More than a moment – The achievements of Black Lives Matter

July 19, 2022

Nadia Sayed assesses the Black Lives Matter movement two years after mass protests erupted following the assassination of George Floyd. We share a talk she gave at Marxism festival in London in July 2022, which is based on her article for the International Socialism Journal (click the link at the bottom of the page to access the full article). Defending the movement’s achievements while considering its weaknesses, Sayed argues that mobilising the power of the working class is crucial to ensuring that Black Lives Matter is not merely a moment but the beginning of a movement that delivers fundamental change.

By Nadia Sayed

Two years on from the explosive and exhilarating Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer, Derek Chauvin. This was the biggest social movement in American history. Millions of people took part in protests, marches and local rallies that spread across every state in the United States (US). In the US and the United Kingdom (UK), where the movement was biggest after the states, it was not just the big cities that answered the BLM rallying cry. Even predominantly white rural towns with little history of anti-racist struggles, such as Bethel, Ohio, a town of 3000 people or Haverford West, a Welsh market town, experienced protest.

Moreover, the international dimension of the movement meant that the banner Black Lives Matter was not only raised in white majority countries but also in the Global South. The biggest BLM protests in Africa were seen in Kenya and South Africa, while smaller yet significant mobilisations took place in other countries like Ghana and Uganda. So much so did Black Lives Matter resonate in Africa in 2020 that when the chairman of the African Union, Moussa Faki Mahamat spoke out against the murder of George Floyd, he provoked widespread criticism against himself due to the brutality of police forces across the continent.

Despite all of this, two years on, a debate has emerged as to whether BLM achieved anything. For Elaine Browne, the former head of the Black Panther Party in the US, the movement is barely a movement and certainly isn’t worth celebrating as people weren’t willing to sacrifice their lives as her generation had in the Black Power movement. Cedric Johnson, author of The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now, instead has argued that BLM was a bulwark for neo-liberalism. Others are disheartened at the lack of concrete outcomes the movement produced. I disagree with these positions because BLM has had a massive impact on society.

Black Lives Matter Transformed How We Fight Racism

The movement achieved one of its primary aims – getting Derek Chauvin, the policeman who killed George Floyd, locked up on the charge of murder. While this is only the beginning of challenging police racism, we must remember that there was nothing automatic or inevitable about Chauvin’s charge. We know how rare it is to have police officers charged and sentenced for racist violence and murder, both in the US and the UK. Additionally, the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 has radically transformed the terrain in which people understand and talk about racism, as well as making people feel more confident in challenging it. And this is the impact we have continued to see roll out two years on.

Let us remember the powerful response to the Child Q case. When news spread that a fifteen-year-old black female student was pulled out of an exam to be strip-searched by male police officers in Hackney, London, hundreds from the community, activists and crucially students, marched on two different days to the local police station. Among their demands for justice, they asked for the involved officers to be sacked. The widespread anger at the treatment of Child Q is in part what has forced the Met Police, alongside five other police forces in the UK, to be put under special measures at present.

The radical response to the Child Q case is not unique though. We have seen several spontaneous anti-racist mobilisations since Black Lives Matter that showcase the new layer of society radicalised against racism, as well as a new layer of activists within the movement. From the student protests and walk-outs at Pimlico Academy (South London) and City and Islington College (North London) to the anti-deportation protests in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Hackney and Peckham over the last two years, it’s evident there is a new and bigger layer of people confident and prepared to challenge racism. If the movement had no impact – to put it simply, the ruling classes wouldn’t be working so hard to undermine Black Lives Matter, something that happened from the very start of the movement and continues today. And we’ve seen this backlash in two ways: the ideological backlash and the backlash with repression.

The Black Lives Matter Demonstration in Whitehall, London

Accommodation and Repression of the Movement

In the US, Biden has both openly opposed defunding the police and intensified his rhetoric of being tough on law and order, a green light to the right who treat protestors as violent, just as they did with the movement in 2020. This slander goes alongside the repression of Black Lives Matter activists. In the UK, we know that the Tories have been relentless in undermining the movement. They have produced the Sewell report, which denies the existence of institutional racism. Their education secretaries have dismissed calls to decolonise education and instead pushing for the positives of the British Empire to be taught.

As in the US, the UK’s Conservative party’s (The Tories) ideological attacks on the movement’s gains go hand in hand with their drive to ramp up the repression with the increasing of police powers through the expansion of Section 60, which allows police officers to stop and search anyone in a specific area without needing to have reasonable grounds. When we look at the vicious backlash of the ruling class to and since the Black Lives Matter movement, it becomes urgent that we not only celebrate the movement that threatens them so much, but that we also learn lessons from it to move forward.

The backlash from the ruling class and the other external pressures and challenges BLM faced meant that inevitably, debates emerged within the movement. Many of these debates continue today and are crucial to how the movement goes forward. Now, I talk in greater detail about these debates in my article in the International Socialism Journal, which I hope people will read, but I’d like to draw on a few of those debates briefly using the space I have here. While the issue of police violence toward black people was the igniting issue of the Black Lives Matter movement, activists proposed a plethora of solutions for dealing with police racism and brutality.

Firstly, even though ‘defund the police’ became a mainstream slogan of the movement, most people think we still need the police and so reject getting rid of them. Secondly, the slogan ‘defunding the police’ has proven to mean different things to different people. For some, it’s cutting police budgets or diverting funds away from the police into other areas. For others, the slogan is about abolishing the police. For example, in the wake of the 2020 protests, 77% of Americans understood defunding to mean changing the way the police operate, only 18% saw it as meaning abolishing the police.

Now, in some cities, the movement did succeed in beginning attempts to defund the police. But two years on, most cities that did so have largely reversed this process. More than that, where cities did reduce or divert sections of police budgets, this had no impact on the way the police operated as they were able to mitigate those cuts. In other words, we can see that it is meaningless to cut police budgets without thinking about wider changes to the police as an institution and wider challenges to institutional racism and inequality.

Flowing from that, we must look at the role of the police in society. The police have the function of suppressing ordinary people, working-class people to uphold a system where a tiny minority have privilege over us. That system has racism hardwired into it to divide and rule, that’s why it’s inseparably embedded into the police, which has the task of upholding that system. That’s why we need strategies that confront the police, not reconcile with them.

As with previous black liberation struggles, the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 faced enormous pressures to be incorporated into the state and respectable politics, mainly by the Democrats. Because the Black Lives Matter movement began under the Obama administration many looked to Joe Biden, who was a presidential candidate at the time of the protests, with suspicion. This suspicion often underpinned a more confrontational stance with the state and establishment for people within the movement: more protests, more occupations, more street protests.

Despite this, sections of the movement in 2020 did get pulled into throwing their weight toward Joe Biden’s election campaign against then-President Donald Trump. Moreover, Biden’s making Kamala Harris his vice-president was met with much enthusiasm by many. For that section of the BLM movement, the fact that Kamala Harris could become the first black female vice-president was enough to warrant its support.

However, as mentioned before, lots of people within the movement were wary of the Democrats and their tendency to co-opt and tame movements. And rightly so, people pointed out that Kamala Harris’ politics were dangerous to the movement. She failed to support independent investigations for police using deadly force, stood against the use of body cameras on police and recently opposed defunding the police. The divisions between those pulled behind the Democratic party and those wanting to continue confronting the state exacerbated the decline and fragmentation of the street movement. For revolutionary socialists, both here in the UK and in the US the Democrats are no friends to the movement. They are a political party of the ruling class. Their interest is to demobilise and deradicalise the movement. Any movement pushing forward means resisting this pressure.

The question of co-option versus confrontation with the state and establishment relates to how we organise, which we shall now consider here. In rejection of big parties and organisations, the ‘structurelessness’ and ‘leaderlessness’ of the BLM movement are often celebrated as a strength of the movement. And to a large degree, this is fair enough – these qualities helped enable the movement’s creativity, which in turn produced a whole new layer of activists.

But, as the writer Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor discusses in her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, strategies that seek to be structureless and non-hierarchical have the limitation of being unable to formulate clear, united demands, nor make decisive moves for the movement at key junctures. This in turn allows for fragmentation, as had happened to some degree in 2020 and an even greater degree in 2016. And while debates can be had on social media, through blogs and so on as to how the movement goes forward – this doesn’t mean these are effective ways for conclusions and decisive action to be decided.

I go into more depth in my article as to the question of how the movement should organise and whether it should be leaderless or structureless, but it’s worth noting here that this debate isn’t unique to the Black Lives Matter movement – it emerged within the recent climate movement, as well as in previous movements like the anti-capitalist movement.

Multiracial Character of the Movement

The Black Lives Matter movement has inspired people in Britain — The Black Lives Matter movement protest in Britain

Now a big debate that I’ll just mention is the debate around the role of white people within the BLM movement. This question has come up in one form or another in every anti-racist movement. What was different about BLM was that the multiracial nature of the movement and its spread (to predominantly white towns) has meant that more people are asking whether white people can play more than just a peripheral and passive role in the fight against racism. This is a positive development because the fight against racism can’t just be left to black people – if racism is systemic, ending it will take the energy of more than just the people who face racism.

The multiracial character of the movement links to how the question of class featured strongly within the BLM movement. COVID-19 exposed the depth of systemic and structural racism, as well as where the real privilege lies in society – with the 1%. Many people saw for the first time how most of our lives are disposable for the good of profit, but racism puts the lives of black and brown people on the sharp end of that. That is the context that BLM emerged from as a powerful mass multiracial uprising in 2020. Class demands for Personal Protective Equipment and decent housing for all were at the centre of the protests and online discussions surrounding the movement. I was at the protests in London, chanting with thousands of others for ‘justice for Belly Mujinga’, a black women rail worker who died after being spat at by a man claiming to have coronavirus.

Significantly, the movement highlighted the intersection between race and class. That’s an important step towards the recognition that racism does not affect us all the same. The death of the railway worker Belly Mujinga, a Congolese woman working at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, did not just happen because she was black. It happened because she was a black worker, like many others often in frontline work which put them at greater risk of contracting Covid. The disproportionate deaths in general of people who are black and of other global majority backgrounds were not simply down to race, but the intersection between race and class – whether to do with work, overcrowded housing, poorer health rates and so on. Class shapes our experience of oppression, including racism.

As Marxists, we think class ultimately gives us the power to end oppression, including racism. Racism has been hardwired into capitalism from its infancy. It was born out of the Atlantic slave trade, persisted through the era of empire as a mechanism of dividing and ruling and extracting resources abroad and continues today to scapegoat migrants and refugees as a way of deflecting anger from the ruling classes (that is, the bosses and politicians, who squeeze most of us to make their profits and maintain their privilege in society).

At the same time, the ruling classes’ reliance on labour makes it vulnerable. Workers who form most of society are the source of its profits and crucial to the functioning of the capitalist system. So, when workers collectively fight back by using their ability to withdraw labour, they can bring the system to a standstill and the ruling classes to their knees. Being part of the working class gives black and brown people the power to end the system, which maintains itself through racial divisions. With Black Lives Matter in 2020, we witnessed a glimpse of the potential impact that working-class action could have on the scale, breadth and radicalisation of the movement. The high points of that movement included the 2020 Longshoreman strike on Juneteenth, where thousands of dock workers shut down the ports up and down the West Coast to protest police brutality and institutional racism.

We welcome this process. But for the movement to achieve fundamental change and raise a challenge to systemic racism, it must consistently base its strategy for change on the power of the working class. We have a huge opportunity to do this now – the recent railway strike in the UK led by black, migrant, and white workers, was an inspiring example. It has rocked the Tories. We must connect the radicalism of BLM with the power of the organised working class if we are to win fundamental change and stamp out racism across the world.

Click the link to read Nadia’s article online: “More than a moment: what did Black Lives Matter achieve” International Socialism Journal Issue 175, 2022.

Nadia Sayed is an antiracist activist based in London and a member of the Socialist Workers Party. She was actively involved in the Black Lives Matter movement in Britain in both 2016 and 2020.

Reading Walter Rodney in occupied Azania

ROAPE

July 14, 2022

The revolutionary work and activism of Walter Rodney was celebrated in Cape Town as workers and students gathered to read his work in the context of neocolonial capitalism in Azania. Joseph Mullen writes about a weeklong event in June which marked 50 years since the publication of Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

By Joseph Mullen

Two days of tragedy marked the beginning and end of a week of celebration in South Africa, entitled “Walter Rodney: Anti-Imperialist Politics Today”. We commemorated the 50th anniversary of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa on 13 June, the date of Walter Rodney’s assassination in 1980, when a neocolonial government silenced a revolutionary individual and 16 June, the beginning of the 1976 Soweto Uprising in South Africa, when a settler colonial regime began killing young people across the country.

In both events, revolution was suppressed with egregious violence, but over 40 years later, the revolutionary spirit represented by Walter Rodney and the youth of Soweto was resurrected in Cape Town as workers and students gathered to read Rodney in the context of neocolonial capitalism in Azania.

Rodney’s mighty spirit has been resurrected by the Walter Rodney Peoples’ Public Revolutionary Library, a collective started in 2019 formed by student activists from Pretoria to fill the gap. The week’s events, put together by the Library and the Tshisimani Center for Activist Education, sought to take Rodney’s analysis and show that “South Africa is still the way Rodney predicted”, as comrade Nyikiwa Mabunda of the Library said. As the comrades went around to introduce themselves, they announced that “Walter Rodney lives”, and that “Rodney is in the room with us today.”

The proceedings began with two films from University of the West Indies Mona Professor Matthew Smith. We first watched “The Past is Not Our Future”, reflecting on Rodney’s days as a student. The audience included many students from across the country who had participated in the influential student movements of the past few years, such as Fees and Rhodes Must Fall (the latter originating in Cape Town itself). We learned how Rodney participated in the anti-apartheid protests that began when he was studying in Jamaica in the early 1960s, and how Rodney’s travels brought him to Cuba during the early revolutionary years, an under-examined aspect of his own intellectual development. Much of the discussion revolved around Rodney’s instruction from a professor that, “There is no such thing [as a revolutionary intellectual]. One can be an intellectual or one can be a revolutionary. You can’t combine the two”.

