Race and class inequality in South Africa

February 2, 2022

Many commentators argue that South Africa has not changed fundamentally since apartheid, and that racial inequality has continued because the basic structures of the old system have remained untransformed. Owen Crankshaw challenges these views and argues that the labour market in Gauteng, South Africa’s largest province, has been dramatically restructured.

By Owen Crankshaw

Many scholars and commentators hold the view that South African cities have not changed substantially since the end of apartheid. They argue that racial inequality has persisted because the basic structures of apartheid have not been dismantled. Some even go so far as to say that racial inequality persists because of continuing racial discrimination and oppression by white people.

My research on employment trends in Gauteng over the period 1970 to 2011 has produced evidence that challenges this view in several ways. First, the results show that the labour market in Gauteng has not remained the same since the end of apartheid. On the contrary, it was dramatically restructured, producing new winners and new losers in ways that substantially undermined the old apartheid order.

In 1970, unemployment was very low, and most workers were employed in manual jobs, either as unskilled labourers or as machine operators and assembly-line workers. Forty years later, unemployment was extremely high, and most workers were employed in non-manual jobs, as clerks, sales and service workers, technicians, professionals and managers. This changing labour market, which benefitted better-educated workers and severely disadvantaged poorly-educated manual workers, also substantially changed the pattern of racial inequality.

For white workers, this resulted in their continued prosperity, which took the form of a low unemployment rate and their over-representation in high-income technical, professional and managerial middle-class jobs. However, white workers were not the only people to benefit from the growth of middle-class jobs. The growth of high-income middle-class jobs far exceeded the supply of the white workforce and therefore provided middle-class employment opportunities for many well-educated black, mostly African, workers.

The same trend took place in middle-income non-manual clerical, services and sales occupations. These non-manual occupations grew more than other occupational groups, resulting in dramatic upward occupational mobility among better-educated black workers. By contrast, there was very little employment growth in manual jobs, in which mostly poorly-educated black workers were employed. In particular, there was almost no employment growth among middle-income machine operators and assemblers, which dealt a terrible blow to the gains made by the unionised black working class.

The result was therefore upward occupational mobility for many black workers into non-manual jobs. Although by 2011 white workers were still over-represented in high-income middle-class jobs, the black middle class was much larger than the white middle class. As far as clerical, sales and services jobs are concerned, the number of black workers had grown to the extent that white workers were no longer over-represented in these jobs.

However, this changing division of labour severely disadvantaged a great many poorly-educated black workers who were left jobless by the shortage of manual jobs. The combined effects of racially-unequal schooling during the apartheid period, generally low employment growth and the changing occupational structure meant that it was poorly-educated black workers who bore the brunt of an extremely high level of unemployment. By 2011, the number of unemployed black workers was substantially more than the number of middle-class black workers.

The evidence

1. De-industrialization and the changing occupational and earnings structure of employment

In 1970, at the height of the apartheid period, the labour market was dominated by the manufacturing sector and characterized by a low unemployment rate of only 5 per cent. Four decades later, in 2011, employment in the manufacturing sector was less than each of the services sectors. Furthermore, unemployment had grown to 26 per cent. In 1970, the manufacturing sector was the single largest employer, employing almost one-quarter of all workers. By 2011, this percentage had shrunk to only 10 per cent. Correspondingly, employment in the service sectors increased in absolute and relative terms. Most notable, employment in community, social and personal services grew from only 12 per cent in 1970 to 21 per cent by 2011. Similarly, employment in producer services grew from only 5 per cent to 21 per cent (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Employment change in the largest economic sectors in Gauteng, 1970 to 2011 (Error bars indicate the 95% confidence intervals).

Over the same period, the occupational structure of employment changed substantially. In 1970, 64 per cent of all workers were employed in low-income and middle-income manual jobs. By 2011, employment in these manual jobs had declined to only 40 per cent. Correspondingly, employment in high-income managerial, professional and technical jobs increased from 19 per cent of all employment in 1970 to 28 per cent in 2011. Similarly, middle-income clerical, sales and services jobs increased from 14 per cent of all employment in 1970 to 31 per cent in 2011 (Figure 2). So, over a period of forty years, the occupational structure was transformed from one that was dominated by low- and middle-income manual workers to one that was dominated by middle- and high-income non-manual workers.

Figure 2. Employment by low-, middle- and high-income occupational groups in Gauteng, 1970 to 2011. (Error bars indicate the 95% confidence intervals).

The labour market therefore changed from one that required workers mostly without a secondary-school education to one that required workers mostly with a completed secondary-school education or more. Between 1970 and 2011, the employment of workers without a completed secondary-school education stagnated. By contrast, the employment of workers with a completed secondary and tertiary education increased dramatically.

This changing occupational structure of employment was therefore a partial cause of rising unemployment. The reason for this is that about 60 per cent of unemployed workers did not complete their secondary schooling and about 60 per cent of employed workers had completed their secondary or tertiary education. Over the period from 1980 to 2011, which is the period when the unemployment rate increased, two-thirds of all employment growth among workers with at least a completed secondary school education took place in middle- and high-income non-manual jobs.

The other important reason for the high unemployment rate was the overall slow growth of employment in the face of a faster growth in the size of the population. Whereas from 1970 to 1980, when the unemployment rate remained low, the increase in the size of the economically active population was matched by employment growth. Between 1980 to 2001, the period during which the unemployment rate increased, the growth rate of the economically active population grew faster than the growth rate of employment. This explains why the unemployment rate is highest, not only among poorly-educated workers, but also among younger workers who entered the labour market during the period when employment growth was low and there was therefore a severe shortage of jobs.

2. The changing pattern of racial inequality

Although the occupational profile of white workers remained largely unchanged, the occupational profile of black workers changed substantially over the period from 1970 to 2011. In 1970, almost all black workers were employed in low-income and middle-income manual jobs. By 2011, this percentage had decreased to just less than 50 per cent. The remaining black workers were employed in high-income middle-class and middle-income non-manual occupations. This transformation resulted in the racial desegregation of employment in middle-class and clerical, sales and service occupations that were once predominantly filled by white workers. In 1970, at the height of the apartheid period, about 90 per cent of all high-income middle-class jobs were held by white workers. Forty years later, this percentage was reduced to only one-third (Figure 3). Similarly, the percentage of black workers in clerical, sales and service jobs increased from 50 per cent in 1970 to almost 80 per cent in 2011.

Figure 3. The changing racial composition of high-income, middle-class employment in Gauteng, 1970 to 2011. (Error bars indicate the 95% confidence intervals).

So, contrary to the argument that the old apartheid labour market has persisted, the evidence suggests that there were dramatic changes that have produced new kinds of earnings inequalities. First, the demand for labour shifted away from poorly-educated manual workers to better-educated non-manual workers. In the face of a small and slow-growing white workforce, this resulted in the dramatic increase in the numbers of black workers employed in high-earning middle-class jobs and in middle-income non-manual jobs. Second, the rise of unemployment resulted in widespread poverty among poorly-educated black (mostly African) workers.

Both these features of the labour market did not exist at the height of the apartheid period and therefore cannot be the result of the persistence of the racially oppressive apartheid system. South Africa therefore needs to urgently apply new solutions to these new causes of inequality. Specifically, the country must fix its secondary school system and expand its universities. South Africa must also encourage labour-intensive job creation in all sectors to reduce unemployment.

Owen Crankshaw teaches sociology at the University of Cape Town. He has written and researched widely on labour, labour markets, class and cities in South Africa.

Owen Crankshaw’s new book, Urban Inequality: Theory, evidence and method in Johannesburg is being published by Zed Books later in February.

Africa was at the centre of Lenin’s work

ROAPE

January 27, 2022

Marxism, we are told, is Eurocentric and has lost much of its appeal in the eyes of many scholars and activists. Some have even denounced Marxism as a racist theory, irrelevant to the study of Africa. Vladimir Lenin is implicated in this critique. In a far-reaching study of Lenin’s ideas, Joe Pateman argues Lenin placed Africa at the centre of his analysis of imperialism and contemporary capitalism. Here, the author reflects on the key aspects of his analysis. Following this, Pateman’s full article in the ROAPE journal can be accessed for free.

By Joe Pateman

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the father of Bolshevism, never stepped foot in Africa, but his influence upon the continent has been tremendous. Alongside the ideas of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Lenin’s revolutionary theories provided the framework for an entire generation of African socialists during the twentieth century. By drawing upon Lenin’s writings, in addition to the practical experience of the October Socialist Revolution, millions of African freedom fighters were able to smash the shackles of Western imperialism, and in doing so, slice off some of the longest tentacles of parasitic Western capitalism.

Although, today, many socialists are hesitant to defend Bolshevism and the Soviet Union, the leaders of twentieth century African socialism were not ashamed of acknowledging their intellectual debt to Lenin, as well as the achievements of the world’s first workers’ state. Many of these leaders proudly announced themselves as Lenin’s African disciplines, and as African Leninists, contributing to the global struggle for human freedom, equality, and socialism. African socialist governments demonstrated their Leninist heritage by, amongst other things, placing gigantic portraits, busts, and statues of Lenin in the halls of power seized from the European colonialists.

Lenin’s presence was especially prominent in post-revolutionary Ghana, where the Marxist leader Kwame Nkrumah portrayed himself as an African Lenin. As part of his campaign to honour Lenin’s legacy, Nkrumah devoted his pioneering study on Neo-imperialism: The Highest Stage of Imperialism, to Lenin’s seminal work of Marxist theory, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. This book’s penetrating analysis of global capitalism remains as relevant today as it did when Lenin published it in 1917. Imperialism has provided especially profound insights for scholars of African political economy.

In recent years, however, some have challenged the relevance of Lenin’s legacy for the study of Africa. This challenge has comprised part of a concerted and coordinated effort to denounce Marxism as a Eurocentric doctrine, one that both marginalises and misunderstands the history of non-Western peoples. Lenin, alongside Marx and Engels, has been tarred with this brush. Many scholars have used Eurocentrism as a weapon to discredit Marxist ideas.

The concept of Eurocentrism found its most famous expression in Edward Said’s book Orientalism, which caused shockwaves amongst racist Western academics when he published it in 1978. In this book, Said used the term Orientalism to describe the West’s commonly contemptuous depiction of the ‘Eastern’ ‘Orient’, or in other words, the societies and peoples of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Orientalism constructed a stark contrast between a white-skinned Western ‘us’ and a non-white eastern ‘other’, whilst claiming that the West was racially, politically, socially, economically, and culturally superior. This distinction underlined the perpetuation of racist stereotypes in the Western scholarship of Eastern peoples, since Orientalism judged them in accordance with the standards of ‘superior’ white Western civilisation.

In the discipline of international political economy (IPE), Said’s conception of Orientalism has been re-formulated as Eurocentrism or Western centrism. Many scholars have denounced the leading theories of IPE as Eurocentric. John Hobson, a prominent proponent of this view, has identified four characteristics or stages in the development of Eurocentrism: 1) the splitting of the East and West into two separate and self-constituting entities; 2) the evaluation of the West as superior to the East, in the sense that the West is endowed with rational characteristics, including liberal democracy and capitalism; whilst the East is endowed with irrational ones, such as barbarism and slavery; 3) the ‘Eurocentric Big Bang theory’, which accords a monopoly of global developmental agency to the West; and 4) an imperialist politics, in which imperialism is either i) ignored, or presented as a benign civilising mission; or ii) empire is critiqued (direct imperialism), but the Western universalism of the theory renders its politics as a form of indirect imperialism (see Hobson 2013).

Hobson has accused Marx himself of endorsing these four characteristics of Eurocentrism. In doing so, he and many others have echoed the sentiments of Cedric Robinson, who provided a detailed defence of this narrative in his book Black Marxism. When it was originally published in 1983, Robinson’s study didn’t cause a stir. In recent years, however, Black Marxism has provided the foundation for the renewed critique of Eurocentric Marxism. Robinson’s ideas are all the rage nowadays, and scholars routinely endorse his claim that Marxism miscomprehends the history of Black and African peoples. As a result of these focused efforts, Marxism has lost much of its appeal in the eyes of many scholars of African political economy. Some have denounced Marxism outright as a racist theory, irrelevant to the study of Africa, whilst others claim that Marxism requires a fundamental reconstruction to remove its Eurocentric assumptions. Lenin’s ideas are of course implicated in this critique of Marxism.

Scholars have reemphasised the Eurocentric basis of Marxism since the rise of Black Lives Matter, a movement that has highlighted the systemic nature of anti-black racism in developed capitalist societies. Likewise, the global campaign to decolonise academia, by exposing and denouncing Eurocentric figures and theories, has further emboldened the critique of Marxism as a fundamentally Western-centric approach. It is not an exaggeration to say that these attacks- which have come from both anti-communists and self-professed ‘Marxists’- constitute an all-out assault on the fundamental premises of communism and Marxism. Once again, the revolutionary theory of the fighting working class is being demonised.

Not everyone has jumped on this bandwagon, despite the fact that doing so has been an effective method of getting published and advancing one’s academic career. Not all left-wing scholars have sold out and joined the witch-hunt for Eurocentric Marxism. Some have resisted the tide; and have sought to highlight the fundamentally non-Eurocentric foundations of scientific communism. One such person is Biko Agozino (2014), who in 2014 published a hugely important article in the ROAPE, ‘The Africana paradigm in Capital: the debts of Karl Marx to people of African descent’. In this article, which he summarised in a blogpost for roape.net in 2020, Agozino demolishes Robinson’s claim that Marx ignored and misunderstood Africa and its peoples. Agozino shows that Marx gave Africa an important place in Capital, his magnum opus, by making hundreds of references to the continent and the ‘negro’.

In my own article, which is published in ROAPE, and can be read for free, I provide a sequel to Agozino’s contribution by making a similar argument for Lenin, a figure whose influence upon African studies has been just as significant. Contrary to the views of Robinson and his followers, Lenin showed a profound concern for Africa. In fact, he placed Africa at the centre of his theory of imperialism, and this theory is fundamentally non-Eurocentric.

