The birth of the Working People’s Alliance in Guyana

May 12, 2022

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

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

[4] Kwayana, Eusi, 1988.

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

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

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

Rosa Speaks – beyond, and against, the conventional

ROAPE

May 11, 2022

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

By Heike Becker

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

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

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

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

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

Rosa Luxemburg: a letter from her prison cell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROAPE

May 5, 2022

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

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

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

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

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

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

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

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

Race, Class and Guyanese politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[10] Rodney,1981a, p189.

[11] Rodney, 1981b, p659

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

[13] Rodney,1981a, pp174-189.

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

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

Kenya’s struggle heroes today – the social justice movement

ROAPE

May 3, 2022

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

By Gathanga Ndung’u

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

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

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

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

Carol ‘Mtetezi’ Mwatha

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Ekal Lober “Turu”

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

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

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

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

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

Ekal: Hello Njeri

Njeri: I’m fine, what about you?

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

Njeri: Yeah, I know how to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is my ode to Ekal:

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

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

May your trees be home to thousands of homeless birds,

ejected from their ancestral homes due to ecological disruption.

May your trees clean the foul air in Mathare,

the foul air of ethnicity, crime, despair and hopelessness

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

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

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

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

May that soil never be eroded or washed away.

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

Alphonce Genga

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The horrors of the global gulag archipelago

ROAPE

April 28, 2022

ROAPE’s Graham Harrison examines Britain’s deal with Rwanda which he argues shows Western states are constructing a vast international network of refugee prisons in post-colonial countries – offshoring the wretched of the earth to a dystopian universe devoid of rights, justice, and humanity.

By Graham Harrison

The EU Partnership Framework on Migration connects European aid to logistical and legal measures in partner countries to hold migrants at Sahelian borders rather than allowing them to move through the complex and risky trans-Saharan conduits to the Mediterranean coast and then possibly into the EU.

In 2017, Niger was the per capita largest recipient of aid in the world. It received money to introduce legal restrictions of movement, harder borders, return programmes, and material for its security services. Before its closure, the Dadaab complex of refugee camps accommodated as many as 450,000 refugees, mainly Somalis left in a condition of suspended expatriation. The Dadaab camps were maintained by over a thousand aid workers from 22 agencies living in the UNHCR compound located in Dadaab town.

Since 2001 (with an interregnum when the centres were closed) Australia has routed refugees coming by sea to the island of Nauru ‘regional processing centre’ where people might remain for up to five years. It provided financial support to the Nauru government that effectively legislated for the suspended animation of asylum seekers who were travelling to Australia. In 2018, the US government offered to take some Nauru refugees. The US itself has a set of ‘lily pad’ centres to hold refugees: US Border Patrol has operations in Iraq, Jordan, Afghanistan, Colombia, Haiti, Peru, Panama, Belize, Mexico, Kenya, Costa Rica, Ukraine, Kosovo, Argentina, Honduras, Ecuador, Armenia, Tajikistan, and Guatemala.

The overall pattern is clear. Since the early 1990s there has emerged a transnational gulag archipelago in which displaced people are cantoned into camps and centres in the post-colonial world. These centres are in part funded by Western states with a view to restricting the movement of peoples with livelihoods destroyed into the West. The funding is centrally based in a security logic that has as its effects a militarisation of migration policy and a downgrading of human rights. Most strikingly, it has created a world in which millions of people exist in a state of non-citizenship, dependency, and radical uncertainty. Leaving their own country, refused citizenship in a host country, and villagized into a Western-funded encampment. It is hard to imagine a more disempowered state of being.

The UK has signed a deal with the Rwandan government to re-route refugees to Rwanda. Boris Johnson said that the deal would potentially involve tens of thousands of people and also involve resettlement of approved asylum seekers in Rwanda itself. The announcement itself – presented through the prime Minister and the Home Secretary in ways that were deeply ambiguous – is part of the global cantonment strategy sketched above. As with Australia, the EU, and the US, aid and other funding is allocated to a remote country which in return commits to establish the architecture to hold hundreds or thousands of displaced people and subject them to a permanent state of securitised insecurity. And, most importantly, to keep them away from Western borders.

Rwanda: the cantonment state

This is a global order. It consists in a political strategy of holding pens into which the millions are forcibly routed into a state of non-citizenship. The distinctions between legal and illegal, bogus and genuine, economic or political refugee status miss the point from which one should start: that civil war, state collapse, swingeing erosions of livelihoods, and manifold processes of dispossession have created a multitude whose state-citizen relationship (however tenuous and difficult) has all but disappeared. Narratives of emergency or exception misrepresent what are quite clearly structural features in global politics.

This is why a transnational gulag archipelago has been constructed over thirty years. One can conceive it as a hierarchical network of states in which governments that receive aid and/or have Western militaries on their territory act as host for cantonment. There are certain prerequisites: a willingness to change law and order practices to remove freedom of movement from those expatriated in keeping with the strategic objectives of Western countries; an ability to act as a conduit for aid and military support to bolster the security mechanisms that stop the risk-taking, innovation, and energies of the displaced who endeavour to escape the cantonment system; and an ability to generate political discourses of civilised hosting based in global humanitarian principles.

This global system of holding pens relies on two distinct and mutually constituted forms of sovereignty: the Western nation or region that seeks a way radically to reduce immigration and the post-colonial nation that partners the West as a development and security solution.

In this context, Rwanda fits the bill extremely well.

In 1994, when the current Rwandan government came to power, the first of the many crises it faced was a migration crisis. In fact, migration crises: returning Tutsis and Hutus from outside the country, and internally displaced Rwandans moving from one region to another. The UNHCR estimated that there were 1.2 million refugees in Zaïre, and 600,000 in Tanzania alone. Return involved different countries, sociologies, and histories of fleeing and return. Initially, and without a great deal of external aid, the new government did remarkably well at managing inflows, stabilising their spatial ordering, and keeping its borders relatively stable. Subsequently, the government established re-education (ingando) camps into which it poured tens of thousands of people who had been identified through a grassroots courts system (gacaca) as complicit in some way or another in the genocide against the Tutsis or of needing a new mindset. Rwanda processed people through a detention/education penal system which—whilst heavily authoritarian—completed a kind of statist transition beyond the genocide.

In short, Rwanda is a cantonment state par excellence. Through resettlement, the construction of refugee camps, and the re-education centres, it has internalised a core facet of its governance in the spatial ordering of those within its borders. More broadly, its planning of villages, re-naming of streets, and re-zoning of agrarian space all speak to the same political logic.

Western development and diplomatic staff involved in Rwanda like this aspect of the government’s approach. During one of my research visits, I interviewed a senior European manager of Bralirwa, part of the Heineken drinks manufacturer group. He showed me pictures he had taken of the tractors parked on one of the agribusinesses (Bramin farm) that supplied maize to Bralirwa. They were perfectly aligned. He told me—with no little enthusiasm and with a mindset I have encountered many times in western expatriate circles in East Africa—how orderly the parking of the tractors was and how impressive it was in comparison with similar commercial farms in Kenya where tractors were parked chaotically.

Many Westerners who have researched Rwanda and interviewed Western expatriates will, I think, find this vignette familiar: the view held amongst Western expatriates that Rwanda is uniquely and exceptionally orderly. This aesthetic of modernity, the internal discipline within the apparatus of the state, the bureaucratic culture of target setting… all of these phenomena present to expatriates a kind of developmental mutual respect: a sense of shared purpose, a softening of the often-adversarial core of relations between vulnerable former colonies and intervening donors and agenda-setters. Everyone is taking the project or plan seriously.

It is unsurprising, then, that the UK government finds in Rwanda a near-perfect partner for its own contribution to the transnational gulag archipelago. It fits the bill. A state forged in effective spatial ordering; a government adept at sustaining donor support; and a country that will likely generate an orderly, well-audited, transparent, and well-presented system of reception, processing, cantoning, and possibly resettling of people from all over the world into what is historically a state defined by successions of settlement and resettlement.

Visit Rwanda, obey the rules, receive support, stay unless given permission otherwise. This is the expectation of the UK government.

Disaster foretold

However, this expectation is naïve in the extreme. In fact, like so many initiatives that have emanated from the current UK government, it has the real risk of falling apart quite quickly and looking ludicrous.

Most importantly, there is the obvious imposition of suffering that the agreement implies. The government argues that the measure is purposefully unpleasant, a deterrent to traffickers. But it is unlikely to work as a deterrent because, as we have already noted, immigration is not best understood as an undertaking made by individuals or families according to perceived incentives and disincentives. It is structured into the dynamics of capitalism and the sovereignties it has produced, manifested in insecurities and penuries experienced by countless millions. Trafficking is a symptom of a deeper process and making things harder simply means, well, making things harder, not stopping the flows.

It is analytically feeble to try and define a legitimate and illegitimate migration in this context. As if some people who have, say, had their homes destroyed by a Syrian government bomb are legitimate and those who decide to migrate—quite sensibly, young men first—to seek a better life are illegitimate. However one discusses immigration levels into the West, let us not start with the premise that hundreds of millions of people should quash their own agency and ambition, sit still, and enjoy their poverty until an NGO might arrive with a solar panel or a microcredit scheme.

Nevertheless, if one is prepared to discount the suffering experienced by refugees then one might argue that this measure is a necessary one, a ‘least worst’ solution to a pressing problem. But it isn’t. And this is because the partnership itself is high risk, ambiguous, and unsustainable.

One part of the account of the Rwandan government’s obsession with order is the authoritarianism that enables and dynamises it. This is well-recognised in the research on Rwanda. There have been endlessly debated cases of alleged mass atrocity by the Rwandan state, most infamously the Kibeho refugee camp in 1995 where evidence suggests thousands of internally displaced people were shot by the Rwandan military. There is the tiered surveillance of citizens and state officials that cascades down to groups of ten residences. There is the shutting down of media and civil society, and alleged assassinations (at home and abroad).

One might suppose that all of this would not apply to re-routed refugees, that they might escape the difficult post-genocide ethnic politics of Rwanda’s statehood. But there are good reasons to expect otherwise. The Rwandan government understands very well the political advantages of presenting an attractive shop window to influential and wealthy states. It will want the project to work, and ideally to work better than expected. This was a constant refrain from Rwandan officials and Western donors in my interviews: the project was successful and completed ahead of time. One can expect re-routed refugees to be treated as a political resource, socially engineered into order, surveilled and contained. Yet eventually the refugees will experience the same forces of the state that others have in moments of social upheaval.

In that moment—whether witnessed by Western media or not—the idiocy of the policy will be exposed as those who moved from, say, Afghanistan find themselves as stateless and brutalised as ever before and wish for nothing more than the possibility to escape, to rejoin the stateless multitudes and try again.

It gets worse. Rwanda’s relations with the West and UK are not entirely cosy. ‘Partnership’ is code for a kind of adversarial-aid relationship in which the Rwandan government has significant moments of rejection and rebellion against the West. In early April this year, Rwandan President Paul Kagame stated that ‘there are three systems that govern the world, one is called democracy, the other is called autocracy, the third in between – most powerful, very silent, effective – and that is hypocrisy’. The latter, Kagame implied, being Western states.

