Liberia’s Pan-Africanism: a reappraisal and interview with D. Elwood Dunn

November 29, 2022

Brooks Marmon introduces the work and life of D. Elwood Dunn. Dunn, a Liberian intellectual and former politician interviewed by Brooks, asserts Libera’s position in the pan-African, anti-colonial world in the 1970s. While Liberia was associated with moderate states in the 1960s, Dunn sees Liberia, under William R. Tolbert, as a progressive force helping to shape Africa’s post-colonial political trajectory.

By Brooks Marmon

A violent coup d’etat in April 1980 saw the implosion of 130 plus years of rule in Liberia by American-born black repatriates or their descendants.[1] President William R. Tolbert Jr. (1971-80), whose father was born in South Carolina, was the last of this unbroken line. The Chair of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) was assassinated in the Executive Mansion overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Ten days later, just down the beach, a firing squad executed 13 of his leading associates, prominent members of Tolbert’s True Whig Party regime, or cabinet officials.

D. Elwood Dunn, the Minister of State for Presidential Affairs, was one of the senior figures from Tolbert’s administration who survived this deadly purge. A political scientist by training, he had spent the better part of the 1970s climbing Liberia’s bureaucratic governance ranks after obtaining his doctorate from American University. Following the loss of his ministerial position, Dunn briefly assumed a lectureship at the University of Liberia but found his situation in Liberia untenable.

He and his family relocated to the US, where Dunn became one of Liberia’s pre-eminent intellectuals, lecturing at Sewanee – The University of the South, for three decades. From that position, he became one of the leading forces promoting the scholarly study of Liberia. He edited the Liberian Studies Journal for a decade. He co-authored The Historical Dictionary of Liberia, one of the most valuable reference texts on the country, and compiled an edited collection of state of the nation speeches by Liberian presidents from 1848 to 2010.

Dunn’s latest contribution comes in the form of a personal reflection of his service to Liberia, his memoir, A Liberian Life. The book variously explores his childhood in Buchanan, a sleepy Liberian port town, his early intellectual exploits, government career, and academic exile in the United States.

Within this multi-pronged approach, a key theme that emerges is Dunn’s attempt to assert Liberia’s position in the pan-African, anti-colonial world. The country’s strong links to the United States have generally obscured this dimension of its history. While the Liberian capital, Monrovia, is eponymous with the coalition of more moderate states that opposed the more radical Casablanca Group, Dunn clearly sees Liberia, especially under Tolbert, as a progressive force instrumental in shaping Africa’s immediate post-colonial political trajectory.

Dunn was a teenager when Tolbert’s predecessor, William VS Tubman (1944-71), hosted Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sekou Toure for the 1959 Sanniquellie Summit that laid the groundwork for the formation of the Organization of African Unity.[2] Several years later, the initial efforts of Tubman’s Secretary of State, J. Rudolph Grimes, and Romeo Horton, a Liberian banker, culminated in the formation of the African Development Bank.

Throughout the early 1960s, Liberia hosted a procession of visiting anti-colonial leaders. In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela recalled that Tubman provided him with US$5,000 for “weapons and training” for the armed wing of the African National Congress.[3] In A Liberian Life, Dunn notes that the pan-African environment at Cuttington University, the private Liberian institution where he pursued a bachelor’s in political science, “enthralled me…I was walking into a college environment consisting of students from a number of African countries and colonial territories agitating for independence.”

Though a White Redoubt persisted in southern Africa, Africa’s political decolonization was largely complete by 1971 when Tolbert, Tubman’s Vice-President since 1952 came to power. However, the True Whig Party’s pan-African orientation remained pronounced. Less than a year after coming to power, Tolbert served as a pallbearer at Nkrumah’s funeral in Conakry. In 1973, he worked alongside Sierra Leonean President Siaka Stevens to establish the Mano River Union, successfully forming a subregional economic union in advance of the creation of the Economic Community of West African States.[4] A defense pact with Guinea was implemented and Tolbert’s eldest son married the goddaughter of the Ivorian President, Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Under Tolbert, Liberia joined fellow African states and in a move that provoked American ire, broke ties with Israel. He also evinced strong support for self-determination for Western Sahara.

Continental recognition of Tolbert’s diplomacy came in 1979 when the Liberian leader became Chair of the Organization of African Unity. When Tolbert was executed, Dunn was in transit from Zimbabwe, where he had been part of the advance team preparing for Tolbert’s attendance at the nation’s forthcoming independence celebrations.

In this interview with ROAPE, Dunn further reflects on Liberia’s underacknowledged pan-African and international engagements and offers an assessment of Liberia’s position in Africa.

Brooks Marmon: Can you provide ROAPE readers with an overview of significant international and pan-African engagements that marked Tolbert’s political trajectory?

D. Elwood Dunn: When serving as Tubman’s vice president, Tolbert was engaged in a number of missions of a pan-African character. He was Liberia’s envoy in the quest for peace during the Biafra secession crisis in Nigeria. Additionally, he was Tubman’s envoy to President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt in the quest for Afro-Arab solidarity in context of the Middle East conflict. Tolbert’s ties to his Ivorian counterpart, Senior Minister Auguste Denise, may very well have been a prelude to his controversial “dialogue” with Apartheid South Africa in 1975.[5]

Once in the presidency, Tolbert attempted to take Liberia’s continental engagements to the next level for reasons of both internal and external policy. Greater solidarity was pursued with more progressive African states in an attempt to further national unification and integration. Whereas progressive or frontline states leaders were reluctant during the Tubman administration to support Liberia’s membership on the Liberation Committee of the OAU, that membership was secured under Tolbert. What then followed was a fuller implementation of the pan-African project with a flourishing of African regionalism.

As historians more deeply engage with UN and OAU records, they will recover Liberia’s activist Africa project of the 1970s. Though not a decisive leader, it is my impression that Tolbert showed signs of progressive leadership in his Africa policy.

Brooks Marmon: In your view, how deserving is Tolbert of this legacy of a ‘mainstream’ progressive African leader?

D. Elwood Dunn: Tolbert is deserving of such a legacy because he strove to integrate Liberia into the African mainstream. Both as vice-president and then as president, he was exposed to and embraced Africa’s great pan-Africanists – Kwame Nkrumah, Gambel Abder Nasser, Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyerere, etc.

Tolbert was convinced that genuine African unity of thought and action, even an eventual political union of African states was the surest path to the continent’s sustainable development. As I have written elsewhere, where Tubman wished to heal the “wound of loneliness since [Liberia’s] 1847 independence” and stamp on the organization a conservative imprimatur “with some Casablanca [representing African radical nationalism] coloring,” Tolbert saw his task as one of deepening the dye of the Casablanca coloring, or more closely aligning Liberia with progressive African policy.[6]

Why do you think that Tolbert, leader of a country small in terms of both size and population, exhibited such extensive interest in continental affairs?

One must begin a response by pointing out that Tolbert’s predecessor, President Tubman demonstrated similar extensive interest in African affairs. Few appreciate the commanding role of Tubman in the forging of African solidarity in the midst of the Cold War.[7] The OAU that emerged in 1963 was heavily influenced by Liberia. Comparison of a Liberian draft charter proposal and the first charter of the OAU amply makes the case.[8]

For his part, Tolbert wanted to part with the narrative that Liberia was in Africa without being of Africa. He wanted to shed the image of Liberia as a “little America in Africa.” He wanted to Africanize Liberia both internally and externally. Though begun as a Black state in the 19^th century to demonstrate that the Black race was capable of self-governing, internal and external factors undermined this ambition. Tolbert’s vision incorporated the restoration of this founding mission (“African regeneration”) and carrying forward the pan-African project.

One of your best-known books, Liberia and the United States During the Cold War, offers an unassuming, but searing indictment of the shortcoming of the United States’ Liberia policy. For readers who may be unfamiliar with it, how do you evaluate that relationship?

In the long history of relations between the two countries since American recognition in 1862, one a superpower and the other a small African country, there have been the usual ups and downs, each party attempting to pursue its values and interests. I remain appreciative of the asymmetrical relationship. In the 1970s Liberia was struggling with fundamental internal change. Liberia was also contending with the reality of being an understudied country with paradigms proffered largely by foreign academics.[9]

It does not seem to me that US policy was sympathetic to the change process. Rather, the policy seemed steeped in the old narrative of two uneven Liberias. Under the circumstances, American antagonism hastened the fall of the True Whig Party regime. The eventual post-coup policy of ambivalence toward the presidency of Samuel Doe, and the arms-length US stance during the civil war of 1989 – 2003, did not evince the vaunted “special relationship.” Liberia is a small African state. Its future is an African future. Liberia’s ties with the external world need to be viewed in this light.

Tolbert had an uneasy relationship with his youthful leftist domestic opponents, such as the Progressive Alliance of Liberia (PAL) and the pan-African oriented Movement for Justice in Africa (MOJA). As these groups garnered strength over the latter part of Tolbert’s rule, they faced state repression. Was this a line that Tolbert fully embraced or was he pressured to take a hardline by ‘old guard’ members of the True Whig Party?[10]

Tolbert’s approach to the social movements, MOJA and PAL, as with all progressive opponents was to engage in democratic dialogue. He opted for dialogue because he wanted to more fully democratize Liberia. Some of his senior political colleagues who saw things otherwise were the real purveyors of “state repression.” An indecisive political leader, Tolbert was not able effectively to communicate his change agenda to the “old guards” of the True Whig Party. A situation thus developed where the forces for change looked wearily upon the forces of the status quo. This domestic engagement did not proceed without subtle external interference. In the end, Tolbert became the cloth between the scissors.

One other member of Tolbert’s cabinet, his Finance Minister, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, has written an autobiography. Do you see any key differences between her take on this era and yours?

Former President Sirleaf’s take is already in the public domain. And mine is in my recently-released memoir. Mine is a much more nuanced view of Liberian history and the vision for change that Tolbert was attempting to implement.

I don’t see consistently two Liberias. My lived experience has not been two Liberias. I see complexities. I see a mosaic. I see communities of peoples on the soil that became Liberia striving to forge a modern nation-state. Conflict and cooperation were inevitable then and they are today as Liberia forges ahead. Two centuries of efforts have landed us where we currently are. We are not in a good place, but we have been in bad places in the past. We will overcome. Liberia will endure. An alternation of democratic forces will define its governance, not the dominant but fleeting “us” versus “them” narrative.

Brooks Marmon is a post-doctoral scholar at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University. Brooks wrote the introductory passage and conducted the interview. Follow Marmon on twitter @AfricaInDC.

Featured Photographs: D. Elwood Dunn and William R. Tolbert Jr. (from Dunn’s private collection of photographs from his time in government service).

Notes

[1] In the academic literature, this group has traditionally been referred to as ‘Americo-Liberian.’ Locally, they are more frequently dubbed ‘Congo.’ Robtel Pailey, in Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa: The Political Economy of Belonging to Liberia (Cambridge University Press, 2021) calls the former term a “misnomer” and prefers “black settlers” (p.1). Dunn himself believes that “racial and ethnic slurs are being replaced with enlightenment as Liberia speaks truth and reconciles in the aftermath of a brutal civil war.”

[2] J. Gus Liebenow, “Which Road to Pan-African Unity? The Saniquellie Conference, 1959,” in Gwendolen M. Carter, ed., Politics in Africa: 7 Cases (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966): 1-32.

[3] Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1995): 351.

[4] Peter Robson, “The Mano River Union,” Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 20, No. 4 (1982): 613-628; Augustus F. Caine, “The Mano River Union: An Experiment in Economic Integration,” Liberian Studies Journal, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1988): 6-41. Tubman and Tolbert thus seem to have both been influential in shaping the sub-regional and functional approach to African unity that has assumed prominence on the continent.

[5] D. Elwood Dunn, “The 1975 Vorster Visit to Liberia: Implications for Free Africa’s Relations with Pretoria,” Liberian Studies Journal, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1982-83): 37-54.

[6] D. Elwood Dunn, Liberia and Independent Africa, 1940s to 2012: A Brief Political Profile (Cherry Hill: Africana Homestead Legacy Publishers, 2012): 15.

[7] On Tubman’s foreign policy see: D. Elwood Dunn, The Foreign Policy of Liberia During the Tubman Era, 1944-1971 (London: Hutchinson, 1979).

[8] See: D. Elwood Dunn, “Research Notes: Liberia and Founding the Organization of African Unity/Organizing African Unity,” Liberian Studies Journal, Vol. 45, Nos. 1&2, 143-237.

[9] Probably the most notorious of these is Robert W. Clower, et al. Growth without Development: An Economic Survey of Liberia (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966).

[10] Liberia’s progressive movements of this era are understudied, but one key primary source text is: H. Boima Fahnbulled (ed.), Voice of Protest: Liberia on the Edge, 1974-1980 (Boca Raton: Universal Publishers, 2004).

More of the same: coups, imperialism and instability in Burkina Faso

ROAPE

November 24, 2022

Discussing the recent coup in Burkina Faso, ROAPE’s Bettina Engels describes the major instability in the country and the region. For several years there have been attacks by non-state groups across the country – with two million people displaced, and more than 4000 killed in the last 12 months. The current military junta is an expression of this wider breakdown, and the intervention of imperialist countries.

