Scholars and activists from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, came together to draft the Dakar Declaration last year. The declaration condemns the constraints to Africa’s economic and monetary sovereignty. Against the multifaceted crises of capitalism, climate breakdown, speculative finance, war and inequalities, the Dakar Declaration calls for Pan-African, South-South cooperation and global solidarity.
In the spirit of the Arusha Declaration and the Porto Alegre Declaration we have come together in Dakar from all corners of the world to face a world in crisis under the theme of African Economic and Monetary Sovereignty.
We are a group of scholars, policy-makers, and activists from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, some of us economists, others political scientists, historians, sociologists and anthropologists. We address this declaration to African governments, African institutions and external actors and agencies that constrain Africa’s economic and monetary sovereignty.
Our existing international economic order is at the heart of the contemporary crises. The Global South suffers disproportionately from these multiple crises. Africa’s adverse incorporation into the capitalist order is the problem. We are integral to the system which could not thrive without our exploitation. We dissent from the dominant paradigm in economics which conceptualizes the economy in almost quasi-natural terms and describes a benign world devoid of unequal power relations.
Our global crises are multifaceted: climate breakdown, biodiversity depletion, pollution, speculative finance, war, and rampant inequalities. There is a general crisis of the neoliberal capitalist order with a turn to a resistant form of imperialism. Geopolitical turmoil is a dangerous symptom of both.
We do not accept this set of crises but confront and seek alternatives to it in solidarity with workers, the landless, peasants, women, climate activists and similar groups. For these reasons, we launch the Dakar Declaration with the aim of initiating lasting and trusting cooperation with initiatives and movements that share its spirit.
Ten strategic aims serve as our yardstick for action:
Most of our governments will not implement the transformations we need. We need to become the masses that always push for more.
Yet, we need strong states, democratic and responsible states. But even more than that, we need stronger peoples to defend those states and push them to always do more for the majority. African states can and should mobilize African labor and resources to meet Africa’s own needs, resuscitating the developmental ambitions of the early post- independence period.
With a world breaking apart into more regional trade blocs, building regional alliances becomes necessary and possible. The reassertion of our economic and monetary sovereignty and the subjection of foreign interests to our internal needs and interests becomes easier. This growth in policy sovereignty to structurally transform our economies and societies can enable us to fundamentally tackle long standing issues of poverty, social development, and democratization.
We must work to build a new multilateralism where global policy fora and institutions are inclusive, democratic, and reflective of the concerns of the Global South’s populations.
Militarism and imperialism cannot continue to politically mould the world system. We defend a positive neutralism with respect to the historic colonial-imperial bloc, and non-cooperation with their interference in African affairs.
Global inequalities arising from ecological breakdown and exposure to volatilities in finance and commodity prices put the Global South at a particular disadvantage which we need to overcome.
Recurrent debt crises have to end. We need to develop a global approach to correct the harmful impact of excessive foreign currency debt — including that issued by the IMF — and odious debts. Widespread, deep, and swift debt write-downs are essential. They must be focused on supporting economic transformation.
We need to stop the ongoing theft of wealth, committed by transnational corporations (TNCs), which flows into the Global North when TNCs transfer their earnings in tax havens and then invest them in financial markets, all this clothed in the harmless language of “Foreign Direct Investment”. To that end, measures such as capital controls, restrictions on tax evasion and illicit financial flows and fair taxation of TNCs must be actively promoted and implemented.
We have to tackle historically persistent inequalities rooted in the emergence and global expansion of the capitalist system. We also need a global reparations agenda to address in a fair manner the multifaceted ecological crisis. We must seek to elaborate this agenda technically, legitimize it, advocate it, defend it, and implement it. We support the efforts of our African American and Caribbean sisters and brothers in their specific labors for reparatory justice.
We act, teach, research, and mobilize in our local and national contexts, regionally and transnationally. We do these with the aim of building a lasting movement and acquire real influence in our political processes.
We are calling for a Pan-African, South-South cooperation and global solidarity for our collective cause. We invite you all to our gatherings during which we share our experiences, evaluate our progress, and plan the next steps.
The time is now!
Signatories
Charles Abugre, Ghana
Souad Aden-Osman, Ethiopia
Max Ajl, Tunisia/USA
Alexandre Abreu, Portugal
Asghar Adelzadeh, South Africa/USA
Dereje Alemayehu, Ethiopia/Germany
Ikal Angelei, Kenya
Broulaye Bagayoko, Mali
Hanene Bergaoui, Tunisia/Germany
C.P. Chandrasekhar, India
Horman Chitonge, South Africa
Carla Coburger, Germany
Caroline Cornier, Germany/France
Demba Moussa Dembélé, Senegal
Ndeye Fadiaw Diagne, Senegal
Dialo Diop, Senegal
Henriette Faye, Senegal
Andrew Fischer, Netherlands
Daniela Gabor, Romania/United Kingdom
Maha Ben Gadha, Tunisia
Hamza Hamouchene, Algeria/United Kingdom
Jason Hickel, United Kingdom
Nimi Hoffmann, United Kingdom/South Africa
Tetteh Hormeku, Ghana
Florian Horn, Germany/Belgium
Peter James Hudson, USA
Fadhel Kaboub, Tunisia/USA
Nancy Kachingwe, Malawi/Zimbabwe
Mary Karimu, Ghana
Rasmane Kientega, Burkina Faso
Ingrid Kvangraven, Norway/United Kingdom
Kai Koddenbrock, Germany
Imen Louati, Tunisia
Jamee Moudud, USA
Godwin Murunga, Kenya/Senegal
Fathimath Musthaq, Maldives/USA
Alvin Mosioma, Kenya
Kaba Nabe, Guinea
Redge Nkosi, South Africa
Jane Obuchi, Kenya
Franklin Obeng-Odoom, Ghana/Finland
Adebayo Olukoshi, Nigeria/South Africa
Keston Perry, Trinidad and Tobago/USA
Lebohang Liepollo Pheko, South Africa
Stefano Prato, Italy
Matthew Robinson, USA
Chafik Ben Rouine, Tunisia
Arif Rüzgar, Germany/Belgium
Ebrima Sall, Senegal
Matthias Schmelzer, Germany
Jean-Michel Servet, France
Howard Stein, USA
Crystal Simeoni, Kenya
Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Malaysia
Ismaïla Malick Sy, Senegal
Ndongo Samba Sylla, Senegal
Lisa Tilley, United Kingdom
Eric Toussaint, Belgium
Fiona Tregenna, South Africa
Dzodzi Tsikata, Ghana/United Kingdom
The Dakar Declaration is available in French and Swahili.
May 1968 in Dakar was a defining moment in the political history of Senegal. Dakar University students went on strike and blockaded the campus. The protests were violently suppressed, sparking a short-lived but intense nationwide revolutionary uprising against the ruling class. Over the last several years, videographer Yannek Simalla has compiled a collection of filmed testimonies from activists involved in the protests. Here, he introduces his collection, the creative process behind it, and how memories of May 1968 inform us as much about the present of Senegalese society as they do the past.
In 2017, with two friends, we started a biographical film project about Issa Samb, a Senegalese artist and agitator known by the alias Joe Ouakam. Reading an article by François Blum took Issa to the events of May 1968 in Dakar, Senegal, when several hundred students from the University of Dakar were rounded up and then transferred to Camp Archinard.
Issa wrote a poem asking for their release, and he recites it for us. I discover with him a student movement with its own demands that was close to youth movements in France and other industrialized countries, and was notable for its aspirations to freedom (Amadou Doucouré translates this double characteristic, explaining how he was revolted in the face of a colonial situation made up of regular humiliations within the university and at the same time fascinated by Jimmy Hendrix – he went on to take musical classes at Berkley College in the US).
The collection of testimonies has been an ongoing project since 2017. The decision to make portraits allows the events of May ‘68 to become embodied by individual trajectories, from students of prestigious families ‘aspiring to lead the country’ (Mamadou Racine Bathily), to people of more modest origins such as the trade unionist Birahim Ba and the apprentice shoemaker Pa Diagne.
The choice to give the floor to the this cast of characters, those who have not subsequently known the bright lights of political success, makes it possible to observe raw material that has not been the subject of multiple reconstructions during its formulation.
However, it is not a question of saying here that we would reach something more real because it had been less worked by memory, a kind of nugget of truth unearthed late. The individual stories that have been little produced and little repeated are not fossilized. They are still the subject of modifications during discussion and during the meetings before filming begins.
Birahim Ba’s account of the attack on the university by the security forces (the level of violence involved in particular) has changed over time, as meetings and interlocutors progressed, as if all this memory still hadn’t stabilized 50 years later. Similarly, an informal discussion, often off-camera, can bring up explanatory elements not previously mustered. This was the case with Mamadou Diop-Decroix, who related stories about Luis Cabral (the brother of Amilcar Cabral) and the war of liberation waged in Guinea against the Portuguese colonizer.
By summoning the memories of May ‘68 in Dakar, I have the acute impression of observing people who share between them the nostalgia of an era. It’s a bit like watching the French moved to see the spire of Notre Dame fall in flames. Their emotion reflects to a certain extent their feeling about the supposed state of present-day France (in distress) compared to the time when cathedrals were being built.
Similarly, listening to the testimonies of Senegalese activists informs us more about the present of Senegalese society in terms of the hope and energy that these ‘years of embers’ (Mao Wane) contained. The nostalgia for this era is often expressed directly (Birahim Ba) or more implicitly when speakers enthusiastically agree to devote a considerable amount of time to an interview (Mamadou Diop-Decroix).
In order to better contextualize these testimonies, it was necessary to understand the sequence of events, the history of the regime presided over by Léopold Sédar Senghor, its difficulties in moving towards democracy, the succession of political repressions and their intimate relations with the former colonial power. But it was also necessary to show a theorization of the events which brings out lines of interpretation without which we fail to understand what was at stake at the time. For this, archival research and the work of Pascal Bianchini, Françoise Blum, Omar Gueye and Abdoulaye Bathily were of huge help and guidance.
May ’68, having given birth to young children and youth and student movements (but not only), bloomed thereafter. The one-party regime could not provoke anything other than protest and clandestine organization. The spontaneous tendency (the Marxist-Leninist Youth Movement embodied by Mao Wane) or the more organizational tendency of those who would later form the And-Jeff party (‘Acting Together’ in Wolof) forced the Senegalese political regime to open up and, little by little, become more democratic.
Here again, the repression initiated at the time by the regime, the tortures endured, constituted an essential element of their narrative (‘the police torture people’, Ismaëla Diakhaté) that sometimes had to be brought out through questions or that sometimes were immediately imposed as a central moment of their understanding as to what power is (Eugénie Aw). This brutality was constitutive of the regime since the prohibition of the PAI (African Independence Party) in 1960, with the colonial legacy also expressing itself in these practices.
Finally, and it is a question of wondering about the reasons which lead us to do certain things and not others, to make known or recall the importance of these left-wing movements through their small and large actors in the advent of democracy in Senegal is for me a way of giving back to this country the welcome it has given me for more than 20 years.
Yannek Simalla works at the Lycée Jean Mermoz in Dakar, where he has been teaching for more than 20 years. He studied economics at La Sorbonne in France. His grandmother was a worker and trade unionist in the textile factories of the Roanne region of France.
Roberto Sirvent interviews Koni Benson about her new book Crossroads: I Live Where I Like, that draws on decades of research, to tell a sidelined story of the creation of the city of Cape Town, and the role of movements led by African women who were central in campaigning for public services. Benson speaks about how today there are over 2 million people in informal settlements or shanty towns, in a so-called ‘World Class’ city in the ‘Rainbow Nation’.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help readers understand the current political and social climate?
Koni Benson: Police repression is on the rise for movements for black lives across the world – including in South Africa where the city of Cape Town has earmarked millions for private security to demolish and evict shack dwellers from ‘occupying’ land for shelter, social distancing, and growing food in the midst of the global Covid pandemic. Crossroads: I Live Where I Like draws on decades of archival and oral history research, to tell a sidelined story of the creation of the city of Cape Town, foregrounding the central role of movements led by African women who were, and still are, at the forefront of organizing for what should be public services (food, shelter, water, land, safety) – basic human needs that have systematically been stolen and denied through processes of racist, sexist, colonial violence here and everywhere. Through the story of women’s organized resistance for housing in Cape Town the book tries to show how the current austerity of neoliberalism – the privatization of social services/the commons, has been constructed through an ongoing historical process that has been highly racialized, highly gendered, and highly contested.
Crossroads challenges the normalization of the current set up, shows how it was constructed, how it was challenged, how it can be deconstructed and reconstructed. South Africa has a brutal history of land dispossession whereby over 3.8 million forced removals took place between the 1960s and 1980s in order to engineer social and geographic segregation through a process of divide and rule. In the matrix of 87% of the land being reserved for the 13% of the population, the cities were designated as white areas. Forced removals were not considered in the famous 1994 Truth and Reconciliation Process.