The Rwandan government is not stupid, docile, or weak. It receives donor money for projects but guards its sovereignty jealously. This project, once established, is leverage. If human rights criticisms of Rwanda emerge, this project is security for the Rwandan government that will have been working closely with its partner, the UK government, to solve the global refugee crisis. I can easily imagine the discourse: we Rwandans understand what it is to be dislocated, subject to tyranny. That is why we have worked with the UK to bring safe haven to thousands of displaced people… and now you, you Westerners who did not assist us during the genocide have the temerity to accuse us of human rights violations? Anyone who has read a great many public statements by Kagame and the elite around him will surely be familiar of this kind of statement.

And, there’s more.

It is a banal assumption of elite wrist-wringing about refugees that the refugees themselves are empty vessels. Numbers. Burdens. Generically a threat. They are all people with agency and history. Crossing a sovereign border under extreme stress is a remarkable exercise in agency. All detailed studies of refugees show the same pattern: multi-sited moves from town to city, from city to border, in transit to another city, possible connection to kin or contacts, another move, an appeal to border authorities or the dipping into a covert conduit into a destination state.

Thousands of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have embarked on this kind of journey, most often moving into neighbouring countries in the region but also further afield. According to the UK Census of 2001, 8,500 citizens of the DRC were resident in the UK. And there will be more than the Census did not pick up. Imagine for a moment that those people moved to the UK through the typical multi-stage and dreadfully fearful journeys of most people seeking refuge. Recall that the main driver of mass displacement in the DRC in the 2000s was the Rwandan army. Now imagine that, as a Congolese, if you arrive in the UK or are discovered as an ‘illegal’ resident, and you are renditioned to Rwanda, home of the military that drove Africa’s world war and caused your displacement.

This has not happened yet of course. But it is the aim of the UK government that the more effective its efforts are, the more likely it is that this will happen. We know that the UK government has returned people to countries that they fled from, handcuffed, and led onto planes. So, this has not happened but, if all goes to plan, it will. This is a level of callousness that is difficult to encapsulate in words.

Global gulag archipelago

The global gulag archipelago is a well-established response to the collapse of order in many states around the world and the destabilising and impoverishing effects of capitalism’s relentless lurching from crisis to crisis. It is a global and systemic phenomenon that has generated a form of intergovernmentalism based in the setting up of transnational human holding pens for those who no longer enjoy the minimal political safety of citizenship.

The UK government’s project with Rwanda is part of this, articulated as a partnership to deal with a crisis presented as an exception not a structural phenomenon. And, in the low-grade political calculus of the current government, the muscularity of Rwanda’s social engineering, and the naiveté of the current government in relation to the political nous of the Rwandan government, the entire project looks like that most abysmal of political marvels: if it fails it will be a disaster and if it succeeds it will be worse.

Graham Harrison teaches political economy at the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University and is on the editorial board of ROAPE. His recent book Developmentalism: The Normative and Transformative within Capitalism is published by Oxford University Press. Harrison has written on the UK/ Rwandan deal in Tribune on 16 April.

Featured Photograph: Refugees aboard the Geo Barents, a vessel operated by Doctors Without Borders, before arriving at a hospital in Italy, on 19 June, 2021 (The Outlaw Ocean Project).

Socialism from above or below – Rodney’s politics and activism

ROAPE

April 26, 2022

Chinedu Chukwudinma describes Walter Rodney’s initial enthusiasm for Tanzanian socialism, and how he participated in projects to build an alternative to capitalism in the country. Gradually, Rodney became critical of these top-down efforts at socialist transformation and turned to the struggle of the working class from below. Chukwudinma examines the development of Rodney’s politics, and his views on Pan-Africanism.

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

Rodney’s friends remembered the parties that he and Patricia hosted at their house in Dar es Salaam. When Rodney wasn’t working, there was always someone visiting the couple to discuss politics or play dominos. Patricia described her husband as a good family man; he did house chores and cooked – he loved making Chinese food. Patricia gave birth to their daughters Kanini in 1969 and Asha in 1971. Rodney enjoyed spending time and playing with his kids. When he visited Ujamaa villages near Dodoma in 1970 with the University Students’ African Revolutionary Front (USARF) and the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) youth league, he brought his son Shaka along. Rodney lodged there for weeks and worked on installations for farming. He relished every opportunity to meet peasants and learn about Tanzanian socialism.

Rodney grew fascinated with Ujamaa. He saw it as a radical initiative to eradicate poverty in the countryside. By 1973, TANU had moved 15 per cent of the peasantry from isolated homesteads into cooperative farms, which revitalised the traditional communal ways of life.^[1] These Ujamaa villages were supplied with electricity and clean water, schools, and clinics to encourage peasants to produce more food for the nation. Rodney believed Ujamaa reduced Tanzania’s reliance on trade with the West by replacing cash crops with food farming. In one of his most controversial articles, he went as far as to claim that Ujamaa charted a new path to socialism that would be distinct from that of developed western nations.

Rodney defended his view against some Marxists who argued that a socialist revolution could only happen in western capitalist countries, which had a large modern industry and therefore a large working class. They believed underdeveloped nations like Tanzania must first experience years of capitalist development before a workers’ struggle for socialism would become conceivable. But they overlooked that the Russian Revolution, the only sustained victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, unfolded in an underdeveloped country where the working class accounted for only three per cent of the population. Therefore, Rodney was right to argue against these Marxists that Tanzanians could fight for socialism in the present rather than suffer under more decades of capitalism. But he overplayed his hand when he claimed that Tanzanian socialism could occur without a worker’s revolution.

Rodney assigned no significant role to the Tanzanian working class because he thought the peasant Ujamaa villages alone could form the basis of a socialist society that avoided capitalism, if TANU modernised them with help from other socialist nations. He hoped this route would safeguard peasants against the inequalities that colonialism produced through individual commercial farming – the rise of landlords at the expense of landless peasants. By socialism, he meant preserving the Ujamaa villages from capitalist influence.^[2] However, he failed to see that leaving the working class out of the equation would have adverse consequence for the realisation of socialism in Tanzania.

Until 1973, Rodney supported the Tanzanian state as the driver of socialism and the peasantry as its base. He discarded the central idea of Marxism that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the workers. In Tanzania, the working class was too small and unorganised to lead the nation out of poverty. He naively expected Nyerere and TANU to deliver socialism to the peasants and workers and to share state power with them. Failing to see the masses as capable of liberating themselves, he thus favoured a form of socialism from above. But his enthusiasm for Tanzanian socialism vanished the more he looked at the bureaucratic class that controlled TANU and the state. In 1978, four years after he left Tanzania, Rodney declared: “TANU has not been transformed. It remains a nationalist party under the control of the petit bourgeoisie… incapable of providing the basis for sustained socialist transformation”.^[3]

Why did Rodney change his mind in less than five years? His Marxist USARF comrades played a key role in convincing him that TANU’s Ujamaa villages and nationalised factories failed to empower the peasants and workers. They thought these policies allowed the Tanzanian one-party state to exploit and oppress the masses as under colonialism.^[4] From late 1973, Rodney also realised this when he looked at TANU’s catastrophic plan to increase Ujamaa villages to stop the food shortage that had hit the countryside. TANU ordered peasants to move to areas that were unsuitable for farming. It then deployed the police when the peasants refused to relocate. That the bureaucrats never sought to persuade the peasant disheartened Rodney. He was even more appalled to learn from his discussions with peasants that they controlled no aspects of production in Ujamaa villages. All that mattered for TANU was how much grain it could quickly extract from the peasants’ labour. Reflecting on these experiences he warned: “It is always dangerous for bureaucratization to parade in the name of socialism. It happened under Stalin”.^[5] He feared that TANU, which had led the masses out of colonialism, had now begun to act like any Stalinist one-party bureaucratic state.

Rodney was also struck by TANU’s contempt for workers as it refused to extend management of its nationalised factories to them. Although Tanzanian bureaucrats had replaced colonial managers, workers remained exploited on low wages. He disliked that Nyerere described workers as a privileged class, accusing them of wanting to steal from the peasants when they asked for higher wages. Nyerere had forced workers to sacrifice their interest in favour of national unity. Back in 1964 he co-opted all trade unions into the one-party state after labour leaders supported an army mutiny against him.

The mistreatment of the masses led Rodney to grow suspicious of the petty bourgeois class who ran TANU – the students, intellectuals, and civil servants that colonialism had educated. In 1975, he explained that the petty bourgeoisie never owned anything until it seized the colonial state after independence. The state became its lever of power as it took bureaucratic ownership of the economy from the British and Asian traders. Rodney now saw the Ujamaa villages and national factories not as socialism, but as a means for TANU’s petty bourgeoisie to expand state control over production and to recruit more of its kind into lucrative bureaucratic jobs. TANU, he concluded, could not be reformed from within.

How could the masses free themselves from their exploitation at the hands of the state? Rodney found his solution when he looked back and rejoiced at the workers’ strike movement of the early 1970s. In 1975, four months after he left Tanzania, Rodney spoke to students in Chicago about the conflicts between the masses and the weak Tanzania state, enthusiastically declaring those workers’ struggles threatened TANU with revolution. He argued that the Tanzanian working class was small but its strategic position in the economy gave it great power. Nyerere and TANU could not ignore the agitation of workers in the factories, the docks and in the hospitals. The state, as Rodney explained, issued a charter of workers’ rights in 1971 called Mwongozo to respond to workers’ demands for better conditions. The charter stipulated that employers couldn’t be arrogant, contemptuous and oppressive, as they had been under colonialism. But TANU’s efforts to appease workers backfired. The workers went beyond TANU’s expectations by using the charter to contest low wages, favouritism, and sexual harassment. They printed and kept a booklet version of the charter and opened it on the appropriate page when arguing with management. When the petty bourgeoisie refused to apply the charter in the workplace, the workers led strikes and occupations to implement the Mwongozo charter.

In courses he taught in Hamburg in 1978, Rodney drew even more radical conclusions from his reflections on these workers’ struggles. He showed that the strikes of the early 1970s were not organised by the official trade unions – they were wildcat strikes spontaneously organised by the rank-and-file. He saw in them a new source of power that challenged TANU’s state-led socialism. Rodney reflected on instances where workers’ struggles went beyond demands for wages to ask “who should control production? Who is the boss in a so-called socialist society?” ^[6] In one rubber factory, he explained, the workers locked out management and ran the factory causing panic and fear among the bureaucracy. The workers realised their power when they said, “we as workers are capable of running this enterprise more efficiently than the economic bureaucracy.” ^[7]

The petty bourgeoisie crushed these revolts, fearing that they could spread across factories and destroy its existence as a class. Rodney had realised that workers had developed a revolutionary consciousness through their own experience of struggle – they had the power to propose a new democratic and collective way of organising society. Rodney thus returned to the core contention of Marxism, that the working class is the only class that can liberate itself and the whole of society. If Nyerere and TANU could not deliver socialism, it had to be won from below.

Rodney’s views on Pan Africanism

Leaders from Africa and the diaspora gathered in Nyerere’s Tanzania to attend the 6^th Pan African Congress in June 1974. It was the first time an African nation had hosted the Congress. Black intellectuals of the diaspora had organised previous ones in Europe. Rodney, however, was disappointed with Nyerere for refusing to allow grassroots organisations from participating in the debates. He feared the Congress would reflect the conservatism of African leaders unable to offer radical solutions to Africa’s problems. So, he wrote a provocative article for the event to address the key issue of African unity and denounced the impotence of petty bourgeois leaders.