By Bettina Engels

On Friday, 30 September, gunfire was heard at the Presidential palace in Ouagadougou early in the morning. Soldiers blocked some of the principal roads in Burkina Faso’s capital. The national broadcasting station RTB (Radiodiffusion-Télévision du Burkina) was temporarily cut off. It was a sense of déjà vu – a very similar situation occurred not even nine months before, on 24 January. Then a coup led by one of the country’s highest military ranks, lieutenant colonel Paul-Henri Sandogo Damiba, toppled the previous civilian President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré. In January, many people principally agreed to the coup, or at least they did not oppose it.

Since the second half of the 2010s, and clearly increasingly during the last three years, non-state armed groups, mostly jihadist ones with linkages to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, have committed attacks in Burkina Faso. Around two million people are internally displaced, almost ten percent of the population. Between late October 2021 and late October 2022, more than 4,000 people have been killed in attacks, counter strikes by the military, etc. Damiba and his Mouvement patriotique pour la sauvegarde et la restauration (MPSR), the military junta, that took over over in January, justified their coup pointing at the government’s failure to effectively fight the armed groups.

Another coup to “fight terrorism”?

Eight months later, at the end of September this year, lower ranks in the army led by captain Ibrahim Traoré staged a coup against Damiba. The number of attacks have increased within the past six months, despite the announcement of the transitional government that had been appointed in March, headed by Damiba as president, to make the “fight against terrorism” the top priority. The recent sequence of armed attacks temporarily peaked in late September with two consecutive attacks near the town of Djibo.

According to official figures, 37 persons, including 27 members of the armed forces, were killed in an attack of a convoy in Gaskindé 180 kilometres North of Ouagadougou on 26 September. The convoy of more than 200 trucks was accompanied by the state security forces and was supposed to deliver foodstuff to Djibo that is currently home of around 300,000 people, most of them internally displaced. Earlier in September, on the same road 35 civilians were killed in a mine explosion. Meanwhile, foodstuff and medicines are now only transported to Djibo by helicopters.

The military coup, four days after the Gaskindé attack, did not come as a surprise. Frustration within the army about the lack of success in the fight against the armed jihadist groups is ever-present. Lower ranks have long been feeling ignored by the military leadership. In late September, Ibrahim Traoré ineffectively demanded a meeting with Damiba, to present the claims of the lower ranks, notably those within the MPSR, to him. In contrast to the January coup, the one on 30 September was a typical “coup from below” carried out by junior officers who do not see any chance to prevail within the army.

Captain Ibrahim Traoré begun his military career as a “rank-and-file” soldier and successivelyrose to being the chief of the special forces “Cobra” in the region around the town of Kaya in the North of the country. In 2018, he was deployed as a blue helmet in the UN mission MINUSMA (Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali) in Mali. Traoré supported Damiba’s coup in January and was a member of the MPSR from the beginning. Aged 34, he is said to be currently the world’s youngest head of a state.

Traoré’s appearance on television on 30 September in the evening was remarkably similar to Damiba’s in January. Surrounded by armed and mostly masked soldiers, Traoré read a declaration that the government was dissolved, the constitution suspended and the state borders closed. A curfew was imposed from 9 pm to 6 am.

France’s problematic role

At first it was unclear where Damiba was staying. There were rumours saying that the French army had helped him by flying him to Dakar, or that he was staying in the French military base of Kamboisin close to Ouagadougou, where he was preparing a counter offensive against the recent coup. The French ministry of foreign affairs denied this immediately and clearly: France would not be involved claimed the official statement. It was obvious that the rumour would reinforce the critique and rejection of France, the former colonial power that still has an enormous influence in the region.

In Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso, the second largest city in the country, furious demonstrators, on 1 October,attacked the French cultural institutes, and in the capital the French embassy. It might have been strategic, in order to put pressure on Damiba, that Traoré publicly blamed France for protecting Damiba and announced that Burkina was “open to all partners in the fight against terrorism.” Religious and traditional authorities mediated between Traoré and Damiba. On Sunday, 2 October Damiba agreed to step back, on the condition that security for his supporters within the military and himself was guaranteed and the schedule for a transition of no more than two years would be respected. Traoré agreed. The borders were reopened for air traffic 48 hours after they had been closed, and the night curfew was lifted. Actually, it emerged, Damiba had left the country to neighbouring Togo, as the Togolese government confirmed on 3 October.

On 5 October, a spokesperson of the putschists declared Traoré as President and head of the armed forces. On 14 and 15 October a “national assembly” of representatives of the political parties, traditional and religious authorities, trade unions and civil society was held. A charter of the transition was adopted with a schedule for the transition of 21 months, until July 2024. Traoré’s timetable followed the same pattern as Damiba eight months before. In February Damiba had installed a 15-person commission to work out a timetable for the transition and in early March, he signed the charter of the transition and appointed a transitional government.

The recent transitional government was appointed on 25 October, with Appollinaire Joachim Kyelem de Tembela, a lawyer and former director of a think tank for international and strategic studies, as prime minister. The legislative assembly (parliament has been dissolved) is now comprised of 20 persons named by the president, 13 (who must not be members of any political party) representing each one of the country’s regions, 12 representatives of political parties, 16 military personnel and 10 “civil society” persons (two each from agriculture, the private sector, youth, women, and people living with handicaps).

Geopolitical framing

Following the January coup, some people have hoped that a military head of state would be able to strengthen the army in the fight against the armed groups and to improve the security situation in the country. Given that during the course of 2022, the situation has deterioriated, a sense of resignation now predominates. During the demonstrations on the week-end following the coup (1-2 October) Russian flags were present, might be interpreted in various ways: as indicating that some actually hope that Russian military support – which would probably mean deploying the private military company Wagner – would result in success in the fight against the armed groups. Or the flags could be considered an expression of the steadily increasing critical stance towards the influence of France, and particularly the French military presence in the region. Or possibly some of the flags do not come with any clear intention or political claim. In any case the Russian flags attracted more attention in the European media than in Burkina Faso. The framing of “France vs. Russia” rather reflects the proclivities of European media, their political discourses and geopolitical interests rather than a serious analysis of the recent conflicts in West Africa.

Actually Damiba, being one of the highest military officers, already had suggested to the previous president Kaboré to deploy the contested Russian private military company Wagner; a suggestion Kaboré swiftly rejected. So far it remains open whether in Burkina Faso, as in neighbouring Mali, French troops will withdraw. According to media reports, Traoré meanwhile has declared that he has no intentions of hiring Wagner mercenaries. With regard to reports of severe human rights violations and violence committed by Wagner mercenaries in Mali and the Central African Republic, deploying the private military company to Burkina would simply deepen the instability. The very last thing that people of Burkina Faso need is yet another imperialist actor able to arbitrarily perpetrate violence.

It remains an open question who should be Burkina Faso’s “partners” in the fight against terrorism. It would be naive to hope that the armed groups will stop the attacks without being forced by military violence to do so. Therefore, the Burkinabé army needs personnel, equipment and competencies – including the competency to respect and defend substantial human rights and protect the people in the country instead becoming a threat to security itself. The former colonial power France has hardly proven itself as the right “partner”, and the French military operation “Barkhane” in the Sahel region has reinforced the popular rejection towards France. Neither has the transnational joint “anti-terror” operation of the G5 Sahel states (Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauretania, Niger, Chad) thus far succeeded in improving the security situation. Serious accusations have been raised of human rights violations and massacres against civilians by soldiers of these operations. Altogether, military interventions have seriously destabilized than stabilized the region. The option of an ECOWAS intervention or a UN mission has hardly been discussed.

Little room for alternative visions

Radical organisations and trade unions have opposed both coups. Yet their room for manoeuvre already has been severely curtailed by the previous elected government of Kaboré. Their situation had not improved after the coup in January, and it seems unlikely that this will be the case in the near future. Most of them follow the process of transition from a critical distance. A new transitional government of 23 ministers (five women and 18 men, three of them being from high military ranks) was installed on 25 October. National elections are supposed to be held in 2024. Many people have serious doubts about the institution of national elections. Related to past presidential and parliament elections, calls for boycotts have been frequently launched. Today, radical political groups will discuss how to position themselves with regard to the elections planned for 2024. The prolonged security crisis and political-military instability are a constant personal strain on activists. Activistsand their organisations have to permanently react to events. These conditions hardly leave room to reflect on developing progressive visions and strategies.

Bettina Engels teaches at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, Freie Universität Berlin, in Berlin. Bettina is an editor of ROAPE.

Featured Photograph: Demonstrators at the Rond point des Nations Unies in support of the 24 January, 2022 coup that overturned President Roch Marc Kaboré (24 January 2022).

The garden and the jungle – coloniality, knowledge and development in Africa

ROAPE

November 22, 2022

Europe’s assault on the rest of us, who were exterminated and expropriated, millions who were enslaved and died resisting European occupation, continues today – recently, and graphically, re-stated by the European Union’s top diplomat Josep Borrell. Eyob Gebremariam exposes the language and practice of coloniality, which sustains inequalities at the global level and has done for nearly 500 years of European empire-building.

By Eyob Balcha Gebremariam

In October this year the European Union’s top diplomat Josep Borrell praised Europe as a “garden” and bashed the rest of the world as a “jungle”. By claiming Europe as a “garden” of freedom, prosperity and cohesion, Borrell is equally asserting that the rest of the world is a jungle of repression, destitution and division. Borrell is affirming that these so-called “Western values” are the fruits of European “civilisation” and “development” are non-existent in non-western societies because the jungle is uncivilised and undeveloped. It appears that Borrell was not aware that his speech was recorded. He wanted more private discussions with his audience where he could have an uncensored discussion without the “jungle” listening.

If we look closely, Mr Borrell’s speech did not only distinguish between the physical and geographical places per se. He also emboldened the difference between the Western white man capable of rational thinking and the non-western “savages”. Borrell is immortalising the hierarchisation among human beings, building on the Cartesian logic of “I think; therefore I am”.

The unstated assumption of this Cartesian logic is that others do not think or do not think properly; therefore, they do not exist, or their existence can be disregarded. The residents of the garden “think”, and they achieve civilisation and modernity. Those from the jungle are incapable of “thinking” and are masters of and subject to “the laws of the jungle”.

A decolonial orientation recognises and challenges the overarching Eurocentrism that informed Josep Borrell’s speech. The language Borrell used is not accidental. It is a well-thought and rationalised standpoint. His thoughts are deeply embedded in the EU’s ideologies, institutions, policies, and practices. Indeed, Borrell underscored that emphasising the difference between the garden and the jungle is “the most important message” of his speech.

Borrell suggested that the gardeners must protect against the “invasion” of the garden by the unthinking savages. However, he insisted the garden cannot be protected by “building walls”. Instead, Borrell demanded the gardeners “to be much more engaged with the jungle”. I bet if someone used a time machine to travel back to attend the infamous 1884 Berlin Conference, the tone and orientation of the discussion would be the same, i.e. to exploit and subjugate the jungle.

In this blogpost, I aim to explain how the logic and imperatives of colonial relations remain constitutive parts of the ideologies, institutions and practices of pursuing “development” and “science” in Africa. Using the concept of coloniality, I argue that one of the fundamental starting points to challenge the forms of present-day colonial relations is to recognise and acknowledge their existence. Coloniality is deeply embedded in shaping socio-economic, political, cultural, and intellectual relations across the world, particularly in Africa’s relations with the so-called “Global North”.

The West and the rest

Africa’s relations with Europe can hardly be detached from the multiple manifestations of coloniality. Coloniality is the sustained inequities and power asymmetries at the global level that stem from nearly 500 years of European empire-building. The notion of coloniality enables us to uncover the camouflages of imperialism which are often depicted and narrated from Eurocentric standpoints.

Socio-historical and political processes broadly categorised as “civilisation”, “progress”, “development”, and lately, “the spread of democracy and human rights” served as vehicles of coloniality. From the standpoint of Africans (and also Asians, Aboriginal peoples and indigenous peoples of the Americas), the above socio-historical and political processes caused the dehumanisation of non-Europeans, exploitation, genocide, the destruction of knowledge and seemingly permanent subordination to the socio-cultural and political interests of the West/Europe/the ”Global North”.

The legitimacy, credibility and value of African societies, their products and social relations have been consistently and systematically delegitimised, discredited and devalued. As a result, Africa’s position in the global science and research ecosystem remains negligible. Africa constitutes approximately 10 per cent of the global population but contributes to only 0.7 per cent of academic researchers globally.

This is not because there is no knowledge in Africa. It is because the mainstream knowledge production ecosystem is essentially Eurocentric and degrades non-Eurocentric orientations. On the contrary, European societies’ socio-historical processes, inventions and achievements have been celebrated as universal standards, hence superior. Such hierarchisation served the colonial logic and empire-building in the past and present. This was in devastating display in the speech made by Borrell.

Coloniality and development

Borrell claimed that Europe has “the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that humankind has been able to build.” This “best combination” has been packaged as modernisation and development and exported to the “jungle”, particularly since the 1950s. The ideologies, institutions, policies and practices of development embrace this Eurocentric orientation. The institutionalisation of colonial relations between Europe and Africa remained concealed from this narrow interpretation of history. In simple terms, Europe’s economic prosperity is achieved at the expense of the continued deprivation of formerly colonised societies.

