“The international forces against Sankara were too much” – Victoria Brittain in conversation with Brian J. Peterson

December 6, 2022

Radical journalist Victoria Brittain discusses the life and politics of the Thomas Sankara with Brian J. Peterson. Peterson has written a biography which recounts in detail the politics and murder of the Burkinabé revolutionary. The book sheds new light on the responsibility of those who worked for Sankara’s assassination. In this interview, Brittain and Peterson talk about his work, and the project of transforming Burkina Faso in the 1980s.

Victoria Brittain: Let’s start by talking about your sources and style. One striking thing about the book is its very wide sources close to Sankara. Some of the quotes are clearly from recorded interviews, but many are short, as though part of on-going chats.

Brian J. Peterson: I originally had in mind a book about the revolution, a “history from below,” as a grassroots study of revolution. I was especially keen to explore how state initiatives worked with local politics in the context of the revolutionary local level assemblies, CDRs (Comités de défense de la revolution). I started interviewing people active in CDRs, mostly people who were rather young at the time of the revolution, many of them urban workers, students, and the petty bourgeoisie, as they put it. So, I didn’t start at the “top” of the revolutionary political structure. Blaise Compaoré was still in power, and many people were actually afraid to speak about Sankara. When I met people in their homes or in Ouagadougou’s many roadside bars or restaurants, they would speak in hushed tones, and avoid using Sankara’s name. It took many unrecorded conversations, and the establishment of trust, until people agreed to formal interviews. Eventually, my conversations with local CDR activists led to contacts with the leaders of the leftist civilian political parties (Parti africain de l’indépendance, PAI, and the Union des luttes communistes, ULC)) that had helped bring Sankara to power.

One of these was Valère Somé, a childhood friend of Sankara from Gaoua. When we first met at his home in Ouagadougou, he was eager to hear about what “ordinary people” were telling me about the revolution. He was working on his own history of the revolution, which he never finished (and he’s now deceased), and he understood the limits of his own perspective as a revolutionary leader. He complained that his own people were often reluctant to speak honestly to him about the revolution’s successes and failures. We spent a lot of time together, chatting, driving around town meeting other people, drinking tea, playing chess, and just hanging out at his house or office. He was very open about the revolution’s history and willingly discussed its errors and triumphs along the way.

As with most research projects, there was a random aspect to how it went. The more I spoke to people, the more my research veered towards Sankara. He was simply unavoidable, and I changed tack to write the book specifically on him. I had heard plenty about the revolution’s policies, what worked and didn’t work. Through Valère and others, I met the major revolutionary actors and Sankara’s closest friends, people like Fidèle Toé, the PAI leader Philippe Ouedraogo, the labour leader Soumane Touré, Sankara’s classmates and military colleagues Abdoul-Salam Kaboré and Paul Yameogo, and many others. In first encounters, Sankara’s colleagues were very protective of him. But when I kept returning for second, third, fourth and fifth interviews and numerous off-the-record conversations they really opened up. Some of them even said it was their responsibility to Sankara’s memory to be as honest as possible. This is not to say that there were some deep dark secrets about Sankara, but rather that, although they universally revered the man and held him in high esteem, they also could see with the benefit of hindsight where things had gone wrong. They volunteered insights into Sankara’s personality and how some of the revolution’s errors stemmed from his approach to governance, and at the same time they defended him from criticisms over a specific policy or action which they knew had come from other initiatives within the revolutionary leadership.

Sankara’s family have been remarkably open and welcoming to you.

Yes, but it was only after I’d spent a good amount time with Sankara’s colleagues and friends that I first met his family. Once I made contact, they really took me into the family. I was able to spend time with them, especially with Pascal and Paul Sankara, socializing, talking, watching soccer, listening to music, or sharing meals. Much of what I learned about Sankara as a person was absorbed through this immersion in the family culture. Of course, there were also formal interviews that were more structured and recorded, focusing on specific questions or periods in their family’s history. Sankara’s sisters, especially Pauline, Florence and Colette were also extraordinarily knowledgeable about the family’s history. Everyone had their piece of the puzzle, their memories, and so my task was simply listening carefully. This array of puzzle pieces would eventually also include many official archive documents, the testimonies of US diplomats, journalists, aid workers, and other foreigners whose anecdotes and memories brought additional perspectives to the story. The wide array of testimonies helped to guard against hagiography.

The chapters on Sankara’s youth and education reveal his unusually deep level of reading, and a gifted student whose leadership qualities emerged in many anecdotes from these years. Can you fit that into the unexpected portrait of the colonial education system you draw, for a lucky few, in this very small, poor country?

Sankara was very fortunate to have access to formal education within the French system, at primary school and then lycée and military academy. His generation was really the first to see education opened up to a broader segment of the population, including women and ethnic minorities. He seems to have had an innate sense of leadership, and in school realized his intellectual potential and demonstrated his rare moral authority. His former classmates and siblings all observed that Sankara naturally rose to leadership in these settings and displayed a rather precocious obsession with justice and fairness.

I do think that the family roots in the Catholic church were very important, as shown in his embrace of liberation theology. But his specifically anti-colonial radicalization was in many ways nurtured in the French academic environment, where his own teachers, many of whom were African, were exposing students to leftist ideas and literature. His classmates described how the school’s own faculty members were decisive in radicalizing the kids as teenagers. It seems contradictory, but these colonial schools, and eventually neocolonial institutions, carried within them the intellectual tools that young Africans appropriated and put to good use in critiquing the colonial system.

It was the same at the military academy where one of his revolutionary fathers, Adama Touré, taught history. Touré was a clandestine member of the communist PAI party, and he used his history courses to educate his young cadets along leftist lines. Bizarrely, in this neocolonial institution, designed to groom future military leaders aligned with France, the cadets were reading Marx’s Communist Manifesto, the works of Lenin, French utopian socialists, and learning about the long history of revolutions and anti-colonial resistance.

How did four years in Madagascar prepare Sankara for what he would build between military and peasants in Pô, which you have described as the template for the revolution?

In 1969, nearly twenty, Sankara was a graduate of the military academy in Ouagadougou, and selected for advanced training in Madagascar. Here he’d have his first direct experiences of rural revolt, when a Maoist uprising spread across the country. In 1972, as part of his training, he joined a Malagasy unit, called the “green berets,” that got involved in rural development. For the first time, he saw the potential role of the military in development projects. Soldiers were working alongside the people, setting up schools and health clinics, and bringing new agricultural methods. He had entered the academy to specialise in special forces, commando operations. He left Madagascar with a new vision of how he could use his position in the military to help his people.

In the Sahel drought of 1973 Sankara witnessed widespread suffering at home. Three years later, put in charge of the commando training base in Pô, Sankara used his Madagascar experience to build a community based on a new spirit of cooperation and trust between his soldiers and the people. The military were mobilized for development and a broader progressive agenda, including attitudes to women.