In the second film, this statement was explored further, as Smith’s “Disturbance 1968” showed Rodney’s decision to throw himself into the popular struggles of Jamaica’s working people and the uprising of Jamaican students in reaction to his banning known as the “Rodney Riots”. As we watched students fight police and bulldozers destroying shantytowns, one could not help but be reminded of the Soweto Uprising in 1976, or the Must Fall movement of the past few years.

**Comrade Vusi “Oldman” Mahlangu introducing Matthew Smith’s films.**

On the second and third days, teach-ins were held on Rodney’s life and his thought in his 1972 classic How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (HEUA), led by the comrades from the Library. They consistently embodied Rodney’s revolutionary intellectual pedagogy. As Vusi Mahlangu said, “[Rodney] didn’t only write… or organize lectures. He also actively partook while students were having protests, unlike the modern bourgeois academia that sit in their offices somewhere and only direct us when we want to do Fees Must Fall”.

The desire among South Africa activists to relate Rodney’s analysis of imperialism, underdevelopment, and capitalism to conditions for South Africans was the very application of Rodney’s critical pedagogy of “Groundings”. Rodney’s desire “to go anywhere that any group of Black people were prepared to sit down and listen” informed the approach of participants from the Walter Rodney Library. The event included many learners from the townships around Cape Town such as Khayelitsha, and generally from outside of the academic ivory tower. One attendee, Andre Naidoo, asked the organizers to remember that illiteracy continued to be a problem in South Africa, and that Rodney’s ideas would have to be made practically understandable.

The comrades from the Library did just that. They took Rodney’s writings and turned them into a teach-in (as opposed to teaching), following Rodney’s ‘groundings’ approach with a hefty dose of a “shop steward voice”, as comrade Vusi put it, to ensure Rodney’s words could be heard by all.

As we began to read HEUA on day three, there was a clear desire to relate everything he wrote to the lived experience of South Africans. When we read Rodney’s statement in HEUA that “it would be an act of the most brazen fraud to weigh the paltry social amenities provided during the colonial epoch against the exploitation, and to arrive at the conclusion that the good outweighed the bad”, my comrades could summarize this in an understandable manner by simply pointing to former Democratic Alliance (and Mayor of Cape Town) Helen Zille’s 2017 assertion that “those claiming [the] legacy of colonialism was ONLY negative” ought to be grateful for “our independent judiciary, transport infrastructure, piped water” and ask themselves if they would “have had a transition into specialized health care and medication without colonial influence?”.

With respect to transport infrastructure, the comrades frequently pointed to “Pit to Port” infrastructure throughout South Africa’s extractive mining industry to prove Rodney’s analysis of “development by contradiction”. Phethani Madzivhandila of the Library told me, “the white settlers would take the N1 National Highway home with them at night and put it back up in the morning if they could”. Now, even more comprehensive evidence can be added to the analysis. Take the “energy racism” of Eskom’s current load-shedding, as Nyikiwa Mabunda pointed out, one can compare the constant power outages in Soweto to the consistent power in Sandton, Africa’s “richest square mile”. Participants could reject the supposed benefits of colonial development easily and concur with Rodney that “the only positive development in colonialism was when it ended”.

Nyikiwa also noted Rodney’s analysis of income inequality and its pertinence to South Africa today. Rodney wrote in HEUA about his interaction with a “young Ugandan” who “put it in a very personal form when he said that the per capita income of his country camouflaged the fantastic difference between what was earned by his poor peasant father and what was earned by the biggest local capitalist”. Rodney extended this analysis to South Africa to prove the poverty of colonial developmentalist logic, as he wrote, “South Africa boasts of having the highest per capita income in Africa; but as an indication of how this is shared out, one should note that while the apartheid regime assures that only 24 white babies die out of every 1,000 live births, they are quite happy to allow 128 African babies to die out of every 1,000 live births”. The failure of statistics to match the reality of the situation led Rodney to conclude that “gross inequalities of land distribution, property holding and income… are camouflaged behind national income figures”. Today, South Africa continues to boast one of the higher income per capita figures but as the Library comrades pointed out, today South Africa has the highest GINI coefficient in the world and is the most unequal society in the world. It is virtually unchanged from Walter Rodney’s analysis fifty years ago.

The significant change in the context of South Africa after apartheid’s formal end has been the growth of the neocolonial comprador bourgeoisie. “We changed just the face of capitalism from a settler capitalist to a native capitalist”, Vusi said. Rodney once wrote that “in politically independent African states, the metropolitan capitalists have to ensure favorable political decisions by remote control. So, they set up their political puppets in many parts of Africa, who shamelessly agree to compromise with the vicious apartheid regime of South Africa when their masters tell them to do so”. Today, the only change is that political puppets of Western imperialism run South Africa.

During our week of discussion, we were asked to look no further than the Marikana massacre in 2012, the epitome of post-apartheid brutality against workers. When discussing Marikana, it was impossible to ignore the role of the comprador class. “What we have today is the consolidation of the comprador bourgeoisie who are assisted by the metropolitan bourgeoisie in the exploitation of the workers. The murder of the workers at Marikana… is the hallmark of what most African countries went through. We went through armed struggle against structural racism to the state of neocolonialism”, comrade Phethani said.

The invocation of Rodney to understand the current contradictions of South Africa, with an aspirant Black bourgeoisie increasingly allied to the needs of the settler minority against the native working class, led to a consistent debate throughout the week about the “Primary Contradiction”. Rodney’s position on the matter is part of Chapter 3’s conclusion in HEUA. He summarized his thoughts by saying that “oppression of African people on purely racial grounds accompanied, strengthened and became indistinguishable from oppression for economic reasons”. He quotes C. L. R. James, “noted Pan-Africanist and Marxist” in saying that “the race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental”.

Throughout the week, the comrades from the Library showed us that one of the most valuable aspects of Rodney was his own experience of the need to hold race and class as inseparable and anyone who privileged one over the other as misguided.

Some participants were equally frustrated with “Eurocentric Marxists” and “Black Capitalists” and strove to find the dialectical answer in Rodney’s writing. When one attendee put himself forward as a “skeptic of Marxism” and asked why race was not still the central point of analysis in South Africa, rather than the dogmatic approach on questions of race found in Euro-Marxist circles, Phethani explained that “it might have been easy during apartheid to organize solely on the basis of race but now we are in a different epoch, and we need different tools of analysis. We must not allow race to be pushed to the front in a way that demobilizes the unity of the working class”.

Rodney’s political development was a story of the same struggle to find synthesis. He was at one point told he was “Babylon” by Rastafarians for his academic posture and focus on socialism, which to them smacked of a certain Europeanness. As Rodney put it, “many … present the debate as though Marxism is a European phenomenon and black people who are responding to it must of necessity be alienated because the alienation of race must enter into the discussion. They seem not to take into account that already that methodology and ideology have been utilized, internalized, domesticated, in large parts of the world that are not European”. But Rodney encountered in equal measure the scorn of Euro-Marxists, class reductionists who begged non-white comrades to forsake the problem of racism.

Debating Rodney’s legacy

As Chinedu Chukwudinma notes in his Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney which was the book studied for the second day of the event and the subject of a book launch on the fourth, “Rodney accused the British left of neglecting the fight against racism. He resented the paternalism, the silent and sometimes open racism he encountered from some of them”. Rodney’s ability to forge a theory not weighed down by reductionism led the Library comrades to call him the “greatest Pan-African Marxist”, a testament to Rodney’s synthesis of race and class, of Marxism infused with Black Power.

One of Rodney’s great values was his lack of dogmatism. As Rodney wrote in the collection of lectures, now published as a book, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, “it is always in the interests of bourgeois scholars to take Marxism as expressed in a rigid and dogmatic manner, because such dogma is then easily shown to be false when it is tested against experience”.

We were constantly reminded that the most important challenge was combatting what Rodney called “Education for Underdevelopment”. As Rodney pointed out in HEUA, European and colonial education (particularly under apartheid) was “not an educational system designed to give young people confidence and pride as members of African societies, but one which sought to instill a sense of deference towards all that was European and capitalist”.

When discussing with younger attendees, many of whom were completely new to Walter Rodney, the accuracy of this analysis was borne out. On the third day, attendees were asked to begin by describing what the word “development” meant to them, and which countries they thought were developed. One noted that if she could, she would leave South Africa for the more developed France. She noted that Paris was free of the “gangsterism” she experienced in her township, and that she would have a much nicer life there. The pedagogical work of Rodney allowed the flaws of this deeply instilled Eurocentric view of development to be easily challenged.

As we sat in small groups to read Chapter One of HEUA, Rodney’s introduction to the concept of development was greeted by comments like: “This guy is sharp” and “He’s very clear”. One attendee, Lunga, who offered to read aloud for the group, reflected that the typical view of progressive social development was disconnected from reality in South Africa, saying that he was told “feudalism, colonialism, and capitalism improved our lives”, but had come to conclude from reading Rodney that “we were just introduced to the Western way of living”. He noted in contrast that “Rodney’s view of development is centered on the human being”.

When we studied Rodney’s later chapters, it became clear why Rodney’s analysis of imperialism has lasted so long as a popular and accessible framework. South Africans who have been dominated by the extractivist mining industry for so long know better than anyone the reality of imperialism’s role on the continent. When Rodney wrote that imperialists “collected fabulous dividends every year from the gold, diamonds, manganese, uranium, etc. which were brought out of the South African sub-soil by African labour” and that “huge fortunes were made from gold and diamonds in Southern Africa by people like Cecil Rhodes”, imperialism turns from an academic phrase to a concrete face of oppression and exploitation.

The desire to tear down and decapitate the statue of Rhodes is recontextualized as a vital anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist action. When Rodney writes of the imperialist super-profits from South Africa, we can point to a company like LonMin (short for “London Minerals”) who employed Marikana workers in 2012. No clearer explanation is needed of imperialism and the super-exploitation of South African workers than the killing of 34 mineworkers at Marikana, who dared protest for a salary higher than their pittance of US$6,000 a year.

One of the most revealing moments of the week with respect to how Rodney is being read in South Africa was when comrades Phethani and Nyikiwa interacted with Chukwudinma to respond to his 2019 article “Towards a Full Understanding of Walter Rodney”, where he argued against Rodney’s view that “whenever internal forces seemed to push in the direction of African industrialization, they were deliberately blocked by the colonial governments acting on behalf of the metropolitan industrialists” with the counter-claim that “South Africa remained a notable exception that contradicts Rodney’s views that British colonialism always stifled industrialization and failed to create a powerful working class. The emergence of industry in South Africa created one of the strongest labour movements in the world that was key to the defeated of apartheid”.

Chukwudinma’s framing of Rodney’s view as a “concession to Africa nationalism” proved unpopular, and after panelist and Marxist author Molaodi wa Sekake initiated a debate on the subject by raising the article and calling the claims problematic, we engaged in a comradely debate.

This debate has no easy answer, but to see students of Rodney in the Global South contextualizing his thought to their conditions and applying it to debates is the necessary continuation of his legacy. The analysis of South Africa cannot be informed without understanding settler colonialism. As comrade Vusi put it, “Occupied Azania is where you can see the legacy of settler colonialism most clearly”.

**Participants in the week’s events engage with Chinedu Chukwudinma over Zoom.**

How this changes the analysis of capitalism, imperialism, and development in South Africa/Azania is highly relevant to the prospects for revolution there. Rodney insisted on a non-dogmatic approach to understanding distinct national and continental conditions. He argued in his piece “The African Intellectual”, that “it can still be affirmed that the African Revolution cannot afford to draw on Marxist theory in its dogmatic Stalinist or even Trotskyist form. But, conversely, it should be equally clear that Africans can benefit from mankind’s ideological heritage just as we can build on the universal technological heritage”.

Rodney’s ability to draw on the universal revolutionary inheritance of humanity, and at the same time emphasize the particularity of African conditions, is what is leading to a growing popularity of his work in occupied Azania. For example, Rodney’s analysis of the Russian Revolution in particular focused on the similarities of Russia to the Global South, as he wrote, “looking at Russia in the nineteenth century was almost like looking at Tanzania today”. This is not just because of the size of the proletariat or peasantry, but also because, to Rodney, “before 1917, industry in Tsarist Russia was not merely capitalist, it belonged to foreign imperialists”. Therefore, there was an element of anti-imperialism in the Bolshevik Revolution, as Rodney says, “the accuracy of Lenin’s analysis has subsequently been borne out by the revolutionary process in Asia, Africa and Latin America”.

This made the ‘Russian model’ a possible path to follow for the Global South in rejecting imperialism and capitalism simultaneously. But for Rodney, colonialism offered yet another particularity that would justify a more specific study of conditions rather than a dogmatic importation of the Russian model. As Rodney wrote, the “transformation of the USSR from an agrarian country into an industrial power” was an inspiration to follow, but Rodney could still conclude that “the African continent will in time produce other examples … of socialism”.

But Rodney was not a dogmatic bourgeois nationalist willing to blindly embrace any instance of “African socialism”. His later analysis of the failures of Julius Nyerere’s socialism, as brought out in his recently rediscovered 1978 Hamburg lectures “100 Years of Underdevelopment in Africa”, again shows a lack of dogmatism and an ability to evolve in his analysis. Where Rodney had once praised Nyerere’s Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), he now wrote that “my feeling is that in spite of all the rhetoric, TANU has not been transformed, that it remains a nationalist party under the control of the petit bourgeoise… incapable of providing the basis for sustained socialist transformation”.

