, in her novel Une année studieuse (Gallimard, 2012, pp. 157-158). Upon learning that the filmmaker was looking for ‘a Marxist-Leninist student,’ her friend Antoine Gallimard suggested casting Blondin Diop, a close companion of his. Charmed by the Senegalese activist, Godard later selected him to play Comrade X—his ‘own role’—in the film La Chinoise (1967).
[5] Historian Michelle Zancarini-Fournel highlights Blondin Diop’s role in student mobilizing in 1968 (they had crossed paths a few times) in her piece ‘En souvenir d’Omar’ for the collective book Étudiants africains en mouvement : contribution à une histoire des années 1968 (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2017, pp. 11-12). “He probably didn’t go much to class that year, but he was at all the debates organized by far-left political groups,” she writes.
[6] This information was provided by Alymana Bathily (a close friend of Omar Blondin Diop) in conversation with Florian Bobin (9 July, 2019).
[7] Alioune Sall ‘Paloma’ (a close friend of Omar Blondin Diop) insists on the necessity of understanding Blondin Diop as a complex, multi-faceted being, in his testimony for the 40th anniversary of his friend’s death (10 May, 2013).
[8] A selection of Omar Blondin Diop’s writings (Nous voir nous-mêmes du dehors) preserved by his family and edited by Florian Bobin is set to be published later in 2023.
[9] Nadia Wells’ four-page handwritten letter to Omar Blondin Diop is featured in the aforementioned selected writings.
[10] Journalist Amandla Thomas-Johnson’s Becoming Kwame Ture (Chimurenga, 2020) explores post-independence circulations of Black American activists between the United States and West Africa.
[11] Artist Vincent Meessen published Blondin Diop’s ‘Urban Theater Project’ (circa 1970) in his artist book The Other Country (Sternberg Press, 2018, pp. 38-39).
[12] This information was provided by Roland Colin (chief of staff for President of the Senegalese Council Mamadou Dia, 1957-1962) in conversation with Étienne Smith and Thomas Perrot for Afrique contemporaine (2010, p. 118).
[13] Since Senegal’s independence in 1960, President of the Council Mamadou Dia had been increasingly calling for decentralizing public administration and empowering peasant communities. Towards the end of 1962, tension mounted within the ruling party (Progressive Senegalese Union), between sympathizers to Senghor and Dia. Among the former, some decided to table a vote of no confidence against Dia’s government. At the time, every decision went through the party first, provided that it was the only recognized political force. Dia opposed a motion he deemed illegitimate and Senghor accused him of ‘attempting a coup against him.’ On December 18, 1962, Senghor ordered the arrest of Dia, alongside ministers Valdiodio N’diaye, Ibrahima Sarr, Joseph Mbaye, and Alioune Tall. They were incarcerated in the arid region of Kedougou until 1974. Mansour Bouna Ndiaye (a young official within the ruling party in 1962) and Roland Colin (chief of staff for Mamadou Dia, 1957-1962) offer two thorough first-hand accounts of the ‘December 1962 crisis’ in their memoirs Panorama politique du Sénégal ou Les mémoires d’un enfant du siècle (Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1986, pp. 136-154) and Sénégal notre pirogue : au soleil de la liberté (Présence africaine, 2007, pp. 253-293). Colin also testified in Archives d’Afrique (Radio France Internationale, 2019). Additionally, see Mouhamadou Moustapha Sow’s article Crise politique et discours médiatiques au Sénégal. Le traitement informationnel des évènements de décembre 1962 à Dakar.
[14] Léopold Sédar Senghor and Georges Pompidou met in 1928 at the prestigious secondary school lycée Louis-le-Grand. Maintaining a strong friendship throughout the years, they later collaborated politically, practically non-stop, between 1962 and 1974. While Senghor was Senegal’s President (1960-1980), Pompidou became France’s Prime Minister (1962-1968) and President (1969-1974). When Pompidou visited Dakar in February 1971, Senghor declared on the airport apron: “The Senegalese people feel particularly honored to receive the President of the French Republic. […] Because the French-Senegalese friendship dates back to nearly three centuries. […] I am pleased to host in my country an old classmate from high school, and a friend.”
[15] Senegalese authorities prided at President Senghor’s involvement in the reversal of Blondin Diop’s ban from the French territory (The White Book on the Suicide of Oumar Blondin Diop, Republic of Senegal, 1973, pp. 14-15). Historians Françoise Blum and Martin Mourre expose his possible motivations in their article Omar Blondin Diop : d’un monde l’autre (Centre d’histoire sociale des mondes contemporains, 2019): “Police sources explain this intervention by Senghor’s wish to rid Senegal of the very active Omar Blondin. He would have preferred knowing he was in France. For our part, we instead think that Senghor was concerned that the student pursued the brilliant studies he had started to become one of the flagships of Senegal’s future elite.” Evidently, Senghor saw himself in Blondin Diop: both were Senegalese, French-educated, and classically trained in the humanities. Perhaps, he believed that his younger compatriot could pursue his political agenda. But Blondin Diop famouslydisapproved of it in the strongest terms. By the late 1960s, the authorities had been closely monitoring him; it seemed apparent that they preferred to have him out of the country.
[16] This information was provided by Alioune Sall ‘Paloma’ in conversation with Françoise Blum and Martin Mourre for Maitron (8 May, 2019).
[17] In this striking letter to the penitentiary authority before his death in custody (featured in Nous voir nous-mêmes du dehors), Omar Blondin Diop denounced the drastic measures limiting detainees’ access to daylight, before concluding in a request for a general improvement of living conditions in prison.
[18] This information was provided by Roland Colin (chief of staff for President of the Senegalese Council Mamadou Dia, 1957-1962) in his memoir Sénégal notre pirogue : au soleil de la liberté (Présence africaine, 2007, pp. 324): “Oumar Blondin Diop, imprisoned at Gorée prison, received Jean Collin’s visit with whom he had an altercation. The Interior Minister, we later learned, would have ordered the guards to punish him. The next day, he was found hanging in his cell.”
[19] This information was provided by Moustapha Touré (chief investigating judge of the High Court of Dakar, initially in charge of Blondin Diop’s case) in conversation with La Gazette (21 December, 2009). In this interview, he recounts the state’s efforts to intimidate and coerce him during his investigation: “I had made the decision to indict the prison officers who had custody of detainee Oumar Blondin Diop. There were three of them, but I had only charged two of them, waiting for the third. At the time, we were in the absolute reign of a single party. The order that was in place left little room for maneuver for senior officials like us. And yet, I had responsibly and fairly fulfilled my duty as a judge, where others would have chosen to do something else, by obeying orders emanating from the political authority. I naturally refused and came to the decision to indict, because I was convinced, against the advice of my department and the state, that the detainee could not have committed suicide. This was impossible under the conditions in which the autopsy report sought to accredit the thesis of suicide. I was reinforced in such a belief by the prison logbook [registry]. It carried edifying mentions in this regard. This logbook did indeed mention that detainee Oumar Blondin Diop had fainted during the week in which he was pronounced dead by suicide. Nowhere was a medical examination mentioned in this same logbook, in order to determine the causes of the recorded fainting. The circumstances revealed credible and consistent evidence, tending to prove that the suicide, officially mentioned to justify the death of Oumar Blondin Diop, was in reality made up. So, I decided, in the secrecy of my investigative office, to indict. After this indictment, deemed bold at the time, I was immediately transferred. Ten days later, I was promoted to president of the Court of Dakar and adviser to the Court of Appeal. Let’s say that at the time, it was like a kind of a promotion-sanction which tried to hide its true nature.”
Using Fanon’s work, Benjamin Maiangwa, Gillian Robinson and Ethan Oversby ask if questions of origin and geography are racist and discriminatory, with harmful and belittling connotations. Does the question ‘where are you from’ contain in it white supremacy, entitlement, and racism. Surely, the authors ask, no-one should have to constantly affirm their existence.
By Benjamin Maiangwa, Gillian Robinson, and Ethan Oversby
“I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my desirous to be at the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects“
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
I (Ben) published a piece in the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) titled: “Where are you really from?” I argued in this piece that whether in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and elsewhere, the “where are you really from” question engenders micro-aggressive elements about one’s sense of (un)belonging. I shared various anecdotes from Nigeria, South Africa, Japan, and Canada to underscore this nervousness of belonging, emanating from that question. In all cases, I concluded that the question, despite its assumed harmlessness, favors whiteness as a standard for judging other people’s sense of being and origin.
Various anecdotes in my ROAPE story have spurred interest about the nature of the question and whether it is naturally rooted in micro aggressive elements, being intentional or unintentional discriminations, some not so subtle, with often harmful and mal-intentioned undertones. Some of my students asked whether the ‘where are you from’ question can broadly be marked up to white supremacy, entitlement, and racism at its core.
I (Ben) was at a grocery store with my friend, lining up to check out our items. I was conversing with my friend in English, when I realized a man on the queue was eavesdropping on our conversation. As I was about to pay for the groceries, I heard the man uttered “Jambo” (hello – in Swahili) and looked up as if he was talking to someone in the air. I looked at him, but he kept his gaze upward. I was certain that I heard him say “Jambo”, and to be sure I asked, “sorry, did you say something?” He quickly said “no”, and for good measure, added, “Habari Yako” (how are you – in Swahili), and then looked away again. I’ve had it at this point! “Why is he uttering phrases in Swahili to no one in particular?” I thought it was the “white gaze” already dissecting me like Fanon said in Black Skin, White Mask. So, for what it was worth, I decided to engage him. “Nzuri” (everything is fine – in Swahili), I said directly to him. He smiled with some sense of satisfaction, and then responded “my grandfather lived in Kenya.” “I am not from Kenya,” I quickly interjected. “But I have many friends from there which was why I could respond to you even though I didn’t know you were talking to me.”