Europe’s “economic prosperity” is an outcome of its dominant role in the operations of the “commercial-non-territorial-military empire”. This empire thrives on the exploitation of cheap natural resources across the world, the dominance of the World Bank, the IMF and WTO in controlling and dictating economic policies of former colonies, the military and political intervention of the West into former colonies (coups d’état, assassinations, invasion, bombardment etc).

The Franc Zone is one ideal example of how coloniality sustained plunder and exploitation to benefit Europe at the expense of Africa. The French Treasury controls the entire economic activity of 15 African countries, “members of the franc zone”. These 15 West and Central African countries, including Comoros, constitute around 14 per cent of Africa’s total population. Four of the five least developed countries of the world based on UNDP’s human development index are members of the Franc Zone (Niger, Central Africa Republic, Chad and Mali). The colonial pact that necessitated the establishment of the franc zone was part of the colonially imposed “development model” after “WWII”. The aim was “guaranteeing France’s economic control of the colonies and facilitating their wealth’s drainage towards the economically fragile metropole.“

The Franc Zone illustrates the normalisation and institutionalisation of coloniality. Countries in the “jungle” are made to surrender their monetary sovereignty to enable “the garden” to blossom. Fifty per cent of the foreign reserve of the Franc Zone countries is deposited in the French Treasury, and their fiscal policies are highly constrained because their currencies are pegged to the Euro. As a result, the 15 African countries cannot invest in their economies to enhance their productivity or improve their citizens’ well-being. Instead, their economies remain “adversely incorporated” into unfavourable and exploitative trade relations with Europe (mainly France). The political elites in these countries are benefiting from the system and so have little incentive to challenge the neo-colonial relations radically.

Unless we recognise that coloniality is the order of the day, we cannot see the threads that connect the deprivation of the “jungle” and the prosperity of the “garden”. If we do not see it, we will not recognise it; hence we will not act against it.

“I do not know what a decolonial research would look like.”

On 21 October, I attended a conference at the Royal Society in London entitled African scientists in colonial and postcolonial contexts (1800 – 2000). The conference offered a stimulating scholarly space to reflect on “personal and professional ways in which European science was shaped by colonial and postcolonial contexts”. Most scientific archives hardly recognise, preserve and record the scientific knowledges, contributions and role of African scientists. One of the reasons for this is that Africa has been depicted as a “dark continent” devoid of knowledge. In most cases where African knowledges are recognised, they are often categorised as “traditional” or “indigenous knowledge”; hence particular and provincial. European knowledge is “modern” and, most notably “universal” (relevant and vital, in any context).

“Coloniality of knowledge” is one of the fundamental ways in which the power asymmetries of the empire-building period remained deeply engrained in the present institutions and processes of knowledge production. Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano argues that:

In the beginning colonialism was a product of a systematic repression, not only of the specific beliefs, ideas, images, symbols or knowledge that were not useful to global colonial domination, while at the same time, the colonisers were expropriating from the colonised their knowledge, especially in mining, agriculture, engineering, as well as their products and work. The repression fell, above all, over the modes of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and systems of images, symbols, modes of signification, over the resources, patterns, and instruments of formalised and objectivised expression, intellectual or visual.

Kenyan scholar Ngugi wa Thiong’o also referred to the coloniality of knowledge by focusing on how colonialism causes the “annihilation” of colonised societies’ languages, cultures, knowledges and belief systems.

A conference concerned with the misrepresentation of African scientists cannot afford to disregard a critical engagement with the notion of the coloniality of knowledge. The papers at the conference presented several insightful cases about how colonial relations shaped and influenced the lives of African scientists and Africans who might not necessarily fall in the category of a “scientist”. However, in my view, most papers fell some way short of approaching colonialism as an epistemological project (a totalising theory of knowledge). One that views colonialism as not only acquiring knowledges from Africa which had relevance to empire-building, but also as institutionalizing a knowledge hierarchy from which colonial forces have continued to benefit.

When the coloniality of knowledge is at the centre of studying the relationship between science and colonialism, the inquiry enables us to go beyond recording the unjust relations embedded in colonial knowledge production. Additional questions may ask how such inequities were cemented during colonisation and how coloniality sustained them.

I spoke with one of the conference presenters about decolonial knowledge production and the limits of Eurocentric perspectives. The person responded, “I do not know what decolonial research would look like.” It was an honest response. This is why I insist that until we recognise that the “coloniality of knowledge” is dominant in mainstream intellectual enquiries, we will not apply truly decolonial perspectives.

Eyob Balcha Gebremariam is a Research Associate at Perivoli Africa Research Centre, University of Bristol, UK and Adjunct Professor of African Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna, Italy. Gebremariam has written on coloniality here.

Featured Photograph: Meeting with the Representative for Foreign and Security Policy of the European Union and Vice-President of the European Commission, Josep Borrell (4 November 2021).

Rage and Bloom – a review

ROAPE

November 17, 2022

Lena Anyuolo is a Kenyan writer, poet and feminist who lives in Nairobi. She specialises in human rights work, political activism and environmentalism. Rage and Bloom is Anyuolo’s debut collection of poems and tackles patriarchy, revolutionary contradictions as well as hope for a better tomorrow. Stuart T A Bolus celebrates a collection of poetry that speaks to the 21st century of pure unapologetic African love.

By Stuart T A Bolus

This collection of striking poetry leaves a deep impression on the reader that lasts long after you put this collection down. Lena Anyuolo truly knows how to transport the mind of the reader into the many situations that they find themselves in these collections of short but evocative poems.

There are recurring themes throughout, revolution and its often-disappointing conclusion, the power that sex holds over individuals, and of loss. Each theme is partitioned into different chapters of the poetry anthology. The first chapter Rage covers the anger of a young revolutionary angry and bitter that the promised utopia hasn’t arrived. The second chapter Transition sets a different tone while some poems still carry the hot anger of the previous chapter focusing more on the personal loss of the individual, of a lover’s last embrace, and protests that end with the loss of a loved one. The final chapter Bloom takes on an almost ethereal tone where the time and space of the poems are never truly defined, more a stream of consciousness with thoughts that tackle topics ranging from the resting place of fallen comrades to a soliloquy to the moon at the dead of night. For a short anthology, it captures a lot of emotion and heartfelt meaning which must be commended.

Lena Anyuolo, the author of Rage and Bloom

Revolution and the false hopes that comes with it is dealt with in almost heart-breaking ways. One poem in the chapter Rage “B802” Marxist dialectics are mentioned almost simultaneously with the act of taking drugs as if to emphasise that the rush of narcotics mirrors the rush of revolutionary fervour that can take over a person’s mind. One wonder’s if the cold turkey of revolution lurks in the author’s psyche. The poem juxtapositions the young idealistic Marxist getting driven in fancy cars and discussing left-wing theory while surrounded by luxury shines light on the absurdity of the situation. The author captures the hypocrisy of the upper classes who talk revolution yet clearly benefit handsomely from the status quo.

In the second chapter Transition two poems stand out, “Childhood” where a simple statement that childhood isn’t simple unfolds to a tragic ending where one is confronted with the allegations of patricide. Such a shocking turnaround of events characterises a lot of the work in this collection. It stays with you long after you’ve set down the book and taken a moment to think about what you have just read.

In contrast, the poem “Loomis Heads” detailing the aching for lost love is soft yet peppered with moments of vulgarity that shows us that love is not always high-minded and is always partly based on base impulses as well as any notions of romantic love that one thinks of. It was a very refreshing take on love poetry that speaks to the 21st century of pure unapologetic African love, devoid of wanting to be accepted, but simply being raw and therefore, real.

The final chapter Bloom occupies the most dreamlike state of the chapters, tapping into conscious thoughts. “Saba Saba” where the author lists all the female activists and revolutionaries they admire from Kenya, Morocco to China and beyond, creating a sense that they are all from one family fighting for the same cause across different nations. The final words “Homeland or death! We shall win!” on the fight against patriarchy really puts fire in the soul and highlights that although our struggles are eternal they will never stop being waged until our objectives are realised.

This book was heavy on the heart but I’m glad that I was able to read it. One can almost feel yourself on the Kenyan streets, Swahili spoken in the dusty pathways while lovers catch glimpses of each other from their windowsills. The ache of lost love that is all too familiar is felt on these pages and the bitterness of revolution that never arrives is palpable. The author has extraordinary talent and I very much look forward to more work from her in the future.

Stuart T A Bolus is a British-Ghanaian MPhil graduate of the Centre of African Studies at Cambridge University. He is also the author of the chapter featured in Critical Insights: Post Colonial Literature, writing the chapter Obliteration or Assimilation? Culture Clash in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.

Towards a just transition: breaking with the existing order

ROAPE

November 15, 2022

The action proposed by world leaders, their advisors, and corporate lobbyists at the climate talks (COP27) in Egypt are neoliberal, market-based, and focused on preserving a racist and capitalist global order. Introducing a collection of papers on the climate emergency in North Africa, Hamza Hamouchene, Ouafa Haddioui and Katie Sandwell denounce mainstream and top-down solutions for an environmental crisis engulfing the region, and continent.

By Hamza Hamouchene, Ouafa Haddioui and Katie Sandwell

The mainstream narratives on the climate change, the ecological crisis and the energy transition in North Africa are still dominated by international neoliberal institutions, whose analyses are biased and exclude questions of class, race, gender, justice, power, or colonial history. Their proposed solutions do not address the root causes of the climate, ecological, food and energy crises. The knowledge produced by such institutions is profoundly disempowering and overlooks oppression and resistance, focusing largely on the advice of ‘experts’, to the exclusion of voices from below.

The historical, political, and geophysical realities of the North Africa region mean that both the effects of and the solutions to the climate crisis there will be distinct from those in other contexts. North Africa was forcibly integrated into the global capitalist economy in a subordinate position: colonial powers influenced or forced North African countries to structure their economies around the extraction and export of resources – usually provided cheaply and in raw form – coupled with the import of high-value industrial goods. The result was large-scale transfer of wealth to the imperial centres, at the expense of local development.[1]

The persistence today of such unequal and asymmetric relations reaffirms the role of North African countries as exporters of natural resources, such as oil and gas, and primary commodities that are heavily dependent on water and land, such as monoculture cash crops. This entrenches an outward-looking extractivist economy, exacerbating food dependency and the ecological crisis while maintaining relations of imperialist domination and neo-colonial hierarchies.[2]

There are therefore crucial questions that need to be raised when addressing climate change and transitioning towards renewable energies in the region: What does a just response to climate change look like here? Does it mean the freedom to move to, and open borders with, Europe? Does it mean the payment of climate debt, restitution, and redistribution by Western governments, by multinational corporations, and by rich local elites? Does it mean a radical break with the capitalist system? What should happen to fossil fuel resources in the region that are extracted to a significant extent by Western corporations? Who should control and own renewable energy? What does adapting to a changing climate mean, and who will shape and benefit from it? And where are the key agents who will fight for meaningful change and radical transformation?

Just Transition(s) in North Africa?

What is ‘just transition’?

The concept of ‘just transition’ has emerged as a framework that places justice at the centre of the discussion. It is usually traced back to the US in the 1970s, when labour unions, local communities and other social movements sharing an interest in a liveable environment and decent, safe, and fairly paid work aligned against polluting industries and their unfair policies. Over the following decades, the concept was adopted by a range of social movements around the world who have built coalitions and shared visions of transformative solutions for the climate crisis that tackle underlying causes, and that put human rights, ecological regeneration, and people’s sovereignty at the centre.

A just transition is not a stand-alone concept but a field of contestation; a space where struggles about genuine responses to the climate crisis can be formulated and put into practice. Progressive social movements have an abiding conviction that people should not bear the heaviest costs of a sustainable transition. They should rather be the leading agents in shaping such a transition. From feminist and indigenous perspectives to regional and national programmes, movements are advancing their own definitions of both ‘justice’ and ‘transition’ in their diverse contexts.

For us, discussions of a just transition in North Africa and beyond must respond to the reality of unequal development caused by imperialism and colonialism. Therefore, a just transition must include radical transformations that increase the power of working people and reduce the power of capital and governing elites. We need to also recognise that environmental issues cannot be addressed without addressing the racist, sexist, and other oppressive structures of the capitalist economy and that the environmental crisis is much broader than just the climate crisis. Ultimately, a just transition cannot be achieved without transformations of political, as well as economic, power towards greater democratisation.

The concept of a just transition has been shaped partially by labour movements, so the question of decent work remains central to many serious proposal. The International Trade Union Confederation has dubbed the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region the worst in the world for workers’ rights, with systematic violations across the region. Across the Arab world, youth unemployment is almost twice the global average and about two-thirds of workers in North Africa are employed in the informal sector.

Today, the vast majority of humanity, regardless of the kind of work they do, are giving up some part of their essential daily consumption, their human rights, or their ability to live a dignified life in order to keep propping up the super-profits of transnational corporations. Whether this is because their food, health, energy and care systems have been privatised, putting the full burden of care on the family unit – because they have lost or are at risk of losing access to their lands, territories or fishing rights – or because they are unable to find work and struggle to make a living in an informal economy where they have no means to demand a living wage, the effects are the same. It is no coincidence that this precarious and exploited majority is also the group most at risk from climate change, and least able to protect themselves from its effects.

