Remembering Cabral

April 20, 2023

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

By Basil Davidson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endnote

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

Bibliographic Note

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

The geopolitics of debt in Africa

ROAPE

April 18, 2023

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

By Tim Zajontz, Ricardo Reboredo and Pádraig Carmody

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The geopolitical deadlock in the Common Framework

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works cited

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

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

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

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

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

Helmi Sharawy, the African – a celebration, a life

ROAPE

April 4, 2023

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

In memory of Helmi Sharawy (1935-2023)

By Habib Ayeb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Abeer Abazeed

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

A storyteller

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

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

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

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

A scholar

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

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

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

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

An activist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

ROAPE

March 30, 2023

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

By Shubi Ishemo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Internationalism

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

Conclusion

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

Bibliographic Notes

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

Mike Powell, Editor of the Original Special Issue

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

A Manifesto for an Ecosocial Energy Transition from the South

ROAPE

March 28, 2023

The world is confronting an unprecedented multidimensional crisis – ecological, economic, geopolitical – each interacting with the other. Yet it is the Global South that yet again is becoming the sacrificial zone, providing the resources for the countries of the North. In a powerful statement from the Global South movements challenge the existing neo-colonial energy model and offer a just alternative.

An appeal to leaders, institutions, and our brothers and sisters.

More than three years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic – and now alongside the catastrophic consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – a “new normal” has emerged. This new global status quo reflects a worsening of various crises: social, economic, political, ecological, bio-medical, and geopolitical.

Environmental collapse approaches. Everyday life has become ever more militarised. Access to good food, clean water, and affordable health care has become even more restricted. More governments have turned autocratic. The wealthy have become wealthier, the powerful more powerful, and unregulated technology has only accelerated these trends.

The engines of this unjust status quo – capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, and various fundamentalisms – are making a bad situation worse. Therefore, we must urgently debate and implement new visions of eco-social transition and transformation that are gender-just, regenerative, and popular, that are at once local and international.

In this Manifesto for an Ecosocial Energy Transition from the Peoples of the South, we hold that the problems of the Global – geopolitical – South are different from those of the Global North and rising powers such as China. An imbalance of power between these two realms not only persists because of a colonial legacy but has deepened because of a neo-colonial energy model.

In the context of climate change, ever rising energy needs, and biodiversity loss, the capitalist centres have stepped up the pressure to extract natural wealth and rely on cheap labour from the countries on the periphery. Not only is the well-known extractive paradigm still in place but the North’s ecological debt to the South is rising.

What’s new about this current moment are the “clean energy transitions” of the North that have put even more pressure on the Global South to yield up cobalt and lithium for the production of high-tech batteries, balsa wood for wind turbines, land for large solar arrays, and new infrastructure for hydrogen megaprojects. This decarbonisation of the rich, which is market-based and export-oriented, depends on a new phase of environmental despoliation of the Global South, which affects the lives of millions of women, men, and children, not to mention non-human life. Women, especially from agrarian societies, are amongst the most impacted. In this way, the Global South has once again become a zone of sacrifice, a basket of purportedly inexhaustible resources for the countries of the North.

A priority for the Global North has been to secure global supply chains, especially of critical raw materials, and prevent certain countries, like China, from monopolising access. The G7 trade ministers, for instance, recently championed a responsible, sustainable, and transparent supply chain for critical minerals via international cooperation‚ policy, and finance, including the facilitation of trade in environmental goods and services through the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

The Global North has pushed for more trade and investment agreements with the Global South to satisfy its need for resources, particularly those integral to “clean energy transitions”. These agreements, designed to reduce barriers to trade and investment, protect and enhance corporate power and rights by subjecting states to potential legal suits according to investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms. The Global North is using these agreements to control the “clean energy transition” and create a new colonialism.

Governments of the South, meanwhile, have fallen into a debt trap, borrowing money to build up industries and large-scale agriculture to supply the North. To repay these debts, governments have felt compelled to extract more resources from the ground, creating a vicious circle of inequality.

Today, the imperative to move beyond fossil fuels without any significant reduction in consumption in the North has only increased the pressure to exploit these natural resources. Moreover, as it moves ahead with its own energy transitions, the North has paid only lip service to its responsibility to address its historical and rising ecological debt to the South.

Minor changes in the energy matrix are not enough. The entire energy system must be transformed, from production and distribution to consumption and waste. Substituting electric vehicles for internal-combustion cars is insufficient, for the entire transportation model needs changing, with a reduction of energy consumption and the promotion of sustainable options.

In this way, relations must become more equitable not only between the centre and periphery countries but also within countries between the elite and the public. Corrupt elites in the Global South have also collaborated in this unjust system by profiting from extraction, repressing human rights and environmental defenders, and perpetuating economic inequality.

Rather than solely technological, the solutions to these interlocked crises are above all political.

Demands for justice

As activists, intellectuals, and organisations from different countries of the South, we call on change agents from different parts of the world to commit to a radical, democratic, gender-just, regenerative, and popular eco-social transition that transforms both the energy sector and the industrial and agricultural spheres that depend on large-scale energy inputs. According to the different movements for climate justice, “transition is inevitable, but justice is not”.

We still have time to start a just and democratic transition. We can transition away from the neo-liberal economic system in a direction that sustains life, combines social justice with environmental justice, brings together egalitarian and democratic values with a resilient, holistic social policy, and restores an ecological balance necessary for a healthy planet. But for that we need more political imagination and more utopian visions of another society that is socially just and respects our planetary common house.

The energy transition should be part of a comprehensive vision that addresses radical inequality in the distribution of energy resources and advances energy democracy. It should de-emphasise large-scale institutions – corporate agriculture, huge energy companies – as well as market-based solutions. Instead, it must strengthen the resilience of civil society and social organisations.

Therefore, we make the following 8 demands:

We warn that an energy transition led by corporate megaprojects, coming from the Global North and accepted by numerous governments in the South, entails the enlargement of the zones of sacrifice throughout the Global South, the persistence of the colonial legacy, patriarchy, and the debt trap. Energy is an elemental and inalienable human right, and energy democracy should be our goal.
We call on the peoples of the South to reject false solutions that come with new forms of energy colonialism, now in the name of a Green transition. We make an explicit call to continue political coordination among the peoples of the South while also pursuing strategic alliances with critical sectors in the North.
To mitigate the havoc of the climate crisis and advance a just and popular eco-social transition, we demand the payment of the ecological debt. This means, in the face of the disproportionate Global North responsibility for the climate crisis and ecological collapse, the real implementation of a system of compensation to the Global South. This system should include a considerable transfer of funds and appropriate technology and should consider sovereign debt cancellation for the countries of the South. We support reparations for loss and damage experienced by Indigenous peoples, vulnerable groups and local communities due to mining, big dams, and dirty energy projects.
We reject the expansion of the hydrocarbon border in our countries – through fracking and offshore projects – and repudiate the hypocritical discourse of the European Union, which recently declared natural gas and nuclear energy to be “clean energies”. As already proposed in the Yasuni Initiative in Ecuador in 2007 and today supported by many social sectors and organisations, we endorse leaving fossil fuels underground and generating the social and labour conditions necessary to abandon extractivism and move toward a post-fossil-fuel future.
We similarly reject “green colonialism” in the form of land grabs for solar and wind farms, the indiscriminate mining of critical minerals, and the promotion of technological “fixes” such as blue or grey hydrogen. Enclosure, exclusion, violence, encroachment, and entrenchment have characterised past and current North-South energy relations and are not acceptable in an era of eco-social transitions.
We demand the genuine protection of environment and human rights defenders, particularly Indigenous peoples and women at the forefront of resisting extractivism.
The elimination of energy poverty in the countries of the South should be among our fundamental objectives – as well as the energy poverty of parts of the Global North – through alternative, decentralised, equitably distributed projects of renewable energy that are owned and operated by communities themselves.
We denounce international trade agreements that penalise countries that want to curb fossil fuel extraction. We must stop the use of trade and investment agreements controlled by multinational corporations that ultimately promote more extraction and reinforce a new colonialism.

Our eco-social alternative is based on countless struggles, strategies, proposals, and community-based initiatives. Our manifesto connects with the lived experience and critical perspectives of Indigenous peoples and other local communities, women, and youth throughout the Global South. It is inspired by the work done on the rights of nature, buen vivir, vivir sabroso, sumac kawsay, ubuntu, swaraj, the commons, the care economy, agroecology, food sovereignty, post-extractivism, the pluriverse, autonomy, and energy sovereignty. Above all, we call for a radical, democratic, popular, gender-just, regenerative, and comprehensive eco-social transition.