In his article, Rodney conceived of Pan-Africanism as a weapon in the struggle against imperialism. It was less an ideology than a historical movement to unite Africans beyond the artificial borders that colonialism had created. He was appalled that most independent nations accepted these colonial borders. If Africa remained fragmented, it would stay vulnerable to incursion from Western companies seeking to rob its wealth. He argued the Pan-Africanism of “the petty bourgeois states became a sterile formulation… incapable of challenging capitalism and imperialism”.^[8] He therefore saw the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the predecessor of the African Union, as a club for African heads of state destined to betray the masses. The OAU, created in 1963, at best regulated conflicts between African dictators while it sanctified existing borders to ensure that the elite kept ruling over the masses in their own states.

Rodney’s article offered insight into the treacherous and cowardly nature of the class that ruled Africa after independence. The petty bourgeoisie, he said, once played a progressive role by leading the anti-colonial struggle and voicing its support for Pan-Africanism. But it reneged on African unity when it negotiated independence, lacking the vision and the economic power to enforce that unity. Rodney here echoed Frantz Fanon who argued that the petty bourgeoisie owns nothing and will provide nothing. Apart from Nyerere and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, most leaders sought to get rich by becoming agents of the western bourgeoisie, never seeking to defy imperialism. The petty bourgeoisie’s control over the state—the police, the army and the bureaucracy—meant it had a vested interest in maintaining colonial borders. This was the way Africa’s new ruling classes ensured that multinationals dealt with them, and that workers and peasants stayed oppressed and exploited.

Seeing the petty bourgeoisie as the biggest obstacle toward African unity, Rodney argued that Pan-Africanism had to become a movement driven from below. He called on Africans to struggle against the Western capitalist class and its African allies, to break from imperialism and build a socialist society that would free the masses from exploitation. Which class was to lead that struggle? In 1974, Rodney’s article did not give a definitive answer. He believed that Pan-Africanism had to be an internationalist, anti-imperialist and socialist weapon in the hands of progressive groups and organisations. He saw the seeds of a new leadership in the guerrilla struggles and emerging workers’ movement in Southern Africa when he wrote: “our brothers in the South are striking blows, which include attacks on enemy bases in Angola, the destruction of rail links in Mozambique, the disruption of production through strikes in Namibia and South Africa”.^[9] In time, he would come to believe that the working class in Africa and the Global South was the only class able to lead an African liberation struggle to socialism (as I have written about above).

Rodney fell ill before the Pan-African Congress and was unable to attend and deliver his powerful article. Moreover, he thought it was time for him to return to Guyana. Rodney thought he would never be able to fully relate to Tanzanians and grasp their idiom. He told one of his students, “I have to go back to people I know and who know me”.^[10] Rodney had made important contributions to the African liberation struggle, which inspired countless radical African students and intellectuals. But he was only an academic moving in academic circles. He was discontented with being a radical intellectual—he wanted to be a revolutionary. He longed to build a close relationship with working people and play an integral part in their struggles against exploitation. He felt that could only be done back home.

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: originally published on the Elephant website here.

Notes

[1] Jannik Boesen, Birgit Madesen, and Tony Moody, 1977, Ujamaa- Socialism from Above, (Copenhagen: Uppsala, 1977), p.15

[2] Rodney, Walter, 1972, “Tanzanian Ujamaa and Scientific Socialism”, African Review.

[3] Quoted in Leo Zeilig, 2019, ‘Walter Rodney’s Journey to Hamburg’, Review of African Political Economy blog.

[4] For debates between Rodney and USARF students on Ujamaa see Hirji, Karim, 2010, pp.133-55 and Issa Shivji in Chung, Clairmont (ed.), 2012, pp. 90-91.

[5] Rodney, Walter, 1975a, “Class Contradictions in Tanzania”, in The State in Tanzania.

[6] Rodney, 1975a.

[7] Zeilig, Leo, 2019.

[8] Walter Rodney, Walter, “Aspect of the International Class Struggle in African, the Caribbean and America” in Pan-Africanism, (1975b).

[9] Rodney, Walter, 1975b,

[10] Issa Shivji in Chung, Clairmont (ed.), 2012, pp. 89.

The Mecca of African Liberation: Walter Rodney in Tanzania

ROAPE

April 7, 2022

Walter Rodney moved to Tanzania in 1969. As a lecturer in history at the university, he threw himself into radical, political debates in the country, as attempts were made to break from a crippling colonial past. Chinedu Chukwudinma writes how Rodney immersed himself in the politics of the country and university, and went on to write his 1972 masterpiece, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

Karim Hirji, a Tanzanian student, was in a good mood when he went to bed on the 10 July 1969. That evening he had heard the most impressive lecture of his life at the University of Dar es Salaam. The lecture was on the Cuban Revolution and its relevance to Africa. Back in his dorm, he praised the speaker in his diary: “one could almost feel the strong conviction and deep emotions from which he spoke”. The man he admired and later befriended was Dr Walter Rodney. ^[1]

After being banned from Jamaica, Rodney settled with his family in Tanzania to teach history and political science at the University of Dar es Salaam from 1969 to 1974. He reconnected with the socialist students he had met during his first stay in 1966. In those days, Rodney helped them establish the University Students African Revolutionary Front (USARF). He ran their Marxist workshops and attended their anti-imperialist protests and talks. His connections brought the likes of CLR James, Stokely Carmichael and Guyanese politician Cheddi Jagan to speak on USARF platforms. Upon his return in 1969, Rodney was pleased to see that the USARF had gained new members. Karim Hirji was one of them. He got Rodney to write the first article for the group’s magazine Cheche on African labour (Cheche took its name from Lenin’s newspaper Iskra. Both words mean ‘spark’ – in Swahili and Russian respectively). Rodney thus continued agitating for socialism on campus as he had done in Jamaica. But the political climate was now more favourable for him, as Tanzania was the mecca of African liberation.^[2]

Tanzania offered hope to Rodney and many radical black intellectuals. They believed the African diaspora’s fight for freedom and equality relied on the success of anti-imperialist movements in Africa. Tanzania’s first president Julius Nyerere and his party, the Tanganyika African Nation Union (TANU) opposed imperialism as few independent African states did. Nyerere gave diplomatic and material support to every national liberation movement in southern Africa. He opened offices for the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO) and built military bases for them. He established training camps for the paramilitary wing of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, uMkhonto we Sizwe, to help it fight the apartheid regime in South Africa. Living in Tanzania enabled Rodney to deepen his understanding of guerrilla warfare and international solidarity. FRELIMO fighters taught him how to shoot a rifle when he visited their camps. He also met with delegations from Vietnam, then involved in the war against the United States and organised solidarity protests with the Vietnamese on campus.

When Rodney first visited Tanzania in 1966, he witnessed Nyerere publish his program for socialism and self-reliance, the Arusha Declaration. The president had turned his African socialist philosophy known as Ujamaa—familyhood—into a policy of nationalisation of foreign companies and land reform. He aspired to increase food production through the creation of Ujamaa villages based on collective farming. Africans no longer had to rely on volatile cash crops and aid from advanced capitalist nations to make a living. Nyerere was confident that his plan suited the interest of the peasant majority. But he had yet to convince the minuscule educated elite, made up of students and state officials, to help the peasants. Back in 1964, some elitist students had shown Nyerere their disdain for work in the countryside when they protested against compulsory national service. Afterwards, Nyerere vowed to turn the university into a battleground for his progressive ideas.^[3]

By 1970, Rodney stood at the heart of the debates concerning African underdevelopment that occurred almost every night at the University. In the packed auditorium, Rodney debated a TANU Cabinet Minister on Tanzania’s economic direction. He also debated the renowned Kenyan political science professor, Ali Mazuri, on why Africa should be socialist, not capitalist. His ideas, however, did not always please Nyerere. The president replied with anger to an article Rodney published in TANU’s newspaper, which argued that African leaders who served western capitalism deserved to be overthrown by the people. Nyerere disagreed and accused him of preaching violence to young people. The regime set limits on how left-wing students and academics could be. A few months later, it banned the USARF for promoting “foreign ideology”.^[4]

The ban did not change Rodney’s respect for Nyerere, nor did it discourage him from sharing his radical Marxist ideas with students. He taught a graduate course on the Russian Revolution to show his African students that they could draw lessons for their own struggle from October 1917. He made parallels between present-day Tanzania and Tsarist Russia, which both had a large peasantry and a small working class. Rodney praised the Russian Revolution as the first break with capitalism, transforming the once mainly agrarian country into an industrial power in its aftermath. Bourgeois historians, he argued, sought to discredit October 1917 because it represented the victory of organised workers allied with peasants over their class.^[5]

Rodney had begun a monograph on the Russian Revolution in 1971, but he never finished it because he had more urgent matters at hand. He wanted to use Marxist theory to address the issue of African underdevelopment.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Rodney’s involvement in debates concerning African underdevelopment in Tanzania inspired him to write his most influential book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. He was concerned that most African nations had not broken ties with the old colonial powers in the decade after colonialism. They had achieved political independence, but their economies remained in the hands of European and American companies. They remained poor and reliant on foreign aid because the Western ruling class stole their natural wealth (land, oil etc.) for its benefit, with help from African leaders who served them. Yet, many African intellectuals still believed that trade deals, loans and investment from advanced capitalist countries would benefit African development. Rodney sought to convince them to the contrary.

His book, published in 1972, revealed that European intervention in Africa, through the slave trade and colonialism, stifled African development. It told how the European ruling class robbed Africa of its wealth, which contributed to Europe’s prosperity and industrial growth. Rodney examined Africa’s relationship with Europe from 1500 to 1960 to elucidate the present. He opened the preface with his message for the future: “African development is only possible on the basis of a radical break with the international capitalist system” which had underdeveloped Africa for centuries. ^[6]

Rodney’s skilful use of Marx’s historical method in his book uprooted Africa from the colonial myths surrounding its past. In Chapter One, Rodney dismantled the racist idea that Africa stood outside progress by defining development as a universal and multifaceted process. As Marx and Engels did before him, he understood development as being rooted in how human beings cooperate to provide the necessities of life out of nature. He explained that when people found better ways to produce wealth by working together, they developed new forms of cooperation, new ideas and changed the form of their society. Rodney showed a sophisticated understanding of development, arguing that it did not unfold as a linear process but rather was uneven across continents and regions, as sometimes the people who defended old forms of cooperation and ideas stopped those attempting to modernise production, delaying societal change for years to come.^[7]

Rodney dedicated the second chapter to portraying Africa’s development before Europeans arrived in the 1500s. Far from being outside of progress, Africa displayed formidable advances in agriculture, science, and art. Most societies at the time were small classless ones with low levels of production, where people had equal access to land and evenly shared resources. Africa, however, developed more hierarchical societies that resembled Europe’s feudal states in places like Ethiopia, Egypt, and Zimbabwe. In these unequal societies, a ruling class owned the land and appropriated the surplus created by the exploited peasants. Rodney argued that underdevelopment was never the absence of development. It was not inherent to Africa and its people, but the historical consequence of capitalist expansion and imperialism.^[8]

By the 16^th century, Europe developed at a faster pace than Africa and the rest of the world, transitioning from feudalism to capitalism. Rodney argued that European powers demonstrated their superiority in maritime and armaments technology. They opened West Africa for trade with their ships and canons and transformed it into a supplier of slaves for their plantations in America and the Caribbean. In the third and fourth chapter, Rodney explored the consequences of the transatlantic slave trade on African development by engaging in the debate concerning the number of African captives. He opposed Philip Curtin’s tally that counted only 10 million enslaved from 1500 to 1870. “Because it is a low figure it is already being used by European scholars who are apologists for the capitalist system and its long record of brutality”.^[9] Rodney explained that Curtin’s toll failed to measure the whole tragedy because it only relied on records of slaves’ arrivals in America. The number of victims went far beyond 10 million, as some captives were smuggled, and millions more never left Africa. They died in the wars fought over slaves and more captives perished during the long journeys from the interior of Africa to the coast as well as the so-called ‘Middle Passage’ the journey across the Atlantic.

