Walter Rodney in London

March 23, 2022

In 1963 Walter Rodney moved to London. He had received a scholarship to undertake a PhD in the UK. In the UK, Rodney confronted racism, a sectarian left and studied Marxism alongside CLR James. In the second part of his biography, A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney, Chinedu Chukwudinma explores the development of Rodney’s politics in London.

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

Rodney faced racism when he arrived in London to pursue his doctorate in African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1963. Although he had graduated with a first-class degree at UWI (University of the West Indies), SOAS almost forced him to take admission exams. If Rodney were a white English man, he wouldn’t have had to justify himself. But he was a black man from the colonies and therefore British society saw him as inferior. Yet he felt privileged compared to his friends and his older brother who had migrated to England to seek work—they faced the brunt of job and housing discrimination. The resistance of black people in Britain to racism fascinated Rodney. He spent much of his free time speaking at Hyde Park Corner where West Indians gathered to discuss politics. He talked about racism, Caribbean politics, apartheid and Zimbabwean independence. Rodney was happy to reunite with his girlfriend Patricia, who had left Guyana for Britain to work as a nurse. They had started dating in the summer before Rodney went to university in Jamaica and maintained a long-distance relationship until he arrived in London. Having reunited, the couple deepened their affection for one another and married in 1965.^[1]

In England, Rodney aimed to deepen his engagement with Marxism to relate to the black working class. SOAS, however, proved unable to help him with such a task. “There was nobody”, he lamented, “who could be remotely termed a Marxist.”^[2] Rodney thought that SOAS, which was founded in 1916 to train British colonial administrators, now educated Africans to serve the interests of Europe. He despised his curriculum and his pretentious professors entrenched in bourgeois ideology. For example, one of his lecturers, the renowned historian John D Fage, argued that the slave trade had benefited West African development, and did no harm to the region’s demographics and economy.^[3] Rodney challenged Fage’s defence of the slave trade in his thesis A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800. Although he thought his dissertation showed no strong Marxist scholarship, it was nonetheless the work of a people’s historian. Rodney portrayed pre-colonial West Africa as innovative and culturally refined and countered the narrative of Western scholars that depicted it as primitive.^[4] He exposed how European powers disrupted the lives of African people and their societies through the slave trade. Rodney sought to develop this theme in his later work “to upset … the deans of African history in London”.^[5]

The British Marxist left of the time made a poor impression on Rodney. He was repelled by the sectarianism of the Communist Party and the different, smaller Trotskyist groups that he came across. They seemed to him more interested in debating amongst themselves than organising workers and defending migrants. He found them old, inarticulate and unprepared. Rodney, moreover, accused the British left of neglecting the fight against racism. He resented the paternalism, the silent and sometimes open racism he encountered from some of them.^[6]

Rodney was not the first black activist to be frustrated with the British left. Before him, Claudia Jones, the founder of the Notting Hill Carnival and a member of the Communist Party, had criticised her own party for marginalising anti-racism in the 1950s.^[7] But Rodney found solace in a Marxist study group taught by CLR James and his wife Selma. From 1963 to 1966, he and a handful of radical West Indian students visited James’ home in North West London on Friday evenings.

Rodney saw in CLR James qualities that he admired. James never went to university, yet he was a brilliant Trinidadian Marxist scholar, a prolific writer and a powerful orator. As a black Bolshevik, he placed the liberation of Africans and colonised peoples at the core of his politics. In his earlier Trotskyist days, James led campaigns against Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia before writing his path-breaking Marxist history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins, in 1938. Although James had long broken with Trotskyism when Rodney met him in the 1960s, he was still in a class of his own. He had recently returned from Trinidad and Tobago after opposing the despotism of his old friend, Prime Minister Eric Williams, by resigning as editor of his party’s newspaper.^[8] James taught Rodney about Marx’s theory of historical change and the Russian Revolution. They read classics such as, Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Lenin’s What Is to Be Done.

From listening to James, Rodney learnt about the revolutionary potential of the working class through its past and present militancy in Europe and abroad. He discovered that exploitation gave workers immense power, as the capitalist relied on their labour-power to make profits—if workers engaged in mass strikes, they could bring the capitalist system to a halt. Rodney also wrote a paper on Marxism and democracy to show what the workers must do to the state in a revolution. Years later, he wrote about the lessons of the Russian Revolution: “The workers could not simply take over a bourgeois parliament and consider the revolution achieved…the bourgeois state had to be destroyed and replaced by institutions which sprang from the working masses.”^[9] That’s how well he understood the key concepts of Lenin’s State and Revolution.

Rodney’s understanding of Marxism was also shaped by a world in which the communist parties of the Soviet Union, China and Cuba had conquered state-power and challenged western imperialism. That most Third World nationalist movements and regimes in the 1960s identified with socialism and sometimes called themselves Marxist was no coincidence. They received material and logistical support from the Soviet Union, which hoped to find allies in the Cold War against the United States. Moreover, they looked to the Chinese (1949) and Cuban (1959) revolutions because they appeared to offer a new path to socialism that suited the interest of underdeveloped countries that had a large peasantry and a small working class. The idea that guerrilla struggle in the countryside was essential to achieve national liberation became central to Third World Nationalist ‘Marxism’.^[10]

Many on the European left, who opposed the Soviet Union’s bureaucratic oppression of workers and peasants, came to see Mao’s China and Castro’s Cuba as favourable socialist alternatives. Rodney’s mentor CLR James, for instance, supported the workers Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against the Soviet Union and advocated for a proletarian revolution in the advanced western capitalist countries. But he also saw the Cuban Revolution and its strategy of guerrilla warfare as a model for Third World revolutions.^[11] Rodney would display a similar ambivalence towards revolutionary strategy as Third World guerrilla intellectuals such as Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, influenced him as much as Marx and Lenin. While he acknowledged the centrality of strikes and workers’ struggles in his later writings on the Russian Revolution, he also believed that guerrilla warfare presented a viable approach to revolutions in the Global South.

**Join the Walter Rodney symposium on the 80th anniversary of his birth and fifty years since the publication of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (see link below to register).**

Rodney, however, failed to understand why the strategy of guerrilla warfare that the Third World revolutions adopted was incompatible with Marxism, which emphasised revolution through working class self-activity. As guerrilla warfare involved shifting the struggle from the town to the countryside, Third World intellectuals claimed the agent of the revolution was not the urban working class but the peasantry led by commanders from the urban middle class. They had thus revised Marxism and removed it from its proletarian base. Che Guevara saw the working class in underdeveloped countries as a weak and impotent force, while Fanon even claimed it as an obstacle to national liberation because workers benefited from colonialism. The Guinean leader Amilcar Cabral, who directed the guerrilla war against Portugal in Guinea-Bissau with unparalleled success in Africa, had initially attempted to organise the small working class in Bissau. However, he turned to guerrilla struggle after the Portuguese massacre of 50 dockworkers in 1959. Che Guevara continued to pay lip service to the international proletarian revolution and affiliate with Marxism despite his revisions. He wrote: “The peasant class of Latin America, basing itself on the ideology of the working class whose great thinkers discovered the social laws governing us, will provide the great liberating army of the future.”^[12]

Guevara forgot that the great thinkers—Marx, Trotsky and Lenin—had argued that the essence of a socialist revolution lies in the self-emancipation of the working class, whereby “the proletariat becomes the subject of history, not the object.”^[13] In the absence of the proletariat, the guerrilla wars of the Third World led not to socialism but to bureaucratic one-party regimes that resembled the Soviet Union. The seeds of this failure were obvious in the contradiction in aims within the guerrilla army—the elitist middle-class commanders wanted to rule, while the peasants wanted land. As a result, the middle class mobilised the peasantry to give itself state power, and then exploited and oppressed the masses to bring the nation out of underdevelopment.^[14]

Despite its flaws, guerrilla warfare had nonetheless inflicted serious defeats to western imperialism in Africa, Asia and Latin America. By the mid-1960s, it had become the main form of anti-colonial resistance in Portuguese-speaking west and southern Africa. That explains why Rodney, throughout his life, saw this strategy as a high form of politics, convinced that it forced revolutionaries to educate and mobilise the masses. He believed in the redemptive qualities of revolutionary violence that Fanon discussed in his book on anti-colonial struggles, The Wretched of the Earth.[15] Fanon argued that this violence freed the colonised from their inferiority complex and transformed them into proud independent people.^[16] Rodney especially saw this transformation occur in the guerrilla liberation movements against Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau. He felt attached to them, as he had witnessed Portuguese dictator Salazar’s repressive fascism when he was conducting his PhD research in Lisbon.

The national liberation movements in the Global South informed Rodney’s ideas on the role of revolutionary intellectuals in the struggle. Rodney was particularly impressed with the Amilcar Cabral. He admired that Cabral had thoroughly analysed the formation of the various classes in his country and based his anti-colonial mobilisation strategy upon the sensitivities of each class towards the colonial state. In his analysis of Guinean society in 1964, Cabral had found that the educated middle class, which he belonged to, could become an elitist and greedy caste that would compromise with the old colonial power to enrich itself.^[17] However, he idealistically maintained that this middle class also had the potential to lead the anti-colonial struggle only if it committed “class suicide” to resurrect itself as revolutionary cadres “identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which they belong”.^[18] Rodney nevertheless took from Cabral the idea that revolutionary intellectuals must understand the historical reality they seek to transform. They must do away with their elitism, learn from the people and grasp their needs to influence the struggle.^[19]

On 5 July 1966, the day Patricia gave birth to their son Shaka, Rodney earned his PhD in African history. He then moved with his family to Tanzania to teach history for one year and meet the Mozambican and Angolan freedom fighters stationed there. But Rodney forged his reputation as a revolutionary when he relocated to Jamaica to lecture at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in January 1968.

Join the Walter Rodney Foundation for the 19th Annual Walter Rodney Symposium on “Walter Rodney: 50 Years of ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,'” which will be held on Saturday, March 26, 2022 (10:00am EST) – click here to register.

Chinedu Chukwudinma is a socialist activist and writer based in London. He writes on African politics, popular struggles, and the history of working-class resistance on the continent and is a member of ROAPE’s editorial board. Join Chinedu for the launch of his new book, A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney, on 1 April at Bookmarks Bookshop, London (register here).

Featured photograph: Walter and Patricia Rodney in Tanzania.

Notes

[1] Lewis, Rupert, 1998, Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought. (Press University of the West Indies), pp.31-35.

[2] Rodney, Walter, 1990, The Making of an African Intellectual (Africa World Press, Inc.), p.27.

[3] Fage, J.D, 1969 “Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Context of West African History” The Journal of African History, Vol.10, No.3, pp. 393-404.

[4] See Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545 to 1800, (Oxford University Press, 1970) pp.1-297.

[5] Lewis, 1998, p.36.

[6] Rodney, 1990, p.31-32.

[7] Brown, Geoff, 2019, “Tackling racism: the Communist Party’s mixed record”, International Socialism 163 (summer).

[8] Boukari-Yabara, Amzat, 2010, Walter Rodney (1942-1980): Itinéraire et Mémoire d’un Intellectuel Africain, PhD thesis, (Centre d’Études Africaines CEAf, EHESS) pp.389-402.

[9] Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, (Verso, London, 2018), pp.108.

[10] John Molyneux, 1983, “What is the real Marxist tradition?”, International Socialism 20,

[11] See CLR James, 1967, “The Gathering Forces”.

[12] Che Guevara, 1961, “Cuba: Historical exception or vanguard in the anticolonial struggle?”

[13] Tony Cliff, Deflected Permanent Revolution, International socialism 12, 1963.

[14] John Molyneux, 1983.

[15] Rodney, 1990, p.45.

[16] See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. (Harmondsworth, 1967) pp.35-95. For Rodney’s views on armed struggle see Rodney, 1990, pp.51-52.

[17] Amilcar Cabral, 1964, “A Brief Analysis of Guinean Society” in Revolution in Guinea.

[18] Amilcar Cabral, 1966, “Weapon of Theory”.

[19] Firoze Manji, and Bill Fletcher, Claim No Easy Victories: the Legacy of Amilcar Cabral. (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2013), pp.297-315.

Racist Europe – Ukraine, human rights & the wretched of the earth

ROAPE

March 21, 2022

As the total disregard for people of African descent is shown in the context of the deadly invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Christiane Ndedi Essombe and Benjamin Maiangwa argue that the contempt and compulsive need to invalidate, belittle and dehumanize people of African descent remains unchanged in an irredeemably racist Europe. Essombe and Maiangwe ask what does this racism reveal about international human rights frameworks?

By Christiane Ndedi Essombe and Benjamin Maiangwa

Despite the supposed universality of human rights, we are constantly reminded that these ‘rights’ seemingly never quite apply the same way to racialized people.

It is worth highlighting that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was signed after World War II, at a time where virtually all of Africa was still colonized by European powers, Jim Crow laws were still enforced in the United States and the vast majority of Indigenous peoples could not vote in Canada. Such an omission, in and of itself, may have been the silent admission that universal human rights were not intended to be so universal after all.

The multiple violations of human rights against people of African descent specifically, from the Transatlantic slave tradeto the state-sanctioned murders of suspected Haitians in the Dominican Republic, can leave one wondering whether anti-blackness is the oldest and most accepted international foreign policy. Indeed, the UDHR does not seem to apply to people of African descent who still die in droves in the Mediterranean, remain at risks of getting beaten by US border agents as they exercise their right to seek asylum and can get forcibly tested, evicted and framed as carriers of COVID-19 or Ebola without seemingly any breach of human rights frameworks.

The ongoing armed conflict in Ukraine has understandably shaken and shocked an overwhelming number of governmentsand citizens around the world. For many, the last few weeks may very well have been a reminder that history is written in real time and brutality is still the order of international politics. An assault on an independent sovereign country and deadly attacks on civilians – including children – is no longer the distant rhetoric from past historical events but constitute instead a contemporary reality.

NATO country members openly shared that they are “more united than ever” as Russia faces “unprecedented sanctions”. Several NGOs and UN agencies have also immediately joined forces to ensure the safety of the people of Ukraine, illustrating a clear commitment to their human rights and a stand against the invasion of Ukraine overall. The understandable and anticipated condemnation has been swift and unequivocal, even if ineffective so far.

Yet this response has not been equally applicable to non-Ukrainians, particularly people of African descent. Even non-white people fleeing wars and poverty on the continent, or in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan are treated with disgust or allowed to drown in huge numbers in the Mediterranean. This nonresponse to the plights of the “Other” shows the cracks in the so-called universal responsibility to protect, while also demonstrating the nonchalance of African leaders who treat their own people as non-beings at home and abroad.

In any event, it would be expected that during an armed conflict, international human rights law would apply for “everyone within the state’s jurisdiction or effective control”. This implies that representatives of the state ought to guarantee everybody’s human rights regardless of citizenship, including their right to safety as per three of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Yet, several videos have circulated showing how African students, and South Asian individuals were denied that very right. Waiting in the cold for hours, threatened to get shot at, denied access onto trains and forced to walk for hours , it appears that these individuals were not to benefit from the very international laws that should protect them at any time.