Today there are over 570 000 families (which is about 2 million people) live in informal settlements or in overcrowded township housing, on official waiting lists for social housing, in a ‘World Class’, ‘Rainbow Nation’ city that builds between 11-16 000 low cost units a year. So if you do the math, you may get what they call a ‘housing opportunity’ in about 50 years time. So really, to quote Willie Baptist of the Black Panthers and National Union of the Homeless, ‘you only get what you are organized to take.’ In fact, recently the Minister of ‘Human Settlements’ said that anyone under the age of 60 did not ‘suffer from apartheid’ and is therefore not eligible for social housing today. So you can see what is at stake in the narratives that celebrate anti-apartheid organizing against evictions, but deny the need for and criminalize organizing for land and housing in the present. I think there are likely parallels with historical narratives that celebrate Black Power/Civil Rights movements in the 1960s while denying the ongoing brutalities of systemic racism in the USA today.
Roberto Sirvent: What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
Koni Benson: The book tries to provide a history as an opening into conversations about mobilization, demobilization, and remobilization in the face of power. Once pieced together, the story in this book was then workshopped with activists and community organizers over a five year period, so to a large extent it was activists and community organizers who picked key themes to highlight for both education, mobilization, and debate in movements. This includes: the details of colonial and apartheid dialectics between experiences and structures often airbrushed into neat nationalist narratives; complexities of alliance politics across race, class, and issue; the internal dynamics of movements, particularly the gendered and generational dynamics; and it included questions of authority and individualization that often overtake collective narratives.
As the only informal settlement to successfully resist the apartheid bulldozers, thanks to the organizing of the Crossroad’s Women’s Committee, the book goes into detail of both the victories, and the unglamorous hard work of how women in Crossroads turned the building of shacks into a highly visible political campaign using posters, plays, pickets, direct actions, media campaigns, alliance building, and vigils, to the point where, in 1978 over 22 Congressmen stood up in United States Congress to appeal the demolition of Crossroads in Cape Town. All of this can be useful in honoring and inspiring struggle. But as Amilcar Cabral said, claim no easy victories, which here would include ‘ending the story’ at this high point, rather than seeing it as an important victory, in an ongoing war. The book therefore follows these movements past their heyday, and looks at how momentous gains were pushed back through a reconfiguration of power and politics.
The apartheid state employed counter-revolutionary guerrilla warfare strategies which were developed and used across the world at the time, from Vietnam and Colombia, to undermine community protest ‘from within.’ In Crossroads in 1986 state-sponsored vigilantes (known as witdoeke), set the Crossroads camp on fire and chased out 70,000 residents deemed “squatters” by the apartheid state. The Women’s Committee was then dismissed and housing allocation militarized over the subsequent decade in the area.
After apartheid officially ended, women in Crossroads were again at the forefront of initiating one of the first and most prolonged protests for undelivered housing and public services. Yet their 1998 four-month sit-in on City Council Housing Offices, like other occupations and protest movements today, was criminalized by the state, vilified and oversimplified by the media, and disconnected from the more complicated legacies of colonialism and anti-apartheid organizing. Again, women’s leadership was demobilised, depoliticised, and dislocated from the issues they stood up for and from the celebrated history of women’s mobilising in Crossroads during apartheid.
This lip service, and these unresolved complicated dynamics of movement demobilization impact current attempts to mobilize for housing, water, education, etc. and are important to acknowledge and study in order to subvert, for strategic purposes, as well as for facing questions of how do we (want to) operate, amongst ourselves, in the face of neocolonialism, racism, and patriarchy in the present.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
Different readers will have different take aways, but there are a number of ideas about borders, boxes, and boundaries that the book tries to challenge. The first is to challenge the denial of ongoing apartheid: the myth that 1994 was a key turning point. This is the so-call South African miracle, Rainbownationism – where the ANC led us to the end of apartheid and that there is no need to drudge up calls to decolonize and call attention to white wealth, now. The book tries to show how the negotiated settlement, first experienced in Crossroads and then in South Africa as a whole undermined community organization and shows how post 1994 organizing is conveniently disconnected from colonial legacies and anti-apartheid era organizing, and instead criminalized today.
The 1994 divide keeps us from seeing the liberation struggle as unfinished, as an urgent priority that requires drastic measures, immediately. While Crossroads is an iconic piece of anti-apartheid struggle history in South Africa which captured local, national, and international attention at the peak of the apartheid regime, two decades later, when 300 African women – the 1998 Crossroad’s Women’s Power Group – organised in the same place, again publicly and politically against some of the same male figures in authority, they were vilified.
These moments of women-only organizing are rarely connected in public debate and never taught in schools where anti-apartheid struggle history is limited to learning about Mandela and ends in 1994. In the main, Crossroads Women’s Committee women are treated as disposable footsoliders, freeze framed in the 1980s and ignored today, and the Women’s Power Group, one of about 10 000 protest moments per year in post 1994 South Africa, are framed as undeserving, impatient troublemakers dislocated from the celebrated history of women’s mobilising in Crossroads. Listening to them speak their much more complicated truths to power in this book challenges the 1994 narrative that tells us we are in good hands.
Second, the book attempts to go beyond exposing or juxtaposing the extremes of Cape Town and the wealth gap that characterizes South Africa as the most unequal society in the world. Apartheid translates into separateness, but in fact, apartheid then and now is about a set of relations, a deep, exploitative, personal and structural dependency on racism and sexism – a playing out of what Walter Rodney called underdevelopment in his history of colonial dynamics between Europe and Africa. If this is understood then it becomes clear that liberal ideas or projects that attempt to address ‘black poverty’ without challenging white privilege will never disrupt the current status quo.
Third, I hope to raise questions about who counts as a struggle ‘or ‘leader,’ and what counts as the women’s movement and as women’s history. Beyond ‘retrieving’ women leaders from the ‘silences’ of history to compete with or compliment the better known individual male nationalist leaders of liberation struggles, Crossroads is a collective biography of two women-only organizations. And within these gender-based formations, as is the case with most local women-led collectives, women were not fighting for ‘women’s rights’ per se, but for basic human rights and public services, in a word the commons, for all. As such it attempts to unsettle the ideologies that underpin conventional nationalist historiographies and liberal feminist practices of women’s histories.
Fourth, related to the ideology of the individual heroes is the idea of the individual expert, the historian, researching and writing history. I want to challenge the practice of just adding new, albeit badly needed, content to history books without changing the form that both research and writing takes. It is an experiment with creative collaborative re-presentation of the past. So this book was illustrated by the Trantraal Brothers and Ashley Marais, local political cartoonists by drawing on over sixty life narratives and a decade of archival research I had conducted and workshopped with contemporary housing activists and women’s collectives who chose the most urgent and ongoing themes they felt spoke to and clarified some of the ongoing challenges against segregation, racism, violence, and patriarchy standing between the ongoing colonial and apartheid past, and a future we are still fighting for.
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
As explained best by Paolo Freire, I don’t see intellectual work as limited to those who author books or lead movements, and even those who do author books or take leadership positions are products of larger environments. But I can share some of the works or ways of working that represent some of the main threads that shaped my thinking and practice behind the experiment which became this book.
Feminist organizers of ever evolving formations and collectives that have actualized compasses that lead our way, for me, would include Ottilie Abrahams, Grace Lee Boggs, the Combahee River Collective, Dora Tamana, the Crossroads Women’s Committee, and Awra Amba. On the work of radical political education, I am led by Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Domitila Barrios de Chungara, Training for Transformation, the Highlander Institute, and the many comrades whom I have learned from in movements in action over the last 15 years in Cape Town.
On creative and poetic history as political engagement, I am grateful for the works, ways of being, and words of Yvonne Vera, Ayi Kwei Armah, V. Geetha, Nehanda Isoke Abiodun, Nawal El Saadawi, June Jordan, Patricia McFadden, and the cultural work/ers of Medu Art Ensemble and the Rhodes Must Fall Writing Subcommittee. Relatedly I am inspired by the radical archiving initiatives of the Mosireen Collective’s 858.ma An Archive of Resistance and Interference Archives and the radical history education work of Know Your Continent.
The political and intellectual work of activist historians who I turn to over and over again, include Walter Rodney, Neville Alexander, Robin Kelley, Susan Geiger, CLR James, Jacqui Alexander, Amilcar Cabral, Amrit Wilson, Manning Marable, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot. This intersects with the strands of oral history and feminist collaborative praxis where Richa Nagar and Chandra Talpade Mohanty have blazed trails for anti-disciplinary border-crossing.
On graphic non-fiction, this book has been inspired by Joe Sacco’s Palestine, Chester Brown’s Riel (2006), Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s This Side, That Side, Stavans & Alcatraz’s Latino U.S.A, and D’bi Young’s Shemurenga, and by the Just Seeds Collective.
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
Women in Crossroads have gifted us with a history of organized resistance and alternative visions of what Robin Kelley writes about in his classic book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination: “In the poetics of struggle and lived experience, in the utterances of ordinary folk, in the cultural products of social movements, in the reflection of activists, we discover the many different cognitive maps of the future, of the world not yet born. Recovering the poetry of social movements, however, particularly the poetry that dreams of a new world, is not such an easy task.”
These ‘poetics of struggle,’ or what Silvia Federici describes as a ‘joyful militancy’ that comes from connectedness and courage to collectively confront the world are evident in life histories of activists involved in the struggle for Crossroads. Amidst the layers of brutalities women in Crossroads refused another forced removal and organized until the end of the infamous apartheid pass laws. Their strategizing, their stories, their alliances, their tensions, their humor, their pain, their planning, recalibrations over time, and reflections decades later all comes through in their narratives pieced together through oral histories and archival materials and drawn by the sharp eyes and skillful hands of the Trantraal Brothers.
For those of their generation still on earth, this book is a retrospective photo album of days remembered. For those of us who were not there, this history is a doorway into an alternative future that has yet to become present. It is an invitation to imagine forms and prospects of organizing, of collaborative scholarship, of storytelling, and of writing that can challenge the artificial and colonial built boundaries between activism vs. academia, and the classroom vs. the community, and unsettle conventions of exclusive readerships and expert authority and authorship in alienated academic knowledge production. We want to imagine manifesting new approaches to some of the old impasses of history writing and make space to experiment with collective and creative approaches to engaging history.
Koni Benson’s Crossroads: I Live Where I Like was published in conjunction with PM Press and Jacana Media. A version of this interview was published by the Black Agenda Report here.
Koni Benson is a historian, organiser, and educator. She is a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. Roberto Sirvent is editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.
Adam Mayer praises a new collection, Liberated Texts, which includes rediscovered books on Africa’s socialist intellectual history and political economy, looking at the startling, and frequently long ignored work of Walter Rodney, Karim Hirji, Issa Shivji, Dani Wadada Nabudere, A. M. Babu and Makhan Singh.
By Adam Mayer
Liberated Texts is a magnificent, essential, exciting tome that feels like a bombshell. This incredibly rich collection is a selection that is deep, wide, as well as entertaining. The book focuses on twenty-one volumes from the previous one hundred years, with a geographical range from the UK, the US, Vietnam, Korea, the Peoples Republic of China, the Middle East, Ireland, Malaysia, Africa (especially East Africa), Europe, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union, focusing on books that are without exception, foundational.
The collection is nothing less than a truth pill: in composite form, the volume corrects world history that Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of the United States offered for the sterile, historical curriculum on domestic (US) history. The volume consists of relatively short reviews (written by a wide collection of young and old academics and activists from every corner of the globe) but together they reflect such a unified vision that I would recommend Liberated Texts as compulsory reading for undergraduate students (as well as graduates!) Although the text is a broad canvas it speaks to our age (despite some of the reviewed book having been written in the 1920s).
Each review is by default, a buried tresure. The writer of this very review is a middle-aged Hungarian, which means that some of the works and authors discussed were more familiar to me than they would be to others. For example, Anton Makarenko’s name was, when the author grew up in the People’s Republic of Hungary, a household word. Makarenko’s continued relevance for South America and the oppressed everywhere, as well as his rootedness in the revolutionary transformations of the Soviet experiment, are dealt with here marvellosly by Alex Turrall (p. 289). In loving detail Turrall also discusses his hero the pedagogue Sukhomlinsky’s love for Stalinist reforms of Soviet education (p. 334).
There is one locus, and one locus only, where death is given reign, perhaps even celebrated: in a Palestinian case (p. 133) the revolutionary horizons are firmly focused on the past, not on any kind of future. The entire problematic of Israeli society’s recent ultra right-wing turn (a terrible outcome from the left’s point of view) is altogther missing here. Yet it is difficult to fault the authors or editors with this (after all, they painstakingly included an exemplary anti-Nazi Palestinian fighter in the text, p. 152) but it might be in order to challenge a fascination with martyrdom as a revolutionary option on the radical left.
In every other aspect, Liberated Texts enlightens without embarrassment, and affirms life itself. Imperialism is taken on in the form of unresolved murders of Chinese researchers in the United States as a focus (p. 307), and in uncovering the diabolical machinations of the peer-review system – racist, classist, prestige-driven as it is (p. 305).
The bravery of this collection is such that we find few authors within academia’s tenure track: authors are either emeriti, tenured, very young academics, or those dedicated to political work: actual grassroots organizers, comrades at high schools, or as language teachers. This has a very beneficial effect on the edited volume as an enterprise at the forefront of knowledge, indeed of creating new knowledge. Career considerations are absent entirely from this volume, in which thankfully even the whiff of mainstream liberalism is anathema.