Rodney observed workers demanding the rights they had supposedly won under the government’s Mwongozo policy, “a charter of workers’ rights, reviving the radical aspect of the government’s ujamaa or socialist policy”, which had not been implemented. He notes a “very important instance” wherein “workers actually took over [the Mount Carmel Rubber Factory] and they didn’t take it over from the government, they took it over from a private owner… And they said we can run this factory… They locked out the management and they were running the factory. And this caused the greatest excitement and fear on the part of the bureaucracy”.

Rodney was driven to this conclusion on the future of Tanzania: “if workers were running one factory, then maybe they will run another and another. And this doesn’t look too good for the economic wing of the bureaucracy… their whole rationale of production as a class would disappear if there was workers’ control… so they moved to crush those initiatives”.

The repression of the working class after the ostensibly anti-imperialist national liberation movement led Rodney to conclude that “it is important to recognize that it fits within the general pattern, which we have been discussing so far by which the colonization process ended through an alliance of classes… but within this alliance the workers and the peasants never really had hegemony”.

If we simply remove “TANU” and replace it with “ANC”, how far off is the analysis?

If Rodney was still alive today, and had been around for the celebration of his 80th birthday this year, what would he have made of the post-apartheid situation, where a “national liberation” party kills workers who dare to ask for more justice?

Rodney wrote in his lecture on the Russian revolution that the “aspect of Marxism which lays claim to universal validity [is] its method—the scientific method of dialectical materialism. Like any other scientific method, it produces results on being applied to a given set of data or conditions”. South Africa today can be subjected to the same analysis Rodney was beginning to apply to Tanzania. Indeed, it seems Rodney’s nascent analysis of the failures of bourgeois power in Tanzania would be sorely needed in the first few decades of bourgeois democracy in South Africa.

In conclusion

Though Rodney was stolen from the people who needed him, his analysis and his writings last to be applied to the conditions of occupied Azania. During dinner on the fourth day, I overheard Vusi explaining to anyone who would listen about Rodney’s groundbreaking analogy of Russia in 1917 and Tanzania in 1961, and the similarity of their class composition and status as “backwards” nations. This comparison was revolutionary because it demonstrated to listeners that the development of socialism was not only possible in Africa and the Global South (as many orthodox Marxists had doubted), but also part of the universal revolutionary heritage.

South Africa today, where the failures of the capitalist settlement have been revealed, there is a strong desire to take a revolutionary path that links the struggle against imperialism and the national bourgeois in a single movement for socialism. As comrade Vusi put it, “the national liberation struggle [did not] dismantle capitalism”. The comrades were left to conclude that “a capitalist is a capitalist. Exploiters are exploiters. The workers and youth must crush all of them”. The mounting contradictions of post-apartheid society leave little room for any other conclusion.

As the week concluded, participants from outside academia reflected on its revolutionary significance. Simphiwe Jikijela, a worker from Khayelitsha, told me: “it was the first time I heard of Walter Rodney and his life… the way it was presented to me, it was easy to understand. There was nothing complicated about the presentation during the four days of learning”. Simphiwe said the most powerful lesson from Rodney was “how he fought for the Black working class”. As working class Black South Africans find this inspiration in Rodney, I concur with Chukwudinma, who recently wrote that “the significance of Rodney’s politics will grow in proportion to the new radical working-class movement that emerges today”.

When I asked the comrades of the Walter Rodney Library what the next steps for reading Rodney in Azania were, I was told that readings taking place in the urban center of Cape Town, or in the academy, were not enough. “Rodney should be taken to where the working class is… take these gatherings to Khayelitsha”, Vusi said. Rodney’s legacy is being resuscitated. “I want to be the next Rodney”, comrade Phethani told us and surely South Africa today can produce a new Walter Rodney. The conditions of neo-colonial occupation, super-exploitation, and racial capitalism in Azania are ripe for a spirit like his to come and turn the world upside down.

Joseph Mullen is based at Cornell University and a member of the Cadre Journal, a group focused on anti-imperialism.

Colonial conservationism: wildlife, tourism and land expropriation in Africa

ROAPE

July 7, 2022

Across Africa projects of capitalist extraction still ensure evictions, mass expropriations of land and misery. Today the government of Tanzania wants to expand the space for luxury tourists to enjoy picturesque views of nature – a wildlife fantasy of nature supposedly untouched by humans. Laibor Kalanga Moko and Jonas Bens argue that justification for the dispossession of indigenous communities has shifted from “economic development” to “wildlife conservation”.

By Laibor Kalanga Moko and Jonas Bens

In 1913, Maasai communities went to the High Court of British East Africa, because they were trying to stop the colonial government from evicting them from a large part of their land – which is in today’s Kenya. At that time, the colonialists wanted to pave the way for white settlers to use the land for private capitalist enterprise. Back then, in 1913, the Maasai were unsuccessful.

This year, another court decision is expected, this time around by the East African Court of Justice, where Maasai communities seek redress against the renewed threat of eviction. Now, the government of Tanzania wants to expand the space for luxury tourists to enjoy picturesque views of nature in Ngorongoro district – a kind of nature supposedly untouched by humans. While the outcome of the court case is yet unsure, the government continues its harassment of Maasai communities.

It seems not much has changed in the basic constellation between Maasai pastoralists and their governments. Maasai are continuously forced to leave their land through violent means. At recent demonstrations, dozens of Maasai protesters were severely injured. What has changed, however, are the discourses through which governments justify the dispossession of the indigenous communities – from “economic development” to “wildlife conservation”.

In 1913, “development”, “modernization”, and “economic progress” were central keywords to justify the dispossession of Maasai lands. Arguments such as these remain of central importance even today, for example when people are being forced to leave their homes because of large-scale mining operations. People can lose their land either directly by forced eviction, such as in the recent examples from the Karamoja region in northern Uganda or Senegal, or indirectly because their homelands become too toxic to live in, as in the case of communities around Lake Malawi. Here, justifying discourses are often not very sophisticated. One newspaper article reporting on Zimbabwean villagers about to be forcefully evicted from their homes to make way for a Chinese mining company ends with the laconic sentence: “In a statement, the embassy said Chinese investors in Zimbabwe are working for the betterment of the country”.

In case of East African Maasai communities fighting to remain on their land in 2022, the vocabulary of land dispossession has shifted from “economic development” to “wildlife conservation”. Studies show that wildlife conservation has increasingly been used as an argument to evict indigenous communities from their homelands. This trend can be observed since the 1990s and is prevalent in all parts of the world, but particularly in South and South East Asia, North America, and Africa. Another recent example from East Africa is the attempt of the Kenyan government to force 20000 members of the Ogiek ethnic group from their ancestral lands in the Mau Forest on the grounds that the forest constituted a reserved water catchment zone and the Kenyan state had to conserve it.

One reason for this change in discourse is that in the eyes of many people in the international community, economic reasons alone have lost some of their argumentative force to justify an infringement on indigenous rights. As indigenous movements have gained standing in international organizations such as the United Nations, they have done much to convince people that indigenous cultures deserve protection from certain economic interests in “their” nation states. Article 32 of the United Nations Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, for instance, states that “indigenous peoples have the right to determine and develop priorities and strategies for the development or use of their lands or territories and other resources” and that the nation states must take “appropriate measures” to mitigate the “adverse environmental, economic, social, cultural and spiritual impact” of economic enterprises. Because of these indigenous rights discourses, indigenous communities have moved into a significantly better position to publicly protest land evictions when they are simply justified as serving “the betterment of the country”.

Protecting lions and elephants from extinction, however, is another matter. In this framework, powerful donors and environmentalist organizations from Europe and the US are much more inclined to prioritize the interests of endangered animals over the interests of humans. But even though the language has changed, colonial projects of capitalist extraction still determine the political agenda.

Those who demand that Maasai communities must leave their lands in Ngorongoro district argue that Maasai pastoralism, the economic system in which herding of cattle is the main livelihood, damages the environment and endangers wild animals. Critical conservation scientists, however, insist that the narrative of “animals versus people” presents a false choice. Studies show that indigenous pastoral communities such as the Maasai rarely negatively affect wildlife conservation, not least because they do not engage in hunting. Instead, it is very telling that many of the wild animals that still exist in East Africa reside in Maasailand. History clearly shows: The economic system that systematically destroys wildlife is capitalism, not pastoralism.

Many think that wildlife conservation regulations prevent the capitalist commodification of land because human settlement and specific economic uses such as mining and intensive agriculture are banned in conservation areas. But this underestimates how much money international luxury tourism companies make out of wildlife conservation areas. These companies sell their clients fantasies of untouched nature – an idea that is endlessly repeated in romanticizing wildlife documentaries. This capitalist commodification of images of “nature without people” is being decried by critical conservation scientists. In 2019, revenues from the tourism sector amounted to US$2.64 billion, or 4.2 % of Tanzania’s GDP.

Although these luxury tourism companies depend on wildlife conservation measures to keep out the humans, they are not always taking the protection of animals very seriously. Numerous companies in Tanzania offer big game hunting to their high-end clientele from the US, Europe, China or Arab countries. On the websites of such companies, one can frequently find pictures of foreigners proudly posing in front of a buffalo or a lion, one they have slain themselves.

Maasai people in northern Tanzania, including those in Ngorongoro district, have over the years experienced violent evictions in their ancestral lands to give room for exactly these kinds of hunting companies. In Loliondo, one of the areas in the district, people have been evicted to allow the Ortello Business Corporation (OBC), based in the United Arab Emirates, to conduct game hunting activities. In 1992, the Tanzanian government granted OBC an exclusive private hunting licence. The long-term plan is to establish a 1500 km² wildlife corridor exclusively for OBC hunters. In the last years, both state security forces and OBC’s security guards have repeatedly used violence and harassment against Maasai “trespassers”.

All the while, the Tanzanian government has made the intensification of tourism a political priority. President Samia Suluhu Hassan ranks it highly on her agenda and has clearly stated that she sees international tourism entangled with international investment. Recently, she participated in a lavish wildlife documentary made by US American TV producer Peter Greenberg, called “The Royal Tour”. Afterwards, she went on a promotion tour through different countries, including the US, to show the film and to market international tourism investments – endlessly reported on in national television.

In one telling scene in this documentary, Suluhu Hassan and Greenberg are shown flying in an airplane over Maasai territory. The president introduces the Maasai as “one of the newest” arrivals to Tanzania, migrating from the Nile valley “only in the 1700s”, thereby echoing longstanding narratives by the government that Maasai are not “really” indigenous to the region. Then, Greenberg picks up the thread and comments that it was “fascinating to see these primitive tribes still holding on to their traditional values”. As an elderly white male voice off screen, Greenberg tells the viewers that although the Tanzanian government had attempted to convince the Maasai to change their way of life many times, “they persisted to clinging to their ancient ways”. In summary, Greenberg says, “they may not have a choice now and need to find other ways to support their families”.

What a chilling self-fulfilling prophecy. If not anything else, movies like these showcase the unholy alliance of capitalist agendas to commodify indigenous lands, colonial imagery of African nature untouched by Africans, and the misleading appropriation of conservation discourses. In order to understand what is behind the violent mass evictions of Maasai communities from Ngorongoro district it is crucial to unmask the capitalist agendas of enrichment that underlie these indigenous rights violations, and the “colonial conservationism” that is mobilized to justify them.

Laibor Kalanga Moko is an Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Dodoma, Tanzania, and PhD Student at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

Jonas Bens is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

Featured Photograph: Learning to play the drums in South Africa (10 June 2008).

Note

A previous version of this piece erroneously said that the Maasai went to the the Privy Council in London with their case. They planned to do so, but it did not materialize. We are indebted to Lotte Hughes for pointing out our mistake. A detailed account of this court case can be found in chapter 4 of her book Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure (Palgrave, 2006).

Walter Rodney – A Revolutionary for Our Time

ROAPE

July 5, 2022

Chaitram Aklu reviews Leo Zeilig’s biography of the Afro-Guyanese Marxist Dr Walter Rodney: A Revolutionary for Our Time: The Walter Rodney Story. He argues that Zeilig’s extensive research, drawn from primary sources, provides a brilliant insight into the life and work of Rodney. Aklu also shares his own short eyewitness account of events surrounding Rodney’s tragic assassination in the opening sentences.

By Chaitram Aklu

On the morning of June 14, 1980, four cars and a hearse pulled up at the Thomas Street entrance of the Georgetown Public Hospital morgue in a lightning-quick, military-style operation. The gates flew open, and the hearse backed up. A body (in a body bag) was thrown in and the hearse and cars sped away. Directing the operation were two senior government ministers who had exited their vehicles—one from a dark green car and the other from a light-coloured car.

I had no idea what I had witnessed until I went to the newsstand at the north-western corner of Parliament Buildings where I regularly picked up a copy of the weekly Catholic Standard newspaper. The female seller whispered, “Rodney was murdered last night.” I went into the Stabroek Market just across from the car park to get my Dayclean ‘paper’ published by the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) and asked the seller if what I had heard was true. He reached into a drawer, took out a narrow strip of folded paper and spread it on the counter. It read “Walter Rodney was assassinated last night.”

Word spread quickly across the country and the world. Condemnation was universal. Within an hour, individuals with reams of paper flyers were distributing them free to the public. A pink one showed a likeness of Walter Rodney nailed to a cross and a few people kneeling at his feet. It was captioned: Catholic Church worships St Marx.”

The internationally known Marxist historian and radical was assassinated at about 8:30 pm June 13th by an agent of the governing party who tricked him with a time bomb, which Rodney believed to be a walkie-talkie. His brother who was injured in the blast survived to tell the story. He named army sergeant Gregory Smith as the assassin.