Following the steps of the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South, this manifesto proposes a dynamic platform that invites you to join our shared struggle for transformation by helping to create collective visions and collective solutions. We invite you to endorse this manifesto with your signature.

Short list of organisational sponsors

Actrices Argentinas
BioVision Africa
Censat Agua Viva-Amigos de la Tierra Colombia
Centre de Recherches et d’Appui pour les Alternatives de Développement – Océan Indien
Centre for Labour Studies, National Law School of India University, Bangalore
Chile Sin Ecocidio
Consumers Association of Penang
Cooperativa Macondo
EcoEquity
Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South
Ekomarin
Endorois Welfare Council
Extinction Rebellion Medellín
Focus on the Global South
Friends of the Earth Malaysia
Global Justice Now
Global Tapestry of Alternatives
Greenpeace
Grupo Socioambiental Lotos
Health of Mother Earth Foundation
Kebetkache Women Development & Resource Centre
Les Amis de la Terre Togo
Mining Watch Canada
NGO Forum on ADB
Observatorio de Ecología Política de Venezuela
People’s Resource Center
Peoples Response Network
Secretariado Social Mexicano
Seminario permanente Re-Evolución de la Salud
Ser Humanos
Sustainable Holistic Development Foundation
Third World Network
Transnational Institute
War on Want
WoMin

Short list of Individual signatories (institutions for identification purposes only)

Alberto Acosta (Ecuador)
Volahery Andriamanantensasoa, CRAAD-OI (Madagascar)
Alhafiz Atsari, EKOMARIN (Indonesia)
Haris Azhar (Indonesia)
Gerry Arances, Center for Energy, Ecology, and Development (Philippines)
Tatiana Roa Avendaño, Censat Agua Viva-Amigos de la Tierra (Colombia)
Nnimmo Bassey, Health of Mother Earth Foundation (Nigeria)
Karina Batthyany, CLACSO (Uruguay)
Walden Bello, Laban ng Masa (Philippines)
Lucio Cuenca Berger, Observatorio Latinoamericano de Conflictos Ambientales (Chile)
Patrick Bond, University of Johannesburg (South Africa)
Mirta Susana Busnelli, Actrices Argentinas (Argentina)
Fiona Dove, Transnational Institute (Netherlands/South Africa)
Desmond D’Sa, South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (South Africa)
Jose De Echave, CooperAccion (Peru)
Arturo Escobar, UNC Chapel Hill (US/Colombia)
Ashish Kothari, Global Tapestry of Alternatives (India)
Makoma Lekalakala, Earthlife Africa (South Africa)
Alex Lenferna, Climate Justice Coalition (South Africa)
Xochitl Leyva, Ciesas Sureste (Mexico)
Thuli Makama, Oil Change International (Swaziland)
Marilyn Machado Mosquera, Kaugro ri Changaina (Colombia)
Kavita Naidu, Progressive International (Fiji/Australia)
Asad Rehman, War on Want (UK)
Oscar Rivas, Partido Ecologista Verde (Paraguay)
Fernando Russo, CTA (Argentina)
Yeb Sano (Philippines)
Rocío Silva-Santisteban, Comite Ana Tallada (Peru)
Gustavo Castro Soto, Otros Mundos Chiapas (Mexico)
Maristella Svampa, Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South (Argentina)
Pablo Vommaro, UBA/CLACSO (Argentina)
Noble Wadzah, Oilwatch (Ghana)
Chima Williams, Friends of the Eath (Nigeria)
Ivonne Yanez, Accion Ecologica (Ecuador)
Raúl Zibechi, Brecha (Uruguay)

Featured Photograph: Climate activists from the Global South outside COP27 in Egypt in (Friends of the Earth International).

Reading Cabral in 1993: Killing a man but not his work

ROAPE

March 23, 2023

In the first of three essays to mark the fiftieth anniversary of national revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral’s murder in 1973, first published in the ROAPE journal thirty years ago, Lars Rudebeck celebrates Cabral’s extraordinary writing, speeches and interviews. The piece includes reflections on personal conversations Rudebeck held with Cabral at various points. While celebratory, Rudebeck also perceives in the writings and politics of Cabral inadequate attention to the post-colonial situation and the question of how to democratise power over the economy and transform the relations of production.

By Lars Rudebeck

In the evening of 20 January 1973, Amilcar Cabral was shot to death outside his house in Conakry, capital of the Republic of Guinea. Although acting in collusion with the Portuguese colonial forces, the murderer was in fact a member of the PAIGC (Partido Africano da Independencia da Guine e Cabo Verde), the liberation movement for Guinea-Bissau that Cabral himself had launched in September 1956, sixteen and a half years earlier, and which he had led since then with striking success up until the eve of independence and state sovereignty for Guinea-Bissau.

PAIGC headquarters in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau. Wikimedia Commons, 9 February 2019.

Twenty years after Cabral’s murder, his name is only rarely mentioned in the international media. His historical significance remains intact, however, not only as an outstanding leader of African decolonisation but also as a political thinker and strategist of unusual merits. Although originating and reaching its most concrete goals in Guinea and Cape Verde, in terms of intellectual scope and political impact his work transcended by far the narrow geographical limits of those two countries. Among the leading figures in modern African history, Cabral was in fact unique in his capacity to integrate political practice and theory into a coherent whole; combining as he did elements of classical Marxism and neo-Marxist dependency theory in his analysis of social reality, and skillfully applying this to the concrete task of decolonising his native land.

Cabral’s Written Work

In contributing to ROAPE’s commemoration issue, I was asked to select excerpts from Cabral’s writings. The editors’ idea was for the selected texts to illustrate, within a few pages/not only Cabral’s historical achievements and intellectual methodology but also the way he wanted to combine the two goals of democratic participation and organisational efficiency. A recent authoritative bibliography of Cabral’s collected writings covers over 50 pages of titles on a wide range of topics (Chilcote, 1991:179-231). Furthermore, these have to be viewed in the context of his practice. The challenge was thus considerable and can only be partially met.

Views on Democracy and Organisation

We will begin at the end by quoting Cabral’s 1973 New Year’s message to his Guinean and Cape Verdean compatriots broadcast in early January 1973 by PAIGC’s Radio Libertagao, only a few weeks before he was killed (Cabral, 1980:288-289, 294). This was to become his political testament.

As Cabral was speaking on the radio in his clear intensive staccato voice (Endnote 1), the armed struggle for independence was still raging in its tenth year, victory was within sight. Cabral speaks of it as certain, without demagoguery. Still, at that moment, nobody could predict that in only a little more than a year later, on 25 April 1974, the fascist regime in Lisbon would be toppled by a coup, swiftly triggering in turn the independence of Guinea in 1974, and in 1975, that of the other Portuguese colonies. The fall of fascism in Portugal was brought about by young officers of the colonial army who had learnt the hard way, not least in the swamps and jungles of Guinea, that classical colonialism was coming to its end in Africa. These dramatic events in the history of decolonisation can be causally linked, historically, to the very successes of Cabral’s political and military strategy.

Our extract from Cabral’s 1973 New Year’s message thus illustrates his greatest and most concrete historical achievement, that of leading Portuguese Guinea/Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde to the threshold of independence, despite the determination of the Portuguese colonial regime to endure. By the attention paid to the 1972 elections in the PAIGC-held areas of Guinea and to the formation of a People’s Assembly — which actually did meet eight months after Cabral’s death, on 24 September 1973, to proclaim unilaterally the de jure existence of the state of Guinea-Bissau — the extract also demonstrates the importance Cabral attached to popular participation and to democratic procedure. The serious question of under what conditions radical democracy could actually have been expected to function in the post-colonial situation is not touched upon, however.

New Year’s Message, January 1973

Comrades, compatriots. At this moment when we are beginning a new year of life and struggle and our fight for the independence of our African people is ten years old, I must remind everyone — militants, combatants, members responsible for specific tasks (Endnote 2) and leaders in our great Party — that it is time for action and not words. Time for action in Guine, action that is each day more vigorous and more effective (Endnote 3), in order to inflict greater defeats on the Portuguese colonialists and remove them from all their criminal and vain pretensions of reconquering our land. Action that is constantly more developed and better organised in Cape Verde to carry the struggle into a new phase, in accordance with the aspirations of our people and the imperatives of the total liberation of our African country.

