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Mozambique – neither miracle nor mirage

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ROAPE
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Introducing ROAPE’s latest special issue on Mozambique’s political, social and economic trajectory. In this blogpost, we share short videos by authors of the issue who introduce their topic. The articles by Rosimina Ali, Sara Stevano, Carlos Muianga, Natacha Bruna are available to read until 30 June 2022 (see link at bottom of page).  

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, international organisations, development cooperation agencies, financial institutions and the media often described the Mozambican economic, social and political trajectory as a ‘miracle’. However, contradictory assessments of Mozambique’s performance began to emerge in the 2010s. While the IMF’s Managing Director Christine Lagarde highlighted Mozambique’s impressive economic growth in 2014, The Economist highlighted the country’s soaring sovereign debt in a context of increasing FDI and aid inflows, and how credit rating agencies downgraded the creditworthiness of the Mozambican economy from stable-average to severe risk of default.

This special issue attempts to make sense of the contradictory assessments of the Mozambican trajectory by looking at the class structure and the historic, systemic contradictions of capitalism in Mozambique. It explores the challenges posed by the inherited colonial structures of accumulation for social and economic reproduction. In particular, how and why capitalism – in post-colonial Mozambique and under global neoliberalism and financialisation – failed to develop, diversify and articulate a dynamic productive basis. Instead, capitalism in Mozambique evolved as speculative, dependent on unproductive links with multinational capital. These characteristics of the mode of accumulation caused increasing inequality and social exclusion, of which mass displacement of people from the land is part and parcel, and a pattern of extractivism which has exacerbated the environmental crisis. In the videos below, some authors of the special issue provide insights into their articles.  

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Work in agro-industry and the social reproduction of labour in Mozambique: contradictions in the current accumulation system

Rosimina Ali and Sara Stevano discuss the tensions between job creation and employment quality in the system of accumulation in Mozambique. Addressing job quality is critical because Mozambique’s economic structure has mostly failed to generate stable work, pay and dignified working conditions. However, this is neglected in the mainstream view of labour markets, which is dominated by dualisms and limited by its blind spot regarding social reproduction. The authors follow a political economy approach informed by a social reproduction lens and draw on original primary evidence on agro-industries. They argue that low-quality jobs reflect the current mode of organisation of production, in which companies’ profitability depends on access to cheap and disposable labour and relies on workers’ ability to engage in multiple, interdependent paid and unpaid forms of work to sustain themselves.

Rosimina Ali is a researcher at the Institute for Social and Economic Studies (IESE), in Maputo. Her research is focused on the political economy of labour markets, social reproduction, socio-economic transformation and dynamics of capital accumulation, with a specific focus on Mozambique.

Sara Stevano is a senior lecturer in economics at SOAS University of London. She is a development and feminist political economist specialising in the study of the political economy of work, well-being (food and nutrition), inequalities and social reproduction. Her work focuses on Africa, with primary research experience in Mozambique and Ghana.

Rosimina’s and Sara’s article can be read here. 

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The expansion of capitalist agricultural production and social reproduction of rural labour: contradictions within the logic of capital accumulation in Mozambique

Carlos Muianga argues that in Mozambique, policy discourses supporting the expansion of large-scale capitalist agriculture have largely focused on its potential to increase agricultural production and productivity, rural employment and income, and their impacts on poverty reduction. Yet, in focusing narrowly on these dynamics, they have ignored the contradictions of social reproduction of labour often associated with the expansion of capitalist production. This paper explores these contradictions by considering primary and secondary evidence from two contexts of expansion of large-scale capitalist agriculture in Mozambique: sugar cane and forestry plantations. Muianga argues that these contradictions have manifested in diverse forms, reflecting the extent to which forms of expansion and (re)organisation of sectors of capitalist agricultural production, and the associated forms of labour exploitation, have affected different spheres of social reproduction of labour in these contexts.

Carlos Muianga has been a researcher at the Institute for Social and Economic Studies (IESE) since 2010. He is currently a PhD student in development studies at SOAS, University of London, where his research is focused on the political economy of agrarian capitalism in Mozambique.

Carlos’ article can be read here.

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Green extractivism and financialisation in Mozambique: the case of Gilé National Reserve

Natacha Bruna observes that with the intensification of the global environmental crisis, capitalism has extended the reach of financialisation through the creation of new financial assets that rely and are based on further commodification of nature. Using the case of a national reserve in Mozambique, the paper examines the emergence of green extractivism as a consequence of deepening financialisation, an extractivism which is building on pre-existing relations of unequal and asymmetric exchange between industrialised and extractive economies. The article argued that the emergence of green extractivism, supported by green funds and loans, is intensifying the extractive character of the Mozambican economy. The case study shows, that with the support of philanthrocapitalism, the process of financialisation led by mature economies supports the appropriation of nature through green extractivist programmes in the periphery, with adverse implications for development and for rural subsistence.

Natacha Bruna holds a PhD in Development Studies. She is currently a researcher at the Observatório do Meio Rural, focusing on political economy/ecology issues within critical agrarian studies. Her research interests include models of development, agrarian change (green) extractivism, climate change policies and narratives, rural livelihoods and social reproduction. 

Natacha’s full article can be read here. 

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The full special issue can be accessed for free until the end of June here.

Featured Photograph: Fruit sellers at Zimpeto Market in Maputo, Mozambique (Michel Morin Jack).

Remember Africa, Remember Sobukwe

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ROAPE
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For a month the Robbin Island Museum in South Africa has commemorated one of Africa’s most forgotten freedom fighters, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe. Sanya Osha writes about the opening of the exhibition, ‘Remember Africa, Remember Sobukwe’, which reflects on the life and times of Sobukwe on Robben Island.  

By Sanya Osha

Although Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe died in 1978, the struggle to memorialise him appropriately, reconfigure him for the present, and finally, to preserve and extend his legacy, continues. Sobukwe had a huge impact on many lives during the apartheid years and continues to do so for a number of reasons.

This much was clear at the Robben Island Museum (RIM), in Cape Town which has been hosting an exhibition on his life and work since 3 May. The RIM worked in conjunction with the Robert Sobukwe Trust, the Pan-African Congress (PAC) – the party Sobukwe founded – and the late freedom fighter’s family to pull off this historic event.

Speakers opening the exhibition explained that Sobukwe’s contributions were multi-layered and reflected the complexity of not only the man but also the convoluted nature of South African society, morals, and politics.

The panel of speakers was drawn from academia, activism and family and friends who waxed glowingly of Sobukwe’s qualities as a person and as an activist. His memory constantly roused the tightly packed audience to extended bouts of song and ululation. Each slight break was peppered by soul-stirring singing that enshrined the memory of the man, the challenges, and tribulations yet to be faced, and the unfinished business of attaining deeper and more inclusive levels of freedom in South Africa, and the continent. In addition, the collective breaking out in song represented an affirmation of unity, shared historical experience and common cultural identity. Members of the audience wore T-shirts emblazoned with “land first and all things will follow” and other slogans which accentuate the ongoing political project Sobukwe embodied in spirit and action.

Indeed the spirit of Sobukwe was soulfully invoked through the sense of commonality that connected almost everyone in the auditorium. Sobukwe was obviously a man who transcends his times and the ideologies that dominated them. And so, the theme of the exhibition, “Remember Africa, Remember Sobukwe” is quite apt.

Being a teacher, Sobukwe waged his battle against the apartheid regime in multiple ways. First of all, he had to protect his humanity and dignity from being thwarted and perverted by racist oppressors. In other words, he had to ensure he didn’t lose the essence of the philosophical and deeply humanist term, ubuntu. Secondly, and equally significantly, he pursued a battle to engineer the philosophical re-birth of Africa, in other words, the remembering of Africa in a concerted effort to avert cultural amnesia. Finally, as a practical and politically engaged leader, Sobukwe led the PAC’s struggle against apartheid from the front as opposed to from the back. All these strands of his work and activities were quite distinct yet interrelated in realising of the dream of Azanian masses – the name used by political activists for South Africa – to be free of racialized oppression.

Speakers at the exhibition also referred a number of times to Sobukwe’s extraordinary gifts as an orator. It seems he was able to paint a picture of a liberated political future that buoyed and inspired struggling Azanians thirsting for multiple forms of freedom. A few commentators complained that there are only scanty Sobukwe recordings, clips and footage available in the public domain for the benefit of posterity. As such, post-liberation South Africans aren’t able to appreciate and understand the full measure of the man. It is claimed in official circles that the apartheid regime destroyed available recorded archives of his work. Some speakers at the exhibition begged to differ and claim there is a deliberate silencing that is being visited upon Sobukwe and his accomplishments today. Undoubtedly, the rise and fall of Sobukwe’s political reputation is tied to the electoral fortunes of the PAC, and the political dominance of the ANC.

Indeed there is much to be learnt from Sobukwe’s humanist teachings. The instigator of the 1960 Sharpeville rebellion, was a man of several parts: leader, teacher, freedom fighter and family man being his key preoccupations. Instructively, he referred to the PAC as a ‘she’, a maternal and nourishing home to the politically aggrieved and disenfranchised. This could further be extended to how the African continent is understood as “the motherland”. This understanding underscores Sobukwe’s inherent humanism.

Two speakers stood out at the exhibition, Simphiwe Sesanti and anti-apartheid activist, Iman A. Cassiem. Cassiem only met Sobukwe on his deathbed but was able to reflect on broader issues of human dignity and freedom. He began his speech with quotes from Shakespeare and the famous Czech writer, Franz Kafka and then segued into a terminological disagreement with Malcolm X, the African-American civil rights leader and activist. Malcolm had claimed he was black before anything else. Cassiem, on the other hand, claims Malcolm was wrong. He was a human being before all else. But perhaps, Cassiem’s quip makes better sense if it is directed at the racist enforcers who ensure that blackness is devalued and dehumanised historically and globally. However, Cassiem re-established his activist credentials by concluding that “every apartheid criminal must be in prison” for which he received a thunderous response from the audience.

 

Second from the right – anti-apartheid activist, Iman A. Cassiem

Sesanti’s resonant oratory was the climax to a befitting event. He spoke on the philosophical ramifications of Sobukwe’s life and work in a direct and uncluttered manner that was also interlaced with uplifting and energetic eruptions of liberatory singing.

Sobukwe imbued his life and work with discipline and a great deal of sacrifice that came with personal hardship. Indeed, his discipline was such that the PAC was established three minutes before the appointed time! And his success as a leader was evident as both his followers and admirers were present in the auditorium, steadily invoking his spirit with evocative songs and speeches and making consistent claims to a future in which Sobukwe’s work needed to be completed. During the opening day of this unique and intense exhibition, Sobukwe’s spirit not only loomed large, but it also appeared simply unquenchable.

Sanya Osha is the author of several books including Postethnophilosophy (2011) and Dust, Spittle and Wind (2011), An Underground Colony of Summer Bees (2012), On a Weather-beaten Couch (2015) and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow (expanded edition, 2021) amongst other publications. He currently works at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Featured Photograph: Robert Sobukwe leads an anti-apartheid protest in 1960. Photographs in the blog are from the opening of the exhibition on 3 May. 

Extractivism and dispossession in Mozambique

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ROAPE
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Gediminas Lesutis discusses his new book, The Politics of Precarity, on the experiences of extractivism, dispossession, and resettlement in Mozambique.  Lesutis shows how what might be conceived as “marginal African experiences” can help us understand the core questions of global politics and capital.