A Revolutionary for Today

The recently published book (March 2022): A Revolutionary for Our Time: The Walter Rodney Story by Leo Zeilig, published by Haymarket Books, the book provides a most detailed chronology of Rodney’s life and works. The book traces Rodney’s short (38 years) life from growing up in a working-class family, his education and work in the Caribbean, Britain, Tanzania, United States, Canada, Germany and back to Guyana where he was assassinated. Zeilig’s extensive research is presented in 14 chapters and is evidenced by the 37 pages of bibliography and footnotes – almost every paragraph on each page is footnoted. In addition, direct quotes are abundant.

Rodney won a government scholarship to attend the top high school in Guyana. He then completed a degree in history at the University of the West Indies, Kingston Jamaica campus before moving on to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he completed his PhD, specialising in African History.

Zeilig has done a remarkable job in researching and organising the text into one detailed book that provides the greatest insight into the life and work of Walter Rodney from primary sources—The Walter Rodney Papers, which are housed at the Atlanta University Center in the Robert W Woodruff Library.

Rodney believed that one must learn, understand one’s history, and organise before taking action. In London, he frequented Hyde Park corner in the summer where he practised public speaking to perfect his verbal communication skills.

Rodney believed that to change history, “We must read and understand the history that has been silenced by academics and establishment historians.” W.E.B Dubois, the American Marxist historian had already “revealed the shortcomings of the popular and scholarly consensus of the Reconstruction era” in the United States. Gerald Horne, who reviewed Du Bois’ book: The Making of Black Reconstruction (Ed. 2021), noted the book “was the first extended effort to shine Marxism’s sweeping floodlight on the tortured history of his homeland. — it offered a solid foundation for the emergence of like-minded scholars from Eric Williams to Philip S. Foner and Walter Rodney” (The Nation May 16-23, 2022). Du Bois was persecuted by the US Federal Government, which indicted him as a foreign agent, tampered with his mail, and intimidated his friends and supporters to silence him. His passport was revoked. Unlike Rodney, Du Bois chose to exile himself to Kenya where he died in 1963.

While studying in Jamaica and London, Rodney could not confine himself to the university campus. In Jamaica, he visited rural communities to learn about the struggles of the working class. According to Zeilig, in London, he was able “to survive the bourgeoisie trapeze – delivering a work of serious, radical, and respectable scholarship to pass his exam, but also managing to say things that were ground-breaking.” This is Rodney’s genius. He successfully defended his PhD thesis: “A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800” in 1966.

He immediately took an 18-month teaching position at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. He believed in President Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa development policy to transform Tanzania through socialism and engaged himself fully–both on and off-campus—in teaching and organising.

A Committed Socialist and Black Power Activist

His commitment to Tanzania’s development was unwavering. So committed he was to supporting the development policy that he asked for a pay cut (in solidarity with locals) when economic conditions deteriorated there. Always leading by example, he supported agricultural development by participating in the growing of crops. Zeilig writes, “He grounded with students and radical politics.” He spoke on campus and outside of the university. But he ran afoul of Nyrere’s government when he observed that it was deviating from true socialism and disagreed with the direction in which the country was heading and was almost banned. Later, he was to be disappointed that Nyerere was playing a game to keep himself in power and was not serious about transforming the lives of Tanzanians. It turned out Rodney was right.

In 1968, after his University of Dar es Salaam contract ended, Rodney, fully committed to socialism and his family (he had gotten married in England and now had three children), returned to Jamaica to work. According to Zeilig, he did not fit into the elite and started going off-campus to depressed areas such as Trench Town and speaking with and learning from the Rastafarian community – bringing his expertise as a historian and radical to these communities. This was also during the Black Power Movement.

Rodney did not introduce Black Power to the Caribbean, but he used his knowledge “to elaborate the complex historical layers to its development.” He spoke, Zeilig writes, “not as an act of flamboyance or self-regard, but as a way of connecting the gaping absences of official accounts of independence.” He taught the true meaning of black power, emphasising that “when repression escalates, so does stagnation and poverty for the poor.” He disagreed with Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture), who visited Guyana and the Caribbean in 1970, that Indians should not be included in the Black Power Movement – calling Carmichael’s position ‘unhelpful.’ Rodney saw people as a class rather than as a race – the poor working-class people. Rodney grounded with Kingston’s unemployed numbering about 150,000, which accounted for one-quarter of the capital’s population, one-third of which “were involved in much of the city’s already-notorious economy based on petty crime, theft, prostitution, and trade in marijuana,” Zeilig writes.

Zeilig wrote that Rodney saw possibility in the “racial expression” of the Rastafarians, a role they could play in freeing the region from foreign control.” Zeilig quotes from author Horace Mitchell’s Rasta and Resistance (1985) that Rodney was “fully aware of the negative influences of the movement, but he was sure that if the positive attributes could be harnessed —– the Rastafarian movement could be part of the dynamic regeneration of the working people in the search for complete freedom.” He engaged in regular group meetings with them. As a result, Rodney was trailed by the security forces and after just nine months was banned from re-entering Jamaica in October 1968 while on a trip to Canada to attend an academic conference. However, it was from those meetings (groundings) with the poor and suffering, that he produced the still widely read book, Groundings with my Brothers (1969).

Rodney returned to Dar es Salaam where he undertook to redraft the country’s High School Curriculum. He was writing, lecturing, researching and travelling. By then his international travels were also being monitored. Once on a visiting professor’s visa to the United States, his travel documents were seized.

But returning to Tanzania confirmed the direction in which Nyerere and the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) were heading. Rodney and CLR James the Trinidad-born historian, Marxist and leading figure in the Pan-African movement, withdrew from the 6th Pan-African Congress of June 1974 when it was revealed that Nyerere was inviting anti-democratic leaders from Africa and the Caribbean to attend and speak. They feared that would have turned the congress into a political spectacle. Zeilig writes, “Guyanese President Forbes Burnham had already extracted a promise from Nyerere that he would not allow the congress to become a platform for anti-Burnham protests.” Robert Hill, Congress collaborator is quoted by Zeilig: “Tanzania and TANU wanted to turn the 6th PAN-AFRICAN CONGRESS into a state-led jamboree of post-independence leaders, bullies, and murderers.” Tanzania’s Peoples President and Ujamaa as the means of transforming the economy were being questioned.

In Chapter Six, Zeilig examines Dr Rodney’s 1972 book: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (HEUA) in which Rodney skilfully accounted for how Africa became underdeveloped, poor and dependent. Zeilig referenced HEUA: The gradual incorporation (underdevelopment) of Africa and African labour was exploited “as a source for the accumulation of capital.” And “The African contribution to European capitalist growth extended over such vital sectors as shipping, insurance, the formation of companies, capitalist agriculture, technology and the manufacture of machinery.” Further “Algeria in the earlier 19th century displayed far fewer deficiencies – than by the end of the century – stripped of its millions of hectares of forest, robbed of its mines, of its liberty, of its institutions and thus the essential prop and motor of any collective progress.”

The book also notes: “Schooling, which had been widespread when the French arrived in 1830, was almost completely wiped out. By 1950 UNESCO reported 90 per cent illiteracy among the Algerian population.”

Organising the Guyanese Working People

In September 1974, Dr Rodney returned to his native Guyana, only to find on landing that the job he had accepted at the University of Guyana was rescinded on the direct instruction of Forbes Burnham. Dr Rodney immediately declared that he had returned home to stay. He was offered employment in other countries. Instead, he organised the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), bringing together pressure groups from the two ethnic groups. The goal was not necessarily to contest elections. However, his wife, a nurse was given a job in the City’s health service.

Dr Rodney would not be intimidated. He took jobs in and out of Guyana and applied for grants to continue his work, including short stints in the US. When Burnham failed to exile Dr Rodney permanently, his wife was also denied the right to work in 1979. He secured a research grant from a Canadian organisation which allowed him to travel and do research. From this grant, he produced his last major work: A History of the Guyanese Working People (1977) in which he presented a historical account of the emergence of working-class unity between Afro- and Indo- Guyanese.

At the same time, Dr Rodney became the leader and organiser for the Guyanese people of all races and especially the youths. Zeilig writes about Dr Rodney’s Hamburg lectures from the manuscripts which show, “The lectures give a powerful impression of an activist and thinker in astonishing form. Rodney engages with challenging and wide-ranging issues, including the continent’s past, slavery, independence, and projects of radical socialist development.” He would rebuke the Third World pseudo socialists such as Forbes Burnham and Julius Nyerere whose Ujamaa had failed to transform Tanzania and raise the standard of living of the working people. At one of his meetings in Georgetown, Dr Rodney told a gathering of what seemed like thousands that the electoral road to change in Guyana was blocked but that his Working Peoples Alliance was promising a new government by Christmas.

Dr Rodney was officially invited to join in the independence celebrations of Zimbabwe but he was banned from leaving Guyana, after he was charged with arson in July 1979 (he was later cleared of the charges). He managed to skip out of the country unnoticed and arrived in Zimbabwe via what came to be known as the ‘Rodney Airport’. Burnham was also present at the celebrations.

The Tragedy

Dr Rodney was assassinated on the night of June 13, 1980. His body was seized by the government for nearly a week. At a memorial on June 21, at the Brickdam Cathedral, Dr Rodney’s friend and associate George Lamming, who delivered the eulogy, began by telling the audience: “We are gathered here in a dangerous land at a dangerous time.”

CLR James, who had cautioned Dr Rodney’s associates to “take care of Rodney and keep him safe” when Dr Rodney returned home in 1974, chastised Dr Rodney for “taking too many risks”. I agree with James– Dr Rodney did take too many risks. I disagree with those who say that there were divisions in the military, and that would help in the removal of Burnham’s authoritarian regime. Labour leaders were bought out or intimidated by the regime. No revolutionary leader, including Fidel Castro, gave support to any opposition forces in the country. In fact, Castro strengthened relations with the Guyanese leader. And as Zeilig informs us, two leading members of Dr Rodney’s WPA who joined the short-lived 2015-2020 Coalition Government, of which the largest party was the People’s National Congress, refused to testify at the Rodney Commission of Inquiry (CoI). Not even mentioned by the CoI were the two senior government ministers who supervised the removal of Dr Rodney’s body to a private mortuary.

The CoI (2016) concluded “that Rodney was the victim of a State-organised assassination on June 13, 1980, and this could only have been possible with the knowledge of then PNC Prime Minister Forbes Burnham,” and that “Gregory Smith was not acting alone but had the active and full support, participation and encouragement of the Guyana Police Force, the Guyana Defence Force, agencies of the State and the political directorate in the killing of Dr Rodney”.

Finally, Zeilig writes: “What we see in the Archive — and what I have tried to capture in this book – is Rodney’s exhaustive historical work and scholarship.” He has been very successful in doing just that. This book is a very interesting and informative read.

Chaitram Aklu is a writer, educator and union leader based in New York City. He writes on a variety of topics including history, education, environment, labour and current events.

Featured Photograph: “From the Archive Walter Rodney’s last speech” New Frame, 25 March 2021 (illustration by Anastasya Eliseeva)

A version of this article was first published in Guyana Chronicle (21 June 2022)

The CIA versus the UN in the Congo: The covert delivery of fighter jets to Katanga in 1961

ROAPE

June 30, 2022

An edited extract from White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa by Susan Williams.

The events in this extract took place shortly after the assassination on 17 January 1961 of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically-elected Prime Minister of the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

The new nation started to unravel almost immediately after independence from Belgium on 30 June 1960. A mutiny broke out among the ranks of the national security force, which was used by the Belgian government as an excuse to send in troops. UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld condemned this intervention and swiftly organized an operation to send a UN peace-keeping force to the Congo.

The crisis worsened the day after the arrival of the Belgian troops, when the mineral-rich province of Katanga seceded from the Congo under the leadership of Moise Tshombe. This illegal secession had the backing of the Belgian government and of multinationals – as well as the private support of President Eisenhower.

It was in Katanga that Lumumba was murdered. White Malice reveals that the CIA had a far greater involvement in the assassination of Lumumba than has been acknowledged by the US government.

The CIA continued to spread its tentacles deep into the Congo after Lumumba’s death: on land, by sea, and by air. This edited extract records one strand of its secret operations in the Congolese skies.

As reports of Lumumba’s death sank in across the world, there were revelations of deepening US involvement in the Congo. On 17 February 1961, a story broke in the British newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, that an American cargo airline was secretly shipping Fouga Magister jets to Katanga.

This was shocking news. For the French-built Fouga CM. 170 Magister was a jet-trainer aircraft that could be used for combat: with a maximum speed of 400 miles per hour, it had the capacity to carry and use rockets, bombs and two machine guns. The delivery of fighter aircraft to Katanga was in clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions and contrary to official US policy.

The British press got hold of the story by chance because a US cargo aircraft was unexpectedly forced by engine trouble to land in Malta, then a British colony, in the early evening of 9 February 1961.The aircraft was a Boeing C-97 Stratocruiser – a long-range, heavy, military cargo plane – on which the words ‘Seven Seas Airlines’ had been painted over but were still visible. Otherwise, the only marking was the registration number on the tail, which identified it as a US plane. It had flown from Luxembourg and was apparently bound for Johannesburg; it carried three Fouga jet trainers. The names of the crew members, all Americans, were given to the US consul general in Malta.

Parts for the engine were flown from the US to repair the cargo plane; once it was ready to fly again, the aircraft and its sinister freight left Malta for Entebbe, Uganda, in the night of 13 February. While in the air, the captain reported to air traffic control that it was short of fuel and needed to alter course for Fort Lamy (now N’Djamena), the capital of Chad; this was a ploy to justify flying in the direction of Katanga. It then flew to Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi), Katanga’s capital.

Patrice Lumumba meeting with UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld at UN headquarters in New York on July 24, 1960. Credit: UN Photo

British authorities in Malta had not appreciated the significance of this flight until the story broke in the press. At this point they quickly shared information about the episode with the colonial office in London, generating a file of reports and correspondence which has provided many of the important details set out in this edited extract.