As we said our goodbyes, I kept wondering, whether the man judged me based on my accent and placed me—wrongfully—in Kenya. Did he think because of the way I spoke English that I couldn’t possibly be from Canada? Or is Kenya his only frame of reference for the source of any shade of blackness? Or is it just his way of breaking the ice with someone who looked different? If that were the case, why didn’t he just speak English with me?
I wouldn’t necessarily say that the ‘where are you from’ question is a marker of white supremacy, entitlement, or racism, depending on where, when, and how it is asked. Ethan (the third author) asked some acquaintances what they thought of the “where are you from” question seeing they’re from different countries themselves. They felt that it wasn’t necessarily a problematic question, but it definitely has better alternatives and requires a certain level of trust. For example, a better alternative would be to ask, “where did you grow up?” However, in my case with the man who spoke Swahili to me, I consider the manner in which the question was asked as deeply insulting. The question was posed in a way as to categorize me as the “other” with roots anywhere else, but here. It was the case of the dominator culture deciding my fate, and placing me and, probably, anyone that looks like me, in the place it believes I belong. For as Fanon says, “the colonist and the colonized are old acquaintances [without the humanist commitment]. And consequently, the colonist is right when he says he ‘knows’ them. It is the colonist who fabricate and continues to fabricate the colonized subject.” Nobody should have to live in this existential wreckage of always affirming their existence to counter its fabrication by others.
On the anecdote about the woman in Canada in my ROAPE article, who repeatedly asked where I was before I came to Canada, and before then, and before then…when I was clearly not making it simple to access the information while subtly and politely communicating my discomfort, is it possible that she missed those intonations? Is our social awareness so different depending on where you are in the world that we are sometimes unable to grasp cues that would indicate someone does not want to be pushed further? Or is the assumption of expecting an answer so ingrained that she feels she has the right to keep at it until she gets what she wants? Is the fact that this happens in non-white settings as well means that everyone is employing whiteness as a norm?
The question’s origins seems to come from an accusatory white supremacist viewpoint, even if it has since evolved into a question of curiosity. Fanon knew full well what adopting colonial behavior was like, so it can be the embodiment of whiteness. A predominant goal of colonization within Canada was to completely assimilate, and I (Ethan) grew up with people that embodied “whiteness”, in an ideological sense. They had the self-hatred that Fanon spoke of which led them to criticize their peers for any behavior they deemed wrong.
Another contention had to do with the man in Ben’s ROAPE article whose parents came from Pakistan. He clearly (from his disgusted response to Ben’s questioning him where he is from) had an awareness of the potential effect of that question. Unless he never gets asked that question because when someone speaks to him, he sounds like he is “from here”. He wants to know when I (Ben) came to Canada, but how dare I ask him. Is that an indication that he has embodied white supremacy? Is it inherent in a country like Canada, which was industrialized by an ethnically diverse population, that it is your skin colour, or your accent which prompts further inquiry, or both? And if one looks or sounds “Canadian”, “English” (Or Ojibwe or French), then is the other ignored and is it assumed that you “belong”?
Fanon once stated “To speak a language, is to take on a world, a culture.” Speaking English and sounding Canadian makes a minority person “belong”, whereas people that speak English but have “foreign” accents are often asked the question “Where are you from.” The way we sound has much to do with the question as looks do. When I (Ethan) returned to Campus after Christmas break, I met my new roommate who is Chinese with an Australian accent. I would be lying to say that his appearance and sound didn’t make my brain lag for a bit, and in the spur of the moment I asked him where he was from. Even though he didn’t apparently take offence because he understood that his accent could be misleading, I regret asking the question because I made assumptions about race and language.
What comes up repeatedly for the students in Ben’s classroom while discussing the ROAPE story are questions of human’s natural tendencies to be curious about someone that looks, sounds and is obviously from somewhere else, or who is different. In this sense, can we say the question is rooted in white supremacy or is rooted in human nature? Isn’t it inbuilt in us to be inquisitive of, wary of or fearful of strangers? For instance, when children ask, “why is that person black?” which Gillian’s own children have recently BLURTED out in the grocery store towards a man next to them in the aisle, and she (hopefully appropriately), said “because humans are all different colours!” Was her child indicating an innate desire to know more, to understand, to make sense of themselves in relation to others and the nature of the world, absent of malevolent or repressed racist intention?
Children’s curiosity may be excused for obvious reasons, but it is a different story with adults. Unlike the man at the grocery store who concluded that I (Ben) was Kenyan, I met another lady at the same store who started off well in terms of her approach to unearthing the source of my blackness. I had bought cassava, among other items. Out of curiosity, I guessed, the lady asked how I’d cook it. I said, “just like potatoes.” “Ah, and how do you eat it?” “Same as potatoes,” I said. Then I went on about the different types of sauce with which one could eat cassava. And she went for it: “Where are you from?” I paused, and bystanders looked at me, as if they too had been expecting an answer. I felt at that moment like I had been put on trial! The woman might have interpreted my pausing as some sort of a resistance and went on to tell me she’s lived in South Africa for four months, among other exotic places on the African continent. “I lived in South Africa as well”, I managed to chip in. “Oh really?” she said and then added, “my sister married a South African, and you don’t have the accent.” “I am Nigerian”, I finally said, and it made sense to her.
I thought the lady was clever to use the cassava prelude to unravel my blackness. But I also thought she should have stopped at that, and maybe at “South Africa” since we had both lived in the country. But it felt to me that she really wanted to place me somewhere; to get to the source of my blackness. To paraphrase Fanon, I felt “I can’t go to the grocery store without encountering myself!”
Another relatable question arising from the ROAPE article acknowledged that those who frown against the “where are you from question” is because of a state of being perpetually ask this question throughout one’s life; being essentially accused of not belonging here or there. This is so much so that the state of self-inquiry when “where are you from” is a constant, requires one to eventually turn inwards and ask, “who am I?” But the question arises: doesn’t it seem completely inauthentic, ignorant and is the exact opposite of acknowledging someone’s very important differences to not ask the question, as we’re not supposed to be colour, culturally or ethnically “blind”, because that is also a form of racism?
It is not ignorant, and there’s certainly a place for the question depending on one’s familiarity with the ‘other’. Yet in my (Ben) experience, the framing of the question has often been discriminatory even by people considered to be from the same country. I was in the grocery store again with a friend, and a woman came and greeted us: “Hi, where are you from?” My friend looked at me because we’ve had this conversation over and over again, and he was wondering how I’d respond. I simply told her, “Nigeria”. She seemed happy to have found her brothers because she quibbled in pidgin, “na we we na.” We all laughed, as she proceeded to say, “I’m from Delta State.” Incidentally, my friend was from Delta state, and this revelation made the woman ecstatic to the point she didn’t ask where I came from in Nigeria. Then I chipped in for good measure, “I am from Kaduna state.” “We’re all one”, she said in a consolatory tone. I couldn’t help but to wonder why she needed to assure me of the oneness I had already taken for granted. I stopped wondering when she introduced my friend to her “non-Nigerian” friend as someone from her region in Nigeria and said nothing about me. Again, this may not be racism, and given the colonial configuration of Nigeria, the ‘head count’ remains acutely relevant in social relations. But one would think those who have traveled and mixed up with a mosaic of people and, perhaps, being tormented by the ‘where are you from’ question themselves would or should know better.
I (Gillian) acknowledge that I cannot have the experience of being treated as though I am an outsider based on ethnic or geographical heritage. I have never been outside of North America. I certainly do not feel entitled to know more about someone than they care to share, and I would hope that I would be able to pick up someone’s hesitancy before it became awkward or harmful. I’m just not sure we can expect that everyone will know the difference. I don’t think not asking the question makes you blind to culture or ethnicity, but rather, encourages the pursuit of knowledge of the world further. Learning about the world, cultures, and ethnicities is interesting and framing the question around that could transform the question. Framing our similarities like love for food or sport can make the framing of questions more genuine and intimate. The question acknowledges that we are different, but simultaneously leaves out the reality of our similarities, which are as important in forming a humanist or admirable stance.
The reader may be convinced that this question is completely off-limits, that people do not appreciate being asked where they come from or where their land of origin is. If this is true, and people stop asking and being asked, do we succeed (at least partly) in further insulating ourselves from the diverse realities of others, arresting our inquisitive nature and further othering? On the other hand, does the resentment of having our ethnic heritage as a point of constant inquiry leaves us with an ever-evolving sense of existential loci?
Where do any of us belong? Where are any of us from? Who are you, really (originally)? Is that a more appropriate question? Often the simplest answer is the best one that can be provided. Ultimately, we are all human, from far and wide we each have unique experiences regardless of our background. To paraphrase Fanon again, we as a people, want but one thing: may we never be instrumentalized. May the subjugation of people by people cease. May we be allowed to discover ourselves and desire others wherever they may be.
Benjamin Maiangwa teaches in the department of Political Science at Lakehead University. Maiangwa’s research focuses on the intersection of politics, culture, and society. His publications use storytelling to explore notions of contested belonging, mobility, and how people experience conflict and peace in everyday life. Gillian Robinson and Ethan Oversby are Political Science students at Lakehead University.