The dynamics are complex and obviously different across countries of North Africa, yet many shared challenges and questions also emerge from an exploration of what would a just transition look like: Whose needs and rights should be prioritized in an energy transition? What model of energy production, and extraction, can deliver energy to all working people? How are Northern countries and International Financial Institutions forcing the region into shouldering the burden of the energy transition, and what would a more just solution look like? What role should states play in driving a just transition, and what are the possibilities for democratic control of state power for this transition? What alliances of working people are possible, and what role can international solidarity and resistance play in supporting these?

The dossier

In the various essays in Just Transition(s) in North Africa compiled by the Transnational Institute, the contributors initiate a deeper discussion of what just transition means in the context of North Africa and the Arab region.

Mohamed Gad debunks the World Bank’s claim that the liberalisation of electricity prices in Egypt ended subsidies to the rich and redirected resources towards the poor. Instead, he shows how it paved the way for the entry of international finance, at the expense of the poorest – radically turning a basic service into a commodity.

Jawad Moustakbal, in his article on the energy sector in Morocco, asks important questions including, who decides on, who benefits from, and who pays the price for Morocco’s so-called energy transition?

In their contribution on Tunisia, Chafik Ben Rouine and Flavie Roche show how the country’s energy transition plan relies heavily on privatisation and foreign funding, while neglecting democratic decision-making, situating the country firmly within the global neoliberal programme for the development of renewable energy.

In her article on Algeria, Imane Boukhatem highlights the opportunities, challenges and potential injustices facing the green energy transition in Algeria and argues that the country must rapidly transform its energy sector, with a core focus on social justice.

Mohamed Salah and Razaz Basheir, in their contribution on the electricity crisis in Sudan, they chart the evolution of the energy sector in the country since colonialism and attribute its uneven development to policies from that era and to their continuation in the post-colonial period.

Karen Rignall shows how solar energy is embedded in a long history of extraction in Morocco and reveals some of the striking continuities between fossil fuel commodity chains and those of renewable energies in the country.

In his article, Hamza Hamouchene shows how renewable energy engineering projects tend to present climate change as a problem that is common to the whole planet, without ever questioning the capitalist energy model or the historical responsibilities of the industrialized West.

Joanna Allan, Hamza Lakhal and Mahmoud Lemaadel, in highlighting how extractivism operates today in the part of Western Sahara currently occupied by Morocco, emphasize the voices of the Saharawi population and argue that current renewable energy projects in Western Sahara simply sustain and ‘greenwash’ colonialism, undermining a just transition that could benefit local communities.

Finally, Sakr El Nour, in his essay argues that countries in the region are subjected to unequal exchange with the Global North, particularly the EU, through trade agreements that enable the North to benefit from North African agricultural products at preferential rates. He contends that North Africa needs to recast its agricultural, environmental, food and energy policies.

Breaking with business as usual

It is increasingly clear that a just transition for North Africa requires a recognition of the historical responsibility of the industrialized West in causing global warming. It needs to acknowledge the role of power in shaping both how climate change is caused, and who carries the burden of its impacts and of solutions to the crisis. Climate justice and a just transition should mean breaking with business as usual that protects global political elites, multinational corporations, and autocratic regimes, while promoting a radical social and ecological transformation.

The imperatives of justice are increasingly leading to a consensus among activists on the need for climate reparations to be (re)paid to countries in the Global South by the rich North. This must take the form not of loans and additional debts but of massive transfers of wealth and technology, cancelling current odious debts, halting illicit capital flows, dismantling neo-colonial trade and investment agreements like the Energy Charter Treaty and stopping the ongoing plunder of resources. The financing of the transition needs to take into account the current, ongoing and future loss and destruction caused by the changing climate, which is occurring disproportionately in the South.

Yet since inequalities exist not only between North and South, but also within all countries of the world, how can a programme of climate reparations be combined with the creation of a just, democratic, and equitable energy system within the countries of North Africa?

In many ways, the climate crisis and the urgently required green transition offer us a chance to reshape international politics. Coping with the dramatic transformation of our climate will require a break with existing militarist, colonial and neoliberal projects. Therefore, the struggle for a just transition must be fiercely democratic. It must involve the communities who are most affected, and it must be geared towards providing for the needs of all. It means building a future in which working people have enough energy, and a clean and safe environment. Above all we must build a future that is in harmony with the revolutionary demands of the African and Arab uprisings: popular sovereignty, bread, freedom, and social justice.

This is a version of the introduction to the dossier Just Transition(s) in North Africa compiled by the Transnational Institute.

Hamza Hamouchene is the North Africa Programme Coordinator at the Transnational Institute. Ouafa Hiddioui is the North Africa Programme Assistant at the Transnational Institute. Katie Sandwell is the Agrarian and Environmental Justice Programme Coordinator at the Transnational Institute.

Featured Photograph: People gather in Tahrir Square, Cairo, 2011 to call for an end to sectarian divides and support for Palestine (Gigi Ibrahim/Flickr commons license).

Notes

[1] Amin, S. (1990) Delinking: Towards a polycentric world. Zed Books; Amin, S. (2013) The Implosion of Capitalism. Pluto Press. See also Rodney, W. (2012) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Pambazuka Press; and Galeano, E. (1973) Open Veins of Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press.

[2] Hamouchene, H. (2019) ‘Extractivism and resistance in North Africa’. Transnational Institute; Riahi, L. and Hamouchene, H. (2020) ‘Deep and comprehensive dependency: how a trade agreement with the EU could devastate the Tunisian economy’. Transnational Institute.

Migration and climate emergency in North Africa

ROAPE

November 10, 2022

Looking in detail at the issues behind COP27, ROAPE’s Ray Bush examines migration in the age of the climate emergency. The consequences of imperialism, colonialism and climate crises is the persistence of labour migration. Bush argues that the underlying cause of migration is structural inequality and its reproduction between the global north and south, which is now exacerbated by climate catastrophe.

By Ray Bush

COP27 in Egypt’s resort of Sharm el Sheikh is rightly condemned for being held under the auspices of the country’s dictator President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi. His repressive regime that holds more than 60,000 political prisoners, bans demonstrations and any criticism, and has western government support for two weeks of greenwashing. Western governments are happy too, it seems, with Sisi’s platitudinous comments that during the COP27 Egypt ‘will work on adopting a comprehensive vision’ for ‘globally applicable solutions and commitments on climate challenges.’ (Al Ahram 1 November 2022).

COP is driven by western imperialist states whose driving agenda is to refuse reparations and compensation for countries in the Global South and the history of colonial exploitation and continued resource extraction. Among the consequences of the history of imperialism and the persistent accumulation in the North of Southern surpluses is labour migration. The impact of the climate emergency on labour mobility seems moot at COP – unless it is viewed through the west’s prism of security and asylum.

The prevailing narrative regarding labour migration in North Africa is that it takes place when there are no alternatives for people to continue with their ‘normal’ livelihoods. In the context of climate change it emerges when ‘physical, economic, social or political security of a population decreases, and no other resources can be mobilised to adapt to the new conditions’ (Waha et al 2017,1632). A driving force for migration may be water scarcity and sea level rise. Migration is seldom about choices made by individuals, and unless it is mobility caused by forceful displacement, it is well established that it is not the most poor who migrate: migration is expensive and not an option for most households (Black et al 2011; Cross 2021).

Migration, climate change and remittances

Migration is typically internal within national boundaries usually from the countryside to towns or neighbouring villages and peri-urban centres. ‘Migration’ is an umbrella term that covers ‘forced and voluntary forms of movement that can occur in the context of climate and environmental change’ (IOM 2021,236). There may now be at least an increased awareness of how to deal with the different dimensions of migration. Thus global principles were declared with the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (UN 2018) and recommendations made by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) with its taskforce on displacement. However, preference within EU, UK and US government pronouncements remains focussed on ‘illegal’ and ‘undocumented’ migration. This preoccupation does not capture the context of slow onset climate impacts and the numerous forms and different causes of labour mobility. As the International Organization for Migration has noted it is precisely in the area of slow onset climate change impacts that ‘policy and knowledge gaps remain’ (IOM 2020,234)

The countries with the highest numbers of migrants in Africa tend to be from the north of the continent. Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia are also among the largest ‘sending’ countries with Sudan and South Sudan (McAuliffe and Triandefyllidou 2021,62). There were more than 5 million migrants in Europe in 2020 from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia while for Egypt the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) were the main destination.

In 2020 more than a million Egyptian migrants lived in Saudi Arabia and remittances reached a record for Egypt of US$30 billion that year making it the fifth largest recipient globally. Remittance to Egypt and Morocco increased despite COVID-19 restrictions by 11 per cent and 6.5 per cent respectively. Remittances for Morocco and Tunisia account for more than 5 per cent of GDP and for Egypt by more than 8 per cent. Remittance income in these countries is important as migrants send earnings from Europe and Asia to support families at home, helping offset costs of social welfare provision by regional states and acting to supplement exchequers in North Africa with foreign exchange. Egypt is among the top five countries in Africa with international remittance inflows exceeding US$15 billion, accounting, with Nigeria, for 56 percent of the region’s total remittance flows.

North Africa is a major transit area for migrants from elsewhere in Africa. This was well managed and controlled in the case of migrants to Libya to work and to transit to Europe from the 1950s but the labour market was catastrophically disrupted by NATO’s 2011 intervention and the toppling of the country’s leader Muammar Gaddafi. Lawlessness in Libya has helped militias and people smugglers to abuse migrants, even as they are held in ‘official’ detention centres, with women and girls at particular risk and no international agency support.

Turmoil in Libya and COVID-19 restrictions and border closures has interrupted historical migration patterns, involuntary mobility and forced returns and discrimination (McAuliffe and Triandafyllidou 2021, 72). There are about 663,000 refugees and migrants in Libya. As many as 278,000 are Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in Libya in 2020, many of whom had been displaced by conflict and violence elsewhere in Africa especially western Sudan. Sudan hosts more than 1 million refugees and more than 2.3 million IDPs.

Migrants who travel to North Africa try and access Europe by two routes. One is a Central Mediterranean route – Libya and Tunisia to Italy – and the Western Mediterranean route – Morocco and Algeria to Spain. There was an 86 per cent increase in arrivals on both these routes in 2020 – from 41,000 to almost 77,000. The immensely hazardous and life threatening nature of this mobility is well documented. More than 1,500 migrants lost their lives or were reported missing in 2020 from West and North Africa trying to reach Spain, Malta and Italy and it is likely that number is higher in 2021 (AlJazeera 2021; Statista 2021). While 28,000 migrants crossed the Channel from France to the UK in 2021 at least 44 people perished.

The EU response to the build-up of migrants and IDPs in Libya has been to securitise its borders. A whole range of measures have been put into place in recent years, for example, Operation Sophia, and a new Security Union Strategy, as well as the Roadmap to the EU Action Plan against smuggling 2021-2025. This was in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that worsened the plight of migrants as borders were often closed, conditions under which migrants were detained were unsanitary and raised the likelihood of contracting the virus. Border closures ensured migrants were often stranded and conditions worsened if voluntary return programmes were suspended, migrants were forced to return with little support to enable them to do so and in-country health and other social provision was negligible.

Egypt did include migrants in some health care provision, but many migrants reported a dramatic decline in employment opportunities and women in Tunisia noted an increase in risk of sexual exploitation (McAuliffe and Triandafyllidou 2021). Policies of securitization may have reduced the numbers of migrants arriving in Italy but the evolution of migrant routes has now diversified routes into and out of Libya notably from Chad and the persistent concentration of boat departures along Libya’s western coast with emergence of secondary routes in the country’s eastern regions (UNHCR 2019).

Challenging the migration narrative

The evidence is overwhelming. ‘Climate change might act as a threat multiplier’ accelerating competition over scarce resources and reinforcing potential for political conflict (Waha et al 2017, 1632). This will accelerate long standing political crises where countries with young populations of relatively highly educated citizens are unable to deliver sustainable and meaningful employment to match expectations. Poverty was a major driver of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, and it is often forgotten that political crisis and conflict there was driven from inequities in the countryside (Ayeb and Bush 2019).

Western response to migration has been two fold. First, to erect stronger border control to police migration in shorthand known as Fortress Europe. Second, there are attempts to get North African countries to police migrants and migration and to be paid to do so with ‘development’ assistance to keep migrants in NA.

EU and UK strategy generalises and tries to normalise a ‘global apartheid’, As ROAPE’s Hannah Cross writes:

a legal-bureaucratic structure controls discriminatory mobilities in which geographical regions contain impoverished people who are forced to migrate for household survival and whose labour is exploited in squalid conditions (Cross 2021).

Migration is seen as a problem for the west which is managed by border controls, regimes of deportation and a range of citizenship categories to limit numbers of the unwanted in attempts to stem what is seen as a ‘flood’ or ‘invasion’ of undesirable boat people.