Seven Seas Airlines was closely linked to the CIA, either as a CIA proprietary company or as a company contracted to the agency. Set up in 1957 by the American brothers Earl J Drew and Urban L ‘Ben’ Drew, the airline based its fleet in Luxembourg. Its headquarters was in Manhattan.

In July 1960, Seven Seas had been awarded a contract with the UN for the delivery of relief goods to the Congo. The company’s four Douglas DC-4s were mainly used for flights from Europe to Leopoldville (now Kinshasa); later that year the company purchased two Boeing C-97s from the US Air Force, which were deployed to the Congo to carry UN troops and supplies around the country.

Jan Knippers Black, in later years an American professor of human rights and international politics, was unexpectedly exposed to this world in 1961, which she wrote about in 1980 in an article for the Washington Monthly. Every evening, she recalled, she ‘stumbled upon a nest of Americans’ at cocktail hour in the Hotel Dolphin in Luxembourg. She described herself as ‘a naive 21-year-old woman from rural Tennessee, vagabonding across Europe’; they were the managers and crew of Intercontinental US and Seven Seas. She was entranced by the ‘spectacle of the crews staggering in’ and one of them, a Seven Seas pilot—amused by her ‘wide-eyed wonder’— arranged for her to fly to Katanga. It was a ‘bizarre adventure’, which made her curious about the airlines.

Some years later, explained Black in her article, ‘I ran across the son of the man who had identified himself to me as the manager of Seven Seas. The son confirmed what I already suspected: his father, now retired, was a career CIA officer. Both Intercontinental and Seven Seas had belonged to the CIA, he said’.

Another aircraft company linked to the CIA and operating in the Congo was Southern Air Transport, which flew DC‐6 transports. The CIA’s involvement with Southern Air became a matter of public record in 1973, when documents relating to a planned purchase of the airline were filed with the Civil Aeronautics Board in Washington, DC. The documents revealed that the CIA proprietary airlines, including Southern Air Transport and Air America, all shared the same Washington address. Southern had begun its connection with the CIA in August 1960, according to a 1973 report in the New York Times; the article quoted a Miami-based pilot as saying, ‘Everybody knows Southern was doing spook stuff’.

Another airline flying in the Congo with links to the CIA was Air Congo. On 1 June 1961, Michael Hathorn, a medical doctor escaping South Africa for exile in Accra, flew to Ghana via the Congo. ‘We boarded an Air Congo plane’, he recalled later, ‘and we were rather disconcerted at first to find that half the seats had been removed and the rear half of the cabin was filled with cases containing bank notes and ammunition!’

Air Congo featured prominently in the brutal treatment of Lumumba in his final weeks of life. When he was taken to Leopoldville on 2 December 1960 from Kasai, where he had been captured, he was flown in an Air Congo plane. Then, when he – along with Maurice Mpolo, the Minister of Youth and Sport, and Joseph Okito, Vice President of the Senate – were flown to their deaths in Katanga on 17 January 1961, their journey was on board an Air Congo DC-4. They were beaten so badly by Mobutu’s soldiers that the radioman vomited and the air crew, horrified, locked the door to the cockpit.

When the three Fouga Magister jets arrived in Katanga, David W Doyle, the chief of the CIA base in Elisabethville, was at the airport. ‘Not long after the Lumumba incident’, he wrote in his memoir True Men and Traitors, ‘three Fouga Magisters . . . were secretly flown in by US commercial air craft and crew, in direct violation of US policy, to join Tshombe’s forces. During a routine airport check-up, I chanced on them being unloaded from a US civilian KC97 pipeline cargo aircraft at night’. He added that when he chatted with the American air crew, it seemed to him that they were mere delivery men, with ‘no idea of the situation their cargo was about to make more tense—the aircraft were obviously there to shoot down UN planes’. Years later, Doyle identified the crew as US Air Force personnel.

The three Fougas, Doyle explained in his memoir, were training aircraft, but they were armed and perfectly able to destroy UN transport planes. ‘The UN was furious’, he said, ‘and it was suspected that was a CIA operation to help secretly build a stable, pro-Western Katanga in case the rest of the Congo were to fall under communist domination’. But if that was the case, he insisted, ‘nobody had told me anything about it—which makes CIA involvement highly unlikely’.

Kwame Nkrumah welcomes Patrice Lumumba to Ghana on August 8, 1960, following Lumumba’s visit to the US. To mark the importance of the visit, Nkrumah gave a speech in Ghana’s National Assembly, laying emphasis on the need for Ghana to support the legitimate government of the Congo. Credit: Rue des Archives 3 bis rue Pelleport Paris/The Granger Collection

Doyle’s version of events cannot be true. Documents show that the CIA had arranged the purchase of the Fougas and their delivery by Seven Seas. It is reasonable to assume that Doyle, as head of the CIA base in Katanga, was kept fully informed and was instructed to await the arrival of the planes. Doyle’s claim that he was at the airport that night to carry out ‘a routine . . . check-up’ is implausible, since he was not responsible in any way for the functioning of the airport, and in any case routine checks rarely happen at midnight. Equally unlikely is his claim that he ‘chanced’ on the Fougas being unloaded. Doyle may have felt obliged in his memoir to acknowledge the Fouga episode, since it had been splashed across newspapers in February 1961. And in doing so, he contrived – but unconvincingly – to dissociate the CIA from it.

On 17 February 1961 the Foreign Office in London sent a telegram to the UK’s UN mission in New York, headed, ‘Jet aircraft for Katanga’. The American embassy in London, it stated, had received reports that the three French-made Fougas were the first batch of nine to be delivered to Elisabethville.

The Stratocruiser C-97 that had been carrying the Fougas had previously been owned by US Air Force Air Materiel Command at Kirtland Field, New Mexico, and was used in a project code-named ‘Chickenpox’, in which its interior was adapted for the mobile assembly of atomic bombs. The C-97 was then assigned to the US civilian registry and ‘may have been used to ferry arms to Katangan rebels in early 1960s’, according to a flightlog. However, it was not registered under the name of Earl J Drew until 16 February 1961, which was two days after it had delivered the Fougas to Elisabethville.

Aware of the flare-up of tensions over the matter of the Fougas, the British government hastily sought to distance itself from the incident and to prevent further embarrassments. ‘In view of serious political repercussions that could arise out of Aircraft ferrying operations to Katanga’, wrote the colonial secretary to the governor of Malta on 18 February, ‘I should be most grateful if you would do what you can to prevent use of Malta by such Aircraft’.

Kwame Nkrumah, the President of Ghana, felt intense grief at the killing of Lumumba, with whom he had had a warm friendship and a strong political alliance. He was outraged: he blamed the US and the Western powers for the assassination. When he learned on 17 February 1961 from the UK press of the delivery of three Fougas to Elisabethville by a US aircraft, he was appalled. Then he discovered that the three jet trainers were merely the first of nine to be delivered to Tshombe.

Ghana’s minister of foreign affairs issued a strong statement to the US ambassador to Ghana on 20 February. If the reports were true, the minister objected, they ‘are obviously of most serious nature’. In this regard, he continued, the government of Ghana called attention ‘to statement made by president of US on Thursday 16th February to effect that unilateral intervention in Congo by one country [or] one group of countries would endanger peace in Africa’.

President Kennedy was embarrassed. He told Nkrumah: ‘The United States government did not, in fact, learn of this shipment in sufficient time to prevent a transaction which took place entirely outside the borders of the United States’. He added that Adlai Stevenson, the US ambassador to the UN, had condemned the delivery of the aircraft. Nkrumah was unimpressed—and said so.

President John F. Kennedy meets with the President of the Republic of Ghana, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, 8 March 1961 Credit: JFK Presidential Library /Abbie Rowe

The American embassy in London reported to the UK foreign office on 17 February that its government had little control over Seven Seas, since it operated outside the USA. The embassy added, ‘The French have apparently detained the remaining six Fouga aircraft at Toulouse’.

But there was some confusion about the intentions of Seven Seas. A week later, on 27 February 1961, the UK embassy in Luxembourg sent further information to the UK foreign office about the delivery of the Fougas to Tshombe; the information was then cabled to the governor of Malta on 3 March. The message reported that Seven Seas proposed ‘to transport to Katanga six more Fouga Magister jet trainers (with machine guns) which were awaiting shipment by them from Toulouse’. According to the US embassy in Luxembourg, however, Seven Seas had now given an assurance that it would not transport any more such aircraft to Katanga, in response to the embassy’s ‘strong representations’ after the shipment the week before.

The exposure of the role of Seven Seas Airlines in the delivery of the Fougas came as a shock to the UN, which had a contract with the airline. It grounded the entire fleet of Seven Seas planes in the Congo.

But the UN could not stop the airline from operating in Katanga and working directly for Tshombe’s government. Tshombe used a Seven Seas Curtiss C-46A-35-CU Commando as his personal aircraft.

Urban L ‘Ben’ Drew, one of the brothers who had set up Seven Seas Airlines, was working in Katanga for Tshombe in 1961, according to a 2014 article in the South African newspaper The Citizen. Drew, an American veteran of the US Army Air Forces (USAAF), was an ace fighter pilot. He was described as ‘an extremely handsome and sociable man, who liked women and whiskey, who would make a lot of money just to lose it’.

Urban Drew during World War II. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

According to his son, Drew ‘was called upon by the U.S. government to work on clandestine bases in the Belgian Congo and Vietnam’. In a 1975 study of arms trafficking, Drew is presented as ‘an old hand of the CIA with a particularly adventurous past’.

Once the three Fouga Magister jet fighters had been delivered to Elisabethville on 13 February 1961, the Katanga Air Force dominated the skies, for the UN had no combat aircraft at all. This superiority in the air was diminished within a few months, when one Fouga was seized by the UN and another was destroyed in a crash. But there was still one operational Fouga left: Kat #93, based at Kolwezi airfield. This Fouga continued to wreak havoc on the UN, bombing and attacking its ground forces and crippling the UN’s ability to fly. Suggestions have been made that in the last few months of 1961, more than one Fouga was operational; however, the evidence thus far is unclear.

UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld appealed urgently to a number of countries, including Ethiopia, for jet aircraft capable of protecting the UN forces from the Fouga. Ethiopia willingly agreed, but Britain refused to give them the right to fly over British East African territory, which was necessary for the planes to reach the Congo.

It has been claimed that Kat #93, which was capable of air-to-air attack, shot down the DC-6 carrying Hammarskjöld on the night of 17–18 September 1961 near Ndola airport in British-ruled Northern Rhodesia (independent Zambia from 1964), not far from the Congo border. The crash of this plane led to the death of the Secretary General and all those who were travelling with him; their deaths were separated from the execution of Lumumba by only eight months and by less than 200 kilometres.

Commander Charles M Southall, a US naval intelligence officer working at the National Security Agency’s listening station in Cyprus in 1961, was one of those who linked the Fouga to Hammarskjöld’s death. Giving testimony in 2012 to an independent commission of inquiry into the crash, Southall said that he heard the recording of a pilot’s commentary as the pilot shot down Hammarskjöld’s DC-6: ‘It was, I was told, a Belgian mercenary, up there in his Fouga Magister.’ A pilot himself, Southall made the following observation: ‘Now mind you, the Fougas only had what we call a loiter time of about 30 minutes at altitude, so he must have been pre‑positioned up there’.

Southall said he heard the pilot call out, ‘I see a transport coming in low, I’m going to go down and look at it’, and then he said ‘yes, it’s the transport’. Southall added, ‘Now whether he said “yes it’s the Trans Air”, “DC6”, or it’s just, “yes, it’s the plane”, I don’t remember, but he said “I’m going to make a run on it”.’

Southall continued, ‘It’s quite chilling. You can hear the gun cannon firing and he said “Flames coming out of it, I’ve hit it! Great”, or “good” or something like that[;] “it’s crashed”. And that was the end of the recording. I remember the watch supervisors commenting that this recording was only seven minutes old at the time’.

Asked who he thought was responsible for the crash, Southall replied: ‘In my view, and it’s a private view . . . there was a CIA unit out there and they had responsibility for fuelling the plane, finding the pilots, coordinating with the Belgian, French mining interests and it was the CIA unit that ensured that [Hammarskjöld’s] plane would be shot down’.

Inquiries into the role of the Fouga constitute an important plank in the current UN investigation into the cause of Hammarskjöld’s death, which was initiated by the UN Secretary General in 2015. This investigation is led by Mohamed Chande Othman, the former chief justice of Tanzania.

Three earlier inquiries into the crash were conducted in 1961-62. The first was conducted by a Board of Investigation set up by the Rhodesian Department of Civil Aviation. The report of the Board identified several possible causes, including pilot error and the ‘wilful act of some person or persons unknown which might have forced the aircraft to descend or collide with the trees’. The subsequent Rhodesian Commission of Inquiry identified pilot error as the cause but without any actual evidence. The third investigation was carried out by a UN Commission, which reported in April 1962; it reached an open verdict and did not rule out sabotage or attack.

There is evidence to suggest that British government representatives influenced the Rhodesian Commission to adopt the pilot error theory. The Rhodesian Commission’s report was welcomed by powerful Western forces, such that the pilot error theory became widely accepted in the decades after the crash. However, this explanation has been challenged in recent years by fresh evidence. ‘It appears plausible’, observed Judge Othman in 2017, ‘that an external attack or threat may have been a cause of the crash, whether by way of a direct attack . . . or by causing a momentary distraction of the pilots’.

It is difficult to flesh out the full details of the purchase and delivery to Katanga in 1961 of Fouga fighter jets to attack UN forces. Even as recently as April 2022, a Freedom of Information Act request to the CIA for records in 1961 on Earl J Drew, one of the brothers who set up Seven Seas Airlines, produced only five pages. The pages have been so extensively redacted that two of them are almost blank.