Back at home he found his civilian friends who had spent four years in university during the global student uprisings of 1968. Marxist and “Third Worldist” currents had brought them into student activism and politics. Returning from Madagascar Sankara was ready slowly, but clandestinely, to join the emerging leftist groups in Ouagadougou, while charting a new path for himself within the military.

Do you think that the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Delhi in March 1983 was a turning point for Sankara where he found an international fellowship with the anti-imperialist greats of his time? The personal speech he delivered (instead of the one he was supposed to deliver) where he called for Israel to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity, citing the Sabra and Shatila massacres of the previous year, had Fidel Castro send for him for a private talk. And meeting Nyerere, Machel, and Bishop filled him with confidence despite the language barrier, and his speeches at home later that month reflected a readiness for confrontation with the old political powers with anti-imperialism as a central plank?

Yes, I do think that Non-Aligned summit was pivotal and incredibly important for Sankara and his rise to power. But it also must be placed within the context of his trip to Libya. This broader international trip, while he was still prime minister in Jean-Baptiste Ouedraogo’s government, and before his arrest of May 17, 1983, provided Sankara with considerable diplomatic, logistical, military, and financial support. He understood that when he and his group took power, they’d been dealing with efforts to destabilize his government. He already had wide support within Upper Volta, among the youth and the civilian left. He also had the support of the young progressive officers who had just carried out their coup of 7 November, 1982. But what he lacked was international standing and support. Although Qaddafi would eventually turn on Sankara, Libya was very important early on, in providing military and economic aid. In fact, the arms that Qaddafi provided via Ghana and the commando base in Pô, were crucial.

But New Delhi and meetings with Fidel Castro, Samora Machel, Maurice Bishop, Jerry Rawlings, Daniel Ortega, and others—provided Sankara with diplomatic allies and friendships that would help Sankara navigate the perils of the Cold War and French neocolonialism. Only Cuba was really in the position to help, albeit modestly, in development projects. But Rawlings was an important regional ally. Bishop, Machel, and Ortega all gave Sankara a sense that he was not alone in his revolutionary aspirations, especially at a time of neoliberal hegemony, Reaganism, Thatcherism, and the sense that the socialist left was falling apart on a global scale.

Moreover, I think, from a psychological standpoint, his reception by these figures gave him greater confidence and even emboldened him. In particular, Sankara was a huge admirer of Castro and the Cuban revolution, so when he was invited over to Castro’s lodgings in New Delhi, and the two had the chance to get to know each other, Sankara found immediate inspiration and a role model, a sort of revolutionary father figure with much counsel on revolutionary processes and the many challenges ahead.

How do you assess the fragility of the revolution by mid-1987? Firstly, how do you weigh the internal fragmenting of the CNR (Conseil national de la revolution) and the CDRs?

As in many other contexts in history, I think there was considerable revolutionary fragility built into the process in Burkina, especially given the array of internal and external forces. Sankara, in his own words, understood that the revolution he led was going up against some pretty powerful currents and headwinds, and some of these probably could have been navigated had the leadership stayed united. But from the beginning of the process, rivalries and infighting plagued the CNR’s core.

When Sankara took power, he depended on a somewhat tenuous alliance between the civilian left and the group of young progressive military officers who wielded real power. This was led by the quartet of Sankara, Compaoré, Henri Zongo, and Jean-Baptiste Lingani. From the first few months, there was dispute over how to structure things, such as the main grassroots structure, the CDR system.

Basically, the military faction managed to muscle their way into control over the CDRs, while nudging aside the more experienced labour union leaders, like Soumane Touré. But even on the left, there was much division and rivalry, in particular between the PAI-LIPAD (Parti de l’indépendance africaine/Ligue patriotique pour le développement ) and ULCR (Union des luttes communistes – reconstruite), both of which were competing for larger roles in the revolution. Within a year of the revolution, the most important of the two—the PAI-LIPAD faction—was purged from the government. The military was able to consolidate power, while keeping up the appearance of civilian leftist participation. Yet, even so, Sankara was resolute in his commitment to his progressive vision and policies, a commitment that, he soon discovered, wasn’t shared with many other military officers. In the end it came down to two main factions, one coalescing around Sankara and the other gravitating towards Compaoré.

Secondly, how about splits in the military? And how did Sankara’s key issues of women’s equality and no tolerance for corruption fit into the differences?

Sankara was losing support within the broader military for his handling of the war with Mali in late 1985, and the diversion of funds away from the military towards rural development projects. Even Sankara’s agenda for advancing women’s equality was not appreciated by his fellow officers. The strongest support for his feminist agenda had been within the civilian left, which had now been marginalized. Few within the military clique were marching to his tune of women’s liberation, especially among his fellow military officers who had mistresses.

And what about the external context of the web woven by Compaoré involving the US/the IMF, the French, Houphouet Boigny, Gaddafi, Charles Taylor?

In terms of the broader international context, Compaoré was the main link between the growing internal anti-Sankara faction and foreign powers, such as Côte d’Ivoire, France, Libya, and the United States. The divergence between Sankara and Compaoré was clear by June 1985 when Compaoré married Chantal Terrasson de Fougères, a relative of Ivoirian president Félix Houphouët-Boigny. From this point onward, he moved increasingly into Houphouët-Boigny’s orbit, his patronage networks, and a world of luxury and self-enrichment, just as Sankara was intensifying his anti-corruption drive within Burkina, and also across the region as the Chairman of CEAO (Communauté économique d’Afrique de l’Ouest).

However, the broader web of international forces that meshed with Compaoré’s coup did not represent a precisely coordinated plan. Compaoré drew on various forms of foreign support in a piecemeal fashion, seeking diplomatic support and post-coup recognition, weapons, incentives, and intelligence. In terms of the timing of the coup, we know that Compaoré struck when the revolution was in the doldrums and facing widespread grievances, and even resistance. It also intersected with growing economic difficulties. Now, based on secret US embassy cables, I’ve seen that leading up to the coup France withdrew financial support to the CNR, and this support had made up between 30 and 40 percent of the CNR’s budget (including technical assistance and development aid). The US had already cut its aid to Burkina, by early 1987, from around $20 million to $1 million, largely for political reasons. Moreover, 80 percent of the funding for the PPD (Programme populaire de développement ) had come from foreign sources. This meant that Sankara’s government was still heavily dependent on foreign aid, despite the bold efforts, and successes, in the direction of self-reliance.

The revolutionary fragility was thus partly based in an ongoing dependence on the institutions, governments, and systems against which Sankara was fighting. Then, with the abrupt withdrawal of financial support, Sankara was suddenly hemorrhaging internal allies, so that CNR members were even reaching out secretively to the IMF to negotiate an agreement just two weeks before Sankara’s murder. The economic pressure was exposing fissures within the CNR leadership and Compaoré was able to take advantage of this.