Northern imperialist states outlaw spontaneous or undocumented migration shifting the security focus from the insecurity of states to controlling people within them. Western policy makers paradoxically assert they are trying to help North African countries deal with local problems of poverty and displacement. Thus, development assistance is offered to promote adaptation to climate risks or short term mitigation of poverty and livelihood disruptions caused by desertification, drought, crop failure and the terrible consequences these may have for land use.

Western strategy to curtail labour migration from North Africa, and to keep migrants in the Maghreb rather than travel to Europe is part of a ‘new security terrain.’

It is also the case that the consequences of this securitisation of borders has been to empower militias and smugglers in people, fuel and weapons. This has served to sustain and enhance brutal conditions of detention in Libya that become a spur to reinvigorate migrant attempt to escape to Europe (Pradella and Cillo 2021). It may be that the difficulties imposed on people’s mobility is the defining contrast to globalisation and the declared free movement of goods and services (Bauman 1998).

The underlying reasons for labour migration are not addressed by revisions to the main EU and UK policy of Fortress Europe or notions that development assistance might address the causes of people’s mobility. And they are certainly not addressed by a policy of deporting to Rwanda those seeking asylum in the UK. Among other things the EU and UK promote a strategy of externalization of international protection that is inconsistent with the 1951 Refugee Convention (Garlick 2021). The overwhelming interpretation of migration by the EU is that it is universally the result of acts of criminality driven by gangs of smugglers. Smugglers are depicted as predatory yet research on the ground, rather than from Brussels or London indicate that migration networks are often facilitated by well-respected and trusted members of communities in North Africa and the Sahel (Sanchez et al 2021). Grounded analysis of migration has indicated that:

contrary to smuggling’s depiction as a domain of adult men organized into criminal networks, the facilitation of irregular migration often takes place as a community-based enterprise, where local groups – often comprising extended families, women, children and elderly people – play critical roles in the facilitation of migrants’ journeys, sharing and reincorporating profits to the local economy (Sanchez et al 2021, 9).

There is the need for more grounded in-country research on migration dynamics and how rural well being is impacted by elements of the climate emergency. Most important of all is the need to recognise that the underlying cause of migration is the structural divide and its reproduction between the global north and south.

The North’s strategy in dealing with unwanted migration is a securitisation agenda advancing border security and free trade agreements in the promotion of a neo-liberal governance agenda in North Africa (Capasso 2021). The EU and UK promote a ‘biopolitics’ – the idea and practice of support for self-reliance in North Africa, through help with climate adaptation and mitigation seen through the prism of bolstering local basic needs provision and support for vulnerable households.

In other words, the persistent risks of underdevelopment will be managed by development assistance under the guise of support for managing and coping with the climate emergency. The mantra that there is no development without security is morphing into ‘you cannot have either development or security without the containment of human manifestations of underdevelopment’ (Duffield 2010,63; see also Evans and Reid 2013).

Rural migration

Most headline discussion regarding migration is focused on international migration. Yet there is considerable rural migration in North Africa that may be an adaptation strategy by family farmers to promote income diversification or pluriactivity (Van Der Ploeg 2008). Rural migration may also be a response to local conflict and environmental stress. The discussion of migration is considerably hindered by the lack of reliable data. Few countries in North Africa record migration as part of their population censuses.

There is a central migration trend of people moving from rural areas to urban centres across North Africa although Egypt and Sudan are exceptions to this (Wenger and Abulfotuh 2019). The movement may not happen directly as ‘stepwise’ migration can involve movement overseas before returning to town rather than the countryside. This is noted for labour migrants from rural Morocco and Egypt to the Gulf and their return to towns rather than the point of origin. Urbanisation can worsen expansions of slums and crises in welfare provision as even informal employment fails to meet demand for work. Mobility may be seasonal, after harvesting and from urban to rural during periods of peak labour demand.

There is a gap in research that explores the reasons linked to labour migration caused by climate change in North Africa. Most causes of migration are listed as conflict, poor levels of agricultural investment and assumptions migrants may have about urban opportunity. All these reasons for mobility need interrogation but while there is an assumption about climate change as a contributor to the desire for people to move this is underresearched compared to other regions of the world. The expectation is that climate change will reduce levels of agricultural productivity. Warmer temperatures will lower levels of precipitation, reduce the amount of water for irrigation and increase livestock deaths. Drought promoted mass rural to urban migration in Mauritania in the 1970s and 1980s.

Different countries in North Africa will be impacted differently by the climate emergency. Those with most vulnerable populations, where poverty is greatest like Sudan, Mauritania and Western Sahara and where the impact of climate change may be most evident are likely to be more adversely impacted than Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia.

One recent report reflecting on the wider Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has noted the increased importance of climate change in driving migration and in so doing creating conditions for rural and urban crises:

Two types of migration drivers are expected to become increasingly common in the MENA region. The first is migration brought about by slow-onset environmental factors, such as increasingly limited water supplies and subsequent land degradation or sea level rise and soil salinisation. These factors have adverse impacts on livelihoods, health and assets that can further trigger migration or even undermine seasonal movements, depriving people of traditional coping strategies. Climate change can magnify their impact and, in turn, exacerbate existing vulnerabilities. The second is displacement caused by rapid-onset events whose links with migration are easier to identify. In fact, droughts and other long-term changes in rainfall patterns or temperatures may lead to gradual migration movements and changes in migration patterns (i.e. from temporary to longer-term migration) which are more difficult to disentangle (Wenger and Abulfotuh 2019, 28).

The policy response to the ‘environment-migration nexus’ focuses on rhetorical improvements of small farmer resilience and adaptive capacity of women and youth. This fails to understand how and why small farmers are poor and how inequality is reproduced so all that remains are time weary recommendations of climate smart agriculture, livelihood diversification and provision of social safety nets. Each of these ‘solutions’ are woefully inadequate (Wenger and Abulfotuh 2019, 28). There is seldom mention of the need for improved access to land for small scale family farmers, for widescale land reform and improved rural investment which values family farming to promote radical structural transformation. These vital measures, urgently needed, will not be discussed at COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh.

The work described in this article was made possible with support from the Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture in Recurrent and Protracted Crisis (SPARC) Programme funded by the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) of the United Kingdom. The contents are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the FCDO.

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

Soon to be published in ROAPE journal:

Noam Chen-Zion, ‘Caught in Europe’s net: Ecological destruction and Senegalese migration to Spain’.

Hannah Cross, ‘Migration, Europe, and the Question of Political and Economic Sovereignty in Africa’.

Featured Photograph: People transferred to a Malta patrol vessel (17 October 2013).

Notes

Ayeb H. & Bush R. 2019. Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa. Agrarian Questions in Egypt and Tunisia. Anthem Press, London.

Black R, Adger WN, Arnell NW, Dercon S, Geddes A, Thomas DSG (2011a) The effect of environmental change on human migration. Global Environ Change 21:3–11.

Bauman, Z. 1998. Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity

Capasso,M. 2021. ‘From Human Smuggling to State Capture: Furthering Neoliberal Governance in North Africa’. Journal of Labor and Society 24, 440-466.

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Duffield, M. 2010. ‘The Liberal Way of Development and the Development-Security Impasse: Exploring the Global Life-Chance Divide’. Security Dialogue vol 41, (1) 53-76.

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Garlick, M., 2021. ‘Externalisation of international protection: UNHCR’s perspective’. Forced Migration Review.Issue 68, November. (accessed 3 January 2022).

McAuliffe, M. and A. Triandafyllidou eds., 2021. World Migration Report 2022. International Organisation for Migration (IOM), Geneva.

Pradella, L. and R.Cillo., 2021. ‘Bordering the surplus population across the Mediterranean: Imperialism and unfree labour in Libya and the Italian countryside’. In, Geoforum, 126, 483-494.

Sanchez, G., K.Arrouche, M. Capasso, A. Dimitriadi and A. Kakhry. 2021. ‘Beyond Networks, Militias and Tribes: Rethinking EU Counter-Smuggling Policy and Response.’ Euromesco Policy Study n.19 April. (accessed 3 January 2022).

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Van Der Ploeg, J. 2008. The New Peasantries. London: Earthscan.

Waha, Katharina Linda Krummenauer, Sophie Adams, Valentin Aich, Florent Baarsch, Dim Coumou, Marianela Fader, Holger Hoff, Guy Jobbins, Rachel Marcus, Matthias Mengel, Ilona M. Otto, Mahé Perrette, Marcia Rocha, Alexander Robinson and Carl-Friedrich Schleussner. 2017. ‘Climate change impacts in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region and their implications for vulnerable population groups.’ Regional Environmental Change, 17, 1623–1638.

Wenger, Carole and Dalia Abulfotuh. 2019. Rural Migration in the Near East and North Africa: Regional trends. Cairo, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Being excess bodies: Shame in the age of climate coloniality

ROAPE

November 8, 2022

For many in the Global South, instead of recognizing that their suffering is a result of local and global socio-economic and racial structures, they feel shame. As COP27 takes place in Egypt, Shreya Parikh writes about climate change, overpopulation, and shame in Tunisia and India, and how suffering is often interpreted as being a result of individual deficiencies. It is a false narrative that blames those suffering most gravely from climate change for their own suffering.

By Shreya Parikh

My friend and I return to her home – the Hamrouni household – after the sun has set, with sand all over our feet from walking around the beach in Gabès.[1] It is May 2022, and the sun burns above 40 degrees in the day. I head directly to the bathroom on tiptoes, hoping the sand wouldn’t crumble all over the tiled floors and carpets. My friend’s mother rushes to see if there is a towel in the bathroom for me, and realizes that there is no running water in the taps. She looks at Mabrouka, my friend, and sighs; they take turns in telling me that the water has run out before midnight – the usual time for the water cuts in the Mtorrech neighbourhood.[2] As I wash my feet with plastic bottles filled with stored water, guilty of my beach pleasures and the resulting need to clean myself again with water, I am told that Mtorrech has been lucky in Gabès, that other neighbourhoods in Gabès have it worse than 12am-5am water cuts every day.

Gabès city, around 400 kilometres south of the capital of Tunisia, reminds me too often of home in Ahmedabad, a city in India with the population size totalling all of Tunisia. Both Gabès and Ahmedabad see long arid summers when the air thickens with pollution and humidity. In both Gabès and Ahmedabad, pleasure lies in food that burns the tongue and the throat – couscous grains coated with spicy hrous in the former, pickled chili mangoes back in Ahmedabad. In both Gabès and Ahmedabad, water cuts often. And it is in Gabès that the raw memories built over my childhood in Ahmedabad emerge like undiscovered water springs.

I wash my feet and my arms sticky with sand and sweat, and there is just enough water in the bottle to splash on my face before heading to the dinner table and then to bed. My mind, subconsciously, had made the calculation of how to divide the two litres of stored water that Mabrouka had given to me. The mental ritual of the calculation, the bodily ritual of washing with so little water, brings back to me a heaviness, a deep shame.

As we eat dinner in front of the television, I can’t but sink into this shame. I look at Mabrouka’s mother playing with their newly adopted kitten, smile at them, and then proceed to blankly stare at the reality show on the television. But I can’t get the shame out of my mind and body.

Where does shame come from?

In the middle-class neighbourhood I grew up in back in Ahmedabad in north-west India, our days were organised around the daily water cuts. Washing, bucket baths, and cooking happened mostly early in the day when running water was guaranteed – between 7am and 2pm. If the water ran until 4pm, we called it our lucky day! There were also days when there was no water at all, when we would pack our laundry and head to my grandmother’s home.

In the middle of the summer sometime in the early 2000s, the large electric setup that pumped groundwater for our apartment complex broke down, or at least that is the story I was told as a kid. There was no running water at all. A plumbing company was brought in to dig a deeper hole and put in a new pump. In my memory, the men from the company spent the whole summer digging and digging, and we never really knew when we would have running-water again.

Trucks fitted with water tanks were brought in from time to time but they were small attempts to fill in the daily need of water. Rumours would circulate every day that a water tank would be brought in, and we would prepare by heaping all empty containers and buckets together so that we could rush to the tank once it materialised.

Running to the mobile water tank was a woman’s job – I remember women in their house clothes rushing out with all types of empty plastic containers; women in loose cotton dresses in all shades of pastel, with turmeric stains from cooking, and a scarf thrown around the shoulders to perform some form of modesty and presentability. They would crowd around the water tank and elbow each other for what was scarce. I am sure my mother was there as well, running to the tank, but for some reason, my memory has wiped her presence out of these snippets of images that remain in my head.

Was it shame that had erased her presence?

Managing the house logistics without water was, in my mind, also my mother’s job. She made sure that all the buckets were full and that the house had been cleaned and mopped while the water was running. It was with her that we would rush to a friends’ apartment in the neighbouring apartment complex every morning during the dreadfully long summer of the broken water pump, and it was with her that we would brush our teeth and bathe while she cleaned laundry.

Seeing structural problems as our fault

I never spoke with anyone about our daily water cuts during my childhood. I had internalised that the silent performance of water storing was an act of shame. I never spoke about it with my friends at school, nor did I have any conversation about the recurrent water-cuts with my parents. It existed, every day, and we had to silently accept it.