I can say with certainty regarding the collection’s Africanist chapters that certain specialists globally, on African radical intellectual history, have been included: Leo Zeilig, Zeyad el-Nabolsy, Paul O’Connell, Noosim Naimasiah and Corinna Mullin all shed light on East African (as well as Caribbean) socialist intellectual history in ways that clear new paths in a sub-discipline that is underfunded, purposely confined to obscurity, and which lacks standard go-to syntheses especially in the English language (Hakim Adi’s celebrated history on pan-Africanism and communism stops with the 1950s, and other works are in the making).
Walter Rodney, Karim Hirji, Issa Shivji, Dani Wadada Nabudere, A. M. Babu, Makhan Singh are the central authors dealt with here. Rodney is enjoying a magnificent and much deserved renaissance (but this collection deals with a lost collection of Rodney’s 1978 Hamburg lectures by Zeilig!) Nabolsy shows us how Nyerere’s Marxist opposition experienced Ujamaa, and Tanzanian ’socialism’. Nabudere – a quintessential organic intellectual as much as Rodney – is encountered in praxis as well as through his thought and academic achievements in a chapter by Corinna Mullin. Nabudere emerges as a towering figure whose renaissance might be in the making right at this juncture. Singh makes us face the real essence of British imperialism. Nabudere, Babu and even Hirji’s achievements in analysing imperialism and its political economy are all celebrated in the collection.[1]
Where Shivji focuses on empire in its less violent aspect (notably NGOs and human rights discourse) powerfully described by Paul O’Connell, Naimasiah reminds us that violence had been as constitutive to Britain’s empire, as it has been to the Unites States (in Vietnam or in Korea). An fascinating chapter in the collection is provided by Marion Ettinger’s review of Richard Boyle’s Mutiny in Vietnam, an account based entirely on journalism, indeed impromptu testimony, of mutinous US soldiers tired of fighting for Vietnam’s landlord class.
Many readers of this anthology will identify with those veterans (since the collection appears in the English language) perhaps more than with East Asia’s magnificent, conscious fighters also written about in the book. Even in armies of the imperialist core, humanity shines through. Simply put, there are no imperialist peoples, only imperialist states.
Zeilig’s nuanced take on this important matter is revealed in Rodney’s rediscovered lectures. Also, the subtlety of class analysis in relation to workers versus peasants, and the bureacratic bourgeoisie profiting from this constellation (p. 219) brings to mind the contradiction that had arguably brought down Thomas Sankara, Burkina Faso’s anti-imperialist president who nevertheless found himself opposing working class demands. Rodney’s politics in Guyana invited the same fate as Sankara, as we know.
Nabolsy’s review on Hirji’s The Travails of a Tanzanian Teacher touches on very interesting issues of Rodney’s role especially in the context of Ujamaa and Nyerere’s idiosyncratic version of African socialism. Nabolsy appreciates Nyerere efforts but analyses his politics with great candour: Ujamaa provided national unification, but failed to undermine Tanzania’s dependency in any real sense.[2] The sad realization of the failure of Tanzania’s experience startles the reader with its implications for the history of African socialism.
On an emotional and personal level, I remain most endeared by the Soviet authors celebrated in this text. So Makarenko and Sukhomlinsky are both Soviet success stories and they demonstrate that this combination of words in no oxymoron, and neither is it necessarily, revisionist mumbo-jumbo. Their artificial removal from their historical context (which had happened many times over in Makarenko’s case, and in one particular account when it comes to Sukhomlinsky) are fought against by the author with Leninist gusto.
Sukhomlinsky had not fought against a supposedly Stalinist education reform: he built it, and it became one of the most important achievements of the country by the 1960s due partly to his efforts. The former educational pioneer did not harm children: he gave them purpose, responsibility, self-respect, and self-esteem. The implication of Sukhomlinsky and Makarenko is that true freedom constructs its own order, and that freedom ultimately thrives on responsibility, and revolutionary freedom.
As this collection is subtitled Volume One, it is my hope and expectation that this shall be the beginning of a series of books, dealing with other foundational texts, and even become a revolutionary alternative to The London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, both of which still demonstrate how much readers crave review collections. Volumes like Liberated Texts might be the very future of book review magazines in changed form. A luta continua!
Adam Mayer is a researcher and writer and currently works at the American University of Iraq in Baghdad. Adam is the author of Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria (Pluto Press, 2016).
Notes
[1] Pluto Press is preparing a volume on revolutionary movements in Africa for later in 2023, where many of the authors here will also have their own chapters, elaborating on the penetrating analyses of the texts reviewed in this collection.
[2] Indeed, the author of this review has unpublished interviews with an agricultural engineer and socialist Hungary’s agronomist who (after building collectivized agriculture in Hungary) went on in the early 1970s to help design Ujamaa villages in the country. This he did with the participation of Canadian and even West German technical advisors (to his own initial utter bewilderment as a Communist).
Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton write how the ecologically sustainable, communally managed subsistence pastoralism in Somalia has been displaced by militarised extractive ranching. Challenging mainstream accounts of the “drought” Duffield and Stockton argue the current crisis is the result of decades of bad development and relief interventions that have promoted impoverishment and hunger.
By Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton
In Tracy McVeigh’s article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper in December, (“Fear of the F-word: Somalia avoids famine declaration as hunger spreads”) she stated that drought turns people into wanderers “with little option but to leave dead animals and dried-up gardens behind to go in search of food and water.” Until recently, and possibly still, the majority of Somalis were actually nomadic pastoralists, whose existence depended upon continually moving with their animals to those places which had received sufficient rain to grow pasture.
Predating the climate change crisis, this way of life was adapted to long-standing weather patterns in the Horn of Africa where rainfall is erratic in its local distribution while, in aggregate, relatively reliable across the region as a whole. Consequently, the essential algorithm for social and economic survival in the Somali territories was the regular long-distance movement of herds and herders with drinking water for humans (and young animals) supplied by male camels, hauled from reliable surface water sources, often, over enormous distances. That pastoral transhumance has been severely disrupted over the last half century is the underlying cause of animal deaths, the destitution of many Somalis and the increasing frequency of famine.
Nomadic pastoralism began to break down in the 1970’s due primarily to badly conceived ’development’ programmes which distributed thousands of miles of barbed wire to enclose the best rangeland within “group ranching” schemes. Disruption intensified with the inter-communal warfare that broke out as a consequence of denying customary access to former communal pasture and water resources redesignated as the private property of internationally supported commercial ranches. To this day, Somalia remains one of the world’s largest importers of barbed-wire.
Modern land-grabbing in the Horn of Africa, financed by Saudi and Gulf states, continues to deepen the crisis of pastoralism across the region. The result of these so-called development policies has been to exclude politically marginalised pastoral communities from vital livelihood resources. Herd depletion is followed by human sedentarisation in IDP camps where survival depends upon erratic “food for work” schemes overseen by the international aid system.
Of increasing importance is the growing ‘gig’ economy of internally displaced persons (IDPs) hired by the day on large commercial plantations at below subsistence wages. The “communities” to which MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières) and other aid agencies minister and whose desperate condition is reflected in the widely quoted high rates of malnutrition, are in effect trapped in a regime of modern slavery, created and reinforced by actually existing “development” and “relief aid”.
To be clear however, the Somali territories still ‘work’, so to speak. The Red Sea port of Berbera, nowadays managed by DP World (also active in several UK ports) has become Africa’s largest livestock exporter, mainly to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Since 2010, Berbera has been shipping around 2 million sheep and goats per annum, irrespective of reported ‘droughts.’ Every year, Bosassa and Djibouti ports also handle hundreds of thousands of Somali livestock, and there are advanced plans for a new livestock export terminal in Lamu to handle the growing overland livestock exports to Kenya. The FAO estimated that Somalia exported 3.8 million live animals in 2015 and 2.4 million in 2020. In terms of live exports, the region now surpasses Australia. Surprising for a region defined by drought, poverty and conflict?
While annual livestock export numbers vary considerably, highly sophisticated supply chains, operating through a profitable telecom-industry has transformed livestock production in the Somali territories. An ecologically sustainable, communally managed subsistence pastoralism has been displaced by militarised extractive ranching which is dramatically acclerating Somalia’s ecological deterioration and rendering sustainable pastoral adaptation to climate change impossible. While this livestock bonanza lasts, trading hubs, such as Galkayo and Garowe near the Ogaden border, have been transformed from small oases into hi-tech boom towns with thriving hospitality, real-estate and abattoir businesses. Since al-Shabaab controls most of Somalia’s rangelands, it is clear that it is only with its consent that livestock production and export is possible. Being so integrated into the region’s most valuable sector, is this the reason for its apparent resilience?
However, McVeigh’s article presents an ahistorical narrative that speaks to the interests of the international aid system. Here, it is “drought” (incidentally, an equivocal claim given available rainfall data) together with hesitant government and donors, rather than decades of bad development and dysfunctional relief interventions that have caused impoverishment and hunger and which, might reasonably be held accountable for present day “loss and damage” sustained by Somalis, alongside the leading perpetrators of climate breakdown.
But the international aid system now has a stranglehold on outside journalist access to conflict zones. The decimation of independent ‘foreign correspondents’ has reinforced the influence of aid agencies in shaping the external narrative. Even the Guardian’s touted “independent ownership” is no guarantee that the newspaper is “entirely free from political or commercial influence”. Take its Global Development Section, which is co-financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and, importantly, supports the Guardian’s reporting on the Somali territories. The Guardian’s website acknowledges this when it states, ‘The only restriction [our emphasis] to the Guardian’s coverage on this site is where the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is prohibited under US law from directly funding or earmarking funds to: (a) influence the outcome of any domestic or foreign election for public office; or (b) support lobbying or other attempts to influence legislation (local, state, federal, or foreign).’ Presumably, in the context of international reportage, this means the Guardian’s Global Development section will not publish material judged prejudicial to US interests.
It is our contention that the spectacular growth of urban populations in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States can be nutritionally sustained most cost-effectively by land-grabbing and militarised ranching in the Horn of Africa, facilitated by temporary and qualified humanitarian assistance provided by the international aid system for those excluded by this modern form of enclosure and primitive accumulation.
Mark Duffield works on the political philosophy of permanent emergency, including, the datafication of the current global crisis, the expansion of remote management systems and the growing antagonism between ‘connectivity’ and ‘circulation’. Nicholas Stockton describes himself as a recovering aid worker, now in semi-retirement.
Featured Photograph: Oxfam health workers in Dadaab, Kenya distribute water containers and soap to refugees who arrived from Somalia (8 July 2011).
On CLR James’ 122nd Anniversary, Matthew Quest celebrates his intervention in global freedom movements by placing his radical political economy in conversation with the African world and the African continent. He argues that CLR James offers a different and better understanding of capital, the state, and the role of the working class than most Pan-African and socialist thinkers on the continent and the diaspora of the 1940s-70s and today. James developed a radical perspective centred on the self-emancipation of the working masses that strives not to reform capitalism but to abolish it.
By Matthew Quest
It is impossible to discuss CLR James (1901-1989) and his economics without underscoring it was a product of his politics first, that wished to bring the new society closer (not a sovereign nation-state in the world system). While James’s economics has profound contemporary implications, we must also remember it was clarified in specific historical contexts in the twentieth century.
Placing James’s political economy in conversation with the African world, and the African continent specifically, requires recalling his interventions in global freedom movements. His underground theorizing is still outside the main currents of recording his legacies and the Black radical tradition. If radical critiques of political economy reject many of the normative frameworks of economics in the name of pursuing some form of equality and sovereignty for peripheral nations, James calls into question what radical views of economics are. Not simply James’s ideals but the creative conflicts within his legacies help us to inquire more deeply.
The best way to remind us of this proposition is to underline what the critique of neo-liberalism means today. Overwhelmingly, it means a critique of one form of capitalism, not opposition to capitalism as a whole. Neo-liberalism is said to be economics based on finance capital and a retreat from industrial production and infrastructural maintenance. While industry has largely migrated from the center to the periphery in the last 30-50 years; the critique of neo-liberalism is largely the same in imperial centers and peripheries. This flawed challenge is a product of the fusion of New Deal/Keynesian and anti-colonial economics.
Failure of the Critique of Neo-Liberalism Rooted in New Deal and Anti-Colonial Economics
Most who desire a Green New Deal (and/or those who cheer on contemporary China) wish to be partners with industrial capital in building and maintaining roads and bridges, water and electrical systems and wish for the development of free or low-cost public housing, healthcare, and education. This means a certain type of state planned intervention, whether it be the one-party state or aspiring welfare state, in the economy. The critique of neoliberalism seeks to enhance both the profits of capitalists and the creation of good-paying, perhaps unionized, jobs. The apparent challenge to neo-liberalism wants the lion to lay down with the lamb.
The critique of neoliberalism is not for the abolition of capitalism but looks for a renaissance in national development where capital is a partner with progressives and labor is politically subordinate. Progressivism by definition is a permanent evasion that exists between propertied liberalism and content-less socialism.