Also, the French were no longer willing to support Sankara and had already come around to seeing Compaoré as a more moderate alternative. The Americans concurred. Owing to Sankara’s diplomatic estrangement over the previous year, Compaoré and his allies were meeting with US diplomats, and the US ambassador, and shaping impressions, convincing the US that Compaoré was a more viable or “moderate” option. The US ambassador, Leonardo Neher, told me about a lunch he hosted at his residence for Blaise and Chantal Compaoré, just two months before the coup. During the lunch, as Chantal complained about the revolution and the “socialist nonsense,” it became clear to Neher that Compaoré was eager to embrace the capitalist system, and work with France, the US, and the IMF. In fact, very soon after taking power, Compaoré reached out to the IMF to negotiate an agreement.

But Compaoré was equally motivated by other incentives, such as the opportunities that would open up by working with Muammar Qaddafi and Charles Taylor, who were seeking to use Burkina as a base for training soldiers and a conduit for moving weapons from Libya to Liberia. Sankara rejected their requests, and so they reached out to Compaoré, who agreed, in exchange for a cut of the profits once the diamond mines were seized. US cables confirmed that Libya was providing weapons to Compaoré during his seizure of power, and that Charles Taylor had already established ties to Compaoré in Ouagadougou. Now, all of these different foreign powers were not working in concert. Things were being orchestrated by Compaoré, and his faction, in Ouagadougou. But these foreign powers, in varying ways, all knew a coup was on the horizon.

The US was following things very closely via their military contacts with Burkinabé officers who had been trained in the International Military Education and Training program, and France’s tentacles of influence were everywhere, most importantly via Abidjan. US cables suggest that Compaoré was visiting Abidjan regularly leading up to the coup, and that while Compaoré “never asked for a green light from Houphouët-Boigny,” the Ivoirian leader provided assurance that he would “turn a blind eye.” Interestingly, the French ambassador to Côte d’Ivoire, Michel Dupuch—future head of the “Africa Cell” under President Chirac—told US diplomats that he had “personally informed Houphouët of the coup,” and that “the president’s initial reaction was a shrug of his shoulders, almost one of indifference… [he] expressed little surprise and showed no sense of loss at the ouster of Sankara.” The response suggests that Houphouët-Boigny knew about the coup, and at least tacitly supported it, which was a sentiment shared with neighbouring African heads of state.

In the end, the international forces that were arrayed against Sankara, which included the francophone African political class, were too much. Once the connections were established between Compaoré and these sets of interests, there wasn’t much Sankara could do, especially given Compaoré’s overwhelming military advantage within Burkina. The relations of force, internally and externally, had all tipped irretrievably against him, even as Sankara was still widely admired by his people and by Africans across the continent.

You refer to a lot of US diplomatic cables, starting with some warm appreciations of Sankara before the revolution, can you tell us more about that US assessment evolved? And how central did possible links to Libya become in Cold War Washington’s thinking?

My reading of US embassy cables, and also interviews with foreign service personnel, showed Sankara was the source of much fascination, but also deep concern. He first came on the radar of the US embassy when he was still a cadet at military school, apparently marked out by his leadership talents. There was an idea of bringing him over to the US for the IMET program, as some of his colleagues, like Paul Yameogo, were already among the first group of Voltaic soldiers to study in the US, starting in 1979 (at the US Military Intelligence Center in Fort Huachuca). Sankara’s rise was rapid, and in 1981-82 when he was the minister of information in Saye Zerbo’s government, the US State Department invited him for a month-long tour of the US, as a way of establishing a relationship with him.

At this time, Sankara was also in ongoing contact with the Mitterrand government in France, and the Cooperation Ministry under Jean-Pierre Cot. In fact, he was negotiating French funding for bringing the live television broadcast of the 1982 World Cup soccer games to Upper Volta, and at a certain point he threatened to procure funding from Qaddafi if France couldn’t deliver.

From this moment on, news spread through US intelligence circles that Sankara had ties to Libya. It was a major concern, as the CIA was just getting involved in the covert war against Qaddafi in Chad’s civil war. For President Reagan, Libya was the personification of evil, an Islamist socialist bogeyman and terrorist state. Any ties to Libya were an enormous red flag. The US was deeply troubled by the expansion of Libyan influence across Africa, and especially the Sahel. Washington saw Libya as a dangerous agent of destabilization and so the priority was placed on containing Qaddafi. By consorting with Qaddafi, Sankara was putting himself in the crosshairs.

On the other hand, US diplomats were very charmed by Sankara. At the time, Leonardo Neher was working at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (known as INR), and he was captivated by Sankara, and his proposed policies to fight corruption, liberate women, and so on. Neher, a career foreign service officer and self-proclaimed “liberal,” told me that the reason he applied for the post of US ambassador to Upper Volta was because he really wanted to work with Sankara, who represented something new and exciting in African politics. Unfortunately, the Libyan cloud around Sankara never really dissipated and would continue to complicate this relationship.

How do you explain the apparent serious anglophone interest in Sankara today with your book, compared with the very minimal interest – and that only on the left – during his life and assassination?

The revolution was followed across Africa, and Sankara generated wide support in Francophone African leftist circles and still does—although the intelligentsia was not always so favourably inclined, as seen in Achille Mbembe’s oblique reference to Sankara’s government as a “pseudo-revolutionary regime.” Within the United States, Sankara was widely admired in certain progressive Pan-African communities during the 1980s, but interest in the revolution faded rather quickly after his murder. There is a discrepancy between his tremendous popularity in Africa and the lack of academic interest in his story. Few Anglophone historians or academics have written about him. He’s even missing from most general surveys of Africa, so that the historian Paul Nugent commented that the revolution was “airbrushed out of history.”

How did his death change that picture?

Sankara’s posthumous legacy really skyrocketed after the overthrow of Compaoré in 2014. Partly this came with the proliferation of Sankara videos, speeches, and other materials online. This dovetails with French interventions in the Sahel over the past decade and the attendant criticisms. There’s also been renewed interest in African revolutions and political struggles since the Arab Spring, while the even broader context of the global financial crisis of 2008, and the resulting popular movements, such as Occupy Wall Street in 2011, led to a serious reconsideration of forms of socialism. There’s a generational factor, both within Africa and the larger Anglophone world. Younger people, even in the United States, who hadn’t lived with Cold War thinking have been able to assess socialism in a more lucid and balanced way. So I have seen a surging interest in Sankara within this frame. For example, Jacobin magazine has published numerous stories on Sankara over the past 5 years or so, and the website Africa is a country has similarly been doing stories on Sankara. Just anecdotally I’ve also detected a strong current of interest in South Africa, and also among the Nigerian diaspora in the UK.

Brian J Peterson’s study Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa is available here. Peterson is an historian of Africa, specializing in francophone West Africa and the Sahel. His research spans colonialism and the Cold War periods, with particular interests in politics, revolutions, religious change, and environmental history.