For one thing, Lenin was an astute analyst of colonialism in Africa from the earliest stages of his intellectual development. Already in the Development of Capitalism in Russia, published in 1899, Lenin compared Russia’s colonial exploitation of its minority nationalities to Germany’s African colonies. In both cases, he noted, an exploiting core sought to drain the resources of an exploited periphery. Moving forward to 1912, Lenin denounced Italy’s colonial invasion of Libya, including its brutal massacres of defenceless women and children. These actions showcased the fraud of Italy’s claim to be a civilised nation. Lenin argued that Italy’s predatory seizure of Libyan territory was fuelled by capitalist greed. Italian capitalism needed new territories to exploit in order to survive. At the same time, Lenin noted the bravery of the fierce Arab tribes, who would keeping fighting and never surrender, no matter the cost.

From 1915 to 1916, Lenin conducted a vast amount of research on Africa in preparation for his upcoming book on Imperialism. The Soviet Union published his notes as volume 39 of his Collected Works, under the title Notebooks on Imperialism. In these notebooks, which run to 768 pages, Lenin made comments and remarks on hundreds of scholarly books on imperialism, many of which focused upon Africa. Lenin amassed a vast amount of statistical data on Europe’s colonial activities in Africa, including the amount of capital invested and the length of railways built there. He meticulously studied the various treaties and deals signed between the imperialist powers over the partition of Africa from the late nineteenth century onwards. In doing so, Lenin acquired a detailed overview of the continent’s position under imperialism, one based on empirical evidence. More crucially, he repeatedly remarked that colonialism in Africa lay at the centre of imperialism; and was not merely a phenomenon of marginal importance.

Lenin did not only offer description and analysis. He was critical throughout the notebooks, offering scathing descriptions of the chauvinist apologists of African imperialism, as well as the colonial leaders themselves. Moreover, Lenin remarked on the resistance of African peoples, such as the Hottentot and Herero revolts, which were violently crushed by colonial troops. Contrary to what Robinson argues in Black Marxism, Lenin was fully aware of the ‘black radical tradition’.

Upon the basis of his Notebooks on Imperialism, Lenin placed Africa at the heart of his analysis in his book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. The centrality of Africa in this work has been insufficiently acknowledged in the literature, but it is essential to recognise, because it undermines the claim that Lenin was Eurocentric.

To start with, Lenin argued that the colonial conquest of Africa heralded the rise of imperialism, which he defined as a new stage of capitalism characterised by military conflict over territory. Imperialism required Africa’s subordination in order to thrive. Second, Lenin argued that Africa’s repartition was the objective content of the Great War. The belligerent European powers – and Germany in particular – were fighting primarily for greater slices of the African pie. In making these two points, Lenin established that Africa was a continent of unparalleled geopolitical significance. For as long as Africa was colonised, imperialism would be able to suppress European socialism, but if Africa achieved its liberation, then the European socialist movement would achieve a dramatic increase in power. The fate of global socialism and global capitalism depended upon Africa’s freedom.

During the Great War, Lenin became a leading critic of European colonialism and an uncompromising supporter of African independence. He judged socialists in accordance with their stand on these issues. Lenin denounced the chauvinist opportunists in Europe who abandoned their anti-capitalist struggles to support their national war efforts. Lenin insisted that the war was an imperialist conflict, and a symptom of moribund capitalism. It was the duty of socialists to oppose the war and show solidarity with their African brothers and sisters. Lenin abandoned the Second International and founded the Third International precisely because the former failed to oppose the colonial plunder of Africa and the predatory war waged over it. Under Lenin’s leadership, the Third International made anti-colonialism a condition of membership, and it identified African independence as an indispensable part of the global proletarian revolution (see Matt Swagler’s analysis here and here).

Yet, Lenin was not a saint. He lived during a time when European thinking on Africa was overwhelmingly racist. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Lenin was not a scientific racist, though he did, very rarely, express the widely promoted view that African peoples and societies were ‘primitive’, ‘savage’, and underdeveloped, more so in the centre of the continent. It is important to recognise that these remarks were marginal in Lenin’s thought, and they did not shape his theoretical framework. Lenin spent far more time exposing the barbaric nature of European civilisation, than he did commenting on Africa’s alleged backwardness.

For this reason, there is little basis for the view that Lenin was Eurocentric. Such a view ignores the vast amount of evidence to the contrary, including Lenin’s record in championing Africa’s liberation struggle. In both theory and practice, the founder of Soviet communism eschewed Hobson’s four characteristics of Eurocentrism. First, Lenin did not separate the West from Africa. He envisioned imperialism as a global system, one that intimately connected European and African peoples. Second, Lenin did not view the West as superior to Africa. although not fully consistent, he often portrayed Africans as more civilised than the European imperialists, who showed higher levels of violent barbarism. Third, Lenin did not endorse the ‘Big Bang’ theory of European development. He recognised that Western capitalism relied for its expansion upon the subjugation of Africa. Finally, Lenin did not endorse imperialism.

In contrast to the chauvinists of his era, Lenin was a consistent supporter of African independence. As such, Lenin’s legacy remains relevant for the study of Africa today. His book on Imperialism will continue to provide profound insights for both the study of African political economy and the socialist struggles of African peoples.

Joe Pateman’s full article in ROAPE, ‘The centrality of Africa in Lenin’s theory of imperialism’ is available to read for free until the end of April.

Joe Pateman is a Graduate Teaching Assistant in Politics at the University of Sheffield. He is the co-author of Public Libraries and Marxism (Routledge, 2021).

Colonialism is alive and well in Africa, but goes by many nice names

ROAPE

January 26, 2022

Yusuf Serunkuma asks how the continued and violent colonisation of the continent has not been more systematically resisted. In a long-read, Serunkuma looks at the extraordinary control of the continent, from banking, the coffee trade, land grabs and mining. Why have Africans failed to see these forms of foreign control as ‘colonial,’ in which former colonisers have continued the pillage of the continent?

By Yusuf Serunkuma

With all the evidence in our midst—foreign monopolies in mining, banking, coffee trade, humongous profit expropriation, policy double-standards, direct foreign aggression such as foreign capital land grabs, and violent aggressions as witnessed in Somalia and Libya, endless captive debt and so-called aid—why have Africans failed to stage committed resistance [intellectual, cultural or even military] against the ongoing pillage? Most of this championed through the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) whose ruins on the continent have been acknowledged as visible everywhere, why have Africans refused to resist this pillage with their lives as their grandparents’ resisted colonies and protectorates?

Asked differently: how did “former” colonisers so successfully and quickly manage to re-colonise newly independent states—as early as just 30 years after independence—that is, re-monopolise cash and food crop trade, and continue the aggressive violent extraction of Africa’s natural resources without attracting the ire of Africans? Or why have Africans failed to see structural adjustment as ‘colonial adjustment,’ as new ways in which yesterday’s colonisers returned to continue the pillage of the continent?

By demonstrating that structural adjustment programmes – with examples in banking, coffee trade, and mining – actually embody and display all the ugly features of the past colonial projects, this long-read argues that (a) the technocratization of pillage has so successfully disguised the exploitative nature of the power relations giving it a hue of benevolence and mutually observable interests. Africa’s eternal colonisers took off their khaki uniforms for suits, and replaced missionaries with diplomats who, instead of chanting Christianity and civilisation, are now vending democracy, human rights, and free market economics. (b) Reminiscent of the colonialism of old, in addition to violent and structural enforcement, new colonialism has conscripted both willing and unsuspecting compradors across the continent. These have been organised into sophisticated elite networks and are more handsomely [directly and indirectly] remunerated than the earlier group of compradors. These range from heads of states, mid-level politicians, and senior public servants. Others include Europeanised folks in the NGO and civil society sectors whose cosmetic work on the African continent simply benefits the workers than their claimed target groups. Against technocratization and conscription of compradors including local elites, it is common to find expectedly “woke folks” in the west—activists, journalists and scholars—not simply dismissive of the colonial nature of structural adjustment programmes, but also ignorant of the facts to the point that they are unaware of their own conscription to a newer and uglier version of colonial control. In an earlier essay on roape.net, I have called these folks, ‘the new intellectuals of empire.’ Thus, this clearly more lethal wave of colonialism remains invisible – with several fancy names – and has thus failed in generate the ire from Africans, and sympathy from genuine hearts in Europe and North America for whom colonisation of the continent continues in their name.

Most profitable banks in the world

There are 24 commercial banks in Uganda. In the year 2019, the aggregate net-after-tax profit for those banks was USH807.5 billion (about $215m). Of the 24 banks, only three are locally owned. That is, with over 50 percent local shareholding: Centenary Bank, Housing Finance, and Post Bank. Of these three, only Centenary has noticeable visibility in the market; the other two are very minor players with limited visibility. With the remaining 21 owned mostly by South African and British, often white capitalists, that humongous amount of profit money leaves Uganda every year. Profit expropriation is easy in Uganda with the 2020 estimates showing that USH528 billion (about, $144m) left the country. This is 72 per cent of banking, net-after-tax profits that live the country annually.

Picture this: a story published by The Economist in 2020 – with closer focus on Uganda – noted that “Africa’s banks are the most profitable in the world while also being the least effective.” With interest rates ranging between 12-30%, these banks, The Economist noted, make over 17% returns on equity for shareholders. So, what type of businesspersons borrow, thrive and pay off these loans – in an economy as small as $36 billion?

In truth, what The Economist did not say was that these inefficient banks were actually, in many ways, a bunch of thieves, disguised as bankers. The trick is, the lender lends while fully aware that you’ll not make any success with the borrowed monies, instead, the bank will keep you in a cycle of debt while they take all of your labours and any profits in the interests. But most importantly, they are looking at your collateral, which they will also take. Because no one borrows money at that interest rate, invests it and repays their loans back—and also makes profit to thrive as a business. Only thieves or friends of government – not paying taxes or working on government tenders – can actually make a profit on such exorbitant interest rates. Sadly, these bankers are not embarrassed to reproduce colonialist stereotypes as justification for the interest rates. Citing the World Bank, The Economist reported that, “Interest rates also price in risk. Assessing borrowers is hard when they often lack credit histories. Chasing up bad loans is a struggle.” Why do honest borrowers incur costs for unfounded colonialist mistrust that bankers have about them? Can you imagine even in the year of the pandemic – where there was literally no economic activity – these banks together collected USH874 billion (about $239m), which meant their net-after-tax increased by 6.9%! How did they make this money? Through a more technocratized form of exploitation, where, with lengthy labyrinth of contracts and ideologies, the guilt of exploitation is sadly passed onto the exploited as s/he hands over their land, property, sweat and entire livelihood chastening themselves for their bad luck and poor business acumen.

The Kenyan central bank tried resisting this nonsense. In 2020, The Economist reported, Kenya tried capping commercial-loan rates at four percentage points, which was above the central bank’s policy rate. But “the move backfired. Bankers slashed credit to small businesses, reasoning that the rewards of lending no longer matched the risks.” But the exorbitant interest rates actually keep many small businesses away from even approaching these banks in the first place. To appreciate the deep-seated racism and deceptiveness of these high interest explanations, you need to know that in Uganda, for example, the present banks have worked tirelessly to make sure than no native bank opens and thrives.

In 2018, the Auditor General of the government of Uganda, in a confidential report to parliament noted that the central bank of Uganda had in the past three decades closed and sold assets of seven banks – all of them locally owned – with neither guidelines nor minutes: these banks include Teefe Bank (closed, 1993), International Credit Bank Ltd (closed, 1998), Greenland Bank (closed, 1999), The Co-operative Bank (closed, 1999), National Bank of Commerce (closed, 2012), Global Trust Bank (closed 2014) and Crane Bank Ltd (2016). And here is the kicker: Nile Rivers Acquisition, an offshore company based in Mauritius bought assets of five of the closed banks at 93 per cent discount using the British law. Never mind that these assets, mortgages and loans were based on Ugandan soil, and there was no indication whatsoever that the Ugandan laws could not handle the said transactions. One would then ask: what enraged Bank of Uganda to close these banks for sport? Why did locally owned commercial banks become criminalised to the point of being closed without due procedure?

The answers to these questions cannot be reduced to individuals at the Bank of Uganda or the government of President Museveni (although these persons are responsible to a degree especially for their comprador character). But the colonialism of structural adjustment, which coerced African political leaders into selling government assets to foreign capitalists—because these recently decolonised countries had no local capitalists—offshoring them and hiding their profits from public scrutiny, before moving this stolen wealth to the bustle of London and Paris. Indeed, if colonialism was about syphoning Africa’s resources, this has continued uninterrupted, as former colonisers learned exploiting without direct administration!

Creaming Africa’s Coffee

Uganda ranks as one of the world’s leading producers of coffee producing over 5 million bags [each of 60kgs] of beans in the year 2019. Coffee remains a major foreign exchange earner in Uganda bringing USH1.8 trillion, that is, $494m in the financial year 2019-2020. This made it Uganda’s number one forex earner. But while these figures look awesome, the money, despite being counted in Uganda, does not end in the hands of Ugandans farmers and businessmen. But rather traders and big conglomerates in the UK, Switzerland and Germany among others. The Ugandan, Ethiopian, Kenyan coffee farmer remains as exploited as his grandparents during the colonial period. Political economists, Jörg Wiegratz (2016) and Karin Wedig (2019) have documented the quagmire in which the local farmers are trapped after structural Adjustment in the late 1980.

Using terms such as “fraud,” “cheating,” “theft,” “deception” as empirical tools, Wiegratz has showed the farmer as an endangered species cheated for sport by middlemen in the absence of powerful negotiating unit which were once provided by cooperatives. With majority coffee farmers being rural and often uneducated small-scale folks, the cooperative often negotiated prices on their behalf. Dismantled by free markets, they are cheated with impunity. While Wedig disagrees that cooperatives were ever dismantled – focusing on recently created dilutions of cooperatives such as Gumutindo – she too, acknowledges the conditioning limits in which both farmers and the present cooperatives operate.