James, a left-libertarian and autonomous Marxist, opposed most frameworks of progressive economics and politics. He was informed by an original interpretation of the intersection of Hegel, Marx, and Lenin. Most anti-colonial economics relies on a certain reading of Lenin’s Imperialism that James does not share. James offers a reading of Lenin’s last writings to advise peripheral statesmen. That does not add to his insurgent legacies. The idea that banks or monopoly trusts can be “good” or “bad,” from the perspective of working-class self-emancipation, is not sustainable.
A Pan-African and Independent Socialist
CLR James, author of The Black Jacobins, the classic history of the Haitian Revolution, is recalled as a Pan-African and independent socialist. A colleague and critic of anti-colonial politicians and activists (Trinidad’s George Padmore, Eric Williams, and Stokely Carmichael, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, and Guyana’s Walter Rodney) James’s political economy was fundamentally different than his associates. While there are apparent moments of unity, especially around how the empire of capital underdeveloped Africa and the Caribbean through slavery and colonialism, or how federation might help enhance peripheral nation’s sovereignty, James was distinctive. He saw the state, party politics, democracy, and the working class in contrast to Pan-African and Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy.
The Black radical tradition, after experimenting with European radicalism and socialism, never developed its own independent political economy. As a left-libertarian and autonomous Marxist, James founded his own doctrine with comrades in the Johnson-Forest Tendency of American Trotskyism (1942-1951). These included Raya Dunayevskaya, Grace Lee Boggs, Martin Glaberman, and Selma James.
His mature politics benefited from the journey but was finally a rupture with the Trotskyist movement; this produced small American Marxist collectives, the Correspondence group (1951-1961) and the Facing Reality group (1962-1970). These politics could be summed up as advocating direct democracy, workers’ self-management, the autonomy of Blacks, the colonized, and women, and rebellion against totalitarian bureaucracy.
Before the age of Third World national liberation struggles, most of James’s original economics was expressed in The Invading Socialist Society (1947) and State Capitalism & World Revolution (1950). Facing Reality (1958) also illustrated some aspects of his political economy. These small booklets anticipated problems with general staples of Third World political economy before such theories consolidated themselves. Beginning with a critique of the Soviet Union, James started to develop a political economy for the whole world. While he saw the one-party state and welfare state differently, Stalinist Russia, FDR’s New Deal, Fabian Britain, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy all had something in common. Not simply centralized state planning but a militant hostility to labor’s self-emancipation.
For James, there is a connection between state planning and repression of toilers, and he in no way subscribes to classical liberal market economics. We must remember that James’s mature political economy was worked out not just in response to Russia but Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal welfare state, and its repression of self-directed action during the CIO labor movement.
While James recognized differences between imperial centers and peripheral colonized territories, he did not formulate his economics consistent with anti-colonial nationalist values that assumed there were competing blocs of capital in the world, richer and poorer nations, some being progressive and others reactionary. Instead, James, always with the social motion of independent labor in mind, was analyzing political economy from the approach of how workers and farmers could arrive at their own authority.
From Ethiopia solidarity (1935-1941) to Kenya solidarity (1952-1961), James’s anti-colonialism at first informally and formally functioned toward harmony with a view of labor’s self-emancipation. However, his approach to African political economy started to change when expressing solidarity with Ghana (1957-1966) and Tanzania (1969-1974). His view of state capitalism changed, and his approach to labor’s self-emancipation could disappear and reappear, when analyzing these later struggles. Before we criticize James for his concern for labor’s self-emancipation retreating and advancing, we must inquire whether African or Third World political economy-centred labor’s self-emancipation is foundational to his approach.
James started from the premise that capitalism should be abolished and that the self-organization and self-emancipation of the working class was central to such a process. Nations do not produce wealth, except in perhaps classical liberal and welfare state economics. Workers at the point of production and distribution, even where technology and machinery minimize mass labor, produce and distribute all necessities of life (i.e. food, shelter, healthcare).
His only novel Minty Alley (1936), about women who are cooks, caregivers and servants living in Caribbean barrack yard life, explained how even those who had little to no wages and lived under feudal-capitalist conditions, took steps to stop and start social and economic production. Peripheral toilers, even house servants, could informally strike, despite not having trade union organizations or regular workplaces outside the home. Women toilers in the periphery navigated patriarchy and capitalism.
The following are concise original premises of James’s thought that clash with most progressive or socialist understandings of political economy:
Through an analysis of Stalinist Russia as first a fascist, and then a state capitalist society, James concludes through a close reading of wage relations, incentive pay, and nationalized property, that the law of value functioned in Russian society. This means it is was an exploitative capitalist society, despite its state planning and nationalized property, not a socialist society. Following this conclusion, one could make this analysis of any nation-state and its political economy.
There is no progressive or dual character of government bureaucracy. From 1939-1979, James intermittently expressed openly that the idea of national self-determination in anti-colonialism was a fraud that didn’t take seriously popular self-reliance. His experiences from Ethiopia solidarity to Tanzania solidarity revealed this to him.
A police state cannot be the defender of the proletariat and its economic gains – there are no other kinds of states. That is what states do, they are monopolies of the means of coercion (prisons, military, police, intelligence agencies). Both the one-party state and the welfare state need to be abolished. In pursuit of growth, they transform human needs into decimal points of economic progress. National debts, stock markets, prices of commodities, human rights and development indices may go up or down, but these cannot measure an aspiring revolutionary socialist society rather they are measures of capital accumulation, hierarchies of social classes, and alienation of labor.
The revolt against capitalism is not for more jobs, goods, and services. It is the revolt against value production itself – if we are opposed to wage labor and capital relations, we don’t seek more opportunities for the aspiring capital accumulators, jobs for workers, and development of the poor, prison reform, and homeless shelters. (This is a political economy that sustains social stratification in the name of national development). Such “reforms” are only conceded in insurgent situations where regimes seek to reconvert their hierarchies and domination to greater mystification.
Administrative rationalism is a bourgeois philosophy: socialist planning cannot escape the logic of growth, profits and property relations. Redistribution is absurd, as workers produce and distribute everything already. In fields, factories and workshops, on trucks, docks, sea-going vessels, trains, and planes. If workers as a result of repression and miseducation don’t consistently act in their own interests, they don’t need an elite class of experts to do it for them.
Using Yugoslavia and early Communist China as examples, James believed that post-World War II anti-colonial nationalism in peripheral societies, and their economics, obscures that the only capital they will be allowed to administer is the lives of the local toilers. This is the primary way they will extract capital, through ordinary people’s hides.
Nationalized property or public property is not inherently better than private property. The public or nation at the grassroots has no direct power to use and organize these resources as they wish. Everyday people must invade, occupy, and control both to have direct self-governing power.
If vanguards are valid and have a right to exist, they cannot be a self-declared special class transcending time. They can be at the forefront of the next development of political thought for a specific period of time as recognized by ordinary people. One doesn’t declare oneself “the vanguard.” Rather vanguards, small revolutionary organizations and cadre circles, can have one legitimate task, propagating the destruction of bureaucracy and hierarchy.
Professionals need to be abolished as the embodiment of culture and government. Otherwise, what may be termed economic democracy is not marked by direct majority rule of workers and farmers. There is a basic continuity between James’s theorizing of this principle, it transcends his first American years (1947-1958) and what he expressed at the Havana Cultural Congress in 1968 and his speech “Toward the Seventh Pan African Congress” he gave in Senegal in 1975.
Post-War War II society will not see a fundamental redivision of colonies. Rather, through the World Bank/IMF and the State Department U.S. imperialism is striving to integrate the national economies of other countries into their own. These include both European countries and African, Asian and Latin American countries. This will be carried out through finance capital and the military-industrial complex. This observation was not a lament with a request for more fair banking and trade relations. This was a conclusion that justified the need to organize a world revolution. Coupled with this was the idea that there was no crisis of state leadership or vanguard parties. What was required was the direct self-mobilization of toilers to place tasks of politics and government in their own hands. At his most vivid, James believed ordinary citizens could carry out economic planning, judicial affairs, and foreign relations – all the tasks most political thinkers, even radical ones, associate with professionals and elites.
James’s Core Economic Principles and those of African and Third World Political Economy
Whether Pan-African socialists are advocates of the one-party state or welfare state, or see retreats or contradictions in the Soviet Union in terms of its anti-colonial advocacy, most view Russia as primarily an aspiring independent political economy or block of capital whose dilemmas anti-colonial nationalists identify with, and appreciate. Russia, like China and Cuba, or post-independence Ghana or Tanzania is trying to navigate a peripheral nation’s development through a hostile world system.
Most socialist-informed anti-colonial nationalists divide their aspiring middle classes and native business sectors between those who are self-aggrandizing and those who are patriotic to the “socialist” state. This means they posit some measure of heroism for aspiring capital accumulators. This is consistent with the nationalist theorizing of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.
State capitalism is seen as progressive where it is perceived as breaking up the former plantation or colonial economy. These economics seek peaceful coexistence not wars of liberation against imperial powers. “Peace” means the right of peripheral rulers to manage their own nation’s material resources, subordinate their labourers and extract profits from them, and compete with other nation-states to illustrate which regime can best develop their nation.
Anti-colonial economics shifts the goal of socialist economics from rejecting wage labor and capital relations to accumulating national capital. In anti-colonial economics, the role of workers and farmers is to produce heroically in a disciplined fashion to the state plan. Their labor organization should be state-controlled and not organized strike actions that undermine national security or national production which are seen as virtually the same.
Where it has a sociological view of class formation and inquires if a bourgeoisie (be the capital possessed high or low) and a proletariat (be wages high or low) really exist in most peripheral territories, anti-colonial economics subtly supports domination. This is the basis for coalition politics around hierarchical regimes that administer subordinate lives.
Anti-colonial economics is overwhelmingly hostile to class struggle. Sometimes, it falsely presents professional and bureaucratic objections to larger blocs of capital in the world and desires to delink from imperial centers, as a type of class struggle. Still, the call for “people-centered movements” (if this means everyday people) acknowledges that aspiring rulers and capital accumulators are part of the anti-colonial front.
Anti-colonial economics while informed by Marxism, is also informed by classical liberal and Keynesian economics. It is concerned with unfair trade and banking relations, brain drains (its professional classes migrating to imperial centers – its contempt for indigenous knowledge is the other side of this), and lack of research and development in science and technology. Its search for rational capitalism is the last refuge of the aspiring African bourgeoisie that we are conveniently told as a social class does not exist. Their aspirations and desires to be peers with other capitalists in the world have real consequences for the repression of commoners.
The Double Value of State Capitalist Political Economy
CLR James helps us to see there are conflicting tendencies within state capitalist political economy. Yet, James’s state capitalist analysis had a double value. It most often rejected state capitalism as hostile to independent labor; on occasion, it accepted that it could contribute to breaking up the former plantation or colonial economy. However, his second stance evolved with the emerging currents of anti-colonial economics that evolved later, as summed up by Trinidad’s Lloyd Best, Jamaica’s Norman Girvan, Guyana’s Clive Thomas, Egypt’s Samir Amin, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, and Tanzania’s A.M. Babu.
In The Black Jacobins (1938)there is a critical discourse on J.B. Colbert’s Mercantilism or state capitalist economics that placed France at the center and Haiti in its periphery during the era of the slave trade. In some ways, this is a kindred spirit to Eric Williams’s Capitalism & Slavery (1944) which had similar concerns with Britain’s approach to capitalism and its colonies. However, James’s critique of Williams’s book is it didn’t understand the social motion of toilers that wishes to govern themselves.
While both British and French imperialists could be criticized as denying peripheral nations free trade and opportunities for their own indigenous capitalist development, the irony is the preferred “radical” political economy for self-determination in the Global South (the search for independence under capitalism) is state capitalism. And if, since the 1970s, and certainly after the 1990s Africa and the Global South retreated from state capitalism, today China and Venezuela’s example has many cheerleading this political economy again.
However, we have to keep in mind that state capitalism, whether as a measure of national sovereignty or the repression of workers’ and farmers’ autonomy, is a fruitful means of analyzing any nation’s political economy. For the United States, the great propagandist for democracy as defined by liberal markets has been a state capitalist society for most of its history, with stronger and retreating tendencies. This could be measured in its approach to both central banking and industrialism.
Toussaint L’Ouverture, as depicted not endorsed by James, exhibited the treachery of the emerging post-colonial economy, when in the name of pursuing Haitian independence, he restored the plantation economy, transformed the ex-slaves into wage-earners, and had his Black army attack them with the lash. This was to subordinate Black labor to the perceived need to sustain profits, property relations, and the accumulation of wealth. This was a major characteristic of not merely the first Third World national liberation struggle but everyone subsequently that lived by Marxism to greater and lesser degrees. State capitalist economics exists at the fault line of national liberation and labor’s self-emancipation. There is no heralded or contemporary radical political economy concerned about this post-civil rights, post-colonial perennial problem.