By Gediminas Lesutis

Perhaps the most honest way to talk about this book might be how it started. The questions explored in The Politics of Precarity initially came about not so much as a scholarly project but as an attempt to understand what hides beneath the narratives of “progress” and “development” that we are socially conditioned to trust and believe in. These narratives create an illusion of positivity that lies at the core of capital’s ideological representations of what constitutes a “good life”, and its promises of prosperity for all.

The beginning of this project was nine years ago in 2013, during my first visit to Mozambique. At the time, its capital city Maputo was booming. This real estate boom was influenced by a natural resource frenzy: a few years earlier, in 2006, the fifth largest global coal reserve was announced in the province of Tete in central Mozambique. This led to an unprecedented rush of global capital into the province to serve the nascent mining industry. These developments further deepened the pre-existing patterns of extractivism in the country – specifically, Mozambican state’s strategies of profit extraction from large-scale investments in natural resource industries that grew exponentially after the country joined the global neoliberal system as the Frelimo Government opted to implement Structural Adjustment in the late 1980s.

Such programmes are  profoundly damaging, even deliberately harmful, expanding global capital into what once was a periphery, however, countries are often left in the margins of dominant social and political discourses. In Mozambique, the natural resource boom associated with coal extraction has been no exception either. Following the “coal discovery”, the national ruling class focused on coal extraction as an unprecedented opportunity of “national development”. For a few years, this seemed to have been supported by what was happening on the ground: major global companies moving to both Tete and Maputo to commence business ventures.

We all, of course, know that this is only a small part of the story. Not even a real story, more of an ideological phantasmagoria expressed through the spectacle of positivity created by capitalism’s instruments – mainstream media, advertisement, and cultural indoctrination that everything is “getting better” – to distract and pacify the masses. The experiences of privilege, freedom, and wealth of the social class that owns the means of production are presented as universal, as the dream world that everyone can eventually achieve. However, when we pay attention, this dream is fractured and comes undone by realities of the everyday and the struggles that ordinary people face in their attempts to make do, cope, and ultimately survive different forms of violence that phantasmagorias of “development” engender in both grotesque and disguised ways.

For me, this moment of fracture was one of serendipity. During an accidental encounter in an upbeat bar by the Indian Ocean in Maputo, two Brazilian engineers on their customary weekend away from the coal mines of Tete, relaxed in the warm ocean breeze and with cold beers, enthusiastically shared stories about peasants in Tete who, having been displaced from their lands, had blocked a national railway used for coal transportation. Whilst at the time I was working on a different project, this accidental encounter and the anecdotes about the dispossessed people interrupting the flows of coal from their former lands into global commodity markets left me with several questions.

Continually re-articulated over the years, these questions transformed into The Politics of Precarity. They can be summarized as follows: What is the relationship between the contemporary world order, shaped by relentless intensification of extractive capital accumulation, and vulnerable groups of people that contest the destruction of their lives by different modes of extractivism? In the book, I provide a set of answers to, and critical reflections upon, these questions.

The Politics of Precarity is based on extensive fieldwork materials that I collected between 2015 and 2016 in Mozambique.  I lived for four months in a resettlement village called Cateme that was built by Vale, a Brazilian mining company, that resettled over 1,700 families displaced by coal mining in the region. Sharing my daily life with one resettled family, I carried out ethnographic research in the community of Cateme, trying to understand the lived experiences of the people subjected to dispossession and resettlement, as well as the coping strategies that they have had to employ and the spatial dimensions of these processes in relation to the coal enclave in Tete and Mozambique’s political economy at large.

Whilst the book is grounded in experiences of a particular time and space, it does not approach them as only analytically productive in relation to Mozambique, Africa, or extractivism. Instead, analysing accounts of dispossession and everyday life in the shadows of an extractive enclave, the book shows how what might be conceived as “marginal African experience” can, in fact, help us understand the core questions of global politics and capital. It is with this expansive move beyond parameters of the case study that the book develops a set of theoretical contributions.

I show that precarity is a vulnerability of all social life that is intensified by the violence of capitalist abstractions into a condition of suffering and struggle that contains possibilities, but never actualities, of transformative politics. Precarity, precariousness, or precarious life – highlighting profound uncertainties and socio-political injustices – have become contemporary signifiers of singular and multiple crises. Although theorised since the 1980s, scholarly work on precarity re-emerged and proliferated after the 2008 crisis. However, most of this work continues to focus on experiences of exploitative labour regimes in the Global North, and to a lesser extent – violence of biopolitical regimes in liberal democracies.

The Politics of Precarity demonstrates a much more analytically, as well as politically, expansive purchase of precarity as a term and praxis that can be read through diverse political projects implied by different, sometimes conflicting, epistemological positions on precarisation. I theorise precarity at an intersection of historical geographical materialism, on the one hand, and a post-structuralist tradition and its emphasis on power, subjectivisation, and resistance, on the other. This brings together the work of Judith Butler, Henry Lefebvre, and Jacques Rancière. Although they are not frequently, or ever, studied together, reading their writings on precarious life, abstract space, and politics of dissensus – and different forms of violence imbued in these modalities of capital’s development – I demonstrate how such theoretical experimentations articulate questions of politics, resistance, and liveability in the contemporary capitalist era in materially grounded and politically charged ways. This is significant in three ways.

First, I argue that precarity is a condition of life engendered by global capital. Precarity goes beyond labour relations and the governance of life in liberal democracies. I show that precarious lives are sustained through structural, symbolic, and direct violence that extend outside and beyond the violence of labour regimes, exploitation, or an exclusionary politics of a modern state.

People subjected to precarity simultaneously experience struggle and hope, dreaming and suffering because of, and for, a “better life” promised by capital, even in zones of social, political, and economic abandonment. The language of precarity is more analytically productive in engaging with experiences of capital’s violence than various different conceptual frameworks that focus on surplus, wasted, bypassed, or expulsed populations. They draw attention to mechanisms and logics of dispossession; however, they cannot exactly account for multiple, both personal and political, often contradictory, dynamics of everyday life created by global capitalism. For instance, that extractive capital accumulation is often seen as the only viable pathway to “development” even by the very people whose livelihoods are destroyed through extractivism.

Second, the language of precarity harbours an implicit normative project. Others have already pointed out that precarity has emancipatory potential in demonstrating the fundamental, indelible insecurity of all labour relations within capitalism. From this vantage point, holding onto the idea of secure, dignified employment as the basis of political mobilisation that the conventional understanding of precarity validates is fundamentally misleading: such definition of precarity does not question normative underpinnings of the structurally constituted necessity to “freely” sell one’s labour power under capitalism.

The emancipatory potential of precarity as a conceptual framework needs to be approached more broadly in regard to the modes of living, everyday life, and making do, subjected to structural and corporeal modes of violence under capitalism. Such reading of precarity is thus located within critical praxis that aims to expose harm-making within capitalism at large. My claim is that, in the contemporary moment of the ever-expanding disavowal of life, precarity provides an ethical, normative framework to recognise the other, and mutual, although profoundly different, forms of struggle for a more liveable world.

Third, The Politics of Precarity demonstrates how possibilities for resistance and contestation within conditions of precarity have been over-emphasised in the literature, particularly by key post-structuralist theorists such as Judith Butler who overestimate the possibilities of political contestation, as well as overlooking material limitations that hinder effective political mobilisation. The potential danger of fetishising coping with precarity as resistance is very real.

Proposing a spatial reading of precarity, the book offers a theoretical reflection on lived experiences of extractivism, dispossession, and resettlement in Mozambique as central in understanding contemporary impossibilities of living within global capitalism. Doing this, it interrogates opportunities of the political that might exist in the current, overlapping, ongoing enclosures of life to multiple forms of violence that global capital continues to sustain and deepen. Concluding that resistance is only a contingent possibility that is constantly undermined by the violence of capital’s space, the book invites us to critically think about the limits of politicisation in the contemporary conjuncture of different, both singular and multiple, crises. It also encourages us to connect theoretical projects that are needed to build a more liveable world amid the ruins of the present.

The Politics of Precarity can be read online here.

Gediminas Lesutis is a Marie Curie Fellow in Geography at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His research interests include critical theory, politics of contemporary capitalist development in Sub-Saharan Africa, and queer Marxism. More information about his research, publications, and public engagement activities at www.gediminaslesutis.com.

Featured Photograph: Protestors paralyse Vale mine in Moatize, Mozambique (17 October 2018).

An irreparable loss – murder and revolution in Guyana

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ROAPE
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As the popular rebellion, workers strikes and action in Guyana went into retreat in 1979, the Working People’s Alliance and Walter Rodney fought hard to revive them. State repression, with the murder of activists, police harassment and raids, made organising and fighting back difficult. Rodney and the WPA were obliged to consolidate and try and resist. Chinedu Chukwudinma describes the last year of Rodney’s life as the struggle ebbed.

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

In November 1979, Rodney spoke at a meeting on the corner of Lamaha Street in Georgetown. But the ruling People’s National Congress’ (PNC) armed thugs stormed the gathering and chased Rodney through a district of the capital. Rodney escaped after hiding in a sewage trench and then reached his friend’s home “smelling like an unwashed ram goat”.[1] It was not the first time Rodney had to run for his life, but the ferocity of his assailants signalled that the dictator Forbes Burnham wanted to eliminate his opposition at any cost. Rodney was able to escape this time. Some of his comrades were not so fortunate. The Guyana Police Force shot and killed leading Working People’s Alliance member Ohene Koama on the 18 November. Koama was the first WPA activist to die at the hands of the state, and his death signalled a decline in the civil rebellion.

Rodney observed signs of the movement’s retreat as the state’s repression made it difficult for the WPA to organise in the streets. The police sabotaged the WPA’s cars and speaking equipment and detained Rodney on three occasions between September and October.[2] Rodney and the other WPA leaders knew the mass meetings and protests of the summer had shielded them from onslaughts from the state. But the vanishing struggle left them exposed. When the Burnham regime threatened to bomb their home, Rodney and his wife Patricia moved their family to different safe homes on a nightly basis. Other WPA members also moved from safe house to safe house to avoid police raids and harassment as they tried to come to terms with the ebb of the civil rebellion.

Eusi Kawayana argued that civil rebellion retreated with the collapse of workers’ strikes, which he saw as the backbone of the movement.[3] There was frustration among the WPA leaders as the united action of the miners and sugar workers failed to grow into a general strike. The WPA was not rooted among the sugar workers and was unable to raise their combativeness, as they still suffered from the defeat of their 135-day strike in 1978. Its influence had not extended beyond the capital and some mining regions. In May 1980, Rodney criticised the defeatism of the leadership of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), trade unions and anti-dictatorship groups who failed to grasp the potential of the strikes and protests—they believed the regime would be left unshaken.[4] The opportunistic PPP saw industrial action only as a platform for its electoral campaigns and as a lever for its negotiations with the PNC, while the trade union leaders lacked the confidence to withstand the threats from the state. After bullying the unions into submission, the state fired the most militant workers replacing them with scab labour.

Walter Rodney was assassinated on 13 June 1980. The bomb exploded in the car he was in with his brother Donald.

