New details on Walter Rodney’s visit to Hamburg

February 5, 2025

In this groundbreaking piece, Malte Kanefendt and David Weiss uncover previously unknown details surrounding Walter Rodney’s visit to Hamburg in 1978. This blog provides valuable context to Leo Zeilig’s 2019 blog, Walter Rodney’s Journey to Hamburg. The authors explore the German students’ initiative to bring Rodney to Hamburg, his reasons for wanting to visit the city, his lectures, his unexpected return in 1980, and the memorial in his honour following his assassination.

In 1978, Walter Rodney faced an increasingly precarious situation in Guyana – politically as well as personally. In previous years, and especially after Rodney had joined the socialist Working People’s Alliance (WPA) in 1974, he had focused on the political struggle in his home country. With intensified political repression against the party and its key figures, however, including a teaching prohibition imposed on Rodney, the chances to make a living for him and his family had become increasingly challenging. Between 1974 and 1979, Rodney thus travelled to various places across the globe in order to find paid appointments and foster international comradeship. During this period, Rodney also spent three months in Hamburg. In the early summer of 1978, he not only gave seminars and held a lecture at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Hamburg but also built lasting connections with colleagues and students.

This blog post seeks to uncover how Rodney’s stay in Hamburg came to be, how Rodney spent his months in the Northern German city, which scientific and political topics he focused on and the long-lasting impact he had well after his departure. We talked to former students and colleagues in Hamburg, to family and friends of Walter Rodney whose personal narrations and archival sources from the 1970s and 80s are the crucial pieces that helped us to portray a rich, yet underappreciated period in Rodney’s life.[1]

Rodney’s Hamburg lectures – recorded, transcribed and published by his students and friends – represent, as Leo Zeilig mentions, new theoretical and practical insights into the rich political theory of Walter Rodney and his personal development as a central activist-scholar of the 20^th century. In Hamburg, Rodney inspired students with his lectures and his recollections of many years of political work as well as academic research. His lectures were well attended. His rhetorical style and the pressing issues he raised, such as the historical roots of racism and the multi-layered forms of colonial violence impressed the students in the lecture hall. Rodney addressed the neo-colonial status quo, the ongoing dependency of the former colonies and introduced students to his theoretical work on the concept of ‘underdevelopment’, the integration of (neo-)colonial economies into the capitalist world market and the multiple anti-colonial struggles of the time.

The way in which Rodney elaborated on their interconnectedness represented a new perspective on colonialism and post-colonial constellations for the academic landscape in Hamburg. Against this background, it is hardly surprising that Rodney was able to leave his mark on the institute and the university long after his stay in Hamburg.

A student-led initiative invites Rodney to Hamburg

Back in the mid-1970s, Harald Sellin, a student at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Hamburg, stumbled upon Walter Rodney’s book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa on a study trip to Sudan. Sellin was deeply impressed, brought the book to Hamburg[2] and introduced it to fellow students during a gathering of the so-called ‘Africa Group’, a student initiative he had co-founded at the institute. The group had created a newspaper archive with a focus on the continent and continuously debated contemporary developments in postcolonial Africa.[3] It was this student group’s idea to invite Walter Rodney to Hamburg. Rainer Tetzlaff, who had come to Hamburg in 1974 as a professor of political science with a special expertise in African politics and history, was sympathetic to the students’ proposal. Encouraged by his student assistant Harald Sellin, Tetzlaff initiated the contact with Rodney.[4]

Walter Rodney And Friends in Hamburg 1978 (From Monika Rulfs’ personal archive). Monika identified the three people in the back: Ursula Şemin-Panzer, Imke Meyer, her boyfriend (with the black beard), Walter Rodney, Nina Laatsch-Nikitin.

Why Rodney came to Hamburg

The arrangement at the University of Hamburg also came in handy for Rodney himself. First, Rodney had visited Hamburg before. Fifteen years earlier, in 1963, after having won an essay competition at the University of the West Indies with a text on “Concepts of Democracy”, Rodney was offered the opportunity to travel to Europe via the Hamburg-America shipping line. Together with his school and university friend Albert Parkes, he spent several days in the city.[5] Another visit to Hamburg then followed in 1976. Together with his wife Patricia, he travelled through Germany, this included a stay in Hamburg as well as meetings with academics and friends in East Berlin.[6]

Second, there were crucial financial considerations, especially due to the precarious economic, political and personal situation he and his family faced in Guyana, since Rodney’s appointment as director of the Institute of History at the newly established University of Guyana had been cancelled in 1974. Without any chance for a regular income, it had become necessary for Rodney to leave the country and take up short-term research, lecture and teaching positions at foreign academic institutions. Before he came to Hamburg, he had already taken up appointments at several North American academic institutions. While he had given guest lectures at Harvard, Stanford and Columbia University among others, he had also held a teaching position at the Africana Studies and Research Center in Ithaca and co-organised a six-week Research Symposium at the Institute of the Black World (IBW) in Atlanta.

Third, teaching as a visiting professor in Hamburg in the summer of 1978 was then also a favourable opportunity to find new allies for the internationalist cause of the WPA. And, in addition to these decisive political and financial considerations for Rodney, there must also have been academic reasons that attracted him to spend three months in Hamburg. On the one hand it can be assumed that – against the background of state censorship in Guyana – Rodney was looking forward to the comparatively free academic discourse in Hamburg.[7] On the other hand, Hamburg might have garnered scientific interest in Rodney since he had dealt with the influence of the German East Africa Company (GEAC) on Germany’s colonial expansion in present-day Tanzania before.[8] It is only most likely that Rodney, with all his knowledge about Tanzania and the Maji-Maji rebellion against German colonial exploitation and forced labour, was well aware of Hamburg’s colonial legacy.

Life and Work in Hamburg

After Rodney arrived in Hamburg in April of 1978, he lived with his friend and previous Hamburg travel companion Albert Parkes, who, together with his family, had settled down in the city. Soon, the house of Harald Sellin, which he shared with his friends and fellow activists, would become another hub for Rodney’s social life and work in the city. There, Rodney often joined long evenings filled with parties as well as intense debates about politics. At the Institute of Political Science at the University, Rodney often engaged with the ‘Research Group on Armament and Underdevelopment Studies’, a small collective of peace and conflict researchers at the institute. He was especially interested in their ‘Archive of Military and Armament in the Third World’, where he was able to recruit a wide array of sources on military (and thus repression) capacities in the Global South.

What other specific research and political projects Rodney pursued at the University is difficult to reconstruct, only a handful of documents indicate several areas of activity. In an article for the famous Hamburg-based weekly magazine Der Spiegel, for instance, published on July 16^th, 1978 under the headline “Cuba promotes a just cause”. A researcher of the Third World on Castro’s Africa policy” [9], Rodney discussed Cuban activities on the continent and differentiated between the Cuban intervention in Angola and their engagement in the Horn. In Angola, Rodney argued, we see Afro-Cubans, whose ancestors were brought to the Caribbean as slaves, now return to the continent to help liberate Angola from the disciples of the slave traders. He described this as an “ironic historical turn” and deemed it to be “the strongest demonstration of international solidarity.” Considering Cuba’s engagement in the Horn, however, particularly in support of Ethiopian troops in territorial disputes with Somalia, Rodney argued this support to be “neither necessary nor desirable”. The conflict was, Rodney wrote, “a side-product of the illogic of colonial borders”. He questioned, however, the Marxist and revolutionary nature of the Ethiopian regime, who actively repressed, even killed “progressive Ethiopian workers, students, and intellectuals”. Another problem with the Cuban support for the regime, Rodney continued, could become its potential suppression of the Eritrean people, whose struggle for liberation Cuba had previously supported. In this light, Cuba’s active engagement with the Ethiopian rulers could become a challenge for its “credibility” on the continent. “In this context”, Rodney then concluded, “the image of Cuba as a Soviet pawn appears”, only serving Soviet interests on the continent. This, however, only distracted “from the actual decisive difficulties, the liberation of Africa from colonialism, racism, and imperialism”.

Hamburg lectures

Surely, the most important, influential and lasting testament of his stay in Hamburg, are his lectures at the University in the summer term of 1978. During his months in Hamburg, Rodney held at least 6 lectures and, in doing so, pursued a quite ambitious programme. In each lecture, he expanded on one overarching theme, starting with an overview of his “framework of general materialist development”.[10] In his second lecture, Rodney then engaged with what he called classical development theories and modernisation theory and juxtaposed these conventional theories with a critical approach that connects “underdevelopment” and ongoing dependency to their historical roots. In the following lecture, Rodney then recounted the process and driving forces of the colonisation of African societies, in order to – in his next lecture – discuss various theories of African colonial economies, emphasising often underappreciated factors like the commodification of labour, changes in land use and the introduction of colonial trade systems. In the final two recorded and preserved lectures, Rodney then moved on, first, to the decolonisation process throughout the previous decades, presenting his reading of various causes and modes of decolonisation, and, secondly, contemporary and contested “post-colonial development strategies” in Africa. All of these lectures were accompanied by intensive Q&A sessions, during which Rodney addressed the students’ questions, referenced various literature recommendations and also connected the respective topics to a seminar he taught parallel to the lecture.

The fact that the dense and rich lectures are preserved at all – mostly word for word – is, again, due to the students of the Africa Group at the institute. Harald Sellin had recorded Rodney’s classes week after week. In the early 1980s, a whole collective of students then went on to transcribe the lectures and initiated the printing of the collection in the small university-owned publishing house. Rainer Tetzlaff and Peter Lock served as the publishing editors of the collection and contributed a short introduction to the 1984 publication of (probably) around 300 copies of Rodney’s Hamburg lectures.

Walter Rodney Walter Rodney delivering the Hamburg Lectures in 1978 (From Monika Rulfs’ personal archive)

Rodney’s unexpected return in 1980

Rodney’s life after his stay in Hamburg in 1978 was shaped by growing suppression of political dissent in Guyana under the government of the People’s National Congress (PNC).

In July 1979, for example, Omawale, Rupert Roopnaraine and Walter Rodney, the three most well-known faces of the party, were accused of having played a role in an arson attack on the Ministry of National Development and the PNC Headquarters and were arrested. The nationwide protests and strikes against Burnham’s PNC that followed their arrest went on for three months, signified a rapidly growing resistance to the PNC government and were described as a Civil Rebellion by the WPA. Rodney and his comrades were released on bail.[11] Even if pressure from the Guyanese public and international protests had led to the release of the three-party members after a few days, the threat of persecution and re-imprisonment continuously loomed over Rodney.[12] In this tense situation the WPA was able to smuggle Rodney out of the country in a clandestine operation via Suriname. In the spring of 1980, he then managed to arrange short stays in Zimbabwe and Germany.

Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s then new Prime Minister, turned out to be an avid reader of Rodney’s writings and proposes that Rodney could spend a year in Zimbabwe.After some deliberation with his family, Rodney accepted the offer and, towards the end of May 1980, travelled to Zimbabwe for a few days. Mugabe wanted to commission Rodney to compile a chronicle of Zimbabwe’s history and to set up a historical institute for this purpose.[13] Shortly before the trip, Rodney had changed the route of his flight and added Hamburg as an in-between stop for both the outward and return journey.[14]Because all these plans were made secretly, Rodney surprised his friends in Hamburg. Even though he was in Hamburg for less than a week, his stories and the discussions both in the shared flat and with selected colleagues at the institute made clear once again how urgent and heated the conflict in Guyana must have been. Rodney was even more concerned than previously with the question of the legitimacy of political violence and armed resistance.[15]His final trip to Hamburg, spontaneously and secretly planned as it was, could also indicate that he attempted to figure out additional ways to support the struggle of the WPA in Guyana. On June 3^rd, Rodney finally returned to Guyana. On June 13^th, any hope of a safe home for Walter and Patricia Rodney and their children Shaka, Kanini and Asha was destroyed forever. At the age of 38, Walter Rodney was assassinated by a PNC appointed agent who handed Rodney an explosive mobile device moments before it exploded in Rodney’s car.[16]

Memorial rally to commemorate Walter Rodney’s assassination in 1980. From Left to Right: Michaela Freyhold, Horace Campbell, Jan Carew, unknown, Christa Randzio-Plath, Ursula Şemin-Panzer, Ursula Niebling, unknown(white jumper), Harald Sellin. (According to Monika Rulfs)

Grieving, remembering and organising in Hamburg

As the news of Rodney’s assassination reached Hamburg, dismay, desperation, and grief were tangible. Only two weeks after his death, on June 29^th 1980, Der Spiegel published an article on the developments in Guyana, Rodney’s murder was framed as a symptomatic example for the increasingly repressive political landscape in the country. At the University, Peter Fischer-Appelt, president of the university, penned an obituary in which he honoured Rodney as one of “the most distinguished historians of the Third World”. In Hamburg, Rodney would be remembered as an “outstanding teacher and colleague”, admired amongst students and colleagues alike for his lectures on the “history, political ideas and movements for emancipation in Africa. […] His work will live on”, Fischer-Appelt concluded.

Acting in this spirit, letting Rodney’s work live on, were his former students and colleagues at the Institute of Political Science. In the days following his death, they formed a Solidarity Committee Walter Rodney and held a memorial service on June 30^th, 1980, at the University, remembering Rodney, his life and political work. In October of the same year, they organised a large event in honour of Walter Rodney. The event brought together international guests, like Guyanese poet Jan Carew and pan-Africanist Horace Campbell, as well as German academics and former students of Rodney.

These activities were only the beginning of years of remembrance and activism in memory of Rodney. Still in 1980, his students and friends form the Guyana Committee at the University, organised money in support of Rodney’s family but also to further collect and publicise information on the developments in Guyana to the German public. A comprehensive radio broadcast on Rodney’s life and work, leaflets on the situation in Guyana and occasional demonstrations continued this work. Annual highlights were large events around the anniversaries of Rodney’s death, in 1981, for instance, the students were able to welcome Rodney’s widow, Patricia Rodney, and his former WPA comrade, Andaiye, in Hamburg.

In the following years, active students broadened their focus to oppose US imperialism in the whole of the Caribbean. In 1983, they form the Hamburg Grenada Initiative, which conducted multiple research activities on the invasion of Grenada and worked closely with the Guyana Committee. In 1984, both groups formed the Caribbean Information Centre Hamburg (KIZH), and continued their academic and public political work.

During our research process and, first and foremost, through the personal contacts to family, friends and colleagues of Walter Rodney, we began to understand what made Rodney’s stay in Hamburg so meaningful. We learned how pressing the issues were that found their way into the Hamburg lectures – a treasure of academic brilliance yet to be fully rediscovered and appreciated. In addition, we got to experience, over and over again, the admiring way in which those we were able to interview and who had the chance to cross paths with Rodney in Hamburg looked back on the personal relationships and the political debates that were developing during the years of 1978 and 1980. These memories shed light on the unbroken motivation to organise, engage with radical theory and, importantly, publish the Hamburg lectures, years after Rodney’s death.

Featured Photograph: Walter Rodney and his German friend Harald Selling in Hamburg May 1980 (Credit to Monika Rulfs)

David Weiss studied Political Science at the University of Hamburg, as well as Political Theory in Frankfurt and Darmstadt. His main academic interests are democratic and international political theory as well as reactionary thought and its influence on right-wing political parties in Western Europe and the US.

Malte Kanefendt studies Political Science in Berlin with a focus on social movement studies, racial capitalism and resistance projects of decolonization.

[1] We want to give special thanks for their support and patience with all our questions to Patricia and Asha Rodney, Albert Parkes, Monika Rulfs, Peter Lock and Rainer Tetzlaff

[2] How Europe Underdeveloped Africa had already been translated and published in German in 1973 under the (unfortunate) title Afrika – Die Geschichte einer Unterentwicklung (Africa – A History of Underdevelopment) by Wagenbach Verlag in Berlin.

[3] This is how Peter Lock remembers the increasing engagement of the Hamburg students with Rodney’s work in a talk we had in the summer of 2021. Lock has worked as a researcher in peace and conflict studies for several decades. During Rodney’s time at the University of Hamburg, he had worked at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy (IFSH) and became one of the closest academic and personal contacts for Rodney in Hamburg.

[4] Rainer Tetzlaff shared this information with us during an interview we had in the summer of 2021.

[5] More detailed information on Rodney’s first trip to Europe are available at the Archives Research Center of the Atlanta University Center which is home of the Walter Rodney Papers. In series B, box 1, folder 19 the circumstances under which Rodney won the prize are mentioned.

[6] Interview with Patricia and Asha Rodney, 2021.

[7] That is at least a reason Rainer Tetzlaff mentioned during our conversation in 2021.

[8] With his contribution „Migrant Labour and the Colonial Economy” to the volume Paper from the Institute for Research on Africa (original title: Arbeiten aus dem Institut für Afrika-Kunde) that was published in 1983, Rodney traces the significance of German colonialism in causing the focus on sisal production in the contemporary Tanzanian economy back to German colonial rule that remained even under British colonial rule after 1920. Rodney shows how, on the one hand, the GEAC coerces African labour to produce export goods (like rubber and ivory) and, on the other, how the German colonial administration focusses on concentrating agricultural estates for the benefit of German settlers who live off a plantation economy.

[9] Original title: “Kuba vertritt eine gerechte Sache”. Ein Wissenschaftler der Dritten Welt über Castros Afrika-Politik“.

[10] This first lecture was, unfortunately, not recorded.

[11] Hinds, David 2008: Walter Rodney and the Political Resistance in Guyana: The 1979-1980 Civil Rebellion: 46-47.

[12] Campbell, Horace 1980: Walter Rodney: A Biography and Bibliography: 134.

[13] Shared by Patricia and Asha Rodney.

[14] Shared by Peter Lock.

[15] Shared by Albert Parkes and Peter Lock.

[16] After a long struggle to dismantle the PNC’s narrative around Rodney’s death and misleading allegations (including in the direction of the WPA), in February 2016 a “Report on the Circumstances Surrounding the Death in an Explosion of the late Dr. Rodney […]” was released. We want to highlight pages 57-58 and 102-103 where most of the myths around Rodney’s death are debunked and the PNC’s involvement becomes clear, see: https://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/coi%3Arodney_report [last seen 28 November, 2024].