The People of Kenya Speak for themselves
CLR James and Grace Lee Boggs helped write Mbiyu Koinange’s The People of Kenya Speak for Themselves (1955) which was part of a global Kenya solidarity project rarely remarked upon. This pamphlet centered on Kikuyu peasants and women specifically doing their own economic planning, in building independent schools in the rural areas. This pamphlet was meant to counter dehumanizing anti-Mau Mau (Land and Freedom Army) propaganda by the British colonizer. It was consistent with how James saw unsung African rebellions that took on an ethnic, gendered, or religious form as of equivalent value to more modern labor strikes on the African continent. How many observe how Kenyan peasant farmers and women organize their resources to build a school and view this as political economy? And yet if the state gathered taxes and talked of planning, distributing, or appropriating capital to build schools this would be more acceptable to many.
Gathering Capital to Defeat Capital in Ghana?
Yet James was not always focused on everyday people on the African continent when thinking about economics. Consistent with his speeches on the Caribbean federation (1959-1960), his speech to the Conventional People’s Party in Ghana in 1960, and the years he advised Eric Williams’s Trinidad and Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana governments, James could function like an advisor to the nation-state on economic planning.
As recorded in Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977), James once suggested that Ghana must tell the global community that it seeks to gather as much capital as it can so it can overthrow the relations of capital in their country. This on the surface seems absurd and inconsistent with his own original formulations on political economy. But this is actually how the main currents of anti-colonial economics often see things.
James also critiqued Nkrumah’s Ghana for his state capitalist planning that tried too hard to catch up with modern industrial societies, such as the Akosombo Dam Project, and therefore created an environment of austerity around Ghana toilers. While James wrote about Ghana’s toilers’ role in the anti-colonial revolution, he did not recognize and record their revolt against Nkrumah, particularly the general strike of 1961, in his post-colonial criticism. This is consistent with his retreating into the silences in the main currents of African and Third World political economy in this era.
Class Contradictions in Ujamaa Socialist Tanzania
As of 1964, there is evidence that CLR James thought Julius Nyerere was a shallow politician. But from 1969-1974 James started to make a global alliance with Nyerere to forge the Sixth Pan African Congress in Dar es Salaam, where he was a mentor to African American and Caribbean younger activists.
James was impressed with Nyerere’s stance that socialism was not racialism. This was significant when young Pan-Africanists were concerned that Marxism or the pursuit of socialism was a white ideology. James after discussing with Nyerere also was impressed that the Tanzanian leader understood that while he nationalized much property in his country, this was insufficient to empower ordinary people.
Still, Nyerere was unclear about what to do next. James’ Nyerere appeared to challenge professionals and the formally educated and wished to center the rural peasant-farmer as the embodiment of African socialism. Yet while there were autonomous ujamaa villages for a time in the Ruvuma district near the Mozambique southern border, Nyerere allowed these to be repressed and then transformed this model into a state plan for compulsory villagization that bulldozed African villagers’ modest homes so they might be arranged into centralized communities in the name of national development.
In James’s A History of Pan African Revolt, he analyzes Nyerere’s TANU Party’s Arusha Declaration of 1967. This manifesto suggests that no party or government leader can do the following things: live by two or more salaries, live by rent, direct a privately owned business or own shares in a privately owned business. That every party and government leader must be a peasant or worker.
James elevated Nyerere’s projection as superior to anything Aristotle, Plato, Marx, or Rousseau ever said. It was also a projection that in no way was implemented in real life. However, as guidelines for measuring what may be radical (or not) about a political economy, it was fascinating. And no standards of radical political economy today can compete with these measures.
Is it Efficient for Every Party and Government Leader to be an African Peasant or Worker?
Perhaps contradictorily, James’ Nyerere also suggested that Tanzania’s politics and economics should be flexible, efficient, and solve real-world problems. Was the elimination of landlords charging rent not a real problem for poor people? Were political leaders living by two or more salaries and collaborating with corporate hierarchies, not a burden? Should there be some other type of political leadership or directors of the economy besides peasants and workers?
We must remember that the contemporary critique of neoliberalism wants badly an alliance with industrial capital, and in no way advocates the direct self-government of toilers.
Now, in the movement for the Sixth Pan African Congress, especially at an organizing meeting in Kent, Ohio, the contradictions of working with the Tanzania government, especially its diplomatic core, threw up dynamic tensions. Tanzania was defining global solidarity with Africa as mobilizing science and technology aid for Africa as facilitated by formally educated professionals.
African American activists Modibo Kadalie and Kimathi Mohammed (both had taken part in the networks around Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers), were inspired by James’ anti-vanguardist politics. With these ideas, they challenged Courtland Cox, the Caribbean-American leading organizer of the 6PAC and former SNCC member based in Washington D.C.
Kadalie and Mohammed, based on their understanding of CLR James’ A History of Pan African Revolt,argued that the 6PAC approach to science and technology aid was elitist. That it was obvious that African miners, mechanics, market-women, peasant-farmers, and mid-wives could directly govern and had the skills required to self-manage African political economies. Cox by parliamentary manoeuvre found a means to avoid this contestation. But James was at the meeting also, and to Kadalie and Mohammed’s great disappointment, he did not support their stance. At this moment James was a fellow traveller of Nyerere’s state.
African Labor in the World Community
In obscure archives can be found a rare paper by James, “African Labor in the World Community,” an analysis focused on Ujamaa Tanzania. James explained in this projection that the world, especially those in imperial centers, may be surprised to know that Tanzania’s toilers wish to govern their own workplaces. This is consistent, James said, with the most advanced disposition of labor found all over the world. And yet Nyerere’s government insists Tanzania’s toilers are not ready to govern themselves and run the nation’s economy. James underlining the contradiction did not take a definitive stance.
After James boycotted the 6PAC, as a result of Nyerere’s Tanzania, Michael Manley’s Jamaica, and Forbes Burnham’s Guyana conspiring to ban the Caribbean activist delegations, especially those that advocated direct democracy and workers’ self-management, he along with Issa Shivji and Walter Rodney, began to admit to the world community that the self-organization of independent labor was repressed in Tanzania.
James’s notions of African labor are not simply radical politics that went unfulfilled. At the very least they are superior to the most advanced approaches to African and Global South political economy today. There is something about even radical political economy, that in the name of science, reason, and administrative efficiency, fears and trembles before the idea that African labor might directly govern society. At the very least this exposes a new measure for evaluating what is “radical” political economy.
Matthew Quest has taught African, African American and Caribbean History at universities including Georgia State University in Atlanta, and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He is known as a scholar of the legacies of CLR James.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panthers told their members and supporters that to be a good revolutionary you must make time to read for at least two hours a day. We realise with the almighty, soul-destroying pressures of work and neoliberalism, this will seem like an impossible luxury to many of our readers and supporters; but it’s a good objective for 2023, and the political and personal challenges to recalibrate the world, and our lives, for a just and socialist alternative. It’s in this spirit that we – members ofROAPE’s Editorial Group– offer the following list of our favourite radical reads over the last 12 months.
Published in Arabic and English and available as a free download,The Arab Uprisingsis a collection of essays written by committed activists and scholars. The collection offers a decolonial and longue durée reading which allows a reader to grasp both the root causes of the uprisings as well as their specificities in each country while highlighting class struggles and imperialism. In short, ditch all orientalist and short-sighted analysis which relegate the Arab uprisings to an Arab ‘winter’ (bad pun and lousy analysis). Instead, read Aouragh and Hamouchene’s edited collection. If you can afford it, you can also buy the book for a solidarity price of €10 by emailing secretariat[at]tni.org.
I do a lot of my reading in the middle of the night – as a long-suffering insomniac. Depending on the book, I have managed to find a way to enjoy that 3AM solitude. I normally read, huddled in my bed (in the current cold of the British winter), and often with a novel. One astonishingly good book that kept me up until dawn was radical novelist Stefan Heym’sRadek: A Novel, first published in 1995 and published in English for the first time this year. Karl Radek was an internationalist revolutionary who, like Lenin, saw the survival of the Russian revolution after 1917 as dependent on the success of struggles and revolutions across the world. However, as Stalin’s strength grew – brilliantly described in Heym’s novel – hope for international revolution was crushed under the project of ‘socialism in one country’. Radek and other members of the opposition were sent into exile, or to Siberia.
In show trials in 1936 to 1938, a generation of activists who had witnessed and help make the 1917 revolution were murdered. Radek wanted to live and compromised with the new power in Moscow, to Leon Trotsky’s outrage and disgust. Yet the way he gave his support – ironic, questioning, playful – was astonishing and an act of impressive resistance in itself. Nevertheless, he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment in 1937 and murdered in prison two years later at the age of 54.
Heym’s novel is heart-breaking. A revolution broken and a generation of internationalists humiliated. Yet in telling the story, Heym keeps alive a real possibility of a global struggle against capitalism. That this story is told by a communist who made his own compromise with Stalinism is even more remarkable. Heym’s great novel rediscovers an emancipatory history that briefly offered the world a global alternative to capitalism.
Lastly, I couldn’t fail to mention Lena Anyuolo’s astonishing debut this year, Rage and Bloom, a collection of poems that tackles patriarchy, the excesses of capitalist exploitation, and revolutionary contradictions as well as hope for a better tomorrow. Anyuolo is a Kenyan writer, poet and feminist who lives in Nairobi, and is highly worthy of our attention.
This is a memoir by a CIA agent set in the (now Democratic Republic of) Congo at the height of the Cold War. Even though Larry Devlin is not expected to be completely honest about the CIA activities in the Congo, his account is candid enough to be revealing about how the United States used the crudest of murderous acts – including the assassination of the Left-inclined leader of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba – to fight communism and take control of one of the most resource rich parts of the world. Devlin admits the decision to kill/remove Lumumba was made by the President of the United States, but falls short of admitting the Americans carried out the actual killing. The book goes some way to provide a few clues and cues, (perhaps inadvertently) removing any doubt that the atrocities committed by the world’s hegemonic power in the Congo are intimately tied to the turmoil, instability, and poverty which continue to mercilessly ravage that country today.
African Economic Developmentis a fantastic read, available as a free download, which challenges the ultra-pessimistic view of African development from both right and left and the excessively optimistic view of ‘Africa rising’ pushed by international organisations and conventional economists. It resurrects Albert Hirschman’s concept of ‘possibilism’ and the unintended consequences of apparently failed policies and projects. One of the authors is an Ethiopian government minister and this helps to present a view about African development from the vantage point of people on the ground. Imperialism and Developmenttells the story of the disastrous Tanganyikan Groundnut Scheme in a very entertaining way. Although the lessons from such ‘development’ projects have never really been learned, there is a positive legacy resulting from the actions of people on the ground moving the local economy in unintended directions.
Peter Lawrence
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Transformative Feminist Writings
by four African women writers
Koni Benson’s Crossroads: I Live Where I Like is a superb graphic history of women’s struggles for a space to live and work at Crossroads, a shanty town in Capetown. The narrative documents two periods of struggle in the 1970s and 1980s when Africans (largely women and children) were forcibly removed from their homes and dumped at Crossroads. A mix of teachers, nurses, informal operators, workers, the women united together across party lines and ethnicity. The narrative combines colourful illustrations drawn from the everyday lives of the community with ‘spoken’ text and accessible historical information, providing a people’s history of their own struggles highlighting women’s leadership and contribution.
Another example of graphic history, Rebecca Hall’s Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revoltsis part memoir of Rebecca Hall, the granddaughter of slaves, and part historical novel. The author places herself into the story, and shares a detailed account of how she uncovered the hidden facts of African women’s leadership in slave ship revolts as well as slave revolts in New York City and Liverpool. She challenges malestream historians to explain how and why they ignored women’s participation, let alone their leadership, thus exposing the need for continual vigilance and commitment to speak truth to power.
NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory, published this year, is an historical novel providing a powerful and critical analysis of Zimbabwean history and authoritarian rule throughout Africa. Animal characters portray rulers and their downtrodden citizens with bitter irony and caustic humour. The brilliant narrative combines facts and fiction to expose the corruption, injustice and plunder carried out by African governments and their neocolonial masters. Female characters have a leading role in exposing the truth underlying the veneer of independence and organising ‘another war for Africa’s second Liberation from neocolonial oppression’. The prose is powerful, often poetical, this is a book to read aloud.
A delightful coming of age novel about Kirabo Nnamiiro and her two grandmothers, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s The First Woman weaves stories within stories, bridging generations, to deconstruct patriarchy and honour rebellious women. Domestic struggles are embedded in precolonial and contemporary class structures of power. Probably the most moving element to me is the way stereotypes of ageism and gender are demolished. Two elderly grandmothers Alikisa and Nsuuta dance naked in the rain, celebrating life even as Nsuuta is dying from breast cancer.
These can be tough and miserable times for those of us on the radical left. And so, reluctantly, on the advice of a dear South African friend, I read this book. Reluctantly, because I had come across some of Solnit’s short articles in the press and found them pretentious and self-indulgent. What I always like to read is very fact of the matter, practical stuff, that I think will help me be a better teacher and activist. This time, from the outset, I decided to open myself up to this book, to ‘go with the flow’ of it, even if it might make me cringe. I need not have worried. From the first chapter I wanted to get lost. I realised I was lost, more than usual (!), and I had to keep getting lost. What do I mean? Well, what leapt out from the pages was the uncomfortable idea that loss is not always destructive, and it need not mean the end. It can be the start of something new. Because it’s often then that what we don’t know appears. Often something that is eye-opening. Regenerative.