I came of age after SAPs (structural adjustment programmes) had just been imposed onto the continent, and cooperatives were dying out across Uganda. But I vividly recall coffee growers’ unions—a local extension of cooperatives—spread across the countryside helping local farmers thrive. The colonial government had, specifically, favoured Indian monopolists, and had worked so hard to make sure farmers remained disunited and lacked a single bargaining voice. This barrier had been successfully dismantled with the enactment of the Coffee Industry Ordinance in 1952. This allowed Native cooperatives to thrive having been denied operational licenses since 1908 which saw many natives die fighting to cooperate. Local Growers’ Unions had village offices, big storage facilities, and cemented yards where farmers collectively dried their coffee beans. Small scale farmers using mostly family labour would harvest their coffee, and use a bicycle or carry it on their heads to the nearest grower’s union yards and stores. The prices had been fixed for the benefit of the farmer. Since Uganda Coffee Marketing Board (UCMB) had negotiated the price for the beans, there were no middlemen to cheat the farmers, and prices never depended on seasons. If they did, the UCMB would pass the message down the chain.

Over and above negotiating good prices, the cooperatives and growers’ unions ensured that farmers received additional services, including farm equipment, training, seedlings and veterinary support. During bad weather, storage facilities were offered. Lorries branded, “FOR EXPORT” or “COOPERATIVES” often traversed villages collecting farmer’s produce. The Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB) offered big and small loans to farmers—alongside grower’s unions—to help them meet their immediate needs including sustaining their families and paying school fees, medical bills. Can you imagine UCB was giving farmers up to 90 per cent of capital costs to cooperatives to buy ginneries of their own? The 1950s-1980s were good times before structural adjustment took hold. Together, the farmers were enabled with a voice to demand representation at the national stage. Then structural adjustment came and crushed this down.

Presently, with the dismantling of nationally supported and bottom-up cooperatives, coffee farmers do not have any locally-invested voice on the international market, as UCMB did. Prices are determined by the so-called market forces of “demand and supply”—and all their fetishized violence. When the books say $490m were earned in a particular year, over 60 per cent of that money ends in the pocket of local barons and British and Indian middle-men. These middle-men have also set up shops and farms in Uganda and are, sadly, part of the local count. African Business reported that the biggest players include, “Kyagalanyi Coffee…which later became Volcafe group, the coffee division of ED&F Man, a commodities trader headquartered in London. Other big players include a subsidiary of Sucafina, a Swiss trading firm, and Olam, a commodities giant from Singapore.” Others include Neumann Gruppe with farms and large tracts of land in Mubende district in the central region, and Twin Trading, which is a UK coffee trading company. These use their local offices to earn money—audited as earned by Ugandans—but quickly returned to Europe – just as colonialism did.

But there is more: if Ugandan coffee ever fetched $490m into the Ugandan economy—which ends in UK and German companies with local offices in Uganda—the same beans brought $3.4billion into the Swiss or Germany economy. In a ground-breaking essay, Angers Elsby showed us how a bag coffee grown in Uganda, Ethiopia or Ivory Coast, Europe earns from the same bag seven times more. Elsby has written that, “between 2000 and 2010, Ethiopia, Uganda and Cote D’Ivoire received an average of $138, $71 and $68 per bag of coffee exported, respectively. Switzerland, Europe’s most profitable coffee re-exporter, earned over $700 per bag.” And this is not because African countries are unable to “add value” but rather that the politics of assessing value addition are inherently flawed to favour western multinationals. Elsby notes that policies implemented by European states during the 1980s and 1990s – accompanying structural adjustment – “dramatically restructured global commodity markets in their favour of Europe and artificially inflated the international competitiveness of their commodity trading and processing industries”. In truth, this so-called competitiveness, Elsby demonstrates, does not stand much on value-additional claims but rather “value capture” by Europe, a thing entirely dependent on political or state power. Not economics. Value capture, and claims of value addition is the new language of exploitation. But what more value would be there beyond making the bean available, beyond farming this bean?

From Leopold II to King Gertler

In his seminal book, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Adam Hochschild tells the story of an official, Edmund Dene Morel from shipping company Elder Dempster which was based in Liverpool. Morel championed the campaigns to end the late phases of slave trade under King Leopold II, something he followed up on by sheer intuition and instinct. It was about 1897, when, on one of his occasional supervisory trips at the Belgian port of Antwerp, Edmund Morel noticed something unsettling about the ships loading and unloading goods to and from the Congo:

At the docks of the big port of Antwerp he sees his company’s ships arriving filled to the hatch covers with valuable cargoes of rubber and ivory. But when they cast off their hawsers to steam back to the Congo, while military bands play on the pier and eager young men in uniform line the ships’ rails, what they carry is mostly army officers, firearms, and ammunition. There is no trade going on here. Little or nothing is being exchanged for the rubber and ivory. As Morel watches these riches streaming to Europe with almost no goods being sent to Africa to pay for them, he realizes that there can be only one explanation for their source: slave labor.

Indeed, there was slave trade, and Morel would go on to champion a major human rights movement against King Leopold II in the years that followed. Among the other activists that Morel inspired was the well-known satirist and novelist Mark Twain. In one of his epistles, Mark Twain noted that when he participated in the anti-slave movement that Morel had inspired, “in the Congo, a practice [Slave trade] had taken eight to ten million lives.” Reading this figure, Hochschild was startled: He noted:

Statistics about mass murder are often hard to prove. But if this number turned out to be even half as high… the Congo would have been one of the major killing grounds of modern times. Why were these deaths not mentioned in the standard litany of our century’s horrors?

There are three things I want to highlight from this section of the story of King Leopold II and his crimes in Congo. The first is that if he ever returned anything to the Congo for the rubber and ivory he pillaged, it was weapons and soldiers. Not more goods. Secondly, his actions directly led to millions of deaths as Mark Twain noted. If they were not directly killed and maimed as punishment for not fulfilling the quotas of wild rubber demanded, they died from the conditions that the Leopold enterprise put in place. Conservative estimates have put the numbers at 10 million people. The third point, and perhaps most important for this essay, is that the template that Leopold used has never been thrown away. It has simply been revised over the successive years, to become more disguised but it remains as lethal as before. To make that case more succinctly, I will tell the story of Leopold’s later replacement: King Dan Gertler.

Considered the richest or one of the richest men in Israel, Dan Gertler’s empire has been built off Congolese natural resources and like Leopold, leaving many dead bodies in his wake. With monopolistic rights over almost all the mining sites in the Democratic Republic Congo, Gertler is the absolute embodiment of the colonialism of the so-called free-markets – that were ushered in by structural adjustment. Gertler enjoys near-monopoly rights in Congo’s diamond, copper, cobalt and gold trade, which he attained only dubiously. Recently, western media was awash with his corruption scandals, in which he allegedly gave out $100m of bribes to acquire this monopoly status. Interestingly, the script involves direct voices and footprints of the American presidents from George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and now Joseph Biden. Sadly, not narrativized as colonialism, but in the beautiful language as a contention over a “trading licence.” The state of Israel appears only on the side-lines.

But why would the story of a single businessman – interacting in a free market economy – directly implicate presidents and states? Because there are no businessmen of this size without the violence of their states. These license scandals notwithstanding, in 2020, Bloomberg reported that Gertler would be getting richer over his Congolese possessions after entering trade agreements with Tesla’s Elon Musk.

Having reached the DRC in 1997, the BBC reported, Gertler’s breakthrough came during the 2000 civil war in DR Congo which “risked ending Kabila’s reign as suddenly as it had begun.” Arguably with the support of the Israel government, “Gertler promised millions of dollars and, according to a United Nations report, access to arms.” Emphasis added. In the spirit of states propping their capitalist exploiters of the African wild—disguised as individuals on free trade projects—this access to arms would only be guaranteed by his state. Gertler delivered on his promise of arms according to a UN report cited in the New York Times. In return, Gertler “received a monopoly on DR Congo’s substantial diamond exports,” and “diamonds would be exchanged for money, weapons and military training.”

The mention of military training should signal us to the ways in which state-driven, war-driven capitalism reproduces itself: works with the state. No wonder, when Laurent Kabila was assassinated in 2001, Gertler had “gained the trust of the younger Kabila” who went on to become president, and with him, Gertler was guaranteed more success. Just 47 years of age, Gertler is believed to the richest man in Israel with major investments across Tel-Aviv – not Kinshasa. King Leopold built Belgium through his proceeds from Kongo – not Kongo.

The BBC story continues that with bribes estimated to be over $100m, “Companies controlled by Mr Gertler started sweeping up licences for mineral deposits all over the country.” Not to eat alone, Gertler helped other capitalist exploiters “like Swiss commodities trader Glencore and New York hedge fund company Och-Ziff Capital Management.” These acquired control over mining sites, and the pillage continued. It is estimated that DR Congo has lost $1.36bn in these shady deals. Presently, there are Blue Helmets in DR Congo, and continued violence in different parts of the country directly connected to the ways in which minerals are mined in the region. The difference here is that while King Leopold II would be directly called out, under Gertler’s regime, it is individual Congolese held responsible for killing each other. Gertler is deftly hidden.

For those unfamiliar with the new wave of colonialist-capitalist control, it is easy to put the two Kabila presidencies on the spot for being corrupt and allowing foreign pillage. It is also easy to seek to hold Gertler as individually accountable. This would be barely scratching the surface. These men are beneficiaries and servants of a ‘regime of truth’ that was set in motion by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Under the language of free market economies, former and new colonisers work in the background—outsourcing individual businessmen whom they can discard once things turn sour. In addition to quietly manipulating and supporting conflicts, they return as defenders of human rights, and seek to prosecute perpetrators – to do all of this they have conscripted an army of journalists and scholars, returned as donors and aid-givers, and turned the political class into compradors accessing entire economies through simple, technocratized routes (development, aid, human rights, democracy, etc.)

In the Congo, the Gertler pillage is technocratized and no one ever questions how a white foreigner owns monopoly rights over natural resources in a war-ridden country. Instead, the situation is captured and debated in technicalities and legalese of courts judgments, licenses or sanctions, and does not involve dismantling this outrightly colonial empire.

Structural Adjustment as Colonial Adjustment

In a recently published book, Less is More: How Degrowth will Save the World, Jason Hickel tells the story of Structural Adjustment in rivetingly precise details: after independence in the 1950s and 1960s, Hickel writes, newly independent governments rolled out progressive policies to rebuild their economies. They used taxes and subsidies “to protect their domestic industries, improve labour standards and raising workers’ wages. They also invested in public health and education.” Hickel continues that “all of this was meant to reverse the extractive policies of colonialism and improve human welfare – and it was working.” The effect of this was that “average incomes in the global South grew at 3.2% per year in the 1960s and 1970s” which in effect, improved the quality of life in these countries. As this happened, former colonisers were not pleased at all. These breakthroughs in formerly colonised places had meant, Hickel notes, “losing access to cheap labour, raw materials and captive markets that they had enjoyed under colonialism.” They had to intervene. For about 25 years, they schemed and planned on how to reverse the tide. Using their control over the World Bank and the IMF, they imposed structural adjustment programmes across Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia. Forcefully, SAPs “liberalised the economies of the global South, tearing down protective tariffs and capital controls, cutting wages and environmental laws, slashing social spending and privatising public goods – all to break open profitable new frontiers for foreign capital and restore access to cheap labour and resources,” Hickel concludes.

To make the argument that parastatals and cooperatives – mining companies, transport systems, farmer’s support systems, value addition chains, hotels, etcetera – were not working, Wiegratz (2016) has noted that World Bank (i.e. it’s advisors/experts) had to forge evidence: according to a key source from inside the state machinery in Uganda, “cooperatives were forced to sell their business to the private sectors” through manufactured bank statements that declared them indebted and unsustainable: “accountants were sent into cooperatives to check their books… made sure the cooperatives were on a loss on paper: cooperatives were told, you have to sell to cancel your debt [that was created on paper in the first place]. Also, cooperatives were not regarded credit worthy by respective banks” (2016: 99). It did not matter that almost all African economists and ministers of finances had argued that African economies were too small to be left on their own (i.e., without protective barriers, state subsidies, trade deals politics etc.). There were no businessmen rich enough to buy, take loans (at +20 per cent interest), and run entire railway lines or hotel chains. We had just emerged from colonialism. It meant – with global market fictions – that, rich, mostly white men from Europe and North America, propped by their governments would come and buy the very things they had once taken by force and looted.

In truth, after decades of independence, the loot continues – but in a more technocratized form and expert driven and less violent than before. This is the story of Dan Gertler, ED&F Man London, Sucafina, Switzerland, Olam Group, Singapore, Neumann Gruppe, from Germany and Twin Trading from the UK.

Conclusion: scramble without partition

If the 1885 Berlin Conference meant that Europe would grind Africa down after sharing it amongst themselves—which also often meant fighting over each other’s share—the 1980s Structural Adjustment project meant that the lions had finally agreed to eat their prey without fighting over it. There was no reason to split it into small units of influence anymore. They could eat all at once, and everybody was welcome to the dining table, exclusively designed, meticulously calculated, legally and forcefully protected for dinners in Europe and North America.

Hickel has written that in Europe and North America, “…fully half of the total materials they consume are extracted from poorer countries and generally under unequal and exploitative conditions. The coltan in your smartphones comes from mines in the Congo. The lithium in your electric car batteries comes from the mountains of Bolivia. The cotton in your bedsheets comes from plantations in Egypt… the vast majority of materials consumed in the south ultimately originate from the South itself even if they are recycled through multinational value chains” (2020: 112). How does one ensure that these supplies keep coming? Beyond the legalese of SAPs, Sierra Leonian-German activist, Mallence Bart-Williams has added that this also involves “systematically destabilising the wealthiest African nations and their systems, and all that backed by huge PR campaigns” while at the same feigning endless benevolence to the Africans through aid—under the flashing lights of cameras—but stealing much more under the shadows.

One might say, that one of the most binding lessons of the Second World War, and the Cold War, was the uselessness of fighting over helpless prey – or prey that can easily be sedated or manipulated into subservience. The lions realised there was no need for outright violence over the prey. This eating-together approach is more tactical, subtle, disguised, and even welcome among sections of the prey, as it does not arouse any animosity from the prey itself. In truth, it is this subtlety, technocratization, legalese, conscription of local politicians/elites that Africans publics remain blinded from the colonial continuities despite the enormity of scale.

Yusuf Serunkuma is a columnist in Uganda’s newspapers, scholar and a playwright. In 2014, Fountain Publishers published his first play, The Snake Farmers which was received with critical acclaim in Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda. He is also a scholar and researcher who teaches political economy and history.