This is a further example of the secrecy that prevents any full understanding of the Congo’s history, so much of which has been shaped by other nations.

Nevertheless, sufficient information has emerged to reveal a thick nexus of clandestine and coercive operations that were used by the CIA to support American plans for the Congo and for the African continent.

Senator Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who chaired the 1975 Senate Select Committee investigation into the abuses of the CIA, opposed covert action of any sort. He described it as nothing more than ‘a semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies, whatever is deemed useful in bending other countries to our will.’

Excerpted and edited from Chapter 32 of White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa by Susan Williams and published by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd. © Susan Williams, 2021. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Footnotes have been removed to ease reading; they are available in the printed book.

For more information about the author and the book, see the publisher’s site here: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/white-malice/

Dr Susan Williams is a senior research fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her books include Who Killed Hammarskjöld?, which in 2015 triggered a new, ongoing UN investigation into the death of the UN Secretary General. Spies in the Congo spotlights the link between US espionage in the Congo and the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. Colour Bar, the story of Botswana’s founding President, was made into the major 2016 film A United Kingdom.

The Struggle for Change in the Congo – An Interview with Bienvenu Matumo

ROAPE

June 28, 2022

ROAPE’s Ben Radley interviews Congolese activist Bienvenu Matumo. Matumo speaks about what led him to become an activist with Lutte Pour Le Changement (LUCHA) and LUCHA’s struggle for social justice and human dignity. He argues that the killing, imprisonment, and repression of activists has continued unabated under the new presidency of Félix Tshisekedi.

Ben Radley: To start us off, can you tell us something about your childhood and upbringing? How did your own background lead you to become a LUCHA activist?

Bienvenu Matumo: I grew up in a village in Nyamilima, where my father worked as an agent of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA). I’m the son of a cop. He raised me to be politically aware and to love radio so I would follow the news, and that’s how I became interested in public information and politics. He came from South Kivu and would describe the conflicts and war in the 1960s, the independence struggles and especially seeing successive Congolese presidents. I come from a modest family but my father told me that I could do better than him. He wanted me to study hard so I could find a decent job and eventually go into politics. I was still very young when he died in 2001, so to graduate from school and university I needed a lot of support from my mother and her family.

I grew up amid the conflicts rife in the province of North Kivu. I saw Congolese people dying, young people killed for belonging to one ethnic group or another. I lost friends who fell victim to these ethnic practices. Other friends joined the armed groups to seek vengeance for relatives killed in the ethnic violence, and some of those friends died. Yet none of my friends chose freely to join. As victims of that violence, it was their only option.

My path was determined in the context of these conflicts, of the injustices they generated, and of the poverty endured by Congolese families like my own that struggled to provide for their basic needs. Unfortunately, several of the issues that affected my childhood continue to afflict the civilian population today: the living conditions of those displaced by war, the Rwandan refugee problem, and the Rwandan and Ugandan occupation.

I was at the University of Goma in 2008 when I met activists like Luc Nkulula, Serge Sivya and others. That led me to join the citizen movement LUCHA (Lutte pour le Changement), then still in its infancy.

Yourself and your comrades have been imprisoned under the Kabila administration for your activism with LUCHA. Can you tell us about these experiences and their influence on you?

The NIA arrested me twice in Kinshasa for my activism – in August 2015 and again in February 2016. The first time I didn’t spend long on police premises. After pressure from a number of sources – Congolese, human rights organisations and DRC partner organisations – I was released without trial after four days of interrogation. But the second occasion resulted in six months in Makala, Kinshasa’s biggest prison. Friends arrested with me suffered from bouts of depression as this was their first experience of prison, Victor Tesongo and Marcel Kapitene in particular. But I stayed strong, in public and in private. I was the most high-profile figure in the case and I acted as a leader. I couldn’t afford to appear anxious or depressed even though imprisonment was changing the course of my life – for good and ill.

I was more worried about my mother and two sisters, who rely on me so much. I’d only just graduated and received my posting to the Ministry of Agriculture. I thought that I’d lose my job and that my family would suffer.

https://www.acatfrance.fr/public/victor-tesongo-bienvenu-matumo-heritier-kapitene.jpg — Bienvenue (centre) in prison with two other activists, Victor Tesengo (left) and Marcel Heritier Kambale Kapitene (right)

However, our imprisonment was very significant in political and symbolic terms. We came to represent a courageous younger generation prepared to fight and challenge the dictatorship, and our jailing (and that of other LUCHA activists) made the Congolese aware of the political manipulation of the justice system.

During our six months in Makala we achieved a great deal (the Kinshasa section of LUCHA was founded there). The authorities intended the prison to be a place of punishment and detention. Instead, it turned into an activist laboratory. It also became a university, as we managed to arrange opportunities to read, share knowledge, write, debate, and learn languages like English and Italian (although we didn’t make much progress). While I was in prison, with the full support of Fred Bauma, I drafted my application for the grant that enabled me first to study in France and then to pursue my doctoral research at the Paris 8 University, where I now teach in the geography department.

In short, I think prison played a big part in shaping my activism and developing my social and cultural capital. I met some fantastic prisoners who gave us vital support. With Eddy Kapend, I regularly discussed the DRC’s history under Laurent Kabila’s regime. I developed my first serious contacts with Congolese politics while I was in jail. In short, the effect of these arrests was to supercharge both my personal commitment and the construction of LUCHA’s ideas more generally.

Can you tell us a bit more about LUCHA, its history, its vision, and its objectives?

I’ve been a proud member of LUCHA for almost nine years. In general terms, LUCHA works for social justice and human dignity. Our aim is to raise awareness among citizens to render them capable of monitoring decision-makers and holding them to account. We want to fulfil our civic responsibility, which requires us to be politically aware and to exercise our power as citizens to secure freedom, democracy, and respect for human rights in our nation and to install a form of government which permits all Congolese to live in peaceful enjoyment of our natural resources and of equality before the law. Our vision is simple: it is of the New Congo, a strong, free, united, and prosperous nation, where every Congolese may live with dignity and justice. We draw our inspiration from the political ideas of Lumumba and other pan-African opponents of colonisation and slavery. LUCHA is thus open to African coalitions and committed to wider African issues.

There is a contradiction inherent in our work. How can we expect young activists from regions plagued by three decades of conflict to embrace an ethos of non-violence? The answer is simple yet complex. We argue firstly that ‘political’ violence has produced damage greater than any solutions to the issues it seeks to resolve, so the option of non-violence is an invitation to use alternative methods that lead to different results. The solutions produced by non-violence are also durable, while violence leads to fragile solutions and breeds hatred and a desire for revenge. Another argument highlights the success and global reach of non-violence. We can cite the meaningful and politically significant speeches and actions of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and others like them. Non-violence is essential in bringing new hope to the struggle and in countering the widespread belief that young people in eastern Congo are violent by nature. Non-violence is now firmly embedded in Congolese society, particularly in the fields of political and community activism.

LUCHA has had its highs and lows, but the history of the movement is essentially built around the ideas, beliefs, rebellion, and anger of its activists, and around the illegal and arbitrary arrests they have suffered. In my view LUCHA has played a historically significant role in the struggle to ensure respect for the constitution and in the promotion of certain social and security issues. For example, LUCHA helped to ensure that Joseph Kabila obeyed the constitution and did not stand for a third term as president. LUCHA activists mobilised and demonstrated in various ways – direct action, dead city days, sit-ins, petitions, strikes, marches, protests – and at local, national, regional, and international level. Together these actions forced Kabila from office.

Having grown up under Joseph Kabila’s presidency, how would you describe the impact of this period of Congolese history on yourself and your political development?

Yes, I grew up under Kabila’s presidency. Initially, many people found his youth attractive. At school, for example, we were proud of having the world’s youngest president. But as we matured and developed firm views on government our disenchantment grew. We can forgive his early years of shared presidency, from 2002 to 2005, even while opposing him on certain matters. From 2006, however, he squandered the chance to develop the country, which is unpardonable. His regime was one of predation, corruption, impunity, embezzlement, repression, instability, and uniformity of thinking. Daily life continued to collapse, hugely affecting my education and that of my contemporaries, households, and the nation as a whole. Many children had families that couldn’t afford for them to study. Others finished their education but couldn’t find a job due to high rates of unemployment.

My political activism was triggered when Kabila decided to defy the constitution and seek a third term of office, when living standards were falling and insecurity in the eastern provinces was killing many Congolese. Lives were being cut short, families torn apart and hopes dashed, all to complete official indifference. Nothing was done but count the dead, compile statistics. Then, shortly after military commanders like Mamadou Ndala Moustapha and General Bauma had led the struggle against the M23 rebels, they were killed in dubious circumstances, again to no interest from the Congolese state. I also abhorred the poor conditions suffered by the military, civil servants, police officers, and their dependents, whose protests continue while government ministers and governors lived or live in social opulence. This unequal distribution of state revenue angered me. We must fight against the social inequalities created and perpetuated by the state.

All this happened around 2014. That’s when I was radicalised and became an activist. I wanted to raise awareness among my compatriots in order to thwart the plans of Kabila and his cohort of predators. Happily, Kabila was forced from office but his practices live on. The fight continues in this respect.

Kabila left power and was replaced in January 2019 by Felix Tshisekedi. Has the new regime made it easier for citizen movements like LUCHA to grow and expand?

Far from it, repression continues and activists are now dying. Three LUCHA activists have been shot dead by the police during non-violent protests since 2019: Obadi in November 2019, Marcus in May 2020, and most recently 22-year-old Mumbere Ushindi on 24 January 2022. LUCHA activists have also been subject to arbitrary arrest, and another comrade from Beni, Kambale Lafontaine, suffered an amputation after he was shot in the leg during a demonstration. Thirteen of my comrades have just been thrown in jail and sentenced to twelve months’ detention. LUCHA has already appealed this unjust verdict. And another comrade, King Mwamwiso, has been arrested by Goma’s mayor for strongly criticising the local administration.

One thing that has changed is the reason for our arrest. Under Kabila we campaigned around issues of democracy and respect for the constitution. Now we’re protesting about security issues. Our demands for an end to instability, massacres and violence are legitimate, and without doubt we’re contributing to the search for peace. I should stress that we’re not the only group suffering a crackdown for highlighting security issues. Local activist artists in Beni are also being targeted. I’m thinking here of Idengo who is languishing in Goma’s central jail.

Politically speaking, LUCHA continues to circulate proposals and ideas on the electoral process, corruption, impunity, the handling of Covid, and the tricky issue of the state of emergency. Our influence permeates the religious and political spheres. To advance our causes and agenda, we engage with political, religious, and civil society actors. If they heed what we say, the Congo will be the winner. We ensure that institutions receive copies of documents relevant to them. Our annual Fatshimetrie newsletter, for example, is sent to a wide range of actors, telling our leaders how their actions are viewed by the citizens. We send memos and letters to the authorities when consultations and conferences are held. We’ve met President Tshisekedi, the Prime Minister, and other ministers to discuss our proposals on various issues in national life, but three years later there is nothing to show for it. I’ve realised that these people don’t listen and would rather carry on regardless. The only visible reaction has been to demonise and stigmatise brave activists. LUCHA is growing and will continue to do so, and its role will be crucial in the months to come.

Do the recent events and political changes in the Congo give you hope for a better future, or are the same practices under Kabila, of predation and so on that you’ve mentioned, simply continuing under a different leadership?

My hopes of a bright future come from the fact that I’m standing up and fighting for it, not from past political changes and events. Tomorrow’s Congo will be better than it is today but only if we assume our individual and collective responsibilities. In short, I argue that while Kabila has gone his practices remain and we must be resolute in combating them.

Finally, 2021 was the 60th anniversary of the assassination of Lumumba. Can you describe his influence in today’s Congo? What does he mean to you and other political activists?

The trio of Lumumba, Okito, and Mpolo are considered the fathers of Congolese independence, while Lumumba himself is a major figure in Congolese, African, and world history. To describe yourself as a Lumumbist is seen as an asset conferring political legitimacy in popular opinion. Congolese political parties continue to proclaim their adherence to Lumumba’s ideas in words if not in deeds. I’m thinking, for example, of the Parti Lumumbiste Unifié (PALU) whose actions are a travesty of Lumumba’s political thought. His influence played a key role in my development as an activist and he continues to inspire in the DRC. A lot of young activists identify with his thought and embody many of its aspects.

Bienvenu Matumo is a LUCHA activist. He is a doctoral student in social geography at the Paris 8 University, and a student in political science at the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. He is a member of des ateliers de la République, a group of reflection and action on public policies in the DRC and in Africa. He is an alumni of the Ecole nationale d’administration. He currently lives in-between Paris and Kinshasa.

Whites and democracy in South Africa

ROAPE

June 21, 2022

Before 1994 there was enormous speculation that white intransigence in South Africa would lead to a racial war. In his new book, Roger Southall finds that by the mid-1980s most whites saw the writing on the wall. Even so, he argues, the economic system which had maintained white dominance was left more or less intact.

By Roger Southall

How on earth does one write a book about a category of people defined by the social construct of ‘race’? Is it possible to say anything sensible about such a topic? The answer to both questions is ‘with difficulty’, and the knowledge that whatever answers one comes up with, are likely to be highly contested, and very possibly be wrong. Even worse, whatever one says, the motivations of the answers given are likely to be misconstrued, one is probably setting oneself up for all sorts of accusations. In fact, when I look back, starting on this project was a pretty stupid thing to do. But I have done it, and while I don’t think I have got a lot wrong I am not sure I have my got all my answers right.