“They’re not allowing Black people […], they prioritize Ukrainians” shared a witness recounting their experience as they attempted to leave Ukraine. In addition to illustrating a clear violation of international human rights by discriminating people based on their skin color, this sentence speaks to the intrinsic functioning of racial hierarchy. Black people are seen as belonging to the bottom of such a hierarchy: they are existentially understood as the “Other” who cannot enjoy the same rights as the majority. The only conclusion that can be drawn in the face of such accounts: the treatment of Black foreigners and South Asian foreigners within an emergency context is a manifestation of racism and a clear confirmation that the ‘non-western’ is indeed the wretched of the earth, failed by their own governments and the world community.

Further corroborating that conclusion are the neighboring government’s deliberate changes to prevent documentation and paperwork from jeopardizing border crossing for those fleeing the war. As such, for Ukrainian authorities, documentation cannot be used as a premise to discriminate between individuals. The only reference that remains is a phenotypical one and, effectively, the distinction between white people and non-white people was applied. White people, seemingly regardless of nationality, were able to leave without much difficulty.

Evidently, international human rights principles are colour-blind which might be the very reason why they repeatedly fail to acknowledge, anticipate, and address racism. In 2022, after global condemnation of racism following the videotaped murder of George Floyd, the sudden amnesia and denial about racism as a global phenomenon is both disturbing and revealing. Racism is a critical underpinning of the nation-state ideology. As such, in a nation based on homogeneity, in this case European ancestry, so-called “minorities” are racialized individuals for whom the state laws will not be applied the same way. In such a construction, the very fabric of the society is based on a hierarchical treatment between the majority who belongs and the minority who is only tolerated as long as it knows its place.

That very premise – the differential application of human rights towards racialized populations – is constantly left unchallenged despite being constantly corroborated, be it internationally or in internal disparities in police brutality, incarceration rates, and poverty rates in countries such as Canada and US.

On 1 March, 2022, the African Union shared that it was “disturbed” by reports of African nationals fleeing the war in Ukraine and being denied access to neighbouring countries. In keeping with the common habit of using ‘discrimination’ as a euphemism for racism in political statements, the statement also fell short of calling the treatment of African nationals attempting to flee Ukraine for what it was: racism and ineptitude on the part of the African governments.

What does it say then, that both non-African and African governmental bodies alike ignore the obvious plight of people of African descent and other racialized populations?

What does it say that for many, condemning racist practices against African people inherently distracts away the attention from the “real issue”?

These reactions, one could argue, point to the same underpinning: in human rights laws and in the common imaginary, the individual to protect is inherently seen as white and somehow without of a racial identity. It follows that non-White people are still not seen as deserving of rights and protection.

That would also explain, at least in part, the double standards in rhetoric and overall media coverage witnessed since the beginning of this war.

When such a blatant and terrifying aggression could be an opportunity to both renew a commitment to prevent wars and defend human rights for all, it appears that it is currently failing abysmally.

As a result, when facts show that Ukrainian civilians are caught in a terrible war and deserved to be safe and that non-white people are simultaneously subjected to racism by Ukrainian authorities even during the war, there is seemingly no framework to comprehend this horror.

Two manifestations of human rights violations end up pitted against each other in the Olympics of Oppression instead of being analyzed as stemming from a similar ideological ill: the pursuit of domination over a given people. In any case, the observable consequence is that, once again, human rights don’t extend to racialized people and specifically not to people of African descent.

Does it imply then that people of African descent are already perceived as inexistant and that extending human rights to them is seen as unnecessary?

Death of a people and its civilization does not seem to have such obvious characteristics. It is often only in hindsight that one can appreciate the erasure of a people from international frameworks. Complicating that endeavor is the fact that often, Africans themselves only know about their history as told by former colonial powers or by the Africans who ended up assimilating into a supposedly colorless, objective, approach to their own people.

Fanon warned us that “for the colonized subject, objectivity is always directed against [them]”. It must then be concluded that “objective” international human rights cannot possibly apply objectively to African nationals.

The odds are even further reduced when the geographical setting is Europe itself: the colonial “metropole” that normalized the use of astoundingly barbaric methods to conduct their hegemonic ambitions and carry its so-called mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) for the purported welfare of the “uncivilized African”.

Centuries pass by and yet, it appears that the contempt and compulsive need to invalidate, belittle and dehumanize the non-western Other – in this case, the person of African descent – remains, even in the context of a war.

Evidence piles up and yet, the very authorities that should speak up against the mistreatment of any other racialized people, remain timid.

Again, we ask, what do these reactions (or lack thereof) reveal about international human rights frameworks? What do they reveal about the existence of African people? Where do they belong?

Even on the African continent, it could be argued that laws and political decisions do not protect our existence and the sustainability of our cultures and heritage.

It is estimated that hundreds of pre-colonial African languages are close to extinction and many have already disappeared.Discourses proffering various philosophical approaches to governance and social relations such as Negritude (nativist humanism), Afrocentricity, Pan-Africanism, African Socialism (Ujamaa or familyhood), and Ubuntu (togetherness) have for the most part disintegrated after the fanfare of political independence subsided. The architectural landscape on the African continent counts very few remaining pre-colonial artefacts except for the royal palaces of Abomey in Benin, Rock-Hewn churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia and the Djenné mosque in Mali.

Finally, if we look at the organizations of societies themselves on the continent, whether it is populous centers, the division of labour or existing socio-economic classes, they can all be traced back to an era where the erasure of people of African descent was an explicit political ambition.

Whether it is abroad or on the continent, it seems that no legislative or human rights framework can effectively protect the rights and existence of African people.

As the total disregard for people of African descent is further evidenced, this time in the context of the deadly invasion of Ukraine by Russia, perhaps it is worth considering Issa Shivji’s clarion call for an anti-imperialist reconceptualization of human rights that would ‘unreservedly’ be centred on the collective rights and struggles of oppressed people.

Christiane Essombe holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Montreal School of Public Health. She has worked with various marginalized populations such as people with albinism in Tanzania, migrating people at the US/Mexico border, survivors of the Colombian armed conflict and refugee claimants in Montreal. She is currently completing a PhD in sociology at the University of Cape Town.

Benjamin Maiangwa is Assistant Professor in the department of Political Science at Lakehead University. Maiangwa’s research focuses broadly on the intersection of politics, culture, and society. His recent publications use storytelling, action research, and critical ethnography to explore notions of contested belonging, mobility, and how people experience conflict and peace in everyday life.

Featured Photograph: African and South Asian refugees waiting for transport after fleeing from the war in Ukraine, near a border crossing in Poland, March 1, 2022 (Markus Schreiber).

‘Women who sweat’ – working women organising in Dar es Salaam

ROAPE

March 17, 2022

The Manzese Working Women’s Cooperative, or UWAWAMA, unites women in Tanzania seeking a cooperative alternative to the “slavery” of financial institutions. A recent meeting on International Women’s Day, was a chance for women to unite, organise, and articulate their demands. The women who participated in the day’s discussions summed up their demands for working women in a declaration. ROAPE posts the English translation of the declaration and an introduction by Michaela Collord.

Manzese Working Women’s Cooperative (Ushirika wa Wanawake Wavujajasho Manzese, UWAWAMA)

International Women’s Day “brings together all working women to discuss our struggle against exploitation,” declared Stella Mwasa as she invited working women and men to gather for a meeting on the 8 March in Manzese, a working-class area of Dar es Salaam.

Stella is a leading organiser with the Manzese Working Women’s Cooperative, or UWAWAMA as per the Swahili acronym. UWAWAMA unites the savings and loan groups of petty traders and cargo porters, seeking a cooperative alternative to the “slavery” of financial institutions.

UWAWAMA hosted the meeting in a rented space, dubbed Amy Garvey Hall, which the cooperative uses for both its economic and political activities. But the meeting was for all wanawake wavujasho, meaning all working women, or more evocatively, all “women who sweat”. It brought together not only the urban-based petty traders of UWAWAMA but a group of rural small-scale farmers, women members of the Tanzania Network of Small-scale Farmer Organisations (MVIWATA). Other groups with representatives at the meeting included HakiArdhi, JULAWATA, Kilosa Land Movement, and underground hip hop groups like Watunza Misingi, among others.

As with previous UWAWAMA gatherings marking International Women’s Day, this year’s meeting was a chance for women to unite, organise, and articulate their demands. The women who participated in the day’s discussions summed up these demands in a declaration, part of a “struggle to remind society that women’s demands differ depending on class” and to explicitly define these demands “for working women.”

In the spirit of International Women’s Day, and to “remind society” beyond Tanzania, here is an English translation of the declaration. The original Swahili version is available here.

Six abiding demands from working women for Women’s Day

We working women, urban and rural, including small business operators and smallholder farmers, have come together in solidarity to celebrate International Working Women’s Day today, 8 March 2022, in Amy Garvey Hall, Manzese. As women who face a variety of challenges under all oppressive systems, we realize that our interests are different from the interests of upper class women. Therefore, we decided to establish our alternative forum to celebrate Women’s Day. After a lengthy debate through this forum, we declare the following six abiding demands for working women.

Full economic freedom

Despite there being many campaigns for women’s economic empowerment, like microfinance initiatives, a large group of working women have ended up the slaves of financial institutions. Instead of being empowered, we are chained by debt that exacerbates our poverty. This is because the solutions offered to tackle women’s poor economic conditions do more to entrench an oppressive economic system than to liberate women.

Many initiatives for women’s economic empowerment benefit financial institutions more than they liberate us. Through these campaigns, we are encouraged to take out exploitative loans, and then to become selfish to the extent that we will do anything to pay them back, including exploiting and oppressing other women.

We working women are tired of being slaves. We no longer want deceptive empowerment initiatives that are useless to us. We have unanimously decided that we will continue to fight for full economic independence, and we want it to be known that such freedom will not be achieved if a large group of women continue to be enslaved by financial institutions. So we will continue to fight against oppressive financial institutions and against all systems of class exploitation until all women and all working people are free.

Freedom to own land and protection from land-grabbing

We working women are the major producers given that a large percentage of rural smallholder farmers and urban small business operators are women. Land is our main source of livelihood. Yet the patriarchy deprives us of our right to own land because of our gender, and the capitalist system robs us of that right along with working men because of our economic class. Because of capitalism, neo-colonialists have been given the name of investors and are protected by the state when they plunder our land.

Every time the government announces the arrival of investors in our areas, we are filled with grief and anxiety because, in our experience, we can expect nothing aside the loss of our homes and our productive areas. We are always told that investors are coming to bring us prosperity, wellbeing and development, but reality and experience have shown that they come to destroy us by depriving us of our land, which is the main means of production, and by turning us into labourers in their fields or factories.

Others come as investors then plunder our land. Yet later they end up fencing off that land without even using it for any productive activity. Whether in rural areas where our fields are stolen or in cities where our businesses are evicted, the cry of all working people is the same.

We unanimously say that we are tired of being turned into serfs on our own land, and of becoming producers without food or other basic necessities because our land is stolen. For us, land is our identity, our heritage, and our life. There is nothing more important than fighting for our lives. There is no greater right to defend than the right to life, and to separate us from our land is to rob us of our lives. Therefore, we will continue to claim that right and to fight land-grabbing in all its various forms.

Free social services

In this unjust system, everything is turned into a commodity for sale, including important social services like health, education, clean and safe drinking water, and more. Since the system itself has created classes of the haves and have-nots, the vast majority of the have-nots cannot afford such services due to lack of money.

When it comes to discrimination in these services, we working women are the main victims. We are the ones who lose our lives by failing to access quality health care during childbirth because we cannot afford the high cost in hospitals that provide good care, many of which are private. Even when we go to government hospitals, we still need to purchase medical equipment for maternity care, which are also sold at a high price. Maternity services start at a cost of TSh75,000 (US$30) rising to TSh200,000 (US$90) and up to Tsh3,000,000 (US$1300) depending on the type of hospital and the type of delivery, natural or caesarean section. These costs are in addition to the cost of purchasing medical equipment. In short, in this system where we are forced to purchase essential health care, working women are at greater risk of losing our lives or those of our children during childbirth.

The health sector is just one facet that shows how we live in a society that degrades human dignity by selling services. Since without these services we cannot live nor safely bring a new life into the world, for us women, our rights cannot be realized if the right to access these essential services discriminates against us and the whole class of working people. We are tired of living in fear of losing our lives and the lives of our children. Thus, we want a system in which our human dignity is given priority over money.

The right to the city for all, without discrimination

In urban areas, we working women earn our living by running small businesses in the middle of the city. Our dependence on such businesses stems from being the victims of an economy that fails to protect our livelihoods while concentrating the means of production in the hands of the few.

The economy fails to focus on production and thus ends up creating a nation of informal traders. Among us, there are victims of land grabbing that deprived us of our farms as well as a large group that could work productively in factories but that remains unemployed because there are no factories. Thus, our only option is the business of petty trading, and we cannot operate in areas where there are no customers as all our needs depend on this business.

In addition to relying on our businesses, we are also major service providers for people of all classes in the city. We are the cleaners and cooks in offices and other urban areas. In short, all the activities of upper-class people in the city depend in every way on our services. Yet, whether we can live and earn a livelihood in the city is at the mercy of the state and not a recognized or respected right. We working women – as well as men of the working class – have been called derogatory names to justify the abuse, humiliation and theft inflicted on us, including the brutal evictions from urban areas.

Since cities are built with our sweat and through our taxes, we want our right to remain and do our business in the heart of the city. We are tired of being harassed and robbed of our property under the pretext of sanitation and urban planning. We do not accept to be second class citizens in cities that thrive on our sweat and our labour. Thus, we want the relevant authorities to plan cities based on the needs of all citizens without discrimination. As the main victims of urban planning that discriminates against the majority of urban residents, we will continue to fight for a “right to the city” for all without exception until a revolution to establish a fully equal system is achieved.

Decent jobs for all

We working women recognize that the employment problem is systemic, and that it is not due to individual laziness or lack of ingenuity as we are told. We recognize that relations of production have been engineered such that a large group of able-bodied people are unemployed and turned into the slaves of a small group that monopolises the means of production. And that slavery thrives even more where the numbers of unemployed grow larger.

As working women, we are also affected by this problem, as we are educating our children with difficulty through our small businesses and farming. Sometimes we must sell everything we own to afford their schooling, which is also commodified in this system. Yet even after all that, our youth come back home and continue to be our dependents because there are no jobs.

As victims, we oppose all misleading ideologies that try to cover up these systemic weaknesses. We reject all ideologies that blame the victims for failing to find employment when it is the unjust system itself that has failed to create jobs. In solidarity with our children, we will continue to fight for decent jobs and to wish that all workers enjoy the fruits of their labour.