Yusuf Serunkuma and Eria Serwajja’s edited book, Before the First Drop: Oil, capitalists and the wretcheds of western Uganda has just been published by Editor House Facility (EHF), Kampala and is available here, and at the Uganda Museum bookstore.

Featured Photograph: Drawing of King Leopold II and other powers at the Berlin Conference 1884. The French sub-heading reads, ‘When will the people wake up?’ (François Maréchal, 20 December 1884).

Revolutionaries killed in Sudan

ROAPE

January 20, 2022

Following the murder of revolutionaries this week, Sudan’s resistance committees called for civil disobedience and a general strike. Sara Abbas writes about the massacre of revolutionaries on 17 January. We also include the joint statement of the Khartoum State Resistance Committees Coordination.

By Sara Abbas

This week has been incredibly painful for Sudan. On Monday seven revolutionaries were killed in the protests, and many other protestors are badly injured and are fighting for their lives. Since the coup on 25 October 2021, 71 revolutionaries have been killed. The photo above is of five of the young revolutionaries killed on 17 January.

The military is ramping up the violence, and it is only going to get worse. Hospitals in Khartoum have been getting attacked for weeks now, medics are regularly beaten, tear gas deployed inside the premises, and injured protestors arrested (as in kidnapped from their beds). A massive hike in electricity prices recently shows the regime has a cash problem. The recent killing of a police officer was blamed on a young revolutionary, who has been arrested. It’s clear to most Sudanese that the killing was carried out by elements of the regime to justify the barbaric use of violence, including the use of anti-aircraft weapons, against human bodies, sound bombs, live ammunition, and the deliberate firing of tear gas canisters at the heads and faces of protestors (on Monday this week all the deaths were by bullets but a lot of deaths in recent weeks have been due to trauma from the impact of gas canisters to the head). Resistance committee members in the last week have faced a more aggressive than usual campaign of arrests.

In response to the bloody day, and the escalating repression, the revolutionary forces on Monday announced two days of mass civil disobedience, which started on Tuesday 18 January in preparation for a general strike. Doctors’ unions also announced full withdrawal for three days (18-19-20 January) from all military and security owned hospitals, and a strike of three days from “cold” non-urgent cases in all hospitals.

Please see the link to the original Arabic text here.

Khartoum State Resistance Committees Coordination joint statement (17 January 2022)

We cannot retreat, the price of this journey was and still is our lifetimes, and know, revolutionaries of the world, that we are still steadfast, and we are still victorious, and we are still confident that we will win our battle and the revolution against the rotten bloody regime.

Men and women revolutionaries, Our Rebel People:

A new massacre has been added to the massacres of the military coup d’état against the Sudanese people. Until now, we have lost seven revolutionaries [today] and we consider them martyrs who live among us. Until this moment, we are still counting our wounded; there are many serious injuries with live bullets and tear gas canisters aimed at the faces of the revolutionaries. Daily, the coup council and its militia allies reveal to the world and to the Sudanese who wrongly imagine some good will come out of this, that the council are just gangs that call themselves a state. They steal our resources to kill us, they arm their soldiers at the expense of bread, health, and education in order to spread bullets in the streets. This is not our army, they are the enemies of the Sudanese, and it is necessary to resist them until we win, or they rule an empty country after they have killed us all. This is our covenant with the martyrs.

We call on all the revolutionaries to completely close Khartoum and erect barricades everywhere. Our barricades terrify them and remind them that we are the strongest and largest army in this country. We call on all professionals, employees and workers everywhere to establish their committees in the workplace, and to coordinate well between those committees and the resistance committees in preparation for the general strike and the implementation of civil disobedience on 18-19 January.

We call on the revolutionaries in all the neighborhoods of the country to prepare for a long battle in which we defeat the militias, based on our good preparation of our organization, on the continuation of the announced [civil disobedience] schedules, and on the arrangement of ad-hoc schedules according to what the women and men revolutionaries see [happening] in their neighborhoods.

We will publish our next steps in response to 17 January massacre. This massacre will not go unnoticed. We are the generation that was destined to write the end of the military coups, and we will not postpone this battle. The action is what you see and not what you hear.

Development is capitalist development – violent, coercive and brutal

ROAPE

January 19, 2022

Graham Harrison argues that all development is capitalist development. Based on his recent book, Developmentalism, he argues that development is not only risky and likely to fail but also very unpleasant. Contemporary notions of development see it is as a stable, incremental, and positive process but this is a fantasy in which capitalist development is reimagined as a planned, inclusive, and socially just modernisation.

By Graham Harrison

My book Developmentalism starts with speculation. It imagines Tanzania in 2090 as a middle-income country. Average incomes are an adjusted $12,000; wage labour has expanded and become more regulated; the fiscal effort of the state has improved; large-scale infrastructural investments have increased and generated a more densely connected national market; production has diversified; rates of saving have increased; technological innovations have taken place and been embedded in local production chains.

One might respond to this futurology by arguing that it is a fantasy that ignores well-known diagnostics of Tanzania’s—and more generally Africa’s—development problems and failures. The dependency-minded thinker might refute the optimistic 2090 prospective by arguing that Tanzania is locked into an exploitative global capitalism that makes this kind of transformation impossible. The outcome: Tanzania—and again by extrapolation many other African countries as well—cannot develop because of some combination of its own properties and its location in a global economy.

The book argues that these responses are misguided. There is nothing in Tanzania’s current condition that looks exceptional or categorically different to any other country. There is no need to foreclose the possibility that Tanzania will be a middle-income country in 2090. Yes: Tanzania is unique; it has its own troubled historical and geographical inheritance; and it faces very significant challenges. But, so does everywhere else.

Capitalist development

One of the most powerful bourgeois ideological sleights of hand has been the naming of capitalist development as simply development. ‘Development’ discursively serves to naturalise what is a profoundly disruptive and political transformation, a transformation based in an imposed reallocation of property and wealth that relies on an invigorated and restless putting to work of people, requiring sustained and muscular state action. A transformation, above all, that is extremely risky and unlikely to succeed.

Development is capitalist development. This means not only that it is very risky and likely to fail but also that it is very unpleasant. The bourgeois coinage of development is that it is stable, incremental, and positive sum. In a word: liberal. Liberal development strategies—operationalised through a massive institutionalisation of international aid from the late 1950s—is in essence a theatre of global fantasy, a fantasy in which capitalist development is reimagined as a planned, inclusive, and socially just modernisation. The ideological erasure of enclosure, corporal punishment in law, forced labour, slavery, genocidal frontier expansion, theft and fraud, and war from the concrete manifestations of capitalist development has been sustained through the rolling out of a multi-trillion-dollar aid industry underpinned by an international elite institutionalism.

The fact is that capitalist development is fundamentally Hobbesian: nasty and brutish; destructive of existing community and extremely exploitative. It is in the DNA of capital’s ascendance that it remakes societies for its own purpose and the foundation of that purpose is not ‘making money’ or ‘earning income’ (the liberal vocabulary) but maximising profit, and extracting surplus labour: again and again, maximally and forever.

This brings me to two cardinal points that address our focus back to Tanzania or many other African countries. Firstly, that capitalist development requires the emergence of strong, purposeful, and well-resourced capitals. Secondly, that the conditions under which these emerge are, vitally, politically secured. Let me comment briefly on each.

In relation to the first point, we should note that much of the more progressive mainstream development discourse revolves around capabilities, microfinance, poverty reduction strategies, participatory development, empowerment, and resilience. All of these aid-driven devices are variations on a theme which the book describes as strategies to allow mass populations to ‘enjoy poverty’. That is, to live in an enduring and untransformed condition of material scarcity in meagre relative comfort. This discourse is at heart—and despite the often pleasing imagery it purveys—neoliberal. The story goes something like this: the enhanced capabilities of an individual lead them to secure a loan that allows them to earn a little more money that brings them to purchase a second-hand motorbike, a solar panel, a corrugated roof or a three-month class at a night school to learn accounting methods. Often told in vignette, these narratives bear slender connection to the major engines of poverty reduction which reside in those zones of capitalist industrialisation in northeast Asia and elsewhere in which tens of millions of people have experienced increases in income. All of the evidence indicates that capitalist industrialisation generates poverty reduction not through individual or community vignettes but through the structural changes wrought by capitalist industrialisation.

So, capitalist development is nasty, brutish, and impoverishing and also the world’s most tenacious engine of poverty reduction. It might seem that there is a contradiction here, but it is only apparent, not substantive. Capitalist development is the rolling out of what Anwar Shaikh calls turbulent trends: a collision of disorders set in unstable social relations that in their own dynamics generate the conditions of possibility for a generalised improvement in mass material well-being. Conditions of possibility, no more than this. There is no modernisation-style certainty of mass consumption; there is, paceThe Economist, no inexorable rise of a global middle class. But, in a way that is historically unprecedented, capitalism presents the possibility that a level and breadth of shared wealth can be achieved. This possibility depends on levels of economic growth and productivity and the strength of social mobilisation to makes claims on the commonwealth that capitalism generates and alienates.

The second point indicates what is, intellectually, a considerable lacuna in studies of capitalist development: its normative foundations. The major attraction of liberal visions of (capitalist) development resides in its ability to suture over the violence. The liberal vision is, to twist Rousseau, all freedom, and no force. This is a seductive fiction. It evades what is the most important political question facing any state that aspires to achieve capitalist development: how to engineer the social transformation within which capital can ascend into a dominant position within a national political economy. But this question is unavoidable. The book goes through variants of an answer to this question: England, America, Japan, Taiwan, Israel, China. All different; all the same. All extreme, not exceptional. All coercive, all risky. Only enjoying success after generations of uncertainty, chaos, and violence, and even then, success is not permanent. Developmentalism argues that, in radically different geographical and historical circumstances, all of these states only succeeded in forging capitalist transformation when this transformation was seen as inextricably integrated into a major-order or existential threat to sovereignty. Forging a nation, securing a border, or consolidating a besieged elite’s rule… in these circumstances in which states are seen as inextricably part of a project to promote the ascendance of capital one can identify the emergence of ideologies where capitalist development is not desirable but necessary. This ideological family is developmentalism.

So, the core question for African states that wish to pursue capitalist development is political-strategic. It is not about ‘getting the institutions right’ or good governance. It is broader and more ambitious than that and set in a temporality that is generational, not what economists call medium-term. It requires authoritarian state action—as it did in almost all other cases.

The book’s argument here is unlikeable: that there is no implicit commensurability between capitalist development and rights. If a ruling elite wishes to promote capitalist development it will only succeed if it deploys top-down and coercive state action—through law, programmes of social engineering, and also police action—to reallocate property, discipline workforces, secure exploitation, and push money into ascending capitals. One of the most unhelpful conflations in development studies in Amartya Sen’s development as freedom. To see development as an expanding freedom is to define away the central feature of capitalist development.

This is, of course, normatively very troubling. Does this perspective serve as an apology for forced resettlement, the detention of labour leaders, the top-down enclosure of land and resources for capital? No, it does not. There are three co-ordinates here.

In the first place, a theoretical orientation towards political realism. Realism is not amoral—this is a caricature that cannot really be found centrally in major Realist texts. Realism simply argues that normative politics is contextual: the modes of address to justice and right are not ideally-derived but produced in specific circumstances. So: the normativity of development does not disappear, it simply relocates into the processes of struggle themselves. This orientation leads to a better awareness of the political norms and normative contestation that accompany capitalist development. This is because the focus on rights is enriched through a recognition that socially-embedded political normativity is only in part about rights. It is also about a stability that allows people to see a better future, a sense of value in community and/or nationhood, religious cosmologies, economic growth, and other situated values which can only be understood through actual research. From a Realist point of view, these other value-clusters enjoy equal status with equally contextualised manifestations of rights norms and their significance and value are empirical matters. As a result, normative investigations from a Realist perspective do not insist on an a priori and idealised derivation from universal and absolute rights. And, they are all the richer for that.

Secondly, analytically, the book insists that there must be a separation of rights and development. They are not commensurable. They are antagonistic, or perhaps in the midst of capitalist transformation, highly strained: constantly requiring non-ideal play-offs. Capitalist development requires active deception from states; force strategically deployed; heavy ideological underlabour; secrecy and cronyism. In other words: politics… politics in the sense of making least-worst decisions in the midst of incomplete information and risk. Human rights scholars and activists work within a very well-specified moral universe that is founded on a meta-norm of justice. But this is not the province of the development scholar.

Thirdly, the political agencies that drive justice claims and indeed underpin the sustained demands for generalised material improvement emerge from concrete situations, not idealised norms. Consequently, we need to situate them in the very turbulence of capitalist transformation itself. As political economies change, so do the possibilities for political mobilisation. Normative agency itself develops within organisation, mobilisation, debate, and public action. This is, historically, a story of the changing organisation of labourers, but also of middle-class organisations, and mobilisations that intersect across poverty, race, gender, and other identities. None of these mobilisations exist because they are intrinsically or ideally right; they exist because they are produced within the transformations themselves.

In summary, the normativity of capitalist development is a non-ideal pluralised normativity that is composed within transition itself. It does not accept rights as its master norm because to do so would be to relinquish the necessary acceptance that capitalist development is not rights compatible.

All of which takes us to Rwanda, the African country that ends the case studies in the book. The Rwandan government is clearly not a ‘rights state’. What kind of a state it is, is still intensely contested. Rwanda does illustrate what a contemporary developmentalism might look like. Its future is very uncertain, but the government constantly and heavily claims otherwise, and portrays the government’s strategy as one of national revitalisation and esteem. It has used covert and extra-legal devices to allocate property and wealth in ways that have, arguably and in some instances, been based in securing expanded circuits of accumulation rather than simply graft. It has achieved a high degree of re-engineering of its rural areas through diktats on habitation, cropping, water usage, the formation of co-operatives, agrarian-ecological zoning, village governance, and performance management. It has invested in the infrastructure of an upgraded service economy: IT, hospitality, air freight, and national highways. It has done all of this whilst consistently reiterating a discourse of national economic transformation. The Rwandan government, in the midst of its authoritarianism and security obsessions, pins its legitimacy on its ability to generate development through an ascendance of capital. Its chances of success are slender; its record on human rights is poor; the challenges it faces are major-order or even existential. In short, it is, for now, developing.