Victoria Brittain is an author and journalist who has lived for many years in Africa and Asia, and has been visiting and writing on the West Bank and Gaza for 30 years. A version of this interview and the featured photograph was published on Afrique XXI.

Read more on roape.net on Thomas Sankara’s politics and legacy.

Surrounded – an ethnography of new colonialism

ROAPE

December 2, 2022

ROAPE contributor Yusuf Serunkuma asks if the pillage we are witnessing on the African continent—mostly from the 1980s-onwards—is worse than the exploitation of the 1884-1960s, where is the resistance? Serunkuma writes that even after decolonisation has been achieved (the academy decolonised, stolen artefacts returned, Rhodes, and others, fall), Africa will remain an impoverished and looted continent. The reason for this absurd state of affairs is that the African intelligentsia still struggles to see and expose the performative, informal, localized, and seemingly benevolent manifestation of new colonialism.

By Yusuf Serunkuma

A recent study put the pillage of Africa at US$152 trillion dollars lost between 1960-2010 from just unequal exchange (consider that the US economy is just $25 trillion dollars annually). With 70% of products in Europe and North America coming directly or indirectly from “formerly” colonised places, clearly Kwame Nkrumah was visionary in calling neo-colonialism, more dangerous than the old form of colonialism.

Yet why are Africans seemingly content to magnify and celebrate otherwise small things such as black faces in office; so-called electoral democracies; some native capitalists; associations with former colonisers; football, the English language, wifi, and the penetration of European consumer ostentation? Even when West Africa remain under direct French colonialism—as recently, succinctly explored by Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla—why is there no concerted effort by Africans to liberate the 14 countries of West Africa as happened during the fight against apartheid in South Africa, or the liberation struggles in Mozambique.

My contention is that this state of affairs—of indifference, acquiescence, complacence, comprador-ism, and false happiness—is a product of carefully choreographed game, which must be the focus of the African intelligentsia.

Continued calls for “decolonisation,” are captured in noble demands such as “reparations,” “decolonising knowledge production” or “decolonising the academy.” Progressive hashtags including #RhodesMustFall, #CadaanStudies (or #WhiteStudies) or advocacy for collaborations between western scholars and Africa-based scholars are all good. But are terribly bereft of an actual decolonisation agenda. They do not make the new colonialism visible enough in its minute performative everyday details. Look, even after these were to be achieved (the academy is decolonised, stolen artefacts returned, collaborations improved, Rhodes fell), Africa will remain an impoverished and looted continent.

Nkrumah’s vivid and prophetic 1965, Neo-colonialism: the last stage of imperialism is detailed in its description of the ways in which the coloniser will continue exploiting the continent. But the text has struggled to highlight the otherwise, “performatively friendlier” techniques through which pillage is executed. And the genius of New Colonialism has been the power to seamlessly fetishize itself and endlessly mutate like an amoeba, appearing to align itself with the interests of the colonised.

There is a great deal of scholarship about the ruins of structural adjustment especially how the colonisers—through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund—returned just 30 years after independence, preached and enforced privatisation and bought back (often extremely cheaply) or oversaw the utter ruin of all those things upon which any economy thrives—and upon which Africans were building themselves. While all this is well-known, there is a way the so-called ‘market-led economics’ have developed, taken on a new more disguisable life, convincing entire populations that African poverty is of Africa’s own making, a product of not just laziness but a failure to see opportunity and grab it: Stereotypes such as “Africans are unable to do business” (because they lack business skill or are simply greedy), “Africans are unable to see opportunities” proliferate and inform many interventionist projects, both by government but more so by western interventionist organisations. There are incredible amounts of “education” and “self-help” programmes, and offers to start ups on the continent. Innumerable NGO intend to “teach” Africans ways of overcoming poverty, and competing in a free-market world inundate the African continent.

In truth, all this is nonsense, depoliticised, and deftly crafted as robust intervention. Because nothing has changed. The reason for this absurd state of affairs is that the African intelligentsia still struggles to see, let alone, expose the performative, informal, localized, and the seemingly benevolent manifestation of New Colonialism. The devil is in its everyday forms that are subtle and seemingly gracious towards the Africans.

While the old colonialism was known for brutality, violence, whiteness, annexation, murder, annihilation, and absolute direct racism, this new order is known—or actually unknown—for an entirely different sets of performative practices. With the old order, the Native did not need to have a PhD nor a masters degree to see it. Everyone saw it and resistance was a natural involuntary response. These performative practices of the new colonialism range from the seemingly innocent and benevolent ones, to the hardcore structured ones, which are also often negotiated not only behind closed doors (and often presented in the language of security) but also without the spectacle of violence. They appear benign and mutually agreed. “This is the best we could get,” the African half-educated elite concludes. In moments where the elite is willingly conscripted, and is aware of the cronyism, they are made to see their condition as a helpless one: “what can we do?” they ask in resignation. Thus, we are witnessing a proliferation of a comprador industry where entire populations often knowingly or unknowingly are turned into accomplices in their own exploitation.

Friendly agents

As opposed to the men in short khakis carrying riffles, and ordering Natives about, our new colonisers are dressed in designer suits—normally with white shirts and red or navy-blue neckties—and are ever smiling from left to right. They are our friends and we hang out with them. We eat with them; we visit their houses and they visit ours. While most of them could be white, a good number of them are black. While some aren’t racist in the overt sense, the majority of them are not racist at all. We even marry from them, and they marry from amongst us. Take for example, there are no ‘European or White Only’ neighbourhoods nor restaurants. This colonial distancing of the colonised and coloniser is now embedded in the prices of things (rent and foods), and emoluments of colonial labour.

Increasingly the continent has taken on a class appearance. So, the new coloniser lives an entirely exclusive neighbourhood, which is not necessarily closed off to the colonised (through gates, permits and any other such barricades)—and could actually be visited—but structurally shut off. Members of the colonised group, with the financial muscle are absolutely welcome to reside in these otherwise, posher, and formerly white neighbourhoods. But the cost is higher for this native, than the new coloniser who is structurally enabled by the neo-colonial organisation that sent them.

Continuing with our example, when sent to Africa on performatively soft colonial missions—ambassadorial, foundation work, agencies, consultancies, or simple fieldwork—agents are given special salary grades or special upkeep (and depending on where they go on the continent, “danger money”). It does not matter whether they are doing the same work as the Natives; the native will be paid less. It is often argued that this special emolument caters for the “inconvenience” of working abroad. While I do not begrudge this argument, it should be baffling that remuneration remain huge even when the life these so-called expats enjoy in Africa (with all the cheaply available organic foods, and friendly souls around them) is cheaper and far better than their blighted, miserable capitalistic lives back home. With these often-humongous salaries, the new coloniser can access an exclusive lifestyle, including residence in elite suburbs of African capitals: Kololo and Muyenga in Kampala, Nyarutarama and Kiyovu in Kigali; Karen and Westlands in Nairobi; and Masaki and Oyster Bay in Dar-es-Salaam etc. In West Africa, it is East Legon in Accra and Banana, and Victoria islands in Lagos. This is not simply a function of class—as many scholars of neoliberalism would wish to contend—but an old colonial model reproducing itself through class.