Featured Photograph: Black community in Chicago’s West Side in the early 1970s (June 1973).
Last month, ROAPE re-posted a collection of essays from 1993 to mark the 50th anniversary of Amílcar Cabral’s murder in 1973. Continuing our tribute, Chinedu Chukwudinma interviews António Tomás, who wrote Cabral’s biography in the 21st century. Tomás speaks about Cabral’s political development as well as his abilities as a teacher, revolutionary diplomat and leader. But he also discusses his insecurities, shortcomings and the myths surrounding national liberation in Guinea-Bissau.
What motivated you to write a biography of Amílcar Cabral in the 21st century?
When I wrote the first version of the biography on Cabral, I was in Portugal, and I wrote the book in Portuguese. The introduction is different from the one in English. I don’t see Amílcar Cabral: the life of a reluctant nationalist (2020) as a translation. I prefer to say that it is the English version of the book that was written in Portuguese. When I started working on this book project in the early 2000s nobody, at least from my generation, was talking about Cabral in Portugal.
But Cabral, his generation and all the people fighting for the independence and liberation of Africa were students in Lisbon. Most of them lived in Lisbon. Cabral was married to a Portuguese. So he was pretty much part of the debate about blackness in Europe, and blackness in Portugal as a student. When I started writing about Cabral in Portuguese (O Fazedor de Utopias – Uma Biografia de Amílcar Cabral (2007) I was just trying to understand, as a black man, how to think through and engage with Cabral and his struggle in the context of race, not so much that of independence, which is the kind of stuff I became interested in after I went to the United States and did my PhD at Columbia University. I was trying to understand, the place of race and blackness in Lisbon in the context of black Portuguese or African immigrants.
António Tomás, Amilcar Cabral’s biographer
Many years after, I changed a few things in the English version of the book. The initial debate on race and racism is less there. But what is interesting now is that the Portuguese version is sold out in Portugal. It has been sold out for many years. I’m now preparing a new edition where I bring back the debate on race because we have a lot of developments: A right-wing party in Portugal and an emerging and very strong black movement, formed mostly by people who want to bring debates on racism and the legacies of colonialism to the national agenda. It is a good moment to get back to these original questions that drove me to the quest of Cabral’s legacy.
In what ways do you think Amílcar Cabral’s life and work have relevance to the young people developing their racial and political consciousness in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protest?
He’s a very important figure, either you like him, or you don’t like him. If you compare him with Walter Rodney, they both moved back to Africa and they were involved with questions of societal transformation, and racism. It was not just about critiquing imperialism and critiquing colonialism. Particularly for Cabral, it was about how to create new societies, and how to go about creating societies that go beyond the ways in which these countries came into being through colonialism. It is important to appropriate these figures and to bring them into discussions about what is going on now with issues such as Black Lives Matter, structural violence and racism.
But it is important to put these thinkers in their very particular context and to do the sort of exercise that David Scott did with Conscripts of Modernity when he says we have to find not the answer, but the question that they asked in relation to their context. But it’s very important to engage with these figures and to learn, but also to understand that they were fighting in different times using different resources like Cabral using armed struggle and so on.
One thing I like about your book is your refusal to tell Cabral’s story in retrospect as if everything he did since a child was destined to turn him into a revolutionary leader. Can you tell me a bit about who was Cabral? How did he become politicised and politically active?
I’m from Angola and I grew up in Angola during Communism. People of my generation (I was born before 1975, the year of independence) grew up with all these traditions of big men, like Agostinho Neto, Brezhnev, Tito, and Che Guevara. Even today the toponomy of the city (Luanda) reflects that, with streets named after Kwame Nkrumah and Amilcar Cabral. The biographies of these figures have been recorded in a very problematic way. They are talked about as if their lives were linear. They don’t have challenges, they don’t have doubts, and they know from the outset what they are going to do. They have a destiny and they fulfil it. But what you see in my book on Cabral, is that life is not like this. Leaders like Cabral had to make really hard choices. Most of the time they were thrown into situations that were not of their choosing. It’s the conflation of circumstances that brings them to this these moments when they have to make hard choices.
Cabral was born in 1924 in Guinea-Bissau to Cape Verdean parents and moved back with his family to Cape Verde in 1932 and then to Lisbon, in 1945. Cabral was not the most politicized of his generation of African-born students in Lisbon. Agostinho Neto, who later became the first President of Angola, was by far more politicized than Cabral. He was already in prison by the Portuguese secret police even before Cabral knew anything about what he would do as a nationalist. Cabral was just trying to do the best he could in the circumstances that he found himself. He had his radical friends; he was trying to help his friends. By the time his friends were being harassed and arrested by the police, he was the only one that had a formal job working as an agronomist for the colonial state. So, he could travel in the Portuguese empire; go to Angola and Guinea-Bissau, link people, and distribute money and letters. But it reached a situation where he could no longer do that. So, he had to take a stand. And that was in 1959 or 1960 in London when he wrote these very famous documents, Facts against Colonialism, which is how he introduces himself as a nationalist.
What is interesting is that because he was not as politicized and devoted to politics as many others in his generation, like Mário Pinto de Andrade or even Agostinho Neto, he had time to draw from other resources, such as his training as a scientist and his writings. All of these allowed him to do the kind of stuff that nobody had done in any other place fighting Portuguese colonialism, such as creating the liberated zones during the anticolonial war in Guinea-Bissau and promoting an approach to gender equality throughout the struggle. Because he pushed back the moment to become a full-fledged nationalist, he had time to bring much more to the fight.
My descriptions of what Cabral was doing in 1959 convey the sense of hope that Africa’s time had arrived. It was the time for Africans to show the world what they could do. It was the time for Africans to build societies that could deal with and go beyond all the structures that colonialism and imperialism imposed upon them. And then there was the 1960s–a wonderful decade in Africa. Of course, things get worse in the 1970s and particularly the 1980s with the IMF and structural adjustment. but it is a very important time in Africa and I think we should revisit that formative moment and perhaps try to re-capture a little bit of the optimism of the 1960s.
Your book points out the discrepancies between the myths and the actual reality of the national liberation struggle. I remember when I was learning about Guinea-Bissau’s struggle at university, I enjoyed reading Lars Rudebeck who paints a very idealistic picture of the struggle, and Basil Davidson as well. What are the discrepancies that we should know about?
This is a very important question. Reading authors, such as Lars Rudebeck and Basil Davidson and getting to know how the struggles in Africa were understood in the context of global struggles for freedom. But this comes with a problem. These liberals and progressive writers were so involved with the struggle, particularly Basil Davidson, that they lost objectivity. For them, these struggles for liberation in Africa were seen as part of ideological struggles going on in Europe. For them, it was sort of mandatory to make the case that everything was going well and that the national liberation movement would prevail. About the critical decisions that had to be made, you won’t find much in their writings. But the struggle is a very tough business. Whenever violence needs to be used to liberate a country, there will be people dying. In the case of struggle in Guinea, which you don’t see in the writings by these authors, that war was conducted in the context of historical rivalries between Cape-Verdeans and Guineans within the national movement, the PAIGC (Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde). So, the questions were then: who was fighting and who was leading?
Cabral’s decision to start the war was a very heavy one to take. First Cabral did not have any military training. If he could, he certainly would have pursued the liberation of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde in a non-violent way. He resisted pressure to start it in 1961 when the anticolonial war was starting in Angola. It was only when his men were caught smuggling military equipment by the authorities in Guinea-Conakry and his companion was imprisoned by Sekou Touré in 1962 that he had no other choice than to show the uses of the smuggled guns. If he had not shown Sekou Touré that the weapons and military equipment were to fight the Portuguese, Touré would certainly have thought that it was a way to feed one of the groups against him.
To come back to your question, I think the ways in which liberal and progressive writers were engaging with the struggle have also contributed to obscuring our knowledge of the killing of Cabral. A lot of people who were writing about Cabral were people that were invested in Cabral’s theory and practice, Cabral’s ideology. So, they were not paying much attention, or they were not interested in understanding the killing of Cabral in relation to the contradictions that the national liberation movement had brought to the fore. The idea that António de Spinóla, the Portuguese governor in Guinea-Bissau, had ordered the killing, or that the PIDE (Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado) had plotted it, was a good explanation. However, I also think that this explanation prevented a lot of these scholars from really engaging with the contradictions of colonialism and the contradictions of post-colonialism. And this is part of what I tried to do in my understanding of Cabral.
There is a contradiction between those petty-bourgeois Cape Verdeans, some of which lead the PAIGC, and the Guinean masses who are much poorer comparatively. How does this contradiction play out throughout the liberation struggle and at independence?
Cabral tried to think through this issue with what he proposed as the class suicide of the petty bourgeoisie. He knew that there was a contradiction, and he knew it was very difficult for people to overcome these contradictions. Cabral proposed that the petty bourgeoisie had to transcend who they were. They had to put aside all the privileges and they do embrace the masses. But how do you do this in practice? when you have very deep structures that put people against others, in terms of language, in terms of culture, in terms of the mechanisms that the Portuguese created to differentiate people, such as the native laws. These laws fostered the overwhelming distinction between natives and civilized. The central idea behind this legislation is that a group of people were given privileges because they were able to assimilate a way of life that the Portuguese deemed civilized: they could eat with utensils, they could speak Portuguese and dress like Europeans. Those who could not demonstrate these abilities were placed under the statute of native.