As a series of discrete chapters, the book is in some ways unstructured, and this opens up the possibility of you filling the chapters with your own meaning. Whatever that meaning is, it will take you on a journey, who knows where, but it will probably be a journey you have not been on before. On my journey I realised that it’s not a weakness or failure to not know. For example, to not know why we keep losing or where our movements are going next and what we have to do to get there. But I came away from it no longer afraid of loss, of losing, and of feeling lost. Lord knows our side has lost enough times, but that doesn’t mean it’s the end and it doesn’t mean we have to despair. If we want to win, indeed, if we are to win, we will undoubtedly have to get lost again, but if we embrace the unknown instead of being scared of it, we just might discover a world of possibilities. Go on, do yourself a favour and get lost.
In this book William Robinson (who had part of his education at the University of Ibadan) argues, from a Marxist perspective, that the nature of imperialism has changed fundamentally from the early 20thcentury when Lenin described it as competition between nation-states to protect their national companies. William argues that the introduction of neoliberal globalisation means that we no longer have national classes but a transnational capitalist class and a global working class.
William’s theory of global capitalism has four aspects. First is the rise of truly transnational capital and a new global production and financial system into which all nations and much of humanity have been integrated, either directly or indirectly. Second is the rise of a transnational capitalist class. Third is the rise of transnational state apparatuses, a loose network made up of trans- and supranational organizations together with nation-states that functions to organize the conditions for transnational accumulation and through which the transnational capitalist class attempts to organize and institutionally exercise its class power. Fourth are novel relations of global inequality, domination, and exploitation, including an increasing importance of transnational social and class inequalities relative to North-South inequalities that are geographically or territorially conceived.
By describing an emerging system whereby individual national capitalist classes are being replaced by a transnational capitalist class, William’s ideas in this book provide useful arguments against nationalism. While the continuous struggle for socialism might start at the national level, as Lenin recognised, it will not ultimately be successful until it is victorious at the global level. William’s book provides ideas that may better help us to understand the world and so to change it.
Andreas Malm has published five highly significant books over the last six years. Together they make a powerful case that capitalism has distorted technological and economic development in the direction of fossil-fuel exploitation, with the consequences for the future of the planet that we are now all familiar with. Technologies that are not based on fossil fuels were always available and sometimes more efficient, but because they were less suitable to capitalist profitability, they were marginalised. Electric vehicles, solar and wind power, and food production less dependent on fertiliser and insecticides could all have been developed decades if not centuries earlier, but for the synergy between fossil fuels and capital’s ability to control labour. This extends to capital’s role in colonialism, distorting trade and the drive to material extraction, but Malm concedes a need to develop his work further in relation to the specific nature of Africa’s underdevelopment by fossil-fuel capitalism, and in particular how it fuelled racism.
The five books cover a wide range of scholarship and readability, but I suggest that everyone should readHow to Blow Up a Pipeline. This is much more measured and less adventurist than its title might suggest, and depends on the detailed research and analysis of Malm’s earlier books. The others are:Fossil Capital;The Progress of this Storm;Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency; andWhite Skin, Black Fuel(with the Zetkin Collective).
An absolutely fascinating semi-documentary account of life in Albania under Enver Hoxha (‘Uncle Enver’), from the perspective of a young school-age girl. Ypi describes how that ‘socialist’ society gradually broke down and class privileges and material inequality resurfaced. The book provokes thoughts about experiments in ‘African socialism’, few of which amounted to anything more than rhetoric (although Tanzania did make stabs at structural transformation). Along the way it also throws light on why and how Albanians figure so prominently in current migration statistics.
There is a long tradition in the Third World of developing alternatives to the world system and Adom Getachew has reminded us that post-colonial nationalists, in the middle of 20thcentury, sought to advance a counter to the love affair with Westphalian states – CLR James, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Eric Williams and many others promoted a view of nationalism that was not wedded to the state. They promoted pan Africanism and pan Arabism, to encourage socialist internationalism that culminated in the 1970s formulation for a New International Economic Order. Third World leaders wanted to maximise the gains from the structures of a new political architecture that included UN advocacy for self-determination, regional attempts at federalism in Africa and the Caribbean, and critique of capitalist crisis in the 1970s that was accelerated by onset of neo-liberalism.
Getachew argues that for many Third World nationalists and anti-colonial critics, ‘decolonization was a project of reordering the world that sought to create a domination free and egalitarian international order’. Getachew goes beyond the narrative that that decolonisation was a moment of nation building and self-determination. Instead, her compelling argument, grounded in historical analysis, is that ‘anti-colonial nationalism was worldmaking’. Her central actors rejected alien rule and Nkrumah and Nyerere, among others, knew that colonial power definitions of sovereignty merely meant that you had to demonstrate to colonial states that you were able to combine stability with economic growth. Yet Third World leaders wanted a view of sovereignty that transcended the nation state, rejecting the necessity of post-colonial governance that maintained modes of colonial control.
Don’t imagine for a moment that the conclusions of this fascinating read are pessimistic and Getachew’s reading of history is to merely catalogue Third World initiatives coming up against the buffers of failure. She highlights clearly and with much analytical heft that the historical record – and hinting at contemporary dynamics – emphasises the reformulation of the contours of anti-imperial futures and the need to enact new strategies to realise alternatives to imperialism.
I don’t recall when or how I got hold of this selection of Nyerere’s writing and speeches from 1968 to 1973, but this year I finally got around to reading it. The collection of 46 essays is striking for the level of self-reflection and the extent of his uncertainty as he explores the tensions and contradictions within the Tanganyika African National Union’s 1967 Arusha Declaration, Tanzania’s most prominent political statement of African Socialism, or ‘Ujamaa’. Constantly raising questions and doubts about various policies and objectives (including the now infamous villagisation effort), the most extensive reflection comes in the fascinating 70-page ‘Ten Years After Independence’, which offers a frank assessment of the progress and failures of his administration up until 1971. The book provides a welcome antidote to liberal understandings of freedom as an individual rather than a collective endeavour and undertaking – popularised in universities by the Indian philosopher and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom (notably the same two title words as Nyerere’s collection, but radically opposed in its conceptualisation of each and how they relate to one another) – and there is much here to be learned about the failures and shortcomings of Tanzanian socialism to inform today’s struggles across the continent and beyond.
by Adam Sneyd,Steffi Hamann,Charis Enns, andLauren Q. Sneyd
This book explores commodity production through the lens of the political contestation it engenders. It focuses on the actions and motivations of various actors seeking to exert power and influence over the governance of commodities in Cameroon, a country dependent on primary commodity export. The book is built around case studies of agricultural commodities (sugar, palm oil, etc.) as well as large-scale commodity extraction (the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project). Its innovativeness lies in the way it uses different and competing notions of responsibility to expose multiple dimensions of commodity politics.
Marxist and Liberal researchers and analysts have commonly conceived the white working class in South Africa since 1922 as an analytic category and as a political problem – an obstacle to class solidarity or to proper liberal politics. So ‘we’ are all agreed. Is our agreement a reflection of the social worlds that many of ‘us’ grew up in? White English- and Afrikaans-speaking middle-class boys in Pretoria East – where I lived in the 1950s – were fully aware of working-class white Afrikaners. ‘They’ lived west of Paul Kruger Street, and their fathers worked at Iscor. We English speakers knew little of them, commonly could not speak ‘their’ language fluently and looked somewhat down on them. In mining towns, African working men, and Afrikaner skilled and supervisor workers, only came together in the mines and mine shafts. Scholars of South Africa have dedicated a great deal of time to understanding and explaining the lives, cultures, and politics of those African working men, within the mines and beyond them, and very little to making sense of the lives, cultures, and politics of the Afrikaner men they worked for and with. Van Zyl-Hermann takes us through her careful empirical account and incisive analysis of white mineworkers, the Mine Workers Union and Solidarity (its political successor) and the ethnographies, social histories, and political dilemmas of the ‘Privileged Precariat’, before and after the end of apartheid. I suggest Van-Zyl Hermann’s book is of most importance to Marxist readers.
The Wife’s Tale is a personal history of Yetemegnu, written by her granddaughter, which also shows the history of Ethiopia through the life of Yetemegnu, who died in 2013 at the age of 97. It is a captivating account, starting from the time of feudalism to Haile Selassie’s period, up to the revolution and modern times. Ceremonies is a prose and poetry collection of essays on the lived experiences of an LGBTQI activist. The poems are memorable and stick with you, focused on personal experiences and efforts at organising and struggle.
As someone whose remaining hair is as white as his beard and in anticipation of what, in 2023, will be the 50thanniversary of my first trip to Africa, I would like to contextualise my book choices within a reflection of many years of thought and action on the relationship between Europe and Africa and between comrades in both places.
We (the comrades) and they (the continents) are all continuously involved in change processes, both convergent and divergent. One criticism I have long held of many approaches to African/ Development Studies is that, by seeing Africa as an object of study, they fail to notice the many changes affecting their own gaze and hence their relationships to Africa. Few changes have been as profound and as multi-level as those of communication practices and technologies. These affect global and national political economies and the way we as intellectuals do, communicate, and benefit or not from our work, as well as the organisation of our daily lives. I was very proud to co-edit, with Reg Cline-Cole, issue 99 of ROAPE (with some overspill from 98) which explored some distinctly local manifestations of such change in various parts of Africa.The Costs of Connectiontakes the North American variant of such change and looks at the global impact of that model. The argument goes beyond the economic to the wholesale re-organisation of life and may be particularly disturbing for readers in the global North who, unlike our long-suffering African comrades, may not have realised the extent to which the context in which they live is being changed without their informed consent for someone else’s profit. It also sketches possible avenues for resistance and building more progressive and democratic alternatives.
The issue of whose knowledge counts – and how it is constructed, valued and used – has been an ever-present but seldom prioritised strand of interest within ROAPE. It is probably fair to say that most ROAPE contributions on the subject have taken a political or pragmatic approach to the subject – exposing class or gender bias for example – rather than the philosophical/ontological approach of much current decolonisation literature.Epistemic Decolonisationbridges these two discourses. Whilst there may be some agreement on the coloniality of mainstream academic practice (albeit not from many natural scientists in my experience), there is little consensus on what a decolonial practice would look like. Wood takes issue with the theoretical foundations of much of the decolonial literature and suggests that setting the discussion within a revolutionary socialist intent offers greater philosophic and practical clarity. He does this through a detailed analysis of the contributions of Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral to these issues. In doing so, he not only provides a different perspective on a crucial contemporary debate but also reminds people of the continuing relevance of these great African revolutionaries, one of whom, Cabral, remains virtually unknown and unread within the Anglophone Africanist world. Wood has previously edited (and translated) a selection of Cabral’s writings (Resistance and Decolonization) and here he develops an assessment of Cabral’s work which includes but goes beyond the focus on revolutionary practice which dominated most work about Cabral in the years following his assassination. In particular, he revisits Cabral’s work as an agronomist, with a particular interest in soil, and uncovers ecological aspects of Cabral’s science, understanding of rural political economy, and language which are revealed as astonishingly prescient given the current crises we all face.
The dramatic changes at Twitter provide a good moment to reflect on how platforms are entangled with material inequalities that shape the vibrancy of African digital publics. Scott Timcke and David Mastey take us through the major issues and argue that with the abrupt destruction of online public content our histories are at stake.
By Scott Timcke and David Mastey
When platforms fold, all of the irritating grifting within that venue ends. But so too does the communal learning that emerged from sharing insights and perspectives across the networks that users collectively built alongside programmers. The artifacts of cultural production endure only for as long as URLs through which we can access them remain active. This is an acute issue for African digital publics, one that coincides with wider digital transformations that showcase exciting ideas about what these publics could look like across the continent.
Networked citizens’ discussions take place on WhatsApp about the performance of newly devolved county governments in Kenya. Charismatic figures are developing strong followerships through gossip websites and online tabloids in Rwanda. Surreptitious election campaigning and far-reaching debate unfold through Facebook pages in Zimbabwe and Zanzibar. There is an efflorescence of #hashtag commentary, satire, and the rise of a Twitterati. The cacophony of shared voices made possible by the continent’s rapid growth in mobile and internet connectivity at first seems beguiling.
As much as we agree with this view about the ‘diversity and dynamism of publics in practice’, we also recognize that WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter are the platforms that mediate this energy. And while digital platforms provide new forms and forums in the public space, they are equally vulnerable to enclosure.
The archive of public understanding that African users produce on these platforms cannot be easily replaced when links expire. The abrupt closures of platforms disproportionately impact communities, for which data storage is not internally managed because costs are prohibitive. The same applies to organizations without their own web domains and so rely upon platforms to conduct their business, as is common throughout Africa. Given these ramifications, it is worth thinking through the public implications of a platform folding.
One source for current African digital publics is the formation of digital networking itself. The internet has been fairly stable in the past decade as mature products and infrastructure have become interwoven into everyday life. This stability is also due to the rise of powerful platforms fuelled by low interest rates producing spectacular (sometimes incomprehensible) valuations.