This is not class, but colonialism.

Lords and ladies of poverty

It is worth noting that while a good number of the new colonisers believe in the new colonial mission of extraction—and are aggressive in its execution— the majority of them are simply workers, simple conscripts. Yet they have been convinced that their work in Africa actually promotes the well-being of the Africans. Thus, they are handed seemingly benevolent projects such as “promoting democracy,” “watching human rights,” working on financial inclusion, teaching a culture of ‘savings’, protecting the rights of refugees, environmental conservation, fighting hunger and disease, protection of the rights of women, improving access to medical care, etc.

The causes of these problems are never exhaustively discussed—and connected to the extractive machinary on the continent—but are simply stereotyped: Africans lack this, Africans lack that, and thus intervention this, and intervention that. Even when discussed, the approach is often pre-determined and the conscripts are only required to execute it, not attempt to reform it. And since the problems actually exist and visible even to the blind, the ordinary person, the sufferer of these problem, appreciates whoever offers any anaesthetics. The very efficient conscripted giver (the foundation worker, ambassadorial staff) finds pleasure in relieving pain. The process is then repeated, as the new colonisers and their myriad emissaries reproduce themselves through constant offers of anaesthesia to otherwise complex conditions.

Ever wondered why expats in European/North American agencies and foundations working in Africa are so committed to offering aid and grants, endlessly “calling for proposals” even when the things they have supported for years have never improved?

Agencies and foundations remain active in the areas of human rights, democracy, public health, education, business empowerment, etc. Why do they continue supporting NGOs and CSOs even when they know things are only getting out of hand? There is a double standard here. Because while for Europe and North America, it is work of the state to create an environment in which people thrive (democracy, business inclusion, human rights, etc.), yet they argue these things can be improved by non-governmental work on the African continent. Why?

Double standards

Consider business empowerment in Germany as an example: a start-up business starts paying taxes only after it has made €20,000 in profits. In this same country, interest rates on loans might only peak at 1.5%. These things are determined by government, and not a single NGO can fix them. It is the same banks in Europe and North America that dominate the markets in Africa. Sadly, while these same banks are opening benevolent foundations on the African continent, they are endlessly pressuring African leaders not to push for lower interest rates. And the reason? They have trust issues with the African borrower.

When Kenyan in 2016 “capped commercial-loan rates at four percentage points above the central bank’s policy rate” The Economist reported, “the move backfired. Bankers slashed credit to small businesses, reasoning that the rewards of lending no longer matched the risks.” The Kenyan central bank responded by scrapping the cap in 2018. This was an actual act of sabotage on the Kenyan economy. The point here is that the sleek neo-colonialism of banks is enabled by a discourse that pivots towards claims such as “Africa’s poor saving culture,” or “poor African business acumen” thus an overwhelming emphasis on NGO work to teach these Africans business.

Let’s consider a related question: Why do donors simply continue “calling for proposals” when they know successful candidates use that money to fund their soft and beautiful lifestyles?

Cases of corruption are really high among the African NGO and CSO elite. In fact, the joke goes that these agents spend most of their time in offices “writing proposals and forging accountabilities.” (See Makau Mutua’s edited book). But why are our ethically attuned benefactors never concerned about how the ways in which their monies are misspent? It is because the new coloniser has understood that to take as much as they want, they have to (a) appear benevolent, whatever the end results of their benevolence, (b) and have to capture the few educated Africans who start and run NGOs and CSOs through some long-convoluted train of corruption.

Funded, through what appears like their good work and good proposals, the coloniser buys both their silence and complicity. What then happens is that once a hostile agreement is negotiated, the privileged Native (who might be still active in the academia, media, non-governmental work, and now government official) sees the coloniser’s real interests and combines with them. Even when a government-multinational deal (say on extraction of minerals such as oil or gold or marble) is clearly bad, potential resistors and or public intellectuals—the CSO and NGO elite—are in a different world of their own. Their lives will not be affected by the bad deal since theirs lifestyles are sealed off from societal concerns. They have a major grant to complete. For the new coloniser, this is simply a long process of turning potential resistors, and yesterday’s public intellectuals into obsequious (sometimes, unsuspecting) compradors. The point I’m making here is that the New Coloniser is inherently, and unquestioningly willing to “help” the Natives – collectively or singularly. But in truth, they are crafting, drafting, and conscripting unsuspecting accomplices, sadly, into their own exploitation.

Get them while they are young

At the end of the day, Africans have to understand that genius of the New Coloniser is not in negotiating and entering contracts, (which are, to be fair, no different from the coerced agreements of protectorates and colonies) in which entire minerals, industries and ecosystems are handed over to the coloniser. But the genius now lies in the ways in which the ground is set for entering this contract—years before even a contract is ever considered. The coercive arm nowadays has a longer, performatively, non-coercive history, but the coercion is rather cultivated. It is really not about cash handouts (although these might be part of the game at some point), but a more elaborate and discrete formular.

The story begins with massaging, preparing, panel beating, and capturing the (potential) African signatory before they ever become signatories. Normally, a blanket selection of potential leaders, mostly the smartest youngsters in any specific country, happens annually. The cohorts come from students, advocacy groups, public servants or NGOs and CSOs. This takes the form of innocent engagements either in the form of scholarships, fellowships or summer schools. Presently, there is competition in Europe and North America for souls and minds of young Africans, and other persons from the formerly colonised world.

The scholarship market is inundated: Germany has DAAD and Erasmus (for both of which I’m a beneficiary), among others; the UK has Chevening, Commonwealth, Cecil Rhodes (doesn’t get more colonial than that), and British Council scholarships among many others. Including several others funded through endowments. America has its flagship programme, Fulbright, in addition to several others offered by independent institutions. Scandinavian countries have many similar programmes pitched as benevolence to the Africans. Even China nowadays has the China-African Friendship programme, China Scholarship Council, etc. In truth, however, weighed against what the benefactor countries take out of the African continent in terms of minerals, food resources, market access and eco-systems, these offers not only pale in comparison, but emerge as absolute tools of patronage and control (the corporate and financial sector have a raft of similar programmes, scholarships and positions). It is like the stuff called corporate social responsibility invented by the capitalists to calm the emotions of those being exploited.