An end to gender-based violence in all its forms

We working women are the biggest victims of gender-based violence. Due to the patriarchal system, we have grown up experiencing beatings and harassment, among other forms of abuse. We recognize that all women go through this ordeal, but it is indisputable that we are the biggest victims. Due to the hardships caused by capitalism, working women are vulnerable to violence as they are victims of men’s stress and anger resulting from the cruelty of life. And since everything costs money, our economic situation deprives us of access to justice when we experience violence.

Given this reality, we will continue to fight to end gender-based violence, and beyond that, for full gender equality, which we believe will only be achieved when all oppressive systems are broken and a fully equal society is established, one that respects the dignity of each person.

Thus, we have decided:

(a) All of us present today will continue to create alternative organisations uniting working women wherever we are, raising our voices together to fight for these demands.

(b) We will continue to use these organisations to reach out to other working women and to encourage them to join forces and fight for our demands.

(c) We will continue to educate ourselves and to build class consciousness between us and working men to create strong solidarity that will enable us to bring about a revolution in the system and build a society with dignity, justice and prosperity for all.

This is a struggle to remind society that women’s demands differ depending on class. These six abiding demands are for working women and all working people, and we, working women, will continue to fulfil our revolutionary duty by leading the struggle for these demands.

Introduction and translation from Swahili by Michaela Collord. Collord teaches politics at the University of Nottingham and is active in labour organising both in the UK and in East Africa.

Read roape.net’s series of interviews with African feminists, Talking Back, edited by Rama Salla Dieng here.

Featured Photograph: Members of the Manzese Working Women’s Cooperative (Ushirika wa Wanawake Wavujajasho Manzese, UWAWAMA) on 8 March 2022.

A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney

ROAPE

March 15, 2022

This year is the 80^th anniversary of the birth of the Guyanese revolutionary Walter Rodney, and fifty years since he published the ground-breaking How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. We are serialising ROAPE’s Chinedu Chukwudinma’s study of Rodney’s life A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney – due to be published on 23 March (Rodney’s birthday).

Over nine weeks we will be publishing Chukwudinma’s full study, from Rodney’s early years in Georgetown, to Jamaica, the UK, Tanzania and back to Guyana. His life encompassed the great movements of the time, and he was a leading activist and thinker of this tumultuous period.

Aware of the inherently destructive capacities of capitalism, its incessant drive to war and conquest, and the relentless decimation of the natural environment, Rodney realised that the most important task for humanity was the revolutionary transformation of the present.

In the first part of Chukwudinma’s study of Walter Rodney, he explains that Rodney was a Marxist of impressive originality and in his last years of his life, his ideas and practice developed as he moved closer to Marxism. Chukwudinma also looks at Rodney’s early life in Guyana before he moved to Jamaica to continue his studies.

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

The Marxist

Walter Rodney was almost the same age as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr when he was assassinated on 13 June 1980 in Guyana at the age of 38. Throughout his short life, he waged a relentless battle against the horrors of capitalism, for which he should be revered as one of the great black leaders of the last century.

Rodney is best known for his famous book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa which he wrote in Tanzania in 1972. Yet, his incredible journey and contributions to the struggle of the oppressed are largely unknown beyond Pan-African activist and academic circles. If some remember him as an influential Black Power advocate in Jamaica, few know about the time he spent in Africa. Fewer still remember the revolutionary struggle he led before his death in Guyana.

This short introduction is an overview of Rodney’s life, activism and political thought, which aims to preserve and promote his legacy. Rodney’s family and the Walter Rodney Foundation have already done important work in this respect. In recent years, they have republished Rodney’s Groundings with My Brothers, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and released his manuscript on the Russian Revolution. However, most biographies on Rodney are currently out of print. Readers unable to access academic libraries often cannot obtain Rupert Lewis’s Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought. This book intends to encourage young black people to read about Rodney and fight for the ideas he stood for.

Scholars have attached various labels to Rodney’s ideas and political identity. They have described him as a Pan-Africanist, a Black Nationalist or an anti-imperialist. Meanwhile, his most ardent supporters identify as ‘Rodneyites’. Although there is some truth to all these descriptions, they fail to highlight that the mature Rodney aspired above all to be a Marxist. This point must be stressed, in particular, against those who want to claim Rodney for the ‘Black Radical’ tradition, along with CLR James, WEB DuBois and Richard Right.^[1] The advocates of that tradition misconstrue Marxism as European in its outlook, and therefore incompatible with black liberation— Rodney never believed that. They suppose that black revolutionaries must outgrow Marxism to grasp the plight of black people against imperialism.^[2]Rodney’s journey demonstrates the opposite: the more he developed his ideas, the greater he relied on Marxism to understand racism and organise for black liberation.

Yet Rodney’s Marxist writing, speeches and activism extend beyond black liberation to outline key lessons for revolutionaries today. They teach us about the role of the working class as the gravedigger of capitalism. They also reflect on the debate about socialism from above versus socialism from below, and the role of radical intellectuals. Finally, they explain the Marxist view on race and class. Rodney does not have the final word on any of these topics. He died before he reached his full potential. But Rodney left behind a monumental body of work that strengthens our struggle against capitalism.

The Early Years

On 23 March 1942, during the Second World War, Pauline Rodney gave birth to her second son, Walter, in Georgetown, in what was then British Guyana. The 1939-1945 war, which ravaged Europe and weakened the British Empire, gave the colonised peoples of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean hope of winning their freedom. They organised mass movements against their colonial rulers through clubs, associations and political parties. In British Guyana, Pauline and her husband Edward joined the leading organisation of the nationalist movement, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), in the 1950s. She worked as a housewife and seamstress while he was an independent tailor who, in difficult times, sought work in large establishments. They were attracted to the PPP’s anti-colonial rhetoric that promised a new society, where Guyanese workers would be wealthier and free. The Rodneys sent their elder children to distribute the PPP manifesto around the neighbourhood. Walter Rodney learnt at 11 years of age that those who owned wealthy houses often despised the PPP. He also realised that he wasn’t welcome in their yards— once had to run from a dog that someone let loose on him. Rodney would remember these leafleting sessions as his introduction to the class struggle.^[3]

Reminiscing upon his childhood in 1975, Rodney said he grew into Marxism with ease “because the PPP was the only mass party… and its leadership explicitly said, ‘we are socialist’”.^[4] He further praised the PPP for uniting Guyanese of African and Indian descent against the British. Such racial alliances were rare, given the British had historically divided both communities to better rule over them. Rodney’s nostalgic recollection of the PPP’s heyday echoed the overwhelming support Guyanese people gave the party in the 1950s. In 1953, the PPP won 75 per cent of seats in the House Assembly elections and its leader, the Pro-Soviet Indian dentist Cheddi Jagan, became Prime Minister. But the PPP’s rule only lasted 133 days, as the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union interfered in Guyanese politics. Under pressure from the US, Britain sent troops to its colony to remove the PPP and allegedly stop the spread of ‘communism’.

Despite its short rule, the PPP managed to increase the number of educational scholarships available to young people. It wanted to prepare Guyana for independence by broadening the number of educated Guyanese. Rodney, who excelled at school, belonged to the only generation that benefited from the PPP’s reform—he earned a scholarship to attend Queen’s College, the most prestigious high school in the country. Most of his five siblings were not offered the same opportunities and dropped out of school when their parents could no longer afford tuition fees. In 1960, Rodney won another scholarship to study history at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Kingston, Jamaica.^[5]

Rodney attended the UWI in the years leading to Jamaican independence from Britain in 1962. He witnessed the university embark on what he called a “nationalist pilgrimage”, which broke ties with its colonial past. The Department of History stood at the forefront of this nationalist awakening. It was no longer exclusively preoccupied with teaching its students about European history and civilisation as it had done under colonialism. It now introduced classes on African history and the slave trade to help them better understand the factors that shaped Caribbean Identity. It established Eric Williams’ book Capitalism and Slavery and CLR James’ The Black Jacobins as core readings on the curriculum. Few academics discussed these writings as examples of Marxist literature—instead, they served to arouse nationalist consciousness. West Indians students felt emotional when reading these books. Williams’ writing revealed to them how the enslavement of their ancestors set in motion Western industrial development, while James’ story of the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804 gave them hope. They learnt that black people could resist their masters and win. These books encouraged Rodney to write an article on the cruelty of slavery entitled the Negro Slave and spend time in the campus library reading on pre-colonial African history.^[6]

Rodney’s professors and peers adored him. He was a smart and friendly student. He captained the UWI debating team in his first year and made his reputation as a sharp mind and bold speaker. Rodney carried his speaking ability into student campaigns for the West Indies Federation—an unsuccessful regional project that aimed to merge former British colonies into a single independent state. But Rodney’s enthusiasm for the UWI’s nationalist pilgrimage faded. Even his most progressive nationalist teachers were complete philistines when it came to questions of class and socialism. The students were no better. Rodney lost his second presidential election to the West Indian Students’ Union to a conservative candidate. His opponents accused him of being a dictator because he had travelled to Cuba. That criticism, however, did not discourage Rodney’s fascination with Cuba. He had travelled to the island in 1960, a year after the victorious revolution, in which Fidel Castro and Che Guevara led a guerrilla war against the pro-American dictatorship. Fifteen years later, Rodney still remembered the pride and sense of freedom that the revolution gave the Cuban people. “The Cubans”, he said, “were running and jumping, really living the revolution in a way that was completely outside of anything that one could read anywhere”.^[7]

His journey to Moscow in his senior year also made a good impression on him. For the first time, he saw workers and peasants partaking in activities, such as aeroplane travel or ballet recitals that were reserved for the elite in Western countries. Rodney returned from his travels with literature. He took a keen interest in Lenin and wrote a paper on his leadership of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. Lenin’s life experience showed Rodney that it was possible to be both a revolutionary organiser and an intellectual, unlike what his professors had told him.^[8] He now aspired to dedicate his radical intellect to strengthen the movements of the oppressed in the Global South. Rodney, however, would take his first major steps to become a Marxist thinker not in Jamaica but in London.

Next week Chukwudinma looks at the formation of Walter Rodney’s Marxism while a PhD student in London in the early 1960s.

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

Chinedu Chukwudinma’s A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney is due to be published next week (Bookmarks Publications, 2022)

Featured Photograph: Leo Zeilig ‘Walter was way ahead of his time‘ The Elephant (19 June 2020).

Notes

[1] See Manning Marable, 2011, ‘Marxism, Memory, and the Black Radical Tradition: Introduction to Volume 13’, Souls, vol.13, no.1, pp. 1-2.

[2] Cedric Robinson supposes that for CLR James, WEB Dubois and Richard Right. See Cedric. J, 2000, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, (The University of North Carolina Press), pp. 1-319.

[3] Rodney, Walter, 1990, The Making of an African Intellectual (Africa World Press, Inc.) pp.6-7.

[4] Rodney, 1990, p. 9.

[5] Lewis, Rupert, 1998, Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought. (Press University of the West Indies), pp. 2-6.

[6] Rodney, 1990, pp. 12-15.

[7] Rodney, 1990, p. 17.

[8] Rodney, 1990, pp. 17-18.

Afrika and reparations activism in the UK – an interview with Esther Stanford-Xosei

ROAPE

March 10, 2022

ROAPE’s Ben Radley interviews Pan-Afrikan activist Esther Stanford-Xosei. Stanford-Xosei speaks about the struggle for the total liberation and unification of Afrikan people and an indispensable and self-empowering reparatory justice. She argues that reparatory justice and Pan-Afrikan liberation is central to reparations activism in Britain.

Ben Radley: Can you please describe to us a little about your personal background, and what experiences or encounters had the strongest influence on your early political development?

Esther Stanford-Xosei: I was born in South London and brought into this world by parents who were born in the Caribbean (Barbados and Guyana), yet who retained their genetic and cultural memory of Afrika. My activism has sought to re-member the historic, geopolitical and cultural ties between Diaspora communities and our ancestral Motherland, Afrika. By vocation I am a jurisconsult, or legal specialist in applied jurisprudence, the science, philosophy and study of law through its actual practice. As a jurisconsult, my unique professional niche is serving as a Pan-Afrikan internationalist ‘guerrilla lawyer’; a grassroots scholar-activist law practitioner. I am also in the process of completing my PhD research on the UK contingent of the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations.

The Anti-Apartheid Movement had a strong influence on my early political development. I recall that in 1987, at age 13, I entered a competition for young Black writers, and my winning entry was a piece of creative writing under the theme ‘Not only equality but justice’, about the abolition of apartheid featuring the role of an imagined woman protagonist who was a freedom-fighting ‘mother of the nation’ named Mauba Sheshea. The impact of the Anti-Apartheid Movement had a strong influence on my emerging race and national consciousness as an Afrikan woman in the Diaspora as well as recognition of the connections between global racism and imperialism.

Another significant encounter was my activism as an aspiring lawyer as part of a UK organisation of ‘Black Lawyers’, to effect and secure holistic reparatory justice; organising with fellow Pan-Afrikanists who were in exile in the UK and had been involved in Afrikan liberation struggles in their home countries in Afrika. Recognising the fact that there was a political vacuum in championing the cause of Pan-Afrikan Reparations, these encounters led to my involvement in 2000, with fellow-Ghanaian Pan-Afrikanists Kofi Mawuli Klu and Kwame Adofo Sampong, in co-founding the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe.

Part of your academic work has focused on studying the history of reparations activism in the UK. How far back does this history go? Who were its earliest advocates, and did they share a similar understanding of reparations to how the issue is framed and addressed today?

The history of reparations organising in the UK goes back to the eighteenth century. Some of the earliest documentation of calls for reparations that influenced organising in Britain go back to a letter written by Fiaga Agaja Trudo Audati in 1726, addressed to King George of England demanding an end to chattel enslavement and trafficking, by setting up ‘local plantation agriculture’ within Ouidah, a coastal city in the then Kingdom of Whydah (in what is now Benin). This intervention by Agaja has increased awareness about indigenous Afrikan abolitionists in Afrika and their influence on the Slavery Abolitionist Movement within and beyond the UK. Some of the earliest documented organising to effect and secure reparatory justice can be traced to the Sons of Africa, including one of its key protagonists Attobah Kwodjo Enu aka Ottobah Cugoano (1757-1791). Cugoano was an enslaved Afrikan originally from the Fante village of Ajumako in present-day Ghana. The ‘Sons of Africa’ movement was formed in London (1797) by Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano (1745-97) as a “political group led by Afrikan abolitionists who campaigned to end slavery”.

However, these men were not just abolitionists; they were also reparationists. In 1787, Cugoano published the book Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. In the post-script to the 1791 edition, Cugoano raises “the issue of adequate reparation and restitution for the injuries enslaved persons received”, making him the first published Afrikan author in English to denounce the trafficking and enslavement of Afrikans and to pronounce the Afrikan human right to resistance against enslavement, as well as to advocate in a letter to the Prince of Wales the demand for reparations including ‘restitution for the injuries’.