Graham Harrison’s book Developmentalism: The Normative and Transformative within Capitalism is published by Oxford University Press.

Graham Harrison teaches political economy at the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University and is on the editorial board of ROAPE.

Featured Photograph: Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa in 2013 (posted by DFID – UK Department for International Development – as ‘Golden Opportunities for Development‘ by Simon Davis).

Africa-China Relations: South-South cooperation or a new imperialism?

ROAPE

January 13, 2022

The relationship between Africa and China hinges on the question of cooperation and development. Kristin Plys, Amenophis Lô and Abdulhamid Mohamed ask if we should celebrate this relationship as the South-South development that the Global South dreamed of in the mid-20th century, or are contemporary Africa-China relations a new imperialist dynamic?

By Kristin Plys, Amenophis Lô and Abdulhamid Mohamed

Author and activist, Vijay Prashad elucidates in The Darker Nations, the ‘Third World’ is not a place, but a political project. In the mid-twentieth century, at the height of US hegemony, the Global South imagined political, economic, and social emancipation. One important incarnation of this was the Bandung Conference in 1955 where representatives of 29 newly independent Asian and African states met to promote what is now termed, South-South cooperation, in other words, the idea that African and Asian states could come together for economic and cultural cooperation and together oppose colonialism and imperialism.

Bandung was eventually institutionalized in the Non-Aligned movement, a forum that opposed US and Soviet intervention in the Global South. Non-alignment was not without its critics, however. Muammar Qaddafi of the non-aligned movement said, “The world is made up of two camps: the liberation camp and the imperialist one. There is no place for those who are non-aligned. We are not neutral and totally aligned against the aggressor… Long live the liberated. Down with imperialism.” As he saw it, the Global South was not comprised of states who were beholden to US imperialism, states who were beholden to Soviet imperialism and states that opposed either influence. For Qaddafi, there were only those states who are against imperialism and for liberation and those states that are imperialist.

Our understandings of contemporary imperialism, however, are shaped by the lived experiences of US hegemony and the particular way in which it supplanted European colonial rule with new dependent relationships of exploitation of the same character but through new forms of politico-economic relationships between the United States and the Global South. But with the crisis of US hegemony starting in the 1970s, and now with a more pronounced global crisis since 2008, of, perhaps, the capitalist world-system itself, imperialism as we know it will also necessarily change. Forms of power and hierarchy need to be remade so that they can continue as they lose moral authority.

The United States has lost its moral authority for global rule providing openings for a new hegemonic power to emerge and lead the world-economy in overcoming the current crisis. For example, in the transition from British hegemony in the 19th century to US hegemony in the 20th, imperialism persisted, but the form it took changed. Formal colonialism lost its moral authority leading to the important development of flag independence across much of the Global South. But in the absence of formal political rule through colonialism, the United States innovated new articulations of imperialism during the Cold War and beyond.

Any new hegemon, as part of its rule, must convince the rest of the world that it is acting in the best interests of the inter-state system. Part of the establishment of that consent to rule entails forming dependent relationships with the Global South that appear to be in the best interests of the Global South. With the rise of a new world-hegemon, imperialism must necessarily be remade to look like aid, cooperation, and solidarity. This helps the rising hegemon establish a global moral authority as it appears to be acting in the moral interests of the entire world economy. In these phases of world-history where a new hegemon is on the rise, it is critically important that we distinguish true South-South cooperation that has the potential for national liberation from a new incarnation of imperialism in its guise.

Authoritarianism and exploitation

When we examine this distinction between South-South cooperation and contemporary imperialism on the ground, it is essential to examine the local political conditions that create an imbalance of power. Therefore, we must better understand the contemporary dynamics of African sovereignty.

While the 21st century began with revolutions to oust decades of postcolonial authoritarian rule in Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan, and elsewhere, these efforts were short lived. Counter-revolutionary forces, particularly those led by right-wing nationalists and conservative religious leaders too often became the eventual beneficiaries of toppled authoritarian regimes. In recent years we have witnessed more counter-revolutions and coups across the continent, in Chad, for example. States succumbing to authoritarianism have become more prevalent and we seldom observe revolutions that have been successful at installing long lasting democratic states committed to promoting the interests of African people.

In this fraught context of authoritarian rule across the continent, it has been easier for imperialists to usurp African sovereignty. Just as European and North American states have found authoritarian rule in Africa more amenable to their politico-economic interests so too has the Chinese Communist Party. In Zambia, copper mining accounts for 65% of the country’s export earnings. Most of the mines are owned by the Chinese state, though a few are mining companies with headquarters in Canada. Foreign mining companies have been able to create pockets of Chinese state sovereignty within Zambia where labour laws are notoriously lax, wages low, accidents and deaths of workers, prevalent. When workers have combined and protested these conditions, they have been met with violence, not from the Zambian state, but from Chinese management who has met workers’ demands by deploying violence without consequence. In 2010, a manager at the Collum Mine shot and killed 13 workers who organised against poor safety standards.

The Lamu Project to build a deep-water port connecting East Africa to Asian export markets is another example of loss of sovereignty. Initially, the Lamu port was to be funded jointly by the Kenyan, Ethiopian and South Sudanese states but because of funding issues and occasional attacks on port construction by Al-Shabaab, Kenyan Defense Forces sought loans from China which were supported through the ‘Maritime Silk Road’ programme, a policy to not only aid China in gaining further access to African resources and markets but also enable the Peoples Liberation Army Navy to establish a counter-terrorism base in Northern Kenya. Ports are crucial to African development as 90% of East African exporters depend on seaports to remain viable, but if Kenya defaults on the debt they have incurred, which seems likely, the Lamu port will soon become yet another space of Chinese state sovereignty in sub-Saharan Africa.

Land grabbing through creating pockets of Chinese state sovereignty and through control of strategic assets has helped China obtain cheap natural resources needed for industrial production, while railroads, other infrastructure, along with access to seaports allows for the extraction of these resources from Africa. Regime change has not been successful in disrupting this dynamic because the movements for regime change have mostly focused on ousting political leaders, but as a result of European and North American imperialism and also through the support of the domestic bourgeoisie, sovereignty in most African states rests with the military. Recent revolutions have done little to disrupt that dynamic or to create states that will serve the interests of its people.

Return to a Pan-African internationalism

There is a difference between globalization done on the terms of more powerful states, and a horizontal internationalism based on solidarity. Africa-China relations in and of themselves could bring great benefit to both regions, but as long as there remains a power differential in African states’ individual dealings with China, it will remain a tie that will ultimately result in economic benefit for China and the exploitation of Africa. One possible solution could be to have negotiations around Chinese development projects in African states done as a regional bloc through a Pan-African union rather than country-by-country.

But beyond this, what we, as an internationalist left can do is decentre the role of the state in Africa-China relations. If civil society and leftist groups in both China and across the African continent could work together across borders it could put pressure on states to realise common social injustices in both China and various African contexts such as the importance of opposing authoritarian regimes that fail to serve the best interests of the people and promoting workers’ rights through a labour internationalism. We can also envision linkages between other Chinese and Pan-African civil society organizations around issues common to the African and Chinese contexts.

Frantz Fanon famously described the ‘Third World project’, as a rejection of the goal of ‘catching up’ to Europe and North America, and instead, saw as its primary goal to innovate a new way of thinking. Fanon believed in the creativity of revolutionary Pan-Africanism and the Global South, that new forms of politics could be envisioned and enacted that would provide solutions to the longstanding social problems.

Internationalism from below

There’s a tendency within the Global North left to see any political development that opposes Western dominance as something to celebrate. But in thinking through the complexity of contemporary Africa-China relations it is evident that we need to be more discerning about the dynamics of power involved in movements that may claim to be South-South cooperation and/or anti-Western. They may yet be an embodiment of the unequal power dynamics and politico-economic exploitation we stand firmly against.

Propaganda, both from the West, and from China, obscures the power dynamics at play on the ground in Sino-African relations. The ability of propaganda to muddy our understanding of the dynamics at play makes organizing around these issues particularly difficult and controversial. But we need to remember, as Pan-Africanists based in Canada or anywhere else for that matter, that just because something is anti-West doesn’t make it liberatory. We need to be thoughtful and discerning in how we think about power and history in our contemporary context.

The central issue facing us going forward with this conversation is how we can pay closer attention to the dynamics of power in politico-economic relations between states without falling into the Sinophobic tropes of most Western states, but also recognising that there is not an equal and symbiotic relationship between African states and Chinese developmentalism.

Perhaps the first step is, instead of celebrating the ties between an authoritarian Chinese state and non-democratic regimes across Africa, we should instead think creatively about what we can do to build more liberatory South-South cooperation between civil society and left movements in Africa and China. Through these common goals of fighting shared social struggles, a truly horizontal Afro-Asian solidarity can be envisioned and enacted.

The authors are members of GRILA-Toronto (Group for Research and Initiative for the Liberation of Africa).

Featured Photograph: Chinese and African labourers work at the construction site of the TAZARA railway in the 1970s, about 15,000 Chinese workers were sent to help build the railway, which linked Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to central Zambia (China Daily, March 26, 2013).

Black Lives Matter in the middle of the Atlantic

ROAPE

January 11, 2022

The Black Lives Matter movement will be recorded in history as one of the most explosive recent political events. Hundreds of thousands of people across the world have been on the streets, angry, radicalised and protesting to achieve change. Elizabeth Adofo writes how the movement has resonated in every part of the world and its reverberations were felt in Bermuda – a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic.

By Elizabeth Adofo

A year after it held its Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest in June 2020, Bermuda appears to be consumed by its relentless battle against new strains of the Coronavirus and its problems of rising unemployment. On the surface, it is hard to see any traces of that radical period of racial justice on the island. There is also a longstanding tradition shared amongst Bermudians of upholding a sense of political politeness and avoiding controversy, which partly explains the lack of discussions about racism within Bermuda. But when one delves in deeper it becomes clear that the BLM movement touched many souls, and people have begun to question and criticise this custom of not talking about racial inequality in hope of encouraging racial harmony.

Yet BLM left an impression on the island that goes beyond the few art murals that were put up throughout the island. It’s only when you engage in conversations can you get a real sense of how people want to continue the fight for racial inequality, especially amongst the youth of the island. The important question to ask then becomes why hasn’t there been a bigger change on the island since the protests? To answer that we must examine the protests that took place, which became the biggest Bermuda has seen in several decades and what they mean for Bermuda’s long history of racial injustice.

A brief history of race in Bermuda

Bermuda is located roughly 600 miles from the east coast of mainland North America and is home to approximately 65,000 people. It is one of seven British Overseas Territories officially becoming a British colony in 1707 after being claimed by European settlers as early as 1612. Today, the island is culturally diverse with a population consisting of 55% black Bermudians who can trace their lineage directly to Africa and the Caribbean, 33% white mainly of Portuguese heritage, and the rest are of other descent including Asians and indigenous Americans – who were previously bought as slaves from the Americas. It is widely accepted amongst many historians that the island does not have a native population as there is currently no record of the island being inhabited before it was discovered in the 17th century. This entails that black Bermudians are descendants’ slaves and indentured servants whom the British empire had bought from West Africa and, to a lesser extent, other colonies in New World. Bermuda was thus founded on racial inequality, slavery, exploitation at the hands of British imperialism.

Slave revolts were few as the 21-mile island held the smallest population of slaves compared to the other Caribbean colonies. Rebellions and uprising were crushed quickly, punished swiftly, and were largely unsuccessful. Slavery was the starting point upon which a tense history of race relations unfolded. Many Historians have largely ignored these racial divisions by depicting black and white people as living in harmony on the island throughout its history.

Quite the opposite is true, Bermuda has a long history of laws and policies that have ensured segregation amongst its black and white populations. For most of its 400 years history, the country has been subjected to segregation. After slavery was officially abolished in the British colonies, black Bermudians were forced to become dependents of their slave owners and continued to carry out work on their land, essentially slavery by another name.

This harsh exploitation continued but as Bermuda’s economy diversified black Bermudians managed to work their way out and find new crafts and trades. Yet, they lived in a segregated society where the black people were banned from employment in many sectors such as in the civil service and the post office, and many other administrative jobs. Only recently in the country’s history was segregation ended, in the summer of 1959 after 17 days of boycotts and demonstrations at movie theatres in protest over racially segregated seating practices.

Bermuda and race today

Currently, Bermuda holds the fourth-highest income per capita in the world with tourism and the financial industry being its two main sources of revenue. Despite the large amount of wealth that is opulently displayed on the island in mansions, superyachts, and designer label shops there is a huge racial wealth gap on the island. Bermuda very much has a racism problem.

Although racism in contemporary Bermuda has not yet produced the same scale of violence against black people as America, it is nonetheless real and omnipresent. White Bermudians and (non-Bermudians of the ex-pat community who make up a large proportion of the population) disproportionately earn higher incomes than black Bermudians. Most of their children will attend privately funded schools while most black students attend public schools. Statically these children will also more likely be university educated and have more access to the higher-paying business sectors jobs on the island.

Being a young black person in Bermuda will put you at a much greater risk of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration than your white counterparts. Between the years 2009 to 2011, 30,725 reported instances of stop and search were performed by the Bermuda police force. Almost exclusively these had been carried out on black Bermudians ranging in ages from 16-36. This ties in seamlessly to the prison system in which 97% of inmates are black Bermudian despite being just 55% of the population.

With an almost entirely black-employed police force and judicial system, Bermuda is a clear example of why policies, such as ‘more black faces in higher places’ do not help reduce racial profiling. It exposes our systems to what the police truly is: corrupt and unaccountable. These statics also paint an important picture of the current racial climate in Bermuda and why BLM was an important catalyst for addressing these issues for Bermuda.

At first, it seems that it would be easy for someone to become blind to these inequalities when living on an island that mirrors paradise with its clear blue seas and pink sand. Global issues appear as distant phenomena when viewed from Bermuda, which has just one local news channel and only three newspapers – two of which are workplace publications. Yet young, old, black and white sprang into action almost immediately following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and inspiration of the many protests taking part in the US. Bermuda in total had three large-scale protests in June 2020 with reports of one protest having 7000 people. These reported numbers meant that almost 11% of the entire population took part in the demonstrations making them the largest protest movement in the country’s history.