Figures show that by 2020, 1.46 million students from across the formerly colonised world studied in Europe. Of these, 368 700 were in Germany. Other major numbers were in France with 17 per cent and 9 percent in the Netherlands. These numbers are humongous. Consider this revolving door, which benefits the coloniser whichever way it turns: If these brilliant young minds ever return to the continent after their time in Europe or North America, they return as friends of the imperial power, which benefited them with a supposedly free education. These are David Scott’s sublime examples of “conscripts of (colonial) modernity.” If they never return, as more frequently happens, they remain in the benefactor countries, using their talents in service of the coloniser. It never goes the other way. Thus, it becomes some sort of tragedian dilemma, “damned if you do, damned if you do not,” especially that the conditions of education in the formerly colonised world are made difficult by the same people airlifting their best brains. In some rare cases (which were more common under direct colonialism) these graduates returned to the continent as more conscientized revolutionaries ready to challenge the empire.

If the young brains selected were not students but actors in the post-1980 NGO or CSO sector—these sectors being themselves colonial constructions—they are offered with support for their well-written proposals. By the time these folks enter public position, or get appointed as ministers or permanent secretaries or become politicians themselves, they have already been softened and thus conscripted by the agents that used to fund their NGO or CSO work. But as we noted earlier, the NGO world conscripts the elite, the potential public intellectual (who are very few in many countries on the African continent) is turned into accomplice. At most they are turned into satiated individuals who cannot speak independently as their mouths and stomachs are bloated.

Compradors under New Colonialism

There is another form of conscription that Nkrumah talks about quite extensively in Neo-colonialism. But this time under New Colonialism, it takes a more subtle everyday form: namely, offers of assistance in terms of money, guns, or budget support to already existing politicians. This often comes alongside passive-aggressive threats of eviction from office. If the sitting political head was not “helped” when they were in the bush fighting (especially with political heads of the 1980s and early 1990s) or if they were not supported during their presidential bid, they are threatened with removal from office by signalling support to any of their challengers. By indicating potential to support their challengers, they are coerced into handing over the economy. If they were beneficiaries of any help during their political struggles, they are then effectively turned into compradors. This has happened in Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, and Uganda. Indeed, Africans need to beware that many of their leaders and politicians are threatened individuals coerced into a comprador situation. Most of the decisions they are taking—on issues such as mining, banking, trade in agricultural exports, terms of trade—do not necessarily reflect their independent will.

When discussing the violence of structural adjustment programmes still enforced to this day, the African intelligentsia ought to appreciate the ways in which direct and subtle forms of violence are disposed on the daily.

I am not trying to downplay the agency of African political leaders in this mess. They are squarely responsible especially for their decision and obsession to hold onto power for the small pleasures that come with holding a powerful political office. They have the capacity to ignore these threats and if needs be, sacrifice their political careers or even their lives for the greater good of their compatriots. But they very, very rarely do that.

The point I’m labouring here—as I have throughout this entire essay—is that the new coloniser needs to be seen in their informal and performative initiative. There is no direct animosity between the colonised and the coloniser. Most of these engagements appear mutual, friendly, and benevolent to the colonised. While Africa’s problems are stereotyped as needing standardised interventions. Intellectuals, the elite, and the smartest youngsters are quietly, subtly, cultivated, conscripted, and manipulated into comprador positions. While privatisation—as was enforced by the World Bank and IMF—remains operational to this day, we ought to understand that resistance is also is possible. While we are surrounded as I have explored, resistance is difficult if the victims remain blind to the subtle and seemingly friendly ways in which they are being preyed on and turned against themselves.

A version of this long-read appeared in The Pan African Review here.

Yusuf Serunkuma is a columnist in Uganda’s newspapers, and a regular contributor to roape.net. As a scholar, Serunkuma’s recent publications include an edited volume with Eria Serwajja, Before the First Drop: Oil, capitalists and the wretcheds of western Uganda, and Non-Essential Humans: Essays on Governance, Ruin and Survival in Covid-19 Uganda, both books published by Editor House Facility (EHF), Kampala.

Featured Photograph: Julius Nyerere demanding complete independence from the British Empire in 1961.

ROAPE special issue – The climate emergency in Africa: crisis, solutions, and resistance

ROAPE

December 1, 2022

ROAPE is excited to announce a call for contributions for a special journal issue on the climate crisis and its disproportionate impact on the African continent. In this special issue, titled ‘The climate emergency in Africa: crisis, solutions and resistance’, we aim to underscore the urgency of current conditions, the roots of the crisis, and debates over solutions, highlighting the resistance of those struggling for climate justice.

Editors: Lee Wengraf and Janet Bujra

Despite the outpouring of narratives about the climate crisis in Africa, there is still a gap in attempts to synthesise the dynamics as seen in and from the continent, to generalise and develop a wider understanding of the crisis globally, and to centre the analyses of those most engaged in this work. ROAPE aims to offer a unique contribution through this project by locating analyses and reports in a political economy framework, and by bringing together researchers and activists grounded in a radical approach of resistance and system change.

Our hope is that this special issue will embrace the complex interplay of the continent’s shifting patterns of capital accumulation, imperialist expansion, and competition in relation to the climate emergency. The global consequences of the climate breakdown are expressed in the profound and ongoing environmental emergency on the continent and embedded in specific class relationships and inter-imperialist competition. Ideally the special issue will grapple with these issues, highlighting the transformation of the continent’s political economy as it becomes profoundly intertwined with the environmental crisis, and the contradictions and opportunities for political mobilisation and organisation.

Manifestations of the depths of the crisis in Africa are stark: from the disappearance of Lake Chad to the flooding in Durban, drought conditions in East Africa and the cyclones of Mozambique. This special issue seeks to understandwhy Africa is the most vulnerable continent to climate change, despite being a low contributor to the causes of it. This assertion is commonly recognised but requires a thorough unpacking: how do we account for this development from a historical and political economy perspective?

How can we understand climate ‘solutions’ from the perspective of conditions on the continent? The November 2022 UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm Al Sheikh, Egypt, is an ideal conjuncture to take up dimensions of the crisis and elite responses. Africa is the site of rich renewable energy resources as well as a ‘deep bench’ of knowledge from an agroecological perspective, and a long history of struggle against extraction, pollution and land displacement, all of which have fed the current crisis.

The existential nature of the climate emergency compels a thorough engagement that may bring ruptures and disagreements into focus, but that overall can be generative in charting a path towards genuine solutions and a just and revolutionary transition.

A single special issue is not adequate to this large task: we envision the project as a jumping-off point for ongoing and future work.

Themes and exploration

The following are some themes we are eager to explore. We encourage discussion on other related topics. We invite proposals for full-length articles as well as shorter blogposts.