After he established the horrific magnitude of the slave trade, Rodney explained how it underdeveloped Africa. He showed that the trade stunted Africa’s demographic growth. As European powers kidnapped able young men and women, Africa lost those of childbearing age who performed the most arduous tasks on the land. With fewer people at hand, many African societies struggled to harness nature and develop. Moreover, Rodney argued that Europe’s demand for slaves made slave raiding and wars commonplace in West Africa. Societies that had hitherto coexisted in peace now turned on each other to acquire more slaves. Violence instilled fear and insecurity among Africans. It disrupted the organisation of agriculture, mining, and commerce that they had established over centuries. It destroyed crops and artisanal trade turning farmers into soldiers, and soldiers into slaves. This disruption of farming and trade even impeded the development of African regions that were not involved in the slave trade.

While the slave trade stalled and reversed African development, it contributed to Europe’s capitalist development. Rodney demonstrated that the slave trade generated enormous profits for the Portuguese, British and French empires, making fortunes for countless bourgeois merchants and plantation owners. Its wealth and magnitude gave rise to the infamous ports of Bristol, Liverpool, Nantes and Bordeaux. He explained how the profits and goods accrued from the exploitation of African slaves in the New World fuelled Britain’s Industrial Revolution. A century ago, Karl Marx had made the same point when he wrote, “without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry”.^[10]At the end of chapter four, Rodney explained how colonialism emerged out of the imperialist stage of capitalism in the late 19^thcentury. Rivalries between European capitalist firms assumed the form of a competition between nation-states for control over the world’s markets, natural resources and trade routes. Africa, which had been weakened from centuries of slave trading, fell victim to Europe’s violent colonial conquest. European ruling classes justified this conquest with racist ideology, as they claimed to be civilising savage people by converting them to Christianity. Thus, by 1900, they had divided the entire African continent into colonies.^[11]

In the fifth chapter, Rodney analysed colonialism (1885-1960) as a cruel and exploitative system, whereby the European bourgeoisie extracted wealth from African workers and peasants. He assessed the oppression and suffering of African workers at the hands of the colonial state. The state ensured that Africans often worked under forced labour, while their European counterparts could freely sell their labour. Even those Africans who were able to choose their employer received miserable wages for endless hours of work. Colonial rule was even worse for the African peasant. Rodney showed how the colonial state confiscated their land through severe taxation, evictions, and warfare. It forced some peasants to abandon food production for export crops that were sold cheap. Moreover, peasants suffered at the hands of trading companies and their middlemen who offered miserable prices. Rodney, however, did not simply illustrate the horrors of colonialism. He provided case studies of multinational companies, like Unilever, and the enormous profits they acquired from robbing Africans. Moreover, he described how Africa’s contribution to capitalism went beyond monetary returns. Its raw materials supported Europe’s advancement in electronics, metallurgy and chemistry and other industries, which stood at the centre of Europe’s capitalist development in the 20^th century.^[12]

In the final chapter, Rodney attacked the racist idea that colonialism had benefits for Africans because the colonisers built railroads, schools and hospitals. All the roads and railways, he said, went from the plantations and mines to the coast to ship raw materials to Europe, never to encourage trade between different regions of Africa. The infrastructure that colonialists built served to entrench Africa’s unfavourable position in the world economy, as a precarious supplier of raw materials and a free market for European finished products. The colonialists had no interest in providing health care and education to Africans. Rodney established the grim tally of five centuries of Portuguese colonisation: “The Portuguese had not managed to train a single African doctor in Mozambique, and the life expectancy in Eastern Angola was less than thirty years”.^[13]

Rodney’s historical account received support from Tanzania’s radical socialist minister A M Babu who clarified Africa’s present predicament in the postscript. “Foreign investment”, the minister wrote, “is the cause, and not a solution, to our economic backwardness.”^[14] Investment went into projects designed to exploit African labour and raw materials for the benefit of the Western ruling class, never into health care and education. At best, foreign investment made fortunes for the few African leaders and businessmen, who partnered with western states and multinationals. But it failed to uplift the masses from poverty. Babu and Rodney advocated a revolutionary path to development, aimed at breaking Africa’s dependence on imperialist powers and empowering the workers and peasants. What would that path look like? Initially, Rodney thought that Nyerere’s socialism offered an answer to that question.

Please click here to read the earlier parts of Chukwudinma’s A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney which roape.net is serialising over the coming months.

Featured Photograph: Julius Nyerere with Fidel Castro and a Cuban worker in 1977.

Notes

[1] Karim Hirji, The Enduring Relevance of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Mkuki Na Nyota, 2017).

[2] Karim Hirji, Karim, Cheche: Reminiscences of a Radical Magazine. (African Books Collective, 2010), p.29.

[3] See Mattavous, Viola, 1985, “Walter Rodney and Africa”, Journal of Black Studies, pp. 115-130. and Amzat Boukari-Yabara, Walter Rodney (1942-1980): Itinéraire et Mémoire d’un Intellectuel Africain, PhD thesis, (Centre d’Études Africaines CEAf, EHESS, 2010) pp.351-362.

[4] Karim Hirji, 2010, p.95.

[5] Rodney, 2018, p.76.

[6] Walter Rodney, 2012, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Pambazuka Press, Cape Town, 2012), p.xi.

[7] Rodney did not see development as a linear process. Although it was a general trend, it was uneven across continents and regions. As sometimes, the people who defended old forms of cooperation and ideas stopped those attempting to modernise production, delaying societal change for years to come. See Rodney, 2012, pp.7-10. For Marx’s historical materialist method, see Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Lawrence & Wishart, 1970) pp.42-60.

[8] Rodney, 2012, pp.3-70.

[9] Rodney, 2012, pp.96.

[10] Karl Marx, Karl, Letter from Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov (1846).

[11] Rodney, 2012, pp.75-145.

[12] Rodney, 2012, pp.149-201.

[13] Rodney, 2012, p.206.

[14] Rodney, 2012, p.284.

Imperialism and GMOs in Kenya: A perspective from social movements

ROAPE

April 5, 2022

Noosim Naimasiah interviews Irene Asuwa and Cidi Otieno about food sovereignty, ecologically appropriate production, distribution and consumption, social-economic justice, and local food systems in Kenya. They also discuss the role of social movements in raising popular consciousness and defending the rights of Kenya’s popular classes.

In these years of confinement and isolation, social movements in Kenya have struggled to breathe. The virtual arena, a poor alternative for community and intimacy, has sharpened the colonial shadows of alienation. Our collective asphyxiation is only allowed temporary individual reprieve through the venting regulator of zoom. The fear produced by the pandemic is being commodified and weaponised. In conjunction with the U.S. government and Bayer, the Kenyan government is flooding peasant farmers’ land with Genetically Modified (GM) seeds.

In colonial Kenya, we were alienated from our land and then quickly, our indigenous food production. We were forced to grow the more commercial variety of crops for export in order for our exploited waged labour to pay for our violently imposed taxes. Consequently, our environment became alienated from our bodies and our bodies to our food. By the 1980s, structural adjustment programs increased the reliance on food imports and food aid, and privatised the provision of water. Now, in these neoliberal times, even a seed, the very essence of life, is being commodified.

Peasant farmers who have been banking and sharing seeds for centuries will now be forced to buy seeds every season, monocrop, and use expensive and potentially carcinogenic herbicides that come with the GMO package. The debt incurred in the name of the old civilising mission now dubbed ‘infrastructure development’ has further constricted our national sovereignty. Debt has become a way of colonising the imagination of future possibilities and sovereignty to make local decisions.

Meanwhile, local farmers and activists are pushing back and advocating for food sovereignty, which emphasises ecologically appropriate production, distribution and consumption, social-economic justice and local food systems as ways to tackle hunger and poverty and guarantee sustainable food for all peoples.

I met with Irene Asuwa and Cidi Otieno, coordinators at the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) and Kenya Peasants League (KPL) respectively to speak about this new hyper-alienation in the form of the illegal distribution by the Kenyan government of GM seeds. We also discussed the role of social movements in the time of COVID in raising public consciousness and defending our sovereignty.

***

Noosim Naimasiah: If you have been watching TV or reading the newspapers in the last year in Kenya, you see that the government has been actively donating GM seeds to farmers. This comes in the wake of the still existing moratorium on GM seeds that was installed by the Kenyan government in November 2012 against the importation and planting of any GMO product. I want to place our discussion in the context of the global debate on the viability of GM seeds. With this in mind, we can begin the conversation by understanding firstly what precisely we mean by GMOs. What does the acronym stand for and what exactly are they?

Cidi Otieno: Thank you comrade, for organizing this timely and important meeting today. In simple terms, Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) are actually those crops that have been genetically engineered. Genetical engineering is basically altering the DNA of a particular organism or of a particular crop and we have seen that scientists have been arguing that genetic modification is not new and has been taking place naturally. Through natural selection we have seen organic genetic engineering taking place. But what is happening in the labs is that different foreign components are being added into an organism’s DNAs, motivated by the potential for massive profits for transnational corporations and basically having a potential of artificially altering an entire population.

Why is this genetic engineering a big issue because as they say, if we are going to get a better variety of a crop, resistant to certain pests, increasing the yield, reducing the maturation period of the crop, why would we be against it?

Cidi Otieno: Firstly, if GMOs are coming to solve the problem of hunger and accessibility to food, why do we have a country like South Africa where despite their long-held adaptation of GM, having the problems of hunger? Secondly, you find that some of these GM crops are highly dependent on chemicals pesticides and herbicides like Round Up that has been sued for its carcinogenic effects. Thirdly, as the KPL, we focus on indigenous seeds, and we tell farmers to bank seeds which can be replanted after every season and shared among members without altering their nutritional benefit. However, with GMs, you have to keep buying them every season and not only is this very expensive, but it makes farmers very dependent.

When you are a farmer, you have land, and you don’t own the seeds then you cannot attain food sovereignty and that’s why we say that food sovereignty starts with seeds sovereignty. This means the farmers owning the seeds, the farmers owning the land, the farmers owning the water systems, the farmers owning the food production system. Seed is very important in ensuring the availability of food and once our farmers are left in the hands of multinational corporations like Monsanto Syngenta, Bayer and One Acre Fund, then we lose that aspect of seeds sovereignty.