It was for Cabral a difficult task to bring these groups together. Guineans would resent Cape Verdeans because they considered them agents of colonialism. Many Cape Verdeans would not be comfortable around Guineans because of their different languages, customs and traditions. For Cabral, it was how to dilute these cultural differences. And then there was the Portuguese colonial power finding ways to exacerbate these differences to create even more problems in the national liberation movement. If the suicide of the petty bourgeoisie was something difficult to consider during the struggle, it was even harder after independence when the postcolonial states became machines for accumulation. So, you start to have a sort of differentiation between the haves and the have-nots.
I called the Portuguese version of this book O Fazedor de Utopias ‘The Maker of Utopias’ because of the odds of making the national liberation movement a functional and operational machine. It was hard to bring different people together. Reality is too complex for that. People are too complex for that. Humans are for the most part comfortable with what they have. This is one thing. But the other thing is that we must give credit to those who think that transcending difference is possible. It is difficult, of course, but it is worth dreaming about and aiming for. We still need to believe that a world without racism and discrimination is possible.
Can you talk about Cabral’s political identity? You called him in the English version of your book a reluctant nationalist. What does that actually mean?
Cabral was reluctant on many issues, and he hesitated on a lot of issues. The Cubans wanted Cabral to finish the anticolonial war by invading Bissau. He had numbers. But to do that, you would have to bring more people, more violence, more killing and more blood. So, he was hesitant. In terms of the ‘reluctance’ of his nationalism, there are two reasons to consider. When he started to get involved with political activism, the notion of nationalism, for black Portuguese, was not there. Cabral was married to a Portuguese, Maria Helena, in their correspondence that was recently published there is something to allow us to understand Cabral as the product of a different identity. He is a black Portuguese. He was Cape Verdean, which was a culture, not a nationality. The whole idea of non-longer being a subject of the Portuguese Empire could give you a nationality that was not Portuguese was not conceivable as a second-class citizen Portuguese because, in 1951-52, Portugal changed the Constitution to get rid of the notion of the colony and replace it by an older one, overseas provinces. So, there was the idea that Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde were provinces of Portugal. Those born in these territories were Portuguese, but they were not like white Portuguese, they were second-class Portuguese. If you read Cabral in Portuguese, what he wrote at that time, he considers himself black Portuguese and there is an important tradition of black Portuguese since the 1920s. So, this is the first idea behind Cabral being a reluctant nationalist.
The second idea is that when Cabral has the chance to put forward a notion of nationalism, he did not have any. He was not talking about a nation. He didn’t believe in nations. He believed that he could create a by-nationality bringing Cape Verdeans and Guineans together because he thought that Cape Verdeans originated from Guinea–their ancestors had been brought to the island of Cape Verde during the Slave Trade. Unless you can convince me otherwise, the kind of nationalism that Cabral was proposing, is not in any form a traditional nationalism that Benedict Anderson would write about in Imagined Communities, around the culture and language.
What place does Pan-Africanism have in Cabral’s mind?
He was highly influenced by this movement. And if you are black Portuguese you knew what went on in New York during the Harlem Renaissance. All these wonderful poets, such as Langston Hughes, were part of the conversations that African students were having alongside Jazz music. Because Cabral could speak French, he could read what was coming from Paris with the Négritude. In the w thinking and writing of black students in Lisbon from Africa, there are all these influences. You see the influence of Aimé Césaire, you see the influence of Du Bois, of Garvey’s going back to Africa.
But what is interesting about Cabral and many of these authors, Du Bois, Nkrumah and Senghor is that they are on both sides. Because they were the ones writing about ‘imagine what an independent Africa would be like!’. Then they were on the other side as leaders trying to come to terms with the formation of these new countries and new nationalities. It was a very difficult position to be in. Guinea-Bissau only became independent in 1973. Cabral was certainly thinking about how to avoid dictatorship and one-party rule because he was watching what was going on in Africa, with the spread of coup-d’états and political violence at the time.
What was the influence of Marxism on Cabral?
The Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) was very strong in Portugal and it was a great part of the resistance toEstado Novo, the fascist regime in Portugal. PCP the most organized illegal opposition to Estado Novo was the Portuguese Communist Party. So, it was just natural that, everyone that was against the Estado Novo would gravitate around the PCP. Cabral and many other students were seduced by Communism and Marxism. In almost everything, Cabral has written you see the mark of this intellectual tradition, with a lot of contradictions as well. The Communist Party were against Estado Novo but they didn’t side with the independence of African countries. It took a long time for communists in Portugal to have a clear position about independence in Africa.
Amílcar Cabral, the revolutionary diplomat, meeting with Romanian leader Nicolae Ceauşescu in June 1972
To what extent were Cabral and his guerrilla army influenced by the Soviet Union, China and Cuba?
The Soviet Union with Lenin had the struggle against imperialism as central in their policies. Lenin and Mao have written about imperialism, Fidel Castro was interested in the liberation of Latin America from the yoke of imperialism. It was clear, they would support any national liberation movement fighting against any form of colonialism and imperialism in Africa. What Cabral did, in coming to terms with his insurgent strategies was to use all these experiences. The influences are clear for instance in the kind of support he received throughout the war. In the early stage of the war because of the geographical conditions of Guinea, based for the most part on rice production, the nature of mobilization was based on China’s Maoism. But towards the end of the insurgency, in the late 1960s, the whole organization leans more towards the Soviet-Cuban model, in which you have the separations between the structures of the whole organization and the cadres. So, the cadres, those doing political work, were above the military elements in the PAIGC. This structure was also handy for Cabral. He was not a soldier. Throughout the war and until his death in 1973, he was always trying to find ways to subsume the power of the military under the power of civilians.
Reading your book and thinking of Cabral’s actions and internationalism, he gives the impression of being more of a revolutionary diplomat than a soldier. Someone who is able to manage complex relationships with leaders of other nations. How accurate is that depiction?
The most interesting trait of Cabral’s personality was his penchant for diplomacy. Because it was a very crazy world. With the Cold War, it was very easy for many leaders just to take sides. But Cabral didn’t take sides. He tried to use his diplomatic skills to bring everyone together or to bring everyone behind his movement. He had very good relations with the left Portuguese people fighting against Estado Novo. He had very good relations even with the Vatican. During this in the 60s and so on, he had very good relations with northern Europe, countries like Sweden and Norway. He received humanitarian support from the religious denominations around the world. He got a lot of support from associations and groups in France as well. Towards the end of his life, he was trying to get the hardest group to convince to support his struggle against colonialism: the Americans. He made a few trips to the United States. He spoke at the Congress. It is always fascinating to see how Cabral dealt with diplomacy in the Cold War. One day he was giving a speech at the anniversary of Lenin at a congress in the Soviet Union and a few days later, he was talking at the Congress in the US. There are not many revolutionary leaders that have done that. Diplomacy was very important as a tool to get things done. It was the strongest side of Cabral. And even bringing together Cape Verdeans and Guineans was also part of his diplomatic effort to work through differences.
What I liked about Cabral from reading your work was his quality as a teacher. Especially in how he trains the PAIGC recruits and spends a lot of time helping them understand, the society they are trying to change. What can you say about that ability of Cabral?
Through the years, there is a lot of effort and a lot of people trying to see Cabral as the Theoretician of the revolution. But Cabral was not like that. He was an organiser, but he was particularly, as you say, a teacher. He was very, very good at explaining, very complex ideas, scientific ideas, to people that didn’t have any sort of education. A s great part of what has Cabral written, that we now read as theoretical contributions are in fact teachings. Almost everything is Cabral talking to his soldiers, his companions. He’s someone who had been to Portugal and had the opportunity to learn. And trying to explain all these very complex ideas to people that hadn’t been exposed to anything. Besides his diplomatic abilities, the teaching and the sharing of knowledge was the strongest part of Cabral.
I wonderwhat you think can be generalisable from Cabral’s writings and speeches for today.
That is a good question, it is such a different time. That is the difficulty. It is easier to read Fanon and to engage with Fanon because there’s all the psychoanalytical side and he was a brilliant writer. He was part of a very profound philosophical school, and if you read Fanon, you’ll find all the resonances to everything that was going on in French literature and French philosophy with Jean-Paul Sartre and Existentialism. You find none of this in Cabral. Unlike Fanon, Cabral was not a speculative writer. He was really trying to write about the day-to-day in Guinea at that time. In that regard, it’s very hard to find things in Cabral that you can easily use and easily apply to the struggles that we have today. Even in terms of the post-independent state, how to think of it, and how to understand it, you will not find in a lot of instances in which Cabral would talk about how he imagined Independence. He talked about unity he wanted to create a country bringing together Cape Verdean and Guinea. But the whole stuff about how that would function is not to be found in Cabral’s writings.
A huge part of his personality was his ability to learn from the mistakes of others. He started the war in Guinea and didn’t want to replicate the same kind of mistakes of other movements and national liberation struggles. That gave him a lot of space to do stuff to push forward something very original. But this raises questions: What kind of post-colonial leader would Cabral have been? what would Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde be with Cabral as a leader? We will never have answers to these questions.
António Tomás is the author of Amílcar Cabral: the life of a reluctant nationalist (available here) He teaches at the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. He has worked as a journalist in Angola and Portugal and has written on issues related to Lusophone Africa.
Featured Photograph: Amílcar Cabral giving a speech (9 June 2007).