Extraction and the exploitation of fossil fuels – We are eager to look closely at these processes historically and welcome proposals for articles and blogposts examining resource nationalism and the interplay of state-building and capital accumulation. We also are interested in discussion on the alarming pace of extraction projects on the continent such as the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline and the drilling in the Okavango preserve, to name just two recent examples.
War, repression and climate change – Analyses of the numerous examples from the continent could explore themes such as the shrinking of arable land and water supplies and militarisation. We are curious to examine the role of the state in relation to these conditions: how has conflict unfolded in the context of the deepening climate urgency? How might repressive state rule undermine the promise of reform and challenges from below?
Renewable energy sources and labour – The African continent offers wide opportunities – currently unrealised – for the development of renewable energy sources. The potential impact of such development on policy and wage labour systems is profound, such as through the creation of new ‘green industries’, systems of production and employment and, likewise, the role of trade unions and the question of labour negotiation over the terms of exploitation.
Climate disaster in Africa and its impacts – Accounts and analyses of the climate emergency’s impact across the continent will be crucial for the issue.
Land sovereignty and displacement – we hope to explore the historical roots of land grabs and the loss of land and food sovereignty as central elements of the national project and the drive for accumulation. Displacement of people from their land has both facilitated and exacerbated the climate emergency, while the transformation of land for non-sustainable industrial and large-scale commercial purposes has been devastating.
Solutions – An array of debates and discussions on solutions to the crisis have engaged scholars and activists from the continent (and elsewhere). For one, how do we understand and struggle for a truly just transition in the context of dominant market-based solutions? How are the processes of socialising technological solutions and ‘energy democracy’ bound up in questions of class conflict? Likewise, how might we assess the international financial institutions and non-profit organisations’ embrace of methodologies of ‘adaptation and resilience’ and the implications for economic development? Finally, what are the lessons from social movements and the possibilities for life-saving reforms and wider change?

Timetable

We welcome proposals to contribute to this special issue, with an anticipated print date of September 2023. Contributions can include articles, briefings, debates and reviews for the print journal and also blog reports for Roape.net.

Your proposal should:

include an abstract and an outline of what type of contribution you’d like to make
address the objectives and themes set out above
be sent to production.editor@roape.net by the deadline of 1 February 2023.

Your proposal will then be sent to the special issue editors, Lee Wengraf and Janet Bujra. As well as the subject matter and approach you plan to take, they will be looking for:

a willingness and agreement to engage in prior discussion about formats
accessibility and political engagement in the material you hope to submit.

Subject to acceptability of the proposed contribution, the editors will then spell out the process and timelines. Brief queries to the editors about the special issue can also be sent via production.editor@roape.net.

We look forward to your proposals!

Playing the Ostrich – COP27 in Egypt

ROAPE

November 30, 2022

Radical climate activist Nnimmo Bassey asks why the COP is playing the ostrich and burying its head in the sand in not accepting that fossil fuels are burning the planet? How come everyone knows that up to 85 percent of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere emerged from the burning of fossil fuels but the COP ignores this truth? Having witnessed COP27 first-hand, Bassey writes how the event was a huge carbon trade fair for the fossil fuels lobby.

By Nnimmo Bassey

The recently concluded 27^th Conference of Parties (COP27) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, went in the way of rituals and did not rise beyond the low bars set by previous editions. Well, maybe it rose above the bar in one aspect which could be considered, more or less, the brightest glimmer of hope, appearing in the extended time of the conference. For those who were keeping vigil on the deliberations, it was a rollercoaster session. Hope glimmered when many nations unexpectedly rose to say that fossil fuels, all of them, should be phased out, not just the phasing down of unabated coal as was cockily suggested at Glasgow. Recall that Glasgow only talked of phasing down (not phasing out) of unabated coal (not all coal). Observers gasped and yelped as some nations notorious for blocking any attempt to name fossil fuels as the driver of global heating in the official negotiations shifted positions. However, the flickering candle was snuffed out at the final plenary. So it came to pass, that a handful of nations, including Saudi Arabia and China, threatened to scuttle the entire COP if fossil fuels were called out and their obituary announced.

Why is the COP playing the ostrich and burying its head in the sand by being unwilling to accept that fossil fuels are literally burning the planet and that the real climate action is to phase out the polluters? How come everyone knows that up to 85 percent of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere emerged from the burning of fossil fuels but the COP choses to ignore this truth? How come even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) which is the COP’s thinking hat says that fossil fuels must be addressed, yet the COP plays deaf?

The simple answer is that the swarm of over 600 fossil fuel lobbyists at the COP, with some on official national delegations, simply would not allow reason to triumph over profit. And, as expected, African nations asserted their right to use fossil fuels as the means towards developing their nations even if the dangerously polluting pathways that the industrialised nations used brought the world to where we are now. That argument sounds more like the swan song of a fossil fuel industry desperate to keep itself on life support. And, of course, there is no shared understanding of what the development the African leaders speak of looks like.

Some of us expect leaders in the Global South to demand the payment of the climate debt and a stoppage in accumulating further debt by halting dependence on fossil fuels. The jinx and allure of the fossil age must be broken. It is time to quit denial and accept that fossil fuels must be fossilized. African nations are right to be concerned by poor levels of energy penetration on the continent. However, it is essential to point out that this cannot be solved by allowing fossil fuel corporations to get away with murder, ecocide, and human rights abuses just so that you have fossil fuels to export.

Do these leaders not realise that 89 percent of fossil fuels infrastructure in Africa serve export purposes and that Africa’s extractive sector employs less that 1 percent of Africa’s workforce? Testimonies from oilfield or minefield communities are tales of woes, pains, poverty, and death. With the scramble for new fossil fuels development deltas across the continent is the last ditch stand by the fossil fuel speculators and companies.

Assault on the Deltas

The deltas under assault in Africa include the Zambezi Delta in central Mozambique, in the provinces of Sofala and Zambézia; the notoriously ruined Niger Delta in Nigeria; Okavango Delta in Namibia/Botswana and the Saloum Delta in Sénégal. Add to that the lakes and rivers in the Albertine Rift Valley and the Virunga Park and the continent and the world are set to lose major biodiversity hotspots, protected areas and UNESCO world heritage sites.

The resistance by communities, fishers and knowledge holders in South Africa and elsewhere clearly show that the industry is unwanted by the people and that their persistence is nothing but a war against people and planet. We should add, too, that militarization, violence, and conflicts are the templates on which the industry constructs its ever-rising inordinate profits.

Considering the above, it should be clear that fossil fuel extraction in Africa has little to do with employment, energy supply or boosting local economies. It is all about meeting the appetite for inordinate profits and of fossil fuels addicts. It is time to rethink the hard-headed marriage with the polluters.

A harsh reality

Just before COP27, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) issued an Emissions Gap report that aggregated the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that countries have made under the Paris Agreement and concluded that the puny pledges would do nothing to ward off impending catastrophic global heating. In fact, the report highlighted that the world should prepare for a temperature rise as high as 2.8 degrees celsius above preindustrial levels by the close of this century. The report emphasised that the window to avert climate catastrophe was rapidly closing and that the world needs urgent transformation and deep actions to cut emissions by at least 45 percent by 2030.

The first jolt of COP27 was the release of a concept note on carbon removal activities under the Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement. That document defined carbon removals as:

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) refers to anthropogenic activities that remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and ensure its long-term storage in terrestrial, geological, or ocean reservoirs, or in long-lasting products. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon capture and utilisation (CCU) can be part of CDR methods if the CO2 has been captured from the atmosphere, either indirectly in the form of biomass or directly from ambient air and stored over the long term in geological reservoirs or long-lasting products.