Interview with Mamadou Koné – A long, tragic history of the Senegalese Riflemen: A story of colonial racism and murder

ROAPE

January 29, 2025

By Pascal Bianchini

In this interview, Mamadou Koné, curator at the Musée historique des forces armées du Sénégal, looks back at the long history of the Senegalese riflemen, the African troops employed by the French army during the colonial period. This military corps was founded in 1857 by the governor of the colony of Senegal, Louis Faidherbe, who created the first battalion in Saint-Louis du Sénégal, but the practice of recruiting Africans to maintain order existed since the 18th century. With the abolition of slavery – in 1848 for France – and the conquest of Africa by the European powers, mainly British and French, but also German, Belgian, Italian and Portuguese, the tirailleurs, many of whom were freed former slaves, were to play a new role. Mamadou Koné takes a closer look at the different ways in which these men were recruited, often under constraints. Although the name ‘Senegalese’ came to be used, these tirailleurs were in fact recruited under French domination from all over Africa, mostly from the Sahel.

From the First World War onwards and under the influence of racist doctrines developed with the French army, promoting the idea of ‘warrior races’, these men went to fight on European battlegrounds. Thus, the French were the only colonisers to bring African troops to their homeland, which triggered a whole series of interactions and representations among the civilian populations, generating new imaginaries that have persisted both in France and in Africa until today. The Thiaroye massacre occurred at the end of the Second World War. In December 1944, the extreme violence that had taken place in Europe and Asia was also to be found on the African continent. French soldiers massacred their own colonial soldiers, while at the same time, on the Metropolitan territory, French people were celebrating their liberation. The death toll, still being debated by historians, could be between 300 and 400. Thiaroye marked the beginning of a whole series of repressions and massacres in the French Empire: in Algeria from May 1945, in Indochina in November 1946, in Madagascar in the spring of 1947, and so on. This interview takes a closer look at the direct causes of this tragedy and the state of the search, while the French authorities have always sought to conceal the facts, if necessary, by forging documents.

On the other hand, West African societies quickly seized on this tragedy to make it a symbol in their struggle against colonialism. Initially, the fight was for the release of the thirty-four riflemen, considered mutineers by the army and convicted in a military trial in March 1945. This was the struggle of a new African political class that emerged in the post-war period. It was also a cultural struggle. Léopold Senghor wrote a poem, as did the Guinean Fodéba Keita, founder of the Ballets Africains in the 1940s and future minister under Sékou Touré before he was executed by the latter in 1969. During the 1950s, Senegalese also commemorated the massacre by organising what they called ‘pilgrimages’ to Thiaroye. After independence, in a context where Senghor’s Senegalese government remained very close to that of the former metropolis, the memory of Thiaroye was kept alive by various cultural and political activists who opposed Senghor. In these matters, the most famous piece is probably the film Camp de Thiaroye, by Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow, released in 1988. From the 1990s and 2000s onwards, young Senegalese people, particularly through hip hop, continued to commemorate this tragedy, refusing to allow the memory of the colonial violence to disappear into oblivion.

Presentation by Martin Mourre

Monument in tribute to the martyrs of Thiaroye, Bamako (Mali) (photo credit Martin Mourre)

Pascal Bianchini: Before talking about this massacre of ‘Tirailleurs Sénégalais’ (Senegalese riflemen) on 1st December 1944, we need to go back to the creation of these African troops in the French colonial army and the role they were made to play… The ‘Tirailleurs Sénégalais’ were set up as part of the colonial conquest in the 19th century. Can you briefly outline the historical context?

Mamadou Koné: The Tirailleurs corps was created on 21 July 1857 by Louis Faidherbe, who was still a colonel and later became a general. To understand this, we need to take into account the historical context in the long run. First, there was the triangular trade, when the French and other Europeans came to Africa to find slaves and take them to America. Then, in the 19th century, with the industrial revolution in Europe, first in England and then in France, Europeans no longer needed to call on slaves from Africa. In America, there were already slaves on the spot. With the advent of industrial machinery, Europe discovered that there were valuable minerals and raw materials in Africa. It was in this context that slavery was abolished, because it was no longer necessary, what was done in 1848 in the French colonies. Africa’s role was to provide raw materials and possibly also to become an outlet for consumer products manufactured in metropolitan France. In the case of Senegal – with Governor Faidherbe – in the middle of the 19th century, what particularly interested France was the gum trade. Therefore, it was important to have a climate of security. This is what was called at the time, ‘pacifying’ these territories…

Pascal Bianchini: ‘Pacifying’ is here to be put between commas?

Mamadou Koné: Yes, such peace was based on the economic interests of colonisation. The slave trade was banned, but some unscrupulous slave traders continued to trade clandestinely. Sometimes these slaves were freed, but sometimes the slave traders took them back to sell them. To prevent this, the French army sometimes integrated these freed slaves into its colonial troops. Faidherbe then proposed that Napoleon III creates this corps. In this way, the French army killed two birds with one stone. Not only did they put an end to the clandestine slave trade, but these soldiers were also to be used for colonial expansion.

Pascal Bianchini: We talk about Senegalese riflemen, but they weren’t all Senegalese?

Mamadou Koné: The first battalion was created in 1857 with the Senegalese. Until 1880, there were only Senegalese among the tirailleurs. But as the colonial conquest continued east of Senegal with the conquest of Sudan, a battalion of Sudanese riflemen was created. Then, in each conquered territory, new battalions were created: Haoussa riflemen, Gabonese riflemen, Congolese riflemen, and so on… But in 1900, as a tribute to the first battalion created in Saint Louis, only the name ‘Tirailleurs Sénégalais’ was retained, encompassing all soldiers recruited south of the Sahara, in the French colonies. It was a generic name for African soldiers. These Senegalese Tirailleurs enabled France to acquire the second largest colonial empire in the world, after that of the British.

Pascal Bianchini: Later on, these riflemen would also be used in wars between European powers, outside the African continent?

Mamadou Koné: It happened at the beginning of the 20th century when alliances were being formed between these different powers, the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance. War seemed increasingly imminent. In 1910, Lieutenant-Colonel Mangin proposed using Senegalese riflemen to help France overcome its demographic deficit in relation to Germany.

Pascal Bianchini: It is the thesis of the ‘Force noire’ (Black Force). Could you elaborate this?

Mamadou Koné: Mangin had a career in Africa among the Senegalese and Africans. In his book ‘La force Noire’ (the Black Force), he explained that they were valorous warriors who simply had to be disciplined to become a military force that could compensate for the lack of troops in metropolitan France. On 14 July 1913, the first regiment of Senegalese riflemen was invited to parade in Paris and receive the Legion of Honour medal. The aim was to show these black troops to French people in order to accustom themselves with their presence.

Mural painting in tribute to the martyrs of Thiaroye, Dakar (Sénégal), photo credit Christophe Colomb Maléane

Pascal Bianchini: These riflemen arrived on the battlefields in 1914. Can you tell us how they were recruited?

Mamadou Koné: They arrived as early as 1914. There were different ways of recruitment. First, there were freed slaves. There were also voluntary recruitments fostered by the difficulties of the agricultural economy: droughts or plagues of locusts. Rather than cultivate a land that had become ungrateful, it was tempting to go to Saint-Louis and be recruited to get a weapon, wear nice clothes and receive a salary. Many young people were recruited this way. From 1912, with the prospect of war looming, the French introduced what was known as conscription. In other words, when a young man reached the age to be recruited, he was recruited. But the problem was civil status, which was lacking in Africa. So, people were recruited based on physical appearance: a young man could be only 15, 16, etc., and they would say he was 20. Finally, there was also forced recruitment.

Pascal Bianchini: Were people sometimes refused conscription?

Mamadou Koné: It could happen but when someone was recruited for conscription, and refused or ran away, their relatives could be taken hostage. They were held until the conscript presented himself. To sum up, it was sometimes voluntary service and sometimes conscription.

Pascal Bianchini: Can you give us a figure on the number of African soldiers sent to fight in the First World War?

Mamadou Koné: It is estimated that 185,000 riflemen were recruited during this war. Of these, more than 130,000 were sent to Europe, while the rest fought in Africa, particularly in Togo and Cameroon. Every year a new recruitment was made. Because of the high numbers of casualties during this war, the French army needed more and more recruits. In 1917, there was a shortage of French soldiers, which led to the idea of even more mass recruitments. During the previous year, in 1916, people in the French Sudan could no longer stand conscription. When the recruiting sergeants arrived, there was an alarm system (with a tamtam or balafon) to warn the young people to flee and take refuge in the bush. It was probably because the first soldiers to return to their villages from this war recounted the horrors they had experienced in Europe. Sometimes, populations rose up to fight against recruitment in Sudan (present-day Mali), as well as in Burkina Faso (the former Upper Volta). These uprisings were brutally suppressed and recruitment continued.

Pascal Bianchini: Can we talk about the role of Blaise Diagne, who was Senegal’s Member of Parliament at the time?

Mamadou Koné: With the bloodshed of the Battle of Verdun in 1916, the French army needed more and more reinforcements. The French government led by Clémenceau once again turned its attention to Africa. But within the colonial administration in Africa, some people were reluctant. In Dakar, Governor General Van Vollenhoven replied that enough troops had been sent, and that manpower was needed for agricultural work. Then, Blaise Diagne intervened. He told Clémenceau that he was in a position to recruit these new soldiers. In exchange, he asked to be appointed to the government, which was accepted as he became commissioner of the Republic for recruitment, with the rank of minister. In practice, this meant that he was the superior of all civil servants in the colony, including the Governor General who resigned when he learned of Blaise Diagne’s appointment. Whereas Blaise Diagne was asked to recruit 47,000 soldiers, he succeeded in recruiting 77,000, 63,000 of them in West Africa and the rest in Equatorial Africa. To achieve this, he arrived with a very large delegation, including senior French officers from the colonial army, politicians such as Galandou Diouf and marabouts such as Seydou Nourou Tall. The result was massive recruitment wherever he went. It was also because he had some charisma. Several famous marabouts like El Hadj Malick Sy of the Tidjane Brotherhood and Cheikh Ibra Fall sent their own sons to fight in the French army. Following these examples, many ‘talibés’ (followers) left. Another issue was the situation of the ‘four communes’, Saint-Louis, Rufisque, Gorée and Dakar, where some of the inhabitants were considered to be French citizens. However, this was not full citizenship, as one could reproach them for not having done their military service. So, the First World War was an opportunity to obtain full French citizenship.

Pascal Bianchini: During World War II, a similar scenario was repeated?

Mamadou Koné: Yes, the same procedures would apply: conscription, voluntary service and roundups. So, the first contingent of 63,000 arrived in France. They went to fight against the Germans during the ‘phoney war’ and experienced the defeat of the French army in 1939-40. Then came the armistice.

Pascal Bianchini: In this colonial context, what ranks were Africans given in the army? Were there any non-commissioned officers or officers among them?

Mamadou Koné: There were non-commissioned officers and even a few officers, but the bulk of the troops were infantrymen, the rank and file. The highest rank for Africans was captain. Charles N’Tchoréré from Gabon was one of the few officers. He was taken prisoner by the Germans and later executed.

Pascal Bianchini: After the French defeat by the Germans in 1940, were African soldiers treated differently from white French soldiers as prisoners of war?

Mamadou Koné: …the French soldiers were so many that the Germans, to avoid taking so many prisoners, disarmed them and asked them to mingle with the French population fleeing the advance of the German army in what was called the ‘exodus’ in June 1940. But as for the Africans, they were told, ‘You blacks, stand aside’. They thought they were going to be freed, but in reality, once their French officers had left, they were isolated and summarily executed because the Germans didn’t want any black prisoners. However, the massacres stopped as they became known, and the German army command intervened to put a stop to them. They were then locked up in open-air prisons, camps known as Frontstalags. Consequently, many African soldiers died there from cold and hunger. Faced with this hecatomb, some protective measures were taken, in particular by appealing to the wartime godmothers who sent them food and sometimes a little money.

Pascal Bianchini: Was it the French army that organised this system?

Mamadou Koné: The French army had set up this system of godmothers since the First World War. The idea was to call on women to support these young conscripts. They played an important role, particularly for those who had no family in France. The Germans also had the idea of using soldiers to work for German companies to support their war effort. Many riflemen took advantage of the situation to escape, and some joined the French resistance. As for the work done for the Germans, this was remunerated in accordance with the provisions of the Geneva Convention. Some African soldiers were able to save relatively large sums of money, up to 15,000 or 20,000 metropolitan francs. I have even seen in some archives that some saved as much as 40,000.

Pascal Bianchini: They kept the money in their pockets? And then they had to change it when returning to Africa?

Mamadou Koné: Most of the time, they kept the money with them. Sometimes, they put it in their godmothers’ hands. But then, most of them wanted to change the money. That’s what caused the problem when it came to making the exchange. They were offered an exchange at only half the normal rate. This problem should not be confused with that of pay arrears, which we’ll discuss later, but it was also one of the tirailleurs’ demands. Then, in 1943, the Allies began to organise troops in North Africa, in preparation for the landings that were to take place the following year. And when the troops were reorganised in 1944, they were able to proceed with the Normandy landings on 6 June.

Pascal Bianchini: An important point to make is that these allied troops included Africans, right?

Mamadou Koné: You could even say that the Africans were at the origin of this French army. So, from West and Central Africa, African soldiers came to North Africa to form the first French army. From Senegal, for example, they sent the 18th Regiment of Senegalese Riflemen, which included many intellectuals, schoolteachers and so on. Their presence allowed France to take part at the landings. Initially, it was the Leclerc column that set off from Brazzaville to reach Chad. Then the Leclerc column would be transformed into the Second Armoured Division (‘Deuxième DB’ in French). Initially, the Second Armoured Division should have taken part in the Normandy landings, but the Americans said ‘No. No Negroes in the 2nd Armoured Division’. In response to this order from the Americans, the Second Armoured Division was ‘whitened’: it was made up entirely of white men, with a few exceptions, for example, nationals of the four communes, or the case of Claude Mademba Sy who was a captain, the son of a chief, etc., whom Leclerc himself personally defended.

Pascal Bianchini: How was it possible for this regiment to be formed in Senegal? I thought Dakar was held by the Petainists under Governor Boisson?

Mamadou Koné: To cut the long story short, the Petainists were no longer there, and Boisson had been replaced in 1943. In fact, at the beginning, he was not a Petainist. It was when the British bombed the French fleet at Mers el Kébir to prevent it falling into German hands that he changed his position, as did others. Moreover, when the armistice was signed in 1940, some Senegalese soldiers who refused to accept defeat managed to join the Leclerc column clandestinely. Many of them went through Gambia. But if they were caught, they were shot. Some were shot on the Corniche in Dakar.

Pascal Bianchini: Then these African troops landed in France?

Mamadou Koné: There were two landings, first in Normandy in June, then in Provence in August 1944. Then the Allied armies advanced and the two troops joined forces. Victory was now certain. It was here that another type of ‘whitening’ of the troops took place. Before entering Paris and other major cities, the black soldiers of the Allied troops were brought out.

Pascal Bianchini: Why did the American order this ‘whitening’?

Mamadou Koné: The Americans said they didn’t want black people because they were not supposed to drive tanks. It was a form of racism that existed in the American army. Another whitening took place after the landing in Provence when the troops were advancing to liberate the rest of France. This second whitening took place because the French did not want a parade of black troops during the liberation of France’s major cities. Then, on another level, we had to bear in mind France’s political situation. The Communists carried a lot of weight in the Resistance. Hence the idea of mobilising the maquisards by making them wear uniforms to control them better. The African riflemen who were wearing the uniforms the Americans had given them were stripped naked and exchanged their uniforms for those of the maquisards. This caused a great deal of frustration among the riflemen.

Pascal Bianchini: Then the issue of the service pays arose with the demobilisation of these soldiers…

Mamadou Koné: Prisoners released from the frontstalags started demanding the money they were owed. There began to be unrest. Fearing that these movements would spread to all the troops in France, the authorities chose to evacuate them. An offer was made to give them an advance corresponding to a quarter of the sums owed. Some of them accepted. But the others did not agree… Those who accepted the offer, between 1,600 and 1,700, were shipped off to Morlaix in Brittany. But according to the official version, at the stopover in Casablanca, around 400 of them got off …. But this official version is not credible, since in his logbook, the battalion commander who was convoying the ‘tirailleurs’ said on arrival in Dakar that there was nothing to report. In fact, this story about the riflemen disembarking in Casablanca was later invented to downplay the number of deaths at Thiaroye.

Pascal Bianchini: You mean that the French army deliberately forged documents to disguise the reality, i.e. the death toll in Thiaroye?

Mamadou Koné: It seems that the number of infantrymen on arrival in Dakar was reduced so that the number of those who died in the events could be reduced by the same amount. This is a working hypothesis that has yet to be backed up by historical research, but it is a strong one.

Pascal Bianchini: They arrived in Dakar and then what happened?

Mamadou Koné: They were evacuated to the Thiaroye transit camp, where the soldiers had to spend a few days before returning to their locality. But before going home, they asked for their money. They had been given an advance before they left, and were told that in Dakar they would receive the rest of the money. When they arrived in Dakar, they were told to go to their villages and that they would receive the money later. They refused to leave, knowing that if they split up, they would no longer have the strength in numbers to claim for their rights.

Pascal Bianchini: Let’s talk about the Thiaroye massacre. What exactly occurred?

Mamadou Koné: It was a premeditated massacre using heavy weapons. Armoured cars and a tank were used. I interviewed someone who was a child trooper at the Prytanée de Saint Louis in 1944. Their supervisor had told them that they were going to be away for a few days, because they had to go and collect some American equipment in the Sahara, to transport it to Dakar. When they returned to Saint Louis, they told their pupils that they had gone to Dakar to subdue the riflemen.

Pascal Bianchini: Were there local witnesses to the massacre from the village of Thiaroye ?

Mamadou Koné: In fact, Thiaroye today looks nothing like it did in 1944. It was a bush. The camp was isolated from the surrounding villages. However, we have testimonies from survivors among the riflemen. Some of them were published much later.

Pascal Bianchini: Precisely, some of these survivors were brought before the military courts…

Mamadou Koné: They were accused of having had a leading role. It is said that they were made to walk from Thiaroye to Dakar barefoot, in order to humiliate them. Thirty-four of them were condemned.

Pascal Bianchini: For a long time, the official version was that it was a mutiny. I myself heard that expression for a long time.