ROAPE’s Peter Lawrence argues that there are strong echoes across Africa of the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The reappearance of recession, debt and structural adjustment to the continent reminds us of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism. Based on his editorial in the forthcoming ROAPE issue 174, Lawrence concludes that there are alternatives to the continent’s enduring entrapment in a global financial system that works for the global financial corporates that dominate it.
By Peter Lawrence
A world recession induced by pandemic and war, a consequent boom in energy prices and a cost-of- living crisis with rising inflation especially of food prices, is threatening to reverse the progress that many African economies made during the ‘commodity super-cycle’ of the 2000s and the first part of the 2010s. Indeed, there are strong echoes of the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s, itself induced by a twelvefold increase in the price of oil and in Africa, by famine and war. In both cases, these appearances of crisis disguise the fundamental contradiction of capitalism – the relentless pressure to increase profits facing the limits of realisation as consumption is squeezed and the state is restricted in its powers of intervention, even in limiting the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on its already impoverished population.
While much attention has been focused on the oligarchs of Russia and Ukraine, these plutocrats as they should be called, exist all over the world. Their increasing influence is evident everywhere. They acquire their wealth by hoarding the economic rent they receive from highly valued products and paying as low wages as they can get away with to largely non-unionised labour. They then secure that wealth and economic power from any government intervention by first, capturing political parties, and not only of the right, but also the self-styled left, and then play a crucial role in funding their election campaigns. Then after those parties win elections the government is captured and liberal democracies or countries moving towards such democracy morph into shades of oligarchy or even autocracy, as we observe most obviously in countries such as India, Hungary, Turkey and in Africa, Uganda.
Once again, the chief beneficiary of this war-induced recession is US imperialism and its dominant financial-security complex (if not oligarchy) based on oil, gas and arms. Not only has the US been able to benefit as an oil producer from the increase in the oil price, but also from the increased demand for its liquid petroleum gas (LPG) as Europe reduces its demand for Russian gas following that country’s further invasion of Ukraine. The potential axis of Brussels-Moscow-Beijing, which would have been a serious threat to US global interests has been averted. The US has been able to reassert its hegemony over Europe through its mobilisation of economic and military support for Ukraine and has also underlined its hegemony in the Far East with its clear assertion of its support for Taiwan’s independence, reaffirming its strategy of, and belief in, a unipolar world.
For the countries of Africa, the last decade has seen a large increase in sovereign debt in the wake of the extremely low interest rates that followed the financial crisis of the late 2000s. The encouragement of African economies’ entry into global capital markets mainly through issuing Eurobonds, was regarded as something to be celebrated as part of the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative. Not that capital markets treated African economies in the same way as those of the Global North. Instead, they placed a premium on interest rates reflecting what they saw as the greater risk in lending to African countries. Borrowing on global capital markets when interest rates were low seemed a good way to finance development or even restructure existing debt. However, the downturn in the world economy both before and especially during the Covid-19 pandemic together with the effects of the Russia-Ukraine war has now placed some 22 countries in the position of actual or potential ‘debt distress’ and needing, or likely to need, IMF and World Bank support. Such initiatives as the G20’s Debt Service Suspension and the Common Framework for Debt Treatment have relieved very little of the pressure on the debtor countries.
African countries’ debt now averages over 60% of GDP and in the case of Mozambique 100%, ratios not high in comparison with some countries of the Global North but servicing this debt diverts resources away from investment in productive activity as increasingly borrowing is directed to repayment of previous bond issues. In the case of Mozambique, Zambia and Ghana, ‘debt distress’ has led to default on some of their debts and attempts to restructure them including negotiating deals where effectively a large part of the debt is written off as the lenders take the proverbial ‘haircuts’. In Ghana, these problems of integration into global financial markets have led to bank failures putting even more pressure on weak financial systems. Ethiopia’s war with Tigray has had devastating effects on its economy and increased its level of debt distress resulting in a rescheduling of its debt to China (a third of its total external debt) and so reducing the risk of default. In North Africa, Egypt and Tunisia have been racking up huge external debts and have now agreed new credit arrangements with the IMF.
China has become a major lender to Africa, mainly for infrastructural investments and now holds 12% of Africa’s debt, and for several countries in Africa is its biggest creditor. Debate around the motivations for Chinese lending abound, with some observers seeing China luring key African states in debt-traps while others see China being drawn into a trap of its own as the risk of default heightens. Perhaps because of this risk, the last two years has seen China sharply scaling down its lending to Africa. Unlike its willingness to reschedule Ethiopia’s debt, and that of some other African countries, China is now delaying a rescheduling of Zambian debt arguing that the multilateral organisations such as the World Bank and IMF should also take haircuts as well. This is of no help to Zambia which needs support from all its creditors. The IMF’s agreement to grant an Extended Credit Facility of $1.3 billion in August 2022 is contingent on Zambia effecting its ‘home grown’ adjustment strategy which involves restructuring and rescheduling China’s external debt as well as the other usual ‘adjustments’ in the IMF’s playbook, to which we return later.
How far repayment of current external debt by African economies is feasible will depend on its foreign exchange earnings. These are still for much of Africa, some 60 years after the end of colonial rule, highly dependent on the export of primary products. The latest data tells us that these products, predominantly fuels and minerals, comprise 77% of Africa’s export income. Some countries are more dependent on primary product exports than others and in some cases their export income is dominated by just one product, as in the case of copper in Zambia which produces 70% of its export income, Botswana, heavily dependent on its exports of diamonds and Angola and Nigeria, almost completely dependent on oil. Recent discoveries of new sources of gold, oil and gas has led to export concentration in an increasing number of countries.
Such dependence and concentration leaves countries vulnerable to swings in commodity prices which can affect both the capacity to import and the management of windfall gains in export income. However, research carried out to examine the effects of commodity prices on economic growth in African economies has suggested that there is no clear positive relationship which may have to do with the volatility in commodity spot prices not being reflected as sharply in actual export earnings. Commodity prices are normally set by long-term trading contracts incorporating expectations about the future, so the prices at which commodities are actually traded do not fluctuate as wildly as spot prices such that the effect on economic growth will be more muted. Where a country exports more than one commodity, all prices may not always move in the same direction.
Diversifying out of dependence on primary commodity exports was always a policy objective of post-colonial governments in Africa and elsewhere. While there has been considerable growth in industrial and service activity, primary commodity production has also grown as global corporates with active support from African governments have sought to diversify their sources of high-value commodities. The ’commodity super-cycle’ of the 2000s petered out in the course of the 2010s and especially during the pandemic-induced decline in global growth, but now there is talk of a new super-cycle as economies recover and demand especially for precious metals increases. The Ukraine war’s effect on oil prices has strengthened primary commodity prices but this will not offset the large increases in debt interest payments following the tightening of money supply generally in the wake of the rapid rise in inflation resulting from the steep increase in energy and cereal prices triggered by the Russia-Ukraine war.
A return to structural adjustment
The combination of rising indebtedness and a slowdown in global growth, if not another world recession has seen the return of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). These sets of policies spawned from the 1980s neoliberal revolution succeeded in halting the transformation of African economies from producers and exporters of primary products to industrialized manufacturing economies despite the less than perfect implementation of their industrialisation strategies. Now once again, indebted countries seeking assistance from the international financial institutions (IFIs) are to be subject to a set of economic policies intended to restore domestic and external balances to some degree of equilibrium (see suggested further reading below for more background to the first phase of SAPs).
Current SAPs, whether ‘homegrown’ or not, involve government budget restraint, increasing efficiency in tax collection, abolishing many price subsidies, improving the management of public enterprises, and facilitating greater private sector investment. The major plank of previous SAPs – devaluation – is no longer a requirement where, as in most cases, foreign exchange markets are liberalized and currency values find their own level dependent on market assessment based on the trade and payments balance and its anticipated movement. However, in the case of Egypt, there is a specific requirement to liberalise the exchange rate. Paradoxically, exchange rates tend to appreciate when an IMF support package is agreed and financial inflows increase, which is the opposite of what is theoretically required to increase exports, but that seems to matter less than the fact that a country’s economic policy is being supervised by the IMF and gives greater confidence to potential foreign investors even if the trade balance goes even more in the red.
The most noticeable difference with the SAPs of the 1980 is the requirement that governments protect the vulnerable. Here is the IMF Mission Chief for Ghana announcing the agreement with the Ghana government for an extended credit facility of $3 billion over three years:
Key reforms aim to ensure the sustainability of public finances while protecting the vulnerable. The fiscal strategy relies on frontloaded measures to increase domestic resource mobilization and streamline expenditure. In addition, the authorities have committed to strengthening social safety nets, including reinforcing the existing targeted cash-transfer program for vulnerable households and improving the coverage and efficiency of social spending. (IMF, 2022)
Help for ‘vulnerable households’ is also a key requirement for the Egyptian loan package. With the benefit of hindsight, the IMF and the World Bank recognise the political difficulties for governments in pursuing an austerity agenda which leaves more and more people living below what passes for the poverty line. The solution to avoiding bread riots and other manifestations of public discontent is to target ‘vulnerable households’ with cash transfers so that they can eat. But it is not to support government investment in economic activities that will generate employment and structurally transform African economies, support which is badly needed to build the economic and social infrastructure that will generate growth in other sectors and the linkages develop.
However, as has been pointed out many times before in ROAPE the activities of the IFIs are not about growth and development, let alone protecting the vulnerable, but about control of global south economies by the global north and the hegemon-in-chief, the US which lest we forget appoints the head of the World Bank, while Europe chooses the head of the IMF.