**Men fishing for anchovies along the polluted coast of Gabès (Shreya Parikh, June 2021).**

The water cuts, in my mind, were our fault – we didn’t have enough money to pay to live in more privileged housing complex where, I assumed with certainty, the water flowed with ease and the bathrooms came with built-in marble bathtubs and I could bathe myself every day like the characters in the English textbooks we read at school. I reasoned that to talk about water cuts in school would mean that I would reveal an uncool fact about my (comparatively lower) socioeconomic class.

As I think about these memories, I find thick layers of shame wrapped around them. This shame came from the collective meaning we had given to the recurrent water cuts – that our inability to pay for more water was to be blamed for the situation we were in and that, if we could move into a more upper-class neighbourhood, there would be running water all day.

The only time we talked about water-cuts as a social problem beyond our individual agencies was when so-called intellectual op-eds blamed shortage of water in India to overpopulation. We were too many, we were told again and again, and we were the excess bodies creating this overpopulation. Every time I would read about ‘overpopulation’ in our geography textbooks in India, I would have an intense desire to dissolve and disappear.[3] Maybe then we could have running-water?

We witnessed intense urbanization, falling ground water levels, and decreasing average rainfall all around us, and could see that frequent cutting of water in many households across Ahmedabad was (and is) linked to these visible outcomes of global climate change and environment destruction.[4] Yet, we continued to suffer not only from the water cuts but also from the narrative of ‘overpopulation’ that constructed our lives as excess – the ‘too many’ drinking away ‘too much’ of the water.[5]

The ‘too many’ in Tunisia

‘Overpopulation’ may not be the word used in Tunisia in the textbooks or in journalistic media to talk about a social problem. But political and social discourses that construct families (like the Hamrouni family in Gabès) outside the Tunis-Sousse-Sfax region as excess are omnipresent.

Since early 1970s, Gabès hosts a series of chemical industries that lines its coasts, drinking away its fresh ground water and emptying the dirtied water into the sea. These industries have disrupted and destroyed the oasis ecosystems and the livelihoods that depend on it; they have polluted and killed the fish, and put fishermen out of jobs. And their polluting gas emissions have brought a long list of fatal maladies like asthma and cancer to its people.[6]

A common dominant discourse presents Gabèsians as having ‘chosen’ to have chemical industries along its coast as a development policy in the 1960s. According to this discourse, all coastal spaces in Tunisia were to be automatically developed as touristic beaches; because folks in Gabès are ‘too conservative’ to tolerate women in bikinis (so the discourse says), they ‘chose’ heavily polluting and water-consuming industries instead. Today, tourist forums continue to repeat this discourse by reminding (non-Tunisian) tourists to not ‘expose [themselves] too much during [beach] tanning’ because of the ‘conservative’ nature of locals in Gabès.

This dominant discourse constructs Gabès and its population as conservative and hence inferior from liberal and more-educated populations along the Tunis-Sousse-Sfax coast. Gabès is portrayed as deserving of its polluting industries because, for many, there can be no other model of development except for building giant industries in areas with low literacy levels. The so-called conservativeness of Gabès is used to justify continuous lack of public infrastructure in the region.

Bodies under the heaviness of climate coloniality

The shame induced by being recurrently described as ‘overpopulation’ or excess bodies weighs down on families that live on the margins of the world – the Global South. The intensity of this weight experienced by those in the Global South is determined by other factors as well – gender, class, race, and caste among others. Both, the Hamrouni family in Gabès and my family in Ahmedabad, carry many privileges, among them the privileges that come with our middle-class status. Their experience of being called ‘excess’ are not equivalent to the experiences of those who are poor in the Global South.

Those at the margins of the margins are the worst affected by climate change as well as the intensity of shame linked to their marginalised condition. According to scholars Elaine Chase and Robert Walker (2012), shame, in the context of poverty, combines ‘an internal judgement of one’s own inabilities; an anticipated assessment of how one will be judged by others; and the actual verbal or symbolic gestures of others who consider, or are deemed to consider, themselves to be socially and/or morally superior to the person sensing shame.’[7] For them, shame induces a sense of disempowerment – a lack of control. At the same time, they point out the presence of guilt in the life narratives of many who experience poverty.

For many at the margins, shame is experienced as guilt; instead of recognizing that their suffering is a result of local and global socio-economic and racial structures that create and perpetuate inequalities, the suffering is interpreted as being a result of their own individual lacking (lack of effort or lack of enough money, for example). It is this false narrative that blames those suffering most gravely from climate change for their suffering that weighs heavily onto bodies, a result of what scholar Farhana Sultana (2022) calls ‘climate coloniality.’[8]

Sultana argues that climate change and colonialism should be viewed together in order to understand the uneven effects of climate change globally, what she terms as ‘climate coloniality.’ This climate coloniality not only takes material and political forms, but also discursive forms. Dominant discourses on studying and addressing climate change render, according to Sultana, ‘some lives and ecosystems…disposable and sacrificial, whereby [inequality-producing] structural forces, both historical and contemporary, fuel it’ (2022:4). For example, in discussions on addressing climate change, ‘burdens on the poor across the Global South to reduce greenhouse gas emissions continue to exist’ while, at the same time, luxury and survival emissions are treated as equivalent (2022: 5).

A similar argument exists in conversations on addressing water shortages. For example, in 2018, total water withdrawal per capital in India was at 563 cubic meter per year (per inhabitant) while that for Tunisia was 332 cubic meter per year (per inhabitant).[9] For France, the value stood at 416 cubic meter per year (per inhabitant). The value takes into account water withdrawals from agricultural, industrial, and municipal purposes. While France’s total water withdrawal per capital is lower than that of India, the number doesn’t take into account France’s dependence on agricultural produce imported from elsewhere (for example, dependence on cotton fabrics produced in India).

For the case of Tunisia, scholar Habib Ayeb pointed out during the screening of his documentary Om Layoun (in May 2022) that agricultural water in Tunisia is diverted into producing fruits and vegetables for export to Europe (including France) rather than producing grains (or other produce) for local consumption and agricultural sovereignty.[10] Hence, the 416 cubic meter per year (per inhabitant) of water withdrawal in France doesn’t take into account the water that goes into the making of watermelons or olives imported from Tunisia.

As a scholar who grew up in and experienced the material and phychological marginalization resulting from climate coloniality in Bangladesh, Sultana notes that ‘feeling, embodying, and experiencing the heaviness of climate coloniality is a steep price to pay’ (2022, 10). The cost of shame-inducing marginalization is high.

Shame calls for certain practices to be replaced by capitalist ideas and actions that are defined as superior. I am thinking here of the embracing of fast fashion in the middle- and upper-class families in India, which is replacing a more sustainable use of cloth.[11] I think of agricultural plots in the oasis in Gabès being sold away to build residential structures to accommodate increasing urbanization (which is seen as a path to ‘development’) and the decreasing dependability on local agricultural produce for livelihood.[12]

At the same time, our material understanding of climate change through cutting water, the increasing pollution, and recurrent cases of fatal maladies is continuously rejected by dominant discourses that tell us (instead) that we are the problem – that we are the ‘too much’ in the so-called problem of ‘overpopulation’ on this earth.

A world of shame

The discourse of ‘overpopulation’ explains climate change by portraying bodies at the margins as consuming ‘too much,’ yet, at the same time, it blames the bodies at the margins for the heightened effects of climate change that they suffer by explaining it as the margin’s inability to pay for necessary goods of sustenance (hence, not consuming enough).

The learning of shame, under the weight of climate coloniality, is gradual and continuous. It pushes us to be ashamed of our helplessness in the face of the consequences of global climate change which are passed onto us through a series of micro-level interactions as well as macro-level institutions. Examples of these include textbooks in India or Tunisia that portray a consumerist way of living as a lifestyle to strive towards; they include advertisements about ‘modern’ intensively water-consuming bath tubs, showers, or toilet systems that construct more water-frugal options as linked to lower socio-economic class. Class differences are seen as a moral issue, and the ability to consume resource-intensive goods (goods that make intensive use of financial as well as environmental resources) are constructed as a morally-correct aspiration to have.

It is through consumption, we are told, that we can become individuals instead of a lump that is defined as excess or ‘overpopulated.’ To not have financial resources to pay for these resource-intensive goods is socially constructed as a marker of personal failure; shame comes from the internalisation of this idea where not being able to consume goods of morally-correct aspiration is considered a personal failure.

**Cement and phosphate factories that line the coast of Gabès (Shreya Parikh, June 2021).**

The effects of these internally-contradictory discourses of ‘overpopulation’ are visible all around the Global South. For example, large cities around Global South continue to choke their inhabitants with increasing road traffic and resulting pollution. In many cases, use of private vehicles over public transportation is motivated by the shame that is linked to sharing transportation spaces with those from relatively lower classes. In addition, images of crowded public transportation are used as proofs to explain the so-called problem of over-population in the Global South leading to climate change.

Public transportation has hence come to be associated with ‘overpopulation.’ We have come to think that those who take public transportation are excess bodies that should be ashamed of not being able to afford a car or other private forms of transportation. So, while international organizations are pushing cities in the Global South to build public transport infrastructure to decrease dependence on private transportation (and linked pollution), shame continues to act as a mental and emotional restriction in the development and democratization of public transportation.

It is time to take this shame seriously and work towards deconstructing the discourse of ‘overpopulation’ – the source of the shame – that portrays so many of us as excess and expendable.

Shreya Parikh is a Dual Ph.D. candidate in sociology at CERI-Sciences Po Paris and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Beyond Borders Fellow (2022-24) at Zeit-Stiftung. She is also an affiliated researcher at Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC) in Tunis. Her dissertation research focuses on the constructions and contestations of race, and racialization in Tunisia through a focus on the study of racialization of Black Tunisians and Sub-Saharan migrants. Parikh grew up in Ahmedabad in India, and currently resides in Tunis in Tunisia.

Featured Photograph: Old city in Ahmedabad, India (Shreya Parikh, 2019).

Notes

[1] In this text, I use pseudonyms to protect the identity of my interlocutors.

[2] Both Mabrouka and her mother Ahlem are Black Tunisians. Mabrouka is 34 years old, and teaches English language at a private institute in Gabès. Her mother is 66 years old, and a retired nurse. They both live in Mtorrech neighborhood in a comfortable house; the neighborhood is middle class and racially mixed, and located outside the city center of Gabès.

[3] Social science textbooks (as well as other social science study material) in India continue to portray ‘overpopulation’ as a societal problem in India. See, for example, Rumani Saikia Phukan, “Overpopulation in India – causes, effects and how to control it”, 22 April 2022.

[4] In 2019, for example, the average rainfall recorded in Gujarat state (where Ahmedabad is located) was less than that over three previous decades; many parts of the region were declared as facing drought. See Sharik Laliwala, “The Undercurrents Of The Water Crisis In Gujarat.” The Wire. 5 May 2019.

[5] The discourses of overpopulation have been traced back to the book The Population Bomb (1968) published under the name of Stanford-based entomologist Paul Ehrlich who co-wrote it with his wife Anne Ehrlich. The book argued that the problem with the increasing population in the world would lead to immense global disasters (like mass starvation). The popularity of his book would lead international organizations to promote fertility reduction programs in the Global South, including in Egypt, India, Pakistan, and Tunisia. See Charles C. Mann, 2018, “The Book That Incited a Worldwide Fear of Overpopulation.” Smithsonian Magazine..

[6] Hortense Lac. “Autour du Groupe chimique de Gabès, une population sacrifiée.” Inkyfada. 12 November, 2019.

[7] Elaine Chase and Robert Walker. 2012. “The Co-construction of Shame in the Context of Poverty: Beyond a Threat to the Social Bond.” Sociology. 47(4):739-754.

[8] Farhana Sultana, 2022. “The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality.” Political Geography.

[9] All data comes from UNFAO’s (Food and Agriculture Organization) AQUASTAT database.

[10] The documentary reflects on the unequal access to water in Tunisia, where absence of state infrastructures for water provision in marginalized rural areas forces families to either lose water supply or pay the high cost of privatization.

[11] See Flavia Lopes and IndiaSpend.com 2021 (23 December). “By creating a false demand for fresh looks, fast fashion is hurting the environment.” Scroll.in, 23 December 2021.

[12] For a detailed understanding of urbanization of Gabès and decline in agricultural activities in the region, see Maha Abdelhamid, Les transformations socio-spatiales des oasis de Gabès (Tunisie): déclin des activités agricoles, urbanisation informelle et dégradation de l’environnement à Zrig, des années 1970 à nos jours. Thesis defended at University Paris Nanterre, France.

Don’t greenwash your climate crimes by greenwashing Egypt’s military dictatorship

ROAPE

November 7, 2022

Sisi go — Protesters listen to Samaya Halawa explain about the detention of her brother Ibrahim when he was just 17 exercising his right to protest peacefully against the military coup in August 2013. Alisdare Hickson. November 2015.

As Egypt plays host to COP27, Y.Y.H. Al-Askar – writing under a pseudonym – draws attention to the plight of the tens of thousands of political prisoners in Egypt. Al-Askar points to the hypocrisy of Sisi, presenting himself on the international stage as a fighter for the oppressed while brutally repressing any Egyptian who dares to speak out against his military regime. Al-Askar argues that through its uncritical engagement with Sisi’s Egypt, COP27 threatens to derail the struggle for climate reparations while greenwashing Egypt’s military dictatorship.