I must, however, respect tradition by addressing a few words to you at a time when all sane human beings — those who want peace, freedom and happiness for all (Endnote 4) — renew their hopes and the belief in a better life for mankind, in dignity, independence and genuine progress for all peoples.

As you all know, in the past year we held general elections in the liberated areas, with universal suffrage and a secret vote, for the creation of Regional Councils and the first National Assembly in our people’s history. In all sectors of all regions, the elections were conducted in an atmosphere of great enthusiasm on the part of the population. The electorate voted massively for the lists that had been drawn up after eight months of public and democratic discussions in which the representatives of each sector were selected. When the elected Regional Councils met, they elected in their turn representatives to the People’s National Assembly from among their members. This will have 120 members, of whom 80 were elected from among the mass of the people and 40 from among the political cadres, soldiers, technicians and others of the Party. As you know, the representatives for the sectors temporarily occupied by the colonialists have been chosen provisionally.

In the course of this coming year and as soon as it is conveniently possible we shall call a meeting of our People’s National Assembly in Guinea, so that it can fulfill the historic mission incumbent on it: the proclamation of the existence of our state, the creation of an executive for this state and the promulgation of a fundamental law—that of the first constitution in our history — which will be the basis of the active existence of our African nation. That is to say: legitimate representatives of our people, chosen by the populations and freely elected by conscientious and patriotic citizens of our land, will proceed to the most important act of their life and of the life of our people, that of declaring before the world that our African nation, forged in the struggle, is irrevocably determined to march forward to independence without waiting for the consent of the Portuguese colonialists and that from then on the executive of our state under the leadership of our Party, the PAIGC, will be the sole, true and legitimate representative of our people in all the national and international questions that concern them.

We are moving from the situation of a colony which has a liberation movement, and whose people have already liberated in ten years of armed struggle the greater part of their national territory, to the situation of a country which runs its own state and which has part of its national territory occupied by foreign armed forces.

Concern with the war and with political work should not, however, make us forget or even underestimate the importance of our activities at the economic, social and cultural levels, as the foundation of the new life we are creating in the liberated areas. We must all, but mainly the cadres who specialise in these matters, give the closest attention to questions of the economy, health, social welfare, education and culture, so as to improve our work significantly and to be ready to face the great problems we have to face with the new situation … so many new problems, but the more complex the more exciting, which we must be capable of solving at the same time as we intensify and develop vigorous action at the politico-military level to expel the colonial troops from the positions they still occupy in our land of Guine and Cape Verde.

PAIGC soldiers in Guinea-Bissau, Coutinho Collection. Wikimedia Commons, 1973.

Intellectual Methodology

The 1973 New Year’s message is straight and clear. In that sense it does indeed illustrate Amilcar Cabral’s intellectual methodology. But for a more theoretical grasp, we have to consult other parts of his work. The most frequently quoted version of Cabral’s general view of the conditions of social transformation in a colonised, dependent and underdeveloped country, such as his own, is found in the address he delivered to the first Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America in Havana, 3-12 January 1966. (Endnote 5) Cabral adopts the orthodox view that history goes through ‘at least three stages’, each definable by the ‘level of productive forces’ (p.78) which is assumed to rise as history moves on, thus making possible more advanced forms of social and political organisation. Cabral’s scheme differs from the conventional Marxist one by offering a stage of their own to communal societies, thus avoiding seeing these as mere pre-stages to history, while grouping instead feudal and bourgeois societies in the same broad category, thus dethroning capitalism by putting it at par with feudalism.

Here we shall only quote one important introductory point. Cabral had, he said, found that a fundamental part of the struggle for national liberation was actually lacking on the agenda of the conference. This was ‘the struggle against our own weaknesses‘ (Cabral, 1969:74):

Obviously, other cases differ from that of Guinea; but our experience has shown us that … this battle against ourselves, no matter what difficulties the enemy may create, is the most difficult of all, whether for the present or the future of our peoples. This battle is the expression of the internal contradictions in the economic, social and cultural (and therefore historical) reality of each of our countries. We are convinced that any national or social revolution which is not based on knowledge of this fundamental reality runs a grave risk of being condemned to failure.

This is a sternly realistic observation, characteristic of Cabral. But let us turn to an even earlier document, Brief analysis of the social structure in Guinea (Cabral, 1969:46-61), first presented in on 1-3 May 1964, to a seminar held at the Frantz Fanon Centre in Treviglio, Milan to illustrate his way of moving from theoretically penetrating analysis to political conclusions: (Endnote 6)

I should like to tell you something about the situation in our country, ‘Portuguese’ Guinea, beginning with an analysis of the social situation, which has served as the basis for our struggle for national liberation. I shall make a distinction between the rural areas and the towns, or rather the urban centres, not that these are to be considered mutually opposed.

In the rural areas we have found it necessary to distinguish between two distinct groups; on the one hand, the group which we consider semi-feudal, represented by the Fulas and, on the other hand, the group which we consider, so to speak, without any defined form of state organisation, represented by the Balantes.

This distinction between the two groups is theoretically founded in sociology and anthropology. Two years later, in his speech in Havana, Cabral would also use for the first time the terms vertical versus horizontal social structure to denote the conceptual dichotomy implied (p.78). In Milan he still used more common words, although with great precision. The most general point made (pp.49-50) was that it had proved less difficult to mobilise the Balanta and similar groups than the Fula for the struggle against the Portuguese colonial regime, as . . .

the Fula peasants have a strong tendency to follow their chiefs. Thorough and intensive work was therefore needed to mobilise them .. .(on the other hand) … these groups without any defined organisation put up much more resistance against the Portuguese than the others and they have maintained intact their tradition of resistance to colonial penetration. This is the group that we found most ready to accept the idea of national liberation.

Limits of Cabral’s Analysis

It is not possible here to develop the complex theoretical and political issues related to the way Cabral applied the vertical/horizontal distinction. A recent attempt to sum up my own and others’ contributions to this debate is found in Rudebeck, 1992:48-54. In 1964 Cabral consciously focused attention on that dimension of the social structure of Guinean society that was most relevant to the task of mobilising the peasants for anti-colonial resistance. He was successful in this, as we know.

It is easy, today, to point out that Cabral’s analysis was far from complete, and in fact much more limited to the specific tasks of the anti-colonial struggle than was generally thought at the time. This seems to have become clear to Cabral himself, as the struggle went on. In Conakry on 10 May 1972, for instance, he described at length to me the system of government he wanted to see at work in his country after the achievement of independence. This was to be a system with political and economic power firmly anchored in decentralised assemblies of the people. The functions of the state were to be strictly limited. In our discussion Cabral called this ‘cooperative democracy’.

In a revolutionary perspective, the cooperative system obviously rests on the assumption that the people are a ‘revolutionary force’ and not a mere ‘physical force’, as Cabral had labelled the Guinean peasants in his 1964 seminar lecture in Milan (p.50). We see thus, how two different modes of thinking were ambivalently posed against each other within Cabral’s own analysis of the social basis of the liberation movement: one marked by Leninist party theory combined with conventional modernisation thinking, the other revolutionary-democratic. The problem for the future was that the question of the social basis of the democratic alternative was not confronted, thus opening up in practice a one-party system cut off from the majority of the people, once independence had been achieved.

Cabral’s theoretical work mirrors his political task. Taken as a whole, it never reached beyond the point of independence, whether in politics or economics, except for fragmentary pieces. Nowhere in his writings do we find, seriously conceptualised, any realistic way of making the revolutionary-democratic alternative come true in the post-colonial situation. The only way considered is the unrealistic one of asking the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ to ‘abandon power to the workers and the peasants’, as he put it in Milan (1964:57). In Havana (1966:89), in an expression that would become famous, he asked for the ‘class suicide’ of the petty bourgeois leaders of the liberation struggle. The passage is subtly ambiguous. Are we listening to a realist, a voluntarist, or a prophet?

To retain the power which national liberation puts in its hands, the petty bourgeoisie has only one path: to give free rein to its natural tendencies to become more bourgeois, to permit the development of a bureaucratic and intermediary bourgeoisie in the commercial cycle, in order to transform itself into a national pseudo-bourgeoisie, that is to say to negate the revolution and necessarily ally itself with imperialist capital. Now all this corresponds to the neo-colonial situation, that is, to the betrayal of the objectives of national liberation. In order not to betray these objectives, the petty bourgeoisie has only one choice: …the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie must be capable of committing suicide as a class in order to be reborn as revolutionary workers, completely identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which they belong.