Mamadou Koné: According to this official version, the mutineers were armed and the French army had to fire back at the mutineers.

Pascal Bianchini: Regarding this official theory, was there any evidence to suggest that they were armed?

Mamadou Koné: Hardly. As shown in the inventory of the weapons held by the riflemen, there were only a few pistols, one or two, I think. The rest were bayonets and knives, among other things; in other words, ‘hardware’. Nothing compared to heavy weapons… Some of the riflemen were still having their coffee. They heard some shouting…

Pascal Bianchini: How were they massacred? Were they asked to regroup?

Mamadou Koné: They received the order to leave the barracks and gather on the esplanade next door. They were told to go to the station, which they refused. This was considered disobedience, rebellion. Then, an order to fire was given. The shots didn’t last long, less than a minute, but many were hit. The others were then ordered to leave for the station with their luggage. They rushed to get their luggage and left for the station. Officially, according to General Dagnan (the army commander for Senegal and Mauritania), 24 people were killed on the spot and 11 mortally wounded. But the same general says in another message that 24 people were killed and 46 were wounded, but they also eventually died. So, according to this same official source, depending on the version, there were either 35 or 70 deaths in the end. But each of these versions underestimates the reality.

Pascal Bianchini: Another question is where are the bodies? Where were they buried?

Mamadou Koné: That’s the question of mass graves. Some people are talking about mass graves near the motorway interchange. But I don’t believe it. The slabs are in fact water reservoirs that had been built by the Americans. I can’t rule out the possibility that bodies were buried in the Thiaroye cemetery itself. There’s also a part of the camp where there are paratroopers, where it’s possible that mass graves were dug. I interviewed a witness who told me that he took part in burying the bodies of the riflemen. He told me that he would be able to recognise the location, but with urbanisation, it was actually impossible to find the site.

Pascal Bianchini: Why were excavations not carried out? Were there any obstacles that prevented this?

Mamadou Koné: On this issue, the cat’s got my tongue. I just hope that with the new regime, the ‘omerta’ will be broken, which has not been the case in the past. All they have to do is order a search. Sooner or later, these searches will take place.

Pascal Bianchini: In addition to the question of historical truth, which has yet to be established and confirmed, there is also the question of justice…

Mamadou Koné: It’s true. Now, in their demands, not only are the descendants of the Tirailleurs asking for a reversal of this financial spoliation, but they also want a review of the trials, which France has always refused to do. For this to be legally possible, France would have to officially accept that it was a massacre. Since Macron has just acknowledged this fact, it could allow the files to be reopened, but I’m not a legal expert.

Pascal Bianchini: This raises the question of relations between the two states: France and Senegal. For a long time, the subject was not put on the agenda. It was only in 2014, when Hollande went to Dakar, that the French state started to acknowledge the facts, but his president did not then speak of a ‘massacre’. He also promised to return the archives. A commission was appointed in Senegal headed by Iba Der Thiam, who is deceased. Where do we stand now?

Mamadou Koné: Recently, François Hollande also used the term ‘massacre’. I was part of the commission that was appointed ten years ago. There were nine of us, including historians and archivists. Macky Sall received us. He entrusted us with the archives that had been digitised and granted us a budget. All the archives were brought together, and someone was asked to make an inventory. The archivists then produced a guide to these archives. They wanted to pass this guide on to Macky Sall and then, with his agreement, hand it all over to the historians so that they could do their work. But afterwards, we never got Macky Sall’s agreement and the historians were unable to work on the archives. We were supposed to hold a conference to present these archives. In fact, there was only a pre-conference in 2016 since we were unable to hand over the archives to the historians who had come… That’s when people started to wonder what was going on… We were accused, as members of this commission, of withholding archives or of being complicit in this situation…

Pascal Bianchini: And now, with the new government, has that changed?

Mamadou Koné: In principle, the archives are now available. Except that when historians wanted access to these archives, they were told: ‘Wait, there hasn’t been an official decision yet’. Finally, they took a decision recently. The archives have been declassified.

Pascal Bianchini: Now a new commission of historians has been appointed, headed by Mamadou Diouf?

Mamadou Koné: This is the ad hoc committee that has been set up to commemorate the 80th anniversary, etc. It is divided into two commissions: a commission of experts and a commission for the commemoration. At the same time, a special delegation has been appointed to collect archive documents in France.

Pascal Bianchini: There is one final point that does not directly concern the Thiaroye affair, but is linked to the claims of the Tirailleurs and their descendants, and that is the discrimination in the pensions paid to them…

Mamadou Koné: When independence was proclaimed, the French ‘crystallised’ the pensions of veterans from countries that had become independent. This meant that the level of pensions was set definitively with no possible increase. To avoid this, the only possible option was to take or keep French nationality. But in order to receive the pension, you had to visit France at least every six months. It was only some twenty years ago, when Jacques Chirac was head of state, that the first steps were taken to decrystallise these pensions. A few years later, under President Sarkozy, the crystallisation was completely abandoned, but in fact there were almost no veterans left who could benefit from these pensions. Not to mention the fact that many of them had not kept the necessary papers to qualify…

Pascal Bianchini: However, to conclude this interview, despite many efforts to conceal the Thiaroye tragedy, a number of political activists, artists and intellectuals have spoken about it on several occasions in the past. It hasn’t been completely swept under the carpet.

Mamadou Koné: Yes, that’s Thiaroye 44, in posterity. It’s a subject in itself. I’m due to talk about it in a conference soon.

Pascal Bianchini is an independent sociologist based in Senegal. He has recently edited with Leo Zeilig and Nodongo Samba Sylla, Revolutionary Movements in Africa. An Untold Story (Pluto Press, 2024)

For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers path-breaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive. Please consider subscribing or donating today.

Workers, protests and trade unions in Africa

ROAPE

January 22, 2025

ROAPE’s Bettina Engels introduces Volume 51 Issue 182 of the journal, about labour organisation, working class struggles and popular protests. The issue features contributions from Eddie Cottle on the role of women in the Durban mass strikes of the 1970s, James Musonda on the financialised precarity of Zambian mineworkers, Prince Asafu-Adjaye and Matteo Rizzo on informal workers in Ghana, and Franceso Pontarelli on Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution in South Africa. It also features briefings from Nathaniel Umukoro and Eunice Umukoro-Esekhile on conflict and innovation in the Niger Delta and Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe on attacks on intellectual labour in Nigeria, alongside a debate piece on global historical materialism and decoloniality from Joma Geneciran. The issue is rounded off with two book reviews, with Zachary Patterson on Voices for African Liberation and Tarminder Kaur on Wentworth: The Beautiful Game and the Making of Place. Each article is accessible through the links provided above and below, and the entire issue can be accessed, downloaded and read for free here.

By Bettina Engels

This issue is about labour organisation, working class struggles and popular protests.¹ It is about the ambivalent role that trade unions play in the organisation of workers and labour struggles as well as in popular struggles and mass protests on the continent. These can only be understood in the context of the continued austerity policies, privatisation and economic liberalisation enforced by the international financial institutions (IFIs). Recent protests in Kenya and Nigeria have clearly exemplified this.

On 25 June 2024, protesting youth in Kenya stormed the national Parliament and set part of it on fire. This was the peak of a week of massive protest all over the country against President William Ruto’s government’s fiscal strategy that was announced in May and introduced significant new taxes, including on essential goods. The youth, widely referred to as Gen Z, know where this comes from: ‘Ruto is IMF village elder in Kenya’, says a sign held up by a protester (Patterson 2024). Indeed, the tax was suggested by the IMF, and the government had stated that it needed the tax revenue to service the external debt (ibid.; Wambua-Soi 2024). On 26 June, Ruto strategically withdrew the Finance Bill in an effort to calm the protests. The protestors, unwilling to be tamed in this way, met the military on the streets the following day. More than 40 youth were killed during the protests, and thousands were injured, arrested or have disappeared, possibly abducted by the police (Githethwa 2024; Muia 2024). In the city of Ongata Rongai a 12-year-old was killed by a stray police bullet (Wambua-Soi 2024). Ruto, to save his neck, dismissed most of his cabinet on 11 July, and on 12 July, police chief Japhet Koome resigned. But this has not changed the principal course of the government.

The following month in Nigeria, mass protests, both organised and spontaneous, took place across the country between 1 and 10 August 2024 in anger at President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s austerity policy. The state authorities reacted harshly: around 40 protestors were killed and more than 1,500 arrested (HRW 2024; for the campaign to release the detained protestors, see Ousmane 2024). On 1 October, protests – tagged #FearlessOctober – resumed, and were promptly suppressed (Amnesty International 2024). Tinubu had taken office in 2023 and immediately begun to implement measures demanded for some time by the IFIs. Among the first measures, taken at the end of May 2023, was the withdrawal of the fuel subsidy, which was a major cause of the rise in inflation of over 34% within a year. The electricity price was increased almost threefold (Odah 2024) and the national currency, the naira, was devalued by 50%. This was a familiar set of outcomes following IFI intervention. The same happened 30 years earlier with the CFA franc, the currency of neighbouring countries, which was similarly devalued by 50% in 1994. Unsurprisingly, as in countless other cases, hunger, poverty and unemployment have increased as a consequence of the austerity policies, the rising cost of living and declining real income, although in Nigeria’s case GDP (in current US dollars) has increased threefold in real terms since 2000.² As in many other cases, people have expressed their anger through what have been labelled food and fuel price riots – riots against ‘the politics of global adjustment’, as Walton and Seddon (1994) express it in the subtitle of their book. The current protests in Nigeria are taking place under the labels #EndHunger and #EndBadGovernance whereby the protesters do not have same notion of ‘bad governance’ as the global liberal development discourse.

In July 2024, the trade unions reached an agreement with the Nigerian government to increase the minimum wage by more than 130% (to 70,000 naira per month, which corresponds to slightly less than €40 in mid October 2024). This may sound like a lot, but it falls far short of the 1,500% increase (to 494,000 naira per month) that the unions had called for. Against the backdrop of the significant rise in the cost of living, the real value of the minimum wage halved in the five years before this increase (Odah 2024). Apart from the fact that wages are paid irregularly, only those who receive a wage from a more or less formally contracted job benefit from the minimum wage. And not even formal employment in an supposedly well-paid sector such as industrial mining necessarily secures the livelihood of workers and their families, as James Musonda demonstrates in his article in this issue (Musonda 2024). As Prince Asafu-Adjaye and Matteo Rizzo show, also in this issue, informal-sector waged catering workers in Accra, Ghana, are often paid less than the national minimum wage (Asafu-Adjaye and Rizzo 2024).

The Ghana case study, like the recent uprising in Nigeria, points to the ambivalent role of trade unions in popular struggles against hunger, poverty and corruption: Nigerian trade unions have a militant tradition and are certainly more combative than almost all of their counterparts in the global North. They consider themselves more as mass organisations, and historically they have been important forces in broad popular struggles for liberation and against (neo)colonialism, dictatorship and apartheid (Freund 1988; Kraus 2007; Beckmann and Sachikonye 2010). They have played a leading role in the recent protests and faced substantial repression.³ However, they are still membership-based workers’ organisations, and ‘workers’ continues to mean, first and foremost, people in more or less formally contracted employment status.

Worker is neither a synonym for employee nor for man

The articles in this issue all deal in various ways with the labour movement, labour organising and working-class struggles. It is important that labour is not limited to formal wage employment but also includes informal and self-employed labour as well as reproductive labour, and to understand these as members of the exploited classes (Pattenden 2021, 94). Concepts such as the ‘popular classes’ (Seddon 2002; Seddon and Zeilig 2005), ‘working people’ (Shivji 2017, referring to Walter Rodney) or peasant workers (Pye and Chatuthai 2023) are based on the same idea. However, the relationship between wage labour and reproductive labour often remains vague or subordinated, and the concepts hardly engage in depth with the fundamental entanglement of class and gender relations.⁴

In this issue, Eddie Cottle draws our attention to the fact that ‘worker’ is frequently used as a supposedly ‘gender-neutral term’ (Cottle 2024, 544), while actually suggesting that the ‘normal’ worker was identified as male, noting Ensor’s 2023 finding that in a book ‘where 95 workers were interviewed the gender of the interviewees was not mentioned; the male pronoun, “he”, was used, but never “she”’ (ibid., 544). Cottle emphasises that agency and leadership of women is widely ignored both in the practice of labour struggles itself and in reports and research. This not only obscures the agency of women but also gender relations within labour, the labour movement and labour struggles. Feminists have been pointing out for decades that most analyses of class relations and class struggles fail to integrate gender into their theoretical reflections (Robertson and Berger 1986). A feminist perspective in class analysis of course does not mean to ‘add women and stir’; nor does it refer to a liberal-constructivist gender perspective that neglects or blurs the material conditions of social relations. Underlining that gender relations are social relations does not mean getting stuck in the observation that gender is socially constructed. It means to recognise that gender (and of course, gender does not simply mean ‘men’ and ‘women’) is a social relation that is produced by inequality and power: heteronormativity and the supposedly ‘natural’ binary gender order are very useful for capitalism, colonialism and imperialism (Federici 2004; Lugones 2007; Beier 2023). As Lyn Ossome put it, ‘capitalism draws on reproductive labour for its functioning but does not support the reproduction of that labour’ (Ossome 2024, 517). At the same time, reproductive labour under capitalism is, at least partly, also transformed into waged labour. Janet Bujra has traced that domestic service as wage labour ‘is a product of the colonial period with its racialised social order’ (Bujra 2000, 4).

To reveal how the entanglement of gender and class relations works precisely in various contexts, and how people reaffirm or contest it, both in everyday confrontations at the family and community levels, including within labour organisations, community organisations and social movements, and at the level of socio-political struggles, remains a task for empirical studies.

In capitalism, waged labour represents one of several forms of labour; and the idea of waged labour actually works on the basis of the exploitation of other forms of labour, namely in the reproductive sphere. Focusing on waged labour, it might be argued, somehow reflects an andro- and Eurocentric perspective that universalises the concept of waged labour in the factories at the time of the emergence of capitalism in Europe (Komlosy 2016, 56–57). This form of capitalism, hand in hand with colonialism and imperialism, is the dominant global form but by no means the only one, either in the North or the South.

Indeed, most people in the global South (and increasingly, in many settings in the North likewise) are not engaged in formal and relatively secured waged labour. They are handicraft producers, artisanal miners, petty traders, hauliers, agricultural labourers, care workers and others, and they do unpaid reproductive work. Around 85% of African workers are engaged in the so-called informal economy and, even in South Africa, the most ‘advanced’ industrialised economy on the continent, more than 40% of all employment is precarious and irregular in some way (Bernards 2019, 294). That large numbers of people are engaged in formal, relatively secured employment is rather an historical exception than the norm in global capitalism (Breman and van der Linden 2014; Serumaga 2024). Informal, precarious, unfree and unpaid labour is, and has always been, key to capitalism. Thus, ‘our picture of capitalism – whether as a system of “accumulation on a world scale” or more narrowly as a set of spatially and temporally bound relations of production – [is never] complete without taking such forms of work into account’ (Bernards 2019, 296).

If precarious and informal work are expanding, this does not mean ‘the end of trade unionism as we know it’ (Rizzo and Atzeni 2020, 1114). Prominent authors on precarity (Standing 2011; see also Gallin 2001), predominantly focusing on the North, assume that trade unions are unable to defend the rights of precarious workers and struggle to improve their conditions of work and life. Informal workers are indeed sparsely represented in trade unions but are present in a range of other organisations, both progressive and neoliberal (Britwum and Akorsu 2017): workers’ associations, women’s associations, cooperatives, civil society organisations, advocacy organisations, and others – ranging from scattered local groups to well-organised transnational networks. This does not have to be an either/or (trade unions or other organisations): for example, in the 1990s the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions sought to organise informal workers by allowing their organisations to become associate members of the federation and providing them with some funds. However, these attempts were neither sustainable nor particularly successful (Yeros 2013, 230). In other cases, for example in the urban transport sector in Dar es Salaam, the organisation of informal minibus workers and the transport trade union entered into an alliance, with advantages for both sides (Rizzo 2013). Finally, there are also examples of informal workers organising in trade unions: in palm oil production in Ghana, casual workers have organised themselves alongside their regularly employed colleagues in two competing trade unions (Britwum and Akorsu 2017).

Contributions to this issue point to this well-known debate about the form of organisation and representation of workers’ interests, on the continent and worldwide: namely, whether and how far trade unions are the appropriate, best and only organisations to represent workers. This debate is, of course, as old as the labour movement and trade unions themselves. Trade unions as organisations emerged at a specific moment in the history of capitalism, namely the industrial revolution and the related proletarianisation, especially in Europe. This form of organisation has spread, changed and been adapted. Trade unions are not a fixed model arising from the historically specific industrial relations of the global North (Engels and Roy 2023). Many different organisations and collective actors consider themselves ‘unions’, for example student unions, unions of artisanal miners or other ‘informal’ and precarious workers, of the unemployed or small peasants throughout the world. Industrial unions by no means have a monopoly on the term and no exclusivity over the form of organisation, just as they have no exclusive claim on striking as a means of collective action (Atzeni 2021). The current strikes in Nigeria are an impressive example of this. Elsewhere on the continent, a well-known example and a paradigmatic case of the ambivalent role of trade unions as a form of organising and mobilising workers on the one hand, and as an institutionalised actor in corporatist state–society relations that tend to tame and contain workers movements on the other, is the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA – see Francesco Pontarelli’s (2024) contribution to this issue) and the strikes in the South African platinum mines in 2012–13 (Chinguno 2013, 2015; Dunbar Moodie 2015).

As class formations, trade unions organise workers to end workers’ atomisation in order to maintain and increase wages, reduce working hours, and so forth (Annunziato 1988, 112; McIlroy 2014, 497). This does not necessarily mean that they develop class consciousness in relation to a working class as such that goes beyond the respective workforce, union members or formal workers in a particular area. This is what the notion of ‘labour aristocracy’ refers to (Saul 1975; Waterman 1975). Moreover, trade unions are a product and part of capitalism and function as a regulating force to it. This raises the question of the extent to which the elites and leadership of trade unions, the bureaucracy, are actually responsible for the fact that trade unions contain rather than escalate class conflicts; and of what difference formal democratic procedures make within trade unions. To what extent does the fact that trade unions are both actors and products of the capitalist system place limits on radical democracy because it is incompatible with the system (McIlroy 2014; Atzeni 2016)? Furthermore, leaders and members of trade unions are not homogeneous groups: depending on the context, reformist ideas are just as entrenched among the rank and file of trade unions as among their leaders, and in some case ‘officials may be more militant than members; in other cases the opposite applies’ (McIlroy 2014, 517). At the end of the day, this remains an empirical question, which is also addressed in the articles in this issue, with reference to the perspectives of workers and trade unionists themselves.