The bedrock for this stability can be traced to the 2000s. This period of the Internet’s history saw experimentation with digital services and a broader shift to make user data the product. A whole suite of services that were once considered free and fundamental to the internet (like email, web forums/BBS, etc.) became enclosed and bundled together into proprietary packages. The lure of the monetization of the data users created through using these bundled services has been strong. Audiences are increasingly consolidated into a small number of platforms, with network effects leading to monopolistic power.[1]
Additionally, there was also consolidation of platform ownership by leveraging asset prices to finance acquisitions of growing rivals or capture growing markets, like Facebook’s acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram, or Twitter’s acquisition of Vine. Throughout this period, profitability was a secondary consideration provided the value of platforms increased. But with Big Tech firms losing US$800 billion in late October 2022 (nearly twice the 2021 South African GDP), as well as the lure of investors back to the ‘old economy’ – due to the Biden Administration’s coherent industrial policy – our naive assumptions about the constancy of platforms may be changing.
These changes have substantial and potentially permanent ramifications for the inequality between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. Yet again, the effects of decisions made in Washington, New York and San Francisco will reverberate in Nairobi, Cape Town, and Addis Ababa.
It is well known that Big Tech creates enormous wealth and income inequalities. It is important that citizens and researchers pay attention to these areas. Of equal importance are questions that focus on what happens to the data when platforms fold. Although Twitter is most recently in the news, this is a recurring problem.
In 2019, MySpace effectively purged its server storage, even while claiming it suffered from a data migration error, causing the loss of 12 years of community-generated content, including roughly 50 million music tracks curated by 14 million artists. This archive of the most dominant social media site of its time is now irreparably lost. Over the last year, the public archival features of Vine, another widely used platform that both inspired and created an audience for TikTok, were discontinued. Other examples include Deja News (2001), Google Groups (2008), Geocities (2009), Tripod and Angelfire (2009), Delicious (2010), Google Reader (2013), and Google+ (2019), among other hosts and platforms.
Of course, some users may be relieved by the closure of these services, as they no longer want to be associated with past uploads, a sentiment the EU has enshrined into law with its 2012 Data Privacy Act. Still, the abrupt destruction of previously widely accessible public content has real-life implications for how publics remember, forget, and contextualize their current affairs. In effect, our own histories are at stake.
***
African scholars are well aware that due to structural adjustment and other factors, meagre state subventions to universities have led to the general degradation of archival collections. Dwindling budgets makes acquisition, preservation, and maintenance of local archives very challenging. Civil conflict exacerbates this problem.
With common ways of work now relying upon computation, and without budget lines dedicated to digitizing the vast collection of 19th and 20th century archival materials, the field of African Studies is likely to lose knowledge in a process analogous to analog decay. The point is that the digital divide, which emerges between those who have archived and have continued access to the material and those who have not, will almost certainly have considerable ramifications for African epistemological self-fashioning. The same applies to the vast writing and other forms of self-expression posted by African content creators on platforms.
Consider the late Pius Adesanmi’s Twitter feed, which now serves as a memorial.[2] Adesanmi was a leading public intellectual in Nigeria and winner of the 2010 Penguin Prize for African Writers for his book of essays You’re Not A Country, Africa before his unexpected death in 2019. Not only did many of the essays in his collection take form on Twitter, but equally as important, Adesanmi spoke to (and sometimes for) generations of domestic and diasporic Naija audiences. Twitter helped him to project his voice loudly enough that even the Global North began to listen. Certainly, his essays in Nigerian newspapers will still be available for as long as their servers exist. Yet before long his Twitter content and the conversations it engendered will inevitably disappear.
For a period of time that is both exceedingly long in the lifespan of the Internet, but also worryingly short from a historical perspective, the US Library of Congress was gifted the entire archive of public tweets from 2006 onwards until this initiative ended in 2017. Some tweets are still acquired ‘on a selective basis,’ however leaving aside the question of whether Africans are adequately represented in this archive, it is evident that Africans have no formal role in deciding preservation or access. So even if Adesanmi’s tweets from 2018 and 2019 were selected, for example, how feasible would it be for a student in Abuja to read that material and view it in a curated context? Perhaps no easier than it is for Liberian citizens to access their national archives, notwithstanding the obvious care with which Northern scholars have attempted to preserve them.
The tragedy of losing an archive has an impact on African civil society organizations too. These organizations often operate over long distances, making monitoring and documentation of human rights abuses a difficult endeavor, even in the best of circumstances. Without taking anything away from Nigerian activists who drew attention to the abuses by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, it matters that there were 28 million tweets using #End_SARS in October 2020. Without Twitter, #End_SARS would have been unlikely to draw domestic and international attention to the police abuses. (Or to connect them to #BlackLivesMatter movement, for that matter). This attention was almost certainly a central consideration for the Nigerian Police Force’s decision to disband the unit. The #End_SARS campaign is particularly notable because it illustrates a conjecture in which a youth population have created a participatory digital media culture that has strengthened transnational connections between Africa and diasporas in the West.
For activists, organizations and movements looking to create backups of their knowledge, public archiving projects on Archive.org and Wiki Commons do exist. These sites offer a free-for-user method to preserve African-oriented online content that are less likely to be monetized, paywalled, or decommissioned. Smaller businesses in the Middle East and India use Archive.org to upload image files, for example, and point their web-based image links to Archive.org as a source, to get around data limits from web hosts. Elsewhere on the site, museums are uploading images of collections, and scans of rare books. While not discounting the value that these archival platforms offer, they typically do not have the rapid sharing features of social media sites, nor the ability to tag other users to get their attention (or, indeed, the hundreds of millions of users found on commercial platforms). Without the more advanced features and archiving tools found on Twitter and similar sites, and with content on those platforms increasingly jeopardized by market forces, it will likely become harder for civil society organizations to undertake the work of building social justice movements.
Returning to the ‘cacophony of shared voices’, it is well beyond time that African digital publics be supported by creative policy tools that enforce the right for African-based accounts to be able download their own data archives.
Acknowledgements: Thanks are due to Jay McKinnon and Hanani Hlomani for conversation and critique.
Scott Timcke is a Senior Research Associate at Research ICT Africa and a Research Associate with the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Change. His second book, Algorithms and The End of Politics (Bristol University Press) was released in February 2021.
David Mastey is an independent scholar based in Toronto, Canada. Trained as a literary critic (PhD English, 2015), David previously specialized in trans-Atlantic world literatures and is a former tenure-track professor at the University of the West Indies-St. Augustine (2016-2019).
Featured Photograph: Miranda Harple for Yenkassa (24 August 2012).
Notes
[1] Recently Robin Mansell and W. Edward Steinmueller wrote that ‘digital platforms are distinguished by their use of technologies for linking multiple suppliers and consumers or citizens. They establish these links by making use of data gathered either directly from users or by observing their behavior.’
[2] For disclosure, Pius Adesanmi was David Mastey’s PhD advisor.
As part of our dossier on South Africa’s Marikana massacre 10 years ago, ROAPE’s Kate Alexander looks at which police officers were responsible for the killing. Alexander’s account highlights the role of the operational commander, Brigadier Adriaan Calitz. Briefing his troops two days after the massacre, Calitz told them: “From the planning to the execution was 110%.”
By Kate Alexander
One disappointing aspect of the recent coverage of the Marikana massacre was the absence of serious discussion about what actually happened. This is especially important because, 10 years on, we have a younger generation who do not have a clue about the event, and, moreover, there is still a significant section of the older public that remains confused.
Part of the problem is that TV is the most influential medium and its impact is determined by brevity and visual imagery. With Marikana, this has meant anachronistic photomontage and rehashed shots of Scene 1, which are just as baffling for most people now as they were in 2012.
Those who have followed the debate will know that the decision to use the “tactical option” (deadly force) was made the evening before the massacre, at a meeting of the National Management Forum (NMF), that is, the whole to the top echelon of the South African Police Service (SAPS), including the then national commissioner, General Riah Phiyega, and Lieutenant-General Mirriam Mbombo, provincial commissioner in North West, where the massacre occurred. They will also be aware that 17 of the 34 strikers who died on 16 August were shot at Scene 2, where, as the Marikana Commission’s evidence leaders summarised, there “was a paramilitary operation, with the aim of annihilating those who were perceived as the enemy”. But these events were not televised.
This blogpost attempts to shed light on what occurred at Scene 1, the best-known and most contentious moment in the tragedy. It does so with two graphics: a photograph and a diagram. The former comes directly from the commission’s archives (see here for a more complete collection of exhibits). The latter and my narrative are derived from documents in the archive, in particular, an animated presentation submitted by the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) which is available on YouTube and well worth watching (see below). Some of my account was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Southern African Studies, but I have added further details and links to go with them.
The police killed all 34 workers, but which police were responsible for this “dastardly criminal” act? My account highlights the role of the operational commander, Brigadier Adriaan Calitz. In my view, conclusions reached by the Marikana Commission of Inquiry misconstrued critical evidence, including statements and testimony from Calitz himself.
The photograph shows the battle site at Marikana and was taken soon before 15.43:56 (43 minutes and 56 seconds after 3 pm) on 16 August 2012, about 10 minutes before the massacre. It looks westwards, so north is on the right. It can be compared with the map underneath.
In the foreground, there are police vehicles, mostly white, gathered in a “safe zone” In the middle of this there are two queues of officers lined up south to north, one short and the other longer. These are probably members of the Tactical Response Teams (TRTs). (This animated presentation uses a zoom function to make details clearer.)
Above the “safe zone” (to the west), the main feature is Koppie 1 [a small hill] and, to its right, a smaller koppie (Koppie 2). It is possible to make out a compact group of strikers huddled together between the two, but closer to Koppie 1 and nearer the camera. There are some strikers leaving Koppie 1, and others who are walking towards their homes in Nkaneng and Wonderkop along a track to the right of the police.
Between the strikers and the safe zone there is a line of five police Nyalas [multi-purpose armoured personnel carrier]deployed to lay razor wire. At this point, the southernmost Nyala, Nyala 1 has almost finished its job, and Nyala 2, the next one along, is yet to set off. In practice, only four of the Nyalas were used, and a sixth had already been removed from the line.
On the right of the photograph, to the north of the police and the track, the dark quadrangle is a kraal, in front of which the massacre would occur.
At the very top of the photograph, behind Koppie 2, one can see the low-lying Koppie 3, where the Scene 2 killings took place.
There is no evidence of strikers confronting the police, either at this point or later (except for an isolated incident involving one Nyala and a few strikers). Given the numbers and power of armed might in the vicinity, any attack by the strikers would have been foolhardy. It is unfortunate that reporters had their cameras directed at the strikers, not the police.
Now we turn to the diagram. The green lines show routes taken by strikers.
The “lead group” of strikers, comprising those from the compact huddle and some from the Small Koppie, set off at 15.48:30. There were well over 100 of them and they included Mgcineni Noki (the “man in the green blanket”). The razor wire was still behind them (to the south) and there was no sign of the TRT line. Like others before them, the strikers were almost certainly heading for the track to Nkaneng. Noki had told his comrades not to run “because they had done nothing wrong”, and all footage shows them walking slowly, some crouched low. At 15.52:03, Nyala 4, with razor wire in tow, sped past them, reached the kraal, and blocked their way to the track.
The strikers were now forced to swing northwards. The TRT line was beginning to form, but not in sight, and Noki began to circle the kraal [an enclosure or group of houses] with the probable aim of returning to the track. At 15.53:30, just 20 seconds before the lethal volley, non-lethal weapons, starting with a stun grenade, were used for the first time. Noki and others at the front were about to round the northeast corner, but most strikers were stretched out behind, many of them west of the kraal (see also KKK 52). The group split. The majority, those to the rear, were able to retreat (some to Scene 2).
The minority, about 38 of them, were trapped. Police vehicles to the north and east of this front group could have been used to block their advance. Instead, they created a funnel, channelling them towards the TRT line. Stun grenades, tear gas, rubber rounds and, eventually, shotgun pellets are fired from behind and the side, forcing the group forwards. They run, but they are running from a barrage of blasts, gas and bullets, not attacking the police, as TV footage seems to show.
A few try to take cover at the edge of the kraal. The remainder of those still moving forward, a group of only 12, including Noki, head towards the line of 60 heavily armed police, who, as the evidence leaders put it, were “effectively operating as a firing squad”.
At 15.53:50, about 50 members of the TRT opened fire simultaneously. They were using R5 assault rifles designed to kill or seriously wound, and capable of automatic fire.
According to the SAPS, 328 rounds of live ammunition were used at Scene 1. Nine members of the Noki group were killed, each within 18-25m of the shooters. Four of the kraal-edge group were killed. All 13 were shot multiple times, including to the upper parts of their body. Another four people died from R5 bullets that hit them between 45 and 250m from the nearest point on the TRT line.
There is no doubt that Noki and other strikers in the front group were channelled towards the firing line and were killed by members of the TRT. Brigadier Adriaan Calitz described the positioning of his vehicles as a “perfekte blok” (perfect block).
Members of the South African Police Service Forensic Unit investigate the scene where striking mine workers were killed by police in Marikana near Rustenburg, South Africa, 17 August 2012.