An alternative strategy and politics
While the IFIs return to making policy in some African countries, there is also pressure on them to finance a green agenda for the Global South in the face of the climate emergency. Where such financial transfers from the IFIs to support green policies or compensate countries for the losses from following these policies take place this will offer the IFIs yet another opportunity to exert their leverage on policymaking in general. Dressed up as getting countries to ‘take ownership’ of policies which have been imposed on them, yet again we will see that African countries, and indeed all countries of the global south, will come under the tighter control of global capitalism.
There have always been alternatives open to African governments as we have often argued in ROAPE for decades. The ‘introverted’ strategy advocated by Samir Amin has been much maligned and misrepresented as autarky but, like Clive Thomas’s strategy of seeking the convergence of domestic resources with domestic needs, offers countries a way out of what appears to be their enduring entrapment in a global financial system that works for the global financial corporates that dominate it. This system ensures uneven development with some countries or regions of countries developing faster than others. But it does offer opportunities for rapid development through a relatively coherent industrial and agricultural policy. The alternatives calling for a domestic oriented industrial strategy argue for taking more distance from this system, but still exporting wherever possible to earn the foreign exchange needed to import capital goods while prioritising domestic production for the needs of the majority. This is surely a better way forward than being trapped into permanent debt and cajoled to ‘own’ policies made in Washington DC.
A note on further reading
Readers wanting to follow up on this blogpost might like to look at the many editorials and articles that have appeared in ROAPE on the International Financial Institutions’ structural adjustment policies and their impact on African economies. A good start is John Loxley’s 1983 review of the Berg Report, ‘The Berg Report and the mode of accumulation in sub-Saharan Africa’ (no. 27/28), followed by the special issue, no. 42 in 1990 What Price Economic Reform? by Peter Lawrence and David Seddon, the issue includes several pieces relevant to our times, as well as an analysis of the SAPs of Ghana and Zambia. Later contributions by Gavin Williams in 1994 (no, 60) and Sarah Bracking in 1999 (no. 80) are well worth reading.
Peter Lawrence is an editor on ROAPE, and a founding member of the review in 1974. He is also an Emeritus Professor of Development Economics at the Business School at Keele University and has taught in Tanzania, Uganda, and Canada and spent periods of research in Tanzania, Hungary, Spain and India (some of his work can be found here).
Featured Photograph: Worker engaged in palm oil production (19 March 2022).
Elias Aguigah looks at the restitution of looted objects from Africa by colonial troops and plunderers. Aguigah discusses the debates which have located restitution in questions of identity, representation, and memory politics. However, these debates ignore the crucial political-economic context, or only pay superficial attention to these issues by reducing centuries of colonialism to art theft. Aguigah provides an alternative framework for understanding restitution.
By Elias Aguigah
In December 2022, the German minister of foreign affairs Annalena Baerbock accompanied by minister of culture Claudia Roth travelled to Nigeria to give back 20 of at least 1,100 art pieces known as Benin Bronzes that had been looted by British troops from the palace of Benin City in 1897 and stored in German museums for over 100 years. This diplomatic event was a result of decades of sometimes more, sometimes less intense debates, about colonial looted art in Europe and the struggle for its restitution.
While claims to give back the stolen objects are as old as the lootings themselves, the recent debates have largely been fuelled by Emmanuel Macron’s speech he held in Ouagadougou in 2017. The French president had presented himself as a pioneer in restoring memory of the colonial era, acknowledging European colonial crimes and, above all, promising “temporary or definitive restitutions of the African patrimony”. Consequently, he commissioned the art historian Bénédicte Savoy and the Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr with writing a report on the holdings of African cultural heritage in French museums. The key issue to them was not whether the objects should be restituted – this is the premise underlying the report – but how restitutions could be made possible. Among other things, they should be accompanied with a commitment for a ‘new relational ethics’ in Euro-African policy.
Since then, debates around the issues addressed in the report have taken up more and more space in the European feuilletons. The scholarly restitution debates in the UK, France or Germany, have been dominated by disciplines such as cultural studies, ethnology, art history or critical legal studies (cf. Sandkühler, Epple, and Zimmerer 2021), locating restitution debates in broader political questions around identity, representation, and memory politics. But stakeholders frequently ignore the political-economic context, or, at most, consider it superficially by reducing centuries of colonialism to art theft. In contrast, scholars working on colonial theft and extraction in Africa in the field of international political economy usually deal with natural resources. In order to highlight the political relevance of the subject of restitution, I want to connect these two threads: What does the mass extraction of spiritual, religious, political and symbolic artefacts, or even everyday belongings from former African colonies have to do with political economy? And in which international political and economic relations are these belongings, their restitution, and debates about them embedded today?
Functions of colonial looting
The violent extraction of material cultural property was an important building block in making African societies available to the capitalist world market. For instance, the German Empire used collections looted during the colonial era to establish itself as a colonial power, epistemically and economically. The simple act of placing the objects in a museum and constructing around them a narrative of racial hierarchy and distinction between the colonisers as ‘civilised people’ and the colonised as ‘primitive peoples’, under the guise of anthropological science, contributed substantially to the genesis of scientific racism that was a political strategy for the legitimisation of colonial rule and economic domination (Zimmerman 2001: 153f.).
Beyond the ideological function of so-called ‘ethnographica’, looting often followed clear strategic motives. One aim in the plunder of the Benin kingdom was to hit the Oba and his realm at the heart of their identity and the self-representation of their power, stealing the symbols of his rule – which also happened to be his wealth for that matter – in order to diminish his political power and legitimise colonial rule (Hicks 2020: 136). The motivation for trade companies to support and individuals to participate in military expeditions and lootings were clear: The flourishing European art market promised huge revenue to be made out of objects from the colonies that were sold as commodities. Conforming to capitalist market logic, the most valuable objects were often those not for sale or exchange – consequently, appropriation was frequently violent. For colonial powers, colonial museums and individual colonialists, looting was a win-win situation, at the cost of African lives and societies.
The political economy of colonial looting – interrogating Marx
The structural entanglement between military campaigns and the commodification of looted objects has led me to the conclusion that the mass extraction of weapons, spiritual, religious, political, or everyday belongings can be seen as a process of primitive accumulation.
Karl Marx ([1867] 1887: 505f.) introduces the concept of primitive accumulation to describe the process ‘that clears the way for the capitalist system’. Using the transformation from feudalism to capitalism in England as an example, he characterised primitive accumulation as a violent process of expropriation of farmers from their land. In this way, the capitalist class forced the English rural population into wage labour. The colonial system, for him, was one of the ‘chief momenta of primitive accumulation’ establishing a capitalist world market:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombmentinmines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting ofthe East Indies,the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosydawn of the era of capitalist production. (Marx [1867] 1887: 531)
In addition to hunting human bodies and their remains for museums, the colonial system with museums in the background turned Africa into an enclosure for hunting material cultural goods with the purpose of accumulating symbolic and economic capital. Because in addition to the political value of manifesting tyranny, these objects had a monetary value for the colonialists. ‘The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital’, wrote Marx ([1867] 1887: 533). Thus, the looting and commodification of African material goods served as a means of capital accumulation for colonisers, museums, and their home economies.
At the same time, the colonial looting helped to integrate African colonies and their inhabitants into the global capitalist system fit for further exploitation. Marx ([1867] 1887: 506) defines primitive accumulation as
the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms […] the social means of subsistence and of production into capital […]. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process.
In the case of European colonisation, expropriating indigenous peoples from their land on the one hand and looting their material belongings on the other were part of the same logic. Through the violent theft of weapons, cultural, spiritual, religious, or personal belongings, colonial powers not only physically separated the producers from the products of their labour and their means of subsistence but stripped a part of their history, culture, and knowledge about pre-capitalist modes of production from communities.
The very act of looting thus followed a system from which certain actors clearly profited. It became a means of expanding and legitimising power, as well as of private enrichment. For the most part, the looted objects became valuable goods or capital and were embedded in the international political-economy of colonialism. Today, claims for restitution and repatriation cannot be thought without these relations and how they shape a neo-colonial world.
Restitution of looted artefacts
Various actors involved in restitution, including those with decision-making power over the future of cultural heritage, each pursue their own interests. The documentary Restituer? directed by Nora Philippe (2021) sheds light on how the first major wave of restitution demands was thwarted by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, among others. The Structural Adjustment Programmes in the 1980s degraded cultural capital infrastructure in Africa (Philippe 2021: 51:40-52:20). Nowadays, though, as calls for restitution cannot be ignored any further, the return of prominent objects would mean a loss of symbolic and economic capital for museums, cities, and states.
Museums, for example, increasingly try to incorporate critical debates in their programmes making ‘restitution’ and ‘decolonisation’ their sales model to keep up with the zeitgeist and prevent the loss of relevance. As the curator and former director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, Clémentine Deliss (2020: 88), fittingly wrote, ‘restitution has become both the central bone of contention and the most effective commodity to characterise the future of ethnological museums’.
The central question in the field today seems to be the following: which museum, or even which European state, can distinguish itself by becoming the most progressive and self-critical. The race is on, and, according to Dan Hicks (2022), it uncannily resembles the 1884-1885 ‘scramble for Africa’, when imperialist powers competed for colonial territories and the most efficient system of exploitation. In this comparison, Hicks coined the term ‘scramble for decolonisation’ for qualifying the current zeitgeist. The stakes at hand are: can these dynamics of competition actually lead to postcolonial justice and change the current conditions of museum holdings?