In the aftermath of the retreat of the civil rebellion, the WPA claimed that Guyana was not ripe for revolution because the armed forces had failed to join the protesters. Some of its leaders adjusted to the downturn by focusing on building new WPA branches and working towards a government of national unity. Yet, without the mass protests, the party was more exposed to Burnham’s thugs who murdered a second WPA member, Edward Dublin, in February 1980. It is conceivable that the sheer repression from the PNC, during and after the civil rebellion, led Rodney and the WPA to consider armed resistance.[5]

Three decades later, WPA leaders Rupert Roopnaraine and Tacuma Ogunseye disclosed that their party accumulated weapons during that period. Although Roopnaraine told filmmaker Clairmont Chung that the WPA was preparing itself and the masses for an insurrection, he never defined what he meant by insurrection.[6] A few years later, Ogunseye explained that Rodney, Roopnaraine and himself formed a security committee that supplied 12 automatic guns to WPA underground cells for the party’s self-defence.[7] No other WPA activist has confirmed the claims of these leaders, and the PNC never charged any WPA member with handling weapons.

Regarding Rodney’s alleged role in the WPA security committee, Ogunseye claimed that Rodney was building links with the army to prepare the ground for the military to join the masses in the next popular rebellion.[8] Roopnaraine’s account reveals another possible aspect of Rodney’s activities at the time. He argued that Rodney ached to revive the mass movement out of fear it would forever disappear. In April 1980, he helped smuggle Rodney to neighbouring Suriname, so that Rodney could fly to Zimbabwe’s independence celebrations and seek support and weapons to reignite the civil rebellion. When he received no such assistance, said Roopnaraine after visiting Rodney upon his return, “he (Rodney) was in a very low place morale had dropped…. Walter was always very sensitive about the need for militancy.”[9]

After his death, his mentor CLR James said that Rodney overestimated the inclination of the Guyanese people to take up arms against Burnham. James also presumed Rodney paid no attention to training WPA leaders and cadre in the art of insurrection—he instead wanted to lead by example and take his own risks. He also blamed the WPA for failing to keep Rodney away from the front lines.[10] While there was space for armed resistance within Rodney’s politics as he studied and admired the likes of Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon, it is unclear how he planned to respond to Burnham’s repression. James was not in Guyana in the late 1970s, and therefore his knowledge of events was limited. Does his argument that Rodney undertook too much risk and that his comrades failed to protect him have any semblance of truth?

A part of the answer lies in the fact that many WPA leaders were unaware of the operations of the security committee though they knew about its existence. According to Roopnaraine, some resigned from the party’s executive, disappointed by the lack of accountability from their peers, upon learning that Rodney had been smuggled to Zimbabwe. Furthermore, WPA leaders bore all the burden of secretly acquiring arms and equipment, of which a considerable amount came from the military. Roopnaraine said in conclusion: “We found ourselves at all hours of the night in strange places, doing dangerous things… the miracle is that more of us didn’t get killed”.[11] But Burnham and the PNC murdered Rodney.

On 13 June 1980, Rodney and his brother Donald went to acquire walkie-talkies from an ex-army officer, Gregory Smith. They did not suspect that Smith was a PNC informant. When Rodney activated the device in his car, it exploded and killed him. The Guyanese working people mourned the loss of their leader while Burnham rejoiced. The next day the police and the army patrolled the streets fearing that Rodney’s death would spark another uprising. They raided Rodney’s mother’s house searching for weapons, and anonymous leaflets appeared on the streets with a message: “he who lives by the bomb shall die by the bomb”.[12]

Rodney’s funeral was the largest ever held in Guyana. Thirty-five to fifty thousand Guyanese of all races, ages and genders attended his funeral to wish their beloved leader farewell. Patricia led her husband’s procession chanting “fight back, fight back”.[13] Rodney once said that when revolutionaries fall, “they are lost, it’s an irreparable loss that may … qualitatively affect the development of the struggle in another phase”.[14] His death represented that loss for socialist revolution in Guyana.

After Rodney was murdered, the WPA did its best to continue the struggle. It established bases across the country despite Burnham’s repression. The party, however, gradually relinquished its revolutionary socialist program to adopt an electoral strategy after Burnham’s illness and death in the mid-1980s. The new strategy made it incapable of challenging the racial divide that still plagues Guyana today. The WPA never performed well in elections. The civil rebellion of 1979 had shown that African and Indian could shake off their racial prejudices and see one another as part of the same class when they engaged in united strikes and protests. In contrast with that collective struggle, elections counted on the passivity, uncertainty and individualism of a people who had been shaped by centuries of racial oppression. Far from promoting the anti-racism of the small WPA, election campaigns galvanised existing racial divisions as leaders of the much larger PNC and PPP continued mobilising Africans and Indians against each other to win votes. Following the PPP’s victories in Guyana’s first free elections in 1992 and 1997, African PNC supporters attacked Indians, ransacked polling stations, and clashed with the police. These tragic episodes of racial violence showed that real change could not be achieved through the ballot box.

All of Rodney’s writing and activism in Guyana had underlined the centrality of class struggle for fighting racism. It’s only by fighting against the ruling class in the streets and the workplaces that African and Indian workers could realise their common interest and overcome their prejudices. Every victory, big or small, could strengthen the confidence of the working class and encourage its unity against capital. Rodney saw a revolutionary party as essential for challenging racist ideas and for shaping the fight for socialism. If the workers failed to overcome their racial divide, they would be unable to defeat capitalism.

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.

Featured Photographs: we are grateful to Christopher Laird for the images.

Notes

[1] Gibbons, Arnold, The Legacy of Walter Rodney in Guyana and the Caribbean. (University Press of America, 2012), pp.182-185.

[2] Lewis, 1998a, A study of Wlater Rodney’s Political and Intellectual Though. (University of the West Indies Press, 1998), pp. 237-38.

[3] Eusi Kwayana, Prophet of Self-Emancipation,1988.

[4] Lewis, 1998a, pp. 238-239.

[5] See Lewis, 1998, p. 240 and Rupert Roopnaraine in Chung, Clairmont (ed.), Walter Rodney – a promise of revolution. (Monthly Review Press,2012), pp.112.

[6] Rupert Roopnaraine in Chung, Clairmont (ed.), 2012, pp.112.

[7] Tacuma Ogunseye in The Walter Rodney Commission of Inquiry, Verbatim Report of the Proceeding, June 2014.

[8] Tacuma Ogunseye in The Walter Rodney Commission of Inquiry, June 2014.

[9] Rupert Roopnaraine in Chung, Clairmont (ed.), 2012, pp.111. See also Lewis, 1998, p. 240.

[10] CLR James, “Walter Rodney and the Question of Power”, Race Today Publications (1988).

[11] Rupert Roopnaraine in Chung, Clairmont (ed.), 2012, pp.113 and see p.109-124.

[12] Boukari-Yabara, Walter Rodney (1942-1980): Itinéraire et Mémoire d’un Intellectuel Africain, PhD thesis, (Centre d’Études Africaines CEAf, EHESS, 2010), p.54.

[13] Tchaiko Kwayana (2010); Eusi Kwayana on Walter Rodney (online video) available here (assessed September 2020).

[14] Colin Prescod (1976) “Guyana’s socialism: an interview with Walter Rodney”, in Race & Class, vol. 18, n°1, 1976, pp.125-126.

‘Let the capitalists know that their properties will be trashed’ – an interview with Andreas Malm

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ROAPE
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In a wide-ranging discussion with ROAPE’s Peter Dwyer, Andreas Malm engages with African political economy, the climate emergency, anti-capitalist alternatives to development and the radical thought and politics of Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney. Colin Stoneman introduces ROAPE readers to Malm’s work and politics.

By Colin Stoneman

In the tradition of ROAPE, Andreas Malm is a scholar-activist who maintains that scholars must be actively engaged in campaigns and struggles. Whilst a PhD student, he wrote about accumulation and dispossession in Egyptian fishing communities which was published in ROAPE in 2012.

The research for his PhD became the basis for his pathbreaking 2016 book Fossil Capital. Britain’s embrace of coal came relatively late – waterpower remained dominant for decades after James Watt’s development of the steam engine. Fossil capitalism arose from a desire to concentrate industry in cities, thereby avoiding the complex engineering needed to sustain water-powered production, which would have necessitated co-operation between mill owners; it also allowed for a greater concentration of labour, more easily disciplined, and exploited. Therefore, it is capitalism, not human beings, that is changing the climate; industrialisation itself is less of a problem than the fossil system that powers it; the overwhelming focus of climate activism must be on dismantling fossil infrastructure.

In 2018 Malm published The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, where Fossil Capital was a revision of the history of the industrial revolution, this is a theoretical, methodological, and analytical work. “This essay sets out to scrutinise some of the theories circulating at the nature/society junction in the light of climate change.” Post-modernist theories are the main target, including ‘Constructionism’ and ‘Hybridism’, but also ‘New Materialism’. What survives he calls ‘Property Dualism’ which seems to be a derivative of historical materialism.

As Malm writes “… some theories can make the situation clearer while others might muddy it. Action remains best served by conceptual maps that mark out the colliding forces with some accuracy. … Theory can be part of the problem…. An adequate theory should be able to grasp, the problem as historical.” The conclusion connects with the need for action: “Dare to feel the panic. Then choose between the two main options: commit to the most militant and unwavering opposition to this system. … As for theory, it can only ever play a very limited part in such a project. But at least it should not be a drag on it.”

Using the climate crisis as his core theme, Malm has since gone on to explore how the Covid pandemic reveals the consequences of the destruction of the natural environment in his 2020 book Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century. This relatively short book relates the Covid-19 pandemic to the climate emergency and rejects lessons from the how most advanced capitalist countries handled the pandemic, which were focused on saving capitalism and getting back to normal. Keynesian solutions may have saved capitalism in the second world war but will not save the world in the climate emergency. Instead Malm proposes something more akin to War Communism as in the infant Soviet Union in the early 1920s.

‘The contrast between coronavirus vigilance and climate complacency is illusory. The writing has been on the wall about zoonotic spill-over for years, and states have done as much to address it as they have done to tackle anthropogenic climate change: nothing.’ When the crisis struck, Malm might have added, government action was directed towards shoring up existing property relations and the existing distribution of wealth and income. The interventions were gigantic but overwhelmingly conservative in their intentions and effects.

International agreements are brutal lessons in the art of the possible, but even the most hard-nosed realist might think that the behaviour of the richest countries has veered between the myopic and the abhorrent. As the Sudanese delegate put it at the UN climate conference in Paris, this diminution of ambition meant ‘asking Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact in order to maintain the economic dependence of a few countries [on fossil fuels]’. It was signed anyway.

Malm is clear: ‘The grotesque concentration of resources for burning at the top of the human pyramid is a scourge for all living beings; an effective climate policy would be the total expropriation of the top 1 to 10 per cent.’ Malm loathes apologias for quietism and inaction, usually from writers ensconced near the top of that pyramid. Instead, he proposes an ecological version of Pascal’s wager: a radical eco-modernism might eventually run aground on its own contradictions but is the only progressive politics possible in society as it currently exists.

Emphasising the centrality of political activism, he criticises the (largely) Northern climate movement, and models that preach a non-violent approach to climate justice in his 2021 book How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire. This provocative book is in three short sections. The first attacks the non-violent approach of most climate activists through correcting the false historical arguments they use (the end of slavery, women’s suffrage, Gandhi, Mandela), none of which were non-violent against property (although they tried to avoid violence against people). The second (Breaking the Spell) admits the power and determination of the enemy, but also draws on more recent successful campaigns, showing how progress can be made against the forces of fossil capital, and the final one (Fighting Despair) gets down to some concrete actions with realistic chances of success.