If you look at Migori County in western Kenya where we have members, we saw farmers protesting that there are no seeds in the agrovets [a supply store for farmers], but our members had the seeds. During this corona period we have seen increased demand for seeds from us because there is shortage of seeds. So, the whole premise for the need for GMOs is false because we are not hungry because there is no food, we are hungry because of distribution. We are hungry because of the failure of the food production system.

Irene Asuwa: I remember doing research with an organization in Siaya county in western Kenya and there were these millet seeds that a big company had distributed. The people told me how that had interfered with the whole chain of production from the pollinators to their ability to accurately predict weather patterns and to tell the health of the soil because some of the birds that ate the millet were dead, and the bees disappeared. As for the sunflowers, the birds were not coming anymore because that sunflower was alien. And you realize that when that chain in the ecosystem is broken there is a huge problem for farmers and for the nature.

Also, as you might know, most of the chemical fertilisers and pesticides that we use are contraband. They have been banned in other markets in Europe but we still use them. So, we are using carcinogenic things that put other people health at risk in the name of providing more food. So, if you are providing food and people go to the hospital after eating that food then what’s that?

It is very enlightening especially for people who have done research on the ground and understand the material implications of what actually is happening. There is now, in the continent, a general trend towards unbanning GM, installing trials, and legalising importation and production and it is pertinent for us to understand the political and social factors that are facilitating this new wave. Comrade Cidi, could you share your thoughts on this?

Cidi Otieno: In 2012 in Kenya, the then minister of Public Health Beth Mugo established a taskforce to review and evaluate information on the safety of GMOs. And in 2013, 15 November, the taskforce released a report, noting that the government was right in banning import of GMOs. The taskforce came to a conclusion that the safety of GM foods had not been conclusively demonstrated to allow for the lifting of the ban. It gave some recommendations which included; a need to develop guidelines for testing of GMOs; the priority of safety with regard to human health, and the need to develop capacity for the determination of the safety of GMOs on a case-by-case basis through the national regulator – National Biosafety Authority. Fundamentally, the committee noted that there was need to develop adequate infrastructure for carrying out and where necessary, replicating long term trials by Kenyan scientists funded solely by the Kenyan government.

However, we see that some of these authorities are being funded by the same transnational corporations that are promoting GMOs, so their independence actually is in question. Because I am part of the adhoc technical committee, expert group for the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) as part of La Via Campesina, I know based on the FAO reports that small scale farmers globally contribute over 70% of food on the table. We know right now that the in-house trials of GM maize done by scientists from the Jomo Kenyatta University in Kiboko and Kibwezi and the reports generated, no small-scale farmers were consulted, even after we raised this issue with KARLO (Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization) several times. Instead, the government should be doing farm-based research because the farmers are large laboratories. Farmers have been conducting research from time immemorial using natural selection and saving seeds. What we are saying is that it is high time the government started investing in farm-based research, supporting small scale farmers and peasant farmers, livestock keepers, fisher folk communities who are actually the ones who are contributing to the food on the table.

Right now, if you look at the Big Four agenda of the current government, we are seeing a very big push for GM foods. For example, if you look at the food security pillar, it states that the government will accelerate the introduction of GM-insect resistant crops. As we know, food security does not distinguish where food comes from, or the conditions under which it is produced and distributed. National food security targets are often met by sourcing food produced under environmentally destructive and exploitative conditions, and supported by subsidies and policies that destroy local food producers but benefit agribusiness corporations. That’s why the government is saying to revive manufacturing companies like Rivatex, KICOTEC (Kitui County Textile Center) and KIKOMI (Kisumu Cotton Mills) with BT cotton. But we know what has happened in Burkina Faso, we know what has happened in India with GM cotton, farmers have committed suicide in those countries because they were expecting to earn money and instead, they are plunged into debt.

Specifically, we know the Deputy President has been pushing a lot in terms of lifting the ban. People have been asking why the Kibaki government banned GMOs and the Jubilee government is pushing for lifting the ban. If you look at the debt equation between the two governments, Kibaki, Kenya’s second president, left the country with about Kenyan shillings 1.2 trillion debt [about US$10.5 billion]. Today we are 7 trillion in debt. These debts come with conditions like imposing GM seeds, pushing for the legal lifting of these bans and pushing for chemical herbicides. It is the IMF and World Bank that dictate that since you are borrowing from them, you can only spend on certain sectors and they only choose sectors where they have interests.

Irene Asuwa: I also wanted to add to Cidi’s answer that even in society, there is a class and race component. For example, I know farmers who specifically grow organic foods for the Indian market in Kenya which is only available in certain supermarkets and spaces.

In terms of class, you can clearly see the intent to alienate farmers from their land. Because when farmers are fully dependent on GM seeds, and they can’t afford them anymore, then who is going to grow the food? The corporations are going to grow the food and they are going to do it on a large scale, in monoculture and damage our land so we will be at the mercy of companies to grow food for us. There is also segregation in the sense that what you will find in Naivas supermarket in Kasarani (a high-density neighbourhood) is not what you will find in Naivas Lavington (a middle-class neighbourhood). So, there is also a class question in that.

Now, in terms of democracy, how do we deal with the sudden imposition of GM foods without public participation? Is taking the matter up in the law courts a possibility? It is important to know that both the current government and the unofficial opposition (led by Deputy President William Ruto) all endorse GM seeds. We know that Kenya was one of the first countries to sign the Cartagena protocol that advocates for the protection of biological diversity from the adverse effects of GMOs. We also have the Kenya Biosafety Act which was signed into law in 2009. Kenya is also a signatory to the Africa Model Law which was put in place by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in the year 2000 (now the African Union) and it provides for the protection of the rights of local communities, farmers, breeders and for the regulation of access to biological resources. Can these laws provide any sort of protection?

Cidi Otieno: There is what is called debt colonisation. The structured Aspen programs re-orient the food production systems towards export-oriented food production and promotes large scale cash crop food production. And also, some of these IMF conditionalities of liberalisation also come with conditions that attach themselves to GMOs.

You mentioned the Cartagena protocol which was adopted in 2000 and it entered into force in 2003. Kenya has ratified this protocol, but this depends on the goodwill of the politicians. However, we are already seeing BT cotton coming into Kenya despite the fact that the government has ratified this protocol. The farmers were not given any information. Meeting government ministers in hotels does not constitute meeting farmers.

You also mentioned the Kenya Biosafety Act that was signed into law in 2009. Section 18 of the Act prohibits the conduction of any activity involving GMOs without written approval of the authority. The authority, however, is not the farmers. If you look at the composition of the authority, there are no farmer representatives. If you look at Section 19, it prohibits the introduction into the environment of a GMO without authority. Section 20 prohibits importation into Kenya of a GMO without approval of the authority. 21 prohibits placing on the market of any GMO without approval of the authority.

Who are these authorities? How are they appointed? As I said earlier some of these authorities are funded by the same organizations/institutions that are supporting GMOs. Despite the fact that we have good laws, or the 2010 Constitution, the real the issue is if we have the political goodwill of those in authority to be able to implement them?

Sadly, our government has been privatized. It has been captured by the forces of capitalism so whenever the president who is captured and appoints the chairman of the authority, the chairman is also captured and therefore that’s why we are seeing these approvals taking place. That’s why we as KPL are encouraging farmers to disobey and not wait for so-called good laws. We are already banking seeds and sharing them. We are already ensuring when the farmers who need the seeds, can get them. That’s where we can start. When we have consumers saying we are not going to eat GMs, we are going to start eating indigenous crops, our farmers will get a market for their non-GM produce.

It was very sad during Covid to hear the Cabinet Secretary of agriculture say that they are going to import maize, yet we have farmers with maize in Kenya. That’s because it’s one of the conditions that the World Bank gave Kenya a Covid 19 loan. Now Kenya has to import maize from somewhere in Mexico and yet we have farmers from Kitale, Migori, and many other counties who have maize but who don’t have a market to sell the maize. This is totally irrational. The only way we can get the market is through a boycott of GM crops while creating a food distribution system to link farmers directly to customers – that’s the only way our farmers are going to get their income and continue to plant indigenous seeds. These laws are not going to help. We have to come up with our own laws! We can’t wait for them to make laws for us, that are then not implemented.

Thank you, comrade, for bringing up this issue of debt colonization. It is important for people to understand how legislation comes into being because we use legislation many times as our defense, as our recourse to justice, but a lot of times this legislation can be enacted and abolished and banned at political will or just ignored essentially. Our recourse then, is to plant our own seeds.

Irene Asuwa: We are also party to the Paris Agreement, but we have violated the agreement despite the fact that we were one of the first countries to sign it. Kenya ratifies everything. The Paris Agreement also has sections that say that we recognize indigenous people, vulnerable people and their rights and commitment to guard indigenous knowledge which includes indigenous seeds, indigenous ways of farming, indigenous methods of predicting and managing climate change and adapting to climate change. As Cidi says, it is one thing to sign and ratify these things into law and it’s another thing to implement them. On the suggestion of going the legal way, sometimes it gives small wins but it can be very draining. I was part of the decolonize campaign during the time that we had the court battle and it is not a very nice experience because you are in and out of courts for years before getting the judgment which might not even be in your favor. And there are a lot of interrogations, judges not showing up for the bench intentionally, they don’t communicate, or changing of court venues. It’s just a back and forth and people are likely to lose momentum. We can get a court order, but the government will not obey the order!

I would now like us to discuss the role of multinational corporations. To present the lay of the land, we can begin with Monsanto. Monsanto has been the largest agri-tech GM Company in the world. It was acquired recently by Bayer which was the largest German pharmaceutical even though now the merger is falling apart because there are so many lawsuits against Monsanto. So many people have lodged lawsuits going into tens of millions in US dollars. There is also the Dow and Dupont merger and ChemChina acquiring Syngenta which presents a huge shift in the agritech industry in the way of creating monopolies that globally dominate the food industry.

There are very serious implications of these mergers on our food systems. The history of these companies is telling. A company like Bayer was responsible for the production of aspirin. It was the first company to legally sell and commercialize heroine before it was removed from the market. It was heavily involved in the holocaust, using techniques tested in concentration camps for medical experiments and of course many of them died as you can imagine.

Monsanto itself assisted in the development of the first nuclear weapons. It started as a chemical company in the US, and it has introduced very harmful chemical pesticides like DDT and PCB. They also produced Agent Orange which was used in the Vietnam war as a chemical war weapon.

Then there is the African Agricultural Technical Foundation (AATF) and you see that it is involved in so many organizations like AU, NEPAD, with the National biosafety authorities in the continent and you would imagine that it is an African company, same with the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). But these are just subsidiary organizations for Rockefeller which is in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation as well as USAID. They are essentially the brokers between biotech companies and the African state scientific council to facilitate research on GM crops. They lobby for laws and patent rights for these companies.

So, the main thing that these multinationals really advocate for is the privatisation of land and seeds by introducing property rights over plant varieties and criminalizing farmers who plant their own varieties. They are doing all these things by carrying out training for media to present GM seeds. They hold workshops and lobby government officials to change biosafety regulations and patent their GM seeds. So, they patent life itself. If you can patent a seed, it means you can patent life. And owning life for profit seems to be the long-term game. They laid the ground for neoliberalism with the structural adjustment programmes in Africa that ushered in privatisation, liberalisation and deregulation of public institutions. What are your thoughts on these multinational corporations?