Woman PAIGC soldier playing cards, Coutinho Collection. Wikimedia Commons, 1973.

The Weapon of Theory

The Weapon of Theory is the title of one of Cabral’s most famous texts. It could have been the title of his entire written work. Let us look briefly at three passages, all of which carry significance beyond the context of the anti-colonial struggle, precisely because they are theoretically founded.

The first may seem initially to be limited to the concrete context of the anti-colonial struggle in Guinea. In reality it points toward the future, by shedding light in hindsight on aspects of the development failures of independent Guinea-Bissau. The quote is from my transcription into Portuguese of a crioulo tape recording from a seminar for Party people held in August 1971 (Cabral, 1971:14):

Regardless of their specific responsibilities, the comrades in charge of all branches of our organisation should help our people organise collective fields. This is a great experiment for our future, comrades. Those who do not understand this have not yet understood anything of our struggle, however much they have fought and however heroic they may be.

What disturbed Cabral was that mobilisation in the PAIGC-controlled areas of the country was mainly political and ideological, while very little economic transformation was taking place. Paradoxically, instead, the conditions of the liberation war tended even to reinforce traditional self-reliance in production, in the sense that commercial and administrative links to the colonial system were cut. Since independence, on the other hand, any attempts to develop agriculture through collectivisation have been undermined by the fact that the leadership gave a ‘free rein to its natural tendencies to become more bourgeois’, to use Cabral’s prophetic phrase.

At least in the short run, that fact has in turn contributed to heightening the significance of ethnicity in politics, in Guinea as elsewhere. In 1993, in times of ‘ethnic cleansing’ world-wide, the following definition of ‘ethnicity’ offered by Cabral thus retains all its validity, theoretically as well as politically (my translation from Guinea-Bissau: Alfabeto, 1984:26):

It is not the existence of a race, an ethnic group, or anything of the kind, that defines the behaviour of a human aggregate. No, it is the social environment and the problems arising from the reactions of this environment and the reactions of the human beings in question. AH this defines the behaviour of a human aggregate.

But how is it possible to change environments that give rise to racist or ethnicist behaviour? In another one of Cabral’s lectures to party workers in 1969, we find a philosophical answer to that question (Cabral, 1980:44-45) (Endnote 7):

Our view is the following: man is part of reality, reality exists independently of man’s will. To the extent to which he acquires consciousness of reality, to the extent in which reality influences his consciousness, or creates his consciousness, man can acquire the potential to transform reality, little by little. This is our view, let us say the principle of our Party on relations between man and reality.

What if Cabral Had Not Been Killed?

We noted that Cabral, in his theoretical work, did not go very deeply into the problems of post-colonial development. We shall never know if he would have had the time and force to develop his analyses, had he survived. But if so, this would most likely have been within the realm of political economy. There is an obvious void in his work, as it stands, with regard to linking the transformation of the economy and the democratisation of political structure to each other. This is also the area where the failures of independent Guinea-Bissau are most visible. At the same time, passages like those quoted on collectivisation and ethnicity do indicate a possible direction of thought. Consider the following much quoted words from Cabral’s General Guidelines, written as early as 1965 for the activists of the liberation movement (my translation, Cabral, 1965:23):

National liberation, the struggle against colonialism, working for peace and progress, independence — all these will be empty words without significance for the people, unless they are translated into real improvements in the conditions of life. It is useless to liberate a region, if the people of that region are then left without the elementary necessities of life.

The sharp formulation does express a basic truth, but not the whole truth. It does not raise the question of how to translate the beautiful words into ‘real improvements of the conditions of life’. Taking that question seriously would have led on to issues of how to democratise power over the economy. Yet however relevant Cabral’s philosophical view on ‘relations between man and reality’, the immediate task of decolonisation spurred cultural and political mobilisation rather than transformation of the relations of production.

Bibliographic Note

Ronald H Chilcote, Amilcar Cabral’s Revolutionary Theory and Practice: A Critical Guide, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder & London, 1991; Amilcar Cabral, Palavras de ordem gerais: Do camarada Amilcar Cabral aos responsaveis do Partido, November 1965, PAIGC, 1969; Cabral, Fondements et objectifs de la liberation nationale: I — Sur la domination imperialiste, extracts from Cabral’s speech at the first Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America, Havana, 3-14 January 1966, Conakry, PAIGC 1966 (mimeo); Cabral, Revolution in Guinea: An African People’s Struggle, Stage 1, London, 1969; Sobre alguns problemas praticos da nossa vida e da nossa luta, transcription from tape recording of a speech at a meeting of the Superior Council of the Struggle, 9-16 August 1971, Conakry, 1971 (mimeo); Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings, texts selected by the PAIGC, translated by Michael Wolfers, African Writers Series 198 (Heinemann, London, 1980). Guinea-Bissau: Alfabeto, texts edited by Carlos Lopes, photographs by G Lodi & M Sabbadini, Terra & Imagini, Gruppo Volontariato Civile, Bologna, 1984; Lars Rudebeck, ‘Conditions of people’s development in postcolonial Africa’ in R Galli (ed), Rethinking the Third World: Contributions Toward a New Conceptualization (Crane Russak, New York & London, 1991).

Endnotes

1. Tape recording of the original broadcast against which I have checked Wolfer’s translation which follows the original very closely.
2. Wolfers’ translation, ‘responsible workers’ uses the noun responsavel, plural responsaveis, which is very common in political language but difficult to translate.
3. Wolfers’ translation, ‘time for action in Guinea that is each day . . . ‘
4. Wolfers’ translation of todos homens, ‘all men’, is literal; however, from the context I infer that Cabral was not referring exclusively to males.
5. The text is entitled The Weapon of Theory and has been published in a number of versions, in several different languages. The most complete, in English, is in Cabral 1980:119-137. An earlier English version, Cabral, 1969:73-90 does exist which I have found somewhat closer to the PAIGC document in my possession (Cabral, 1966), used here. ‘
6. Brief analysis is not included in the Cabral, 1980 selection, for which the texts were selected by the PAIGC. It is however, found in Cabral, 1969:46-61, the only English version available.
7. The quote is from the second of nine lectures delivered by Cabral during a seminar for Party people, 19-24 November 1969. The lectures were held in crioulo, transcribed into Portuguese, and later translated by Wolfers for publication in English (Cabral, 1980:28-113).

Mike Powell, Editor of the Original Special Issue

Featured Photograph: A painting of Amilcar Cabral hanging on the wall at the headquarters of PAIGC in Bissau. Wikimedia Commons, 3 November 2017.

ROAPE in 2024 – an end and a new beginning

ROAPE

March 21, 2023

From January 2024 all ROAPE’s work will be available on a single platform 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.

We are delighted to announce that from the start of 2024, our fiftieth anniversary, ROAPE will become a journal which is freely available to all readers online through an open access platform. The change marks the end of the commercial publishing relationship with Taylor and Francis. We will maintain the journal’s remit and structure, as we advance our activities for researchers and activists engaged in the analysis and radical transformation of Africa. Our articles, briefings and debates will continue to be peer-reviewed and available online and in print.

The move to independent publishing removes the paywall for activists and researchers to access ROAPE content. We break from the system of paid for ‘open’ access and take advantage of recent technological changes that have permanently revolutionised the ways in which readers access content. Our website, roape.net and online publication of the journal have increased our readership, and the widening of our audience has been exciting and inspiring. We will now build on this increased readership. From January 2024 all ROAPE’s work will be available on a single platform 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.

Editorial Collective

Review of African Political Economy

The secret of the failure of liberation – a tribute and celebration of Amilcar Cabral fifty years on

ROAPE

March 16, 2023

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of national revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral’s murder in 1973, over the next four weeks, ROAPE will be re-posting a collection of essays paying tribute to Cabral. The collection was first published in the ROAPE journal thirty years ago, and reflects on the extraordinary achievements of Cabral and his organisation PAIGC (the Partido Africano de Indendencia de Guine e Cabo Verde).

By Leo Zeilig, Chinedu Chukwudinma, and Ben Radley

In 1973, fifty years ago, Amilcar Cabral, the leader of the national revolution in Guinea and Cape Verde was murdered. For the next three weeks roape.net will be celebrating his contribution to radical political economy, Marxist and liberation politics in a series of blogposts. We will be republishing a tribute to Cabral that first appeared in our print journal thirty years ago.