As Malm writes, “Here is what this movement of millions should do, for a start: announce and enforce the prohibition. Damage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep on investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed. ‘We are the investment risk,’ runs a slogan from Ende Gelände, but the risk clearly needs to be higher than one or two days of interrupted production per year. If we can’t get a serious carbon tax from a corrupted Congress, we can impose a de facto one with our bodies.”

Malm’s current research looks at how the far-right are using the climate crisis to spread their ideology and grow. In a nod of appreciation to Franz Fanon this is discussed in detail in his 2021 book White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. Although climate-change denial was almost universal on the far Right, this was because the issue was a distraction from their anti-immigrant bottom line, and as it concerned the whole planet was potentially hostile to nationalist border-reinforcing policies. Some far right parties therefore began to develop an argument along the lines of ‘if it is happening, then it’s not our fault, but the fault of Muslims, non-whites et al. who must be kept out.’ We developed thanks to fossil fuels and must be allowed to continue exploiting our own reserves (and driving cars rather than sharing buses with ‘them’). Hence moves towards fossil fascism or eco-fascism.

The association between fossil-fuel exploitation and racism is comprehensively demonstrated at various levels over the five books. Fossil-fuel capitalists may have few qualms about dallying with and funding the far Right, but racism is not their bottom line. Likewise, with its racist bottom line, the far Right’s knee-jerk reaction is denial, but racism can retreat behind its relatively safe northern borders and accept that the rest of the world may burn.

Unlike How to Blow up a Pipeline, whose final chapter is called ‘Fighting Despair’, White Skin, Black Fuel concludes with ‘Death Holds the Steering Wheel’, arguing that a death-wish behind fascism, reinforced by capital’s inability to see a future without its own dominance, is the dominant trend and we must try to fight back.

Malm is now an internationally recognised militant scholar and speaker who still maintains his roots in activism. In a wide-ranging discussion with ROAPE’s Peter Dwyer he engages with African political economy, the climate emergency, anti-capitalist alternatives to development and radical thought and politics from Frantz Fanon to Walter Rodney.

Colin Stoneman is a long-standing member of the editorial working group of ROAPE, and the review’s treasurer. Colin is retired from a teaching post at the University of Leeds.

Featured Photograph: Andreas Malm delivering a lecture ‘Learning to fight in a warming world’ at Code Rood Action Camp 2018 in Groningen (26 August 2016).

Building a revolutionary party

By
ROAPE
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In 1979, the small revolutionary group, the Working People’s Alliance, transformed itself into a party and launched a major rebellion. Thousands joined the new party to challenge the dictatorship. Strikes broke out across the country involving African and Indian workers. Chinedu Chukwudinma writes how the WPA understood that socialism could only be achieved through the self-emancipation of working people. Walter Rodney emerged as the key revolutionary leader.

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

At around 2am on 11 July 1979 someone set the Ministry of National Development in Georgetown on fire. Forbes Burnham knew who to blame for the arson, though he had no proof. In the afternoon, the police arrested Walter Rodney and six other Working People’s Alliance (WPA) members. The dictator hoped to silence his opponents, but little did he know that the arrest would turn the WPA into a mass party with Rodney as the people’s leader. When news of the arson spread across the country, working people in Georgetown, on the cane fields and in the mining communities gathered to discuss and condemn Rodney’s arrest. In the capital, hundreds joined the WPA’s pickets in front of prisons to identify the whereabouts of the prisoners and to campaign for their freedom.

On 14 July, thousands rallied in front of the courthouse demanding bail for the arrested. So great was the outcry that the judge agreed to release the WPA leaders against the ruling People’s National Congress’ (PNC) wishes. Upon hearing the news, the multiracial protesters marched in triumph through Georgetown. All the political parties and organisations that opposed Burnham’s dictatorship figured among those who supported the WPA. But the euphoric mood quickly vanished. Burnham deployed the armed militia of a religious group, the House of Israel, to break up the demonstration. The attackers stabbed a British Jesuit journalist Bernard Darke to death and wounded two WPA members. State repression did not tame the masses but fuelled them with rage. They initiated the civil rebellion against the PNC.[1]

From July to November 1979, mass protests and strikes shook the PNC dictatorship. The people expressed their anger at the cuts in wages, healthcare, and transport that the PNC had imposed in order to reimburse the loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1978. They held the government responsible for the high unemployment rates, which stood at 30 per cent. Faced with deteriorating living standards and lacking democratic rights, they could no longer tolerate the corruption that plagued the ruling party. Burnham grew nervous upon learning that African miners mounted a strike that paralysed the bauxite industry. It was the first time he faced a major rebellion among his African support base. The miners’ strike against the public sector wage freeze also spread to parts of the civil service. At first, Burnham refused to declare the strike illegal, as he usually did, not wanting to frustrate the many PNC trade unionists who were involved. But Burnham’s greatest fear became reality when 20,000 Indian sugar workers struck in solidarity with the miners a month later. Faced with the prospect of a multiracial general strike, Burnham and his cronies felt that power was slipping out their hands.

In the pamphlet he wrote during the rebellion, People’s Power, No Dictator, Rodney told the masses about the central importance of strikes for advancing the political struggle against the dictatorship:

United strike action teaches us how the dictator can be exposed and how he can be deposed… The dictator requires the population to produce so as to sustain himself and the clique of parasites who dominate Guyana. That is why the mass withdrawal of labour is the ultimate weapon representing the power of the people.[2]

Rodney and the WPA tried to ensure that people supported the strikes through their individual and collective acts of resistance to Burnham. On 20 July the WPA organised its largest ever rally which attracted 8,000 people to the Bourda Mall, an open space where public meetings and markets were held in Georgetown. Rodney delivered a fiery speech in which he declared “the PNC must go by any means necessary”.[3] The Guyanese people were amazed to hear someone articulate their feelings with such honesty and courage. A week later the WPA established itself as a political party geared towards the conquest of state power. Rodney and his comrades understood that the rebellion called on them to connect and direct all the struggles that had erupted in the towns, mines, and the countryside. They aimed to transform these localised struggles over wages and democratic rights into general ones against the dictatorship. And they knew this task meant doing more extensive organising and agitation among the working people than before.

Before becoming a political party, the WPA had strict conditions of membership and stressed discipline and ideological unity among its dozens of volunteer cadre.[4] Having a tight-knit organisation of a few trustworthy members was necessary to withstand harassment from Burnham’s authoritarian regime. There was no mass movement behind which the WPA members could hide. It therefore had to rely on its trained cadres to constantly carry out operations while facing the threat of police infiltrators and raids. The WPA’s ability to survive these difficult circumstances was the result of the meticulous planning of its leaders and the political education of its members.

Now, in the wake of the civil rebellion of 1979, the WPA leaders abandoned their strict recruitment policy. They opened their party’s membership to the hundreds of Africans and Indians of all ages and social backgrounds that asked to join them as long as they agreed with its principles and rules. The WPA leadership had shown an astonishing degree of flexibility and audacity by overcoming the organisation’s old habits, routines, and fears of police spies. It derived its newfound determination to grow its ranks and lead the struggle from the large attendance, the electric applauses, and the ovations that the WPA received at its public meetings. The WPA still maintained its emphasis on the political training of its membership and the formation of a revolutionary cadre. It created education classes and branches called “nuclei” for its party members and organisers, where they read radical literature, such as Lenin’s What is to Be Done and Amilcar Cabral’s Party Principles and Political Practices.[5]

What did the WPA stand for? “The alliance is revolutionary and not reformist”, it asserted in its programme. The WPA meant that socialism could only be achieved through the self-emancipatory struggles of the oppressed masses against their rulers. Rodney expressed this idea when he said that “the revolution is made by ordinary people, not by angels, it’s made by people from all walks of life, and more particularly by the working class who are in the majority”.[6] It therefore rejected the idea that a small group of enlightened and benevolent leaders could gradually deliver socialism to the passive and grateful masses. This understanding made the WPA different from the PNC who identified ‘socialism’ with state ownership of the economy by a handful of bureaucrats. It also made the WPA different from the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) which saw elections—winning a majority in the Assembly and passing laws—as the means to deliver socialist change. [7] The WPA also opposed the cult of personality that had evolved around Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan. “We profoundly distrust the Messiah approach of political parties,” said Rodney, “we are trying to mobilise the energies of the vast majority of the population”.[8] Unlike the PNC or PPP, the WPA established a collective leadership of 15 members, with a rotating chairmanship to ensure that nobody monopolised power.

There was a striking resemblance between the WPA’s claim to see “the revolution in each country as permanent” and Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. [9] Seventy years before, the Russian revolutionary had argued that, even in underdeveloped countries, the fight for democratic rights could grow over into a struggle to expropriate the capitalists and create a socialist society, provided the working class led the revolution with the support of the oppressed. By permanent revolution Trotsky further meant spreading the revolution beyond national borders. However, there was also reason to believe that Trotsky’s theory did not influence WPA intellectuals. While Trotsky conceived revolution as a fluid process, the WPA expected it to present two distinct stages in Guyana, which supposed the realisation of a democratic state as a pre-condition for socialist change.

The WPA programme nevertheless did converge with Trotsky’s ideas in several ways. First, it recognised the leading role of the working class in the revolutionary process. Second, it stressed the need for an alliance between workers and peasants. The WPA programme of 1978 voiced democratic demands such as land for the peasants, the right to work, freedom of the press. These accompanied its calls for workers’ control over the factories and the creation of workers’ assemblies as new ruling organs.[10] Third, the WPA was committed to internationalism. It built ties with the Grenadian socialists who overthrew their dictator in March 1979 and sent WPA members to help with the Grenadian Revolution. That year, the WPA observed with excitement the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, the Iranian Revolution and the Surinamese coup d’état. The rise of the civil rebellion offered its members hope that Guyana was next in line.

WPA leader Eusi Kwayana said that the rebellion “saw almost the whole society creeping out of the shadows into the light of hope, standing in defiance of the power that was … imposing economic and financial oppression and hardship”.[11]The mass rallies that the WPA organised at the height of the rebellion turned into spontaneous marches. In the countryside and the towns, people took to the streets drumming and chanting their favourite slogan: “People Power, No Dictator”. Rodney’s activism was relentless during the Rebellion. He travelled throughout the country to organise and speak at rallies. People promoted his meetings by word of mouth, never with leaflets. He appeared, spoke and captivated the masses, then left before the police or Burnham’s thugs could catch him. His speeches broke the wall of silence and fear around the dictatorship as he mocked Burnham, baptising him “King Kong”.[12] Rodney thus emerged out of Guyana’s highest moment of struggle as the key revolutionary leader of the people.

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.

Featured Photograph: we are grateful to Christopher Laird for the image.

Notes

[1] Eusi Kwayana, “Walter Rodney: The Prophet of Self-Emancipation” (1988) Libcom.org, 2015.

[2] Rodney, Walter, People’s Power, No Dictator, 1979.

[3] Kwayana, Eusi, 1988.

[4] Westmaas, Nigel, 2004, “Resisting Orthodoxy: Notes on the Origins and Ideology of the Working People’s Alliance.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 8, no. 1, p.75.

[5] Westmaas, Nigel, 2004, p.74.

[6] Rodney, Walter, Sign of the Times, 1980.

[7] The PPP’s reformism became more apparent once Guyana held its first free and fair elections in 1992.

[8] Rodney quoted in Amzat Boukari-Yabara, Walter Rodney (1942-1980): Itinéraire et Mémoire d’un Intellectuel Africain, PhD thesis, (Centre d’Études Africaines CEAf, EHESS, 2010), p.532.