Cidi Otieno: Recently, we had an online virtual meeting of the Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on Farmers’ Rights and again we saw how transnational corporations like Monsanto, Syngenta are lobbying for the patenting of seeds. If you look at UPOV 91 (Union for the Protection of Plant Varieties) has worked exclusively to privatsze seeds around the world by imposing intellectual property rights on plant varieties as fundamental parts of bilateral trade agreements. The Kenyan Seeds and Plants Varieties Act is a copy and paste of UPOV. Look at the draft East African Seeds and Plants varieties bill that is being developed, again, it is a copy and paste of the Kenyan Seeds and Plants Varieties Act.

Kenya is at the forefront of the neo-liberal offensive of this region. So, with the African Free Trade Agreement, it is Kenya that is pushing it. You find that Kenya is now the country that is being used to promote the neo-liberal policies in the region. The question we are asking is why are countries like Kenya so quick to implement bad laws yet slow to implement laws like the Article 9 of the International Plan Treaty or Article 19 of the Peasants Rights Declaration? The answer is the influence of transnational corporations.

If you go to Siaya County today, a region in western Kenya, you will find that Syngenta or One Acre Fund are giving farmers seeds and forcing them to get mobile phones and television sets on credit, which a farmer has to pay back for over 21 months and when they don’t pay then their produce is taken. The government is silent about all this. If you look at the regional governments, they are allocating funds to buy seeds from agrovets using taxpayer’s money. Yet we know that government should allocate money to buy these indigenous seeds from farmers to distribute.

We also know that in addition to controlling the production of seeds, these MNCs are also producing herbicides. The most infamous one, Glyphosate, commonly known by its trade name, Roundup, produced by Bayer has been subject to numerous studies that have argued that is has carcinogenic outcomes, increasing weed resistance and environmental hazards. A recent study done by Kenyatta University researchers on tomato farmers in Kenya, especially in Kirinyaga county who are the largest producers (50,000 tonnes at the Mwea Irrigation scheme annually) have found that the use of WHO class II pesticides whose residue is likely to remain in the crop has linked the effects of its consumption to cancer, malformation of the fetus and damage to the immune system. The reason given is that farmers are ignorant of its effects.

Further still, a research report by Route to Food Initiative in 2019 revealed that many pesticides that are actually registered by the government’s Pest Control Products Board (PCPB) have the potential to cause serious health and environmental problems. KOAN did a study on the pesticides actually used by famers (30%) of whom did not use personal protection equipment while spraying and found that 48% have an effect on human reproductive systems, 70% on fish and 41% on bees.

We know that Europe banned the planting of GMO and 34% of the active ingredients of the pesticides registered in Kenya are either withdrawn or heavily restricted by the European market, which ironically is the second highest exporter of pesticides to Kenya. It is claimed that the reason farmers continue to use toxic amounts of pesticides is because farmers have not been trained on pesticide use and they rely on their untrained neighbours for information. Why have these issues not been flagged by the PCPB or the Kenya Drug and Poisons Board and why were they registered in the first place?

Cidi Otieno: Recently, the Kenya Peasant League in collaboration with a Professor from the University of Graz in Austria, War on Want in Britain, and a movement from Turkana (a region in Northern Kenya), were talking about having field tests for organic pesticides in response to the locusts. The Professor from the University of Graz has actually developed an organic pesticide. When we went to the pest control board, the requirements that they made – well, it’s only people like Monsanto who can manage this level of bureaucracy. You find that these pests boards are public institutions that have effectively been privatised. They are public by name but private by funding. Together with the War on Want we are working on a campaign to expose this information.

If you look at some of these pesticides, they are clearly written POISON, KEEP AWAY FROM CHILDREN, so you wonder why something that you cannot use without protection is safe. Some of these pesticides are not target specific, they kill all other organisms in the soil. There are some soil micro-organisms that are very essential for the life of soil and for soil development. When there is surface runoff for example, some of these pesticides are flushed into the rivers and they kill fish. We have heard farmers complaining of several diseases, but the problem is, most farmers take such diseases as common sicknesses so they don’t report them. If someone is at the PCPB and he or she is allowing a pesticide that has been banned in Europe to come to Kenya to kill people, then that person must be held responsible for manslaughter or murder. It’s depopulation, it is genocide!

The health impact has been catastrophic. At least in this continent we have seen the escalation of cancer related deaths by at least 45% since the year 2000. By now, all of us know someone, maybe a friend, a very close family member or neighbour who is suffering from or has died because of cancer – a disease, hitherto unheard of in our childhood. It’s killing more than 500,000 people each year. Women are being very adversely affected because breast and cervical cancer are the most prevalent of the cancers in the continent.

They say that over a third of all cancer deaths in women are in South Saharan Africa even though we are only 14% of the total female population in the world. So, you can imagine what that means. Globally cancer has caused more deaths compared to HIV, TB and malaria combined. In Kenya, it’s the third highest cause of morbidity after infectious diseases and cardiovascular diseases. A lot of documentaries have exposed how families are increasingly devastated when a member has cancer, selling all their property in order to access treatment.

I want to cite just a few studies that were done linking GMOs to cancer. There’s the most famous one, the Seralini study in France that led to the banning in Kenya. Unlike most scientists funded by these multinational corporations who carry out research for 90 days, this one was research conducted over two years. Seralini scientists found that there are severe impacts on kidney and liver functioning after four months because when they did the study on rats fed on GM maize, they developed cancerous tumors.

This is just to show the extent of the problems. All of us know that a lot of people in our lives are now suffering from not just cancer but also reproductive health problems. Things like autism all these health issues that we had never heard of are now becoming an everyday discussion. In India buffalos which were consuming GM cotton suffered from infertility, miscarriages, prolapsed uteruses and a lot of them died. It is important to point out that all the mentioned studies have been done by independent researchers. It is critical to know who is funding a particular study so that results are measured against the potential bias because many pro-GMO MNCs and international organizations fund a lot of the studies that show their ‘benefits’.

Lastly, comrades, what are you doing in your prospective movements to collectively promote food sovereignty?

Irene Asuwa: We are linking already existing youth groups that have environmental departments with each other and with RSL. We have a number of social justice centres as well that have environmental pillars. They have activities of rehabilitating spaces, having small ecological gardens and some of them have also started banking indigenous seeds, propagating them and sharing the seedlings. We have very thankfully received indigenous seeds from KPL. We are working on a biweekly political education class with specific regard to ecological justice.

Cidi Otieno: During the covid pandemic, KPL has seen an increased demand for seeds from farmers who are not even members. Right now, we are working with support from the Agroecology Fund to enhance seed banking and distribution, linking farmers who want seeds with farmers who have the seeds.

As the KPL, we push for food sovereignty and food sovereignty is basically the total control of the food system from the seeds to the land, water, natural resources, and the food distribution networks. We do this by linking farmers directly to consumers, we have seeds exchange festivals annually. Right now, we are documenting all the seeds that our farmers have so that we have a chance at an equable and just system.

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.

Irene Asuwa is a social justice feminist activist who focuses on ecological justice. She is a member of the Revolutionary Socialist League that holds political education classes in local communities. She is also a member of Ukombozi Library. Irene was interviewed for roape.net here.

Cidi Otieno is a policy advisor and secretary general for the Kenya Peasants League. Cidi is a resource economist, a trained social scientist, a passionate agroecologist and most importantly, a peasant farmer who advocates for food sovereignty.

The Rodney rebellion: Black Power in Jamaica

ROAPE

April 1, 2022

In 1968 Walter Rodney was teaching in Jamacia. There were important changes taking place on the island with the growth of radical politics and Black Power. At only 26, Rodney rejected the privileges of university life and committed to speaking with the poor. Chinedu Chukwudinma continues the story of Rodney’s revolutionary life.

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

On the morning of 16 October 1968, 900 students gathered at the University of the West Indies (UWI) campus and began marching to Kingston. They were angered by the Jamaican government’s decision to expel their beloved professor Walter Rodney from the island. They did not get far before the police tear-gassed and beat them into retreat. But the students returned more determined that afternoon. Now they had thousands of Rastafarians, working class and unemployed youths in their ranks. When they invaded Kingston, they did what the young people of Paris, Prague and the black neighbourhoods of America had done that spring and summer of 1968. In Jamaica, they set fire to 15 buses and looted American and Canadian companies, chanting “Black Power” until dawn.

In part, Rodney’s Black Power advocacy had inspired Jamaica’s youth. However, the real significance of the ‘Rodney riots’ went beyond demands for his reinstatement. It lay in the poverty and political exclusion of Jamaicans and the rise of black consciousness among the youth. The young protesters, like most Jamaicans, descended from the thousands of African slaves that British colonialism had transported to be exploited on the sugar cane plantations of Jamaica for over two centuries. Their ancestors resisted slavery, but never managed to take control of the island’s wealth from their masters. In the century after emancipation in 1838 many of them became wage-labourers on the declining British sugar estates, while others became poor peasants. The luckier ones later found work on the docks and in the Western-owned banana and bauxite industries of the 20^th century. These workers unleashed a wave of strikes and protests against colonialism in response to the suffering caused by the Great Depression of the 1930s. But the great labour unrest of the 1930s, which also swept the entire British West Indies, sadly ended in defeat.

The unrest nevertheless forced Britain to open its administration to the tiny number of educated Jamaicans, who inherited state-power after independence in 1962. The new rulers prospered under the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) government, through the substantial foreign investment they received from Western companies. They were white, brown, Lebanese, and Chinese but had very few blacks among their ranks—a glaring disparity given that 90 per cent of Jamaican citizens were the descendants of African slaves. Thus, freedom from Britain meant nothing for most Jamaicans. Rural poverty and unemployment on the decaying estates forced many to migrate to Kingston, often to join the ranks of an estimated 150,000 slum dwellers.^[1]

In the 1950s and 1960s, Black Nationalism gave expression to the anger of poor black youths at the political elite and the multinationals. The radical labour movement of the 1930s had been defeated. The JLP and its rival, the People’s National Party (PNP), had co-opted the trade unions and turned them into electoral machines. The corruption of the trade unions and the absence of alternative organisational models partly explain the adventurism and tendency to engage in conspiratorial plots that characterised some of Jamaica’s Black Nationalist movements. In 1960, for instance, the Jamaican authorities and the CIA uncovered the plot of an Afrocentric evangelical sect, led by Reverend Claudius Henry, to overthrow the Jamaican Government. Three years after the Henry Rebellion, the state attacked a much larger black Christian movement, the Rastafarians.

Originating in the 1930s as reaction to British rule, under the influence of Protestant religious leaders who preached African pride and political figures such as Marcus Garvey who advocated that black people should go ‘Back to Africa’, by the 1960s, thousands of black youth had converted to Rastafarianism and adopted a countercultural lifestyle that ranged from ganja smoking and dreadlock growing, to squatting and small-scale farming. Squatting made them the subject of evictions and police brutality. In 1963, six Rastafarians attacked a petrol station on the Coral Gardens property that resulted in the killing of nine people, including two policemen. The assault was an act of revenge against the landlords and the government’s attempts to evict squatters to repurpose the land for tourism. The police and the army retaliated by arresting 150 innocent Rastafarians.