The French restitutions that have taken place since Macron’s speech in 2017 suggest otherwise. As Europe is increasingly losing geopolitical influence on the African continent, politicians have recognized that the presence of treasures from Africa in their collections can become a valued currency. France ceremoniously loaned the sword of El Hadj Oumar Tall to Senegal for five years in November 2019. Nora Philippe’s 2021 documentary relates this ‘return’ to quid pro quos in French interests: ‘In exchange for the return of a single sabre, France negotiates an arms sale worth several hundred million euros. Measures to curb migration from sub-Saharan Africa are outsourced’.
Unravelling the anticolonial potential of restitution
In summary, what we are witnessing is not a sudden philanthropic turn of European politicians and museums, but rather European attempts to maintain African dependency on Europe in times of increasing awareness for European colonial crimes on the one hand, and rising Chinese and Russian influence on the continent on the other.
This blogpost – a shortened version of a longer article that will appear later in the year in ROAPE’s journal – should be read as a strong urge for scholars and activists to continue critically examining the place of restitutions in a neo-colonial political economy. Already for 20th century decolonisation thinkers like Kwame Nkrumah, a conceptual return of African culture, was essential to achieve Africa’s economic independence. Restitution already emerges in this context. Nkrumah called for the ‘restitution of Africa`s egalitarian and humanist principles’ (Nkrumah 1970 [1964]: 76) in order to overcome European (neo-)colonial and capitalist structures in Africa and to establish an African version of socialism.
In the great mass of objects stored in European museums and archives, there is knowledge about past African societies that can be invoked while pursuing political and economic decolonisation. Restituting objects with Nkrumah’s vision in mind thus has the potential of serving a decolonisation process on a larger scale. But without further critical examination and a genuinely anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist vision historic restitutions risk degenerating into empty performances from which only European and African elites profit.
Elias Aguigah is a researcher at the Technische Universität Berlin. Elias’ full article on the political economy of restitution will appear later in the year in ROAPE’s journal.
Nkrumah, Kwame. 1970 (1964). Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization and Development with Particular Reference to the African Revolution: Monthly Review Press.
Philippe, Nora. 2021. “Restituieren? Afrika fordert seine Kunstschätze zurück:” ARTE F.
Caroline Cornier argues that economic and financial turmoil in Africa could be a favourable moment for fundamental monetary reform. Cornier reflects on a conference held in Dakar that focused on the challenges facing the continent in the context of ecological, economic, and political crisis.
By Caroline Cornier
Africa, like the rest of the world, is in crisis. Yet Africa is particularly ill-equipped to deal with it, as it grapples with external public debt reaching new records at a time when the central banks of the countries of the North are continually increasing their key rates, African monetary systems’ rigidity or predisposition to inflation paralyzes political action, and, finally, parts of the continent remain plagued by various conflicts.
But a crisis can also open up new horizons. The current economic and financial turmoil could represent a potentially favourable moment for fundamental monetary reforms. Similarly, the energy crisis coupled with the global need for green energy could provide a new basis for negotiations for Africa.
With the support of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs) and Politics of Money Network, the second edition of the Conference on African Monetary and Economic Sovereignty was held in Dakar from 25-28 October 2022 under the motto of “Facing the Socio-Ecological Crisis: Delinking and the Question of Global Reparations.” In the wake of the first edition held in Tunis in November 2019, the organizers Ndongo Samba Sylla, Maha Ben Gadha and Kai Koddenbrock invited participants to analyse the monetary and economic constraints faced by countries of the South, particularly Africa, and devise strategies to overcome them. The focus was on pan-Africanist and internationalist responses to the current socio-ecological crisis based on the mobilization of heterodox economic approaches. Indeed, the collapse of public policies inspired by mainstream, neoclassical economics was a widely shared observation.
Broadcast online and translated simultaneously into French and English, the conference brought together 100 researchers, activists, and representatives of national and international organizations. The debates focused on the concept of delinking, the ills of the global financial system, its role in the ecological crisis, and the need for global reparations.
The need for delinking
The basic concept animating the conference was that of “delinking” developed by the French–Egyptian economist Samir Amin in his 1985 book, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World. The concept comes from dependency theory, which originated mainly in Latin America and seeks to explain the inequalities in economic development between the centre of the capitalist system and the periphery. The state and the local bourgeoisie have control over the process of internal accumulation in the core of the system, whereas in the periphery the logic of economic accumulation is subject to external forces and their demands.
Faced with this situation, Amin’s delinking agenda consists of a reconfiguration of the economic relations between the peripheral countries and the countries of the centre. This process does not imply autarky, but rather aims to make self-centred development possible in the periphery through policies oriented around having greater control over the conditions of internal accumulation, that is, policies that work to subject global logics to domestic priorities.
As the Senegalese economist Demba Moussa Dembélé noted at the beginning of the conference, this “re-conquest of sovereignty” concerns three key sectors: the monetary and financial sector, the energy sector, and the food sector. According to Dembélé, the African continent imports 80 percent of its basic products while African governments often spend more than 10 percent on them. This not only creates considerable financial dependencies, but also great vulnerability to shocks affecting supply chains, as recently demonstrated by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
Delinking is not just an intellectual utopia but a primary necessity to bring about real change. According to Dembélé, three additional pillars of delinking in Africa will have to be the acceleration of regional and interregional integration, the reconstruction of developmental states that pursue a policy of industrialization based on the use of domestic resources, and the restoration of sufficient fiscal space to finance this industrialization, notably through the cancellation of external debt considered illegitimate and the fight against illicit financial flows.
The relevance of delinking today
Several participants recalled the limits of dependency theory in a world that has evolved considerably since the current peaked in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, several so-called “emerging” countries have managed to join the ranks of the “semi-periphery”.
Nevertheless, other speakers were keen to draw attention to the particular context of countries such as Taiwan and South Korea, which for geopolitical reasons were strongly supported by the US and thus benefited from a rather favourable international environment. Moreover, the question of whether these countries (including China) have really succeeded in freeing themselves from the particular constraints faced by the periphery was raised. Indeed, economist Andrew Fischer reminded attendees that, contrary to popular belief, countries like South Korea had recurring trade deficits during the early stages of its industrialization. This led him to argue that dependence (particularly on imports of technology and equipment) is not so much a relic of the colonial past as a dynamic that is perpetually reinforced with industrialization. Moreover, he continued, the ecological transition will require the countries of the South to import a large number of technologies that are invoiced in foreign currency.
South African economist Fiona Tregenna of the University of Johannesburg supported the notion that dependence remains relevant for studying the economies of the South as well as the functioning of our global economic system, using the issue of industrialization as a concrete example. Similarly, Ingrid Kvangraven, a researcher in economic policy in London, called for the reintegration of this perspective from the 1970s into economics at a more theoretical level. It was at this time, during the implementation of structural adjustment programs under the aegis of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the failure of the attempt by the countries of the South (the “Third World”) to create a new, more egalitarian international economic order, that Samir Amin developed the concept of delinking.
Reconnecting with this project and its theoretical foundations — which also apply to the European periphery, as Portuguese economist Alexandre Abreu reminded participants — implies integrating it into the core of contemporary economic discourse. Unfortunately, mainstream, neoclassical economics has not only served the northern part of the planet — it also continues to ignore a number of structural economic mechanisms and dissident voices from the South. It seems more urgent than ever to decolonize economics in order to make the discipline more relevant to the countries of the South and their populations. Hence, the importance of building endogenous knowledge production institutions in Africa — a need that justifies the project of some of the participants to set up an African Heterodox Economics Network (AHEN).
Using the 1929 novel Banjo by African-American writer Claude McKay on the precarious life of a group of black dockworkers in Marseilles, historian Peter James Hudson deftly reminded the conference that the expansion of the dollar-based global monetary system is, in essence, an expression of imperial white supremacy and one major cause of global inequality. Giving the example of the dockworkers he argues that for many peoples, money is not a sign of wealth but a symbol of their economic subjugation. According to him particularly striking examples of monetary oppression, such as Haiti, should therefore be taken as a starting point for understanding the role of monetary hierarchies today and for articulating an agenda for global reparations.
One of the lessons of the conference was therefore that delinking is not just an intellectual utopia but a primary necessity to bring about real change, or even, in the case of countries facing monetary sanctions, a reality that must be overcome with intelligence. It was also noted, especially by Senegalese economist Ndongo Samba Sylla, the main organizer of the conference, that such a political endeavour requires a better appropriation of African history as well as a break with the narrative that trade liberalization based on comparative advantage is beneficial to all countries.
Areas in need of delinking
During conference discussions, participants identified the agricultural sector and tax policy as two areas where a delinking from the global system is important. For example, by becoming more oriented towards local demand, the agricultural sector could help boost the local economy and deploy the foreign exchange reserves saved to further stimulate domestic productive capacities. This sector enabled many Asian countries and China in particular to finance its industrialization in the 1960s, although it should not be forgotten that the size of China’s domestic market is incomparable to most African countries.
With regard to tax policy, Souad Aden-Osman, director of the secretariat of the African Union High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows (IFF), stressed the need to better regulate financial flows that impede the sovereign right of states to tax and which, contrary to the dominant narrative, are more the result of the practices of multinationals and criminal networks than of the corruption of African elites. She also noted that, for the time being, several multilateral and bilateral actors such as the OECD, the EU, and the GIZ [the main German development agency] seem to want to prevent a resolution on this issue reaching the UN at all costs.
