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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whites and democracy in South Africa

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

By Roger Southall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walter Rodney – the prophet of self-emancipation

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

By Chinedu Chukwudinma 

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

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

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

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

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

***

Thank you roape.net

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alienation in three parts: mental health in Kenyan women activists

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

By Noosim Naimasiah

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

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

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

Mental health – a Kenyan retrospective

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part One: Imperial Games of Numbers and Manuals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

By
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

By
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
-

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.

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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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