Articles in this issue

In the first article, Eddie Cottle aims to uncover the agency and leadership of black women in the Durban mass strikes that took place between January and March 1973. More than 61,000 workers engaged in 160 strikes. The author points out that in reports and research on the strikes, notably in The Durban Strikes 1973: Human Beings with Souls, an ‘authoritative book’ (544) published by the Institute for Industrial Education in 1977, women’s active roles have widely been ignored. Based on a detailed analysis of reports and press articles, Cottle argues that female-dominated industries, namely the textile and clothing industries, prepared the strikes, as they were at the forefront of the strike movements of the 1960s that preceded the Durban strikes. Cottle demonstrates that mass strikes, even if they seem to emerge more or less spontaneously, are embedded in a history of labour and class struggles.

James Musonda investigates how the consequences of IFI politics – forced privatisation and related retrenchments – relate to the indebtedness of Zimbabwean mineworkers. Even workers in industrial mines, who might be expected to receive a relatively good and reliable wage, continuously go into debt to compensate for low wages. The retrenchments of the mining companies include, for example, the withdrawal of support in the areas of housing, water, electricity and free education – which in fact means a considerable reduction in wages, as the workers now have to pay for basic social services on the market. A growing range of financial products, which are also aimed at the poor, is part of this ‘financialised precarity’. Experiences of vulnerability and uncertainty shape the life of the mineworkers and their families. Musonda, himself a unionist, impressively tells the story from the perspective of a worker: ‘It is easier to write about the underground; it is another thing to work there’ (557).

While organising labour in the formal manufacturing sector is relatively straightforward, organising workers in the informal sector is not at all easy. Against this backdrop, Prince Asafu-Adjaye and Matteo Rizzo engage with the difficult relationship of trade unions and informal workers. They analyse chop bars, informal street food caterers, in Accra, Ghana, and notably the Ghana Trades Union Congress’s efforts to organise these. The Trades Union Congress receives donor funding from the EU, USAID and others for this purpose. However, this has certain negative effects. As the authors demonstrate, the donors, unsurprisingly, follow the neoliberal idea of informal sector workers as potential entrepreneurs and the funding programmes deliberately ignore the structural political-economic causes of informality. Furthermore, they limit the target group to very specific workers and ignore that social stratification and class relations do exist in an informal sector such as the chop bars. There is waged labour in the chop bars – eight out of ten chop bars in the authors’ study employ labour. Yet this is not formal contracted labour, and relations between chop bar owners and workers are shaped by unequal power relations – ‘toxic’, as one of the interviewees describes it. Many chop bar workers end up with less than the national minimum wage. The donor programmes do not target these workers, as the donors consider the informal sector as self-employed. Efforts by the Trades Union Congress to organise the workers were not covered by the donor funding, whereas entrepreneurial ‘capacity building’ of the chop bar owners is supported. The Trades Union Congress also supports bar owners in accessing credit and formal social security. Overall, donor support related to the informal sector is exclusive and clearly based in a market fundamentalist ideology. It is up to the trade unions to decide whether this is the direction they want to pursue.

In the fourth contribution to this issue, Francesco Pontarelli, analysing popular struggles in South Africa, engages with Gramsci’s concept of the passive revolution, and particularly how the concept is referred to in South African academic literature. The ‘passive revolution’ describes a ‘revolution’ – in the sense of a transformative and progressive process – that is carried out not by the masses but by the ruling classes as a strategy of crisis management. The ruling classes take up some of the demands of the subalterns and integrate them, while at the same time suppressing those parts of the subalterns who do not want to adapt and be incorporated. Pontarelli joins the series of articles in ROAPE – in the journal as well as on Roape.net⁵ – that make use of Gramsci’s vocabulary to understand (class) struggles on the continent (for example, Reboredo 2021; Suliman 2022; Gervasio and Teti 2023). The fascination of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks lies in Gramsci’s political biography, in its ‘unfinished nature’ and in ‘Gramsci’s own extensive use of the term’ passive revolution (595). Pontarelli’s concern is to see the passive revolution as a political strategy that opens up room for manoeuvre for the subaltern classes, not just as a theoretical-analytical concept. In analysing recent popular struggles in South Africa, the author uses two quite different cases, NUMSA and #FeesMustFall. He shows first that organised labour – in this case NUMSA – can represent a potential counterforce to the passive revolution. Second, #FeesMustFall can be seen as an example of a successful cross-class alliance of students and workers. Pontarelli’s point here is that the analysis of passive revolution should not be limited to the perspective of the elites, capital and the state, but must explore the scope for resistance by the subaltern classes and at the same time recognise the risks for cooptation.

The first briefing, by Nathaniel Umukoro and Eunice Umukoro-Esekhile, explores a neglected area of debate linked to natural resource conflicts in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. They examine whether conflict in the region over oil extraction has led to the development of innovative strategies for petroleum refining by the local population. The briefing by Jeremiah Arowosegbe documents attacks on academic freedom in Nigeria. He first sets an Africa-wide context of the ways in which higher education has been politicised before looking at a detailed case study of attacks on academic freedom and intellectual labour in Nigeria. He also assesses ways in which academic trade unions and associations have challenged Nigerian state repression. Joma Geneciran’s debate provides a historical materialist critique of decolonial theory. They do this by engaging in the work of Walter Mignolo, offering a trenchant critique of decolonial literature that fails to engage with the specificity of social formations and historical contexts. Geneciran argues for the centrality of historical materialism, national liberation and the social formation as a unit of analysis.

Notes

1. This editorial for ROAPE Issue 182, which concludes our first year of fully open access publication, is, as always, a collective effort. Many thanks to the editorial collective for comments, corrections and discussion. Any remaining inadequacies and superficialities are my own.

2. See World Bank Data at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=NG, accessed October 13, 2024.

3. For example, on 9 September 2024, the president of the Nigerian Labour Congress, Joe Ajaero, was arrested at Abuja airport to prevent him attending a Trades Union Congress meeting in the UK.

4. For an excellent empirical illustration of the entanglement of the productive and reproductive sphere, see Asanda Benya’s (2015) analysis of the ‘invisible hands’ of women in Marikana.

5. See https://roape.net/tag/antonio-gramsci, accessed October 4, 2024.

The entire issue can be accessed, downloaded and read for free here.

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

African Revolutions and Decolonization: a podcast series on African resistance

ROAPE

January 15, 2025

Founders of the militant podcast Guerrilla History, Henry Hakamaki and Adnan Husain, introduce their new series on African revolutions and decolonization. Focusing on African struggles and revolutions, they invite listeners to encounter radical perspectives from the continent and beyond, challenge their assumptions about history, and learn about the struggles of those who dared to resist oppression in Africa. Hakamaki and Husain argue for a nuanced understanding of the revolutionary movements that define Africa’s past and continue to shape its future.

By Henry Hakamaki and Adnan Husain

In a world decisively shaped by the legacies of colonialism, imperialism and the extension of capitalism, the importance of studying African revolutions and the process of decolonization cannot be overstated. Our upcoming 30+ part series “African Revolutions and Decolonization” on the Guerrilla History podcast endeavors to illuminate the complexities surrounding these topics, combining case studies of revolutionary struggles as well as thematic and theoretical explorations of political and economic processes across the continent and its place in the global system. By engaging deeply with historical examples and vital intellectual currents, we aim to forge a rich understanding of the revolutionary dynamics that have shaped Africa and the world.

The significance of this undertaking is multi-layered. First and foremost, examining African revolutions is critical for understanding the broader narratives of global resistance against colonial and imperial forces. The revolutionary movements that emerged throughout the continent, from Algeria’s struggle for independence in the 1950s to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, offer invaluable insights into the mechanisms of resistance, solidarity, and the fight for self-determination. These experiences are not confined to the annals of history; they resonate culturally and politically in contemporary society, informing current struggles against neocolonialism and globalization. Recognizing how these historical narratives inform today’s socio-political landscapes can empower current movements seeking justice and equity.

In addition to highlighting the specific case studies of revolutions, our series will focus on the thinkers whose ideas have been instrumental in articulating revolutionary theory and praxis. The work of figures like Frantz Fanon, Samir Amin, and Walter Rodney challenge dominant narratives and provide frameworks for understanding the complexities of colonialism, identity, and resistance. By delving into their critical writings and analyses, we uncover the philosophical underpinnings that have guided revolutionary thought in Africa, as well as challenge Eurocentric and hegemonic narratives of the imperial core. These intellectual legacies are fundamental, as they not only critique the mechanisms of oppression but also envision emancipatory futures based on freedom, justice, and equality. Our engagement with these thinkers is not merely academic; it is a vital exploration of the ideas that continue to inspire movements around the continent and world.

One of the critical components of our series will be bringing guests from the African continent to contribute their voices, expertise, and lived experiences. Engaging directly with scholars, historians, and activists from Africa is an essential aspect of our project. This commitment arises from our appreciation that a usable past must incorporate narratives from those who have lived it and have a contemporary stake in changing their circumstances.

Collage of the Algerian revolution 1954 – 1962 (Madame Grinderche 2010). The Algerian revolution and war will feature prominently in the forthcoming series “African revolutions and decolonization” on Guerrilla History.

Sadly, historical narratives are frequently shaped by external perspectives that can distort the realities of the people involved in revolutionary struggles. By ensuring that we are amplifying radical African voices throughout this series, we aim to represent the continent’s revolutionary and decolonial history responsibly while enriching our discussions with diverse perspectives that challenge Eurocentric interpretations.

Moreover, hosting guests from across the continent serves to bridge the gap between theory and practice. The guests will provide firsthand accounts of revolutionary movements and the ongoing struggles against legacies of colonialism. Their contributions will help ground our discussions in experiences, which allow listeners to better grasp how these movements were not only struggles of the past, but are also relevant to the historical processes that play out in everyday life and continue to influence contemporary political landscapes.

We believe that by incorporating these voices, we can enhance our understanding of both historical contexts and the ongoing significance of revolutionary thought in navigating today’s socioeconomic challenges.

Furthermore, our focus on African revolutions and decolonization aligns with our broader mission as a podcast dedicated to anti-imperialist Marxist analyses. In a current geopolitical climate characterized by increasing militarization, economic inequality, and ideological conflict, it is imperative to revisit the lessons of past revolutions. The struggles against colonial rule and oppression offer critical insights that can inform current approaches to solidarity and resistance.

Our series will not only highlight the historical struggles of the past but will also facilitate critical discussions on how these lessons can guide contemporary activism within and beyond Africa, as well as linking struggles throughout the Global South, and between revolutionary movements in the North and South.

By exploring these themes, we aim to foster a deeper understanding of the revolutionary spirit that has pervaded African history. In doing so, we hope to contribute meaningfully to the academic discourse on African politics and history, while also engaging a broader activist audience in the complexities of revolutionary theory and practice.

Our series is an invitation to listeners to rethink the narratives they have encountered, challenge their assumptions about history, and honor the struggles of those who dared to resist oppression.

Through Guerrilla History, we aspire to promote a nuanced understanding of the revolutionary movements that define Africa’s past and continue to shape its future. By engaging deeply in the complex realities of African revolutions and decolonization, we endeavor to help listeners grasp the interconnections between historical movements and contemporary social justice issues, fostering a global community committed to supporting and learning from revolutionary thought and action.

As we present this journey into the heart of African revolutionary history, we invite scholars, activists, and curious minds alike to engage with these critical discussions and contribute their insights to this vital field of study.

Guerrilla History is the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global history for the activist left, and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. Have a look at the entire library of Guerilla History podcasts here (and subscribe to the newsletter here). Guerrilla History podcasts can also be accessed here and here

Henry Hakamaki is an educator, activist, co-host and producer of Guerrilla History, and an Editorial Board member of Iskra Books, an independent non-profit, communist publishing company. He co-translated and edited Domenico Losurdo’s Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend, and has two further books he has worked on coming out via Iskra in the next few months – a translation of Guillaume Suing’s Communism – The Highest Stage of Ecology, and a newly edited edition of The Communist Working Group’s Unequal Exchange and the Prospects of Socialism. Those works will be available at iskrabooks.org, with the note that all Iskra titles are available for free pdf download or low cost print editions on the site. Henry can be followed on twitter @huck1995.

Adnan A. Husain is a professor of Medieval Mediterranean and Islamic World History at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario) and Director of the School of Religion. For his other podcast, media, socials and publications visit his website here.

Online Event: Imperialism and Africa, Thursday 16 January

ROAPE

January 9, 2025

Please join us on Thursday 16 January at 1PM GMT / 4PM EAT for a webinar on Imperialism and Africa. The webinar is jointly organised by ROAPE and the African Radical Political Economy Working Group of the International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy (IIPPE). Drawing on papers recently published in ROAPE’s 50th anniversary issue, Lyn Ossome, Hannah Cross, Matteo Capasso and Ray Bush will reflect on imperialism in the African context and beyond. This will include a consideration of imperialism and its relation to crises of social reproduction and gender inequality, the international labour migration regime, and recent interventions in North Africa. The event will be hosted on Zoom and you can sign up now to secure your spot by following this link.

The webinar coincides with a live call for papers to the African Radical Political Economy Working Group for the IIPPE Conference, to be held in Ankara, Turkey on 17-20 September 2025. The Working Group seeks to promote intellectual and practical exchange between scholars and activists of African political economy, and those who share an interest in radical approaches to political economy, acknowledging the power dynamics in capitalism and often with a critical Marxist perspective.

The deadline for submissions is 1 February 2025.

Areas of particular interest include (but are not limited to): multi-faceted impacts of imperialism in Africa, new and old theories of imperialism; anticolonial African Marxist thought; the social, political and economic impacts of multiple ecological crises on the continent; social movements, struggles and resistance against capitalism and imperialism; the return of recession, debt, and structural adjustment; financialisation; work, labour regimes and workers’ struggles; extractivism new and old; so-called green transitions. Analysis at any scale (from local to global, including multi-scalar) and in different contexts – rural, urban and so forth – is welcome. Proposals can be submitted by following this link (please tick the African Radical Political Economy Working Group when you make the submission and then indicate clearly under the title or abstract tab that you are submitting to this group).

Sign up to webinar here, submit your paper here, and circulate both widely!

Debt and Austerity – The IMF’s Legacy of Structural Violence in the Global South

ROAPE

January 8, 2025

In light of the mass anti-austerity protests in Kenya and Argentina in 2024, Rea Maci offers a historical analysis of the neo-colonial relationship between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and these two countries. She exposes the cycle of debt, austerity, poverty, and governmental negligence imposed by this institution of Western imperialism on nations in the Global South. Maci decries IMF policies as a form of unforgiving structural violence inflicted on the most vulnerable populations. She calls for renewed global solidarity to dismantle the institutions that perpetuate colonial power structures and economic dependency.

Rea Maci

Introduction

In the shadow of global institutions, austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) across the Global South are a stark manifestation of neo-colonialism, producing structural violence and dismantling local economies. These policies, far from fostering stability, exacerbate extreme poverty, deepen economic dependency, privatise natural resources, and fuel political unrest in already vulnerable communities.[1] Over the years, three distinct waves of anti-globalisation protests have surged across the globe in response to IMF policies: first in 1976, in the late 1990s, and following the 2008 financial crisis.

This past summer, only weeks apart, the world once again witnessed the consequences of austerity-driven governance. In Kenya, youth-led protests against IMF-backed economic measures turned violent, resulting in at least 39 deaths, hundreds of injuries, 32 cases of enforced disappearances, and 627 arrests. Similarly, harsh state repression in Buenos Aires met waves of protestors challenging Javier Milei’s budget cuts as debates took place in the congressional building.

For many in the Global South, these events are part of a familiar cycle of austerity, poverty, and governmental neglect. Both Kenya and Argentina have experienced repeated uprisings against policies that prioritise debt repayment over public welfare. Austerity in the Global South is nothing new, yet its effects remain just as violent and devastating, prompting serious concerns about the IMF’s ongoing role in borrower countries.

Despite extensive studies documenting how IMF loan conditions lead to worsening poverty, exploit local resources and labour for global markets with little to no benefit to the local economy, and entrench social unrest— austerity in the Global South is rarely considered structural violence. Moreover, its connection to the larger history of colonial exploitation and neo-colonial power dynamics is often overlooked. Instead, austerity is framed as necessary economic reform caused solely by corruption and financial mismanagement by Global South governments, obscuring the broader context of exploitation by colonial powers.

This article analyses the histories of Kenya and Argentina to illustrate a broader neo-colonial relationship between the IMF and borrower countries in the Global South, tracing how IMF austerity leads to structural violence that disproportionately harms vulnerable populations. While Kenya and Argentina highlight the most recent consequences of structural adjustment and debt cycles, these cases represent a larger trend of austerity-induced instability and state repression that extends across the Global South. By reframing austerity as a multi-layered form of violence, the article emphasises the harm caused by the IMF and the shared struggle of Southern Countries under an austerity regime. It calls for accountability and alternative policies that prioritise sovereign economic growth, self-determination, and independent futures for the Global South. Progressive International’s ‘Program on the Construction of a New International Economic Order’ offers a concrete pathway for nations to collectively resist IMF hegemony and reclaim economic autonomy, underscoring the urgent need for global solidarity in dismantling institutions that perpetuate colonial power structures.

Kenyan police cracking down on protest 16 July 2024 (Credit: Morning Star)

Neo-Colonialism and Debt

Historical Roots of IMF Interventions

While traditional colonialism relied on military power and direct occupation, neo-colonialism wields a more subtle influence through economic control. It weaponises debt, loans, and the withholding of aid to maintain geopolitical influence over the Global South. In this framework, IMF structural adjustments reflect the same colonial structures previously enforced through direct occupation. Thomas Sankara well understood the relationship between debt, exploitation, and control, noting that “imperialism is a system of exploitation that occurs not only in the brutal form of those who come with guns to conquer territory. Imperialism often occurs in more subtle forms, a loan, food aid, blackmail.” His observations remain as relevant today as during his presidency in Burkina Faso, highlighting how IMF policies became tools for maintaining global inequalities.