I decided to tackle the subject because for so long there was enormous speculation that white intransigence in South Africa was leading to a racial war. As it turned out, the much-prophesied war was exported to other countries in the southern region, with South African troops sent to fight in Angola and Namibia. Although within South Africa, soldiers were sent into the townships to confront internal rebellion, and the often labelled ‘peaceful transition to democracy’ was rather brutal and very bumpy, it happened in a less violent way than many had expected. As I detail in the book, by the mid-1980s most whites had seen the writing on the wall and turned their attention to coping (personally and collectively) with what they had feared for so long, black majority rule. Under De Klerk, the apartheid regime sought to ride the wave, to shape the transition in the most favourable way for white interests, but ultimately lost control of the agenda. Confronted by the superior negotiating front of the ANC and – let’s not forget it – the genius of Nelson Mandela, De Klerk was forced to concede a genuinely democratic constitution. Even so, the economic system which had maintained white dominance was left more or less intact.

Fast forward twenty-five years. The ANC has been in power all that time, under five different presidents. Like many post-colonial governments, it has been waylaid by the fruits of power. It has become arrogant, increasingly unaccountable, and systematically corrupt. It has merged the party with the state, rendered the public service subject to its whims, and made blatant raids on the public fiscus. Under Jacob Zuma, the parastatal sector – notionally providing fundamental infrastructure for the economy (electricity, transport, water, the national airline etc.) – was transformed into a feeding trough for the ANC’s post-colonial bourgeoisie, with the result that most state-owned enterprises (and certainly the big ones) are hopelessly indebted and need constant bailing out by the Treasury. Local government has become a mess. Most municipalities have likewise been plundered, and most have been unable to do their job, providing access to basic services to their inhabitants.

Meanwhile, the ANC has also made a mess of running a capitalist economy, far less transforming it. Big business and the small and medium enterprise sector alike are totally hampered by a maze of regulations that have inhibited growth and service delivery. Economic growth has stalled; unemployment has rocketed to 35 per cent; poverty continues to stalk the land; black children go to bed hungry. Cyril Ramaphosa, elected to the presidency as a reform candidate, has been boxed in by competing factions within the ANC, and has showed little appetite for confronting his rivals within the party. His so-called long game has ended up as a dull draw, boring and frustrating to the crowd watching the game.

So, what about whites while all this has been going on? It would have been a great help to answering this question if any of the approaches to the national question which were pursued by the liberation movements had given any firm guidance. But when put to the test, neither the non-racialism, officially espoused the ANC, nor Africanism (theorized by the Pan-Africanist Congress in the 1950s and latterly taken up by many elements within the ANC) gave any real answers about how whites would fit in to a democracy. There were both remarkably vague, and while Desmond Tutu’s ‘rainbowism’ had a warm glow to it, like the idea of multiculturalism internationally, it didn’t have anything to contribute to a serious discussion either.

Into this yawning void have stepped the ‘whiteness scholars’, contributing significant depth to the discussion of how the white minority has reacted to democracy, yet trailing many questions behind them in their wake. Is the behaviour of all whites shaped by their ‘whiteness’? Can they ever escape it? Is ‘whiteness theory’ simply a jazzed-up version of the ideas of socialization which I read about when I was an undergraduate? And are whiteness scholars themselves not influenced by their whiteness, even if quite a few of them are pretty obviously trying to prove they are not? No mistake, whiteness theory poses some very difficult questions, and I have learned a lot from its literature, but in the end, I decided it was necessary to take a more obvious and empirical route of asking whites a lot of questions and interpreting their answers, along with analysing their political behaviour.

An important place to start was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It is widely accepted that members of the former regime and whites generally ducked the chance to wrestle with their guilt and complicity with apartheid. Fortunately, there is a massive literature about this, and I was able to plunge into this, especially the comparative thinking that used the post-war German experience to look at South African whites’ reactions to the TRC in the 1990s.

For better or worse, I opted to use focus groups to foment discussion about whites. These were run for me by an expert outfit, Citizen Surveys, and I supplemented them, by looking at year-by-year surveys of attitudes done by the Institute of Justice and Reconciliation (IJR). The answers given by respondents, as they looked back at the TRC and the issues they raised – reconciliation prospects (obviously), white complicity, comparative cases of oppression internationally etc – were surprisingly reflective, although there was quite a lot of retrospective guilt shifted from individual to the regime’s shoulders. A very common theme was that it was the foot-soldiers of apartheid and not the generals who had to take the blame. Interestingly, however, whilst IJR surveys over the years have consistently shown whites to be more conservative and pessimistic about reconciliation issues, white attitudes are shown not be so very different from those of other racial groups.

The focus groups also provided interesting material on how whites have reacted to and behaved under ANC rule. Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of disillusionment with the perceived failure of reconciliation and resentment about what were presented as unfair, pro-black policies. There is also a lot of fear about the future, and a lot of rumination about the possibilities of leaving the country. Yet at the same time, there was a widespread appreciation of whites’ relative advantages, and the good things (for them) of living in South Africa. Interestingly, the overwhelming majority remained committed to staying in the country and making the best of life, and an appreciation that moving abroad would not necessarily improve their lot. In a word, most whites adopt a pragmatic attitude to living in South Africa today and seem to have left crude racial ideology behind.

This was relatively good news, but how have such attitudes worked out politically? In a word, in a very mixed way. It is a commonplace that whites have largely grouped themselves behind the Democratic Alliance (DA), and I track how the DA has shifted ground since the early 1990s. My principal focus was upon how it has dealt with race. Black political activists have long had a very ambivalent, if not outrightly hostile, attitude to liberalism as it has made its appearance in South Africa. So how has a self-proclaimed liberal party sought to attract black voters, something essential for it to do, if it is to confront accusations that it is merely a vehicle for white interests and if it is to increase its support to present a serious challenge to the ANC? My argument is that it made a half-decent stab at a solution under Helen Zille as its leader, and to give it teeth, she stepped aside to make way for Musi Maimane. Until 2017, the strategy worked, and there was popular support for the DA, but when it stalled in 2019, Maimane was unceremoniously booted out, blamed for having been racially divisive! Ironically, the charge was led by Helen Zille, who has seemed to regret her withdrawal, and has come back to manage the party from behind the scenes. My argument is that the DA has demonstrated its total inability to grapple with the issue of race.

Meanwhile, a cottage industry has developed focusing particularly on Afrikaners’ adaptation to democracy. In many ways, this has been remarkable. First things first: the far right was disarmed (literally) at the outset of democracy, and although continuing to be remarkably unpleasant, today it is largely confined to shouting from the sidelines, talking to the Republicans in the US, and posting nasties on the internet.

What is happening elsewhere is fascinating, as basically, Afrikaner activists have erected a state within a state, with the Solidarity trade union (originally developing out of the white mineworkers’ union) having morphed into an Afrikaner welfare-cum-business movement working with AfriForum, a right-wing inclined legal activist group which uses human rights-talk and the South African constitution to remarkable effect. It is overwhelmingly concerned with defending whites’ rights, yet necessarily has to dress these up as human rights. And then of course, there is a small slither of Afrikaners who have embraced democracy with enthusiasm and are trying to make it work.

The book attempts to bring all this and much else together in a chapter grappling with ‘Whites as Citizens’ which examines whites and the politics of representation, recognition and redistribution respectively. As with TRC-related issues, white political voting patterns are more conservative than those of other race groups yet follow very similar trends and it is Afrikaners who are principally concerned with recognition issues. Redistribution is the tricky part, as I present white politics as a politics of defence, yet I argue that that the idea of ‘reparation’, is hugely problematic and unwieldy and needs to be replaced by a focus on social justice. And I make a few suggestions about redistribution strategies to be implemented but point out that rarely are the answers easy.

At the end of the day, I rather surprised myself by arguing that my book is a relatively good news story. I would never have believed this back in the bad old days. But given the sheer awfulness of the South African past, the accommodation of whites into South African democracy has gone reasonably smoothly. Don’t mistake this for the argument that they are all warm and cuddly human beings. They are very definitely not that. There are lots of very unpleasant, racist people among them. But the important point is that whites are no longer a serious threat to democracy.

In fact, if you want to look for the major threat to democracy, look no further than the ANC.

Roger Southall is Emeritus Professor in Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand and Professorial Research Associate, Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS. His new book, Whites and Democracy in South Africa, has just been published by James Currey.

Featured Photograph: Crowd sings the South African National Anthem during a memorial service for the late rugby Springbok Chester Williams in 2019 (Rodger Bosch).

Walter Rodney – the prophet of self-emancipation

ROAPE

June 13, 2022

On 13 June 1980, the Guyanese revolutionary Walter Rodney was assassinated in Georgetown. In the final part of Chinedu Chukwudinma’s biography A Rebel Guide to Walter Rodney he celebrates Rodney’s revolutionary organising and focus on worker’s power. Rodney remains an exemplar to revolutionaries fighting to change the world today.

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

In his short biographical sketch of Rodney, Working People’s Alliance (WPA) leader Eusi Kwayana identified Rodney as ‘the prophet of self-emancipation’. Everywhere he went, Rodney fought alongside the working people, inspiring them to conquer their freedom. The more he travelled and engaged with the masses, the more he embraced Marxism as his theory and practice of working-class revolution. Rodney’s activism in Jamaica shaped his belief in the duty of revolutionary intellectuals to be involved in the struggle against imperialism and capitalism.

Radical intellectuals do not belong in the university. They must go to the oppressed, learn about their struggles, and use their intellect for the struggle for liberation. Rodney followed this path by meeting with Rastafarians and listening to radical youths. His ability to understand and relate to the masses led him to deliver a powerful message of Black Power. He articulated the grievances of the masses while telling them to reclaim the Caribbean from imperialism and its local allies.

His progress from Black Power activism to socialism became apparent when he lived in Nyerere’s Tanzania. Rodney used Marx’s historical method to write his masterpiece How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. He produced a history of the exploitation of African workers and peasants by the western bourgeoisie, to prove that Africa’s development was impossible until it broke with capitalism. He left Tanzania convinced that enlightened leaders could not deliver socialism—it had to be won from below. Rodney had discovered in the strikes of Tanzania the unrivalled power and militancy of the working class. Only they had the power and the vision to build a new democratic society, a socialist one.

Rodney developed his appreciation of worker’s power when he returned to Guyana and organised for the WPA. His writings, speeches and activism revealed the importance of Marxism for explaining and fighting racism. He saw racism as a product of capitalism, wherein capitalists divided the working class to ensure its exploitation. He proposed to end it with a revolution that united African and Indian workers against Burnham’s dictatorship. Rodney then recognised the need for a mass revolutionary party to foster that racial unity. His WPA, which had grown its ranks from dozens to hundreds while bravely leading the struggle against Burnham in 1979, still did not have enough members, experience, and influence to face the state repression and lead the civil rebellion to victory. If the mass party had established itself years before the rebellion, it perhaps would have been better prepared to influence the struggle. But the WPA never fully recovered from Rodney’s assassination.

Although Rodney died at only 38 years of age, he left behind him a colossal body of work that will inspire the next generation of revolutionaries. That makes him the prophet of self-emancipation.

***

Thank you roape.net

The beauty of having an online serialisation of the book is that it allows me to thank those I forgot to mention in the acknowledgements of the printed edition of the book. Above all, I thank one of Tanzania’s best graffiti artists, the legendary Mejah Mbuya, for introducing me to Walter Rodney in 2010 when visiting my family in Tanzania. He gave me a copy of Groundings with My Brothers, but it took another two years before I opened the book. By the time I decided to read the book, I was already, unapologetically, a left-wing Black Nationalist enamoured with Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and playing Dead Prez’s first album Let’s Get Free on repeat. Although Rodney published his book in 1969 as a Black Power manifesto for the Caribbean, I felt Groundings spoke directly to my experiences as a black man growing up in Europe, where I found myself arguing with teachers who claim that colonialism had some benefits for Africa.

Rodney’s pamphlet was a powerful, daring, and bold effort to uproot African history from the racist myth’s surrounding its past. Yet, it was not the clichéd narrative of African kings and queens that I grew accustomed to hearing when attending an informal Pan-African university run by Afro-centrist philosophers and hoteps (a term used to describe Afro-centrists). It was an honest portrayal of African history in all its dynamism and complexity that fostered pride in my African identity.

I’m grateful to Mejah and the African American historian Seth Markle for insisting that I read How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (HEUA) while having long conversations with them on the beach and at a hip hop block party when I returned to Tanzania in 2011-2012. I read Rodney’s seminal masterpiece and referenced it in almost every single essay that I wrote during my university years, and I still read it today. My book only offers a summary of the main argument of Rodney’s book, which will hopefully encourage young activists and radical scholars to read it. A much lengthier discussion of the arguments and the contemporary relevance of Rodney’s masterpiece is found in Karim Hirji’s excellent book The Enduring Relevance of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (2010) and more recently in Leo Zeilig’s monumental biography of Rodney (2022).

In a blogpost from 2019, I attempted to make a left-wing critique of Rodney’s reliance on dependency theory in chapter 5 of HEUA. Although I still stand behind the ideas of the article, I have avoided any further discussion of them in my book. I wanted HEUA to be celebrated as a Marxist history of Africa in its own right. Of course, I surprise no one in saying that it stands at opposite poles to the bourgeois history of ‘Great Men’. But the book also distinguishes itself from most ‘histories from below’, which tend to examine a designated event from the standpoint of the people. What these histories from below too often overlook is the interrelations of events, the broader social and material forces that influence the lives of individuals. Instead of conceiving history as a set of isolated events, Rodney sees it as a continuous process that leads to the present, where African underdevelopment cannot be explained without understanding the catastrophic impact of the slave trade and colonialism.

There have been numerous attempts to develop the powerful framework set by Rodney’s masterpiece. I have recently enjoyed reading Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (1983). Concerning Africa, Lee Wengraf’s Extracting Profit (2019) provides in some respects an updated version of Rodney’s analysis while drawing more heavily on the classical theory of imperialism sketched by Lenin to make sense of Africa’s condition in the 21st century. She skilfully unravelled how the inter-imperialist rivalry between the major superpowers, the United States and China has driven a new scramble for African resources, namely oil. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that Rodney’s magus opus ends with a radical call for action – a call for workers and peasants to take control of their destiny.