What is traditionally termed ‘repatriation’, a return to one’s homeland, represents the oldest form of Afrikan Reparations, dating from the fifteenth century when the first Afrikans were kidnapped and trafficked from the continent and their cultural and spiritual way of life. Cognisant of Afrikan peoples’ desire to be reconnected with their homeland, in the eighteenth century, the British Government developed a nation-state colonial scheme which included aspects of returning Afrikans to Afrika but devoid of the true essence of reparations which is more correctly rematriation.

Rematriation describes the historical, cultural and spiritual restitution needed to repair and redress the dispossessions and other violations suffered by enslaved Afrikan people. Rematriation includes the right to return and belong to ‘Pan-Afrika’. It encompasses the Akan Sankofa principle of returning to and renewing forms of decolonial Afrikan indigeneity to fetch one’s Afrikan personality in material, cultural and spiritual terms, which are all routed in the land and peoplehood of Afrika. In this way, rematriation contributes to repairing enduring historical and contemporary injustices by paying attention to the ongoing psychological, cultural and spiritual damage caused to the sensibilities of people of Afrikan ancestry and heritage through epistemicide and the continued existence of coloniality.

In every subsequent generation since these times, there have been efforts made to effect and secure holistic reparatory justice. In the twentieth century, the Pan-African Congresses in 1900 (London), 1921 (London, Paris, Brussels), 1923 (London, Lisbon), 1927 (New York) and, most importantly, 1945 (Manchester) consolidated a growing Pan-Afrikan Movement out of which contemporary movements for reparations both globally and in the UK would form.

Today, the UK contingent of the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations both acknowledges this history of reparations organising and builds trans-generationally from the knowledges and solidarity that it generated. Many of those twentieth century Pan-Afrikanists who organised in the UK and who were involved in reparatory justice organising work are well known and have been well researched as contributing to the Pan-Afrikan Movement in the twentieth century, such as Marcus Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Kwame Nkrumah, Claudia Jones, Constance Cummings-John and Una Mason.

When many people hear the word ‘reparations’ they tend to think of economic compensation, but as you have just touched on, it is about much more than this. What does the term mean to you and others involved in the struggle and how does it relate to the broader radical project of African emancipation and self-determination?

In The Making of An African Intellectual, Robert Hill recalls how Walter Rodney asserted that the role of Black people in institutions of higher learning was “as a part of the development of Black struggle”. He used the term ‘guerrilla intellectual’ to “come to grips with the initial imbalance of power in the context of academic learning”. He strongly advocated that sincere intellectuals within European academic institutions should embrace the first and major struggle – the struggle over ‘ideas’. Like all other terms, reparations itself is contested. As such, it is important to know that the term ‘reparations’ has its roots in the modern English term ‘repair’; meaning to restore to good condition, to set right, or make amends.

Influenced by the analysis of the Indigenous Yaqui scholar, Rebecca Tsosie, who researches reparations for Indigenous nations in the Americas, the framework for understanding the role of ‘reparations’ for Afrikan People worldwide necessarily must be intergenerational and intercultural and must address Indigenous Afrikan epistemologies. The Maangamizi – which is a Kiswahili and Pan-Afrikan term for the intent to destroy Afrikan people in terms of everything that represents Afrikan personhood, manifesting itself in the continuum of chattel, colonial and neocolonial enslavement including crimes of ecocide and genocide – not only included the theft of the Afrikan person but also, and equally importantly, severed the captive Afrikan from the knowledges that inform the very foundation of human identity; in this case, the Afrikan personhood and personality. Accordingly, there can be no authentic reparatory justice for Afrikan people without global cognitive justice, meaning reparations must also entail restoring indigenous Afrikan knowledge systems of language, spirituality and philosophy, music, art and symbolism, as well as science and technology resulting in Afrika redefining her own knowledge systems.

As I have written elsewhere, the core objectives of Pan-Afrikanism, including the attainment and securing of holistic reparatory justice and Pan-Afrikan liberation and nation-building, have been central to reparations activism in Britain. This has been defined by the taking back of Afrika, restoring Afrikan sovereignty and building Afrika into an unconquerable powerful Pan-Afrikan Union of Communities known as Maatubuntuman, which is collectively governed by Afrikans on the continent of Afrika and the Diaspora.

One of the unique features of Afrikan Reparations organising in Britain is that it has always had a Pan-Afrikan focus. Our emphasis then as Afrikan reparationists in the UK has been on relating to reparations not just as a legal case or claim and political struggle, but also as an international social movement, embodied in the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations. Many Afrikans organising as part of the UK contingent are in pursuit of comprehensive holistic land-based reparations. This means that pursuit of effecting and securing reparatory justice for us as Afrikans in the Diaspora – and certainly those of us who identify as the Maatubuntujamaa, Afrikan Heritage Community for National Self-Determination in the UK – is umbilically connected to the liberation of Afrika, restoration of Afrikan sovereignty and the self-determination of Afrikan people worldwide.Maatubuntujamaas is a model of non-territorial autonomy premised on autonomous community institution-building, resource exchange and service-provision.

The Maatubuntujamaa in the UK has come up with a set of ten proposals for reparations as part of a plan referred to as the Pempamsiempango. In the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe, we recognise the economics of reparations, but only insofar as “receiving the financial component of reparations will be meaningful only if it serves the holistic purpose and strengthens the integral whole of our self-repair process”. So, for us, the economics of Afrikan Reparations relate to how Afrikan Heritage Communities people provide for and re-equip ourselves, as Afrikan people, with the dignity of community self-reliance, reclaiming our stewardship of Mother Earth and securing the restituted resources of Afrika and Afrikan people worldwide. This includes access to land and other tangible and intangible heritage and property, distributed and utilised within Planetary boundaries and in harmony with all life forms.

Concretely, this entails first and foremost the urgent need for Pan-Afrikan Reparations and other Global Justice Movements to compel the stopping of neocolonialism and its inbuilt manifestations of genocide, ecocide and extractivist plunder in Afrika and other parts of the Global South that we have re-made home. In addition, combining our collective power to ensuring the redistribution of wealth and ushering in of a new international political and economic order which supports transformative adaptation and is based on ecological restoration, community governance and stewardship of work and resources for the re-making of our world.

A vital mechanism in achieving this is the demand for the establishment of the UK All-Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice, as part of a global process of dialogue between Afrikan people and state institutions of perpetrators of the Maangamizi, such as the British Parliament, in order that Afrikan Heritage Communities across the world can harmonise our own self-repair plans and actions towards not only advocating for ourselves before all state bodies, but also working to guarantee the non-repetition of the Maangamizi as an aspect of reparations recognised under international law. This goes beyond mere compensation which, as Robin Kelley argues, does not challenge the terms of racial capitalism, but rather reinforces neoliberalism and capitalism including the logic of property rights and compensation without radical transformation.

You often invoke the work and legacy of the Ghanian political revolutionary and intellectual Kwame Nkrumah when discussing and advocating for reparatory justice. Can you talk about his influence on your work and activism?

In his 23 September 1960 address to the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York, Kwame Nkrumah demonstrated Continental Afrikan input to the movement for reparations when he stated:

The great tide of history flows, and as it flows it carries to the shores of reality the stubborn facts of life and man’s relations, one with another. One cardinal fact of our time is the momentous impact of Africa’s awakening upon the modern world. The flowing tide of African nationalism sweeps everything before it and constitutes a challenge to the colonial powers to make a just restitution for the years of injustice and crime committed against our continent.

This is important in the sense that Nkrumah and others felt that the struggle for the total liberation and unification of Afrikan People was a self-empowering reparatory justice process which if enabled to develop, would then allow Afrikans to repair themselves by their own people’s power. Revolutionary leaders like Nkrumah put a lot of effort into seeking to ensure that the struggle for Afrikan Liberation realised this objective of self-repair. Part of this struggle was the reparatory justice conceptualisation of national liberation from the agenda of the Garveyite Movement and the Pan-African Congresses. That is why the US-sponsored plots to overthrow governments, such as that of Kwame Nkrumah and the earlier assassination of Patrice Lumumba, were attacks on that state-building reparatory justice process, being spearheaded by the then resurgent Pan-Afrikan Movement. This is what Susan Williams, the author of White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa, refers to as the struggle for Afrikan Independence being strangled at birth.

Particularly from the late 1970s, when neocolonialism became the dominant form of the nation state in Afrika and the Diaspora, the reparatory justice process was expunged out of emerging nation states which became cogs in the wheel of neocolonialism, devoid of any truly self-repairing substance instead of them becoming building blocks of a truly independent Pan-Afrikan Union of States as envisaged by Nkrumah and others. This complete divorcing of the Pan-Afrikan reparatory justice process from the nation states that emerged after so-called independence compelled the Pan-Afrikan Movement to have a life of its own from the grassroots. My activism – especially working through structures such as the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe, the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide Campaign, and the Global Afrikan Peoples Parliament – is returning to that understanding of reparations as rematriation and an independent sovereign nation-building process.

In the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe’s approach to reparations campaigning, we are guided by the strategy and tactics for the Pan-Afrikan Revolution outlined by Kwame Nkrumah in his post-1966 works such as Revolutionary Path and Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare. In these works, Nkrumah recognised and advocated that indigenous Afrikan ethnicities, communities and nationalities should constitute the core base for the establishment of a repaired Afrika which frees itself from the constraints of European coloniality and the structural violence of Euro-American dominance in Afrika. Integral to this process is the shutting down of what the Stop the Maangamizi Campaign refers to as Maangamizi crimes scenes, which are those sites of extractivist plunder which prolong the criminality of neocolonialism and Afrikan peoples’ dispossession and exploitation.

How do you assess the current state and strength of the struggle today?

There was a lull in the early 2000s, due to gains of the Pan-Afrikan Movement being eroded and many liberation movements departing from the reparatory justice essence of struggles for national and social liberation to embrace neoliberalism, and the states formed by such movements resigning themselves to neocolonialism. More recently, Afrikan Reparations is winning back international recognition as the imperative of our times. A lot of focused work has been done by some of the organisational formations that I am part of to give visibility to the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations from below, and to also recognise the intersectional nature of the cause of Afrikan Reparations.

Looking back, I would say that between 2000 and 2015 was for us a period of regrouping and re-catalysing the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations. But by 2015, the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe had consolidated its position as a vanguard formation around which other structures started evolving, which we have been able to intellectually influence in regards to strategy and tactics, such as the Stop the Maangamizi Campaign, Global Afrikan Peoples Parliament, the Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee, and the International Network of Scholars and Activists for Afrikan Reparations, formed in 2017 and with its exemplary Principles of Participation.

In the UK, there is a contingent of the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations which I believe is one of the most revolutionary in the world, because of its explicit Pan-Afrikan focus and objectives of the restoration of Afrikan Sovereignty and bringing about fundamental social and ecological transformation. From this, we see the promise of an emerging ‘Blackprint’ which remains true to the Pan-Afrikan foundations of reparations movement-building.

We are seeing the growing influence of Afrikan reparationists on other movements such as environmental and climate justice movements aided by the fact that resistance to the worldwide climate and ecological crises is radicalising forces both in the Global South and the Global North.

For instance, the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe took reparations into the Environmental Movement here in the UK and has been strategically building affinities with movements such as Extinction Rebellion (XR) through the Stop the Maangamizi Campaign which co-founded the Extinction Rebellion Internationalist Solidarity Network soon after the inception of XR in 2018. Through the Stop the Maangamizi Campaign’s influence, XR and a specific formation within it known as XR-Being the Change Affinity Network have embraced the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe’s advocacy of ‘Planet Repairs’.

This recognition of Afrikan Reparations and Planet Repairs has also led to mainstream political parties in the UK such as the Green Party of England and Wales embracing Planet Repairs and working with the Stop the Maangamizi Campaign to co-produce the text of Reparations and Atonement for the Transatlantic Trafficking of Enslaved Africans motions, which have now been passed by Islington and Lambeth Council and Bristol City Council. The key purpose of these motions is to build glocal support at the local and city council level for the Stop the Maangamizi Campaign’s demand for the UK Parliament to establish the All-Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice. It took the strength and mobilisation of support of people on the ground locally, nationally, and internationally to create the public receptivity to the passing of these motions.

Despite these advances, there are dangers in the increasing recognition and embracing of reparations, such as the ever-increasing potential of movement-capture, the NGO-isation of reparatory justice resistance, counterinsurgency and the promotion of neoliberal measures purported to be reparatory, but which reinforce global white supremacy, neocolonialism and racial capitalism.

Building on this impetus, underpinned by two decades of mobilising and organising communities, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for African Reparations (APPGAR) was launched on 20 October 2021. The significance of this parliamentary group is that it is the first space created within the state institutions of the UK for dialogue in pursuit of holistic Afrikan reparations, meaning embracing Planet Repairs. Since its launch, APPGAR has opened up prospects for programmes which can support Afrikan Heritage Communities to be drivers of policy on Afrikan Reparations through community links to the group. Work has already begun in developing youth perspectives on Afrikan Reparations and educational repairs. On 20 February 2022, and in association with the Maangamizi Educational Trust and the International Network of Scholars and Activists for Afrikan Reparations, I initiated the launch of the Mbuya Nehanda Afrikan Women and Reparations Project. These focus groups will explore the rights, needs, and perspectives of Women of Afrikan ancestry and heritage on holistic Afrikan Reparatory Justice with a view to concretising Afrikan ‘Womanist’ approaches to policy-making and other strategic interventions relevant to the work of the APPGAR.

The significance of launching this project on the 20 February 2022 is that the date falls on the 124^th anniversary of the 1898 arraignment of Mbuya Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana at the High Court of Matabeleland in the case of the (British) Queen of England vs Nehanda. Mbuya Nehanda-Charwe was a powerful spirit medium, who today can be characterised as a reparationist committed to upholding traditional Shona culture and a heroine of the 1896/7 first Chimurenga war for national liberation against British settler colonialism. Mbuya Nehanda-Charwe, along with three others, was falsely accused of murdering a brutal and terroristic British commissioner, Henry Hawkins Pollard of the British South Africa Company, and was subsequently hanged by the British settler colonial regime on the 27 April 1898, for her contributions in mobilising communities against colonial misrule and dispossession. Before Mbuya Nehanda-Charwe was hanged, her dying words of resistance were that her bones would rise again to lead a new, victorious rebellion against the British colonialists. To us as Afrikan Reparationists, she is one of the greatest Afrikan Sheroes who shaped and influenced the early Afrikan Liberation struggle against the Maangamizi of colonialism.