[9] Working People’s Alliance, 1978, Towards a Revolutionary Socialist Guyana: Principles and Programme of the Working People’s Alliance, p.2.

[10] Working People’s Alliance, 1978, pp.11-28. See also Sookhedo, Ronnie, “For a socialist Caribbean”, 1981.

[11] Eusi Kwayana, 1988.

[12] Rodney, 1979.

The birth of the Working People’s Alliance in Guyana

By
ROAPE
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In 1974 the Working People’s Alliance emerged as an anti-racist and anti-imperialist formation that fought for socialism from below. To start with it was not an electoral party, but a pressure group that united Pan-Africanist and Indian socialist organisations. Chinedu Chukwudinma describes how Walter Rodney’s uncompromising use of Marxist theory and practice transformed him into the foremost organiser of the Guyanese working people.

By Chinedu Chukwudinma  

The racial conflict in Guyana produced a political system that only allowed space for Forbes Burnham’s People’s National Congress (PNC) and its opposition, Cheddi Jagan’s People’s Progressive Party (PPP). Both parties preached a version of socialism from above that favoured the petty bourgeoisie’s control over the state, never the masses. Burnham blatantly discriminated against the Indo-Guyanese, while Jagan talked about racial unity but, when it came to elections, only campaigned among Indians.

In 1974, amidst this political deadlock, the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) emerged as an anti-racist and anti-imperialist formation that advocated for socialism from below. It was not an electoral party, but a small pressure group that united Pan-Africanist and Indian socialist organisations aspiring to build mass action against Burnham’s dictatorship. Rodney, however, joined the WPA as one of its few independent members. He befriended Eusi Kwayana, the group’s co-founder and a well-known Pan-African activist, who had left both the PPP and PNC out of disgust for their racial politics and their corruption. Many of the WPA co-founders had also grown disillusioned with the major parties and sought a new politics to overcome the racial divide among the working masses. Rodney’s uncompromising use of Marxist theory and practice to foster working class unity helped them to find it.[1]

One of the WPA’s first major anti-racist interventions occurred when it defended an Indian PPP activist Arnold Rampersaud, who the PNC had framed for the murder of an African policeman. At the solidarity rally, Rodney gave a moving speech calling on the Afro-Guyanese to resist Burnham’s attempt to manipulate them against the Indians. When a policeman ordered Rodney to stop speaking, the multiracial audience surged forward, removed the officer, and allowed Rodney to finish his speech. Thus began his transformation into a full-time organiser of the working people. The Guyanese respected Rodney as a Marxist scholar and activist, still unaware that he was soon to become their foremost leader.[2]

Rodney and the WPA established bases. They led reading groups and spoke at public meetings in Georgetown and in the bauxite mining regions. Rodney enjoyed lecturing miners on Marxist political economy and the Russian Revolution of 1917 as well as discussing Guyanese politics and labour conditions in the Bauxite regions. The WPA’s influence among the Indian sugar workers was less notable because it did not seek to infringe upon the territory of their allies, the PPP. The WPA considered the PPP allies because it was the main opposition to Burnham’s regime and the main political force within the Guyanese labour movement. It derived the largest share of its support from the Indian sugar workers and their trade unions. Although the WPA knew very well that Jagan’s PPP represented a false alternative to Burnham’s regime, it still sought to work with them. Rodney and his comrades understood that operating alongside the PPP would allow the WPA to spread its ideas of racial unity and its advocacy for rebellion against Burnham among PPP supporters to draw them closer to its radical politics.

WPA encountered several difficulties when trying to find common ground with the PPP. By 1975, the PPP had changed its attitude towards the PNC following Burnham’s ideological shift from anti-communism to pro-communism. It no longer argued for ‘non-cooperation and civil disobedience’ against the PNC but now declared ‘critical support’ for it. [3] The PPP’s new political line was the consequence of the advice it received from the Soviet Union, which did not want to see two socialist parties in conflict with each other. As a result, the PPP decided to support Burnham’s nationalisation programme and abandon all boycotts of the rigged parliament. In 1977, the PPP even proposed a National Patriotic Front Government where it would share parliamentary power with the PNC. Burnham, however, rejected the proposal after a series of futile negotiations.

Membership card for Brian Rodway of the Working People’s Alliance. Rodway was a close friend and confidante to Rodney and a founding member of the WPA.

The eruption of the 135-day strike of 1977 and 1978, the longest in Guyanese history, afforded the WPA an opportunity to engage with Indian sugar workers, which generally supported the PPP. The WPA successfully convinced African miners to donate in support of the 21,000 striking Indian plantation workers. Its collection for the strike relief challenged the idea that all Africans were scabs, especially after Burnham had sent unemployed Afro-Guyanese to replace or terrorise the strikers. The PPP-backed Guyanese Agricultural Workers’ Union, which had called the strike, invited WPA members to speak at their public meeting. Rodney’s speech again impressed the workers. The crowd grew bigger and bigger and overflowed onto the streets as he spoke about racial unity. When the WPA speakers left to attend another rally nearby they were surprised to see that the crowd had followed them.[4]

Although the WPA relied on only a few dozen activists it escaped the most critical pitfalls of sectarianism that Rodney had observed among many small groups on the British revolutionary left in the 1960s. Whereas these sects used complex jargon and concepts that alienated British workers, the WPA with its slogan ‘bread and justice’ spoke to the Guyanese workers in a language they could understand. The WPA often refrained from declaring its socialist ideology in public to set itself apart from the PNC’s abuse of the term socialism. More importantly, sectarianism meant that British sects failed to build links with mass movements, preferring to latch on to their empty socialist dogma – even if that meant isolation from the working class. The WPA, on the contrary, looked to foster mass support and action against Burnham’s government by building and participating in broad coalitions and campaigns. In 1978, they campaigned with the PPP, trade unions and civic organisations to boycott the PNC’s referendum to reform the constitution and extend Burnham’s presidential powers. The regime nevertheless declared victory in the referendum, despite the low voter turnout.[5]

Alliance building, however, presented another pitfall for the WPA – that of entering the wrong kind of alliance. In 1977, the WPA fell into that trap when it welcomed the PPP’s futile proposal for National Patriotic Front Government, though it had its reservation. Shortly after the WPA became a political party in 1979, it proposed a multi-party Government of National Unity and Reconstruction. There was a noteworthy difference between the proposals: the PPP wanted to share power with Burnham’s PNC, while the WPA wanted to overthrow the PNC regime and replace it with a caretaker government of progressive forces. However, both proposals rested upon belief that “all classes in Guyana had an objective interest in national unity” as Rodney declared in one of speeches. [6] This view was mistaken. The objective interest of workers—their self-emancipation from exploitation—never could be reconciled with that of the petty bourgeoisie, which hoped to exploit Guyanese labour.

While the WPA’s anti-referendum campaign of 1978 was an alliance between working class and grassroots organisations over specific aims, its proposal for National Unity Governments sought to include organisations of the petty bourgeoisie (businessmen, big farmers, civil servants, barristers) to form a bourgeois government.

It envisaged a long-term cooperation between classes around a liberal programme that consisted in restoring the national economy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Such a programme contradicted the WPA’s socialist aspirations as it implied the subordination of its socialism from below to bourgeois parliamentary politics.[7] If any of the National Unity Government plans of the 1970s had materialised, they likely would have had tragic outcomes for the WPA in the advent of a major popular uprising. Rodney and his comrades would have found themselves caught between workers’ struggles and the petty bourgeoisie’s desire to restore order. Would they have defended ‘national unity’ against the workers?

The WPA made mistakes, but it was not afraid to experiment. Through trial and error, it gradually rooted itself among the working people and played an increasing role in their struggles. The organisation produced a single newssheet called Dayclean, which its members regularly distributed at protests, rallies, and door-to-door. This newssheet did not stop at exposing the dreadful conditions of the working people. It provided a critical overview of Burnham’s state capitalism, of racism in Guyana and outlined the significance of popular struggles against it.

As Burnham’s PNC banned all free press, the WPA found it difficult to turn Dayclean into a substantial newspaper. The police raided its offices, seized all ink and printers, and arrested those who sold the paper. The WPA, however, heroically strove to print Dayclean when possible, alongside pamphlets and manifestos that reflected its socialist ideology—to lead the revolution in each country, promote women and education, fight against racism and build a classless society. The rise of the civil rebellion of 1979 would encourage the WPA to transform itself into a mass revolutionary party that would pose as a real alternative to Burnham and Jagan.

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.

Featured Photograph: ‘Dr Rodney’s take on class and race in Guyanese politics’ in Guyana Times (13 June 2021).

Notes

[1] On WPA’s creation see Andaiye, and D. Alissa Trotz, 2020, pp. 87-94 and Westmaas, Nigel, 2004, “Resisting Orthodoxy: Notes on the Origins and Ideology of the Working People’s Alliance.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 63–81

2] Eusi Kwayana, 1988, “Walter Rodney: The Prophet of Self-Emancipation” Libcom.org, 2015.

[3] See Ralph Premdas, 1982, “Guyana: Socialist Reconstruction or Political Opportunism”, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 133-164.

[4] Kwayana, Eusi, 1988.

[5] On the anti-referendum campaign see Working People’s Alliance, Arguments for Unity Against the Dictatorship in Guyana, 1983, p2.

[6] Rodney, Walter, 1979, p.78. Concerning PPP and WPA proposals for national unity see also Working People’s Alliance, Arguments for Unity Against the Dictatorship in Guyana, 1983, pp1-5.

[7] See Working People’s Alliance, 1979, Government of National Unity and Reconstruction: Draft Proposal II, Georgetown, Guyana, p. 12.

Rosa Speaks – beyond, and against, the conventional

By
ROAPE
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Heike Becker reviews a book, Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg, which speaks to a generation of anti-colonial activists, from Cape Town to Cairo, London and Berlin, who are using a new language of decoloniality, with which they claim radical humanity in struggle and theory. The heart of the book puts Rosa in conversation with thinkers of the Black radical tradition.

By Heike Becker

Arundhati Roy once memorably wrote that mass protests, which have been nourished by the memory of generations of repression return with “a kind of rage that, once it finds utterance, cannot easily be tamed, rebottled and sent back to where it came from” (2009, p. 169).  Her words ring true for the decolonial uprisings of a new generation. Inspired by South Africa’s Fallist movements of 2015-16 and in the wake of the global Black Lives Matter surge of 2020, (mostly) young and black protesters have turned against the “thingification” – to which Aimé Césaire equated colonization. This generation of anticolonial activists, from Cape Town to Windhoek, London and Berlin, speaks a new language of decoloniality, with which they claim radical humanity in struggle and theory. They have turned to theorists of the radical black intellectual tradition, such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, and more recently Amilcar Cabral and Walter Rodney. Not all their revolutionary heroes are Black and male, though.

Rosa Luxemburg as a person, thinker and revolutionary is particularly attractive to the postcolonial ‘things’, who stand up against their objectified status, and who have been stirred by radical anticolonial humanist desires. More than a century after her violent death in January 1919 Rosa speaks to young radicalising activists because of the ways in which she went beyond, and against, the conventional and predictable in her writing and activism as much as she followed new pathways in the intimacy of her personal life.