There was also an island-wide outrage and a petition with over 35,000 signatures against the appointment of Lee Rizzuto, – a wealthy heir and conspiracy theorist – as US Consul General of Bermuda by Donald Trump. The first lines of petitions summed up the feeling of many Bermudians:

Bermuda is a small 21 square mile rock in the middle of the Atlantic. Often, we watch the world, especially our closest neighbour America — 800 miles away, and stay silent, lest we upset the perceived superpowers and the business stops coming. But today we stand with Black people from across the diaspora who are rising to fight injustice, police brutality, and white supremacy.

These protests organized by youth groups BLM Bermuda and Social Justice Bermuda lead by two young black women who gave the community confidence that it could organise large-scale mobilisations in Bermuda despite not having done so for decades. Social media and the limited number of news channels helped to quickly spread the word about the protest as thousands descended into the capital city of Hamilton. Unfortunately, the lack of previous mass movements and limited space for political activity amongst the working class has meant that much of that great BLM mobilization has yet to generate an organisation working for change.

This is not to say that no change has been accomplished. Several non-profit and grassroots organizations have been created by ordinary people in the hope of tackling some of these issues, such as Citizens Uprooting Racism in Bermuda (CURB), they do important community work with honest intentions of fighting racism. Many of the corporations on the island have also responded to protests by introducing racial bias training and announced commitments to racial equality, but unsurprisingly these are mainly empty box-ticking exercises that companies introduce to give the false appearance of change. In addition, BLM has even created a huge amount of pressure on the Bermuda police force to be held accountable for its acts of racism. Last summer, the police force suspended one officer who made disparaging remarks about the protest and other inappropriate messages on social media – he later resigned from the police.

The legacy of Black Lives Matter

What people want is a completely different attitude to how race is seen in the country and to end the custom of ignoring racial injustices. Speaking to young people on the island, I witnessed a strong sense that there was an eagerness to have some sort of political activity on the island. This goes beyond just fighting racism to include other issues, such as climate activism and the fight for LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion. To accomplish this change will not be an easy process. Empowering the working class of the island will require real action and time. With the presence of strong trade unions who regularly engage in strike action against the bosses and a legacy of fighting back against racism, Bermuda does have potential to develop further powerful mass movement from below.

Ordinary people of Bermuda have long been ignored by the various governments, side-lined by the interest of the wealthy. They are angry and willing to fight for a better Bermuda. However, there is a uphill battle for the country as it currently stands as a tax haven for business and a millionaires’ playpen. Abolishing racism will require the active involvement of the 99 in a broad anti-racist movement. But the anti-racist struggle must crucially be based on the activities of the small but combative working class, which has the power to bring the economy to a halt and bring a crucial anti-capitalist element of the fight against racism.

The very real concerns facing the black population on the island, which have only been made worse through covid, will have to be addressed. The political debate on antiracism needs to go beyond mere calls for black-owned business and capital and most importantly, young people will once again have to be at the forefront of these movements and be allowed space to take active roles. Their energy, radicalness, and in-depth understanding of the situation on the island needs to intersect with other social justices issues that are key to the success of a truly transformative Black Lives Matter movement.

Elizabeth Adofo is a revolutionary socialist activist from London who is based in Bermuda. As a former teacher, she enjoys giving talks about inequality in the British education system and participates in campaigns against racism and police brutality.

Featured Photograph: Black Lives Matter protest in Hamilton, Bermuda on 7 June, 2020 (Blaire Simmons).

Global capitalism and the scramble for cobalt

ROAPE

January 5, 2022

In the context of the climate emergency and the need for renewable energy sources, competition over the supply of cobalt is growing. This competition is most intense in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nick Bernards argues that the scramble for cobalt is a capitalist scramble, and that there can be no ‘just’ transition without overthrowing capitalism on a global scale.

By Nick Bernards

With growing attention to climate breakdown and the need for expanded use of renewable energy sources, the mineral resources needed to make batteries are emerging as a key site of conflict. In this context, cobalt – traditionally mined as a by-product of copper and nickel – has become a subject of major interest in its own right.

Competition over supplies of cobalt is intensifying. Some reports suggest that demand for cobalt is likely to exceed known reserves if projected shifts to renewable energy sources are realized. Much of this competition is playing out in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The south-eastern regions of the DRC hold about half of proven global cobalt reserves, and account for an even higher proportion of global cobalt production (roughly 70 percent) because known reserves in the DRC are relatively shallow and easier to extract.

Recent high profile articles in outlets including the New York Times and the Guardian have highlighted a growing ‘battery arms race’ supposedly playing out between the West (mostly the US) and China over battery metals, especially cobalt.

These pieces suggest, with some alarm, that China is ‘winning’ this race. They highlight how Chinese dominance in battery supply chains might inhibit energy transitions in the West. They also link growing Chinese mining operations to a range of labour and environmental abuses in the DRC, where the vast majority of the world’s available cobalt reserves are located.

Both articles are right that the hazards and costs of the cobalt boom have been disproportionately borne by Congolese people and landscapes, while few of the benefits have reached them. But by subsuming these problems into narratives of geopolitical competition between the US and China and zooming in on the supposedly pernicious effects of Chinese-owned operations in particular, the ‘arms race’ narrative ultimately obscures more than it reveals.

There is unquestionably a scramble for cobalt going on. It is centered in the DRC but spans much of the globe, working through tangled transnational networks of production and finance that link mines in the South-Eastern DRC to refiners and battery manufacturers scattered across China’s industrializing cities, to financiers in London, Toronto, and Hong Kong, to vast transnational corporations ranging from mineral rentiers (Glencore), to automotive companies (Volkswagen, Ford), to electronics and tech firms (Apple). This loose network is governed primarily through an increasingly amorphous and uneven patchwork of public and private ‘sustainability’ standards. And, it plays out against the backdrop of both long-running depredations of imperialism and the more recent devastation of structural adjustment.

In a word, the scramble for cobalt is a thoroughly capitalist scramble.

Chinese firms do unquestionably play a major role in global battery production in general and in cobalt extraction and refining in particular. Roughly 50 percent of global cobalt refining now takes place in China. The considerable majority of DRC cobalt exports do go to China, and Chinese firms have expanded interests in mining and trading ventures in the DRC.

However, although the Chinese state has certainly fostered the development of cobalt and other battery minerals, there is as much a scramble for control over cobalt going on within China as between China and the ‘west’. There has, notably, been a wave of concentration and consolidation among Chinese cobalt refiners since about 2010. The Chinese firms operating in the DRC are capitalist firms competing with each other in important ways. They often have radically different business models. Jinchuan Group Co. Ltd and China Molybdenum, for instance, are Hong Kong Stock Exchange-listed firms with ownership shares in scattered global refining and mining operations. Jinchuan’s major mine holdings in the DRC were acquired from South African miner Metorex in 2012; China Molybdenum recently acquired the DRC mines owned by US-based Freeport-McMoRan (as the New York Times article linked above notes with concern). A significant portion of both Jinchuan Group and China Molybdenum’s revenues, though, come from speculative metals trading rather than from production. Yantai Cash, on the other hand, is a specialized refiner which does not own mining operations. Yantai is likely the destination for a good deal of ‘artisanal’ mined cobalt via an elaborate network of traders and brokers.

These large Chinese firms also are thoroughly plugged in to global networks of battery production ultimately destined, in many cases, for widely known consumer brands. They are also able to take advantage of links to global marketing and financing operations. The four largest Chinese refiners, for instance, are all listed brands on the London Metal Exchange (LME).

In the midst of increased concentration at the refining stage and concerns over supplies, several major end users including Apple, Volkswagen, and BMW have sought to establish long-term contracts directly with mining operations since early 2018. Tesla signed a major agreement with Glencore to supply cobalt for its new battery ‘gigafactories’ in 2020. Not unrelatedly, they have also developed integrated supply chain tracing systems, often dressed up in the language of ‘sustainability’ and transparency. One notable example is the Responsible Sourcing Blockchain Initiative (RSBI). This initiative between the blockchain division of tech giant IBM, supply chain audit firm RCS Global, and several mining houses, mineral traders, and automotive end users of battery materials including Ford, Volvo, Volkswagen Group, and Fiat-Chrysler Automotive Group was announced in 2019. RSBI conducted a pilot test tracing 1.5 tons of Congolese cobalt across three different continents over five months of refinement.

Major end users including automotive and electronics brands have, in short, developed increasingly direct contacts extending across the whole battery production network.

There are also a range of financial actors trying to get in on the scramble (though, as both Jinchuan and China Molybdenum demonstrate, the line between ‘productive’ and ‘financial’ capital here can be blurry). Since 2010, benchmark cobalt prices are set through speculative trading on the LME. A number of specialized trading funds have been established in the last five years, seeking to profit from volatile prices for cobalt. One of the largest global stockpiles of cobalt in 2017, for instance, was held by Cobalt 27, a Canadian firm established expressly to buy and hold physical cobalt stocks. Cobalt 27 raised CAD 200 million through a public listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange in June of 2017, and subsequently purchased 2160.9 metric tons of cobalt held in LME warehouses. There are also a growing number of exchange traded funds (ETF) targeting cobalt. Most of these ETFs seek ‘exposure’ to cobalt and battery components more generally, for instance, through holding shares in mining houses or what are called ‘royalty bearing interests’ in specific mining operations rather than trading in physical cobalt or futures. Indeed, by mid-2019, Cobalt-27 was forced to sell off its cobalt stockpile at a loss. It was subsequently bought out by its largest shareholder (a Swiss-registered investment firm) and restructured into ‘Conic’, an investment fund holding a portfolio of royalty-bearing interests in battery metals operations rather than physical metals.

Or, to put it another way, there is as much competition going on within ‘China’ and the ‘West’ between different firms to establish control over limited supplies of cobalt, and to capture a share of the profits, as between China and the ‘West’ as unitary entities.

Thus far, workers and communities in the Congolese Copperbelt have suffered the consequences of this scramble. They have seen few of the benefits. Indeed, this is reflective of much longer-run processes, documented in ROAPE, wherein local capital formation and local development in Congolese mining have been systematically repressed on behalf of transnational capital for decades.

The current boom takes place against the backdrop of the collapse, and subsequent privatization, of the copper mining industry in the 1990s and 2000s. In 1988, state-owned copper mining firm Gécamines produced roughly 450 000 tons of copper, and employed 30 000 people, by 2003, production had fallen to 8 000 tons and workers were owed up to 36 months of back pay. As part of the restructuring and privatization of the company, more than 10 000 workers were offered severance payments financed by the World Bank, the company was privatized, and mining rights were increasingly marketized. By most measures, mining communities in the Congolese Copperbelt are marked by widespread poverty. A 2017 survey found mean and median monthly household incomes of $USD 34.50 and $USD 14, respectively, in the region.

In the context of widespread dispossession, the DRC’s relatively shallow cobalt deposits have been an important source of livelihood activities. Estimates based on survey research suggest that roughly 60 percent of households in the region derived some income from mining, of which 90 percent worked in some form of artisanal mining. Recent research has linked the rise of industrial mining installations owned by multinational conglomerates to deepening inequality, driven in no small part by those firms’ preference for expatriate workers in higher paid roles. Where Congolese workers are employed, this is often through abusive systems of outsourcing through labour brokers.

Cobalt mining has also been linked to substantial forms of social and ecological degradation in surrounding areas, including significant health risks from breathing dust (not only to miners but also to local communities), ecological disruption and pollution from acid, dust, and tailings, and violent displacement of local communities.

The limited benefits and high costs of the cobalt boom for local people in the Congolese copperbelt, in short, are linked to conditions of widespread dispossession predating the arrival of Chinese firms and are certainly not limited to Chinese firms.

To be clear, none of this is to deny that Chinese firms have been implicated in abuses of labour rights and ecologically destructive practices in the DRC, nor that the Chinese state has clearly made strategic priorities of cobalt mining, refining, and battery manufacturing. It does not excuse the very real abuses linked to Chinese firms that European-owned ones have done many of the same things. Nor does the fact that those Chinese firms are often ultimately vendors to major US and European auto and electronic brands.

However, all of this does suggest that any diagnosis of the developmental ills, violence, ecological damage and labour abuses surrounding cobalt in the DRC that focuses specifically on the character of Chinese firms or on inter-state competition is limited at best. It gets Glencore, Apple, Tesla, and myriad financial speculators, to say nothing of capitalist relations of production generally, off the hook.

If we want to get to grips with the unfolding scramble for cobalt and its consequences for the people in the south-east DRC, we need to keep in view how the present-day scramble reflects wider patterns of uneven development under capitalist relations of production.

We should note that such narratives of a ‘new scramble for Africa’ prompted by a rapacious Chinese appetite for natural resources are not new. As Alison Ayers argued nearly a decade ago of narratives about the role of China in a ‘new scramble for Africa’, a focus on Chinese abuses means that ‘the West’s relations with Africa are construed as essentially beneficent, in contrast to the putatively opportunistic, exploitative and deleterious role of the emerging powers, thereby obfuscating the West’s ongoing neocolonial relationship with Africa’. Likewise, such accounts neglect ‘profound changes in the global political economy within which the “new scramble for Africa” is to be more adequately located’. These interventions are profoundly political, providing important forms of ideological cover for both neoliberal capitalism and for longer-run structures of imperialism.

In short, the barrier to a just transition to sustainable energy sources is not a unitary ‘China’ bent on the domination of emerging industries as a means to global hegemony. It is capitalism. Or, more precisely, it is the fact that responses to the climate crisis have thus far worked through and exacerbated the contradictions of existing imperialism and capitalist relations of production. The scramble for cobalt is a capitalist scramble, and one of many signs that there can be no ‘just’ transition without overturning capitalism and imperialism on a global scale.

Nick Bernards teaches at the University of Warwick in Global Sustainable Development. His new book A Critical History of Poverty Finance: Neoliberal Failures in a Post-Colonial World will be published with Pluto Press later in 2022.