Esther Stanford-Xosei is a decolonial Pan-Afrikanist Jurisconsult, Reparationist, Community Advocate and ‘Ourstorian’ engaged in reparations policy, research and movement-building under the auspices of the Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe, Stop the Maangamizi Campaign, Global Afrikan People’s Parliament, International Network of Scholars & Activists for Afrikan Reparations, Extinction Rebellion Internationalist Solidarity Network as well as XR-Being the Change Affinity Network.

Coups, insurgency, and imperialism in Africa

ROAPE

March 8, 2022

West Africa is in the grip of a wave of coups, popular protests and fierce geopolitical struggles. Amy Niang argues that declining western hegemony in the region goes hand to hand with intensified competition for access and control of Africa’s natural resources. Furthermore, Niang states, the Russian occupation of Ukraine compels us to look at the importance of the country’s growing presence in Africa.

By Amy Niang

Across the Sahel, young people are restless. So are soldiers. The region is in the grip of an unprecedented wave of coups d’état that have followed each other within a short period of time: within a year or so, five coups d’état have successively rocked Mali, Chad, Guinea, and Burkina Faso in widespread unrest that risks destabilizing the entire region again.

Since the mid-1990s, coups had become exceptional events that occurred mainly during moments of perceived chaos, with the aim to disrupt the normal constitutional dispensation in order to restore order. Increasingly however, they occur as a form of political intervention designed to correct regular politics that has fallen into a permanent state of crisis and repression.

This moment is a historical shift but also a harbinger of an uncharted future. Not only are the recent coups not contested, but they are also seen as an opening into a new politics of liberation. They could signal a return to a long period of tumult, equally they could also be an opening for a different kind of politics.

The ongoing instability lays bare the accumulated effects of decades of aggressive neoliberal reforms that have eroded the social fabric, the growing significance of a politicized, young generation of Africans that do not share the same political culture as their elders, and the massive failure of the war against terror in the Sahel that has produced neither security nor stability. It also points to some of the ways in which fierce geopolitical battles are likely to wreak havoc in the African continent as Western hegemonic influences declines in the region.

In this long-read for roape.net, I want to argue that the present dilemma has to be seen as an inflection point in both the democratization and decolonization process in West Africa and Africa more generally.

A democratic impasse

One cannot fully make sense of the recent coups d’état in Africa without a full understanding of concomitant popular uprisings that have been occurring on a regular albeit sporadic manner in different parts of the continent. The common impulse, from Mali to Sudan, from Guinea to Burkina Faso is a desire for change, meaningful change.

The much celebrated constitutional order has been discredited in a context where constitutions are routinely violated, regulating mechanisms are often neutralized, and incumbent presidents consistently violate term-limits. For instance, Cote d’Ivoire’s President Alassane Ouattara and Guinea’s Alpha Condé both violated constitutionally locked term-limits to run for presidential elections. As the Nigerian writer Jibrin Ibrahim demonstrates, under the current nominal democracy, elected Presidents have also perpetrated coups of an electoral or constitutional nature. In Tunisia, the government of President Kaïs Saïed has taken a de facto authoritarian turn in July 2021. Through rule by decree, Saïed has tempered the constitutional and judicial structure and therefore neutralized any meaningful checks and balance.

In the 1990s, the demand for democratic opening was externally driven by development aid partners and Bretton Woods and other multilateral agencies. The democratic norm was being push through as African states were also being pressured to cut public expenditure in education, health and other social services. Yet the ongoing demand for democracy is internal in kind, it is a popular demand for a different kind of politics and a different kind of democratic participation and not a ‘performance’ on the basis of the Mo Ibrahim index or similar instruments.

Yet, overwhelming media attention of the military government’s standoff with the ‘international community’ muddies an understanding of very urgent crises that will not be resolved by another round of elections. As long as fundamental problems of economic sovereignty, of the state’s capacity to raise financial resources internally, to provide security and social services to its population are unresolved, rushing to elections will merely enable a change of guards to run the same derelict institutions. The democratic struggle is first and foremost a struggle for a political model that is responsive to people’s demands for basic public goods.

Popular uprisings are also an indictment of the failure of formal civil societies organizations that have either become too institutionalized if they are not entirely coopted by governments. Their ability to fully perform their responsibility as safeguards of people’s rights against state excesses has been hampered by an attachment to the orthodoxy of electoral liberalism. A major shortcoming has been its inability to harness into a cogent political project strident current popular demands for an alternative political order. The greatest insecurity that plagues Sahelian communities is linked to food security, and to limited human development.

It is clear to many careful observers of West African politics that something fundamentally different has been simmering over the past few years. The disconnect between governments and people has become more pronounced in the prolonged context of insecurity since 2012. The coronavirus pandemic has furthermore eroded public trust in governments’ ability to deliver public goods or foster greater democratic opening.

There is a question that lingers in everybody’s mind: has the specter of coups and countercoups returned to African politics? More specifically, is West Africa about to fall back into a vicious pattern of coups and countercoups without any seeming logic or order? The fear of a domino effect is real, and one cannot rule out the possibility of another elected government falling under another coup.

Linking coups and popular protests

The five most recent coups in Africa have been directly or indirectly prompted by popular protests of insurgent magnitude. This is significant.

Between April-August 2020, massive crowds gathered in Bamako and in major Malian cities to denounce endemic misrule, a series of corruption scandals involving specifically the purchase of military equipment amid insecurity across the country. The government of Ibrahim Boubacar Keita had also been marred by the accusation of massive fraud in the legislative elections of March 2020. Mali’s security situation had deteriorated drastically since 2015. The country fell into a state of chronic instability with burgeoning violence coming not only from jihadist forces, but also from government-backed militias and self-defense groups. Following months-long popular mobilization led by the M5 RFP coalition – the 5 June Mouvement and the Rally of Patriotic Forces – crowds literally escorted the military to the presidential palace. These are the circumstances that saw the takeover of the National Committee for the Salvation of the People (CNSP) military council.

In Burkina Faso, days of uninterrupted public protest preceded the putsch last year. On 14 November, 2021, the country experienced the most brutal attack on security forces. Fifty-three gendarmes were killed in Inata. The public later learned with dismay that the exhausted gendarmes had been without food and supplies for days and could not withstand the ambush. Inata eventually sealed the fate of the president Roch Kaboré. This wasn’t the first recent coup in Burkina Faso. In 2014, months-long street protests culminated into the resignation of 27 year-reigning Blaise Compaoré. Compaoré fled to Cote d’Ivoire where the Ouattara government offered a safe haven against demands for his extradition to Burkina Faso to face justice in the trial on the murder of Thomas Sankara. The military transition that ensued enabled the organization of relatively free elections for the first time in post-independence Burkina Faso.

Although every coup is different and responds to specific circumstances, the same causes can be said to have produced similar effects in both Burkina and Mali. Further, there are embedded historical inequities within armies themselves that mirror existing and widespread social inequities. Coups today may no longer be anchored in revolutionary nationalist or Pan-Africanist politics but some of them, like in Burkina Faso, articulate certain popular demands for social justice and democratic renewal. In the speeches of Paul-Henri Damiba – the interim president and coup leader – Sankara stands as an avatar of an aborted military-driven radical experiment. Army cadets are also politicized in a way that engraves the role of the military in ongoing struggles to reimagine social contracts across Africa. The fact that officers are fighting an internal battle that is also about repositioning a professional military hints at an enduring backdrop to recurrent coups.

It is important to note that public ‘demand’ for the disciplining authority of the military has often been a trojan horse that allows the military to ‘rise up to their responsibility’ as a now familiar, almost scripted ritual announcement that every new coup makes it a point to deliver.

In both Burkina Faso and Mali, transition military governments have initiated country-wide consultations (‘assises nationales’) to collect a wide-range of views from political formations and civil society on constitutional reform. To what extent the military’s move to act democratic-like is likely to lead to substantive change is a different question altogether. If the strategy is quite unprecedented for a military government, the reason for the shift is to be found in the growing importance of struggle on the ground – from popular forces from below.

In toppling civilian governments and ‘installing’ the military, protestors often aim to trigger a speedy change outside of the ballot box. Needless to say, this also heralds an uncertain future that gives no guarantee of success. Military coups are rarely transformative. Further, the military itself is a institution in its own terms that has its own logic of power accumulation. Obviously, if the military was the solution, neither Burkina Faso nor Mali would have gone through multiple coups. Mali has experienced five coups since independence while Burkina holds a record of seven coups with a total of 47-years ruled under various military governments. At any rate, the gains of popular movements hang on a fragile thread that is constantly threated by the encroaching logic of external internal intervention especially in countries whose natural resources are highly coveted.

In 2019, Algerian and Sudanese decades-long regimes fell through popular pressure. Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Omar al-Bashir were deposed by public pressure. In contrast to Mali and Burkina Faso, Sudan has a robust, deep-rooted tradition of political activism led by well-organized leftist movements, especially student movements. Not only have the Sudanese “resistance committees” been able to force concessions from the military, they proactively forged ahead with a political charter for transition presented on 27 February, 2022. The Charter for the Establishment of the People’s Authority seeks to reverse decades-long military-led governance and restricted civic participation.

Two dilemmas are apparent in the trends mentioned above. On the one hand, it is nearly impossible to assess the extent to which popular protests express representative, legitimate, and uncoerced grievances. On another, to read military coups from a liberal institutional framework which demarcates the ‘civilian’ and the ‘military’ as distinct spheres of action has time and again proven reductive. Such thinking does not allow us to consider solutions outside of injunctions to restore the normal ‘constitutional order’. Neither does it take into account the specificity of the formation of African military systems within a colonial context and their development in postcolonial states.

Contested regional leadership

The default reaction of the West African bloc ECOWAS and the African Union (AU) to the recent coups has been to distribute sanctions on account of ‘norms’ uncritically enforced in a bureaucratic and uncreative approach. The coup policy of both the African Union’s Lomé Declaration of 1999 and the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance (ADC) is systematic sanctions against unconstitutional changes of government even when these are the outcome of compelling popular protests. However, the continental body has neither been consistent nor impartial in its approach. In Chad for instance, the AU Peace and Security Council (PSC) determined that the country was under threat of destabilization from Libya and did not therefore enforce sanctions against the Transitional Military Council. Although the dislocation of Libya has had tremendous consequences in the subsequent destabilization of the Sahel, more specifically Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, the AU security assessment is all the more surprising as Chad has been relatively unaffected by the Libyan civil war. However, Chad remains France and the West’s staunchest ally in the Sahel in the fight against terrorism. For many observers, the AU buried its legitimacy in Chad by endorsing both a military coup and a dynastic takeover.

The AU is not the only discredited regional institution. ECOWAS has long been seen as a club of the malleable who speak with one tutored voice. Never before has ECOWAS been so disconnected from its populations. Having turned the other way over a series of constitutional coups which paved the way for military coups for instance in Guinea, ECOWAS has emerged as a discredited entity.

According to the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM), the West African bloc violated its own statutory rules in imposing sanctions that fall outside of its normative instruments, most specifically the 2001 ECOWAS Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance. Besides, the region’s economies are already badly affected by the coronavirus pandemic and sanctions imposed on Mali have consequences for other ECOWAS members. For instance, Mali accounts for 20% of Senegal’s trade volume; most export goods destined to Mali transit through the port in Dakar.

Waning Western tutelage

One could almost speak of an anachronism between on the one hand the perception of post-colonial stagnation in which the Sahelian region is believed to be steeped and the way in which ‘partnership’ continues to be discussed as the framework of engagement that structures the Sahel’s relations with the former colonial power France. France specifically appears like a stubborn guest that stays on when the party is over.

At the request of the government of Mali fearful that Jihadists were advancing towards Bamako, France launched Operation Serval which led a swift ‘victory’ in early 2013. The succeeding Operation Barkhane – a 5000 strong force that constitutes the backbone of French counter-terrorist intervention in the Sahel, over the years fell into a predictable pattern. In other words, it became locked into its own narrow logic, merely responding to French understanding of its strategic security interests in the Sahel. Despite France announcing a drawdown of Barkhane, as a result of intense pressure in Mali itself, it categorically opposed Mali’s seeking support from other governments to help it restore stability across the country.

The government of Assimi Goïta – who has been serving as interim president since May last year – has always shown suspicion regarding French ambivalence towards Tuareg’s desire of autonomy. After all, the French army command enforced a de-facto partition of Mali by preventing the national army from access to the Tuareg rebellion stronghold in Kidal and used its hegemony as leverage against the Bamako government. There is another reason for the French to seek to institute a buffer zone in Northern Mali. Kidal is about 300 km from Arlit where French giant ORAN (former AREVA) exploits uranium yellowcake. There are also important uranium reserves to the south of Arlit in addition to strategic minerals, arable land and water. The maintenance of military forces in Northern Mali therefore becomes the condition for continuing to supply its nuclear plants.

Furthermore, the Taoudeni Basin – from Mauritania to Algeria and north Mali – is a much-coveted oil basin as the world moves towards a period of depletion of oil resources. Mali itself has large limestone, salt and gold deposits in addition to oil, iron ore and bauxite minerals that are largely unexploited. Given all this, France puts tremendous pressure on WAEMU (West African Economic and Monetary Union) leaders to apply sanctions on Mali. Further, taking advantage of the rotating presidency of the EU, the French President has been lobbying other EU members for support. On 19 January this year, at his inaugural speech as rotating President, Emmanuel Macron declared in no uncertain terms: “It is in Africa that global upheaval is partially being played out, and a part of the future of this [European] continent and its youth […] and our future”.

France is neither ready nor willing to deal with its former African colonies on equal footing. For a long time, it has relied upon clientelist relations to ensure sustained access to African minerals for an unfair price. The maintenance of compliant regimes was always the condition for unimpeded access and control.

The ongoing geopolitical struggle with Russia in fact comes down to this: the argument about delayed elections and democratic governance in reality masks strategic and security interests that France is keen to protect at any cost. Declining western hegemony in the region goes hand to hand with intensified competition for access and control over Africa’s mineral and natural resources. Whereas the security crisis is real across Mali and the Sahel, the crisis that emerged out of disagreement over the presence of French troops and so-called Russian mercenaries has been engineered. Despite much noise about famed Wagner Group, there is little factual information about its presence or operations in Mali. Even so, there is nothing unusual about states using mercenary units for ‘special operations’. One recalls that France itself developed the Foreign Legion – a traditional pathway for citizenship for individual adventurers hired to serve unorthodox French operations around the world, in Africa in particular.

The ongoing stand-off between the West and Russia over the occupation of Ukraine throws into stark relief the importance of Russia’s growing presence in Africa. Russia supplies weapons and military equipment to 30 African countries. Russia is said to be the largest supplier of weapons to Africa of the past few years.

It would be a mistake to see in the thousands of young Africans occupying the streets of Bamako, Kayes and Ouahigouya or blocking French military convoys anarchic crowds that are neither rooted in a solid political culture nor hold a clear vision of what they are yearning for. It would equally be a mistake to see in the popular protests against French military presence in the Sahel as some kind of reactionary resentment of the subaltern or a revanchist postcolonial fury. Underlying the protesters’ outburst is a widespread pursuit of a sovereignty most imagine to have been lacking in their countries since the time of independence. Young people’s demand for ‘meaningful sovereignty’ is explicitly framed against a postcolonial condition that maintains their countries under neocolonial control. Theirs is a struggle for a second independence.