Two things among others in the concept note raised concern. First, the reference to storage in ocean reservoirs. While it is not clear what these reservoirs would be, it signals a huge threat to ocean ecosystems. This was roundly denounced by groups such as the FishNet Alliance because using the ocean as carbon reservoirs or for any other geoengineering experimentation could sound the death knell for their livelihoods, cultures and spirituality. The notion of long-term storage suggests that there will be a terminal point or a time when the storage would cease to work. That means that the proponents of such measures are passing on problems to future generations.

Secondly, carbon capture and utilisation, and indeed the entire paragraph, reads like something lifted from the playbook of the fossil fuels industry. Before geoengineering entered the climate debate, oil companies had been capturing carbon and reinjecting into wells to push out more crude oil for burning and releasing of yet more carbon. If this specious definition is accepted, fossil fuel companies would be earning credits for committing more climate crimes by pumping more and more carbon into the atmosphere. It would again illustrate the hypocrisy of the carbon trading non-solutions and the net-zero propositions, keep dirty fuels in business and allow the planet to hurtle to cataclysmic climate impacts.

For many nations and the fossil fuels lobby COP27 was a huge carbon trade fair. However, for civil society groups, indigenous groups, youths, women, and people of faith, it was a great space for interactions, networking, learning and actions. Real and actionable climate solutions were offered while the negotiators were largely busy wordsmithing and birthing non-solutions.

Lost and damaged

The shining light of COP27 was the decision to have Loss and Damage. The Parties decided:

to establish new funding arrangements for assisting developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, in responding to loss and damage, including with a focus on addressing loss and damage by providing and assisting in mobilizing new and additional resources, and that these new arrangements complement and include sources, funds, processes and initiatives under and outside the Convention and the Paris Agreement.

The COP came to this decision after acknowledging:

the urgent and immediate need for new, additional, predictable, and adequate financial resources to assist developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change in responding to economic and non-economic loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change, including extreme weather events and slow onset events, especially in the context of ongoing and ex post (including rehabilitation, recovery, and reconstruction) action.

Having Loss and Damage is indeed historic. However, the nitty gritty of the mechanisms to bring it to life is yet to be negotiated. Already there are signals that the US and some others do not see the decision to have Loss and Damage as having anything to do with reparations or liability. What this portends is that unless those who have already been damaged by global warming speak up and insist that the unfolding crisis has both historical and systemic roots, this may be another tiresome ritual of quirky charity.

Another bone that will have to be picked, will be how this relates to the already existing Green Climate Fund and how rich nations who have not met pledges made since COP15 will cross the hurdle to Loss and Damage. This may well be the pivotal time to go beyond celebrating the possibility of payments for loss and damage and demand the payment of a Climate Debt accumulated over centuries of exploitation, despoliation, imperial and colonial plunder. Loss and Damage cannot be charity.

Seeing the Red Sea

Sharm el-Sheikh is quite a peculiar place. While some could not gain accreditation to attend the COP, the hospitality businesses in the city squeezed all the profits they could from those who could. The people were generally friendly, and the taxi drivers were routinely kind enough to put out their cigarettes as a mark of courtesy. A ride on the Red Sea in a glass bottomed boats was a delight as one could see the state of the coral reefs in the area. Those who found time to visit Mount Sinai came back with tales of getting to the location of the Burning Bush that radically altered the trajectory of the life of Moses in the Bible.

For this writer, the highlight of the two weeks in the Sinai Peninsular city were three guys. The first was the guy who took care of my hotel room and was lavish in the display of his artistic creativity. One day he used the towels in the room to create a heart and decorated it with bougainvillea flowers. On another day he used an assortment of items to create a baboon and hung it over the head of the bed. Swans were routine designs. However, once he used my pyjamas, sandals, hat and pillows to create a full-bodied human form on the bed. It was not a good omen as it spoke to me of a dead or damaged COP. I was happy it was the day to leave and head home!

The other guys who made the stay exciting worked in a panoramic restaurant. They were jolly fellows who offered excellent service and would get you to enjoy the delicacies they offered until your wallet wept for mercy. Medhat was popularly known as Mike Tyson, because people said they had a resemblance. The other guy was Rabea, a very engaging guy who paid close attention to what you needed. And they often tried to make us dance, but the music in my head was a sombre climate negotiations elegy.

Next time perhaps.

Nnimmo Bassey is a Nigerian environmentalist activist, author and poet, who chaired Friends of the Earth International from 2008 through 2012 and was Executive Director of Environmental Rights Action for two decades. He is director of the ecological think-tank, Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), based in Nigeria.

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

ROAPE

November 29, 2022

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

By Brooks Marmon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROAPE

November 24, 2022

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

By Bettina Engels

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

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

Another coup to “fight terrorism”?

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

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

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

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

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

France’s problematic role

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

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

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

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

Geopolitical framing

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

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

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

Little room for alternative visions

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

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

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

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

ROAPE

November 22, 2022

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

By Eyob Balcha Gebremariam

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

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

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

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

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

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

The West and the rest

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

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

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

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

Coloniality and development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rage and Bloom – a review

ROAPE

November 17, 2022

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

By Stuart T A Bolus

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

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

Lena Anyuolo, the author of Rage and Bloom

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

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

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

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

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

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

Towards a just transition: breaking with the existing order

ROAPE

November 15, 2022

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

By Hamza Hamouchene, Ouafa Haddioui and Katie Sandwell

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

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

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

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

Just Transition(s) in North Africa?

What is ‘just transition’?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The dossier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breaking with business as usual

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

Migration and climate emergency in North Africa

ROAPE

November 10, 2022

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

By Ray Bush

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

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

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

Migration, climate change and remittances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Challenging the migration narrative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rural migration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soon to be published in ROAPE journal:

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

Cross, H., 2021. Migration Beyond Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity.

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

Evans, B. and J. Reid., 2013. ‘Dangerously exposed: the life and death of the resilient subject’ Resilience, 1, 2, 83-98.

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

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

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

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

United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), 2019. ‘Mixed Migration Routes and Dynamics in 2018’. June. (accessed 3 January 2022).

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

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

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

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“The international forces against Sankara were too much” – Victoria Brittain in conversation with Brian J. Peterson

Surrounded – an ethnography of new colonialism

ROAPE special issue – The climate emergency in Africa: crisis, solutions, and resistance

Themes and exploration

Timetable

Playing the Ostrich – COP27 in Egypt

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

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

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

Rage and Bloom – a review

Towards a just transition: breaking with the existing order

Migration and climate emergency in North Africa

Decarbonization reproduces colonial inequalities

Oligarchy and the subversion of democracy – warnings from South Africa

The Day Rhodes Fell: Ten Years After

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