Rastafarianism was a threat to the ruling class because it criticised its multiracial composition and its lavish Western lifestyle. Rastafarianism rested upon the belief that black people were the captives of Babylon, an evil system of corruption and oppression that western civilisation had created, which the Jamaican elite upheld. It proclaimed that Black people could only find salvation by returning “home” to Africa—which they called ‘Zion’, the promised land. For many Rastafarians, the notion of repatriation was less about an actual return to Africa than a return at the level of consciousness, which included the restitution of African pride and the adoption of a way of life that was antagonistic to western culture. The Rastafarians preached love, self-respect and freedom from the shackles of mental and physical slavery for those of African descent who suffered from the legacies of slavery and colonisation. They offered black youths an ideological and spiritual framework that helped them understand their suffering and revolt against it.

The elite sometimes resorted to peaceful means when trying to accommodate the agitation around black consciousness. In 1964, the JLP repatriated the corpse of Marcus Garvey and honoured him as a national hero. The elite knew that Garvey inspired many Jamaicans who valued their African heritage. In 1914, while he still lived in Jamaica, Garvey had established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)–the largest ever Black Nationalist organisation–which he then set up in Harlem, New York when he moved there in 1916. The UNIA exerted a strong influence on the emergence of Black Nationalism in the United States but as an organisation it declined after the American Government imprisoned and deported Garvey to Jamaica in 1927. Thirteen years later, Garvey died a poor and forgotten man in London. But Rastafarians remembered him as a martyr and celebrated his legacy.

In 1966, the JLP invited Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, whom the Rastafarians worshipped as the Messiah of black people and the incarnation of God. The Rastafarians revered Ethiopia because it was never colonised by Europe—it symbolised a free and independent Africa. They furthermore regarded the 1500-year-old Ethiopian Coptic Church as the custodian of an authentic Christianity that remained uncorrupted by western influences. So, when news of the emperor’s visit spread across the island, crowds rushed to greet Selassie on the tarmac breaking through all security barriers. Some believe the unofficial parades celebrating Selassie’s arrival were even bigger than those on Independence Day. Whether this was true or not, the visit increased the legitimacy and following of the Rastafari. The ruling class, however, feared that Black Nationalism was proving too difficult to control. The growing influence of the American Black Power movement in Jamaica added to their panic.^[2]

In 1968, the JLP banned all Black Power literature from the USA, fearful of the extent to which the ideas of the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X were inspiring Jamaican students and academics. It resented the formation of a militant alliance between radical black intellectuals and the masses. That year, the Jamaican ruling party also monitored the activities of a 26-year-old lecturer named Walter Rodney who had arrived on the island in January. What did Rodney do to get expelled in October? And how had he won the hearts and minds of the masses during his short stay on the island?

Groundings with my brothers

Eight months prior to his banning from Jamaica, Rodney was appointed lecturer in African history at the UWI. His students admired his kindness and modesty. Rodney was different from the academics that returned from London with dandy shirts and fake British accents. Rodney wore dashikis-a West African form of dress-an Afro haircut and spoke English with a Guyanese twang, yet he had also earned a PhD. Unlike his ivory-tower colleagues, Rodney refused to live on the UWI campus and settled in West Kingston to be closer to the poor and oppressed. He believed the role of the radical intellectual was to help the masses win their struggles and he intended to use his knowledge for that purpose.

People respected Rodney for his public lectures on Black Power at the Students’ Union. He was a talented speaker who attracted dozens of listeners on campus. After one of his speeches, Rodney made friends with three Rastafarians who then connected him to grassroots activist circles and the masses. One of them, Jerry Small, had turned his back on his middle-class upbringing to live among the poor. He invited Rodney to the groundings—the informal religious gathering that Rastafarians organised in the shantytowns of Kingston. Rodney enjoyed listening to the activists he met at those meetings. Among them, the Reverend Claudius Henry left a big impression on him. The reverend had served a six-year prison sentence for conspiring to overthrow the government in 1960. Rodney visited Henry’s Pan-African church and was struck by what he saw. He wrote:

In Kemp’s Hill, in the middle of a most depressed area, which is the Prime Minister’s constituency, Rev Henry has gathered together a number of black brothers and sisters, and they have turned themselves into an independent black economic community. In less than a year they built themselves an attractive church and several dwelling houses, all of concrete for they make the concrete blocks.”^[3]

This passage highlighted Rodney’s support for the attempts of ordinary working people to manage their own affairs when abandoned by the state. Yet, he thought that the black masses could achieve more than build a community—they could rule the island. He was ready to speak to them about Black Power and its relevance to Jamaica and the Caribbean.

According to Rodney’s friend Robert Hill, leaflets were never distributed to promote the groundings. Yet two to three hundred people came to hear Rodney speak on African history and Jamaican politics around a campfire on Sunday mornings.^[4] The JLP, which governed the island, saw Rodney as a Guyanese troublemaker and spied on him. Rodney did not join nor build any organisation. He was just an intellectual interacting with the masses, yet the Jamaican ruling class felt threatened by his message of Black Power. Rodney spoke of Black Power as an ideology and movement against the oppression of black people by whites under capitalism. He defined Black Power in the West Indies as: “(1) The break with imperialism, which is historically white racist; (2) the assumption of power by the black masses in the islands; (3) the cultural reconstruction of society in the image of blacks”.^[5] Although Rodney viewed Black Power as a universal call for self-determination, he thought its relevance to the West Indies differed from that in America. In the United States, the program of most radical black leaders reflected the position of an African American racial minority who faced employment and housing discrimination and police brutality from mainly white police officers. The principal theoretician of Black Power, Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) argued for blacks in the US to take political and economic control of their communities away from the police and the state.^[6] Carmichael’s views would later radicalise and he would join the Black Panthers, who advocated a socialist revolution in 1968.

Unlike in America, African descendants were the majority in most of the ex-British West Indies and suffered oppression from both blacks and other non-white peoples. So Rodney theorised Black Power in a more radical way than Carmichael, to challenge the domination of what he called the “white imperialist system”.^[7] This referred to the collusion between the local black elite and the Western multinational companies that exploited workers and robbed the Caribbean of its raw materials. Rodney also anchored his Black Power in internationalism by linking the struggles of Jamaicans to liberation movements in the Global South fighting colonialism and imperialism. Moreover, he argued that West Indian Black Power concerned Indians and Africans alike. In his homeland, Guyanese Indians outnumbered Africans and they made up half of the population of Trinidad and Tobago. Both peoples, he maintained, shared a history of bondage and oppression at the hands of imperialism. The British Empire had bought Africans as slaves, and then shipped Indians as indentured labour. Now both communities endured poverty and saw power denied to them.^[8]

In Jamaica, Rodney criticised the ruling class for flaunting the myth of a harmonious multiracial Jamaican society. He despised its national motto, “Out of Many, One People” for obscuring the fact that a small multi-racial elite ruled over an African majority. For Rodney, the elite feared above all the prospect of Jamaicans organising politically around their African identity. Therefore, many of his speeches emphasised the need for blacks to reconnect with their African heritage. Rodney aspired to dismantle the inferiority complex that slavery, colonialism and racism instilled among blacks by representing Africa as primitive and uncivilised. He told black students in San Francisco in 1968: “We are the only group in the world who deny ourselves preferring to be known as Negros… To know ourselves we must learn about African history”. Rodney had a similar message for his Jamaican audience. At the groundings, he spoke at length on the great empires of Ethiopia, Kush and Benin. The empirical evidence he presented in his lectures strengthened the religious claims that Rastafarians held on to the grandeur of ancient African civilisations. The Rastafarians nicknamed him ‘the African doctor’ because of his knowledge of African history.

Although Rodney argued that history was a crucial weapon for mobilising black people, he thought its importance was secondary to the tactics and strategy of revolution. What was the correct revolutionary strategy for Jamaica? Rodney grappled with this question that weighed so heavily on his mind. He had reservation on whether the Jamaican masses were willing to support armed struggle against their ruling class. “I doubt whether the situation is explosive”, he wrote in letter to his wife. While Rodney admired Che Guevara’s teaching on guerrilla warfare, he knew that this strategy could not be blindly applied to the Jamaican context, even though it had proved successful in many parts of the Global South. Guevara himself had warned revolutionaries about the impossibly of waging an effective guerrilla war without securing the support of the masses of workers and peasants.

Instead, Rodney took from Guevara’s life experience the need to agitate for more concrete action. “All that matters”, he wrote, “is the question of action: determined, informed and scientific action against imperialism and its cohorts”. Where did theory fit in this picture? Rodney seldom mentioned his affinity with Marxism in his speeches at the groundings. Perhaps, he did not want to alienate the Rastafarians around him who were hostile to socialism. Rodney did celebrate the emergence of a rank-and-file workers’ movement that staged strikes without the support of the state co-opted unions. Yet the workers figured as only one of the revolutionary classes that he identified. He did not view their struggles against capital in Jamaica as central to the revolution. Instead, he placed most of his revolutionary faith in the unemployed black youth.

**Walter Rodney, The Groundings with my Brothers (London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1969).**

In one of the lectures he gave at the Montreal’s Black Writers Conference in October 1968, Rodney spoke with passion about the Jamaican youth’s growing readiness to fight: “Throughout the country, black youth are becoming aware of the possibilities of unleashing armed struggle in their own interest. For those who have eyes to see, there is already evidence of the beginning of resistance to the violence of our oppressors”. The Jamaican government barred Rodney from entering Jamaica upon his return from the conference. Unfortunately, the Rodney Riots that ensued failed to reinstate him as the police beat the protesters into retreat and occupied the UWI campus for several days. While the riots appeared as a moment of unity between middle-class students, the unemployed and working-class youths, they failed to produce a long-lasting mass movement in Jamaica. The sheer brutality of the government’s repression ultimately demoralised the Jamaican masses.

Caribbean Black Power instead peaked in 1970 with the Trinidadian revolution that almost overthrew President Eric Williams. Although they were defeated, the Trinidadian workers proved to be the locus of power—their strikes paralysed the economy and fuelled the anti-government protests. Rodney did not foresee this potential for working class struggle when discussing Black Power in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, Jamaican Black Nationalism was dragged into the party rivalry between the JLP and the People’s National Party, cynically described as “gun politics”.^[11] Both parties financed gangs to suppress rival supporters and to win swing constituencies. By the 1980s, the turf wars had divided and absorbed the once-radical ghetto youths. Contrary to what Rodney believed at the time, the youths did not have the coherence and the power to lead the struggle.

Despite the failure of Black Power, Rodney’s activism in Jamaica is still remembered today in reggae songs and activist circles. At only 26 years of age, Rodney had galvanised the oppressed masses and frightened the political establishment. News of his exploits in Jamaica reached two Afro-Guyanese activists, Jessica and Eric Huntley, who owned a radical bookshop in London. In 1969, they met Rodney and published his speeches on Black Power under the title The Groundings With My Brothers. In his pamphlet, Rodney asserted that the Jamaican government was wrong to believe that his expulsion from the island would stifle the masses. “This act”, he concluded, “will not delay its day of Judgment.”^[12]His faith in the self-activity of the masses would remain with him throughout the rest of his life.

Please click here and here for parts one and two of Chukwudinma’s A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney.

Images: Naomi Oppenheim The Banning of a Man and the Making of a Book: The Walter Rodney Affair, 1968 (27 September, 2019).

Notes

[1] Payne, Anthony, “The Rodney Riots In Jamaica: The background and significance of the events of October 1968”, Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 1983, p60.