A foundering war

The Sahel was poised to become the new cauldron of the war on terrorism following the France and NATO-led armed intervention in Libya in 2011 and the latter’s subsequent disintegration. The securitarian logic pursued by Sahelian states and intervention forces had two predictable consequences. Firstly, as armed groups and militias proliferated in response to perceived arbitrary injustice in relation to both the state and jihadist groups, the state could label any peripheral or dissenting group ‘terrorist’ and thus give itself license to kill legitimately. Secondly, the fabric of state-society relations has deteriorated in the process as the fight against terrorism came to trump all other economic and social objectives.

Counterterrorist policies have in the main reinforced the repressive capacities of Sahelian states. As many a report have shown, more civilians have died in the hands of Sahelian states and Operation Barkhane than they have under terrorist violence. Yet, the overwhelming majority of so-called militants in the various insurgent groups operating in the Sahel are Malians and Burkinabè nationals from villages and communities known to their neighbors. They need to be engaged through dialogue and concertation.

Dwindling resources under the accelerating effects of climate change have led to deteriorating standards of living and compounded conflicts amongst communities over access to scarce resources. The Sahel faces frequent droughts and food shortages. Embattled and impoverished populations are leaving villages and those that can afford it have fled further afield into neighboring countries if they are not risking their lives in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe. Further, at a time when Sahelian states have also become the enforcers of EU border policies, some youth are treated like trespassers and criminals in their own states.

In their unqualified commitment to the fight against ‘terrorism’, it would seem that Sahelian countries have delivered more insecurity than they have delivered jobs and economic security for their populations. Ordinary people are having a hard time understanding why after almost 10 years of intervention, a 13000 soldiers strong UN mission, a 5000 strong Barkhane force, including French-led European Takuba Task Force, and G5Sahel, the security situation has deteriorated rather than it has improved. The G5Sahel is a 2017 French initiative to coordinate the fight against Jihadist among five Sahelian countries – Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. It has been a dismal failure. A UN report explains the joint operation’s slow progress and the absence of tangible security gains as the result of a narrow military outlook, divergent priorities amongst concerned countries and a fraught relation with civilians.

If Afghanistan is anything to go by, military intervention campaigns are rarely transformative enterprises.

Interventions have become ritualized forms of action in which external actors use the cover of ‘peace’ ‘security’ and ‘order’ to justify intervention by itself. It produces discursive tropes that validate militarization as a new-age normative crusade of human rights, democratization and liberation of economic activity. Since the 1990s, states have been reduced to enforcers of Bretton Woods injunctions to liberalize if they are not busy enforcing ‘partner countries’ security policies.

People may not understand the intricacy of decision-making processes that have led to the present fiasco, but they perceive the relative inefficiency of the billions of dollars that have been spent on the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), the Barkhane Operation – which cost around 1 billion euros per year – and other international forces while Sahelian armies remain underfunded, underequipped, lacking the technological resources to collect reliable intelligence. One recalls that the March 2012 coup and that of August 2020 were both prompted by widespread public dissatisfaction with the blatant inefficacy of the Malian army fighting the Tuareg rebels and Jihadists. The Malian army was then ill-equipped -and they still are – to fight the jihadists. The public perceives that something is fundamentally wrong. What is peacekeeping in a country that is in active conflict? Failing to impose peace, what is MINUSMA exactly doing in Mali?

A historical shift?

We may just be at the cusp of a revolution of a new kind, one that first and foremost opposes different generations whose experience of, and outlook over the postcolonial present barely overlap. The generational shift affects both the political and the military elites.

There is in fact more to the recent coups in Mali and Burkina Faso than meet the eye. It would be absurd to pose the problem in terms of a choice to be made between military regimes vs. liberal democracy. The coups themselves are not the ultimate objective. The military is called upon to break a deadlock, to upend the status quo as neutral arbiters. Some of the protestors in Burkina Faso made that much clear in stating their determination to occupy the streets again should the military government fail to deliver on promises. However, coups potentially provide an opening for a necessary debate on a serious social project, something that has not been a preoccupation of previous governments since the time of the revolutionary Thomas Sankara.

Amy Niang is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Africa Institute in Sharjah. She is the author of The Postcolonial African State in Transition: Stateness and Modes of Sovereignty.

Featured Photograph: Aerial photo of Fort Madama – Niger, November 2014 (Thomas Goisque).

Kenya and the rise of the financial inclusion delusion

ROAPE

March 1, 2022

In a major exposé of the ‘fintech revolution’ in Africa, Milford Bateman and Fernando Amorim Teixeira write that the investor-driven fintech model is nothing less than a ‘digitalised’ extension of the earlier colonial-imperialist ‘extractivist’ models that enabled the western nations to appropriate Africa’s natural resource wealth to fund their own economic prosperity.

By Milford Bateman and Fernando Amorim Teixeira

It is very widely accepted that Kenya’s iconic mobile money transfer platform, M-Pesa, has spearheaded what has been called the ‘Fintech Revolution‘. Defined as ‘[c]omputer programs and other technology used to support or enable banking and financial services’, in its very simplest form fintech involves a greatly enhanced ability to transact financial services via a mobile phone or smart device, making it easier, cheaper and quicker, for instance, to (1) obtain a loan; (2) make a savings deposit; (3) transfer and receive money; and (4) pay for and be paid for goods and services. Such is the excitement created by M-Pesa, especially in Africa, that many regard fintech as having the potential to re-engineer capitalism towards “sustainability, equality and the advancement of humanity as a whole”, and thus make it capable of ushering in a new ‘golden age’ of abundance and prosperity.

Since the development of M-Pesa was initiated and funded by the UK’s then aid agency, the Department for International Development (DFID), the largest international development organisations soon heard about M-Pesa, and they were transfixed by it. Above all M-Pesa attracted the attention of the World Bank. Among other things, it saw this radical new fintech application as providing a way to rescue the brick-and-mortar microfinance model that was now seen as having failed in its objective to address global poverty.

After very aggressively promoting the Nobel-award-winning microfinance model from the 1990s onwards, the World Bank inevitably found itself in a very awkward position in the early 2010s when many one-time leading microfinance advocates began to concede that the microfinance model had in fact had no real effect on global poverty. Even worse, as some heterodox economists had long argued, the microfinance model appeared to be guilty of seriously setting back the effort to address global poverty, especially in Africa. The World Bank’s first reaction to these important reassessments was not to consider abandoning the microfinance model – for neoliberal ideological and corporate profit-making reasons the microfinance model was far too important to simply cut loose – but to mount a rescue attempt. This involved simply rebadging the microfinance model as the ‘financial inclusion model‘, the hope being that a changed name and a somewhat wider explanatory narrative would give it a new lease of life.

The importance of this rebadging was that at almost the exact same time as it was initiated, the fintech model was bursting on to the global development scene. It was quickly realised that the fintech model would greatly assist in turbo-charging the revised financial inclusion narrative, and would thus make it possible to very rapidly achieve ‘full’ financial inclusion almost everywhere. With every single individual and household in Africa soon having access to a range of basic fintech services, including digital microcredit, it was possible to state once more, this time with even more confidence, that virtually all of its poor were now on the way towards escaping their poverty by establishing or expanding their own microenterprise. The extended argument began to take shape that the old brick-and-mortar microfinance model had perhaps failed because it had been unable to achieve ‘full’ financial inclusion – essentially not enough microcredit was made available to every individual that wished to set up a microenterprise – but the new fintech-driven financial inclusion model would ‘go the last mile’ and brilliantly finish the job.

When it became clear that the fintech model was also capable of generating huge profits for investors, its upward trajectory became unstoppable. This profitability factor was first amply demonstrated when Safaricom, the corporate entity that owns and operates the M-Pesa platform, quickly emerged to become one of Africa’s most profitable corporations (see below). Many other investors soon joined the party in an attempt to get their own share of the spoils. Thanks to a wave of foreign investors that began to arrive in Africa in the mid-to-late 2010s a large number of new fintech financial platforms were established. In addition, many of Africa’s existing brick-and-mortar financial institutions joined them by quickly migrating their financial services over to new or bought-in fintech platforms. Requiring far fewer employees and much less expensive business space, this was the key to raising their own profits significantly. Like previous natural resource discoveries (gold, platinum, diamonds, cocoa, spices, etc), Africa’s fintech sector was soon being held up as one of the world’s most attractive investment destinations. What we might call the ‘investor-driven’ fintech model had started a new ‘gold rush’ in Africa, and then everywhere else.

The possibility that the investor-driven fintech model might be able to combine investor and corporate enrichment with seemingly demonstrable progress in addressing Africa’s poverty was clearly an extremely seductive narrative. It looked as though capitalism might finally be working in Africa for everyone, and not just for a tiny elite. However, in a discussion paper produced for the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute, Fernando Amorim Teixeira and I argue that this uplifting narrative represents a fundamentally flawed and inaccurate portrayal of the emerging global reality, especially in Africa. While it is quite clear that fintech has delivered many initial benefits for Africa’s poor, including reduced costs of, and greater access to, many important financial services, its full long-term impact is very likely to be far less rosy given the way that it has begun to evolve.

Like many financial innovations that elite groups wish to sell to the wider public in order to make a financial killing at their expense (think sub-prime mortgages), we contend that, for the very same reasons, almost all of the early hugely uplifting analysis of the impact of the investor-driven fintech model was seriously flawed. Largely commissioned, funded, published and promoted by those financial institutions linked to the fintech sector, this was perhaps only to be expected. Notably this problem began with the assessment of the impact of M-Pesa itself. Bringing M-Pesa to the world’s attention were publications produced by staff at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. not coincidentally one of the world’s most aggressive advocates for all manner of technological innovations in the financial sphere. These early outputs all celebrated M-Pesa, while conspicuously failing to mention any of its downsides. Nor did they even mention the fact that M-Pesa was able to secure by dubious means a crucial near-monopoly for its services that enabled it to succeed very quickly thanks to having almost the entire market to itself.

The UK government that was otherwise advising African governments to accept free markets and competition was silent about this anti-competitive tactic. UK government and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funding then helped the US-based economists, William Jack and Tavneet Suri, to produce several influential early research papers promoting M-Pesa. Latterly this included by far the most influential output of all on the subject of M-Pesa – a 2016 article they published in the prestigious, peer-reviewed journal Science that concluded, “[A]ccess to the Kenyan mobile money system M-PESA increased per capita consumption levels and lifted 194,000 households, or 2% of Kenyan households, out of poverty”.This claim created a sensation among the international development community and, even though the article was based on numerous flaws, logical inconsistencies and obvious biases, it was cited in almost every major official publication promoting the investor-driven fintech model.

In fact, the investor-driven fintech model that dominates in Africa today is, we believe, shaping up to be not just deeply damaging to the lives of Africa’s poor majority, but also represents a major lost opportunity to deploy a radical financial innovation to create far more productive, inclusive, equitable, dignified and socially just African economies and societies. We outline six of the main problem areas that have arisen with regard to the investor-driven fintech model. These include: extending the failed brick-and-mortar microfinance model’s support for the ‘wrong‘ type of unproductive ‘no-growth’ ‘here today and gone tomorrow‘ microenterprises and SMEs; increasing financial fraud and thievery; undermining the ability of important social solidarity networks to support the poor into the longer-term; and, plunging Africa’s poor (especially in Kenya itself) into even more individual debt than even the brick-and-mortar microfinance model managed to do in previous years.

The final over-arching problem we highlighted is also one of the most far-reaching: the investor-driven fintech model is nothing less than a ‘digitalised’ extension of the earlier colonial-Imperialist ‘extractivist’ models that enabled the western nations to appropriate Africa’s natural resource wealth in order to fund their own economic development trajectory at the expense of ‘under-developing’ the African nations. Nowhere is this conclusion more in evidence than with regard to the example of Kenya’s Safaricom within which M-Pesa is a key constituent. It first helped that its founding shareholder, the giant UK telecom corporation Vodafone PLC, was able to engineer a near-monopoly for M-Pesa’s services right from the start thanks to a secretive ‘shares for lobbying’ arrangement concluded with key local business and political elites. With this market unfriendly structure neatly in place, Safaricom was then able to go on to ‘mine’ and appropriate considerable value from the tiny digital transactions of Kenya’s poor. Safaricom was soon earning quite spectacular Wall Street-style profits. Crucially, rather than reinvest these profits in the development of the Kenyan economy, the bulk of Safaricom’s profits have been sent abroad to reward its foreign shareholders, starting with its still 40% majority shareholder, Vodafone, which is garnering a huge long-term financial reward for its early support for a UK government initiative. Furthermore, such is Safaricom’s strong commitment to Vodafone (rather than, say, the Kenyan economy and to its poorest citizens) that during the COVID-19 crisis, when its revenues were falling thanks to a lower fee structure imposed on it by the Kenyan government to help the population better cope, Safaricom was willing to take a nearly $US200 million loan on to its books in order to help pay Vodafone its usual high dividend (just short of $US200 million). Equally revealing from another angle is the fact that Vodafone has quite openly admitted that it uses its large foreign dividend flow, including that amount generated from its ownership stake in Safaricom, to fund its vital infrastructure spending in the UK, which is clearly good for the UK economy. But then Vodafone uses this fact as the justification for why it manages its global financial structure in such a way as to pay almost no corporate tax in the UK.

We thus conclude that the initial and not inconsequential benefits arising from the introduction of many new investor-driven fintech platforms are now in real danger of being swamped entirely by the downsides that have begun to emerge. So does this not mean that an alternative fintech model would make more sense? It probably does. However, replacing the current investor-driven fintech model is right now simply not on the agenda of the global investment community or the major international development organisations.

But if we assume that change is still possible in some locations with relatively independent national and sub-national governments, then what might be the alternative to the investor-driven fintech model? We end our TNI discussion paper by briefly discussing this issue using the experience of a fintech’ model that has been deployed since the mid-2010s in the city of Maricá in south-eastern Brazil. While still in its early stage and clearly still subject to modification, this ‘people-centered’ fintech model has nevertheless already demonstrated that it is perfectly possible for basic fintech applications to be directly used to promote the common good. Piloted by the city government, the emerging ‘Maricá Model’ is based around a community digital currency, the Mumbuca, that is managed by the city-owned community development bank, the Mumbuca Bank. One of its centre-piece policies is a generous Basic Income program that is paid out in Mumbuca and which provides demand for many other local enterprises. Other initiatives include financing local enterprise development with no to low cost loans that allow sustainable local SMEs to emerge, as well as for existing informal microenterprises to expand, diversify and otherwise try to increase their level of productivity in order to make a more substantive contribution to the local economy. Crucially, the not inconsiderable financial savings enjoyed by the Mumbuca Bank using fintech applications to manage the Basic Income program and other services are all retained and then directed into expanding the benefits it can offer to the local population as a whole, not to reward a narrow elite of investors.