Recently, the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research released a dossier titled Life or Debt, wherein they examine the origins of the debt crisis in the Global South and the IMF’s role in worsening the crisis. At the IMF’s formation during the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, its stated purpose was to stabilise the global economy. However, during its formation, the absence of meaningful participation by then-colonised nations foreshadowed their marginalisation in global governance.

The initial mission of the IMF, as outlined in its Articles of Agreement, was to promote “expansion and balanced growth of international trade” and contribute to high levels of employment and income. The IMF was intended to provide short-term financial support to countries experiencing balance-of-payments crises, thereby preventing temporary problems from escalating into long-term crises. Despite the IMF’s original mandate to promote global trade and prevent short-term financial crises from becoming systemic disasters, its structure and decision-making processes remained dominated by primarily the United States and the United Kingdom.

As independence wars established newly independent nation-states across the Global South, many formerly colonised nations became IMF members. In its early years, the IMF operated with a limited role in these regions, largely providing modest short-term loans through the Compensatory Financing Facility (1963) and the Buffer Stock Financing Facility (1969). However, this changed following Mexico’s default in 1982, marking the beginning of the Third World Debt Crisis. In response, the IMF underwent a transformation, which its managing director Michel Camdessus termed a “silent revolution,” fundamentally altering its approach to lending.[2]

The IMF began to demand that borrowing nations undertake significant domestic economic reforms as a condition for receiving financial assistance. These reforms were crystallised in Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), first implemented through the Structural Adjustment Facility (1986) and later the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (1987). The core of these programs demanded that borrower countries privatise their state sectors, commodify public goods like education and healthcare, eliminate government deficit financing, and remove barriers to foreign capital and trade.

Life or Debt underscores how the IMF’s policies in the 1980s and beyond disproportionately targeted countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—regions already struggling with the effects of colonialism and capitalist exploitation. By enforcing reforms, the IMF effectively trapped these localities in a cycle of dependency, where they were forced to rely on external loans to meet basic financial needs, resulting in repeated borrowing, mounting debt, and diminished economic autonomy. This often led to debt spirals, where countries were forced to cut social spending, prioritise debt repayment over their sovereign development, and rely on raw material exports, which triggered a race to the bottom in global commodity prices.

Furthermore, in his book The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Governance, James Martin argues that the IMF’s interventionist powers did not originate in the late 20th century. Instead, they trace back to post-World War I international institutions such as the League of Nations and the Bank for International Settlements. These institutions gave “bankers, colonial authorities, and civil servants from Europe and the United States the extraordinary power to enforce austerity, regulate commodity prices, and oversee development programs in sovereign states.” [3] These early economic policies were rooted in financial imperialism, where European and U.S. actors interfered in the economies of borrowing nations, especially in the Global South, under the pretext of development or debt relief.

The IMF’s later structural adjustment programs echoed these earlier practices. Martin argues these policies are not solely a byproduct of the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s but have deeper colonial roots. The powers the IMF wielded in the 1980s were an extension of the earlier imperial economic governance structures that sought to maintain control over the economies of weaker states, cloaked in paternalistic or civilisational rhetoric.

By the time of the Third World Debt Crisis and later financial crises, the IMF’s demand for austerity and market reforms in exchange for loans revived many of these older practices. The IMF’s policies reinforced a global economic system that favoured powerful countries in the global north while entrenching inequality and dependency in the Global South. Martin’s analysis challenges the view that these policies were solely the product of a neoliberal shift in the 1970s, demonstrating that the roots of such interventionist global governance have always been rooted in colonialism.

Given the colonial roots of the IMF’s architecture, the protests in Argentina and Kenya this past summer in response to IMF-sourced policies are neither surprising nor isolated incidents. Rather, they are part of a larger, ongoing trend in which austerity policies consistently leave communities across the Global South in perpetual instability and socioeconomic precarity.

Austerity Trends Across the Global South

In addition to manufacturing cycles of poverty and socio-economic instability, these policies secure the financial interests of creditor nations, banks, and multinational corporations primarily located in the North. Esteban Almiron’s observation that “Today’s practice of trapping former colonies in unpayable debts is the result of well-engineered financial, diplomatic, political, and legal strategies” enforces the structural and intentional nature of austerity in utilising strategic debt entrapment to maintain the legacy of colonial exploitation.

The global scope of this new austerity wave, highlighted in the article “Welcome to the New Age of Austerity,” shows that the global South is disproportionately experiencing harsh fiscal measures imposed by external creditors. Nigeria, Pakistan, Kenya, Sri Lanka, and Argentina, to name a few, are devaluing their currencies and reducing public spending, creating widespread hardship for citizens.[4]

Debt repayment to foreign creditors often precedes local development, healthcare, or education investments. As most borrowing nations are former colonies whose political and economic systems were destabilised by centuries of colonial rule austerity policies perpetuate the same colonial dynamics, though now achieved through economic policies rather than military occupation.

In this age of austerity, fiscal cuts have become the norm, leaving governments with little to no choice but to comply with the IMF’s demands. Nations have been forced to take drastic steps—halving the value of their currency and cutting essential subsidies—leading to mass protests against policies where the debt eats first, and the people starve. As Binaifer Nowrojee, president of the Open Society Foundations, noted, “More than 3 billion people across the world live in countries that are spending more on servicing their debt than on public spending on education or health.” This pattern follows a global trend across the South, where global institutions force governments to prioritise creditor interests at the expense of their populations, self-determination, resource sovereignty, and environment.

Moreover, the broader implications of austerity are not just about balancing budgets but about reinforcing a global power structure that benefits the global north. Clara Mattei, author of The Capital Order, emphasises that austerity is more than an economic calculation—it is a tool for shifting resources away from working people and into the hands of the wealthy elite. Echoing this sentiment, Eduardo Belliboni, leader of Argentina’s leftist group Polo Obrero, remarked that “Austerity is for the workers, not for the millionaires,” emphasizing how these policies are designed to safeguard the interests of the wealthy, leaving millions to bear the consequences.

A 2023 report from Development Finance International revealed that the global South now faces “the worst debt crisis since global records began.” On average, over a third of government revenue (38%) in the South is used to service debt, and in Africa, that figure rises to over half (54%). This means African governments are allocating more resources to debt repayment than critical sectors like education, health, and social spending. Meanwhile, interest rates—hiked across the globe in efforts to tame inflation—have remained high and are expected to stay high for the foreseeable future. This projection further increases the cost of borrowing for the Global South while simultaneously inflating their debt repayment obligations, making economic recovery even more unattainable. The report also highlights a staggering comparison: two years ago, low-income countries spent five times more on external debt payments than on addressing climate change; today, that ratio has ballooned to 12 times.[5]

As Luiz Vieira, coordinator at the Bretton Woods Project, explains, “Most of the global North is already undergoing recovery to different degrees, with the US doing quite well and soaking up all the capital that had flown into the global South during the low-interest rate period.” This dynamic exacerbates an already stark trend: wealth and resources are extracted from the Global South into the financial markets of the north, intensifying the inequality between the two.

A study by Isabel Ortiz and Matthew Cummins further reveals that most governments began scaling back public spending in 2021, a trend expected to persist until at least 2025. This has forced more than 85% of the global population into some form of austerity. For the Global South, already grappling with the ongoing impacts of colonialism, heavy debt burdens, and limited public investment, these policies further aggravate already severe socio-economic conditions, contributing to the ongoing cycle of economic dependency and continuous extraction.

Rather than addressing fiscal deficits through fair taxation of the wealthy, austerity programs shift the burden onto the poor, ensuring that international creditors and multinational corporations continue to profit at the expense of the working poor.

Call for anti-IMF protest on 11 December 2021 on first page of Prensa Obrera (Workers’ Press), the weekly newspaper of the Workers’ Party (PO) Argentina.

IMF policies De-Stabilise Argentina & Kenya…again

As the country’s biggest creditor, Argentina’s long and troubling history with the IMF shows the reality of debt traps. The country’s financial troubles date back to its first foreign loan in 1824, which was marred by corruption and tied to British interests. This initial loan set the stage for nearly two centuries of financial dependency and neo-colonial control. The nation’s external debt (deuda), largely denominated in foreign currencies such as the U.S. dollar, prevents Argentina from printing its own money to repay debts, forcing the country to borrow more or increase exports.[6]

A key example of Argentina’s experience with neo-colonial debt occurred in 2001 when the country defaulted on $95 billion in loans—the largest default in history. Driven by unsustainable debt repayments, the crisis was exacerbated by IMF austerity measures that required severe cuts to public services, wages, and employment protections. Social unrest evolved into the Argentinazo in December 2001, with deadly riots in Buenos Aires and other cities that saw 39 people dead after the government imposed the “Corralito” policy, restricting cash withdrawals. The IMF’s refusal to refinance Argentina’s debt accelerated the collapse. Over 25% of bank deposits were withdrawn, leading to a full-blown financial crisis. President Fernando de la Rúa declared a state of emergency, but protests intensified, eventually forcing his resignation. The IMF’s decision to withhold further financial support increased Argentina’s dependence on external creditors, sinking the nation into political instability and economic collapse.

The cycle repeated itself in 2018 when Argentina took out a $57 billion loan from the IMF, plunging the country into another period of austerity and borrowing. These loans consistently prioritised creditor repayment over public welfare, worsening social inequality and stifling economic growth. Neoliberal policies, pushed by figures such as Domingo Cavallo, devalued wages, fuelled inflation and saw millions fall into poverty. Further complicating matters, the wave of privatisations and deregulation under President Mauricio Macri, particularly the removal of currency controls, led to significant capital flight, destabilising Argentina’s financial system. These policies often intensified during periods of military dictatorships and conservative governments, have contributed to Argentina’s deindustrialisation, increased unemployment, and worsened wealth disparities.

In this context, the recent approval of the Large Investment Incentive Regime (RIGI) under President Javier Milei’s administration represents another chapter of Argentina’s ongoing subjection to external economic pressures While not directly imposed by the IMF, RIGI reflects the same neoliberal economic model that international institutions like the IMF have long promoted. By prioritising the interests of multinational corporations, RIGI follows the same framework of austerity and deregulation that has characterised Argentina’s economic policy under IMF agreements. RIGI permits foreign companies to retain 100% of earnings from exports abroad, effectively legalising the full expatriation of profits. This provision, rarely seen outside of countries like Angola and Nigeria, epitomises the exploitative nature of the current economic policies in Argentina.

Critics like Emmanuel Álvarez Agis have condemned the RIGI for granting multinational corporations more concessions than requested, signalling that the government prioritises foreign corporate interests. RIGI reduces taxes for corporations and allows them to challenge local laws through arbitration bodies such as the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), enabling them to sue governments for lost profits. This grants external corporations’ greater control over national resources. As Senator Oscar Parrilli aptly described, the RIGI embodies “anarcho-colonialism,” allowing extractive industries to drain wealth from the country without contributing to the Argentine economy.[7]

Kenya and SAPs

Similarly, Kenya faces a severe financial crisis shaped by decades of economic mismanagement and IMF structural policies. Kenya’s 2024 Finance Bill was meant to increase government revenue through higher taxes, satisfying an IMF loan condition. However, the bill sparked mass protests across cities, including Nairobi, Mombasa, and Kisumu, as Kenyans already grappling with inflation condemned the additional financial burden. Protesters breached the parliament, setting fire to parts of the building and clashing with police.

The finance bill echoes Kenya’s history of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) in the 1980s and 90s when the country was forced to adopt neoliberal policies prioritising export markets and drastically cutting social spending on public services. As Kenya’s debt grew in the post-independence period, institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank imposed SAPs as a condition for receiving further financial aid. These programs, rooted in neoliberal economic principles, required Kenya to adopt market-oriented reforms that drastically restructured the economy.

The SAPs forced the government to cut spending on essential services and implement cost-sharing policies, leading to reduced spending in healthcare and education, which resulted in higher dropout rates and reduced access to medical care, particularly for the poor and rural populations. The Kenyan government was also required to privatize state-owned enterprises, deregulate the economy, and open its markets to foreign competition.

The results of SAPs were catastrophic. Widespread unemployment occurred as public sector jobs were slashed, and essential services became inaccessible to many due to the removal of subsidies and increased user fees. Unemployment particularly affected youth and women, while many jobs created in the informal sector were precarious and low-paying. Poverty rates surged as income inequality widened, and by the late 1990s, over half of Kenya’s population was living below the poverty line—up from just 35% in the early 1980s. Food prices skyrocketed, and the GDP plummeted, leaving over half of Kenya’s population in poverty and cementing the nation as one of the most unequal societies globally. The gap between the rich and poor widened, with the poorest 20% of the population receiving only 3.5% of national income, while the wealthiest 10% controlled nearly half.[8]

SAPs also reoriented Kenya’s economy toward export-oriented growth, with the country relying heavily on agricultural exports such as tea, coffee, and flowers. This shift left Kenya vulnerable to fluctuations in global commodity prices, further destabilising its economy. Additionally, reducing tariffs and other trade barriers allowed imports to flood the domestic market, undermining local industries and leading to further job losses.[9]

Kenya’s current condition cannot be separated from its colonial history, where British rule entrenched systems of cronyism and patronage, establishing a political culture that relied heavily on favoritism, nepotism, and the granting of economic advantages to local elites loyal to the colonial administration. These systems, inherited and perpetuated by post-independence governments, were only exacerbated by IMF neoliberal reforms. Today, as the debt burden grows and new austerity measures are introduced, the legacy of colonialism and structural adjustment continues to shape Kenya’s socio-economic landscape.

Austerity as Structural Violence

In their book The Violence of Austerity, Vicky Cooper and David Whyte highlight how austerity policies inflict what they describe as “slow violence,” a form of harm that unfolds gradually and is embedded within bureaucratic systems. This type of violence exacerbates poverty, homelessness, and social instability while remaining largely invisible because it is mediated through governmental and institutional processes rather than overt physical force. Cooper and Whyte argue that austerity’s effects are normalised and justified as economic reform, rendering the resulting harm an unfortunate but inevitable and necessary byproduct of fiscal discipline. This normalisation obscures the damage inflicted on vulnerable people as austerity strips away resources essential to well-being and survival.

While Cooper and Whyte’s analysis focuses primarily on the U.K. and U.S., austerity in the Global South carries an additional dimension of neo-colonial violence. The harm inflicted by these policies is a direct extension of colonial history, perpetuating the exploitation and control that characterised colonial rule. To fully grasp austerity’s impact in the Global South, it must be understood as a form of multi-layered violence—combining the slow, bureaucratic harm with the innate legacy of colonial and by extension, capitalist exploitation. This broader perspective reveals how these policies sustain global inequalities justified through narratives of economic reform.

IMF interventions, rooted in colonial power structures, continue to shape the socio-economic and political landscape of the Global South. Beyond macroeconomic shifts, austerity creates structural violence by embedding injustice and inequality within systems, policies, and institutions that reinforce oppression and restrict access to essential resources, resulting in preventable deaths, illness, and suffering. Structural violence operates through economic and political frameworks that marginalise vulnerable populations, constraining their capabilities, agency, and dignity. This violence is not experienced in isolation but rather targets entire classes of people, entrenching social suffering as their lived realities are shaped by these oppressive systems. Further, structural violence focuses specific attention on the social and often global machinery of exploitation and oppression and how “epic poverty and inequality, with their deep histories, become embodied and experienced as violence.”[10] By normalising inequality through stable institutions, structural violence perpetuates cycles of deprivation and exploitation, echoing colonial-era control.

In countries like Argentina and Kenya, IMF-imposed austerity visibly dismantles public services and deepens precarity, illustrating how structural violence operates. IMF loans are disbursed in instalments, contingent on austerity measures like cutting public sector jobs and wages, deregulating national industries, and reducing social spending on healthcare, education, and welfare. These measures are framed as essential for economic recovery, aiming to secure growth and protect IMF resources. Yet, the human cost is staggering.

When governments dismantle social safety nets and public infrastructure to satisfy IMF loan conditions, the poorest communities bear the brunt. Deprived of healthcare, education, pensions, stable employment, and essential services that sustain livelihoods, these communities are plunged into deeper precarity. In Argentina, three million new poor have been created in less than a year, and much of the population can no longer afford necessities like food due to price increases of over 50%. As a result, many are forced to depend on soup kitchens, which are fighting to stay open and keep up with soaring demands and long queues amid a growing hunger crisis. At the same time, 21 of 43 national care policies—primarily benefiting women, children, and the elderly—have been abolished. The dismantling of critical social systems and the creation of large swaths of poverty is nothing less than an act of violence. Despite the devastating social costs, IMF statements claim that “authorities have made significant efforts to scale up social support for vulnerable young mothers and children and protect the purchasing power of pensions,” largely ignoring the reality of these policies.[11]

Similarly, this past summer the Ruto administration in Kenya, under IMF directives sought to eliminate subsidies for essentials like maize, flour, and fuel alongside enacting a 25% excise duty on vegetable oil, which could have raised the price of soap by 80%. In Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum, residents confront mounting living costs daily, made worse by regressive taxation that disproportionately impacts the poor. A Human Rights Watch article details the story of Alfredo Akeyo, an electronics repairman in Mathare, another Nairobi slum, whose income has been halved from 12,000 Kenyan shillings (around US$80) to less than half that amount—due to rising fuel and electricity costs, combined with increased fuel taxes under Kenya’s IMF program. This forces him and his family to survive on just one meal a day.

Despite the IMF’s claim in a press release that “the burden of the adjustment should not fall disproportionately on working families” the reality is that it overwhelmingly does. Human Rights Watch found that over half of the IMF programs approved globally since the COVID-19 pandemic, including Kenya’s, focus on increasing revenues through regressive taxes like value-added taxes (VAT), which disproportionately burden the poor. Additionally, many of these programs remove subsidies for essential goods like fuel and electricity, causing sharp price increases that further strain low-income households. In Kenya, this has resulted in people like Alfredo going without electricity for days at a time because they cannot afford it, and his children staying home from school due to the doubled public transportation costs. The removal of subsidies, coupled with insufficient social spending to counterbalance these effects, again highlights the structural violence of austerity imposed on those least able to withstand economic shocks.