[2] For context on the Rodney Riots, see Payne, 1983, pp.158-174 or Lewis, Rupert, 1998b, “Walter Rodney: 1968 Revisited”, Press University of the West Indies, pp 12-22.

[3] Rodney quoted in Lewis, 1998b, p25.

[4] Robert Hill in Chung Clairmont (ed.), Walter A. Rodney: A Promise of Revolution, (Monthly Review Press, 2012), pp65-66.

[5] Walter Rodney, The Groundings with my Brothers, (Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1969), p38.

[6] Note that Stokely views on Black Power radicalised after 1969 and co-founder of the Black Panthers, Huey Newton argued for a socialist revolution in America.

[7] Rodney, 1969, pp.41

[8] See Rodney, 1969, pp25-27 and pp38-41.

[9] Lewis, 1998b, p38.

[10] Rodney, 1969, pp74.

Transitioning nowhere: Burkina Faso’s coup d’état

ROAPE

March 29, 2022

ROAPE’s Bettina Engels argues that the coup in January 2022 in Burkina Faso was not a surprise. Frustration and anger within the state security forces, among activists and the population in general have steadily increased since the elections in 2020. Engels argues that it remains urgent to think about how radical political-economic transformation can be truly realised.

By Bettina Engels

On Monday, 24 January 2022, a military coup removed Burkina Faso’s president Roch Marc Christian Kaboré and his government. Early that morning shootings were heard at the president’s residence and at some military garrisons in the capital, Ouagadougou. A couple of hours later, the president was reported to have been detained. Later the same day, a military junta led by one of the country’s highest military ranks, lieutenant-colonel Paul-Henri Sandogo Damiba, announced on television, that the army had “decided to put an end of the power of Roch Marc Christian Kaboré” in order to “enable the country to get back on the track”, to restore its “territorial integrity” and its “sovereignty” (BF1 2022). Kaboré would be removed from the presidential office, the parliament and government dissolved, and the constitution suspended. The putschists call themselves Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration (Mouvement patriotique pour la sauvegarde et la restauration, MPSR). Two people are reported to have been killed related to the coup and a dozen of civilians injured during the shootings (lefaso.net 2022).

On 3 February, the MPSR installed a 15-headed (14 men, one women) commission to work on a programme for the “transition phase”, including journalists, academics and civil society representatives (lefaso.net 2022) (excluding political parties), all selected and appointed by the MPSR. The commission submitted its report on 23 February. On 1 March, Damiba signed the charter of the transition. On 5 March, the transitional government was presented to the public. There were 25 (19 men, six women), including a couple of ministers who were office holders before the putsch, e.g. the minister of defence, General Barthelemy Simporé. The transition period is scheduled for 36 months; after that, the constitutional order is supposed to be reinstalled and free elections organised. Damiba stated that he would not present himself as a candidate.

A coup “ against terrorism”?

The putschists’ justification for the coup was the inability of the previous government to deal with increasing security threats by various armed groups that Burkina Faso has witnessed for a couple of years. Two and a half thousand schools have been closed due to the security situation, with catastrophic consequences for access to education. Between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 people have been internally displaced. More than 2,200 people have been killed in 2019-2020, including civilians and members of state security forces and non-state armed groups. Reported fatalities in 2021-2022 thus far amount to more than 2,800 people (ACLED data 2022). On 14 November 2022, in one of the most severe attacks against the state security forces, 50 members of the gendarmerie were killed. Frustrations are high within the armed forces, as many feel that they have been left alone and ill equipped in the peripheral regions of the country where they are targeted by non-state armed groups.

Unsurprisingly, the “fight against terrorism” is the first and principle aim declared in the transition charter (article 2). Beyond this, the charter does not say much. It defines the institutions of the transition (the president of the transition, the transitional government, the council of orientation and monitoring of the transition, and the legislative assembly). President Damiba is presented as the unambiguously most important figure. The legislative assembly is composed of 21 members appointed by him; 13 members representing the country’s regions who must not be affiliated to any political party; eight representatives of political parties; 16 representatives of the state security forces, and 13 representatives of civil society organisations (article 24).

Damiba is one of the leading military figures in the country. In recent years, he became popular for his engagement in the fight against the security crisis. Not two months before the coup, he was promoted as a commander of the central military region covering Ouagadougou and the cities of Manga, Koudougou and Fada N’gourma and tasked to lead anti-terrorism operations in the North.

If the principal justification for the putsch is the ongoing security crisis, the question emerges why the military seizes state power if it is not to strive for political and economic change but just for what it is supposed to do rid the country of (“fighting terrorism”, restoring the country’s “territorial integrity” and “sovereignty”)? The coup was not a coup against the military leadership but only to remove the president. How likely is it that the same army and the same military leader will be more successful in fighting armed groups in the country now that Damiba is not only commander of the most important military region in the country but also president? Has the previous government hindered military commanders from any strategy or action that would have been effective to combat insecurity in the peripheral regions? Rumours abound on whether members of the military collaborated with the non-state armed groups. With that said, people in Burkina Faso watch the new leaders with caution.

An unsurprising coup

The coup in January 2022 was not a surprise. Frustration and anger within the state security forces, organised civil society and the population in general have steadily increased since Kaboré had been re-elected for his second term as a president in late 2020. Kaboré succeeded Blaise Compaoré who himself became president by a putsch in October 1987 and then stayed in power for 27 years until on 31 October 2014, he was turned over after mass protests. Finally the military forced him to announce his resignation. Former diplomat Michel Kafando was appointed transitional president. He immediately appointed a senior military officer, lieutenant-colonel Yacouba Isaac Zida, vice commander of the presidential guard RSP, as prime minister. Many activists were disappointed. They felt that the military had “stolen” the revolution. Chrysogone Zougmoré, chairman of the Burkinabé human rights movement (Mouvement burkinabé des droits de l’homme et de peuple, MBDHP), at a press conference on 2 November 2014, declared that the army had conducted a coup d’état. This “paves the way for anti-democratic activities, as the history of our country has taught us”. The most recent events prove him right.

On 16 September 2015, the RSP, led by its commander, General Gilbert Diendéré, launched a coup d’état against the transitional government. Immediately, the trade unions declared a general strike and virtually all civil society groups mobilised to resist the putsch. Six days later, on 23 September, Diendéré caved into the mass resistance. Presidential elections were held on 29 November. Kaboré won in the first ballot. He was the chairman of the Mouvement du Peuple pour le Progrès (MPP), a more or less social-democratic political party founded in January 2014 by politicians who quit Compaoré’s Congrès pour la Démocratie et le Progrès (CDP). According to civil society groups, the transition ultimately amounted to one faction within the CDP succeeding against another. Among the official political parties, there is virtually no serious opposition to the MPP and their allies.

Nothing to defend

During the insurrection in October 2014 and the resistance in September 2015, the popular classes in Burkina Faso have demonstrated that they are able to turn over a regime and oppose the armed forces. The lack of active resistance against the recent putsch does not mean that people were unable to mobilise. The trade unions and the organisations of the human rights and youth movement, of university and high school students, are capable of mass mobilisation at short notice. The trade union alliance, the Unité d’Action Syndical (UAS), on 26 January published a declaration condemning the coup.However, the trade unions and other organisations have not mobilised popular resistance against the coup as they did in 2015. In 2015 they had not defended the transitional government of Kafando and Zida as individuals. A leading activist explained that instead, they defended democracy, liberty and the importance of government institutions. With Kaboré, there was nothing to defend. Radical activists and organisations in Burkina Faso oppose military coups as a matter of principal. However, many are not convinced that the governments of Compaoré and Kaboré were more legitimate than a coup d’état. Kaboré became president through what is called free and fair elections. However, this points less to broad support and people’s satisfaction and more to the perceived lack of alternatives.

The Kaboré government has considerably curtailed liberties and tried to limit oppositional activities. Referring to the security crisis, basic civil rights have been restricted by the state authorities. In June 2019, the Criminal Code was amended by adopting a new law that criminalises any acts that may “demoralise” the state security forces. Human rights groups complain that the law is used to intimate and persecute activists, journalists, and bloggers. The right of assembly has been restricted because of the state of emergency declared on 31 December 2018 of the increase in terrorist attacks. The state of emergency is frequently used to ban, often at short notice, activities by oppositional organisations. From the perspective of critical civil society groups, the government uses the terrorist threat as an excuse to oppress oppositional activities, especially by leftist organisations. Activists feel that they were denounced as terrorists, and threatened both by terrorist groups and by the state security forces. A well-known example is the case of two activists of the Democratic Youth Organization of Burkina Faso (Organisation Démocratique de la Jeunesse, ODJ) who were killed on 31 May 2019 (Engels 2019).

On 20 November 2021, the authorities suspended mobile internet in the country for one week as a reaction to people blocking a French military convoy. Though the majority of the population does not have access to internet anyway, the suspension of mobile internet to hamper protests is paramount for the behaviour of the Kaboré government towards critical civil society – those organisations that led the insurrection of 2014, and thus paved the way for Kaboré and his companions. In this context, it is hardly surprising that they do not mobilise resistance against the recent coup.

If the car is broken, it does not matter who is driving

In the view of many activists, the coup is the result of the Kaboré government. The UAS states that ‘this situation is the consequence of how the county has been managed by the regime’. For many people, it is obvious that the ruling class cares little about whether people have access to food, education and health care. That Kaboré has been replaced by Damiba does not imply any significant political change. If a car is broken, you would not repair it by changing the driver, as one leading activist put it. So it would not make any difference whether a civilian or a military driver.

With this said, doubts can be raised whether the “transition” will come with any substantial political-economic change. Thus the question remains, what does transition actually mean – transition towards what? With regard to the political economy of the country, radical activists in Burkina Faso insist on the (re-)nationalisation of subsoil and agricultural resources and of other economic sectors; professional education and industrialisation, so that the country would become independent from foreign capital and capable of benefitting from its value chains. Furthermore, they insist that foreign military forces should fully leave the country.

The core questions remain: what is the character of political authority and how is it to be delivered and by whom? Elections, at least in the form that they take in many contexts, so far have not turned out to lead to substantial change. After the insurrection of 2014, the “international community” called for elections. Most civil society activists in Burkina Faso, in contrast, were more concerned with the investigation of the political and economic crimes of the Compaoré regime and less with elections. Many people in Burkina Faso have little confidence in the institutions of liberal representative democracy. So does this mean that military coups “are more legitimate than elections” (Serunkuma 2022)? If not, what are legitimate forms of regime change?

One lesson learnt from the popular insurrection of 2014 is that even if a regime is overturned by a broad alliance of social forces, if there is no vision and strategy of what should come next, little of lasting change will take place. The euphoria of the insurrection lasted three days; what followed was a hangover with the revolution “stolen” by the military and bourgeois political opposition, the latter being just another wing of the previous regime.

There is no euphoria regarding the end of the Kaboré government. Though it remains urgent to think about how radical political-economic transformation can be truly realised.How will institutions of political authority be reformed and what would they look when created and sustained by the broad masses of people to effectively guarantee decent livelihoods for the popular classes rather than to serve the interests of a small, rich and powerful elite?

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

Featured Photograph: Troops patrol the capital, Ouagadougou, after the coup (25 January, 2022).

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