Cabral was a unique thinker and fighter for African liberation, and emerged as a leading figure in the ‘second liberation’ struggles against Portuguese colonialism in the late 1960s and 1970s. Throughout the battle to liberate Guinea, Cabral argued for the need to detail one’s own reality and any revolution must be grounded in a concrete understanding of conditions on the ground.

Cabral’s Marxism emerged in part as a reaction to the failures of an earlier wave of national liberation in Africa. The apparent freedom of the first wave of independence had extended and, in some respects, strengthened foreign control of the continent.

Many activists saw in the revolutionary movements in Guinea and Cape Verde (and to some extent in Mozambique and Angola) examples of more participatory and democratic practice, that could be harnessed to provide a radical alternative for the continent. Cabral’s organisation PAIGC (the Partido Africano de Indendencia de Guine e Cabo Verde) was formed in 1956, and for a generation, came to express the hopes for real liberation across Africa.

In 1963 PAIGC embarked on a campaign to explain the realities of the anti-colonial struggle across Guinea which involved a fusion of ideas. Cabral spoke of a people’s culture developing as a result of the liberation movement, and emerging from the ‘masses in revolt’.

Speaking to supporters of Africa’s liberation, in America, and Europe, amid the Black Power movement and revolutionary upheavals across the global North and South, Cabral pushed further than any other figures of radical national liberation. Yet he was acutely conscious of the problems and limitations of the liberation he sought.

Amílcar Cabral with Fidel Castro in Cuba for the Tricontinental Conference. January 1966, Wikimedia Commons.

For Cabral what was done with the state after independence was a central question – the ‘fundamental one’ for him. He acknowledged that this was an issue that had never been satisfactorily answered, yet with brilliant insight he wrote: ‘It’s the most important problem in liberation movements. The problem is perhaps the secret of the failure of African independence’ (1977: 84).

Once independence was won these movements consolidated in the state. In the case of PAIGC after Cabral’s murder, and independence in 1974, the leaders of the party were compelled to take up the statist model of the Soviet Union and quickly transformed themselves into an exploiting class.

The petty bourgeoisie Cabral referred to in his 1966 paper The Weapon of Theory could not continue to identify ‘with the aspirations of the people’ (1969: 89). After independence these aspirations, like many others, were jettisoned. So the seemingly fluid and radical structures of the anti-colonial revolution hardened into a bureaucratic one-party state.

The short papers in this collection were edited by Mike Powell in 1993. Powell knew Guinea-Bissau and had worked with the radical historian of modern Africa, Basil Davidson, who also contributed to this collection. Powell was close to the politics and disappointments of the PAIGC in the 1970s. Today, we republish Mike’s introduction beneath this piece.

Next week, we will publish Lars Rudebeck’s celebration of Cabral’s extraordinary writing, speeches and interviews, including reflections on personal conversations Rudebeck held with Cabral at various points. While celebratory, and acknowledging that Cabral saw with remarkable prescience the eventual betrayal that would be handed down by the petty bourgeois leaders of the liberation struggle, Rudebeck also perceives in the writings and politics of Cabral inadequate attention to the post-colonial situation and the question of how to democratise power over the economy and transform the relations of production (a point on which Basil Davidson also agrees).

The following week, we look at Shubi Ishemo’s short study of Cabral’s thought and practice, and lessons for revolutionary movements. Ishemo notes Cabral’s stature as an agronomist, a revolutionary theoretician, a political strategist, and an historian. In Ishemo’s recollection of Cabral’s commitment to a rigorous historical approach as he sought to gain a concrete understanding of the social, economic, political, and cultural realities of Guinea and Cape Verde, we find echoes of the Guyanese revolutionary Walter Rodney who took a similar historically grounded approach and rigour to his own research and writing.

In the final week, we will be returning to Basil Davidson’s intimate political and personal portrait of Cabral, who Davidson knew during the 1960s and 1970s. Davidson’s piece contains fascinating detail and insight on Cabral’s principles of organising, as well as how Cabral and his comrades started their successful anti-colonial struggle in the early 1950s, all of which retains its relevance in the context of ongoing struggle and revolt across the continent today.

A Tribute to Amilcar Cabral, 12 September 1924 — 20 January 1973

Mike Powell

ROAPEs decision to mark the twentieth anniversary of the murder of Amilcar Cabral reflects the view that this is an opportune time to consider his achievements and the relevance of both his thought and practice — especially regarding events that are unfolding in Africa today. The contributions from Basil Davidson, Shubi Ishemo and Lars Rudebeck each provide a stimulating analysis that covers enormous ground but hardly overlaps at all.

One enduring relevance of the life of Cabral and of the struggle of the PAIGC (Partido Africano Pela Independencia de Guine e Cabo Verde) is its very success. When the Portuguese responded to a peaceful wage protest on 3 August 1959 by killing fifty dock workers, it must have been inconceivable to the survivors of Pijiguiti Quay that within sixteen years Bissau would be theirs — after defeating a 70,000 strong NATO supplied colonial army. These historical moments need, especially now, to be remembered.

Cabral’s own writing continues to be an invaluable source of inspiration. This is not to suggest, and Cabral himself would have hated the suggestion, that his writing formed some great dogma — the conclusions of which should be obediently followed. What they do provide is an astonishing range of insight and analysis. For instance, environmentalists may discover in his work and in particular his essay on ‘The Utilisation of the Land in Africa’ (first published in the Boletime Cultural da Guine and then in English in Ufuhamu, 1973), an early and possibly original analysis of the links between export-oriented production and soil erosion. As Rudebeck points out, Cabral saw theory not as any end in itself but as a highly practical tool for understanding and changing the reality he faced which was one of armed colonial domination. Soil erosion was important because it affected agricultural production.

The Amilcar Cabral Foundation in Praia, the capital city of Cape Verde. 28 February 2015, Wikimedia Commons.

The role of women was important because their support was vital to the struggle. From as early as the PAIGC’s First Congress in 1964, it was agreed that at least two of the five person committee which would be elected to run each village should be women. Cabral’s commitment to women’s participation did not stop at playing a numbers game. In informal interviews which are published in Return to the Source and with discussions with PAIGC militants such as those interviewed by Stephanie Urdang, it was clear that there was a need to understand the more subtle differences of perception and work towards accommodating them. By the end of the war, women were beginning to put forward their own proposals and did not, in the main, seem to feel they were pushing against closed doors.

According to Mario de Andrade (founder member of the PAIGC), the greatest danger for socialist governments was the failure of communication between the governors and the governed. Cabral clearly gained increasing satisfaction from the results of popular participation in the politics of the revolution, particularly the two-way process of education which was happening as the revolutionary petty bourgeois lived amongst the peasantry and together they shared the joy and the relief of winning a war. It was this shared experience, in the forest, in war, this forging of a common purpose which created the image of the local bourgeoisie changing sides, committing suicide as a class, a concept which has always given more sedentary Marxists conceptual headaches.

However, it is very important to note that Cabral was not simply assuming that all would work out smoothly. He was actively trying to build mass participation into the structures of the state that was being created and, more in interviews than in any major speeches, he appeared to be thinking increasingly of a very decentralised state. I remember one interview i in which he suggested that ministries would be spread around the country and that there would be no traditional capital city.

Cabral’s written and recorded work is important both historically and as a stimulus for creating new ideas. So also is his methodology, described in all the pieces which follow. It was a methodology which, for example, sought to understand ethnic differences through careful studies of how people live, and rather than hiding differences, sought ways for people to unite. It also made exhortations to ‘tell no lies, claim no easy victories’ which might appear banal but, if applied, gain real credibility for any political movement. Equally important in looking at Cabral’s achievements are the skills, in modern parlance, management skills developed during the struggle. As Basil Davidson records, the PAIGC’s ability to train cadres to overcome the warlordism of early years and successfully delegate authority, was vital to its success. In very different circumstances, such training and such delegation are central to any effort to launch a popular-based struggle today.

No direct parallels are being suggested. As Davidson points out, one of the advantages that the PAIGC had was an implacable enemy which left families no room for sitting on the fence. Many of the political struggles developing in Africa now offer far less simple options to the people around them. Cabral’s legacy is not a blueprint for these struggles. What is offered is a wonderful example of victory against the odds, a fountain of ideas, a way of approaching the problems that face us and the benefit of some very practical experience of how to organise.

Featured Photograph: A painting of Amílcar Cabral in the town of Bafatá in Guinea, known as Cabral’s birthplace (13 February 2019).