The compounded effects of austerity policies across time inevitably drive people to the streets in protest, where they face state-sanctioned violence—tear gas, bullets, and the militarisation of public spaces. The transition from “slow” to “fast” violence utilised by the state shows how the same policies that quietly exacerbate inequality provoke immediate, forceful crackdowns. The state’s use of force becomes an extension of the structural violence already at play, reinforcing the systemic control imposed by austerity. While austerity invisibly erodes communities’ well-being, the violent suppression of protests maintains this underlying system of exploitation, punishing resistance and deterring dissent. In this way, structural and state-sanctioned violence are interconnected mechanisms of control, demonstrating how austerity harms not only through socio-economic deprivation but also through the enforcement of compliance, pushing marginalised communities further to the margins of survival.

March for trade unions rights in 2005 Argentina (wiki commons)

Toward a Future of Self-Determination

Austerity’s grip on the Global South is not just a policy issue but a symptom of systemic violence with its origins in colonialism. This article has examined how debt and austerity erode social safety nets, intensify poverty, and drive social unrest. It acknowledges that the path to ending austerity can seem daunting, with the institutions enforcing these conditions appearing both unyielding and constantly adapting. Still, global ‘end austerity’ campaigns are challenging the status quo and pushing for financial systems that prioritise equity and sustainability, as the question is not only how to dismantle debt and austerity cycles but how to build a more just future in their place.

Most recently, Progressive International released a ‘Program on the Construction of a New International Economic Order’, which seeks to end austerity and promote a system based on equity and sovereignty. It calls for restructuring the international monetary and financial systems to prioritise monetary sovereignty, financial insubordination, and disarmed interdependence—shifting power away from the global north and enabling Southern economies to thrive on their terms. By advocating for debt redefinition, fiscal justice, and abundant social programs, the plan offers a pathway to loosening the grip of structural adjustments while fostering global economic cooperation rooted in justice. This vision calls for nothing less than a comprehensive reordering of the global economic system—one that values human welfare over financial interests and ensures the self-determination of Southern nations.

As the program emphasises, the enduring dominance of northern-controlled financial systems continues to sink Southern economies into debt and inequity. The program calls for concrete measures, such as developing multilateral, Southern-based payment systems and alternative currencies to reduce dependency on Northern-dominated financial infrastructure. Additionally, independent Southern-led credit rating agencies would challenge the stranglehold of existing Northern-based agencies, ensuring that Southern nations have greater control over their creditworthiness assessments and financing terms. Moreover, reforms like commodity buffer stocks, procurement clubs, and value chain coordination across the South could bolster regional economies, stabilise markets, and foster South-South cooperation, creating resilience against the volatility and exploitation inherent in the current system.

Confronting austerity demands a fundamental shift in how global economic systems operate. The cycles of debt and austerity are not inevitable; they are the products of deliberate policies that prioritise foreign interests over local communities. To break from these cycles, Southern nations must reclaim their economic sovereignty and build resilient systems that serve their people, and turning this vision into reality will require unwavering global solidarity, grassroots movements, and a reimagining of what political and economic justice look like. At its core, the struggle against austerity is a struggle for dignity and freedom—one that calls for dismantling colonial legacies and building a new order where prosperity is shared.

[1] Reinsberg, Bernhard, Thomas Stubbs, and Louis Bujnoch. 2022. “Structural Adjustment, Alienation, and Mass Protest.” Social Science Research 109 (August): 102777. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2022.102777.

[2] Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. 2023. “Life or Debt: The Stranglehold of Neocolonialism and Africa’s Search for Alternatives.” Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. April 11, 2023. https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-63-african-debt-crisis/.

[3] James M. Boughton, The IMF and the Silent Revolution Global Finance and Development in the 1980s (International Monetary Fund, 11 September 2000), https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/silent/index.htm#3

[4] Justin Villamil. 2024. “Welcome to the New Age of Austerity.” Inkstick. March 13, 2024. https://inkstickmedia.com/welcome-to-the-new-age-of-austerity/.

[5] Strub, Friederike. 2023. “Data Show Global South Is in Worst Debt Crisis Ever, with Another Lost Decade Looming.” Bretton Woods Project. December 13, 2023. https://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/2023/12/new-data-show-global-south-is-in-worst-debt-crisis-ever-with-another-lost-decade-looming/.

[6] Almiron, Esteban. 2022. “How Argentina Has Been Trapped in Neocolonial Debt for 200 Years: An Economic History.” Geopolitical Economy Report. December 18, 2022. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/12/18/argentina-neocolonial-debt-history/.

[7] Cholakian, Daniel . 2024. “The New Colonialism of Milei’s Investment Plan.” North American Congress on Latin America. June 27, 2024. https://nacla.org/new-colonialism-rigi-argentina-milei.

[8] Rono, Joseph Kipkemboi. 2002. “The Impact of Structural Adjustment Programmes on Kenyan Society.” Journal of Social Development in Africa 17 (1): 81–98. https://n2t.net/ark:/85335/m56t0kz71.

[9] Ford, Nicholas. 2024. “The IMF’s Policies Are Destroying Kenya, Again.” Jacobin.com. 2024. https://jacobin.com/2024/03/imf-kenya-austerity-debt-william-ruto.

[10] Rylko-Bauer, Barbara, and Paul Farmer. 2011. “Structural Violence, Poverty, and Social Suffering.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty, edited by Linda M. Burton and David Brady. New York, Ny: Oxford University Press.

[11] Nadale, Martín Fernández . 2023. “Supermarkets and Shops See Price Hikes of up to 50% | Buenos Aires Times.” Www.batimes.com.ar. December 12, 2023. https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/economy/supermarkets-and-shops-record-increases-of-up-to-50-percent.phtml.

Rea Maci is a policy researcher focused on political and social justice in the Global South. She holds a Master of Public Policy from the University of Michigan and studies reparations, while exploring how global institutions and colonial legacies perpetuate structural violence and dependency in the South.

Featured Photograph: Kenya protest against IMF in 2024 (Wiki Commons)

ROAPE’s 2024 Best Reads for African Radicals

ROAPE

December 13, 2024

In what has become an annual offering at the end of the year, the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) family once again shares their best reads of the year 2024. The journal’s family – from the Editorial Working Group (EWG); contributing editors; International Advisory Board and contributors – share both fiction and non-fiction book which they found interesting, educating, shocking, moving and inspiring in 2024. Some of the books include information about where to access them.

***

Revolution is the choice of the people

by Anne Alexander

Here is my radical read: Revolution is the choice of the people by Anne Alexander. The book offers an excellent analysis of the roots and process of revolutions that took the Middle East and North Africa by storm in Tunisia, Egypt in 2010-12 and Algeria and Sudan in 2019. It does so with the aim of drawing radical lessons in struggle. One lesson is that genuine political change can only be won through a complete overthrow of the State along with its military and bureaucracy. Another is that the working class, through its powerful position at the heart of production, has the potential to lead this upheaval.

Chinedu Chukwudinma

***

Beneath the Mountain–an Anti-Prison Reader

Edited by Mumia Abu-Jamal & Jennifer Black

I recommend “Beneath the Mountain – An Anti-Prison Reader” edited by Mumia Abu-Jamal & Jennifer Black. The book is a collection of essays, letters and excerpts from well-known (and not so much) anti-imperialist and revolutionary leaders who have experienced the violence of the state. I knew some things about some of the writers, but the magic of this book for me is how it brings such vitality to their words and actions by opening a window into their lived experience surviving (or not) in an oppressive white-supremacist state.

Ron Uger

***

Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminiality in Tanzania’s New Enclosures

Youjin B. Chung

My favourite read for 2024 was Youjin B. Chung‘s Sweet Deal, Bitter Landscape: Gender Politics and Liminality in Tanzania’s New Enclosures (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press- open access). Chung has written an eloquent analysis of the Eco-Energy Sugar Project in Bagamoyo, Tanzania, focusing on the Swedish Company and government allies involved, and the women and men living in the 20,400 hectares of land transferred to the project. Using stories and photos provided by the study participants themselves, as well as the author, the research documents the tragic loss of land, livelihoods, identity and family history resulting from the project, which ultimately failed. Community members found multiple ways to resist the foreclosures, pitting themselves against the company and the state. Their voices are an eloquent indictment of commercial agribusiness, patriarchy and global capitalism.

Majorie Mbilinyi

***

Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Politics

by Kevin Okoth

The best thing I read this year was Kevin Ochieng Okoth’s Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Politics, published by Verso and available for 9.99 USD as an eBook. In the book, Okoth is unflinching in both his critique of Black Studies (‘the making of an anti-politics’) and his insistence the future of revolutionary Black politics requires resurrecting the anti-imperialist Marxism of Red Africa. “A rallying cry for revolutionary black politics”, in the words of Mikayla Tillery’s review for roape.net late last year. It is also refreshingly short, at just 128 pages of writing, and all the better for it.

Ben Radley

***

Incompleteness, Mobility and Conviviality

by Francis Nyamjoh

My choice is Incompleteness, Mobility and Conviviality by Francis.B.Nyamnjoh, Langaa Research and Publishing CIG, Bamenda, Cameroon, 2024, distributed by African Books Collective. How to make sense of and act within the multiplicity of inter-sectional social and intellectual dynamics is a personal challenge for us all. It is also a political question. Francis Nyamnjoh offers us some original ideas on how to proceed. In summary, he suggests how some specifically African concepts of knowing and being could bring necessary insights to global intellectual discourse on the key challenges of our time, not least the continuing growth of ICTs and related work on ‘artificial intelligence’. He does this on the basis not only of his own academic work, but his experience as director of publications at CODESRIA and, more recently, as a perhaps uncomfortable witness to the decolonization debates at the University of Cape Town. The book is based on a series of lectures given in Germany in 2023. It isn’t perfect. It is not always easy to follow and would have benefited from tighter post-lecture editing. Some of the politics sound more aspirational than probable. That said, I would be surprised if anyone working on the issues covered in ROAPE and wanting to reflect on their or their institution’s intellectual practice does not find moments of revelation and inspiration in this book.

Mike Powell

***

Gabriel’s Moon

by William Boyd

In another prescient novel the extraordinary storyteller William Boyd (viking 2024) uses the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba to explore the roles of western intelligence and spying agencies. Set mostly in London in the 1960s but also in Spain his main character is drawn into a world of espionage. This happens first against his better judgement but is then drawn (predictably) to an affair with his handler. He later questions, a little too late, about what he is doing and why. A fabulous read.

Ray Bush

***

History of Resistance in Kenya, 1884-2022

by Maina wa Kinyatti

My best read for the year 2024 is Maina wa Kinyatti’s (2010; 2019 second edition) ‘History of Resistance in Kenya 1884-2002’. In 2024 Kenya’s Gen-Z added another brave wave of revolt to Kenya’s rich history of resistance as documented by Angela Chukunzira. Kenya’s hero of a historian, Maina wa Kinyatti’s masterpiece is a class chronology of the generations before, who fought and died for freedom. I had read his Kenya’s Freedom Struggle, published in 1986, which uncovered to the world documentation from the Land and Freedom Army. As Gacheke Gachihi wrote in Roape.net in 2021: ‘I first met Maina wa Kinyatti in 2000 and much later, we began organising political study sessions at the Polytechnic Institute in Nairobi as part of introducing us to class struggle and the history of resistance in Kenya. Subsequent study sessions…led to an opportunity to launch one of his books, ‘History of Resistance in Kenya.’ Either edition is a highly recommended companion to this year in Kenya.

Julie Hearn

***

Banjo and Romance in Marseille

by Claude Mckay

This year, like the previous two, my recommendations are novels. Among politicos – who are perhaps unhealthily obsessed with big questions – there is a sickness that sees fiction as not real reading, or serious ‘work.’ Novels must be placed in a clandestine world of nighttime reading, a stash of secret stories to be read in the toilet, or on weekends and holidays. Neoliberal utilitarianism has driven a stake into our creative hearts.

I am a culprit and read my novels in secret. Yet what fools we are! Two novels by the great, great Claude McKay have blown apart my reading world this year. McKay was a remarkable figure by any measure – a poet, novelist, political activist and Bolshevik (a comrade of Lenin, Trotsky and Sylvia Pankhurst). He suffered terribly, and though lauded by many people in his day he was despised by others (including W. E. B. Du Bois).

Originally from Jamaica, McKay lived and worked everywhere, including in Marseille – the bustling, beautiful port city in southern France. Marseille is the city at the centre of two of his novels Banjo and Romance in Marseilles. Romance was published posthumously and only saw the light of day 90 years after it was written. The failure to get the book published almost broke the author.

Both of his ‘French’ novels are startling, the prose electrifying, each page – especially Banjo – challenges and confronts, as the characters (Senegalese sailors, Caribbean travellers, Black Americans and North Africans) cross the city, and survive, ‘panhandling’, as McKay writes, to wrestle joy, love and laughter from a hostile and racist world.

The topics in both novels are ours – race, class, revolution, sex, fighting against oppression, and living fully today. The stories have an astonishing, prescient power. If I can persuade one person to read McKay’s French novels this year, I will be satisfied.

Leo Zeilig

***

America, Their America

by J.P. Clark-Bekederemo

My favourite read in 2024 is a controversial semi-autobiographic book published sixty years ago (in 1964) by Nigerian poet and playwright, J.P. Clark-Bekederemo, titled America, Their America, which critiques the American society, based on his experiences in the United States during the 1960s. The book recounts the author’s disillusionment as he confronts a society which he finds materialistic, individualistic, and racially divided.

His time in American academia frustrates Clark-Bekederemo, as he perceives it as superficial and disconnected from meaningful cultural engagement. He highlights the contradictions between American ideals and realities, particularly in the context of racial inequality, segregation and social injustice, expressing solidarity with African Americans while questioning their approaches to civil rights struggles. The author contrasts American consumerism and alienation with the communal and spiritual values of African society, and celebrates his cultural heritage, reaffirming his African identity and traditions. My impression is that America, Their America could in fact be described as a postcolonial exploration of cultural clashes and Western imperialism, even though there are elements the author offers less than a nuanced treatment. If, like me, you fancy excavating classic books, this book from six decades ago is my recommendation!

Chanda Mfula

***

Guerrilla Incursions into the Captialist Mindset: Essay with a Focus on Kenya, 1997-2003

by Shiraz Durrani

and

Laudering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property and Profits

by Too Black and Rasul A. Mowatt

The first of my two favourite reads, Guerrilla Incursions into the Capitalist Mindset: Essays with Focus on Kenya 1979-2023 by Shiraz Durrani, was published in 2023. Durrani’s collection of writings and original documentation revisits, recalls, and reminds readers of a radical Kenyan history that has been neutralised through the neoliberalisation of education and displaced and discredited by those in favour of financialised, growth-led development over inclusive, community-driven solutions. Through essays, interviews, petitions and letters, this book tells of the origins of the anticolonial freedom struggle, establishing a historical foundation from which ideas and strategies can inform the people’s ongoing demands for liberation. Presented from a working class perspective, Durrani suggests that the lessons from The Kenyan Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) – once painted as backward and primitive by colonial rulers – are crucial for understanding contemporary resistance movements and addressing the persistent issues of social and economic inequality in the country. I have returned to this book more than once since the youth-led, Gen-Z insurgency in Kenya last summer sparked nationwide protests against inflation, dysfunctional social services, and government corruption. For radicals in Africa and around the world, this book offers an otherwise suppressed revolutionary history, inspiration, and guidance for mobilising and collectively charting alternative futures to capitalism and imperialism. Purchase the paperback or eBook here.

My second book is Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits by Too Black and Rasul A. Mowatt (2024, Routledge). A groundbreaking exploration of racial capitalism and the co-optation and depoliticisation of Black radicalism in America, this 2024 book presents a thoughtful challenge to the counterinsurgent tactics of the State that repackage Black Rage as a commodity to be bought, sold, and repressed. Sharing stories of resistance found throughout the African diaspora alongside a critical investigation of state-building under capitalism, writer and filmmaker Too Black and geographer Rasul A. Moswatt identify the 21^st Century city as the site for laundering, resistance, and anti-colonial struggle. Through thorough and widespread analysis, the authors suggest Black Rage – an angry reaction to a violently oppressive system – is capable of organising and collectively acting to build a new and just civilisation. Essential reading for scholars and organizers working at the intersection of capitalism and White supremacy, this book offers new considerations for the study of NGOs, the nonprofit industrial complex, and philanthropy for humanitarianism and human rights. A free PDF download available here by clicking GET at the top of the page. You can purchase the hardcover, paperback, or eBook here.

Zachary J. Patterson

***

Crossing Over

by Ann Morgan

and

Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

by Olga Tokarczuk

and

Conversations with Friends

by Sally Rooney

My best reads have been only peripherally related to Africa, more to political economy, environment and war, but the connection to Africa is also there by implication.

Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead’ is a very strange novel by this Nobel-prize winning author. It is cast as a murder mystery, but its main theme concerns the fight against corrupt bureaucracy and environmental depredation in an isolated rural community. The title is taken from a proverb of William Blake, and all 17 chapters have one of his proverbs as a subtitle

Sally Rooney’s ‘Conversations with Friends’: Sally Rooney is a ‘marmite’ writer (note for non-British readers: marmite is a yeast-based by-product of the brewing industry that half the country loves and half hates). Her writing is precise and unshowy and her novels almost plotless, or at least the plots are not important (E.M. Forster would have approved). As an admirer I find that she gets under the skin of her characters in a way that makes you think about yourself and your friends and acquaintances beyond your superficial immediate reactions. But what is perhaps of more relevance to ROAPE readers is that her lead characters are often self-described socialists, Marxists or communists. Furthermore, their convictions are not much argued over or polemicised or even acted on in the political arena; they are just assumed as natural.

Crossing Over by Ann Morgan: The connection to Africa is overt in this novel, in that one of the two protagonists is an economic migrant who has escaped people smugglers and taken refuge in a neglected farm on the coast of Kent. What makes it interesting is that the farm is still owned by an old woman, with incipient dementia, possibly related to a traumatic event in her early adulthood. Both characters are therefore traumatised albeit by very different experiences, and from initial incomprehension begin to develop some sort of friendship.