Calitz and the ‘perfect block’
The SAPS concept plan was revised during the day of the massacre, 16 August (see Evidence Leaders p. 326). It had three main objectives:
Protect police and journalists from attack.
Disperse strikers in a westerly direction, breaking them into smaller, disorganised groups.
Disarm and arrest.
To this end, the razor wire would be reeled out using the five Nyalas simultaneously; northwards movement would be blocked using various vehicles and deterrents, forcing strikers westwards on open ground; and additional forces would be brought in from behind the massive power station to the south, where they were hidden.
This “plan” was a rushed affair. It was approved by top officers at 1.30pm, when a decision to move to the tactical phase was agreed on without Calitz being present. The chief planner, Lieutenant-Colonel Duncan Scott, briefed him and other commanders as late as 2.30pm. An important shortcoming was that, according to Public Order Police (POP) officers responsible for reeling out the wire, the Nyalas would have to move consecutively, not simultaneously, slowing the process. Vital tactical aspects of the so-called plan were abandoned.
The evidence leaders blamed the tragedy at Scene 1 on these shortcomings, but this minimises the importance of operational decisions. In practice, Calitz decided what happened, which was not the plan, with its map, but choices made in the field.
By 2012, Calitz already had a long and distinguished career. He joined the police in 1987, gained 20 years of public order policing experience, won medals, and was the North West head of the Operational Response Services, which included POP, TRT and other responsibilities (see here and here). From my reading of his evidence, he knew what he was doing, even if this was not what some lawyers, experts and police officers thought he should be doing. He had his own rationale.
Calitz was not fazed by the barbed wire roll-out problem, explaining that it would be uncommon for a crowd to “break around a barbed wire barrier while that barrier is being rolled out”. As we have seen, on this issue he was right. To be on the safe side, he also had five Nyalas — so-called Papa Nyalas, not the Nyalas responsible for the razor wire — positioned opposite the strikers (as can be seen in the photograph). Moreover, as the lead group moved around the kraal, he used his Papa Nyalas and heavily armoured Casspirs to block and disperse a large majority of them, doing so in a single manoeuvre, making effective use of stun grenades in particular.
But Calitz could have acted differently. He could have delayed the roll-out or moved his vehicles more quickly, making it possible for the police — including their water cannon — to disperse the lead group westwards, as intended in Scott’s plan. Alternatively, he could have stopped the strikers in the front group from running into the TRT line. He had ample vehicles in the safe zone and/or could have moved some of the Nyalas around the kraal to achieve this, or he could have ceased firing from behind and alongside the group, or he could have decided not to use the TRT line at all, or to have placed it further back, giving the front group an opportunity to turn in the direction of Nkaneng (if they were still conscious after the salvo). He could not, or would not, offer an explanation for the crescent formation.
It is reasonable to assume that Calitz, as the operational commander, allowed matters to unfold as they did, because that is what he wanted. It was a perfekte blok.
‘TRT, move in’
The senior officer nearest the massacre was Captain Paul Loest, the TRT commander responsible for forming the basic line. At a briefing “on the scene”, Calitz told him he would receive an order to do so, and Loest’s superior, Lieutenant-Colonel Little Joe Classen, heard Calitz say over the radio: “TRT, move in.” Loest testified that, prior to this, he had relayed Calitz’s instruction that “each member would have to act on his own if he felt threatened, that he would act in self-defence”. This would have prepared the TRT for shooting strikers and exonerated them in advance for doing so.
However, Calitz did not wait for his men to act on their own initiative, he gave a command to fire. The evidence here comes from Dirk Botes, a Lonmin security risk manager present in the Joint Operations Centre, who testified that he heard Calitz on the radio calling: “Engage, engage, engage.” When asked about the time lapse between this order and the first shooting, Botes responded: “Basically, immediately.” This immediacy is important, because the POP officers were already engaging, so the order must have been directed at the TRT. In the circumstances, “engage” could only mean one thing: shoot. Calitz not only set the trap, he also triggered its release.
There is disagreement about the extent to which the shooters themselves were culpable, and, if they were, whether they could be found guilty given that R5 bullets tend to disintegrate. These are not matters requiring discussion here.
Final links in the slaughter
Regarding Calitz, the commission rejected the possibility of “intentionality”. This, they reasoned, would have required a conspiracy, and the evidence leaders’ investigations were sufficiently thorough to have revealed one, had it existed. They held that the generally haphazard execution of the operation on 16 August “does not suggest a capacity seamlessly to put together a crescent formation of armoured vehicles at precisely the right time and place to channel strikers into a fusillade of TRT fire”.
This argument, though, does not rebut the case presented here and in the conclusions of lawyers representing the families and injured and arrested miners. The “plan” and Calitz’s deeds and testimony were separate matters. We can be confident that he was personally responsible for the final links in the slaughter: the shape of vehicles around the kraal, the firepower used by POP, and the fatal deployment of the TRT.
One may wonder why the commission reached a different conclusion. Probably part of the answer is that the SAHRC’s animation, which was vital objective evidence, was presented in the 23rd week of the commission’s hearing, so that, as the SAHRC (p. 347) claimed, the SAPS had 22 weeks to present a false case. Rightly, it urged the commission to ask itself: “How might the … process have differed if the synchronised and chronological video and photographic evidence was shown at the start, rather than the end, of the … hearings?”
It wanted the commission to reject the SAPS’s defence, which, very largely, it did. However, the SAHRC’s logic could also be applied to the line that was doubtless emerging in the minds of the evidence leaders and commissioners. The animation provided additional evidence that Calitz was directly responsible for the Scene 1 killings. (By not aborting the plan, he was also indirectly responsible for Scene 2, but that’s another matter.)
What’s striking about Calitz’s testimony and later statements is that, notwithstanding his actions being linked to 17 deaths, he did not acknowledge personal mistakes or ways in which he would have acted differently with the benefit of hindsight.
‘Exactly how we planned it’
The implication is that he felt his actions were in line with decisions of the NMF, which were communicated to, among others, Major-General Charl Annandale, the overall commander on 16 August, and Major-General Ganasen Naidoo, the deputy provincial commissioner. It is implausible that Annandale did not communicate with Calitz about what was expected of him. There were two telephone exchanges involving Naidoo and Calitz in the morning, and another two just before the massacre, at 15.49:54 lasting 119 seconds and at 15.53:31 lasting 12 seconds (see Exhibit MMM 4).
Assuming these times tally with those for video footage, Calitz and Naidoo were in contact just seven seconds before the TRT shootings commenced. This is astonishing. To the best of my knowledge, the contents and significance of these communications have not been aired.
Briefing his troops two days after the massacre, Calitz told them: “From the planning to the execution was 110%. Exactly how we planned it — and it is not often this happens in this large group.” To exonerate Calitz, it would be necessary to show that this claim, and his “perfekte blok” comment, were not intended to be taken seriously, but there is no suggestion that this was the case.
In pursuit of justice and for its own credibility, the National Prosecuting Authority must charge Calitz.
Kate Alexander is a professor of sociology at the University of Johannesburg and a member of ROAPE’s editorial team.
Featured Photograph: South African police check the bodies of striking mine workers shot dead at the Wonderkop informal settlement near Marikana platinum mine, Rustenburg, South Africa, 16 August 2012.
Other publications about Marikana by ROAPE’s Kate Alexander:
Joseph Mullen introduces a pamphlet written for the 10th anniversary of the Marikana Massacre. The pamphlet is a guide to be used to educate those unfamiliar with the massacre, and as a call for internationalist, anti-imperialist solidarity with the ongoing struggle in South Africa. It also seeks to study the strategies of solidarity with the mineworkers, particularly South-South solidarity. The full pamphlet (available in this blogpost) is a vital educational document for reading groups, activists and students.
By Joseph Mullen
The story of the Marikana Massacre began a decade ago, in the periphery of the periphery, during a strike by the mine workers. South Africa’s “platinum belt” holds more than 86% of the world’s platinum reserves; there, imperialists drain open veins of their precious minerals and send them down the arteries of the value chain, pumping lifeblood into the imperial core.
These imperialists aren’t just the mining companies like Lonmin (“London Minerals”), but also the purchasers of the platinum, like Badische Anilin-und SodaFabrik (BASF), a German chemical company which was Lonmin’s main customer, buying 50% of the Marikana mine’s yearly production worth around $660 million. In the post-Apartheid era, the ally of the imperialists is the business class of South Africa, furthering a state of neo-colonialism. The primary actor in this role is Cyril Ramaphosa, the President of South Africa, and a billionaire, who was on the Board of Lonmin at the time of the massacre.
We can’t understand what happened at Marikana on 16 August 2012 without understanding how imperialism operates at these three levels simultaneously: the local level of the direct exploiter (Lonmin), the national level of the comprador class (Ramaphosa and the African National Congress) and at an international level, with the companies that make products from extracted resources (BASF).
When mineworkers went on strike in 2012, they were not only earning Lonmin US$6 million a day, but also producing US$2 million worth of platinum a day for BASF. Though they produced incredible levels of value for their bosses, the workers were paid just US$6000 a year. By demanding higher wages, they threatened the super-profits of an international capitalist class.
If we understand imperialism, then what happened next was predictable. The imperialists and compradors agreed to eliminate the strikers. Albert Jamieson, Lonmin’s chief executive, wrote to the minister of Mineral Resources, Susan Shabangu, demanding that “the State… bring its might to bear on this crucial sector of the economy”; simultaneously, Lonmin’s board member Ramaphosa said the government was “dealing with a criminal act …[and] there needs to be concomitant action to address this situation”.
At the end of the massacre on 16 August, 2012, 34 mineworkers were dead. Seventeen were shot from behind as they fled from police. This was capital punishment: summary executions by militarized police defending international capital. Today, as bloodstained platinum continues to be mined and shipped north, and South Africa and the entire Global South continue to be denuded of their resources, there is no justice for Marikana.
In a collaboration between the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Research and Practice (CSRP), the Marikana Support Campaign, and the Cadre Journal we produce a pamphlet Anti-Imperialism in the 21st Century: Solidarity after the Marikana Massacre in South Africa. This pamphlet hopes to educate readers globally about the massacre, and how workers, students, and activists mobilized in solidarity with Marikana workers. We sketch the spectrum of solidarity that emerged on a local, national, and international level after Marikana.
Within the platinum belt, workers continued the struggle against Lonmin by launching massive strikes, culminating in the Great Strike of 2014. This strike was the longest in South African history, plunging platinum production by 26% in 2013-14, thus causing massive losses.
Activists affiliated with the Marikana Support Campaign and the Gauteng Strike Support Committee showed solidarity for the strikers by organizing marches, providing food to strikers, and promoting a counter-narrative of events that challenged the state’s official “bloodwash” of the massacre.
In subsequent years, a general outburst against the neoliberal post-Apartheid state took place nationally. Student movements like #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall took the anger that young people were feeling at the failures of South African democracy and galvanized them into campaigns against the same state. National political movements like the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and the National Union of Mineworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) challenged the ANC. Marikana revealed the hypocrisy of the so-called democratic transition in 1994.
Days after the massacre, protests occurred at South African embassies in New Zealand, the USA, Turkey, Ireland, Canada, and more. A major campaign, Plough Back the Fruits, began protesting BASF shareholder meetings. Protesters picketed each annual Lonmin shareholder meeting in London. Other displays of solidarity also came from Global South countries like Brazil, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Chile. We emphasize the message from Chile, sent by Miguel Santana Hidalgo, Vice-President of the Copper Workers’ Confederation. Hidalgo draws parallels with mining companies like Anglo American, which mines platinum in South Africa and copper in Chile. Hidalgo asserts that “as long as … action by …[these]… companies is allowed to continue, we will continue lamenting that events like those that happened in Marikana continue to occur”. The linkage of Chilean and South African workers shows the possibility of international working people’s solidarity.
We conclude the pamphlet with reflections a decade later. Lonmin was bought out in 2019, but the new corporation, Sibanye-Stillwater, is indistinguishable. They pay their CEO a US$19 million bonus while workers continue to get nothing. The top ten owners of Sibanye-Stillwater are all American firms. Meanwhile, Ramaphosa still hasn’t been held accountable for his part in the massacre, and BASF has never paid reparations for their role in the events.
Our pamphlet is educational and we encourage readers to share it with anyone irrespective of their knowledge of Marikana. It has definitions, explanations, diagrams, and a set of six concluding questions that can be used for discussion groups. A recent survey found that only 40% of South Africans feel they understand Marikana 10 years on; there is much work to be done to conscientise the workers of South Africa, let alone the entire world, about what happened.
The solidarity action for Marikana offers us a vision of working class internationalism, where workers and activists can fight against capitalism as a world system by organizing internationally. To do so, they had to cross transnational divides and take advantage of social media and instant communications to mobilize a network that could work at a global level. If we can use this network of solidarity as a basis for future struggle, we can move anti-imperialism from abstraction to action.
While this internationalism might still seem abstract, we must remember that imperialism is all too real and remains, as Marx wrote “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” from its extraction of labour and resources in places like Marikana. Our mission is to stop the bleeding and close the open veins of the Global South once and for all.
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