I remember the last protest I went to in Cairo. It was November 2013. Egypt’s current president Abdelfattah Al-Sisi had just taken power, and quickly changed the political landscape. One of these changes was imposing a new law by which one could only demonstrate with a permit, which was never granted if the protest was in any way critical of the regime.

So that day we gathered without a permit. There were around a hundred and fifty of us. We chanted, we stood our ground, until the soldiers charged us, grabbing who they could, including the innocent passers-by. I was scared that day. I had been in their prisons before. I had experienced the psychological torture, heard the screams of others from my cell, and smelled seared flesh upon entering my interrogation room. I didn’t want to return there. I was scared even more by what continued to become clear since the coup of July that year: the military was back to stay.

Later that night police forces violently arrested activist Alaa Abdel-Fattah from his home, accusing him of organizing that day’s protest, without evidence. Proof is rarely needed before a court in Egypt. Alaa had become one of the most prominent activists of the revolution that had ousted former dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011, and as the military regime returned even more brutally than before, it wanted to make an example of what would happen to others if they didn’t remain silent.

Alaa’s sisters, Mona and Sanaa Seif, protesting outside the British Foreign Office in the run up to COP27. Alisdare Hickson. October 2022.

The re-emerged military regime wanted all those out of the way who dissented. Today there are over 65,000 political prisoners in Egypt. Alaa is still among them. In April he started an open hunger strike demanding his right to meet with a British government representative – as he’s a dual citizen – then later calling for the release of all political prisoners. On Sunday, the first day of COP27 he drank his last glass of water and enters a zero calorie strike, because so far there has been no response from the echelons of power.

Meanwhile, the regime is rebranding itself.

This week, as you read this post, the whole world is looking to Egypt as it hosts this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (or COP) in the desert resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh.

Egypt’s dictator has created a new position for himself within the global climate debate by championing the cause of states hardest hit by the climate crisis. In a speech at COP26, al-Sisi reminded his listeners of developed countries’ unfulfilled promise of raising $100 billion annually for developing nations by 2020. He is certainly going to be reminding his listeners of that again this week.

Meanwhile, Egypt is becoming an ever-larger exporter of fossil fuels. Export of oil has increased by 120% this year compared to 2021, while its natural gas exports have increased 13-fold in the past eight years. These are statistics neither al-Sisi nor Hill & Knowlton – the American PR agency that his regime has hired for the COP – will ever mention.

Sisi, the oppressor, presents himself as the fighter for the oppressed. Seeing him from the perspective of the climate debtors of the global North, is he not? But as an activist from Egypt, the hypocrisy is sickening. I believe engagement with the Sisi regime has the potential to derail the struggle for climate reparations, while greenwashing a military dictatorship. Egypt needs a greener economy. But for that to happen we need a complete change of regime, not just replacing one dictator with another.

You might ask yourself why there isn’t any form of meaningful protest to the injustice in Egypt? The story of Alaa Abdel-Fattah depicts the consequences, and the prisons are full of those who tried. That is also why I won’t use my own name to write this article. To make the cleansing of any opposition possible, the Sisi regime has built 27 new prisons. This includes one of the largest correctional facilities in the world, which in the dictator’s own words follows the “American model“, the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world.

The smallest form of demonstration, or even planned protest, the state surveys using technology provided by the likes of German company Fin Fisher, and then harshly crushes them. This also applies to protests over environmental concerns, where the regime acts no differently than its treatment of political activists.

Idku is a small fishing town on the Mediterranean coast, about 35 kilometres west of Alexandria. It is also where Egypt’s Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) terminal lies which is now shipping liquified gas to Germany as an alternative source of energy to the country’s long-term dependence on Russia. During the Egyptian revolution in 2012, the community carried out a powerful struggle against the fossil fuel industry and prevented BP from setting up yet another gas refinery after the LNG terminal was found to be dumping waste into the sea and ruining the area’s marine life.

So, the community occupied the construction site, blocked roads, and raided the company’s offices after their verbal complaints went unheeded. Their creative strategies included using a community radio station to spread information that countered the state propaganda on the news. Police regularly arrested people and attacked their demonstrations, but in the end the activist struggle bore fruit. BP’s project ceded to the pressure of the social mobilization, though sadly by simply moving to a town nearby to implement the same project. Such struggles were made possible by the opening of political space during the revolution. Today, few dare take the risk in the face of the regime’s use of excessive force to shut down all forms of protest.

On October 1 of this year, just over one month ago, an Egyptian human rights group reported that state security had disappeared a 55-year old man for joining a Facebook group and proposing to organize a demonstration during the COP. This is a common occurrence in Egypt, where the police and military arrest, torture, and kidnap countless people every day. Most of them enter the labyrinth of Egypt’s detention system and facade of a judicial system. Some of these people disappear, in some cases only to have their murdered bodies appear in unexpected places with marks of torture all over them, like the Italian student Giulio Regeni in 2016. No words can describe the horror of conditions that exist in Egyptian prisons.

A silent vigil in memory of Giulio Regeni and the hundreds of Egyptians forcibly disappeared and tortured every year. Alisdare Hickson. February 2017.

Yet, a rare struggle has recently been led by the farming community of a Nile island called Warraq, that lies in the heart of Cairo. In 2017 the regime announced a ‘development’ project, which would transform it into Egypt’s ‘Manhattan Island’, with luxury high-rises and a 7-star hotel. The project uses all the right buzzwords: green, tech, future. In fact, it makes life impossible for common people, while lining the pockets of the generals. To make this possible, Sisi overturned a law marking Warraq and 36 other islands in Egypt as nature preserves, and ceded these to the military.

August was the most recent time the police violently crushed the islanders‘ resistance against displacement. That day, police forces arrested dozens, while others are still in prison from earlier clashes when the police also shot dead one resident. It is just one more example of the regime’s land grabbing for its own profit at the expense of Egyptians and the environment. That same month, the police demolished the second of three schools on the island and shut down the only ferry that reaches it. The outcome of that struggle is clear, and it identifies this military regime’s priorities. Profit, at the expense of an entire population and the natural environment.

Yet another case of regime land grabbing lies a few hundred kilometres west of the fishing village, in the town of Dabaa. Here too, the regime has over the years silenced a resistant community into submission for a different kind of project, a nuclear powerplant. This is being built by Russian engineers with a loan of $25 billion from Russia. No mention of that will be made at the upcoming COP, nor of the repression that made it possible.

I have left Egypt.

I no longer found it possible to speak out against this injustice there and fight on behalf of those at the mercy of a brutal military regime. The price was simply too high.

In order to make his regime accepted Egypt’s dictator makes promises of ‘stability’ and ‘development’ by ‘getting things done’. The possibility of the Egyptian Revolution has turned these generals into madmen scared of the smallest signs of popular outcry. It has turned the entire country into an open-air prison in order to make possible the ‘stability’ which they need for the ongoing theft of natural and human resources.

In order to make their ‘development’ projects possible, including the building of 41 new cities across Egypt, Sisi’s regime has begun a borrowing binge. Since taking power the dictator has more than tripled the country’s foreign debt without the population’s consent, bringing Egypt today to the brink of bankruptcy. COP27 is a convenient opportunity to attract foreign finances. If it needs to be ‘green’, the regime will make sure it is because it is desperate to finance its debt-ridden machine of terror.

This puts the global North in a dilemma, because by condition-less participation in the climate summit it greenwashes the brutal Egyptian regime.

The world’s greatest climate debtors must take a strong moral stance. This means pressuring their partners. The global North must raise the Sisi regime’s political crimes and not acquiesce to a few – most likely temporary – prisoner releases. Furthermore, with the Egyptian military dictatorship in an economically vulnerable position, the global North should disinvest from Egypt, unless very clear conditions are met.

At the recent Belgian-German climate cooperation meeting, Analena Baerbock said: “to make it clear to other countries and regions where the climate crisis is already the greatest security risk that we stand in solidarity with the people there and are by their side”. Here the critical point is indeed that climate debtors owe nature and people most hit by the climate crisis, including Egyptians; not governments, and certainly not fascist ones.

But there is a further dilemma. The reason the global North is engaging in the possibility of dialogue with a dictatorship is because it too seeks to utilize COP27 to greenwash its own crimes. If the greatest climate criminals are going to make clean energy financing available, they should do so for that energy to stay in a country that is 94% fossil fuel dependent. Then make that financing conditional on political reforms in Egypt and create real mechanisms to monitor their implementation – that would make the investment reach people, and not governments. Global North countries’ plans to reach net zero emissions must exclude new extraction and import of clean energy from elsewhere, or else this is merely a new form of colonialism. By importing clean energy from Egypt’s dictator, they make the people of Egypt more fossil fuel dependent.

Simply put, creating green partnerships with oppressive regimes addresses climate criminals’ own climate debts, while strengthening these fascist regimes, making a green turn meaningless. For the global North’s energy needs, we need to listen to activists, they have a clear plan. The COP summit must not be about northern economic advancement.

On 22 October the Belgian environment minister Zuhal Demir announced she will not attend Egypt’s COP. “Climate summits are not Eurovision song festivals. They, unfortunately, seem to have become grand shows for the outside world”, she said in explanation of her boycott, “nowhere is this more painfully evident than in Egypt where climate scientists are gagged while politicians and corporations are given the red carpet”.

A boycott by politicians must be a dual act that is accompanied by developing strategies for the global North to repay their climate debts that reach people, rather than prop up governments. This goes beyond attending a COP or not. Already in previous summits promises were made and not kept, so the question is not about attendance, it is about paying up. There is still an opportunity to turn the tide on climate reparations. Meanwhile, Egypt’s dictator might be uttering the right words of ‘climate justice’, yet he is certainly not a man of justice, and should not be a partner for anyone seeking either.

A version of this article was first published in German in DIE ZEIT (November 2022).

‘A Curt Farewell’: decolonizing public space in Namibia

ROAPE

November 3, 2022

At the end of October this year a decision was made in Namibia’s capital, Windhoek, to remove the statue of a colonial officer – the purported founder of the city. Heike Becker describes the extraordinary activist campaign to decolonialise public spaces in the country.

By Heike Becker

On 27 October 2022 the Windhoek City Council finally voted to remove the statue of German colonial officer Curt von François, which has been standing on a pedestal outside the Namibian capital’s municipality offices since 1965. With this significant decision the City Council followed up on an earlier resolution in June 2021 to develop an encompassing policy on heritage matters.

Historically, the von François statue symbolises the continuities between the eras of Namibia under its first and second colonial rulers, Germany and (apartheid) South Africa. During the hey-day of apartheid colonialism in Namibia, the all-white City Council decided in 1965 to honour the purported “founder” of Windhoek by erecting a statue in front of the Municipality offices in downtown Windhoek. A South African sculptor was commissioned to model and cast the 2.4 metres high bronze statue.

Bidding ‘A Curt Farewell’

For the first time ever in Namibia there’ll soon be a move aimed at decolonising the public space, which has been brought about by an activist campaign and supported by the current municipal leadership.

Inspired by the global movement against racism following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, Windhoek activist and artist, Hildegard Titus, started an online petition entitled “A Curt Farewell”, which garnered over 1,600 signatures within three weeks. Considering that Windhoek’s population is less than half a million, and that in 2020 online activism was an entirely new endeavour in Namibian civil society politics, this was quite remarkable.

The petition demanded the removal of the statue celebrating the purported founder of the city; it pointed out that the German officer had only built Windhoek’s Old Fort as a military operation in 1890. The petition insisted further that the statue should be replaced with one to honour Jonker Afrikaner, the Nama leader who first established a settlement in the area of today’s Windhoek around 1840. The petition read:

Continuing to keep Curt von François on his pedestal at the intersection of Sam Nujoma Drive and Independence Avenue is a painful erasure of the city’s history and that of its rightful founder, Jonker Afrikaner. This colonial monument continues to feed the incorrect narrative that “this land was empty” until he “discovered” it.

It is now time that [the city] … ceases honouring colonial faces.

Curt von François was responsible for the building of the Alte Feste, a military fort meant to protect the interests of the German colonial regime, and that is where his statue belongs. He should be confined within the walls that he built, next to the other statue of a bygone and violent era – the Reiterdenkmal – to contemplate their violent colonial legacies until the end of time.

Three weeks later, on 16 June 2020, about a hundred mostly young Windhoekers called for the removal of the statue during a protest against racism, gender-based violence and police brutality in the midst of the harsh Covid lockdown. The protesters gathered around the monument; some climbing on top of it. When they left, after their unsuccessful quest for a reception by city officials to deliver their demands to have the statue removed, they left behind their posters. Placards read, among others, “Rape culture must fall”, “Legalize Abortion”, “Police Brutality must end”, and “Black Lives Matter”.

Other placards recalled the 1893 German colonial attack by 200 German soldiers on the Witbooi Nama settlement at Hornkranz, southwest of Windhoek. By remembering this brutal act of colonial violence, the demonstrators denounced “white supremacy – an insult to those who water our freedom”, as one eloquent poster alluded to the lyrics of the Namibian national anthem. By recalling the event a direct connection was being made: the Hornkranz onslaught had been led by von François, whose statue was the key target the protest action.