Colin Stoneman

***

Minor Detail

by Adania Shibli

In my life between Cape Town and Berlin, I have found this year particularly difficult. The outpour of pro-Palestinian solidarity in South Africa, from the political and cultural grassroots through to the court case brought by South Africa against Israel in the International Court of Justice, was contrasted by an unbelievably cold-hearted lack of empathy in German politics and the country’s mainstream media.

I selected Minor Detail by the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli as my read of the year because it moved me as an extraordinary literary achievement, and also because the slim novel experienced the persistent difficulty faced by Palestinian voices in countries such as Germany. Translated to multiple languages since its publication in Arabic in 2017, in October 2023, a ceremony scheduled for the Frankfurt Book Fair, where Shibli was to receive a prestigious award, was cancelled. This followed accusations of Israel-hatred and antisemitism in the German press against Shibli, notwithstanding that she had already condemned any form of nationalism and emphasised the novel’s aim of “perceiving the pain of others.”

Minor Detail begins in 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people, and which the Zionist narrative celebrates as the war of independence. The novel has two parts. Its first half fictionalises the true story of a 1949 gang rape and murder of a young Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers. Shibli, a Palestinian writer based in Berlin, starts with an account of Israeli soldiers setting up camp at the desert border with Egypt. The boredom of long, uneventful encampment days is broken when they capture a teenager, whom they rape, kill, and bury in the sand.

The novel’s second part tells the experience of a young woman from Ramallah, who investigates this incident many years later. She becomes fascinated with this ‘minor detail’ of history, Top of FormBottom of Formnot only because of the nature of the crime but also because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born.

Minor detail evokes a present haunted by the past, which has raised its head in ever more sinister ways since October 2023, yet having drawn on three quarters of a century of an entrenched historical narrative. Reading this justification of the soldiers’ actions in 1949 sent a chill down my spine:

“And if the Arabs act according to their sterile nationalist sentiments and reject the idea of us settling here, if they continue to resist us, preferring the area remain barren, then we will act as an army. No one has more right to this area than us, after they neglected it and left it abandoned for so long after they let it be seized by the Bedouins and their animals. It is our duty to prevent them from being here and to expel them for good.”

I found that Minor detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of life under occupation. It also demonstrates the difficulty of re-writing the perpetrators’ chillingly-unmoved narrative and counter their entrenched sense of entitlement and superiority. The novel’s second part exposes the ongoing disempowerment and erasure in the ostensibly trivial experiences of the unnamed Ramallah woman. The travel restrictions faced by Palestinians in their own land obstruct her attempted investigation during a risky road trip. In the end, she is killed by Israeli soldiers on the same spot as the young girl who was murdered in 1949.

More than simply political fiction, this is a literary masterpiece. The two parts of the novel are impressively layered. Shibli’s writing is focused on the minute description of action and leaves little room for the narration of emotion. This impassive narration demonstrates the impossibility of shaking off the victim’s point of view in this haunting meditation on war, violence and memory.

Heike Becker

Talking and writing about the history of the exploited and oppressed

ROAPE

December 5, 2024

In the final instalment of our three pieces to mark the publication of Working People Speak – Oral Histories of Neoliberal Africa, Kalundi Serumaga critically interrogates the concepts of ‘workers’ and ‘working class’ and their relevance outside of Western industrial society. He then reflects on how the oral history method might be one way to better understand the exploited and oppressed in their own contexts and in their own words.

By Kalundi Serumaga

History is something someone once said, while talking about something they saw happen. Then somebody else wrote that down. And it ceased to be oral. And the written was deemed to be better than the oral source. This collection of essays is a quest to make the case for the alternative method and to also use it. In summary, it seeks to intensify the basis of social science empirics by utilising the often‑overlooked method of oral history. This could present some interesting situations.

Any reading of a good, as in well‑written, academic paper today, will include taking in of a very large number of references to supplement each point. It is as though writing tends more now toward affirming what has been said earlier by another academic, and therefore in need also of being duly acknowledged. I have sometimes asked the question to academics that who awarded the first ever PhD graduate with their PhD if no one else already had one? It is another way of asking when does knowledge become knowledge and not the opinion attributable to an individual? Furthermore, how may new thoughts and ideas enter into the discourse, if the requirement for proper academic writing is that even fresh arguments must be located within the existing literature?

Often, to do this, one is required to devote a good amount of space to referencing and acknowledging and then possibly even more to explaining any disagreements one may have with some of them. New entrants are therefore always at risk of either deferring constantly to all who came before at the expense of their own arguments or to produce an unwieldly and still overcrowded, tome. Perhaps oral history will enable something of a “reset”, by providing fresh and source material upon which a new generation of disputations can then be built over time. But this raises questions of method, intent and execution.

This is a collection of essays arguing for the use of oral history and, in some cases, using some of its methods. They look at the fate of trades unionism in a changing Zimbabwean economy; the conditions of farm workers in South Africa; the conditions of female casual urban labourers in South Africa; the dynamics of post‑war recovery in northern Uganda in the context of neo‑liberalism; and the impact on ordinary South Sudanese of an increasingly neoliberal economic regime.

With method: in the end, even if one is going to use any method of investigation, it is the one researching who will decide on the subject matter and the area of focus within it. Overall, the essays examine a social category they in general define, or allude to, as “workers” or “the working class”. The question may be asked as to why they choose to do this?

We may reflect a little on the origins of the concept of the “working class” as a political utility and also therefore a point of interest to social science. It emerged during and after the great upheavals within especially Western industrial society when capitalism struggled to contain the continual unrest from its exploited labour force. This course is best known as chronicled by the activism and resultant writings of leading theorists of this conflict on the side of labour. Their position was to see the labour force as a legitimate, viable and potent agent for politico‑economic change, and theorised extensively around this, to support revolutionary political action. The best known of course are Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin. These epistemologies that flowed from these contentions have had a far‑reaching impact on Western social science.

This reality is one of the reasons why the revolutionary movements in other non‑, or far less, industrialised parts of the world spent a long time looking for a class that did not really or substantially exist; so as to ground their own movements in then greatly favoured theories of the day, and hopefully access the potentially significant international support from those states that had already had such successful “revolutions”.

This was quite common to more than a few African dictatorships of the Cold War era. Many problems emerged from this, not least that the pre‑eminence of European thought in the revolutionary thinking of the beginning of the 20th century and the latter half of the century before it, led to a certain Western Left cultural chauvinism, in which many Western activists and thinkers saw themselves as the permanent custodians, curators and teachers of it to everyone else.

This was ironically the result also of the Western cultural legacy coming out of their earlier missionary traditions that built into a 500‑year assumption of Caucasian global leadership. The reality is that the greater experience of the peoples of the world was not of being turned into an industrial proletariat: this was a global minority experience. This is not to say the Western industrial proletariat were not being exploited and left dispossessed and even oppressed. But this reality of demographic divergence is what led, for example, to the critical schisms of theory and practice between the communists of China who had initially received support during their armed struggle from the already successful communists of Russia/the Soviet Union. This support waxed and waned over the later insistence of the Chinese on developing different politics to accommodate interests of other socio‑economic classes in China based on the reality that such classes consisted a substantial part of Chinese society, and were also objectively oppressed by Western and Japanese imperialism. There simply were not enough industrial factory workers and the like in the so‑called Third World upon which to build the classic (or Western?) Marxist vision of workers’ revolution.

With these essays and many before them we now even have the situation where the concept of Working Class may now be found in a perhaps repurposed, or perhaps disembodied form, in areas of writing outside the Marxist tradition. But this may raise the question of what intention lies within the study of the “working class” in the absence of the historical role attributed to it by the ones who invented and weaponised the socioeconomic concept of them?

In terms of execution: all the studies focus on the Global South and are then skewed to southern Africa; partly because of settler industrialism there and again within that, therefore, a quest to find a class in which to locate one’s analysis. These studies, however, are not concerned with revolution and its theories. Nevertheless, we have to engage with the question of what to do when an element of a theory is extracted from its original conceptual habitat and thrust into another area of study. This is one big question. It could be partly answered by the expansion of the oral history method. We can get to hear how the exploited and oppressed of these areas see themselves in their own words. We can also learn the fate of the traditions of the working‑class struggle as perhaps originating in Western Europe and exported, not necessarily in an ill‑intentioned way, to Africa after its own envelopment by the Western capitalist economies.

The essays have made the case for oral history. As the work continues to develop, perhaps more areas could be examined to see if they can enrich it. First, oral history may be seen as now part of the wider family of orality, as it were. These are the arguments put forward by people like Pio Zirimu, who believed that unwritten folklore and even music could be considered as part of what is called “literature”. Diop argued somewhat conversely that the African traditions of verbal record‑keepers among many African communities were in fact a consequence of the falling away of earlier writing skills. Diop said it was disadvantageous because a lot of knowledge got lost or distorted this way, but that the information originally memorialised is in fact actual history. This work being undertaken could also begin broadening its scope to folk includes more music, folklore, popular theatre and the like.

Not everything needs to be designed beforehand and directed by the researcher. We can listen passively, too. Second, if the purpose of such studies is to understand the economic life of a society, perhaps other social groups may also be taken into account. This could include the various categories of subsistence farmers, the small‑scale business owners, and those branches of the “working‑class” communities not in full or regular employment. The essays provide much interesting data and anecdote. A lot has happened in Africa in the last fifty years. There is a lot yet to be captured, one way or another.

Kalundi Serumaga is an activist and political commentator based in Kampala. He has had a long career working as a filmmaker, director, journalist, dramatist, and historian, and has faced broadcasting bans. Serumaga is a follower of the late African activist and philosopher Dani Nabudere. His writing can be found on Patreon as Kalundi Serumaga. He is also on X @NativeLandgrab.

For further oral history material and analysis/work, see also: the History Workshop at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, the Centre for Popular Memory at the University of Cape Town, the Anti-Privatisation Forum collection at the South African History Archive, the African Oral History Project and Overview of African Oral Histories Online Collections at the Washington University in St. Louis.

Featured Photograph: A stoneworker in the Central African Republic (Wiki Commons)

Voices of survival and resistance: African lives under neoliberalism

ROAPE

December 3, 2024

This blog post is the second of three pieces marking the publication of Working People Speak – Oral Histories of Neoliberal Africa. It features Alexander Freund’s compelling foreword, which introduces the wide range of oral histories explored in the book, including interviews with female farm workers in South Africa, tea makers in South Sudan, and a prominent trade union leader in Zimbabwe. The foreword highlights the diverse ways oral history sheds light on the economic hardships, inequalities, and the profound socio-political and cultural changes neoliberalism has imposed on millions of ordinary working people.

By Alexander Freund

What does it mean for people to live and work under the conditions of neoliberal economies in modern-day South Africa, South Sudan, Uganda, and Zimbabwe? The Case for Oral Histories of Neoliberal Africa tackles this question head-on through oral histories of those most affected by economic exploitation, inequality, and violence. The authors’ in-depth research on personal narratives of people’s working and living conditions under neoliberalism in Africa since the 1980s documents the harsh economic reality of rural and urban labourers. It also highlights the role of oral history as a research method in modern African historiography. Historical and economic research often hides people’s voices as it prefers quantitative methods and structural explanations. The authors show, however, the diverse ways in which oral history helps us understand how the deep economic, socio-political, and cultural changes across the continent over the past half century have affected tens of millions of men and women, families and children, and workers and small business owners.

The individual articles focus on several countries and diverse sectors, and they illustrate the diversity and complexity of working lives in neoliberal economies. They explore themes from a bottom-up view, such as the impact of “structural adjustment programs” on female workers and activists, the privatisation of public services in the aftermath of war, the deterioration of work and labour relations through brokerage firms, the hollowing out of social safety nets for those most in need of them, and the consequences of war and other forms of state violence. With its focus on individual and collective experiences, this collection enriches our understanding of recent economic and social history in Africa and our appreciation of oral history’s role in making public such experiences.

This collection also clearly shows that oral history is not a one-size-fits-all approach or a monolithic method. While oral history uses the case study as an in-depth look at historical change and experience, it is broad enough to encompass individual biography, group biography, and larger oral history collections. The authors use ethnographic vignettes, individual biographies, and studies of collectives of dozens and even hundreds of interviews. Whatever their approach, the authors clarify that individual voices are not ornamental to statistics; rather, they are at the core of any possibility of understanding how neoliberalism works and affects social structures. It is when people tell their stories that we can get an inkling of what it means when parents have to leave behind their young children to find work; when they lose their farmland and are forced into backbreaking labour at an age when people expect to retire; and when they depend on the arbitrary decisions of employers that may fire them at a moment’s notice, cheat them of wages, or deprive them of the most basic safety measures.

In her interviews with female farm workers in South Africa, Tarminder Kaur learned about class relations that were reminiscent of the paternalism of Manchester capitalism. Anna, one of her interviewees, recounted how her widowed employer—whose income alone was twenty times higher than Anna’s—complained about her own “financial difficulty.” While this employer seemed to have taken the familiarity between them as a sign of friendship, Anna never forgot the dramatic inequality in their relationship: “What does she want me to do?! – feel sorry for her? I do their taxes. I know what she earns….”

Under the conditions of neoliberal economies, this book shows people’s lives and work are characterised by a fundamental precarity of existence that reaches far beyond the labour situation. They experience inadequate, unsafe, and unreliable housing, often dependent on the goodwill of their employers or, for migrant workers without papers, life under steady threat of discovery and deportation. Luisa Calvete Portela Barbosa interviewed migrant workers in South Africa to uncover the long history of racial capitalism and explore their experiences of dispossession as unfreedom. Khumo, born in the 1950s, explained how white employers used Apartheid in the 1980s to cheat him out of his already meagre earnings and would break Apartheid law to ensure he could still work for them when their profits were at stake. Kagiso, born in the 1990s, had to break off his education and begin paid labour to support his family. Early on, as he noticed how poorly white colleagues and bosses treated black people, he realised, “oh, this is the Apartheid that they are talking about.”

In their interviews with thirty female labour migrants in South Africa, Kira Erwin and Monique Marks learned of other hardships brought on by migration. “I had not imaged that I would leave my child behind to go and work as a maid,” Faith explained. Like other female labour migrants, Faith refused to be a victim. She argued that her sacrifice was nevertheless “a good option.” Other women, fleeing the violence of war, did not have a choice. These women, just like other migrant workers, were not only shocked by the continuing precarity of their existence but also saw and seized opportunities for advancement and activism. Even under the double burden of work and child care, they engaged in networking and acts of resistance, and they took pride in their achievements.

Nicki Kindersley and Joseph Diing Majok Majok interviewed some 200 “tea ladies, market and long-distance traders, day labourers and farm workers, charcoal sellers, seasonal agricultural workers and bricklayers, soldiers, ex-militiamen, police and security agents, students, and elderly men and women on farms and in homes” in the Northern Bahr el Ghazal region of South Sudan. While providing a contextual analysis of the economies of this region, the authors also help us understand everyday survival through illuminating quotations. Regina, a single mother of three young children, was a tea maker:

[I] go to the shop to borrow a half-kilo of sugar, a bit of charcoal with 70SSP and a jerry can of water with 20SSP, and then sit down to make tea…. I am renting the tea equipment…. Now in the evening I pay back the owner of this shelter I am operating in, and the owner of the tea equipment.

It is through such interview excerpts, as we also learned early on from the American pioneer of oral history, Studs Terkel, through his oral histories of work, that we can understand life at a level that statistics and theoretical analyses cannot provide and sometimes even obscure. It might be a cliché that it is under such conditions of deprivation that solidarity flourishes, but it is a truth in many places and important to remember when accounting for the costs of neoliberal capitalism.

Sarah N. Ssali interviewed 47 women and men in northern Uganda, where war had ravaged the countryside and population and neoliberal reforms were introduced after the end of the conflict in 2006. This led to further dispossession and poverty, where now families who used to own land all worked in stone quarries. Health care, even though nominally free, was accessible only through nepotism or bribery. Poverty was particularly high among older adults and sick people, who could no longer perform hard labour. Femke Brandt uses interviews to document how female workers in precarious jobs, under constant threat of violence at work, at home, and in public, and often with full responsibility for child care, launched a campaign for better working conditions. Victor Gwande uses the biography of a Zimbabwean labour leader to clarify the complex relationship between trade unionism and neoliberalism in Zimbabwe since the 1990s.

The chapters in this book document in vivid and poignant detail how neoliberal reforms since the 1980s have failed many Africans, especially those already at the margins of society and victimised by war and other forms of state violence. They demonstrate people’s sometimes superhuman ability to survive under inhuman forms of oppression and exploitation, to band together in solidarity and resistance, and to thrive in protest and activism. One very important contribution of this book therefore is to show how workers have maintained their dignity, even as the superrich try to take away their dignity for the sake of endless profits and insatiable greed.

The Case for Oral Histories of Neoliberal Africa constitutes a major corrective to the scholarship’s neglect of personal narratives. The authors rightly indicate that such an omission only impoverishes our understanding of neoliberalism’s impact because it overlooks people’s resilience, adaption, and even resistance in the face of local and global economic pressures. People’s stories of working and living through neoliberal exploitation challenge the dominant narratives that have often portrayed Africans and their governments as passive recipients of neoliberal policies. Instead, they reveal the agency of individuals and communities, their critical engagement with these policies, and their creative strategies for survival and adaptation. This shift in perspective has profound implications for how we understand economic development, social change, and people’s agency under conditions of massive adversity.

Reading the stories of mothers and fathers, the young and the old, and workers, activists, and union leaders reminds us of the importance of listening to those who have lived through—sometimes barely surviving—historical transformations that we cannot understand in any meaningful way through statistics, analyses, and theories. In the shadows of these stories, we get a sense of the price countless people have paid, including the many who perished under neoliberalism’s often inhumane conditions and did not get to tell their stories. Oral history directs our gaze to the past, but the emotion, power, and urgency of people’s voices also turns our view to the present and the future. And we can only hope that this future lies in the hands of Miriam Letseka, Auntie Marie, Yual, Kagiso, Yomella, Tadiwa, Faith, and the many others who even in the harshest of working and living conditions generously shared their stories with researchers and now with us as readers of this book.