Featured Photograph: Loading copper and cobalt ore at Musonoi Mine in the Lualaba Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (between 1980 and 1983).

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa: The Legacy of Walter Rodney

ROAPE

December 16, 2021

By Lee Wengraf

In the final blog for roape.net, writer and activist Lee Wengraf celebrates Walter Rodney, the scholar, working class militant and revolutionary from Guyana who was murdered 37 years ago this week. She writes how he was influenced by Marxist ideas and remains central to the Pan-Africanist canon for many on the left. His book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a classic that must be carefully studied by activists and scholars today.

A number of African economies have experienced a massive boom in wealth and investment over the past decade. Yet most ordinary Africans live in dire poverty with diminished life expectancy, high unemployment and in societies with low-levels of industry. For the roots of these conditions of “under-development,” one historical account stands alone in importance: Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972).

Walter Rodney was a scholar, working class militant and revolutionary from Guyana. Influenced by Marxist ideas, he is central to the Pan-Africanist canon for many on the left. In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney situates himself in several theoretical traditions: the writings of Caribbean revolutionary Frantz Fanon, the dependency theories of Andre Gunder Frank and others, the Pan-Africanist tradition including George Padmore and C.L.R. James, and African socialism as popularized by national leaders such as Tanzania’s Julius Kambarage Nyerere and Guinea’s Ahmed Sékou Touré. As Horace Campbell describes, “His numerous writings on the subjects of socialism, imperialism, working class struggles and Pan Africanism and slavery contributed to a body of knowledge that came to be known as the Dar es Salaam School of Thought. Issa Shivji, Mahmood Mamdani, Claude Ake, Archie Mafeje, Yash Tandon, John Saul, Dan Nabudere, O Nnoli, Clive Thomas and countless others participated in the debates on transformation and liberation.”[1]

Rodney’s scholarship and leadership in the working-class movement thus had a long reach, including within the revolutionary movement in his native Guyana. He was assassinated on June 13, 1980, likely by agents of the Guyanese government. The Nigerian novelist, Wole Soyinka, in noting Rodney’s legacy, wrote how “Walter Rodney was no captive intellectual playing to the gallery of local or international radicalism. He was clearly one of the most solidly ideologically situated intellectuals ever to look colonialism and exploitation in the eye and where necessary, spit in it.”[2]

Rodney’s work has assumed a foundational place in understanding the legacies of slavery and colonialism for the underdevelopment that unfolded, over centuries, on the continent. The core of his analysis rests on the assumption that Africa – far from standing outside the world system – has been crucial to the growth of capitalism in the West. What he terms “underdevelopment” was in fact the product of centuries of slavery, exploitation and imperialism. Rodney conclusively shows that “Europe” – that is, the colonial and imperial powers – did not merely enrich their own empires but actually reversed economic and social development in Africa. Thus, in his extensive account of African history from the early African empires through to the modern day, Rodney shows how the West built immense industrial and colonial empires on the backs of African slave labor, devastating natural resources and African societies in the process. As he emphasizes throughout How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, “[i]t would be an act of the most brazen fraud to weigh the social amenities provided during the colonial epoch against the exploitation, and to arrive at the conclusion that the good outweighed the bad.”[3]

For Rodney, underdevelopment is a condition historically produced through capitalist expansion and imperialism, and very clearly not an intrinsic property of Africa itself. He thus situates underdevelopment within the contradictory process of capitalism, one that both creates value and wealth for the exploiters while immiserating the exploited. Rodney writes:

The peasants and workers of Europe (and eventually the inhabitants of the whole world) paid a huge price so that the capitalists could make their profit from the human labor that always lies behind the machines…. There was a period when the capitalist system increased the well-being of significant numbers of people as a by-product of seeking out profits for a few, but today the quest for profits comes into sharp conflict with people’s demands that their material and social needs should be fulfilled.[4]

As Rodney describes, African trade was central to its growth, most importantly through the slave trade from approximately 1445 to 1870, transforming Africa into a source of human raw material for the new colonies in North America and the Caribbean. It was to the three major powers involved in the slave trade – Britain, France and Portugal –that massive profits accrued. Trade with Africa was closely tied up with the growth of European port cities such as England’s Liverpool, with the exchange of slaves for cheap industrial goods established as the primary motor for profits of European firms. Drawing on the work of Eric Williams’ classic Capitalism and Slavery (1944), among others, Rodney concludes that the slave trade provided England with the capital for the Industrial Revolution to take off and with the dominant edge over its rivals.

Yet as Rodney shows, the “development” of African societies was thwarted in this process of capital expansion, first and foremost through the lost labor potential due to the slave trade. From its economic foundation in slavery, the range of exports from Africa narrowed to just a few commodities, undermining the development of productive capacity in Africa itself. These trade relations meant that technological development stagnated, creating a barrier to innovation within Africa itself, even in regions not directly engaged in the slave trade, because of the distorting influence on relations overall. The result, concludes Rodney, was “a loss of development opportunity, and this is of the greatest importance…. The lines of economic activity attached to foreign trade were either destructive, as slavery was, or at best purely extractive.”[5]

The nineteenth century “race for Africa” broke out, with European “explorers” seeking out access to raw materials. By the 1870s, colonial powers had expanded into new African territory, primarily through the use of force, further consolidating imperial powers and rivalries. By 1876, on the eve of the “scramble for Africa,” European powers controlled only 10% of the continent, namely Algeria, Cape Colony, Mozambique and Angola. Yet after the infamous Berlin Conference of 1885 and the partition of Africa, “The number of genuinely independent states outside of Europe and the Americas could be counted on one hand – the remains of the Ottoman Empire, Thailand, Ethiopia and Afghanistan.”[6]

Racist ideology justified and facilitated European imperialism in Africa as a “civilizing mission,” or as Rodney remarks, “Revolutionary African thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral …spoke of colonialism having made Africans into objects of history. Colonised Africans, like pre-colonial African chattel slaves, were pushed around into positions which suited European interests and which were damaging to the African continent and its peoples.”[7] Nonetheless, Africans met European expansion with great resistance, targeting forced labor schemes and taxation, restrictive land ownership laws and later, imposed forced conscription during World War I. Workers went on strike and engaged in boycotts, and nationalist organizations – many of them illegal – were formed from the earliest days of colonial rule.

Yet African resistance during that period was caught between larger forces. The European “scramble for Africa” subjected independent states to colonial rule, transforming peasant and trading societies within a short span of time into a wage labor and cash crop system. The increasingly intense economic competition in European capitalism that eventually exploded into World War I likewise spilled over into military clashes in Africa. Alliances between and against the various powers attempted to block each other’s rivals, with France and Britain seeking competing axes of control over the continent.

Colonial brutality was the standard practice across virtually the entire continent, with the chief aim of leveraging force to subdue resistance and to extract profits. Turning Africa into a conveyor belt for raw materials and industrial goods required transportation and communication systems and, as Rodney describes, a pacified – and minimally educated – labor force. The major powers on the continent set up administrative apparatuses that in some cases utilized local rulers, but, as Rodney writes, in no instance would the colonizers accept African self-rule. Infrastructure such as roads were built not only to facilitate the movement of commodities and machinery, but also that of the colonial armies and police relied upon to discipline the indigenous population, whether the expulsion of people from their land or the forced cultivation of cash crops. Industrial development was thwarted in Africa itself because manufacturing and the processing of raw materials happened exclusively overseas.

Europeans divide-and-conquer tactics won a tiny section of African rulers to back the annexation by one power versus another. As Rodney puts it, “One of the decisive features of the colonial system was the presence of Africans serving as economic, political or cultural agents of the European colonialists…. agents or ‘compradors’ already serving [their] interests in the pre-colonial period.” Following Fanon on the role of local elites, Rodney is scathing in his contempt for the “puppets” of “metropolitan” capitalism, where “the presence of a group of African sell-outs is part of the definition of underdevelopment.”[8]

For Rodney, “The colonisation of Africa and other parts of the world formed an indispensable link in a chain of events which made possible the technological transformation of the base of European capitalism.” Copper from the Congo, iron from West Africa, chrome from Rhodesia and South Africa, and more, took capitalist development to unprecedented heights of what Rodney calls “investible surpluses.” The tendency within the drive for profit towards innovation and scientific advancement built a “massive industrial complex,” as Rodney described it.[9] African trade not only generated economic growth and profits, but created capacity for future growth in what he called the “metropoles,” meaning the global centers of political and economic power located in Europe.

Colonial policies heightened exploitation, such as those preventing Africans from growing cash crops drove workers into forced labor like the building of infrastructure to facilitate extraction. Thus, capital accumulation was derived at the expense of greatly-weakened African states and economies, effectively reversing previous development. These two processes were dialectically related. As Rodney writes, “The wealth that was created by African labor and from African resources was grabbed by the capitalist countries of Europe; and in the second place, restrictions were placed upon African capacity to make the maximum use of its economic potential.”[10] This process of underdevelopment only intensified over time: as Rodney points out, investment and “foreign capital” in colonial Africa was derived from past exploitation and provided the historical basis for further expansion. “What was called ‘profits’ in one year came back as ‘capital’ the next…. What was foreign about the capital in colonial Africa was its ownership and not its initial source.”[11]

Rodney argued that development in the so-called “periphery” was proportional to the degree of independence from the “metropolis,” a central tenet of the dependency theorists. He looked to state-directed, national development in the post-colonial period as a template for growth, a model proven – particularly in the years after Rodney’s death – not to be viable. National development in Africa, as elsewhere, proved unable to overcome the legacy of colonialism and weak economies. The wake of such failures and the onset of global crisis pushed many African states into the vice-grip of neo-liberal structural adjustment “reforms” that brought only austerity and crushing Third World debt.

These ideas had a distinctive imprint on Rodney’s variant of Marxism and that of many leftists of his day. For Rodney, independence in Africa rested on “development by contradiction,” by which he meant that the contradictions within African society were only resolvable by “Africans’ regaining their sovereignty as a people.”[12] In his view, the disproportionate weight and importance of even a small African working class offered potentially a more stable base of resistance. But, he emphasizes, that possibility cannot be fully realized as in the “developed” world because production in Africa proceeded on a different path than in Europe. In the latter, the destruction of agrarian and craft economies increased productive capacity through the development of factories and a mass working class. In Africa, he argues, that process was distorted: local craft industry was destroyed, yet large-scale industry was not developed outside of agriculture and extraction, with workers restricted to the lowest-paid, most unskilled work. “Capitalism in the form of colonialism failed to perform in Africa the tasks which it had performed in Europe in changing social relations and liberating the forces of production.”[13] So, concludes Rodney, the African working class is too small and too weak to play a liberatory role in the current period. Instead, somewhat reluctantly, he identifies the intelligentsia for that role:

Altogether, the educated played a role in African independence struggles far out of proportion to their numbers, because they took it upon themselves and were called upon to articulate the interests of all Africans. They were also required to … focus on the main contradiction, which was between the colony and the metropole. …The contradiction between the educated and the colonialists was not the most profound. …However, while the differences lasted between the colonizers and the African educated, they were decisive.[14]

Thus, while Rodney sees the “principal divide” within capitalism as that between capitalists and workers, the revolutionary role for the African working class was nonetheless a task for another day. On this score, Rodney was mistaken: mass upheavals by workers across the continent have shown the capacity for struggle, from the colonial period up to the present day.

Yet, however contradictorily, Rodney’s ideas on political leadership and liberation indicate the potential for resistance under today’s conditions. First, as we have seen, Rodney – following Fanon – was keenly aware of the class contradictions embedded in the new African ruling classes, tensions bound to be thrust to the surface with greater clarity. He writes: “Most African leaders of the intelligentsia… were frankly capitalist, and shared fully the ideology of their bourgeois masters…. As far as the mass of peasants and workers were concerned, the removal of overt foreign rule actually cleared the way towards a more fundamental appreciation of exploitation and imperialism.”[15] This dynamic has only been accentuated over time. Furthermore, Rodney implies, internationalism on a class basis lay in the historical development of capitalism and solidarity as a crucial “political” question. “European workers have paid a great price for the few material benefits which accrued to them as crumbs from the colonial table,” he writes. “The capitalists misinformed and mis-educated workers in the metropoles to the point where they became allies in colonial exploitation. In accepting to be led like sheep, European workers were perpetuating their own enslavement to the capitalists.”[16]

Rodney’s characterization of European workers “led like sheep” may be too simplistic a description of workers’ understanding of capitalism. But Rodney is correct in stressing that racist ideas undermined their own liberation. The “crumbs” Rodney describes are the products of divisions sown by ruling class ideology, and not of insurmountable material barriers. Actually realizing this (future) possibility – that of an international movement of workers of Africa and the West – has much to be gained from Rodney’s invaluable research and analysis.

Lee Wengraf writes on Africa for the International Socialist Review, Counterpunch, Pambazuka News and AllAfrica.com. Her new book Extracting Profit: Neoliberalism, Imperialism and the New Scramble for Africa will be published by Haymarket in 2018.

Notes

[1] Horace Campbell, “Walter Rodney, the Prophet of Self Emancipation,” Pambazuka News, May 12, 2005, https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/walter-rodney-prophet-self-emancipation. Cf. Clairmont Chung, ed., Walter Rodney: A Promise of Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012). The Chung volume includes contributions from Shivji, Thomas and others on Rodney’s legacy.

[2] Cited in Rupert Lewis, Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), xvii.

[3] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Nairobi and Washington, D.C.: East African Educational Publishers and Howard University Press, 1972), 206.

[4] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 10.

[5] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 105-107

[6] Chris Harman. A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium. (London: Bookmarks, 2008), 394

[7] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 229-230.

[8] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 26.

[9] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 180.

[10] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 25.

[11] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 212.

[12] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 261.

[13] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 216.

[14] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 262.

[15] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 279-80.

[16] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 199-200.

Politics, poetry and struggle in Kenya – an interview with Lena Anyuolo

ROAPE

December 15, 2021

In an interview with ROAPE, Kenyan activist Lena Anyuolo talks about her background, politics and writing. She explains that when our environment is trauma, and we are forced to survive under impossible conditions it is hard to love. Activists are exposed twice – first to our personal demons and then to the task of fighting for socialism while living the crisis of capitalism. Only the transformative power of revolutionary work can save us.