Braving the high seas to Europe and North America – the many killers of the migrant worker

ROAPE

March 14, 2023

Yusuf Serunkuma writes that a migrant worker dies many times, and has many killers. They die in their home countries – where they are structurally, violently uprooted – they then die on the journeys to either Europe or the Middle East and then, they finally die in dehumanising working conditions if they ever arrive. Serunkuma exposes the hypocrisy, racism and murder at the heart of the global north.

By Yusuf Serunkuma

Six thousand five hundred migrant workers are documented to have died in Qatar in the build-up to last years 2022 World Cup. Since the time of the award to host the tournament in 2011, estimates show that over 6500 people especially from the Indian subcontinent, Asia and a percentage from Africa died from various tournament-related construction projects. For this reason, Qatar was on the spot for its mistreatment of migrant workers—that ended in these many deaths. In the final three months to the kick-off of the tournament (about July-October last year), Qatar came under even more intense scrutiny over several other things, mostly of a cultural nature by an exclusively western media fraternity. Sadly, clumsily, most of these criticisms were crafted in an explicitly orientalist, Islamophobic fashion—as they sought to question the cultures and traditions of Qataris, and Muslims in general. Something like, “how barbaric and backward could they be in this 21st century?” There were threats to boycott the tournament and many football lovers in Europe and North America—turned cultural and pro-migrant activists—never watched the tournament. While Middle Easterners and football lovers from elsewhere in the world were clearly unbothered by protests and contestations from the western world (as evident in full stadiums and a vibrant cultural life in-between and after games), subaltern intellectuals found themselves in a position that insisted they craft sensible responses to these criticisms. It is not that the pro-Migrant criticisms were bereft of veracity, but there was an acute sense of sanctimoniousness on the part of our western interlocutors, that reeked of ‘rank hypocrisy’ as British media personality Pius Morgan described them.

The cultural conversation about Qatar’s moral and constitutional hue—specifically the issues of sexual minorities—is outside the scope of this essay. This essay is rather focused on the memoirs, life-stories, and general biographies of migrant workers especially those coming from East Africa, Horn of Africa and Central Africa, of whose world I’m more familiar with. While my intention is not to condone Qatar’s ill-treatment of workers, my contention rather is that simply documenting—however exhaustively—the numbers and conditions under which these deaths occur is deliberately, cleverly, telling a half story. There are close, un-ignorable connections between their final deaths in Qatar to (a) the journeys and (b) conditions that prompted their movement (thus the label, “migrant workers,” and not expatriates). And then their eventual death. Plotting these journeys and dots meticulously requires not just journalistic or academic rigour, but also honesty and empathy. It needs to be understood and acknowledged that a migrant worker dies many times, and has many killers: they die in their home countries—where they are structurally, violently uprooted—they then die on the clearly abusive journeys to either Europe or the Middle East (even if these journeys are by aircraft), and then, they finally die (and could be buried or given chance to remain alive) at their workstations at the final destination. At this final moment of deaths—which is the crowning of their dehumanisation—their bodies could be rendered lifeless and absorbed into the ground. But they would have died many times before this moment.

Please note that in these many moments of morbidity (dehumanisation, enslavement, exploitation, abuse, border restrictions, etc.) the killer is not one person or one entity. But many hard-hearted people from different places using different methodologies, all of them driven by a singular motive, exploitation, extraction. While some killers are structural and fetishized—tactfully hidden from public view—and could even appear benevolent towards their victims, they are real and dangerous just like those who are openly extractive and violent such as the enslavers enroute or the profiteers and funders of violent conflict on the African continent. Depending on the perpetrator’s point of contact with the migrant (who begins as a native), the killers are driven by two extractive ambitions: (a) exploitation of labour of the migrant, and (b) extraction of the resources of the migrant either freely or cheaply. If found in their homelands on the African continent, the resources of the native have to be exploited freely, cheaply, often violently, which often ends in the dispossession of the native turning them into migrants. (Again, please note that not all dispossession is openly violent. And that is the ugly more difficult trick: because this violence is fetishized, structural, to the point that the victim could even be compensated at market rates). If found enroute, their bodies become the target. Thus, all of these ugly moments of perpetrator-victim encounter, and the many times of deaths have to be accounted for in narrating the troubled lives of the dead migrant worker.

Kampala

At least since 2010, not a month goes by without Kampala’s social and mainstream media broadcasting a video of a migrant labourer in the Middle East either being tortured by their often-abusive employers, or ailing from a work-related condition that their employers refused to attend to. In some even more grim cases, videos are announcing the death of a colleague (having died under unclear circumstances), while in other cases they feature direct appeals for help in the form of evacuation. This condition became even more intense in the past three years. And against this ill-treatment of migrant/domestic workers in the Middle East, the Ugandan opposition has made it their mission to evacuate some of these clearly ill-treated persons back to Uganda. But while 50 of them would be entering the country through Uganda’s only international airport, at Entebbe, they will be crossing paths with another 500 in the lobby waiting to leave for the same destination. Why is this so? And what does this tell us?

So, the president of the major opposition party in the country, the National Unity Platform (NUP), Robert Kyagulanyi, is often challenged with the question: after you have evacuated these girls, successfully returned them to their homeland, then what is the promise of return? Because if they left because of the material conditions, what then is there for their return? Consider the fact that over 24,000 Ugandans seek employment in the Middle East every year—and this has been happening for the last 10 years! But this is not Kyagulanyi’s problem to solve, it is rather a regional problem, it is the African condition courtesy of Euro-America’s penchant for accumulation by dispossession.

What you are witnessing here is a condition only succinctly summarised in the African adage, “binsobede eka ne mukibira,” which is Luganda for, loosely, life has become difficult both at home and in the woods, or the English equivalent, “caught between a rock and hard place.” There is no place to turn for the African native/immigrant, they are surrounded. They are doomed if they stayed on the continent, and also doomed if they decide to leave the continent.

Erudite pan-Africanist, Abdul-Raheem Tajudeen summarised this condition well when keynoting at conference in Nairobi. He opened his speech by turning our present sensibilities about slavery and slave trade upside down: if a ship docked at Mombasa Port, clearly marked, “Taking slaves to America and Europe,” we’ll all be shocked by the long queues of Africans pushing and shoving to get onto that ship—towards slavery.’ This statement by the consummate Pan-Africanist drew a great deal of mirthless laughter from the audience, signalling to the outright approval of what Tajudeen had said. But why would this be true in independent countries with innumerable programmes towards uplifting their people from penury and misery?

Hargeisa

During my feildwork as a graduate student in Somaliland in 2015, I recall vividly witnessing an epidemic where youngsters determined to make the dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean through Libya into Europe in search for a better life. With the slave shops in Libya being well-publicised, and the death of migrants crossing the Mediterranean into Europe, there had been campaigns inside Somaliland (and almost all of the Somali territories) urging young men and women to stop risking these long and arduous journeys to Europe and North America. Tahrib as the phenomena is called was a major talking point in Hargeisa, and remains so to this day.

Diaspora returnees coming from Europe or North America who had only recently returned to Somaliland or were simply visiting pleaded with their local compatriots not to make these journeys because the grass was not greener in Europe or the Middle East, and not worthy of the trauma and sacrifice on the high seas. These enthusiastic and well-meaning returnees where often met with a threefold solid response: (a) a direct question, “what else is left for me here?” (b) a rhetorical question, “how come you made it?” and (c) a philosophical statement, “every dog has his day.” Thus, Tahribbecame unstoppable in the sense that an acute feeling of precarity, absence and lack in the homeland (of opportunities, futures, growth, certainty), was muted by the appearance of the returnees. The returnees who normally appeared fairly dressed, well-fed, well-spoken, with fancier electronic gadgets, and patronised the more affluent hangouts could not convince their homebred listeners that the grass wasn’t greener on the other side. (For an extended discussion of this sense of loss, see Nimo-Ilhan Ali, wonderfully researched book, Going on Tahrib).

The picture that emerges is not that Africans simply love going to Europe, the Middle East or North America, to enjoy the beautiful lifestyles or would rather work abroad than at home. Despite a strong nomadic lifestyle in some parts of the continent, no African (which is true of all humans) wants to leave their families behind (their beautiful wives, husbands and children), their social networks, their eco-system of friendships and care, to brave the embarrassment of learning new traditions and languages in old age, if it were not for hostile conditions at home.