In terms of agriculture, Max Ajl, a researcher at the Observatory of Food Sovereignty and Environment in Tunis, emphasized the need for an “ecological delinking” through agro-ecological methods, pointing to China, Vietnam, and Cuba in the 1970s as examples, and reinvestment in heavy industries. This last point was met with some scepticism, however, as recent history has shown that small countries are often unable to achieve economies of scale without strategic South–South partnerships. At the same time, however, Andrew Fischer insisted that where there is a will, there is a way, as shown by the example of some Asian countries.
Finally, in terms of ideas, many argued that too much ground had been ceded to neoliberal economic thinking. Jomo Kwame Sundaram called for an “intellectual insurrection” able to confront the de-industrialization underway in many countries of the South. This will have to be institutionalized. He argued that any delinking project would have to take into account that the service sector is now much more important than the manufacturing sector in most countries of the South. It would also have to take into account the fact that the African continent exhibits great diversity in terms of national productive capacities.
Constraints to delinking
For a government, achieving greater monetary sovereignty means having more fiscal space and increased capacity to spend in a non-inflationary manner to guide the trajectory and performance of the national economy. This point was illustrated by Chafik Ben Rouine based on the presentation by Fathimath Musthaq, Professor of Political Science at Reed College, on the origins of our current monetary system, as well as by Jamee Moudud’s interventions on the link between monetary sovereignty and legal systems, and finally by Jean-Michel Servet’s overview on the social dimension of money.
The level of monetary sovereignty is determined by the type of currency a government uses in combination with its level of foreign currency debt. The African countries of the CFA zone are therefore at the bottom of this monetary hierarchy, given that the exchange rate of their currency is linked to that of the euro and that all the countries of the zone have significant foreign debt. As Ali Zafar of the UNDP also showed, the pegging of the CFA franc to a currency as strong as the euro is not justified from a developmental point of view, as it leads to its chronic overvaluation. Consequently, this peg acts as a tax on the exports of countries using the CFA franc and as a subsidy to their imports.
With this type of monetary system, governments find it impossible to use the exchange rate as an instrument to adjust to external shocks, which makes it difficult to make local production more competitive and therefore more attractive than imports. Moreover, since the central banks of the two CFA franc blocs are obliged to defend a fixed parity, they tend to accumulate foreign exchange reserves and ration credit, which is the bedrock of capitalist economies. According to Zafar, the franc zone is trying to “run a marathon with a refrigerator on its back”. One concrete method of delinking could be to replace the franc’s indexation to the euro with a peg to a basket of currencies.
In addition to these regional obstacles to a more self-centred monetary policy, there are false solutions to the financial dependence and instability of the countries of the South. This is the case of “macro-prudential regulation”. As Indian economist CP Chandrasekhar explained, this concept refers to the preference for market-mediated stabilization interventions instead of structural interventions such as capital flow controls and foreign exchange regulation. The result of such intervention is a structural weakening of state capacity, aggravated, according to Daniela Gabor, a specialist in critical macro-finance, by the logic of “de-risking”.
According to this logic, the lack of “development” in the countries of the South is above all a question of financial risk. Consequently, state interventions, especially those aimed at the so-called “green” economy, must above all adjust the risk-return profile of assets invested by private capital. The problem with this “green de-risking state” is that while it is ostensibly beginning to reassume more responsibility for domestic development, in reality it is delegating the pace and nature of transformation and the management of public goods to the private sector. Gabor pointed out that this arrangement ultimately reinforces a form of neo-colonial extractivism that keeps the countries of the South in the position of generators of financial returns for global financiers and consumers of technological products from the most industrialized countries.
Hamza Hamouchene of the Transnational Institute illustrated this fact by taking as an example the so-called “green projects” promoted by European countries in North Africa. Moreover, as Kenyan environmental activist Ikal Angelei pointed out, the globalized private sector perceives the current ecological crisis as a new profit opportunity, which in turn creates new dependencies.
A final major obstacle to monetary sovereignty that received a lot of attention throughout the conference was external debt. Due to the liberalization of financial markets, the volatility of commodity prices, and the declining trend in development aid, debt is reaching increasingly worrying levels.
Pathways out of this threat to the economic transformation of the countries of the South include, on the one hand, the mobilization of domestic financing in national currency line with the ideas of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). On the other hand, there is the possibility of repudiating what Eric Toussaint calls, in the words of Alexander Sacks, “odious debt”, i.e. debt that has not benefited the population and that creditors agreed to in full knowledge that it would not serve its stated purpose.
This system and the place given to Africa in it will not change without the pressure of blocs formed on the basis of broad alliances between different social forces at national and international levels.
According to Toussaint, a significant proportion of Africa’s debt can be characterized as odious. Sometimes it is the result of exogenous circumstances over which African countries have very little influence, such as climate change, the war in Ukraine, or interest rates hikes by Western central banks. On the other hand, the continent’s external debt could be significantly reduced if its savings were not transferred abroad through illicit financial flows, for instance, and if African economies were more oriented towards domestic demand.
Even if some African leaders, notably Macky Sall, the current president of Senegal, have called for the renegotiation of African debt, the path will not be easy. Indeed, according to Eric Toussaint, Africa has little weight in international financial institutions. For example, it has only four percent of the votes in the World Bank.
More fundamentally, debt is a primary mechanism for the control of Northern countries over the resources of Southern countries — not to mention that the expansion of foreign debt also benefits African elites. On the one hand, recourse to external debt is an alternative to raising tax rates in their countries. On the other hand, they can invest in the securities of this external debt, which are not only “de-risked” by the state but also offer particularly high interest rates. Éric Toussaint was therefore one of the few speakers at the conference who demonstrated that in order to conceive structural changes in the global monetary system, the role and interests of local actors must also be taken into account.
Overcoming constraints
Another topic that was discussed mainly from the African–American experience but also from a feminist perspective, notably by Crystal Simeoni of the Afrifem Macroeconomics Collective and Lebohang Liepollo Pheko of the Trade Collective in Johannesburg, was that of global reparations. According to Pheko, global reparations from North to South are more than an economic necessity to rebalance the global economic system. They would allow for a concrete recognition of past injustices, including the fact that what is represented as “common wealth” is in fact a case of “common theft”, and would make the affected populations feel that they have finally been recognized as sovereign subjects.
Following presentations by Franklin Obeng-Odoom of the University of Helsinki and Lisa Tilley of SOAS, who made a point to highlight the link between colonial extractivism and the current ecological crisis, Keston Perry of Williams College reaffirmed this overarching lesson, which in some ways was the foundation of the entire conference. Using, just like James Peter Hudson in relation to monetary imperialism, Haiti as an example, he demonstrated that slave plantation economies and environmental degradation are intimately linked. Therefore, the ecological crisis today represents the material basis for renewed demands for reparations. Given previous failures at the international level, these will have to be carried by a pan-African popular movement anchored in community-based organizations rather than by nation-states.
While supportive of this agenda, Matthew Robinson, a research fellow and doctoral student in the Department of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, offered a caveat. Referring to the preparations for reparations that have been undertaken by and for the African–American community in Kansas City, he emphasized the need to “fix the plumbing before you turn on the tap”, that is, to put in place structures that will be able to ensure that the money will be invested in a way that is useful and sustainable for the recipients.
Broader proposals for delinking were also made by Nancy Kachingwe, a feminist from Zimbabwe, who suggested changing the patriarchal and neo-colonial status quo through a form of feminist delinking. Dzodzi Tsikata from the University of Ghana proposed a revaluation of social policies instead of focusing only on economic policies, and German researcher Matthias Schmelzer defended de-growth in the North as a way to do justice to the countries of the South.
Peter Doyle, an independent macroeconomist, complemented this claim with two concrete demands aiming to ensure that the 1.5°C goal will be achieved while guaranteeing greater global economic equality. First, he suggested that the least developed countries should be entirely free of any CO2 emissions limits until they have reached per capita income parity with the OECD. To this end, he proposed the introduction of an emissions inefficiency tariff for OECD countries. He further suggested the establishment of a Global Rainy Day Fund financed by a recurring tax on the world’s billionaires to fund the necessary technologies.
From why to how
All of these innovative suggestions bring us back to the question of how these alternative structures will be put in place. At the end of the conference, a local participant remarked that the fundamental problem for Africa was that while Asia has become the world’s factory and South America its orchard, Africa has remained its mine, i.e. a site of pure extraction.
The purpose of the conference was to reflect on how to get Africa out of this extractive servitude, how it could put its currency at the service of its people, and how it could produce wealth and keep it at home. The global economic and financial system clearly does not serve this purpose. On the contrary, the mechanisms at work continue to serve an extractive system that contributes to keeping part of the world’s population in poverty and to depleting the planet’s resources for the benefit of a small, privileged minority.
It is essential to keep in mind, however, that this system and the place given to Africa in it will not change without the pressure of blocs formed on the basis of broad alliances between different social forces at national and international levels. Or, in the words of Souad Aden-Osman, as long as these visions are not heard at the table, those they defend will continue to be on the menu.
What remains to be done, then, is to link the structural analysis of the current monetary and economic system to the identification of political forces — external and internal — that can change the situation and find language and proposals that anchor the conversation in concrete realities, especially those of the younger generations who continue to be excluded from the discussion.
Featured Photograph: West African participants march at the Second World Festival Games. Banner reads: “West African Youth Greets [the] Youth Fight[ing] Against Imperialism [and for] National Independence” (Budapest, Hungary, 1949).
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