It is thus quite appropriate that a new edited volume has set out to Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg in decolonial perspective. Jane Anna Gordon and Drucilla Cornell have put together an introduction and nineteen chapters by authors from the Global South and North, who come from different intellectual disciplines and traditions but share the view that the coloniality of power permeates capitalist modernity as a worldwide mode of domination.

Gordon and Cornell’s volume aims to revisit Rosa’s perceptive writings through the lens of creolizing theory to demonstrate how timely the Jewish-Polish-German activist-theorist’s insights are right now. They draw their orientation from a concept of creolizing as processes, which join together groups of people in unpredictable, yet recognizable ways. Creolizing as an approach to social, cultural and political theory originated in the Caribbean, yet has since been appropriated in endeavours to understand the ties between those “who were supposed to be radically unequal and separated through Manichean social orderings” (p.1). Creolized elements of life embrace ideas, yet also attributes of everyday life such as, among others, food or music. Gordon and Cornell argue that creolizing takes two primary forms. They summarise these as ‘historical and reconstructive’ and ‘constructive’ respectively. The first aims “to identify relations of influence and indebtedness that have been hidden and obscured. In its constructive mode, creolizing stages conversations that could not have taken place historically but that would have been and still remain generative” (p.1).

The volume speaks to both approaches. In historical and reconstructive perspective, Rosa’s pioneering practice of internationalism, and her efforts to look in her analysis and practice to global circuits that were already evident in local ways, rested in her understanding of revolutionary solidarity. In her seminal work of political economy, she extended the perspective of continuing primitive accumulation in global perspective, and specifically to Africa and Asia. However, her revisionist theorising of primitive accumulation, mass political action and imperialism always insisted on attention to the specificity of suffering. Her cross-species solidarity with her ‘brothers’ is well known, as she referred to the abused and violated buffaloes that pulled a heavy cart into the yard of the prison where she was incarcerated because of her fierce anti-war stance. In a fascinating chapter of Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg, Maria Theresia Starzmann extends this (post)humanist view with a discussion of Rosa’s herbalism and plant collecting while imprisoned, which Starzmann pronounces “first and foremost an act of care toward the natural world [and] also a political tool and an archival practice” (p.170).

Rosa Luxemburg: a letter from her prison cell

Oh, Sonyichka [Sophie Liebknecht] …Recently … [a wagon] arrived with water buffaloes harnessed to it instead of horses. This was the first time I had seen these animals up close. They have a stronger, broader build than our cattle, with flat heads and horns that curve back flatly, the shape of the head being similar to that of our sheep, [and they’re] completely black, with large, soft, black eyes. They come from Romania, the spoils of war. … The soldiers who serve as drivers of these supply wagons tell the story that it was a lot of trouble to catch these wild animals and even more difficult to put them to work as draft animals, because they were accustomed to their freedom. They had to be beaten terribly before they grasped the concept that they had lost the war and that the motto now applying to them was “woe unto the vanquished” … There are said to be as many as a hundred of these animals in Breslau alone, and on top of that these creatures, who lived in the verdant fields of Romania, are given meagre and wretched feed. They are ruthlessly exploited, forced to haul every possible kind of wagonload, and they quickly perish in the process.

And so, a few days ago, a wagon like this arrived at the courtyard [where I take my walks]. The load was piled so high that the buffaloes couldn’t pull the wagon over the threshold at the entrance gate. The soldier accompanying the wagon, a brutal fellow, began flailing at the animals so fiercely with the blunt end of his whip handle that the attendant on duty indignantly took him to task, asking him: Had he no pity for the animals? “No one has pity for us humans,” he answered with an evil smile, and started in again, beating them harder than ever. …

The animals finally started to pull again and got over the hump, but one of them was bleeding … Sonyichka, the hide of a buffalo is proverbial for its toughness and thickness, but this tough skin had been broken. During the unloading, all the animals stood there, quite still, exhausted, and the one that was bleeding kept staring into the empty space in front of him with an expression on his black face and in his soft, black eyes like an abused child. It was precisely the expression of a child that has been punished and doesn’t know why or what for, doesn’t know how to get away from this torment and raw violence. …

I stood before it, and the beast looked at me; tears were running down my face—they were his tears. No one can flinch more painfully on behalf of a beloved brother than I flinched in my helplessness over this mute suffering. How far away, how irretrievably lost were the beautiful, free, tender-green fields of Romania! How differently the sun used to shine, and the wind blow there, how different was the lovely song of the birds that could be heard there, or the melodious call of the herdsman. And here—this strange, ugly city, the gloomy stall, the nauseating, stale hay, mixed with rotten straw, and the strange, frightening humans—the beating, the blood running from the fresh wound. …

Oh, my poor buffalo, my poor, beloved brother! We both stand here so powerless and mute, and are as one in our pain, impotence, and yearning.

Write soon. I embrace you, Sonyichka. Your R.

(Christmas 1917 from Rosa Luxemburg’s prison cell in Breslau to Sophie Liebknecht).

It is such moments of specificity and solidarity, which are at the heart of some of the book’s most fascinating chapters, where authors put Rosa in conversation with thinkers of the Black radical tradition, who she didn’t and couldn’t meet: from W.E.B Du Bois and Walter Rodney, through to Claudia Jones and Lorraine Hansbury.

So why should we be re-reading Rosa Luxemburg from a decolonial, creolized perspective? What does she offer internationalist, anticolonial readers, analysts and activists in the 21st century? In the remainder of this review, I will highlight points made in some of the volume’s particularly perceptive chapters.

Two chapters connect Rosa’s political ‘strategy’ writing on The Mass Strike with 21st century moments of spontaneous mass action, one (by Sami Zemni, Brecht De Smet and Koenraad Bogaert) on the Arab revolution on Tahrir Square in Cairo; the second one (by Josué Ricardo López) on the Central American migrant caravans from 2018 onwards.

The longest section of Gordon and Cornell’s 500 pages book is dedicated to Rosa’s revisionist analysis of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation, starting with an insightful contribution by the late historian Jeff Guy on, what he calls, “a rousing and provocative treatment of South Africa [with which] Rosa Luxemburg applied aspects of her theoretical arguments on the necessary structural links between capitalist and non-capitalist systems to the contemporary imperialist world” (p. 269).

Apart from a few exceptions, such as Patrick Bond’s and Ahmed Veriava’s chapters on the resonances of Rosa’s critique of political economy for contemporary South Africa, the volume tends to lean towards close considerations of her radical humanism. Many chapters speak to the enduring significance of Rosa’s thinking for contemporary concerns, including anticolonial nationalism, a decolonial and anti-racist approach to a critique of political economy, and in the final, particularly strong section of the book, articles on reading decolonial-socialist feminism with Rosa. These are the discussions at the heart of some particularly insightful chapters.

Jane Anna Gordon reconsiders Rosa’s thinking of the role of slavery and shows how she went beyond the conventional Marxist parameters in consistently including the connections between imperialism and capitalism. Gordon concludes that “many contemporary theorists of racial capitalism are tied genealogically to Rosa Luxemburg and her indispensable insights and orientation” (p. 143).

Siddhant Isser, Rachel H. Brown and John McMahon take this thread further in their important discussion of ‘race’-making in their chapter on ‘Rosa Luxemburg and the Primitive Accumulation of Whiteness’. They turn to Rosa’s reworking of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation to theorize the relationship between capital accumulation and constructions of ‘race’ and whiteness as a continuous component of capitalism, across its history. Their writing speaks directly to Silvia Federici’s socialist feminist approach to the primitive (ongoing) accumulation of capital as ‘an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as ‘race’ and age, became constitutive of class rule’ (2004, p. 63).

The development of the concept of primitive accumulation as an accrual of racialised and gendered social relationships is crucial for pushing radical theorizing that generates incisive accounts for feminist anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist practice. The book’s concluding chapters by Paget Henry and LaRose T. Parris on reading – and creolizing – Rosa Luxemburg through the Black Radical Tradition, illustrate this in fascinating close conversation of Rosa and her – imagined – encounters with thinkers and activists Claudia Jones and Lorraine Hansberry.

Rosa Luxemburg dedicated her life to intellectual reflection and political mobilisation because she could not tolerate injustice of any kind. She expressed and lived solidarity with all who suffered under exploitation and oppression – humans, and members of other species. Her yearning for a more human world undoubtedly resonates with today’s thinkers and activists in the movements for radical humanism in the Global South and North. Jane Anna Gordon and Drucilla Cornell must be thanked for bringing together a captivating collection of articles that look at Rosa’s beguiling legacy for our times.

Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg is edited by Jane Anna Gordon and Drucilla Cornell (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).

Heike Becker focuses on the politics of memory, popular culture, digital media and social movements of resistance in southern Africa (South Africa and Namibia). She also works on decolonize memory activism and anti-racist politics in Germany and the UK. Heike is a regular contributor to roape.net.

Featured Photograph: Portrait of Rosa Luxemburg on an underpass in Frankfurt (13 September 2015).

A difficult return – race, class, and politics in Rodney’s Guyana

By
ROAPE
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In 1974 Walter Rodney and his family returned to Guyana. Rodney immediately faced a country divided between the Indian and African working class, and the brutal and divisive regime of Forbes Burnham. Rodney produced an impressive body of historical work which provided a Marxist explanation for the divide of the country’s working people. Chinedu Chukwudinma continues the story of Rodney’s revolutionary life.

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

In Guyana, a multiracial gathering was a rare sight. Yet, in August 1974, between two and three thousand African and Indian Guyanese rallied in front of the University of Georgetown to support Walter Rodney. They had heard that Prime Minister Forbes Burnham’s regime had pressured the University to overturn his appointment as head of the History Department. Angered by that decision, the university staff union and students boycotted classes for two weeks, while the Guyanese Bar Association went on strike. Many intellectuals launched a global campaign to reinstate Rodney, who had gained an international reputation for his scholarship on African history.[1] Rodney had not even left Tanzania, yet he was already the focus of protests and a major political issue for the Guyanese government. Burnham and his cronies feared him because of his past activism in Jamaica and his popularity among the Guyanese masses. Rodney was an advocate of racial solidarity and a Marxist critic of the government, which divided the Guyanese along racial lines and kept them in poverty. He knew he would return to a country that was different from the one of his childhood.

Rodney had left Guyana at 18 years of age and did not live through its decline into racial violence. The racial solidarity of the anti-colonial movement crumbled after the British overthrew the People’s Progressive Party’s (PPP) government in a coup in 1953. The coup produced a split between the PPP’s two leaders, the African lawyer Forbes Burnham and the Indian dentist Cheddi Jagan. Burnham now accused Jagan of being “a communist stooge” [2] and left to create the People’s National Congress (PNC) in 1957. The ideological split turned into a racial one as both parties mobilised for elections on the basis of racial loyalty. Indians remained in the PPP while Africans joined the PNC. The PPP won the 1957 and 1961 legislative and local elections because it relied on the votes from the Indo-Guyanese majority. The Cold War, however, interfered again into Guyanese politics to ensure the PPP’s defeat in 1964. The CIA financed a coalition between Burnham’s PNC and the smaller United Force, which represented the local Portuguese and Chinese capitalists. The Americans wanted to prevent Jagan from turning Guyana into a second Cuba, once it became independent from Britain. Thus, Burnham’s coalition led Guyana to independence in 1966 because of his close relations with the United States.[3]

The electoral campaigns revived old tensions between Africans and Indians, which culminated in violent clashes between 1961 and 1964. The deadliest confrontations unfolded in the spring of 1964 when the colonial government sent African scabs to break the strike of Indian sugar workers. Ten years later, the bitterness and animosity between African and Indian communities had not disappeared. The semblance of racial harmony that the PNC’s propaganda tried to convey was obscured by the glaring fact that Burnham and the Afro-Guyanese bureaucracy dominated the state and continued to discriminate against Indians. This was the country that Rodney returned to in September 1974.[4]

Patricia and the children, who had relocated before Rodney, welcomed Rodney upon his arrival in Georgetown. The family struggled to adjust to life in Guyana. Patricia missed her African friends and the hospitality she encountered in Tanzania. She disliked that people did not greet each other in Guyana and that her children were bullied in school because of their African names and accents. Patricia was also refused employment in healthcare when hiring managers found out that she was married to Walter Rodney. Yet, she secured a job and a house despite the government’s hostility towards her husband. Rodney, however, was jobless as the protests of August 1974 had failed to achieve his reinstatement at the University. He earned a little from lectures he gave overseas and teaching at Cornell University from January to May 1975. But he decided to stay in Guyana and fight Burnham’s despotism.