No one is content to brave the blinding racism in the white-majority countries including in the Middle East. In all fairness—and I do not say this out of sheer Pan-Africanism—Africa is heavenly bliss compared to the rest of the world. It is not just the beautiful weather, a gentle all year-round sunshine or the abundant natural and marine resources. It is not just the people and their traditions—who are still fairly untouched by capitalist individualism and corruptions. It is all those and the fact one can live in absolute harmony with the environment. See, even with the violence and aggressiveness of the GMO industry on the continent, most foods are still organic, and their taste remains unmatched. To live this bliss for the extremely cold winters, occasionaly blazing summers, the cold and hot racism, of Europe or the Middle East, without compulsion, would be lunacy. But the conditions at home—of precarity, lack and absence—make it extremely difficult for Africans to stay home.

The easy, often regurgitated explanation is that Africans, especially their leaders have been unable to transform their God-given resources into meaningful investments for the future. Claims of African corruption, African laziness, Africans’ failure to build institutions inundate most literature on and about African poverty and precarity. There is a new group of ‘intellectuals of empire’, in media, academia and general commentary building entire careers on stereotyping the African condition. They are obsessed with studying and making connections between African poverty, precarity, and migration to African leaderships. Thus, books, news bulletins and analyses on “African authoritarianism”, “African monsters” (and its allegedly beautiful opposite, democracy) are common terms while discussing African poverty and precarity. The ugly trick here is that these analyses pass the guilt of all the African mess on the heads and shoulders of the Africans—most especially the leaderships. And sadly, Africans have been blinded by the actually existing mess in their midst and the exorbitant, luxurious lives of their leaders. But all this is a distraction. It is nonsense.

While I do not seek to downplay the agency and contribution of the Africans themselves, and their leaders, it is my sobering contention that the African condition—and thus the endless desire to travel into slavery in the Middle East, Europe or North America—is the story of the longue durée of Euro-America on the African continent. Thus, focusing on the blighted lives of immigrant workers in Qatar—as emblematic of the Middle East—is tactfully telling half the story. Were it not for the woes of the Euro-American empire, who structurally and directly continue to dispossess natives, surely no native would countenance going on these arduous journeys and living equally ugly lives in their final destinations—be it by plane or sea.

Ruins of Euro-America in Africa

In several essays (see here, here, and here), I have written about the continued imperial control of the African continent by Euro-America. There are numerous chronicles on this continued exploitation of the continent by present and earlier scholars ranging from Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, Ali Mazrui, Samir Amin, Archie Mafeje, Ezra Suruma, Sam Moyo, Dambisa Moyo and more recently Pigeaud and Samba Sylla, among many others. The story starts from seemingly benevolent moves such as foreign aid, insistence on democracy (which is actually ‘divide and concur’), to clearly violent ideas such as structural adjustment programmes (an absolute case of double standards as the same does not apply to Europe and North America), to things such as military support, as evidenced recently by Africa-America, Africa-France, Africa-Russia ‘puppet summits’ where African leaders are bussed around like school children before being subtly—and sometimes, openly—harassed, threatened, conditioned, and hypnotised into signing contracts that mortgage entire countries.

Structural adjustment or privatisation sadly, only opened African infant economies to international capitalists ranging from banks, telecoms, power distributors to mining giants, while at the same time, ruined public goods and service industries that were uninteresting, unprofitable to private capitalists coming from abroad.

A recent study by Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan and Huzaifa Zoomkawala put the pillage at $152 trillion dollars between 1960-2018 in the form of lost growth and unequal exchange. These scholars, an economic anthropologist and data analyst noted that,

the global North (‘advanced economies’) appropriated from the South commodities worth $2.2 trillion in Northern prices — enough to end extreme poverty 15 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $62 trillion (constant 2011 dollars), or $152 trillion when accounting for lost growth.

These figures are astounding. If the US economy is just $25 trillion dollars, considered perhaps the biggest economy in the world, consider the loss, which amounts to six times the economy of the United States. This loss translates into the endless conditions of precarity, lack and absence, with no end in sight. Seventy percent of items consumed in Europe and North America come from former colonies, extracted under violent conditions or under conditions of unequal exchange. While the native may not succinctly articulate it, they know that a great deal of what they see in Europe and North America originates from their countries. Noted in the study, these stolen resources are able “to end extreme poverty 15 times over.” But the problem is that these resources are cleverly stolen and taken to Europe and North America.

In conclusion, it is absurd, unempathetic, sanctimonious to tell the story of a dead immigrant only in the place of their death—and squarely blame it on the conditions under which they met their final death. This story might be complex, but easily plottable. It is not just those Africans braving the high seas to Europe and North America who embody the pains of dislocation by Euro-America, but also the young men and women lining up at airports for work in the slave conditions in the Middle East. This is why when they move, they are not called ‘expats’—as the other work-seekers moving from Europe and North America to other parts of the world. This is not because they carry no “specialised skills” (which is itself a colonial construction), but because the conditions under which they move dehumanised them. This dehumanisation becomes their identity, the label under which they move, and thus are named and treated. Thus, in death, their story ought to be told more explicitly, more empathetically and more honestly—as the walking dead being finally being lowered into the ground.

A version of this blogpost was posted on the website of the Pan-African Review.

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 researcher who teaches political economy and history, and writes regularly for ROAPE.

Featured Photograph: Migrant workers next to a building site in the West Bay area of Doha, Qatar (1 February 2014).

Where are you really from?

ROAPE

March 9, 2023

Benjamin Maiangwa asks: Has white supremacy permeated every place on earth and created a world view that favours whiteness so that the question – where are you really from? – is asked to determine your state of being? Being African, Maiangwa argues, you are always idenitifed as the exotic, noble, disease-infected, and chronically misgoverned “other” – traits or images that outsiders confer on the continent.

By Benjamin Maiangwa

When I’d visit the village as a child to celebrate our religious and cultural festivities, I’d have some adults come up to me at those events, inquiring: “whose child are you?” It’s not uncommon to have other unsolicited adults who were well intimated of my parentage answer in my stead. These custodians of my lineage would respond to the question as follows: “Oh, you don’t know? He’s the son of so and so.” “I see,” the interrogators would accede. “I can even see the resemblance,” some would claim. Or they would say something like, “but he doesn’t look anything like his father.”

I remember traveling to the village with my father a few years ago, and we visited with an elderly couple. The woman greeted and waved us to a chair, her eyes flashing confusion. She then looked intently at me, at my father, back at me, and then asked my father: “Whose child is this?” It wasn’t my father’s response—when he told her I was his son—that was at issue (for he was visibly flustered that for the first time in his life, he had had to prove that he fathered me), it was the surprising disgust on the face of the woman, who made a comment about me not looking like my father or anyone she knew in the village for that matter. At the time, her response felt like a searing rejection or degradation of the authenticity of my place in the family.

As the years wore on, it wasn’t the whose child are you question that tormented my life, but the where are you from ororiginally from question which, if you come to think of it, both contain similar assumptions about one’s sense of (un)belonging. The where are you from question became like an agonizing migraine I had had to contend with, as benign as some would like to think it is, a mere curiosity or ice breaker. Although I had initially bought the idea of the question’s innocuousness, it would create a nervous condition for me during my various peregrinations. In Nigeria, I never thought the question was of significant import, considering the lack of a strong national consciousness I felt was palpable among Nigerians. This near absence of national belonging that I thought so many in the country feel, makes the where are you originally from question for me a banal invocation of our colonially distorted sense of self or community, revealing an obsession to stamp our legitimacy as authentic “peoples of the soil”; a subdued form of resistance to the (post)colonial arrangement.

When I left the shores of Nigeria to study in South Africa, I landed with the most cheering prospect ahead. But the where are you from question was put before me right at the airport, without it being stated. It was my passport that gave me away at the point of entry at the OR Tambo International Airport, Johannesburg. The immigration officer only had to take a glance at my passport before posing the most chilling question I had ever heard: “Did you come with any cocaine today?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” was my ready reply. But my response didn’t stop the officer from whisking me into a special room for a special treatment (rummaging through my bags) reserved for people that came from special places.

When I was searching for an apartment in South Africa, a houseowner (a police officer), having inquired “where I came from” said to me in no uncertain terms, “I do not rent to Nigerians.” His response was hardly discouraging. I persisted under his rather strong warning that if he ever had to deal with me bringing drugs into his house, I would be locked up. This is not to say that my experience in South Africa left me with a heart overborne with sadness due to my constant effort to situate myself against the perceived odds of my nationality or race: a burdensome inherence? Quite the contrary, South Africa conjures up images of home for me. It was there that I expanded my limited sense of home, not as a place of birth or consanguineous relationships, but a relational space for shared human and spiritual experience.