Can you tell ROAPE readers about your background and work?

I am a writer, a poet and feminist. I am a member of Ukombozi Library. I grew up in a small family. My mother was a teacher and my father a computer engineer. There was a culture of learning in our home. My sister and I were encouraged to explore our environment through reading books, watching films and play. I am a proud alumnus of Dohnolm Catholic primary school. My teachers were kind people. I loved my friends. Many of the aspects of my early learning environment encouraged analysis. I went to a national high school. It wasn’t the best experience to be so far from home, at a boarding school.

Writing was nurtured in me from an early age. My early childhood mentors encouraged imagination. My sister, my friends and I would make up games to play, by myself I would make up fantastical stories in my head some of which I’d write down. In high school, I felt my creativity stifled. It was a blow to my confidence. We had a heavy workload of memorizing irrelevant things so that we could pass our examinations and maintain our ‘ranking’. There were few avenues to ‘blow off steam’ apart from one hour of optional physical education once a week.

My self-esteem took a big blow when my mother died when I was still young. I was in class seven and my sister was in class five. I was really scared because I felt alone in the world. We lived with different relatives over the school holidays. My social life was suddenly heavily disrupted. I went from having a bevy of friends to struggling to find and keep hold of friends because of all the movement. I grew exceptionally close to my sister because of it. She felt like the only family I had. It wasn’t a perfect relationship because we were doing our best to grow up, be there for each other, and fit the expectations of our relatives so that our material needs would be met. We did our best to make it work under such stressful conditions. She remains my dearest friend.

University was rough. My world was getting bigger, and up until then my entire being had been pegged on academic success and the approval of my relatives. In university, it didn’t matter what my grades were or how over-achieving I had been in high school. I ached for a mentor. I desperately wanted to write but lacked the creative confidence to do so. University felt so big. It also challenged my belief systems, and ambition. The initial excitement to be at university wore off very fast. I had imagined an intellectually stimulating culture, but in the end I felt drained and exhausted by the bureaucracy and tedium.

I took on a number of odd jobs and that helped me to diversify my interactions. I read a lot and it expanded my world view. I ended up at Ukombozi Library because of a love for books and libraries. The dreamer in me was excited to explore. The rebel in me was elated because it was a subversive space. I wouldn’t say I was interested in local politics. I had already given up all hope of expecting change from the government. I was apolitical because I didn’t know, or couldn’t see how we could possibly get ourselves out of the fucked-up order of things. Yet, at the library, the atmosphere was hopeful. The centres overflowed with optimism. People didn’t have the answers, but everyone was doing their best to analyse society and come up with a strategy for change.

I would debate a lot in high school and at university, and the period after that. I still do. Our discussions were quite philosophical. I have fond memories of fiery debates about the US elections, and our capacities for change in the current electoral climate. This was around 2013. My best friend at the time introduced me to feminism and she encouraged me to read Frantz Fanon‘s The Wretched of the Earth, and Bell Hooks. On long afternoons with another close friend, I would debate intensely about the application of these ideologies to our reality. I was enriched by these women in my life.

You are an activist and writer, and have been involved for some years with Mathare Social Justice Centre, can you tell us something about your activism and how you became politicised?

I began human rights work and political work at the same time. I was strongly inclined to political work because of the examples of audacity that I read about in the resistance of Muthoni Nyanjiru, Wangari Maathai, the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, the Kurdish Women Movement, Che Guevarra, Celia Sanchez, Dandara Plamares. I could write an endless list of these people. I was impressed by the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg and her analysis of the women’s struggle.

The social justice centres were an ideal space for experimentation with these political theories. They were an organised, organic, grassroots movement of workers. We faced the task of ideologically grounding the centres to grow from human rights theory to scientific socialism. I was challenged by the practical ways in which my comrades dealt with extra judicial executions, water scarcity, gender-based violence. I was inspired by the persistence and collective effort of the social justice centres to document these violations, conduct community dialogues and disrupt the status quo in civic spaces dominated by NGOs, human rights organisations that were based in upper class neighbourhoods.

I became politicised through various study cells at Ukombozi Library, and Mathare Social Justice Centre.

Though you are also an environmental activist, you describe yourself as a socialist. What role does socialist politics – and anti-capitalism – plays in your activism and political thinking?

They are tools of analysis. Capitalist education and religion has conditioned us to believe that the oppression of the many by a few propertied individuals is natural. It is a deeply depressing, fatalistic world view. The ideology of workers is optimistic because we are practically, daily engaged in class struggle for a better world in which the means of production are controlled by our labour. Scientific socialism removes the evil veil of capitalism revealing to us that this is not a natural world order – it is the great, indeed historic adversary of capitalism.

You have spent long years struggling with depression and a diagnosis of ADHD, you have written powerfully about these episodes – can you tell us about your depression, and how you view depression in the context of our struggles under capitalism?

Depression is a monster. As I reflect on my life, I am able to see that much of my struggle with it was directly linked to my material conditions. The structure of capitalism and patriarchy does not support healthy relationships of any kind. Family is considered the bedrock of social justice and freedom, yet it is also the place where peace is first disrupted. Our environment is trauma. We survive under impossible conditions. Nairobi makes it hard to love. As activists, we are double exposed. First to our personal demons and then to the task of organising for socialism while living the crisis of capitalism in these concrete prisons. Depression leads to a very slow death. The medical industry in Kenya is ultra-capitalist. From the insurance company to the hospitals. It is a privilege to gain access to healthcare with any sort of dignity.

Through study, I now know that capitalism is quick to put a stamp of illness on behaviour that does not conform to the picture of the ideal robotic worker. Capitalism profits from the trauma that capitalism and patriarchy itself causes in us. It turns psychiatrists into drug dealers, eager to medicate for profit.

I knew my primary home environment was highly abusive and directly linked to my depression and suicidal ideation, but I lacked the material means to find a place of my own. So, I used pills prescribed by the medical profession to cope, the medication would flatline me emotionally and deaden my feelings. To me that was better than having to be fully aware of the reality of my living conditions.

However, I am hopeful that we can heal but there is no easy panacea. There is also a good amount of effort that must be put into developing healthy mental practices.

My greatest appreciation goes to my comrades, organising together has helped to chip away at some of my despair. It is an exhilarating process because I was able to see practically that even an individual has a role to play in history. No resistance is too small, and we are not condemned to hopelessness. It is capitalist trauma to always perceive doom and gloom. We have all the power in our hands to destroy capitalism and build socialism from its ruins. We must do this in order to survive as a species. The poem by Langston Hughes I look at the world sums up the transformative power of revolutionary work.

I appreciate now, for example, that better planning of my finances can alleviate some of the anxiety of survival. It can help to have a little extra to cultivate a small hobby. Constant, persistent self-cultivation in a study circle continues to sharpen one’s worldview and that in-depth knowledge of our situation helps us remain optimistic about our revolutionary potential and future.

One way you interpret the world, and express your rage against its horrors and how we live our lives, is through poetry? Some of your poetry, can be found here, but can you tell us about the importance of poetry and creative writing in your life, and how it speaks to our battered lives, and revolutionary hope. How do you see the ‘uses’ of poetry in our movements, and lives?

I mentioned earlier that at some point it felt like I had lost my creative confidence. One of my mentors is Mama Wangari. I am so grateful for her presence. Whether she knew it or not, she slayed a big part of my enforced creative shyness. Even the messages, letters, emails we wrote to each other, are pieces of incredibly valuable writing. That was an epiphany. I saw my notebooks in a different light. They were beautiful precious pieces of text. These were my points of release. I am a firm believer in the political flowing from the personal. You must be able to tell your story honestly whether you are telling it to yourself or to others. When we tell our story truthfully, we can inspire others.

We would like to make a short selection of your poems available to our readers, can you introduce us to the collection and what the poems mean to you?

This collection is based on reflections from 2020. That was a wild year for me in terms of organising. I felt like my life had been distilled into the intensity of the months between March and November that year. I had to talk about it because it was a lot to deal with. There was a lot happening in my personal life in addition to organising during the pandemic. I became a workaholic because I was trying to postpone dealing with myself.

Inevitably, I came undone, so I had to face up to myself whether I liked it or not. My comrade, Maryanne Kasina, the convenor of Women in Social Justice Centres urges activists to try and come to terms with themselves. To tell the truth to ourselves and accept who we are – as flawed and broken as we might be. There’s no escaping this aspect of humanity otherwise we may end up causing quite a bit of harm. It’s not as if we will reach an actualised version of ourselves. I don’t believe in that. But we must retain the belief in our capacity to change and grow.

Fanon says that out of obscurity, we discover our mission. Dialectical materialism teaches us that the world is in a constant state of flux – even in our individual biology this is occurring. So, there are no permanent or irredeemable mistakes. Toni Cade Bambara writes that there is no such thing as an instant guerrilla. We have to face up to uncomfortable realities. The good thing is that if we have cultivated safe communities, then we won’t have to go through this process alone. We must remember not to be harsh to our ourselves or each other when we falter, we can correct ourselves and move forward. This collection which is being published next year is a reflection of that time. There is grief and rage, cheekiness too. It is precious. A drop of my being.

In the aftermath of covid, and the continuing devastation of our planet, what is the future for activists and social movements in Kenya and the region?

Mona Eltahaway writes that we must emerge, not regress. We are definitely not unscathed, but we must continue drawing on the lessons from our practice. We need to be really aggressive about organising against patriarchy. It is urgent that we do so because sexism is causing deep harm to ourselves and our communities.

I am optimistic about the future because of the existence of Ukombozi library, the organic intellectuals movement, the ecological justice movement, Vita books, Women in Social Justice Centres, Matigari Book Club, RSL study cells, Cheche Bookshop…. the list is endless and that reflects that we are a young, politically aware group of people eager for lasting change.

Lena Grace Anyuolo is a writer, poet and social justice activist with Mathare Social Justice Centre and Ukombozi Library. Her writing has appeared in a range of publications, including Jalada’s 7th anthology themed After+Life, The Elephant and roape.net.

A collection of Anyuolo’s poetry, Rage and Bloom, is being published by Editor House Facility in 2022.

ROAPE has asked the scholar and Editor House Facility publisher, Yusuf Serunkuma, to select three poems from Lena’s collection, and to give a brief description of the poems.

Taifa Hall

The dreams of (student) revolutionaries and overcoming colonial/capitalist exploitation yet being constantly met by brutal force.

This is a fever dream

Greased by bruised coffee in oily teacups

University students debating socialism and ujamaa

Reform and Revolution.

This is a fever dream,

Greased by bruised coffee…

Ta! Ta! Ta!

Ssssssssss…

Choking smoke through the window

Heavy breathing and shattered glass under the bed

It is a terrorist attack,

These police raids,

Looking for Rosa and Cabral

We told them, ‘Afande, Titina Sila left a long time ago! Or did you not go to school?’

Ta! Ta! Ta!

Ssssssss…

Suddenly I am drowning in blood

The police inspector said if we did not behave, even those fever dreams will be outlawed

…Aha!

An illegal dream we dare to dream,

Greased by bruised coffee in oily tea cups.

University students debating colonialism in Tiananmen square,

Qadaffi’s revolution in Taifa hall,

Opposite Ghandi’s library,

and America’s wing

dwarfed by China’s tower.

I am just a body

The problem with ascribing roles to perceived genders because of our physical bodies and each gender role coming with their own complications.

…that eats and talks.

I am neither woman nor man therefore do not treat me as such.

You see breasts and think that I am a woman,

I must wash the dishes, feed the chickens, wash the children,

harvest osuga and cook it with zeal.

Then in the evening, whether it be icy cold or boiling hot,

my pussy must be clean in case you want to de-stress in it.

You see a bulge in my shorts and think I am a man,

I must be up at the light of dawn, despite the rain,

To milk the cows,

Go down the valley and up the hill to fetch water,

Despite the scorching sun,

Weed the garden and slash the grass,

Despite my fear of snakes and the pitch-black darkness,

check what is making that noise by the fence.

I must not cry because it is said I am to be as solid as the rock of Gibraltar.

I am just a body,

With breasts and a penis tucked in the folds of my flesh

I am neither man nor woman, therefore do not treat me as such.

You saw blood red rivers during a full moon and thought I was a woman.

I must lactate and nurture, so that the children know how to greet elders

and do not pick their noses.

You saw small white pools at the edge of morning woods and thought I was a man.

I must come pre-loaded with the ability to deal with the plumber, the carpenter,

and the electrician.

You forget that I am just a body that eats and shits,

… that eats and talks,

…that eats and fucks,

…that eats and laughs and dances in sorrow and cries in joy,

I am neither woman nor man, therefore do not treat me as such.

B802

On the ironies of people that live a privileged life, while claiming to be socialists!

Two years ago, I met you,

A bad boy who made my heart sing,

We debated class struggle in your BMW X5,

I wondered if a socialist could drive a Benzie,

And flavour their steak with Remy Martin XO,

This is socialist type of living,

As I popped one,

Two pills into my mouth,

I watched my face drop as the world flew by.

You gave me a ruby ring,

“From the communist party to you, my queen.”

We trafficked majestic trunks from Congo to the Cape

They were royal times of Persian silks,

And pedigree dogs named Biggie, Pac and Bella.

Still I wondered if the mobilized were currency for your wallet,

As I snorted one,

Two lines of coke,

I felt my face grow numb as the world flew by.

You gave me a Tanzanite key chain,

“From the communist party to you, my queen,” you said.

As we trafficked little children from Libya to the Maldives

and promised shipwrecked Syrians national status.

Two years ago, I met you,

A bad boy who made my heart sing,

We debated Marxism in your Cherokee,

I wondered if a socialist could drive an Audi,

And dress in cashmere.

This is socialist type of living,

As I chewed one,

Two grams of psylocibin,

The room came alive in technicolour.

You gave me an emerald bracelet,

“From the communist party to you, my queen”

I wondered about Africans and Marxists,

And African Marxists, coloniality,

Confusions of modernity,

Slavery in the north and child pornography in the East.

This is socialist type of living,

As I shot up one,

Two vials of methamphetamine,

I watched the world fly by,

Dazed in luxurious furs.

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