Interviewed in 1976, Rodney accused the government of using control over jobs to intimidate people. “This control is important”, he said, “we are a small-undeveloped economy with a large unemployed sector—to retain one’s job is a matter of life or death”.[5] He also claimed Guyanese workers could not seek work elsewhere because the state had become the largest employer. Burnham’s regime had nationalised 80 percent of the economy, which included the bauxite mines and sugar plantations. This takeover of foreign companies represented Burnham’s opportunistic shift in ideology to what Rodney called pseudo-socialism. Burnham had reneged on his earlier anti-communism and alliance with the United States when Guyana’s production and exports had fallen. Burnham now looked to Cuba and China for economic assistance and declared Guyana a ‘Socialist Cooperative Republic’. Burnham’s ideological zigzag enabled him to promote himself as a progressive leader abroad, though his citizens saw him as a dictator.[6]

Burnham and the PNC kept stoking the tensions between Africans and Indians to divert attention from its failure to provide jobs, public transport, and decent health care. They rigged elections and granted senior bureaucratic positions to Africans while purging their opponents. The state shot and arrested PPP activists and blamed Indian sugar workers for stealing the nation’s revenue when they went on strike. The key issue of racism in Guyana preoccupied Rodney who spent his days writing articles and speeches on that question. He travelled across the country; conducted interviews among his people and researched archives for his famous book, A History of the Guyanese Working People 1880-1905. Rodney’s formidable body of historical work provided a Marxist explanation for the divide between African and Indians.

Race, Class and Guyanese politics

Rodney’s writings and speeches on race and class in Guyanese history explained how capitalist exploitation created the conditions for modern racism. Speaking on this topic at Columbia University in 1978, Rodney presented racism as a product of capitalism when it developed as a global system in the 1600s. Europe’s ruling class invented racism to justify African slavery in the New World to produce goods for the world market. Racism, he said, always stems from the interest of the exploitative classes.[7] This meant that the racism between Guyanese African and Indians workers was not a matter of natural prejudice or cultural difference. In fact, this divide originated in the colonial plantation society, which brought Africans as slaves and then Indians as indentured workers. As a Marxist, Rodney regarded racism in Guyana as the consequence of the white planter class’s divide and rule strategy to control labour after the abolition of slavery in 1838. He gained that insight from his analysis of Guyanese history, where he recognised the material conditions for the existence of racism under capitalism.

First, Rodney identified that racial tensions among workers arose out of competition over jobs on plantations in the decade after emancipation. In his article Plantation Society in Guyana and his History of the Guyanese Working People, Rodney explained that most ex-slaves became plantation workers and fought the planters over decent wages and working conditions. They even organised two general strikes right after emancipation. Although the strike of 1841 was victorious, that of 1847 failed because the planters imported indentured Indians as scabs. The white planter class had introduced cheap and precarious labour from India in an attempt to break the rising African militancy. Rodney also argued that Indian indentureship created excess labour in British Guyana, which enabled the planters to use unemployment to control the workforce. If Africans refused the terms of employment, they feared Indians might replace them. At the same time, as Rodney notes, indentured immigration split the working class. African workers tended to perform skilled labour, such as cane-cutting, while the Indians did the menial tasks.[8]

Secondly, Rodney saw that racism offered African and Indian workers a false sense of comfort in the face of the exploitation and misery they endured in the colony. The economic competition on the plantation meant that African workers despised Indians as job stealers and tools of the planters. Conversely, Indians saw Africans as lazy workers who would have starved without indenture. As Rodney claimed, they “began to relate to each other via the white (planter) stereotype.”[9] Thirdly, Rodney identified that all ruling classes in Guyana deliberately took advantage of the racial tension between Africans and Indians. He argued that the policy of the colonial state was aimed at ensuring that both races policed each other–by using one racial group to quell the resistance of the other. Rodney quoted one planter who understood that the safety of his class relied upon maintaining the animosity between and Indians: “‘if the Negroes were troublesome every coolie (Indian) on the estate would stand by one. If the coolies attacked me, I could with confidence trust my Negro friends to keep me from injury.’”[10] This ‘divide and rule’, which separated and weakened workers in the face of exploitation, meant that the wages in Guyana stagnated from the 1840s until the end of indenture in 1920.[11]

In his speech at Columbia University, Rodney claimed the African and Indian elite of the 1970s drew on the old racist manipulation to defend their interests as rulers. He explained that the African middle class emerged, through the colonial schooling offered in towns, as teachers, junior civil servants and sometimes lawyers. The Indian elite, however, emerged from the plantations as landlords and merchants. The African elite, which saw itself as the heir to the colonial state, opposed the Indian elite who also wanted state power to support its businesses. From the 1930s to the 1970s, both elites used racism to mobilise their communities against each other as they battled for access and then control of the state. Burnham’s regime, for instance, revived the old stereotypes of Indians being greedy to vilify the 135-day strike of Indian sugar workers of 1977-78, while he recruited thousands of African scabs to break the strike.

The racial politics of African and Indian elites also served as a mechanism to reinforce solidarity within their respective communities. Rodney argued that the Indian landlord farmers, who grew wealthy from callously exploiting their fellow Indians, were ironically often spiritual leaders and the most vocal defenders of Indian interest against Africans. Likewise, Burnham bragged about belonging to the African community while oppressing his own people. By mobilising on the basis of race, both elites could hide the class differences between them and their workers.[12]

The Guyanese people, however, did not always accept the racist manipulation of their rulers. Rodney observed that while the class struggle was fragmented in the 1800s, Africans and Indian workers often united against their bosses in the following century. He devoted the final chapter of his History of the Guyanese Working People to the 1905 rebellion. Indian sugar workers had mounted a strike that spread to the African canecutters and stevedores, setting the stage for an unprecedented multiracial alliance. But the colonial state rushed to crush the revolt before the alliance took shape.[13]1905 proved to Rodney that racial unity was possible on the basis of class struggle. By fighting for higher wages, African and Indian workers started to realise their common interests and overcame their racial prejudices. At Columbia University, Rodney mentioned that workers united again in the strikes of 1924, 1938 and the 1950s during the anti-colonial movement. He pointed out that colonial governors saw this workers’ unity as the biggest threat to the colony and he predicted that it would be the Achilles heels of Burnham’s dictatorship.[14] Rodney’s Marxist writings on race and class promoted the idea that racism could only be abolished through a revolution that united African and Indian workers against their exploiters.

While Rodney admired the spontaneity of Guyana’s multiracial strikes, he also saw their shortcomings. The ruling class reversed the solidarity the strikes had engendered when it restored order. Rodney concluded that workers’ spontaneous struggles needed to be channelled by an organisation. His concern was how African and Indian workers could forge an irreversible bond through organisation.[15] In this respect, he saw the anti-colonial alliance of the 1950s as a fragile one, resting on the electoral ambitions of Jagan and Burnham. Rodney aspired to politicise the masses in ways that had not been done before. So, he joined the Working People’s Alliance in 1976 to fight racism and the Guyanese dictatorship.

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.

Featured Photograph: ‘Support Guyana’s Sugar Workers – Stop the Closure of the Wales Estate’ in Socialist Workers Alliance (Guyana) 7 October, 2016.

Notes

[1] Boukari-Yabara 2010, pp 496-498.

[2] Ralph Premdas, “Guyana: Changes in Ideology and Foreign Policy”, World Affairs, Vol. 145, No. 2, (1982) p183.

[3]  See Premdas,1982, pp.141 and Lewis, 1998a, pp. 5-13.

[4] Andaiye, and D. Alissa Trotz, The Point Is to Change the World: Selected Writings of Andaiye. (Pluto Press, 2020), pp 59-74.

[5] Dr David Hinds (2014) In the Sky’s Wild Noise: A documentary on Dr.Walter Rodney (online video) available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= (assessed August 2020).

[6] Premdas, 1982, pp.184-194.

[7] A speech Rodney gave to black students at Columbia university, in 1978 Kilombo Uk (2015) Walter Rodney: Race and Class in Guyanese Politics, (online video) available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9szjOu-yIPs&t=965s (assessed August 2020).

[8]  Walter Rodney, Walter, “Plantation Society in Guyana”, Fernand Braudel Center, Vol. 4, No. 4, (1981b)pp. 657-664.

[9] Rodney, 1981, p664. See also Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905, (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981a), pp174-189.

[10] Rodney,1981a, p189.

[11] Rodney, 1981b, p659

[12] Kilombo Uk (2015) Walter Rodney: Race and Class in Guyanese Politics, (online video) available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9szjOu-yIPs&t=965s (assessed August 2020).

[13]  Rodney,1981a, pp174-189.

[14] Kilombo Uk (2015) Walter Rodney: Race and Class in Guyanese Politics, (online video) available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9szjOu-yIPs&t=965s (assessed August 2020).

[15] Kilombo Uk (2015) Walter Rodney: Race and Class in Guyanese Politics, (online video) available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9szjOu-yIPs&t=965s (assessed August 2020).

Kenya’s struggle heroes today – the social justice movement

By
ROAPE
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Gathanga Ndung’u commemorates activists whose lives were snatched away by Kenya’s brutal capitalism. Activists who launched a war against a system of impunity, a world one hundred times larger, mightier, and older than them, but, Ndung’u explains, that each of them mounted a defence to protect and defend their comrades and communities.

By Gathanga Ndung’u

The independence struggle of 1920 to 1963 against the colonial government was followed by the second liberation struggle from 1982 to 1992 against the dictatorship of the President Daniel Arap Moi. This was a fight for democracy, a just constitution and a fight for civic space. This culminated with repealing of Section 2A of the constitution in December 1991 which had made Kenya a one-party state for almost a decade. The new, or third wave of liberation has been carried out by social justice movements in Kenya together with a multitude of organisations.

This blogpost focuses on three committed activists whose lives were cut short by the same system that took our independence heroes. They dedicated their lives in the new wave of struggle which has been characterised by extra-judicial executions and enforced disappearances by the police, the shrinking of democratic space, high level corruption, the ever-widening gap between the poor and rich and the privatisation of basic services.

The Social Justice Centres’ Working Group (SJCWG) is an umbrella body of more than sixty social justice centres based in the communities across the country. It was formed early in 2018 when individual grassroots human rights centres decided to come together to tackle the many injustices in the country and more so in the poor urban areas. The Social Justice Centres Movement has also suffered losses in its five years of existence with the lives of three human rights defender (HRD’s) ending in tragic ways. The richness of life is not through material accumulation, but rather through the impact we make on others.