My next destination was Japan. I had been forewarned that Japan would be the opposite of South Africa, devoid of a rainbow. But I was excited about this pasture new, partly because my application to extend my study permit in South Africa had been denied as at the time I was out of the country. I had the realization of being far gone when I first landed in Japan. First, the flight was long; 17hrs, excluding a layover in Cairo, Egypt. In Japan, I didn’t need to tell any Japanese where I came from; I was naturally different. Kids would point fingers at me to draw the attention of their parents to what probably was their first sight of an African or a Black man. A few friends in Japan, who could speak Japanese well, shared stories of Japanese kids asking their parents what had happened to their (my Black friends’) colour. “Were they playing too much in the dirt?” The kids would ask. Kids!

The paradoxical reality I encountered in Japan was that the non-Japanese community often stuck together, regardless of race. I was once approached by a man who said “hi” to me, then accompanied it with a big hug, like he had just met his long-lost brother. With his hands still encircled around me, he inquired, “where are you from?” “Nigeria,” I said unhesitatingly because it seemed he had a story to tell. “Do you also get stopped by the goddamn police every now and then?” he ranted. “Don’t even get me started on the police,” I quipped. I could write a whole piece about the Japanese police who, by the way, were not of infernal character or fiendish barbarity as their counterparts elsewhere. Not to say they were entirely free from those degrading vices. I must do them the justice to say that the same policemen on bicycles who would stop to ask me of my alien card on a given day in Japan, would be the same ones who would stop me on a different day to ask of the same card, not minding my usual protest: “You were the same guys who stopped me yesterday,” remember? If I could recall who they were, I thought, they had no right not to recognize me. Their excuse was always, “sorry, no English.” Of course, I didn’t buy it.

But to my tale, the man who hugged me, introduced himself as an English man and called me his brother. Whether he said it due to our colonial history or shared experience of police interrogations in Japan or to remedy colonial injustices, I couldn’t tell. But the experience was telling in some respects. For one, it indicates how the where are you from question could be a source of solidarity, resistance, and homemaking. And probably that was what my English brother meant when he asked the question. Like him, I also embarked on saying “hi” to my other brothers and sisters in Japan without embellishing it with a hug (though with infrequent handshakes). My “hi” was almost always reciprocated with the implicit understanding that we were all connected somehow, experiencing a collective sense of struggle, purpose, and hope in a foreign land.

Then I moved to Canada. My first education was to drop the “hi” that glued me to my brothers and sisters in Japan. I had to drop it because my Canadian brothers and sisters couldn’t care one bit to reciprocate the gesture. Some complemented me with head nods, while others gave me a certain look as if to suggest that something was wrong with me. I got an awkward smile from a few, but that was that.

In my early days in Canada, I felt the horrid dread of being approached by well-wishers with the where are you really (originally) from question. Whenever I’d mention Nigeria, it would prompt a piteous or pseudo empathetic response. “Oh, you must be feeling safe here, I saw what Boko Haram did on TV the other day,” someone once told me. In truth, the year I came to Canada was when Boko Haram decided to internationalize its image by kidnapping 276 schoolgirls in Chibok, a village in Borno State, Nigeria. Those who showered me with this grandiose empathy for having escaped Boko Haram and found sanctuary in Canada, withheld from me the chance to explain that I, in fact, didn’t come to Canada directly from Nigeria, but Tokyo. And that even if I did come from Nigeria, my home in Nigeria wasn’t a fortress of Boko Haram, and my family were quite safe from the group’s mayhem, except for the audacious kidnapping that has now become a lucrative enterprise in the country. So, the where are you really from question in this instance, rendered me a subject of misplaced pity and empathy, foreclosing any potential pathway of knowing my benevolent interlocutors.

At some point, I thought it had become universally understood that I could also pose the same question to others as an outcome of my own benign curiosity to know them better. Thus, I asked a certain gentleman with whom I was exchanging warm pleasantries at a dinner party: “Where are you from?” He looked disgustfully at me before responding with another question, which I thought was only a Nigerian thing (answering a question with a question): “When did you come to Canada?” “Three months ago,” I retorted with much earnestness. After a deep sigh, he told me with great solemnity, “okay, I forgive you. You see, my parents came from Pakistan, but I was born in Canada.” It was the one experience I needed to nip the where are you from or originally from question in the ash tray of social taboo topics such as politics and religion. But I knew that not many would purge themselves of it. So I manufactured a defence mechanism. “If anyone should want to know where I came from,” I thought, “I would say heaven.”

When I first exultingly employed what I thought was an ingenious response to the forbidden question, the man I was talking to said, “that is a good one; I’ve not heard it before. But where are you really from?” My hope was the ‘heavenly’ response would enable us to dig into the depths of our true nature which transcends melanin, extends beyond the corporeal, past geographical origin or political ideologies, and seeks to extract that which we rarely have the time or the courage to explore further than is asked of us in our everyday, material lives.

The best rendition of the question was from a lady who asked me, “where were you before you came to Canada?” I thought that was clever, and I ignored the undercurrents in the question and decided to have fun with it: “I was in japan.” The silence was eloquent, and her looks suggested, “well, go on, you sure aren’t Japanese, are you?” I managed a wry smile. Then she continued, “and before Japan?” “I was in South Africa,” I quickly responded, allowing my smile and silence to linger. I got the sense that she wanted me to keep going, and I decided to put both of us out of the misery of another silent meditation: “How far can we push this question,” I finally asked. She smiled. It registered.

And maybe this is the whole point of this essay. How far can we push this question? Why didn’t the lady above stopped asking when I was clearly not making it simple to access the information? Is her social awareness that different that she was unable to pick up on cues that would indicate someone does not want to be pushed further? Or is the assumption of expecting an answer so overt that she feels she has the right to keep pushing until she gets what she’s looking for? Debra Thompson seems to have a response in her book The Long Road Home where she states that the where are you really from question is by no means innocuous.

Where are really from because you don’t seem to fit in here. Where are you really from, because how long you’ve been here will tell me something about your place in this country. Where are you really from, because my whiteness means that I am entitled to your time, your benevolence, your patience, your attention, and your respect. Where are you really from, because my curiosity is more important than your comfort or safety. Where are you really from, because you can’t possibly be from here.

The micro-aggressive insinuations that could be gleaned from this question are limitless. What’s interesting from my limited experiences, is that the most overt and violent instances of this question seem to come from places whose white supremacy would be assumedly less pronounced, such as in South Africa, Japan, and Nigeria. Whereas the more insidious forms seem to come from “the west”. Why is that? Has white supremacy permeated every place on earth and created a world view in every person’s mind that favours whiteness above all else to the point where whether you are in Japan, Nigeria, South Africa, or Timbuktu, the where are you really (originally) from question seeks to determine your state of being compared to whiteness? Would the elder in Nigeria, or the police officer in Japan agree, or are they similarly ignorant to their own white supremacy?

In certain instances, the where are you really from question may create some transient form of bonding and pseudo-solidarity such as it did between me and my fellow aliens or brothers and sisters in Japan. But not all the relationships were ephemeral. Some stood the acid test of times. I still meet up with a Japanese NGO once a month on Zoom to discuss global issues because its members took genuine interest in what I do and “where I actually came from.” Our subject matter in this forum is almost invariably about Nigeria and my state of origin, Kaduna. Our topics, despite my effort to change them, would always circle back to the exotic, noble, profligate, disease-infected, and chronically misgoverned African “other”, making me feel like an exhibition. These are some of the traits or images that outsiders so eminently bestow on Africa. Any attempt to argue otherwise or present a different picture, if one had the stamina to do so, often feels like an exercise in futility. My dehumanizing home could have consumed or shatter my black body if I hadn’t escaped!

Home may not necessarily be a specific space or place, a comfort zone, a memory, or even people. Home may be deeper and more personal than anything that can appear on the outside of us, or anywhere we’ve been. Home may be a place we’ve never seen or a place that is beyond what we can comprehend within the boundaries of our limited awareness. Home may be like love, a word we’ve prescribed to a feeling that comes and goes, that is neither tangible nor reliably descriptive as a place, but a state of being without the unnecessary interpositions or impassable barriers that we erect and impose on others to distort and call into question the sanctity of their being.

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 recent publications use storytelling to explore notions of contested belonging, mobility, and how people experience conflict and peace in everyday life (Benjamin’s writings on roape.net can be found here).

Featured Photograph: A baggage cart vehicle returns to its bag (31 May 2018).

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