While this demonstration was not the first-ever intervention against remnants of colonialism in Windhoek, previous subversive actions had taken place in the dark of the night, and only surprised passers-by the next morning.

Counter-memorialisation had, in fleeting moments, especially targeted the city’s (then) most notorious colonial memorial, the Reiterdenkmal (literally: ‘rider monument’ and usually referred to in English as the ‘Windhoek Rider’ or the ‘Equestrian Statue’) before its eventual removal in 2009. The horse and rider was a war monument erected in 1912 by the colonial authorities to celebrate the victory against the OvaHerero and Nama people who fought against German rule.

In July 2008, white wooden crosses were planted around the Rider statue, bearing place names and expressions in Otjiherero, the main language spoken by the victims of the genocide that was committed during German colonial rule.

The Reiterdenkmal brought out an aggressive claim to perpetual colonial domination. Since 1912, sitting on a 5m high sandstone plinth, the double life size (4.5 m) bronze statue of a mounted German colonial soldier with rifle had been used in many formats as the city’s iconic image. Its plaque commemorated the German military and civilian casualties during the 1904-7 colonial war. Despite the fact that its location was until 1908 the site of a concentration camp, where prisoners of the genocidal war died, no mention was made of the estimated one hundred thousand OvaHerero and Nama who had been murdered in the genocide committed by the German colonial army.

Interventions that subverted the monument’s colonial claims were credited to activists connected to Ovaherero and Nama victim-descendant pressure groups who have demanded justice for the communities that suffered most during the colonial war and genocide.

Overall, however, until 2020 the decolonisation of the public space remained a project of the postcolonial Namibian state. Windhoek’s German and South African colonial memorials remained largely untouched;instead, government policy was geared at erecting new memorial sites, statues and monuments, which added another layer of commemorative aesthetics and narrative in the public space.

The new structures were constructed as sites for hegemonic state-centred commemorative practices, which celebrate the master narrative of the Namibian postcolonial state, “SWAPO brought us liberation through the barrel of a gun”. Postcolonial structures such as the Namibian Heroes Acre and the Independence Memorial Museum, designed and built by the North Korean company Mansudae Overseas Projects, are distinct from the colonial monuments in terms of aesthetics and historical narrative. Yet the new memorials can just as easily be comprehended as a glorifying history written by the victors.

When protesters climbed right on top of the von François memorial in June 2020, this was the first time that young Namibians of varied ethnic backgrounds came out in a public demonstration for the eradication of colonial symbols in the public space.

More than a bronze sculpture

“It’s never been about the statue” was a frequently heard comment during the 2015 protests against the bronze sculpture of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Of course, in Cape Town as much as in Windhoek, memory and heritage as contested processes of past-based meaning production in the present have played an immense role in activism to decolonize the public space. In this sense, the struggles certainly were about the removal of icons of colonial conquest from public view. There is more to those battles than meets the eye though.

The occupation of the von François memorial on 16 June 2020 pointed out the monument as a painful site of remembrance and memorialisation. It was also the culmination of a remarkable movement of intersectional activism in urban Namibia. Campaigns to decolonize the public space through removing colonial monuments and renaming streets still honouring colonial tyrants have been linked to a range of social and political issues, which have been framed as perpetuated by coloniality.

The text on the plaque translates: Curt von Francois – Founder of Windhoek in the year 1890 – unveiled by His Excellency The Administrator Mr Wentzel Du Plessis on 18 October 1965. Mayor: The Honourable Councillor S. Davis. Sculptor: Hennie Potgieter (Heike Becker, 2022).

Leading Namibian activists have expressly pointed out the intersectional nature of the protests (see Hildegard Titus 2021 and Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja 2021).The movements do not regard the contemporary Namibian struggles as separate from each other. Instead, their struggle for the “full decolonisation of Namibia”, as they have often phrased this, integrates a number of concerns, ranging from the decolonisation of the public space through to matters of economic redistribution, especially regarding land, and state violence. Of special concern, however, have been queer and anti-sexist politics.

Despite the restrictions of the recurrent Covid lockdowns, one month after the protest around von François, protesters took to the streets of Windhoek again. In mid-July 2020 they marched and demanded the legalization of abortion. The pro-choice action was organised by a newly-formed alliance known as Voices for Choices and Rights Coalition (VCRC), which had by then already collected 60,000 signatures (quite a large amount given that Namibia’s population is only 2.5 million) calling for the right to safe abortion and abolition of the country’s Abortion and Sterilisation Act of 1975, a legal legacy of South African colonization.

In October 2020 another movement galvanized an unprecedented number of young people to reclaim the streets, marching and dancing and unleashing incredible creative energy with their performances. Hundreds of Namibian activists, students, working youth, and artists took to the streets of Windhoek and other towns for protests against gender based violence and femicide. The protests, which became known as #ShutItAllDownNamibia, began after the body of a young woman was found murdered in the port city of Walvis Bay.

During this protest, demonstrators blocked busy intersections in downtown Windhoek. They demanded the resignation of the Minister of Gender Equality, Poverty Eradication and Social Welfare, Doreen Sioka. Some carried posters that read, ‘Jou Poes Doreen’ (literally ‘your cunt, Doreen’). This transgressive directive confronted the Minister for her conservative, insensitive and ignorant views around sexual and reproductive health rights. As a leading activist of the protests pointed out in a reflection on protest, performance, publicness and praxis, radical practice was central to the movement’s strategy, “embodied through disruptive politics of public life” (Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja 2021 and see Heike Becker 2020).

A new generation of young Namibians were challenging the vestiges of coloniality, and raising pertinent questions regarding the politically and socially incomplete liberation of Namibia in 1990.

In 2021 the newly-formed Namibia Equal Rights Movement (known as “Equal Namibia”) campaigned for the abolition of the sodomy law, introduced under apartheid South African colonial occupation and still in force in Namibia. They mobilised public protests around court challenges regarding the recognition of same-sex marriages and queer families with the slogan: “There is no freedom if there is no equality”. In a vibrant social media campaign and through participation in Namibian television and radio shows, queer activists made clear that they regarded homophobia as a segment of coloniality in Namibia.

Unlike during earlier waves of state-induced homophobic campaigns, queer Namibians and their allies were no longer silent; hundreds came out for public protest against openly displayed homophobia by members of the country’s political class. On 17 November 2021 a vibrant queer protest march swept down Windhoek’s Independence Avenue, proudly waving rainbow flags and colourful banners standing up against homophobic utterances by veteran SWAPO politician Jerry Ekandjo during a parliamentary debate.

When in March 2022 young protestors, known as ‘Ama2000’- ‘the people of the 21^st century’ – took to the streets again, one activist tweeted that the march targeted the “APARTHEID abortion act of 1975”. The protestor added that, “As Namibia celebrates Independence, we march for freedom from archaic laws!”

The tweet powerfully exemplified how pro-choice and anti-homophobic protestors regarded such persistent concerns as enduring legacies of apartheid and colonialism, rather than simply as issues caused by sexism or patriarchy. In turn, the imminent removal of a South African-created statue of a German colonial officer is significant far beyond just a bronze sculpture.

Heike Becker focuses on the politics of memory, popular culture, digital media and social movements of resistance in southern Africa (specifically South Africa and Namibia). She also teaches in the Anthropology Department of University of the Western Cape.

Featured Photograph: Statue of German colonial officer Curt von François (Heike Becker, 2022).

Demolition colonialism in Nairobi

ROAPE

November 1, 2022

Nairobi remains a monument to the colonial project of discriminatory citizenship, inequality and structural violence. For decades under British colonialism demolitions of ‘illegal’ housing became the norm. Mwangi Mwaura explains that current demolitions in the city are justified under the banner of cleaning-up and building the city to attract investments.

By Mwangi Mwaura

Constant demolitions of homes, structures and other infrastructures have become a norm in most African urban areas. These demolitions are classed. This can be observed by studying the ongoing (re)construction of a Shell petrol station in Kileleshwa, on the affluent side of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital. The petrol station is under reconstruction at the exact location it was deemed illegal four years ago. This prompts us to reflect on race and class in Nairobi’s demolition history. A reflection that shows how the landscape of Nairobi is not only an archive of British colonialism but is a continual perpetuation of the colonial project of discriminatory citizenship, inequality and structural violence.

During British colonial rule the now affluent areas of Nairobi such as Kileleshwa, Westlands and Karen were reserved for white colonialists. Africans were only allowed to enter them to offer their labour under strict scrutiny imposed through the Kipande identification system which tied them to an employer. The African population was to be a transitory workforce in Nairobi, not a permanent one. But as time went by and more Africans came to the city, they started building houses in the east side of the city because neither the authorities nor their employers provided housing. Demolitions soon became a norm in these areas, where “African villages” were constantly set on fire to, in the words of Wangui Kimari, to “make the city legible to empire—racially, spatially, ecologically, and economically”.

Contemporary urban demolitions

Current demolitions are justified under the banner of cleaning up and building the city to attract investments. Projects set under this banner often include roads, for example the recent building of the elevated, 17-km-long expressway connecting affluent sides of Nairobi with the airport. Demolitions for construction of a link road connecting an industrial area to the expressway in 2021 caused a humanitarian crisis as about 40,000 people were left homeless, and forced to fight back on the street, in one of the popular neighbourhoods, Mukuru Kwa Njenga. The other set of projects that involve demolitions are heralded as restoring the “green city under the sun” and often include efforts to clean the Nairobi river.

In 2018, there was a marked increase in demolitions on ‘riparian land’ – this is land which is adjacent to rivers and streams and is subject to periodic or occasional flooding. The demolition spree was led by a multi-agency task-force consisting of the then newly formed Nairobi Regeneration Committee, along with the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) and the county government. Here, they argued, they were recovering riparian land from illegal land grabs. In August 2018 buildings in different parts of Nairobi were bulldozed. What was new and unexpected to most Kenyans was that some of these demolitions were in the affluent suburbs. For example, news of demolition of a Shell petrol station and adjacent Java House cafe at Kileleshwa, and the Ukay mall sparked shock amongst the investors and on social media. These buildings and others caught up in that phase of demolitions were claimed to be on riparian land.

However, it is important to note the fragmented governance of riparian land in Kenyan laws. Confusion exist on how to measure riparian land. There are overlapping mandates for their protection in at least eight pieces of legislation passed by parliament over the last decades. These are sometimes contradictory. For instance, the 1999 Environmental Management and Coordination Act defines it as ranging from a minimum of 6m and a maximum of 30m from the highest watermark while the 1989 Survey Act recommends 30m from tidal rivers. These fragmented and incoherent laws and policies continue to cause confusion. They have also created a legal loophole which the authorities and Kenyan elites have exploited to order demolitions and land grabs over the years.

During such demolitions, heavy security is used. This demonstrates the normalised structural violence. The 2018 riparian demolitions were also executed in the early hours of the morning or at night, causing great insecurity and vulnerability. Court orders and legal title deeds by residents are often ignored, leaving residents to fend for themselves and with no compensation.

Classed rebuilding

However, after exactly four years, the Shell petrol station demolished in August 2018, is currently under reconstruction in exactly the same location with permission and licence from the necessary agencies, including NEMA as seen from the construction site board (see image below). During its demolition the official statement by the environmental management body was that it was encroaching on riparian land and was also on a road reserve. Its reconstruction demonstrates the recolonizing nature of demolitions in Nairobi: when they are enacted against the working class they are permanent but when carried out in affluent areas they are only temporary with loopholes that the elites can exploit to rebuild or receive compensation.

Towards urban justice

In her book, The Struggle for Land and Justice in Kenya, Kenyan legal scholar Ambreena Manji explores the law relating to land and its administration. She studies the country’s rich but scattered ‘land archive’ through which she shows how land law has been the most emotional part of Kenyan laws. She further shows that the struggle towards land justice is ongoing in a variety of different ways, including through case laws. In regards to urban demolitions, some optimism about the possibility of ending demolition or moving towards the creation of a proper compensation structure can be seen in recent court judgments.

In the case, Mitu-Bell Welfare Society v The Kenya Airports Authority, the court noted the discriminatory aspect of demolition by pointing out that while the informal settlement, Mitumba village near Wilson Airport, had been demolished, adjacent multi-story buildings were left untouched.The judgement demanded that demolitions are accompanied by reasonable alternative accommodation.

Building on this precedent is the judgement in William Musembi vs The Moi Educational Centre Co. Ltd lodged by residents of two informal settlements who had faced the bulldozers in 2013 after occupying the pieces of land in 1968. The Supreme Court noted that even when the residents did not have the legal titles to land they acquired a protective right to housing through occupation.

Together, these judgments if respected, may lead us to urban land justice. But this will require an end to the recolonizing aspects of demolitions that has normalised the near-constant demolitions of homes and structures in working class neighbourhoods of Nairobi.

The author would like to acknowledge and appreciate the support of Ambreena Manji in reading earlier drafts of this text.

Mwangi Mwaura (@MwangiMwauraL) is a researcher affiliated to the Centre for Human Rights and Policy Studies (CHRIPS), Nairobi, Kenya.

Featured Photograph: Wangui Kimari and Constant Cap, ‘Under Fire: Forced Evictions and Arson Displace Nairobi’s Poor’ The Elephant (12 March 2022).

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