The narratives in this book are fresh with pain and hope, like the voices Studs Terkel captured in Work. Like American workers in the 1970s, workers in African nations in the 2010s and 2020s understood and expressed sophisticated political analyses of their plight and offered suggestions for meaningful reforms. In another work, Hard Times, Terkel captured Americans’ memories of the Great Depression, but after forty years, memories sometimes had become nostalgia. It is only by documenting such voices now that historians in forty years will be able to analyse what happened to Africans’ memories of neoliberalism. Let us hope then that this volume initiates a resurgence in collecting oral histories of working lives in modern Africa and elsewhere.

Alexander Freund is a professor of history and holds the chair in German-Canadian studies at the University of Winnipeg, where he co-founded the Oral History Centre. He coedited Oral History and Photography (New York: Palgrave, 2011) and The Canadian Oral History Reader (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). He is the author of Under Storytelling’s Spell? Oral History in a Neoliberal Age’ (The Oral History Review).

Featured Photograph: Africa woman farming a big piece of land by herself (Wiki Commons)

African biographies of capitalism – the case for an oral history of neoliberalism

ROAPE

November 27, 2024

Over the next two weeks, we will be posting three pieces to mark the publication of Working People Speak – Oral Histories of Neoliberal Africa. Here, the book’s editors introduce the volume, which draws on worker testimonies from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and South Sudan. They argue the value of oral histories in helping document and understand significant change in the everyday working lives of people on the continent, and review the wide range of material covered by the book. Commentaries by Alexander Freund and Kalundi Serumaga will follow next week.

By Jörg Wiegratz, Joseph Mujere, and Joost Fontein

The last few decades have witnessed unprecedented changes in the working lives of people across the African continent. Yet, there has been a surprising dearth of oral histories of work since the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1980s. Compared to scholarship published more than half a century ago, there has been a decline in the use of oral histories to explore experiences of living and working under capitalism.

The recently published edited collection Working People Speak – Oral Histories of Neoliberal Africa thus presents a re-engagement with oral histories as a way of documenting, understanding, and discussing experiences of work and economic life in Africa under neoliberal capitalism. It shows that oral historical accounts of working lives can offer unique and productive insights into these changes by allowing analyses of neoliberalism that focus on personal experiences over the longue durée. By grounding analysis in biographical details, histories, and dynamics, the chapters in this book seek better understandings of the wider life contexts, challenges, and circumstances in which people’s ‘agency’ emerges, unfolds, gains traction, and gets (re)shaped; and a better grasp of the multiple, entangled layers and temporalities of life and work in capitalist Africa.

This volume explores oral histories of economic life from different parts of the African continent during the neoliberal period. It gathers seven studies in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and South Sudan, from the late 1980s to the present, to offer an analysis of neoliberal transformations and realities at the incisive level of peoples’ biographies. The issues that are explored include rural livelihoods, mobility, urbanisation, and change, conflict and precarity as well as postcolonial labour relations. The centrality of oral history in the work collated here means that all of the articles speak to questions of entangled, incongruent pasts, presents, and futures in particular contexts.

While the first analysis in our collection speaks specifically to questions of how remembered and re-imagined pasts inform understandings of present working lives and economic futures in specific contexts, other studies assembled in the book speak to how larger political and economic forces and structures are manifested, experienced, and made sense of in the context of: migration and urbanisation in South Africa; in the wake of conflicts in the border lands of Darfur and South Sudan, and in northern Uganda; and in the context of continuing struggles to organise labour relations, unions, and workers’ rights in post-apartheid South Africa and postcolonial Zimbabwe.[i]

Why? The rationale for an oral history of neoliberal Africa

Oral histories of contemporary economic life and change in Africa – including those of work or earning a living – have, it seems, fallen out of fashion. Notably, oral methodologies, ethnographic fieldwork, and the collection of life histories have become standard tools in the research repertories of scholars ranging from political scientists to cultural studies specialists, and far beyond the anthropologists and historians for whom they have long been a mainstay of research.

Yet, there are precious few significant oral histories of the contemporary capitalist period. Oral history material is analysed, for example, in Swanson, Field, and Meyer’s edited collection Imagining the City: Memories and Cultures in Cape Town and in Lee’s book Africa’s World Trade: Informal Economies and Globalization from Below. Yet, we have not come across a recent, large body of work that resembles in terms of focus, scope, depth, volume or format the seminal work of Terkel. Terkel published many oral histories of life under capitalism in the US. His 1972 book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do has more than 120 entries, each ranging in length from three to six pages.

From the book cover of Alvarez’s The Work of Living

One of the exceptions to the dearth of oral histories of working lives during neoliberalism is Alvarez’s The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke. The book is based on interviews with ten different workers in the US, focusing on their working lives and personal working experiences during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Alvarez asks how people’s experiences of the pandemic will be remembered, what will be remembered, and whose voices will be recorded. The issues Alvarez raises are highly relevant to the history of neoliberalism as well:

In the future, we’ll need to remember how we felt about this as it was actually happening to us. Because those who aim to capitalize on it will tell us to remember it differently, or they’ll have us recall only very select parts of the experience. The question for us then … is: What will we remember, and how will we remember it? … [W]hose voices will go on the record? Who will tell the story of what happened here? How will they tell that story? What will they focus on? And what will we care to listen to? More importantly: How will we each see ourselves as participants in and shapers of this history? … I think we should all be deeply suspicious of any retelling of human history that leaves little room for, or deliberately excludes, the messy complex lives of the working people who lived and made it.

Given the above, the current lacuna is problematic for several reasons. Firstly, it is a problem of record and analysis. The last few decades have seen significant changes across the continent in the everyday working lives of people. This applies across generations. Generating substantial oral historical accounts would offer invaluable insights into these dynamics and experiences of change. They would show how protagonists manoeuvre around as well as understand, reflect on, and assess these changes and the resulting social order, and their place in it. This would record capitalist transformations – the reordering of the economy, society and culture – unravelling at the level of a person’s biography, as opposed to, for example, economic or social sectors.

Secondly, oral histories can re-open and refocus attention upon questions of voice, self-making, and representation, and more broadly of inclusion, humanism, and equality, which profoundly animated Africanist scholarship a generation ago. These questions are no less urgent but arguably receive less attention today.

Thirdly, such oral histories and their analysis could enrich debates about neoliberalism across Africa, extending, deepening, and nuancing them. Put differently: how can we expect to more effectively hear, listen, and understand the impacts of neoliberal transformations (and crises) without oral histories? Strong oral histories of neoliberalism’s broader societal and political as well as economic affects, abjections, and often undelivered promises, have much to offer.

Oral histories of economic and working life can generate more nuanced understandings of people’s experiences of the myriad challenges provoked by neoliberalism in Africa. The potency of such oral histories of the living lies in how, through the medium of oral interviews, both the interviewer and the research participant co-create knowledge. This results in the production of rich and nuanced knowledge about those mundane aspects of life that often get missed in or silenced by other sources. However, oral histories also present challenges to do with the politics of representation. It is therefore important to reflect on and address concerns about whose voices, whose lives, whose experiences, and whose histories are represented in oral histories.

Fourth, oral histories of economic life under neoliberalism can make key contributions to the global scholarship of neoliberalism, including analyses of the forging of market civilisation, neoliberal subjectivities, earning a living under neoliberal labour regimes, and work in/for the hallmark of neoliberal institutions: the corporation. Workers are prime witnesses of neoliberalism-in-practice. Fifth, such oral history accounts of neoliberalism can also enrich the oral history literature in general: notably, neoliberalism/capitalism does not feature as a topic in the list of 33 chapter titles in The Oxford Handbook of Oral History.

Entangled, incongruent pasts, presents, and futures in particular contexts

Yet, just as these biographies and oral histories of working lives do not emerge in the absence of longer histories, rather finding traction and resonance in the enduring presence of complicating pasts, so too do they not emerge in a historiographical vacuum. As Ferguson noted in the late 1990s, modernity’s ‘malcontents’ make sense of their abjection through their own histories, or more correctly, their own historiographies, in which futures and pasts collapse into or overtake each other; like those workers on Zambia’s Copperbelt for whom ‘modern futures’ became the ‘object of nostalgic reverie, and “backwardness” the anticipated (or dreaded) future’.

Others working elsewhere in Africa have discussed how older aspirations to middle-class respectability entangle in complex ways with the requirements of contemporary cosmopolitanism, just as desires towards ‘conspicuous consumption’ frequently intertwine with, or grate against, older but enduring motifs of rural belonging as often actualised, for example, through elaborate new funerary practices.

As historians of Africa came to realise almost as soon as they embraced oral history, and as already discussed above, historiography and history can never, in the end, be disassembled. One always implies the other, and in the process conventional, ordered temporalities are easily unsettled, reversed, or collapsed. It is for this reason that understanding contemporary working lives in the neoliberal period cannot, only, be a discussion framed by questions of political economy and ‘materialist’ analysis. The temporal schemas upon which such analysis is too often construed cannot bear the weight of time in its multiple forms and complexities; as it appears, in other words, in biographies, life stories, and oral histories.

Collecting oral histories of working lives in the neoliberal period therefore necessarily attends to questions about how the past informs, structures, resonates, and affords the present and falls into the future in significantly open-ended and indeterminate ways; and through this, the demands of materialist analysis of political economy necessarily merges with the insights of post-structural and meaning-oriented analysis.

This indeterminacy reflects exactly the uncertainties and precarities of working lives on the margins, or rather in the wake or demise of modernity’s promise – a promise that has scarcely survived and yet still often informs everyday understandings of working lives in the neoliberal period. It also points exactly to the need to explore actors’ interpretations and diverse meaning-making regarding what analysts conventionally label and understand as ‘neoliberalism’.

That said, we are concerned with the need to examine the salience of larger national, regional, and global political and economic forces and structures across many different contexts, and the extremes of precarity and abjection that these engender, but also with the opportunities and space, however limited and fragile, for agency, autonomy, creativity, wealth, voice, and social mobility, that they sometimes offer. At the same time, we are compelled to recognise and properly account for the particularities and diversities of how these larger forces and structures are manifest, experienced, and understood in specific historical, social, economic, and political contexts.

These include contexts of migration, urbanisation, conflict and post-conflict situations amid the ongoing expansion and intensification of global corporate capital and related large-scale economic and social transformations and change, incorporating recursive cycles of economic boom and bust.

The chapter contributions

The first chapter, by Kaur, focuses on rural experiences of neoliberal South Africa through the empirical lens of farmworkers’ experiences of ‘development’ in the Western Cape. Far from offering a profound challenge to the structural inequalities of the past, she concludes that ‘the neoliberal economy of development produces its own inequalities, perpetuating feelings of worthlessness among the working poor’.

The next chapter, by Barbosa, focuses on the biographies of two men who moved to Johannesburg at very different historical moments, separated by almost four decades (1976 vs. 2015). Barbosa argues that dispossession remains the most prominent form of ‘unfreedom’ generated by racial capitalism, which, despite neoliberalism’s promises (and like the failures of ‘development’ that Kaur identifies) is ‘reproduced every day in and through cities’ and ‘lived as alienation’.

Workers in Durban protest as part of the global day of action to mark COP17, November 2011 (Wikimedia Commons)

Next, Erwin and Marks explore the strategies and coping mechanisms deployed by migrant women – from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Somalia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and rural South Africa – to build economic lives in the South African city of Durban. The oral history data presented here reveals ‘an economy that is fundamentally political, and that attempts to individualise responsibility generating further vulnerability and dislocation, and often amplified household burdens’.

Moving away from the experiences of migrants who have to come to South Africa to make new lives, the next two chapters take us to experiences of displacement, dispossession, and resettlement in the aftermaths of conflict in East Africa, particularly Darfur, South Sudan and Uganda.

Kindersley and Majok examine how cycles of wars that spawned displacements and resettlements in South Sudan and Darfur borderlands ‘created class stratification and individual accumulation and how new propertied and cash-rich classes have invested in exploiting marketisation and a cheap workforce via manipulating laws and controls on land labour’.

Similarly, Ssali tackles the theme of formerly displaced people’s experiences of post-war reconstruction and the implementation of neoliberal policies in northern Uganda. Ssali argues that life history narratives of heads of households demonstrate the nature and transformations of livelihood patterns before, during and after the war. Her chapter shows how neoliberalism and the legacies of conflicts permeated all aspects of post-conflict northern Uganda; land, work, and healthcare, for example.

The last two chapters return to the questions of labour relations which preoccupied Kaur’s focus on Western Cape farm workers’ experiences of inequality in the first article. Brandt examines women’s experiences and navigations of a neoliberalised labour market in South Africa, arguing that the entire institutional set-up of the current system of labour relations creates conditions of unbelonging that workers face and negotiate.

In the final chapter, Gwande uses biography to explore the history and contributions of an often less accounted-for veteran unionist, Alfred Makwarimba, and his labour centre, the Zimbabwe Federation of Trade Unions (ZFTU), to re-examine trade union politics in the context of neoliberal reform in Zimbabwe. Gwande uses oral testimony to demonstrate how Makwarimba navigated the tumultuous neoliberal period.

He concludes that ‘Makwarimba seized the neo-liberal moment, particularly the deregulation and democratisation of labour relations, to propel his trade union career during the 1990s’. This dimension is missing in accounts of labour’s experience during neoliberalism as scholarship preoccupied itself with the role of the dominant Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) in national politics.

Conclusion

This volume reopens debate about the efficacy of oral histories, life histories, biography, and personal reminiscences in the reconstruction of people’s everyday experiences of neoliberalism in African contexts. Although neoliberalism has received considerable scholarly attention, particularly the contentious SAPs, there has been a dearth of works that draw on oral histories or seek to understand contemporary capitalism from the vantage point of ordinary people, i.e. working people/classes of labour.

Oral histories as both a source and method allow researchers to co-create people’s lived experiences of neoliberalism in different geographical and temporal contexts as well as revisiting debates about representation and voice. They allow us to shift the gaze from ‘neoliberalism from above’ and respond to Gago’s call to explore ‘neoliberalism from below’ (i.e. people’s resisting and succumbing to it).

As Erwin and Marks note: oral histories bring to the forefront experiences of actors that get neglected and/or obscured by dominant discourses and narratives. They illustrate how ‘there is no single and predetermined experience of livelihood making in the city’. One can arguably extend this (and as papers in this volume show): there is no ‘single story’, no single experience of neoliberalism (e.g. the neoliberal city).

Further, the articles in this volume indicate that actors navigate, are exposed to, interact with and negotiate multiple sites and aspects of neoliberalism over long periods of time. Oral histories provide detailed insight into respective matters of structure and context, as well as agency, subjectivity, and perception. They offer insights into the multi-faceted nature of options, choices, experiences, emotions, and practices of life unfolding over time, of complex social and personal worlds in motion and interaction.

In other words, oral histories help to recognise and understand better that capitalism is lived, experienced and assessed ‘biographically’ by protagonists (and their families), from childhood to youth and through adulthood. The biographical data presented in Brandt’s analysis (and in several of the other chapters in the volume), for example, shows how people’s family lives, relationships, and care responsibilities shape their economic lives and vice versa; how workers’ subjectivities change over time in particular biographical contexts; and how conditions and changes in economic spheres affect household affairs and social reproduction, allowing deeper insight into relations between work, union/organising, and family life.

By grounding analysis in biographical details, histories, and dynamics, we thus gain better understandings of the wider life contexts, challenges, and circumstances in which people’s agency takes place, unfolds, and gets (re)shaped; and, more broadly, a better grasp of the multiple, entangled layers and temporalties of life in contemporary capitalist societies. This in turn, we hope, contributes to interdisciplinary dialogue about the efficacy of oral histories (in their various forms) for making sense of how people grapple with the effects of neoliberal transformations in different geographical and historical contexts across Africa, and beyond.

[i] The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Third World Thematics titled ‘Oral histories of economic life in Africa during neoliberalism’ (the introduction of the special issue is here). They are accompanied by a new Foreword by Freund and Afterword by Serumaga, to be published on roape.net.

Jörg Wiegratz is Lecturer in Political Economy of Global Development at the University of Leeds and Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg. He specialises in neoliberalism, fraud and anti-fraud measures, commercialisation and economic pressure and related aspects of moral and political economy, with a focus on Uganda and Kenya. He is a member of the editorial working group of ROAPE. His books include Neoliberal Moral Economy: Capitalism, Socio-Cultural Change and Fraud in Uganda and Neoliberalism and the Moral Economy of Fraud.

Joseph Mujere is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of York, UK, and Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Johannesburg. He is also currently Volkswagen Stiftung Senior Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-2023) doing research on artisanal chromite mining in Zimbabwe. He published his first book in 2019 titled: Land, Migration and Belonging: A History of Basotho in Southern Rhodesia, c1890-1969s and has also produced a documentary film titled Waiting in a Platinum City.

Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Johannesburg. From 2014-2018 he was director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa in Nairobi, and before that he taught anthropology at Edinburgh. He is co-editor of the (IAI) journal AFRICA, former editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies, and former editor and co-founder of Critical African Studies. He recently published his third monograph on Zimbabwe titled The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe 2000-2020: Bones, Rumours & Spirits, and co-curated a multi-authored collaboration between scholars and artists entitled Nairobi Becoming which was published in February 2024.

Featured Photograph: Book cover of Working People Speak: Oral Histories of Neoliberal Africa, photograph by Nicholas Bamulanzeki. Nicolas is a photojournalist with The Observer Newspaper, Kampala, Uganda. He does documentary and events photography. As a photojournalist, writer, and blogger, he has covered major events in Uganda and Africa generally, especially in the areas of health, sports, conflict, and development.

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New details on Walter Rodney’s visit to Hamburg

A student-led initiative invites Rodney to Hamburg

Why Rodney came to Hamburg

Life and Work in Hamburg

Hamburg lectures

Rodney’s unexpected return in 1980

Grieving, remembering and organising in Hamburg

Interview with Mamadou Koné – A long, tragic history of the Senegalese Riflemen: A story of colonial racism and murder

Workers, protests and trade unions in Africa

African Revolutions and Decolonization: a podcast series on African resistance

Debt and Austerity – The IMF’s Legacy of Structural Violence in the Global South

ROAPE’s 2024 Best Reads for African Radicals

Talking and writing about the history of the exploited and oppressed

Voices of survival and resistance: African lives under neoliberalism

African biographies of capitalism – the case for an oral history of neoliberalism

The Mozambican people enter the political realm

Water Boards and the Unfolding Disaster in South Africa’s Water System

West African juntas are undermining human rights

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