I stress this last point because what Lenin observed about Marx and Engels’ legacy increasingly applies to Rodney’s. Opportunists will seek to turn him into a “harmless icon” and abuse his name to manipulate the masses. At the same time, they will water down his revolutionary theory, “blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it”, as Lenin wrote. A recent example of this opportunism is found in the 50 years celebration of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa at SOAS, University of London, hosted by none other than Adam Habib, the director who used the n-word in a student webinar, and with a black vice-chancellor who gladly agreed to be anointed by the Queen as the main discussant.

The real revolutionary essence of HEUA and Rodney’s entire body of work can only be captured by those who have a genuine interest in fighting imperialism. And I do not doubt that the significance of Rodney’s politics will grow in proportion to the new radical working-class movement that emerges today. One of Rodney’s former comrades once explained that during Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of 1974, which was largely set in motion by the anti-colonial struggles in Portuguese-speaking Africa, one could find Rodney’s HEUA in every bookshop in Lisbon. The revolutionaries were changing the world and, in the process, changing themselves. They had come to detest fascism, colonialism, and all forms of oppression, and naturally, they sought to learn from those who spoke against them, such as Rodney.

The multiracial Black Lives Matter protest of 2020 had a similar tantalising effect on those who supported it. Hundreds of thousands of young people in Minneapolis and New York City were challenging state racism and police brutality. In London and Bristol, they were questioning history by vandalising the statues of the white supremacist Winston Churchill and pulling down the statue of a racist slave owner. The young people I spoke to during those protests showed an unapparelled desire to uncover the voices of those who stood against imperialism and the legacy of empire from Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis to Walter Rodney.

Although the Black Lives Matter movement is on the downturn, I pray that it will return in some form, stronger and more powerful than ever before. Getting involved in a revolutionary organisation and drawing lessons in struggles from Rodney’s achievements and failures is undoubtedly one the best ways to prepare for that return.

Chinedu Chukwudinma is a socialist activist and writer based in London. He writes on African politics, popular struggles, and the history of working-class resistance on the continent and is a member of ROAPE’s editorial board.

Please click here to read the earlier parts of Chukwudinma’s A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney which roape.net has been serialising.

To order Chinedu’s book, A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney from the publisher, Bookmarks, click here.

Alienation in three parts: mental health in Kenyan women activists

ROAPE

June 10, 2022

In the first of a three-part series on mental health and activism in Kenya, Noosim Naimasiah writes about the pandemic of mental health breakdown in Kenya. She notes how activists respond increasingly to distress calls, extrajudicial executions, sexual abuse, fatal domestic violence, and suicides are interspersed by the chronic conditions of violence in the informal settlements of Nairobi. Naimasiah writes how communities once connected by values of respect, dignity and love have been left to the cold machinations of a brutal system registering only exchange value.

By Noosim Naimasiah

Women activists in Nairobi are struggling with mental health problems, further aggravated by the onset of the COVID 19 Pandemic. As part of the larger community of African activists, I comprehend in sharper relief the myriad ways that women activists suffer. Caring for others and ourselves is a balance most struggle to strike, so that in the end many activists have become overwhelmed, exhausted, frustrated, and resentful.

The manifestation of living in a patriarchal society, the culturally alienating effects of colonization compounded by the suffering inflicted by a highly unequal neoliberal society melt into each other to form a toxic political amalgam. Talk therapy or ‘self-care’ is extended at a prohibitive cost, holding the possibility of healing at bay and leaving most activists depressed and dystopic. It also reinforces individual healing which though important, cannot be isolated from context of the dis-ease. Short retreats or mental health workshops might provide temporary reprieve, but do not address the issues holistically or with long-term healing in mind. Dysfunctional and destructive coping mechanisms like alcoholism have become common coping strategies.

In this three-part series for roape.net, I will be exploring how alienation is manifested in the context of Kenya women activists. The first part will look at how national mental health documents and statistics remain ensnared in imperial hegemony and therefore do not reflect the reality on the ground. The second part will contend with activism as labour and look at how patriarchal structures in the home and the influence of NGOs have further alienated the labour of women activist historically. The third part looks back at African mental health structures before western hegemony and examines colonialism as a watershed period during which cultural structures and social networks were violently discontinued. The conclusion proposes that African methodologies and practitioners should form communities of healing practice to address mental health problems not just for activists, but for the larger African public.

Mental health – a Kenyan retrospective

The meteoric rise in mental breakdown cases in Kenya is symptomatic and catastrophic. Symptomatic because they signal an inner implosion provoked by the unbearable conditions of being today. Catastrophic because it seems, rather suddenly, that intimate relations of the self, of lovers and families, friends and communities are the prelude to a crime scene; for suicide and gruesome murders. As the advance guard in our communities, activists experience a double burden. They not only have to contend with the escalating violence in our local communities but also to deal with the manifestation of this social upheaval in their own lives.

Activists at Vita Books and Ukombozi Library who are also linked with the social justice movement across the city are permanently attending to distress calls, mostly of a violent nature. The severe cases of extrajudicial executions, sexual abuse – even of minors, fatal domestic violence and suicides are interspersed by the chronic conditions of horizontal violence in the informal settlements of Nairobi. Lack of toilet facilities for instance, are the precursor to recurrent urinary tract infections. Or rape. Medical services were privatized since the advent of SAPs in the 1980s and continue to be unaffordable to most working-class people. Gendered relations are buttressed by a capitalist system, making them increasingly transactional and culturally alienated from their history and context. Political systems that held communities together by values of respect, dignity and love have been left to the cold machinations of a brutal and punitive schema registering only exchange value.

It is easy to censure Covid 19 as the primary cause, but the pandemic is a strawman for the complex historical layers that have created a monstrosity whose soft white underbelly was exposed in the last few years. Jobs that were already precariously held were lost. Labouring bodies enervated by decades of consuming pesticides, new age diseases and the liberalization of public hospitals were easily asphyxiated by Covid. And tragically, the fragile conditions of African minds long deracinated by colonialism were crippled further by debt and failed aspirations.

A recent continent-wide study carried out by the African Women Development Fund in 2020, found that 73 million women in Africa were affected by mental health conditions with more than 25 million suffering from neurological conditions. In Kenya specifically, the crisis is escalating with a reported 483 suicide cases and 409 cases of grievous assaults in just three months April – June, 2021, compared to 196 cases in all of 2019. Domestic violence and homicides in Kenya are soaring, with a conservative estimate of at least three people killed by a family member every day, according to statistics compiled from the Nation and police news reports.

For women activists, this trend has been exacerbated with the onset of Covid 19, where personal burdens both at home and in the frontlines of providing support and security, especially for women have been compounded. The UN Women has labelled these incidents the ‘shadow pandemic’ where more than one in three women has experienced physical or sexual violence since the pandemic began. Though the Kenyan President, Uhuru Kenyatta noted the seriousness of this crisis and committed millions of funds to address it, little had changed on the ground.

In a recent study on the wellbeing of Kenyan women activists, 200 WHRDs (Women human rights defenders) in the informal settlements reported that they experienced serious mental health challenges.[1] On a list of possible disorders including depression, anxiety, paranoia and PTSD, the women acknowledged experiencing at least 80% of these conditions. They cited the lack of a regular income, the trauma generated by their work, the physical and sexual harassment sometimes from the community and co-activists, a general sense of dystopia because of the injustice perpetrated by the criminal justice system and the strenuous effect on families and intimate relationships as the precursors for their mental health problems.[2] This recent study is important and illuminating on the general situation of WHRD. However, a political typology of the activists was not articulated, the ‘list of mental illnesses’ was pre-emptive as it was presented during the research and might have undermined the possibility of engaging with the formulations of illnesses as experienced rather than as referenced. Categories are derivations of pathologies researched and articulated elsewhere, in a historically consistent display of colonial dominance over indigenous knowledge systems.

Part One: Imperial Games of Numbers and Manuals

The current national statistics on the prevalence and character of mental illness in Kenya are elusive. Old research data is recycled, presenting a false diagnosis on a vastly altering social and political terrain. Health policies are xeroxed from WHO with little cognizance of the prevailing history and context. Recommendations reveal no engagement with indigenous modes of healing and make the exact same appeals presented more than 40 years ago. We are generating imperial neuro-scapes, effacing the real portrait of a continent in distress.

Case in point: the Taskforce on Mental Health in Kenya. This committee was a presidential directive in 2019 that set out to assess the mental health challenges in Kenya and advice government on resource allocation. They visited health facilities in the major towns and held sector-specific meetings and in total, ‘held discussions with 1,569 Kenyans, received 206 memoranda (submitted 121 on emails, 73 hard copies and 12 on Taskforce website)’. They also stated, with certainty; ‘It was clear that at least 25% of outpatients and 40% of inpatients in different health facilities had a mental illness, and an estimated prevalence of psychosis stated as 1% of the general population’. Yet, there was no reference.

I had encountered this very statistic on another government funded institution – the (KNCHR) Kenya National Commission on Human Rights report on mental health – written in 2011. In turn, this KNCHR presents these very statistics as if they were current, but a cursory look at the reference reveals a paper written in 1979! Professor David M. Ndetei and Professor J. Muhangi conducted this research 40 years ago in a day clinic (the 40% inpatient statistic hence a strange addition) and articulated their findings in an article in which the neurological, cultural, social and political context were expressly demarcated. Firstly, class was a fundamental lens through which psychiatric illness was assessed. The setting was Athi River, a suburban area at the time consisting mainly of immigrant who worked as labourers in the factories, who were low-income earners and a minority peasant Kamba and pastoralist Maasai population existing mainly in a subsistence economy. Secondly, parameters were elaborate, expansive and historical – a psychiatric history which included family histories, personality development, sexual activities, sleep patterns, bowel functions and appetite rather than preemptive. Thirdly, the criterion of culture was a crucial basis for analysis, where an earlier article, was referenced showing how patients with psychiatric disorders had culturally specific symptoms – the more rural and non-literate patients exhibited symptoms related to the gut and the more urban population had more-head related symptoms.[3] Limitations like lack of laboratory investigations were cited. This signals a regression in the way of research capacity and critical analysis.

Why were the obvious ‘laboratories’ for research like the local hospitals, local healers and the police reports that generally serve as the first points of contact for the mentally unwell not consulted? Instead, the usual liberal rhetoric on ‘declaring national emergencies and national health months’ were pronounced. More aggravatingly, a commission on national happiness was recommended, in tandem with the World Happiness Report, with highly subjective criterion, none of which, of course, were generated in the continent. For instance, generosity, cited as one of the indicators for happiness in the survey, is premised on a question of whether one has donated money to a charity in the past month?! In a context where the social relations that bolster generosity have not been fully institutionalized, this is a strange and socially adulterated question.

The definition and determinants of mental health in Kenyan policy though in some ways comprehensive are quoted directly from the WHO manual. Public participation is a farce, the notion that policy interventions were developed through a consultative process are not reflected in the content of the policy. As always it seems, history is censored. Strategies that include reviewing legislation, developing guidelines and standards, investing in finance, technology, human resources, service delivery and developing Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) frameworks are generic functions that are unlikely to facilitate genuine local engagement.

Like the WHO mental health manual, the very basis of mental health diagnosis in Kenya – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is developed by the American Association of Psychiatry. These are western cultural documents, predicated on American notions on ‘what constitutes a real disorder, what counts as scientific evidence, and how research should be conducted’.[4] Psychiatric disorders make dramatic appearances, are declassified as illnesses, changing into pharmaceutically curable ailments reflecting shifts in western social and political contexts. Even when non-western populations are engaged and assessed, the primary criterion for psychopathy are those developed within western subjects. The criterion for health, the distinctions between disorder and normal responses to distress, and the ideas of personhood superimpose foreign categories producing a social dissonance and political disarticulation in local communities.

This very process of mental and medical imperialism is likely a primary basis for mental disorders. The understanding of western diagnostic criteria as ethnopsychiatry is crucial in dismantling western medical hegemony. Even in their own territory, questions abound on over-diagnosis in the pursuit of pharmaceutical profits. It is not a coincidence that the two institutions producing global data on mental health, the WHO and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, are both heavily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Concerns have been advanced on the lack of transparency on the methods and data used by the institute, as well as the lack of a variety of independent views by scientists that could deflect from the political and economic objectives of the foundation.

Even in seemingly benign accounts of health like statistics, imperial machinations remain afoot, preventing us from developing local concepts for research, screening, and diagnosis of mental illness.

Noosim Naimasiah is a Pan-Africanist filmmaker, scholar, and social justice activist whose focus is on indigenous knowledge, political economy and liberatory politics. She is currently a lead researcher and editor at Vita Books and Ukombozi Library.

Featured Photograph: Kibera informal settlement, Nairobi, Kenya (7 May 2015).

Notes

[1] Kibra, Mathare, Kayole, Starehe, Githurai and Embakasi West in Nairobi County and others in Nakuru county.

[2] This recent study is important and illuminating on the general situation of WHRD. However, a political typology of the activists was not articulated, the ‘list of mental illnesses’ was pre-emptive as it was presented during the research and might have undermined the possibility of engaging with the formulations of illnesses as experienced rather than as referenced. In this case, symptoms of unwellness might have been a better criterion.

[3] It is interesting to note that his paper was presented at the third pan-African psychiatric conference. An analysis of these conferences would provide critical political history on psychiatry and mental illness in Africa.

[4] Derek Summerfield, ‘How scientifically valid is the knowledge base of global mental health?’, British Medical Journal, 2008, Vol 336: 992 – 994.

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