In this post I celebrate the lives and activism of our fallen comrades as a testament to their work and in the hope that they did not die in vain, and they can inspire others.

Carol ‘Mtetezi’ Mwatha

Carol Mwatha was a mother of two and was a vibrant and committed human rights defender who dedicated her life to serving the community. She worked to ensure that the streets were safe for the youths who had been a target of police killings, arbitrary arrests, extortion and harassments. She started her activism long before the formation of Dandora Community Justice Centre (DCJC) and she had created an elaborate network with other community organisers, activists and organisations fighting for the same cause.

The truth about her tragic end will probably never be known due to the manner in which the state agents hastily created what seemed like an obvious cover up and disseminated the story to media houses without reaching out to the family first, as protocol would have demanded. This was a deliberate move to control the narrative. Carol went missing on 6 February 2019 only to be found at the city morgue on 12 February registered under a wrong name. Her family and friends had been at the same facility on the 8 and 9 February and didn’t find her among those that had been brought to the facility from the day she went missing.

The police story lacked credence from the very beginning. The mortuary attendants failed to disclose the officer in charge on the day she was purportedly brought to the morgue. The post-mortem was delayed, and even then, the wrong name was suspiciously entered – Carolyn Mbeki – and the police went ahead and informed the media of her ‘discovery’ on 12 February even before informing the family.

Carol was a visionary leader with excellent organisational and mobilisation talents. The idea of forming a centre in the community was taken in her house at an informal meeting with her comrades. She saw the need to have a community centre to bring different community organisers into Dandora under one umbrella and speak in one voice. She sat down together with her comrades from DCJC and committed to organising and mobilising her community against the many social injustices they experienced daily.

As a mother, Carol rejected the idea of bringing-up her children in a context where injustices are normalised. To this end, she committed to fight extra-judicial killings, police extortion, arbitrary arrests and harassment of youths which were and still are a common trend in Dandora and other high-density and poor neighbourhoods. She knew what she was standing against but her zeal for a safe Dandora superseded her fears. Alaman James, a long-time friend of Carol notes she was a frequent visitor to Kwa Mbao Police Post and other police stations in Dandora as she tried to secure the freedom of community members who had been arbitrarily arrested. Alaman recounts how Carol – his church friend turned activist – spent countless hours going late at the night to police stations and from one organisation to another trying to help victims. Her resolve to follow-up police killings set her against powerful forces which were used to acting with complete impunity. The establishment of DCJC in the community definitely sent a strong a message which made these forces feel threatened.

Faith Kasina, another close friend of Carol and a coordinator of Kayole Community Justice Centre, described her as a mother figure to most of her comrades. Despite her lean frame, she had wide shoulders for her comrades to lean on when they needed her. She was an elder sister, a mother figure to some, and a close confidant to many. Faith talks of a comrade who would frequently reach out to her friends and comrades just to make sure they were well. Through her friends’ accounts, I learnt about a leading comrade who stood against overwhelming odds no matter the outcome.

Carol Mwatha launched a war against a system of impunity, a system one hundred times larger than her, mightier than her, older than her, but she mounted a defence to protect her children and the community where she lived.

Henry Ekal Lober “Turu”

On 21 February 2021, we lost another committed comrade. Members of the social justice movement learnt of his death after a six-day search ended with the tragic revelation. Ekal had lost consciousness and was taken to Kenyatta National Hospital. Members of his social justice centre had spent days looking for him without help from the hospital administration. With the lethargy and negligence in our public hospitals and because he was not accompanied by anyone to the hospital, he was left to the mercy of fate. He succumbed to his condition and died.

Ekal or Turu as he was known by many, hailed from Loki in Turkana hence his alias. Just like many in Mathare, Ekal found a second home there and he would spend the rest of his years in the community. He came to Nairobi looking for a promising life after leaving his pastoralist family hundreds of kilometres from the capital. Mathare welcomed him with open arms, and he ‘fell in love’ with the place, never to return home.

Ekal had slurred speech, a limp and wound that had become septic overtime, and he struggled with both alcoholism and the institutionalised poverty in the ghettos of the city. Despite these problems, he was a forever jovial, brutally honest with everyone and coherent when it came to articulating issues of injustices caused by the system. For this, some referred to him as professor.

Mary Njeri, one of the administrators at Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC), recalls her moments with Ekal with nostalgia: “Even though he struggled with alcoholism, he was smart and very clear when it came to articulating his thoughts and what he envisioned for the community. He always carried a pen and a book for jotting down ideas and reflections and a magazine to read in his free time. I sometimes wondered what he would be scribbling and one day out of curiosity, I decided to have a look in one of his notebooks …I was shocked to learn that Ekal was conducting one-man research on Water Accessibility in Kosovo, an area of Mathare where he lived. He did all this with zero budget. Despite his failing health, he would criss-cross the narrow alleys to interview residents on his topic.”

On this particular day, he came straight to Njeri. She wrote and translated the conversation that ensued:

Ekal: Hello Njeri

Njeri: I’m fine, what about you?

Ekal: I’m fine. Are you still in college? Do you know how to use a computer?

Njeri: Yeah, I know how to.

Ekal: (Unfolding his research papers), I would like you type up my research report on water.

Njeri was left speechless after going through the content of his research. It was written in a very clear manner capturing most aspects of the water crisis. Ekal was proactive when it came to action and chose to do what was needed without waiting for donors to fund his work. This is the true spirit of an organic community organiser. Apart from this, he always wrote articles which he would ask comrades to type for him. Yet he was an intellectual that got smothered by the system, slowly sucking his dreams out of him, leaving him hollow and broken.

Ekal was a committed member of Bunge La Mwananchi (People’s Parliament). It is from this space where he became friends with Gacheke Gachihi one of the founder members of MSJC. Ekal floated the idea of forming a JM Kariuki Social Justice Centre named after Josiah Mwangi ‘JM’ Kariuki, who was an activist and politician assassinated during Jomo Kenyatta’s regime. MSJC would later be formed in 2014 to document and fight extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and other social injustices.

I came to know Ekal in 2020 at various functions organised by MSJC. In all these meetings, he always created ‘beautiful trouble’, the kind of trouble I call, ‘necessary trouble’. He would not let the meetings proceed without following protocol. He would speak his mind and oppose anything that he deemed not to be in the spirit of true and radical justice.

According to Njeri, Ekal wouldn’t hide his disappointments and offer his unsolicited criticism and would repeat it over and over until his counsel was heeded. And of course, it was always positive criticism. Through this approach, he was instrumental in MSJC’s growth and helped to ensure that the centre did not veer off from its core and founding mandates.

Oyunga Pala, a Kenyan journalist, columnist and an editor, teamed up with Ekal and became a committed member of the Mathare Green Movement where, with Ekal, he embarked on an ambitious project to clean and green Mathare. Hailing from the arid areas of Turkana in Northwest Kenya, Ekal understood very well the role trees play in our ecology. He invested his time in increasing the tree cover of Mathare knowing very well that most of the trees wouldn’t benefit him personally but would serve the generations to come.

The Mathare Green Movement went ahead and transformed garbage sites and polluted areas into small parks. These small parks serve as oases of hope in Mathare giving us a sneak preview of the Mathare dream that Ekal believed in. In his final tribute to Ekal, Oyunga Pala describes the futuristic dream that Ekal saw for Mathare; the future where youths could craft their destinies by being proactive in shaping and charting a new path full of hope. Ekal was one of the few comrades who was proactive, pragmatic, brutally honest, and committed to the struggle with a jovial soul. He always strived to rise above the system’s dragnets stifling his spirit.

This is my ode to Ekal:

May the homeless birds from the wilderness find a tree to perch on in Mathare,

from a restless journey may they find home, an oasis of peace and comfort.

May your trees be home to thousands of homeless birds,

ejected from their ancestral homes due to ecological disruption.

May your trees clean the foul air in Mathare,

the foul air of ethnicity, crime, despair and hopelessness

 and breathe out fresh air rich in hope, a brighter future and common goal of prosperity.

May the roots of your trees hold together the soil of Mathare,

the soil with the blood of Mau Mau and many slain youths.

May that rich history be held together by the roots of your trees.

May that soil never be eroded or washed away.

Let your trees hold the rich history for us and for the future generations.

Alphonce Genga

On 4 February 2022, the Social Justice Centres’ Movement was thrown into yet another deep mourning after the sudden death of Comrade Alphonse Genga. Alphonse was a 21-year old comrade of Githurai Social Justice Centre (GSJC) whose demise occurred four days to from his 22nd birthday.

Brian Mathenge, a close friend, and a colleague of Alphonse paints a picture of a young, vibrant comrade fresh from school, who decided to make an impact in his community. He chose the unfamiliar route, to commit his life to protect the weak, the marginalised, the voiceless and the poor in Kenya. Within a year, Alphonse was a powerhouse in activist circles due to his sincere commitment. He used art to reach out to more community members and to educate, organise and mobilise.

Alphonse would later join the Mau Mau study cell organised in Githurai. Through the ideological grounding classes he attended, he joined the Communist Party of Kenya (CPK) where he dedicated his time to reading and understanding Marxist theory. This sharpened him politically and he would later use the same knowledge to reach more people from his area of residence in Roysambu. He preached and practiced socialism.

Alphonse wore many hats, but if there is one aspect that defined him it was his commitment to ecological justice. He took part in the annual climate strike, he had joined several ecological justice groups such as Eco-Vista, Ecological Justice League, Kasarani Ecological League, Green Jewel Movement and Githurai Green Movement among others.

During the posthumous birthday and celebration of his life, one of his friends confessed that Alphonse had quit football, giving up a talent that he had nurtured since childhood so that he could spend more time in the fight for his community in Githurai.

On 2 February, he was involved in a road accident. He suffered an internal head injury and a broken arm. He was rushed to Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH) where he was left unattended for more than ten hours, yet he was a critical condition. Alphonse was in acute pain; his centre members were in panic in the hospital compound. It was only after a confrontation between his friends and the hospital staff that the doctors attended to him although with great lethargy. At the time of his death, his broken arm had not been attended to, more than 36 hours after admission. It was this kind of neglect in a system dominated by privatised healthcare that gradually and painfully squeezed the life out of Alphonse. The same healthcare system he was fighting to improve cut his life abruptly short.

It is an agonising fact which makes one reel with pain to learn that a public hospital such as KNH has a private wing to attend to their well-to-do clientele while the general populace is segregated in general wards without enough medics, nurses, drugs and beds for patients. Only the rich get services as they can afford to pay for them while the poor daily die in droves. Privatisation of the healthcare system in the country has turned the entire system into a for-profit venture.

To give a befitting tribute to our fallen comrade, it is the responsibility of every comrade to demand a total overhaul of the cartel-ridden healthcare system and replace it with a service that serves the people.

In the spirit of Alphonse Genga, it’s NOT YET UHURU until our healthcare is liberated. Let’s ensure we fight for justice, dignified lives, and a better healthcare system as comrade Genga lived doing.

Gathanga Ndung’u is a community organiser with Ruaraka Social Justice Centre  which is under the Social Justice Centres’ Working Group. He is also part of Revolutionary Social League brigade that organizes political education in different political cells in the respective centres in Nairobi.  Away from this, he is a biotechnologist with great enthusiasm for ecological justice, food sovereignty and security. Above all, Gathanga is a Pan-Africanist and a socialist.

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For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers pathbreaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive.
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