Even a cursory comparison of the various inter-locking aspects of the ‘Maricá Model’ in action reveals that it is already generating significant value for Maricá’s citizens, and especially for those living in poverty. Pointedly, the ‘Maricá Model’ was able to fashion probably the best response to the COVID-19 crisis that emerged anywhere in Brazil, if not the world. We believe African countries urgently need to learn from and begin to adapt such community-driven fintech models to their own requirements if they genuinely want the global fintech revolution to sustainably benefit all of their citizens into the future, and not just a lucky few.

Milford Bateman is a Visiting Professor of Economics at the Department of Tourism and Economics at the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, Croatia; Adjunct Professor at St Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada; Honorary Research Associate, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK; and Associate Researcher, FINDE, Fluminense Federal University (UFF), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Fernando Amorim Teixeira is a PhD candidate in Economics at the Fluminense Federal University (PPGE/UFF), where he is a Researcher at FINDE, a Substitute Professor of Economics at International Relations Institute of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (IRID/UFRJ) and Economist-researcher at the Inter-union Department of Statistics and Socio-economic Studies (DIEESE), Brazil.

Photographs: Easy credit in Kenya (Nairobi, January 2022 – Jörg Wiegratz).

Mapambano ya Wamasai wa Ngorongoro

ROAPE

February 24, 2022

Ambreena Manji anaandika kuhusu tishio la serikali ya Tanzania kuwaondoa Wamasai zaidi ya 80,000 kutoka Ngorongoro, mahali pa urithi wa dunia, nchini humo. Serikali inadai kwamba Wamasai lazima waondolewe kwenye ardhi yao kwa maslahi ya hifadhi na ekolojia ya makazi ya wanyamapori. Manji anaeleza nini hasa kinaendelea.

Na Ambreena Manji

Katika wiki za hivi karibuni, serikali ya Tanzania imerudia jitihada zake za kutenga ardhi katika kata ya Loliondo, wilayani Ngorongoro kaskazini wa nchi hiyo, kuwa ni makazi ya wanyamapori, na kimsingi kuwapiga marufuku Wamasai kwenye ardhi yao ya asili. Kama wafugaji wanaohamahama, maisha ya Wamasai hutegemea ufugaji wa ng’ombe na kilimo. Malisho na maji kwa ajili ya mifugo yao ni muhimu kwao. Hifadhi ya Ngorongoro imekuwa mahali pa urithi wa dunia palipotangazwa na Shirika la Umoja wa Mataifa la Elimu, Sayansi na Utamaduni (UNESCO) tangu mwaka 1979. Lakini kwa muda mrefu, Wamasai wamekuwa wakikabiliwa na tishio la kuondolewa ili kupisha utalii na hifadhi ya wanyamapori.

Serikali imewatuhumu Wamasai kwa kuingilia njia za wanyamapori na maeneo ya wanyamapori kuzaliana na kudai kuwa kwa maslahi ya hifadhi ya wanyamapori na ekolojia, maeneo maalum kwa ajili ya wanyamapori lazima yaanzishwe kwenye ardhi hiyo ya Wamasai. Wamasai wamejipanga kupambana na hatua hizi, wakiishutumu serikali kwa kutumia hifadhi ya wanyamapori kama kisingizio cha kuwaondoa kwenye ardhi yao.

Hata hivyo, kulingana na Tanzania kuhurisha ardhi na kuvutia uwekezaji wa kigeni tangu miaka ya Tisini, imeelezwa kwamba sababu ya kurejea kwa hamu ya Ngorongoro ni mipango ya serikali kutoa vibali vya haki za uwindaji kwenye eneo lenye ukubwa wa maili za mraba 579 kwa wawekezaji wa kigeni. Kwa Wamasai, huu ni mwendelezo wa mwenendo wa muda mrefu tangu nchi ipate uhuru. Tangu wakati huo, Wamasai wamepoteza zaidi ya asilimia sabini ya ardhi yao kwa hifadhi. Mwaka 1992, mwekezaji kutoka Umoja wa Falme za Kiarabu (UAE) alipewa leseni ya uwindaji wa kitalii wa kuua wanyamapori katika eneo hilo. Mwaka 2018, ripoti moja ilieleza athari za makampuni binafsi katika maeneo hayo: kampuni ya Ortello Business Corporation iliwatimua Wamasai ili kuendesha kitalu cha uwindaji kwa ajili ya matumizi binafsi ya familia ya kifalme na wageni wao na iliendelea na shughuli zake katika eneo hilo baada ya leseni yao kuwa imefutwa na Wizara ya Maliasili ya Tanzania.

Chini ya himaya yenye jeuri ya Mamlaka ya Hifadhi ya Eneo la Ngorongoro (NCAA), Wamasai wamekuwa na fursa ndogo ya ushiriki katika uendeshaji wa eneo hilo au maamuzi kuhusu mustakabali wao. NCAA inatuhumiwa kufanya shughuli zake kwa usiri. Inatoa taarifa kidogo tu kuhusu utekelezaji wa mpango mpya wa matumizi ya ardhi na makazi katika Eneo la Hifadhi ya Ngorongoro ambao utapelekea wakazi 80,000 kupoteza makazi, na kuvunjiwa nyumba zao, shule na miundombinu ya afya,

Kuakisi mapambano ya uainishaji na maana ya ardhi inayoonekana sehemu nyingine za Afrika Mashariki pindi jamii zinapoamua kulinda ardhi yao, wakazi wa Loliondo wanatoa hoja kwamba ardhi yenye mgogoro ni kijiji chini ya Sheria ya Vijiji ya mwaka 1999. Sheria hii ililenga kutoa mamlaka ya maamuzi kwa ngazi ya jamii. Wamasai wanadai kwamba ardhi yao ya asili itambulike kama kijiji halali na sio sehemu iliyotengwa kuwa hifadhi.

‘Hifadhi’

Katika kitabu chao muhimu cha mwaka 2017, The Big Conservation Lie (uongo mkubwa kuhusu hifadhi), John Mbaria na Mordecai Ogada wanabainisha ukweli dhidi ya maelezo yaliyotawala kuhusu hifadhi na kuchunguza unyonyaji mkubwa wa misitu ambayo wahifadhi wamekuwa wakidai wanailinda. Kurejea kwa uporaji ardhi unaovuka mipaka ya nchi unaoendelea Ngorongoro unathibitisha uchambuzi huu. Mwaka 2018, ripoti ya Taasisi ya Oakland ilionyesha jinsi sheria za hifadhi zilivyokuwa zinatumika kuwapora mali Wamasai. Kabla ya hapo, ripoti ya Wilbert Kapinga na Issa Shivji (ambaye aliwahi kuwa mwenyekiti wa Tume ya Rais ya Uchunguzi kwenye Masuala ya Ardhi) ilichunguza nguvu za kisheria na hatua za kiutawala za NCAA. Walionyesha vikwazo walivyowekewa Wamasai na NCAA bila majadiliano na ushiriki wa Wamasai katika mchakato wa maamuzi. Walipendekeza kwamba katika utawala wa NCAA kwenye Eneo la Hifadhi, uwakilishi stahili na ushiriki wa Wamasai na wakazi wengine ni muhimu ili waweze kuamua njia bora za hifadhi na kustawisha sehemu hiyo muhimu duniani.

Emutai

Jinsi wanavyotendewa Wamasai wa Ngorongoro inaonyesha aina flani na matendo yanatambulika kuwa ya kikoloni, kuwawekea mazingira ya maisha yanayoelekea kuondolewa kwa emutai. Katika Ki-Maa -lugha inayoongewa na Wamasai – neno emutai linamaanisha uharibifu au kuondoa na lilitumika kuelezea maradhi ya karne ya kumi na tisa ambapo nimonia inayoambukiza ya mifugo (bovine pleuropneumonia, sotoka (rinderpest) na ndui (smallpox) iliteketeza ng’ombe na kusababisha maradhi yaliyotapakaa. Ni neno lenye inayoakisi na haraka inayoongezeka. Mwaka 2018 Taasisi ya Oakland ilionya kwamba “bila kupata nafasi kwenye ardhi ya malisho na visima – bila uwezo wa kuzalisha chakula kwa ajili ya jamii, Wamasai wapo katika hatari ya kipindi kipya cha emutai.

Emutai ya sasa inajumuisha nini? Kwa sababu ya kutengwa upya kwa ardhi yao ambayo walikuwa wakiitumia kulisha ng’ombe na kupanda mazao, magonjwa na baa la njaa hutokea mara kwa mara. Wakilazimishwa kwenda kwenye maeneo madogo ya ardhi ili kutoa mwanya kwa utalii, uwezo wa Wamasai katika uzalishaji mali kijamii uliathiriwa sana: majukumu ya kila siku ya kulisha ng’ombe na kuzalisha chakula kwenye vitalu vidogo vya ardhi yamefanywa kutokuwa halali. Matokeo ni kusambaa kwa baa la njaa na magonjwa, hususan miongoni mwa watoto. Kuzingirwa kwa mabavu kwa ardhi yao kunawazuwia Wamasai kumudu maisha yao ya kila siku na kati ya vizazi. Kikwazo hiki kwa uzalishaji mali kijamii kwa Wamasai ni tishio halisi. Ardhi iliyomegwa kama sehemu ya uzalishaji mali na urithi wa asili, Wamasai wanakumbana na mateso yanayotokana na jitihada za serikali kuwaridhisha matajiri na watu maarufu wanaokuja Kutalii Ngorongoro. Katika maneno ya kiongozi wa Wamasai, Julius Peter Olekitika, “fikiria nyumba yako inachomwa moto mbele yako ili kutoa nafasi kwa wageni kutoka nje kuwinda wanyamapori. Fikiria kutoweza kulisha ng’ombe wetu kwa sababu serikali inataka kumlinda mwekezaji kutoka nje ambaye maslahi yake pekee ni kuwinda wanyamapori.”

Athari pana

Mapambano ya Wamasai wa Ngorongoro ina umuhimu mkubwa katika kuelewa jinsi gani “utengaji maeneo ya hifadhi kwa kuwaondoa kwa nguvu au kutowashirikisha wakazi wa eneo husika” unavyofanya kazi na unavyoondoa nafasi ya wazawa kama wasimamizi wa ardhi husika. Hii ni muhimu katika nyakati za changamoto ya hali ya hewa. Aina za ukoloni mamboleo kwenye hifadhi huambatana na uhusiano kati ya vyombo vya dola na uhifadhi (vitisho na matumizi ya wanamgambo ni mambo yaliyozoeleka) na kwa uhusiano na makampuni ya kimataifa ya fueli za kisukuku.

Nchini Tanzania, serikali na makampuni binafsi wanakula njama. Kinyume na madai ya uhifadhi, lengo ni kubomoa kwa makusudi maisha ya Wamasai, kubaki tu na vitu vitakavyoendana na malengo ya utalii kupitia kuwafanya watu kama vivutio vya utalii, mantiki ya kibaguzi ya ukoloni wa walowezi. Kama Taasisi ya Oakland inavyotambua, hii haitoishia wao kuondolewa kwenye ardhi lakini pia kuwaondoa uhai.

Wilbert Kapinga na Issa Shivji wanajadili kwenye ripoti yao kwamba mapambano ya Wamasai wa Ngorongoro yasichukuliwe kama mapambano ya wachache bali yachochee kuanzishwa kwa ushirikiano kati ya wananchi wote wanaokabiliwa na tishio la kuporwa ardhi na kutokuwa na ardhi kutokana na sheria mpya ya ardhi (Sheria ya Ardhi ya Mwaka 1999).

Kuchambua athari za kisiasa za kuwaangalia Wamasai kama kundi dogo au wazawa kama yanavyofanya makundi mengi ya utetezi ya kimataifa, walipinga matumizi ya neno hilo, wakidai kwamba itakuwa na athari muhimu kwa asasi za kiraia. Waandishi wamejenga hoja kwamba hilo halijapewa mkazo. Kwa kuwatenganisha Wamasai na wananchi wengine, watakuwa wametengwa na jamii nzima.

Hoja hii muhimu inatuhamasisha kutafiti uzoefu wa pamoja wa kuondolewa kwa nguvu kwa muktadha wa maeneo ya mijini na vijijini, kutambua uhalisi wao na historia zao, huku ukitafutwa ushirikiano mbali zaidi ya muktadha wa kila kuondolewa kwa nguvu au tishio la kukosa makazi. Hakuna shaka kuwa Wamasai wanatengwa na kufanyiwa ubaguzi wa kutisha na serikali, vitendo vinavyoungwa mkono na kampeni mahsusi za chuki. Jukumu ni kueleza mapambano yao na yale ya wengine wanaoishi na tishio la kuporwa mali zao. Kama Salar Mohandesi na Emma Teitalman wanavyotukumbusha katika insha yao ya Without Reserves (bila hifadhi), ni lazima tutambue “aina mbalimbali ya maeneo yaliyotengwa”: wakazi wa mijini hawaepuki miondoko ya maeneo yaliyotengwa ambayo huathiri maisha yao.

Kumekuwa na wito kadhaa wa kuundwa tume ya uchunguzi kuhusu Ngorongoro. Katika hilo, ninashauri ufafanuzi wa hoja ya Wilbert Kapinga na Issa Shivji hapo juu: sasa ni wakati mwafaka kwa harakati za kijamii na vikundi vya asasi za kiraia zinazojihusisha na kupinga kuondolewa kwa nguvu – iwe mijini au vijijini – kuwaunga mkono Wamasai. Ni lazima tuunganishe Wamasai kuporwa mali na athari pana za uhurishaji wa sheria za ardhi na kukua kwa uporaji wa ardhi nchini Tanzania na Afrika Mashariki kwa ujumla.

Ambreena Manji ni Profesa wa Sheria za Ardhi na Maendeleo katika Chuo Kikuu cha Cardiff, Shule ya Sheria na Siasa. Ni mwandishi wa kitabu The Struggle for land and justice in Kenya (mapambano ya ardhi na haki Kenya) (James Currey/Brewer & Boydell 2020; Vita Books 2021)

Pichani: Zaidi ya Wamasai 700 walikusanyika katika kijiji cha Oloirobi mnamo Februari 13, 2022 ili kuomba dhidi ya kufurushwa kutoka kwa ardhi ya mababu zao. (Taasisi ya Oakland).

Rosa Luxemburg: writing against barbarism

ROAPE

February 21, 2022

A new book on Rosa Luxemburg aims to be a source of inspiration and encouragement to commit our words and lives to the struggle against barbarism and for socialism. The book adopts an internationalist approach with Global South contributions from Kenya to Vietnam. The editor of the book, Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichhorn, presents the volume for roape.net (complimentary hard-copies can be ordered below, and a pdf of the entire book is also available).

By Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichhorn

Post Rosa: Letters against Barbarism is a collection of letter-exchanges in conversation with Rosa Luxemburg, in the year of her 150^th anniversary. Nineteen ‘Luxemburgians’ from across the globe engage in vivid correspondence, with references to and reflections about Rosa L. and the times we live in, as understood through their own bodies and geopolitical locations and informed by an understanding and appreciation of both the head and the heart.

Conceived in the midst of a barbarous(ly handled) pandemic, the book adopts an internationalist approach, with Global South contributions from Mo Kasuku (Kenya), alejandra Ciriza (Argentina), Xiong Min (China), Rosa Rosa Gomes (Brazil), Haydeé García Bravo (Mexico), Jigisha Bhattacharya (India), Asma Abbas (Pakistan/USA) and Hong Duc (Vietnam).

What follows is an edited version of the original introduction by Hjalmar :

Left Loneliness – Luxemburg, Letter-Writing and Us

“Hänschen, good day to you, here I am back again. I feel so lonely today and I need to refresh myself a little by chatting with you.” Rosa Luxemburg

Ditto, Rosa. So, let’s start chatting. The starting point for this book was an intense and still ongoing bout of Left Depression, Left Loneliness and a (re-)encounter with Rosa Luxemburg, “[the] lone voice in the wilderness,” just a few weeks before her 150^th anniversary on 5 March 5 last year. More precisely, the meeting was one between my increasingly disintegrating self and Luxemburg’s Letters – from inside prison and the prison inside her – with the surprising outcome being a sense of resurrected vitality and desire to move, once more, against my inner and our outer chains. The next thing I know, I am frantically reaching out to Luxemburgians from across the globe, trying to cajole them away from their busy schedules and enthuse them about contributing to a slightly unorthodox, deeply personal Luxemburg publication in the midst of a barbarous(ly handled) pandemic. The responses were overwhelmingly positive, and the decidedly non-commercial product of these life-affirming collaborations is the book you are about to read, Post Rosa: Letters against Barbarism.

I have been battling with mental health issues for close to six years now and, frankly, things have not begun to look up at all, no matter what I try. I find it quite amazing how many shades of powerlessness, hopelessness, paralysis, disillusion, demoralisation and despair one can experience, though I get the feeling I haven’t yet seen the whole rainbow. And what to say about how all this affects, in the most subversive ways, what once seemed like your own, reasonably vigorous body? Sometimes it’s an uprising of headaches striking you – in Rosa’s words – “with the hammer-blow of [counter]revolution,” the next moment it might be your insides setting up burning barricades for hours on end, only to be (temporarily) purged a few minutes later by General Secretary Heart aching and breaking you until you “drip from head to foot, from every pore, with [the] blood and dirt” of your mutilated dreams and shattered self-image. Anyway, no self-pity here, just a thoroughly debilitating process of self-destructive, primitive accumulation born-in-struggle that I didn’t really see coming and, frankly, did not need.

In other words, it really isn’t much fun to live with a Left-Wing Zombie festering inside of you. Then again, I am even more afraid to imagine who I would be without him, as he is at least a version of the former me that I have been so desperately trying to become again. Pathetic, isn’t it? What’s also slightly pathetic – and I am trying to say this with love and respect – is to bear witness not only to our own self-implosion, but to the utter helplessness, wilful ignorance and oftentimes straight-out abuse we receive from our family, friends and comrades in response to our alleged ‘whining.’

Of course, we know that Rosa L. herself often adopted a carrot and stick approach when dealing with people, including being pretty impatient, not to say harsh, with comrades she perceived to be indulging too much in their personal pain, but really, we must do a better job of taking care of each other, to genuinely have each other’s backs.

I don’t know if any of this resonates, but I sense there are quite a few of us who have been feeling pretty fu**ed up for a long time – starting way before the pandemic – and although I get the impression that Left Depression is never in fashion, I am putting it out there anyway, with what’s Left of my (com)passion, because, who knows, in one of our next self-help sessions, we may eventually, at long last, put a human face back on ourselves. I could do with a new one ASAP. Can I borrow one of your fancy hats, Rosa?

In any case, from what I understand introductions are meant to give context and rationale to what is about to come next, which in our case is a book of letters in conversation with Rosa Luxemburg, conceived in a state of dwindling life force, intense loneliness and a corresponding drop in energy that has made limping along what our Comrades Rosa and Karl [Liebknecht] called the “Golgotha-path” towards socialism a very rough endeavour indeed. After all, “it’s not words, but lives – and in the first place our own – that we are committing,” as our brother Victor Serge, himself no stranger to the defeat of socialist movements, once wrote. Serge also wrote, on the occasion of the death of Trotsky’s son Leon Sedov in 1938:

It was obvious that his physical strength was exhausted. His spirits were good, the indestructible spirits of a young revolutionary for whom socialist activity is not an optional extra but his very reason for living, and who has committed himself in an age of defeat and demoralisation, without illusions and like a man. Such epochs alternate, in our century, with other periods, of revival and strength, which they prepare the way for – which it is the job of all of us to prepare the way for.

Patriarchal language aside (sorry), and acknowledging and admiring all the amazing people and movements out there fighting the good fight “despite all,” as Rosa might say, I think there is a good case to be made that Serge’s 1938 age of defeat – yes, he was referring to the murderous developments in the USSR, but no doubt it was an age of barbarism(s) all over – is still ongoing, arguably starting even earlier, say in 1919 with the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and that one of our main tasks today continues to be that of preparing the way for revival and victory. In this age of defeat which was, in no small part, brought upon us by our own capacity for Left barbarism there is no innocent position for us to return to, Rosa Luxemburg included, and from which to reconstruct a new socialist-communist horizon.

Other than that, this labour of preparation and creation will preferably include tasting some of its fruits in the here and now because tomorrow may be too late for some of us too exhausted to keep committing our lives to what so often seems like an impossible ‘romantic utopia’. The Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci was spot on: now is the time of monsters, and sometimes they look like you and me.

Anyway, the idea for this book originated in Berlin. Mid-January. Heavy snow. 102 years since the murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg. The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 1-6, German Edition. Read every single letter. Bingeing on Rosa. Sometimes bored, sometimes elated. Jörn Schütrumpf and Michael Brie are correct, writing in 2021, some of her language is outdated, “[b]ut getting past this language allows one to unlock the lived reality behind it and discover the enduring reason for her radiance over an entire century: her empathetically sensitive relationship to the world.”

Rosa, the Sensitive. Rosa, the Radiant. For sure. But what (re-)connects me to her in those lonely Berlin days is precisely that, her Loneliness, her Left Loneliness, her emphatically dialectical relationship with it, sometimes being devoured, at other times yearning for it and making it productive. Not always palpably present, but never totally absent. Sounds familiar? Here is a sample of Red Rosa’s expressions of solitude and loneliness, put together from multiple letters:

Lonely Lux

Alone, alone

I lie there quietly, alone

Wrapped in these many-layered black veils of darkness, boredom, lack of freedom

All day long

Up in my room, as usual

The stage remains empty

Finally alone

I don’t go anywhere, don’t see anyone

I am lazy like a corpse

Mimi is happy

All alone

It will always be that way

Completely alone

Terribly alone

Everything else is bilge

Sitting in my little ‘den’ at around midnight

I do things like an automaton

Cold and calm

As though something in me has died

The prison yard is empty

Boarding myself up

Now and then

A stranger to everything around me

All by myself

A kind of deadly apathy

Do you not see how beautiful the world is?

Do you not have a heart like I do to rejoice in it all?

It seems as though we’re in a tomb

Very, very happy

Insane and abnormal

I break into cascades of laughter the way you know I do

How lovely it is to be alive in the springtime

Bad dreams, trembling hands

One day of solitude is all I need to find myself again

Awake, the light goes out

Lying on a stone-hard mattress

I’m terribly exhausted both physically and spiritually

The sand crunches hopelessly

Mimi is merry

I laugh at myself

But that’s certainly the way things are at times, when there’s loneliness

The deep darkness of night is so beautiful and as soft as velvet

God forgive me for this prose poem of wretched quality

My heart constricts

Patching up my inner self

In spite of the snow and frost and the loneliness

I am beginning without wanting to, to hatch plans and nourish hopes

So alone, so free with my reveries

Invisible

Smiling at life

A twinge of despair

Solitude and work

A storm is brewing

I am standing here as though enchanted

There’s a glaring flash of lightning from time to time

The coming of spring

I feel quite ill

Let’s not drag out the matter unbearably

The Revolution is magnificent!

A cheerful youngster, a boisterous child

A flowering meadow in radiant sunshine

A caricature that I fear more than loneliness

It’s simply Life

And if out of impatience I don’t live through it

Remember:

The revolution can never be victorious in St. Petersburg alone

A storm is brewing

Let’s shake up the masses

Let’s trust in the masses

Auf, Auf zum Kampf

WE were, WE are, WE shall be!!!

PS:

Have a good day on Sunday

The deadliest of days for prisoners and solitaries

I will spend tomorrow as usual, all day long, alone

Dancing (on) the Golgotha-path…

Ok, I admit I added the dancing part. Clearly, dancing and revolution go together, but so do Left activism and mental health problems, as well as struggling against barbarism and (seemingly never-ending) periods of profound loneliness. Rosa knew this and seemed to have found a dialectical response to it, understanding and embracing the ebbs and flows of revolution and the people who make it, that is, US. A long quote is due here, from the (in)famous 16 February, 1917 letter to Mathilde Wurm:

You argue against my slogan, ‘Here I stand – I can do no other!’ Your argument comes down to the following: that is all well and good, but human beings are too cowardly and weak for such heroism, ergo one must adapt one’s tactics to their weakness and to the principle che va piano, va sano. What narrowness of historical outlook, my little lamb! There is nothing more changeable than human psychology. That’s especially because the psyche of the masses, like Thalatta, the eternal sea, always bears within it every latent possibility: deathly stillness and raging storm, the basest cowardice and the wildest heroism. The masses are always what they must be according to the circumstances of the times, and they are always on the verge of becoming something totally different from what they seem to be. It would be a fine sea captain who would steer a course based only on the momentary appearance of the ocean’s surface and did not understand how to draw conclusions from signs in the sky and in the ocean’s depths.

Well, I have never aimed for the captaincy of anything, but I confess that I am struggling mightily not to drown in the “raging storm” that is living in this absolutely unacceptable world. But Luxemburg is right when she scoldingly laughs at her (former) lover Kostya Zetkin, upon hearing about his plans to leave the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) after their treacherous support for the Kaiser’s war effort in 1914: “You big baby, do you want to ‘opt out’ of being human too?”

Again, Left Depression and Left Loneliness are not forms of Left self-pity, though admittedly the (party) line may sometimes be thin, but it’s true, why leave the struggle or the world when we “are always on the verge of becoming something totally different from what [we] seem to be.” La lucha does continúa, with or without us, so we might as well hang on, even if battered and bruised.

In the case of this book, with you, dear readers, as well as all those who helped to make it happen – especially Pat, Jo and Daria, THANK YOU – and, of course, the amazing author-comrades, all 18 of them, hailing from at least 17 countries, who agreed to join this spontaneous, unfunded, experimental, letter-writing Samizdat initiative at very short notice and during a global pandemic that has once more exposed and confirmed that capitalism, colonialism and (hetero-)patriarchy are but the intersectionally connected expression of the same barbarism that’s been relentlessly violating bodies and minds, so-called ‘nature’ included, since at least 1492.

The invitation extended to the authors was ‘simple’: Pair up and write from the heart, in loving solidarity with Rosa Luxemburg, the letter-writer, on the occasion of her 150^th anniversary. That is to say, let’s engage in an exchange with a ‘pen-comrade,’ in most cases from another part of the world, in a writing style of your choice, with references to and reflections about Rosa L. and the times we live in, as understood through our own bodies and geopolitical locations and always informed by a theory of both the head and the heart, or sentipensar as we say in Spanish, i.e. to feel-think.

My hope for these exchanges was for them to be(come) a source of affective-intellectual inspiration and encouragement for everyone involved – authors, editors and, I trust, for you, reader-comrades – with the final aim of joining (once more) the rank and file of those of us committing our words and lives, solitaire and solidaire, to the struggle against barbarism and for socialism. Letters against Barbarism. As Rosa L. stated, “Not a wo/man and not a penny to this system!”

See you on the barricades,

Hjalmar

ROAPE version: If anyone is interested in exchanging ideas and experiences about Left Loneliness, please get in touch via rosa150@posteo.de.

Post Rosa: Letters against Barbarism is now available and can be ordered free of charge here.

Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichhorn is a German-Bolivian theatre maker, writer and editor. Joffre-Eichhorn Hjalmar is the editor of Lenin150 (Samizdat), Daraja Press, 2nd Edition, revised and expanded 2021, reviewed by Adam Mayer for roape.net here.

Featured Photograph: Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse, portrait of Rosa Luxemburg, on a pillar of an elevated road, Frankfurt (13 September 2015).

Karl Marx’s Capital in Kiswahili

ROAPE

February 18, 2022

More than a decade ago, Joachim Mwami, now a retired professor of sociology at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, began translating Capital into Kiswahili, the language spoken by roughly 100 million people across East Africa. Now, as his translation is finalized for publication with support from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, he sat down with Loren Balhorn to talk more about the project and the use of Marxism in a neo-colonial context.

Few books have had as great of an impact on how people think about – and seek to change – society as Karl Marx’s Capital. First published in German in 1867, a Russian translation of his magnum opus subsequently appeared in 1872, followed by a significantly reworked French edition in 1875. After Marx’s death in 1883, an English translation was issued four years later in 1887, overseen by his lifelong political and intellectual partner, Friedrich Engels.

As the ranks of the socialist movement swelled in the decades that followed, demand for Marx’s analysis of the capitalist “laws of motion” grew inexorably and Capital was translated into dozens more languages. Beginning with the founding of the Marx–Engels Institute in Moscow in 1919, Capital enjoyed state patronage from the Soviet Union and other states that emerged in its wake, ensuring that the volume was disseminated among millions of readers in the second half of the twentieth century.

Interest in Capital and Marxism more generally declined considerably after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, but has been rekindled in recent years as a result of the global financial crisis of 2008 and mainstream economists’ failure to anticipate such a cataclysm. Since then, Marxism has been rediscovered by a new generation – not as a series of rigid formulations or iron laws, but rather as a dynamic analytical framework for understanding how capitalism grows and sustains itself as a system, often to the detriment of people and the planet.

It was around this same period that Joachim Mwami, a retired professor of sociology at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, began translating Capital into Kiswahili, the language spoken by roughly 100 million people across East Africa. Mwami himself read Capital for the first time in the 1970s and has spent decades applying Marx’s ideas to his own studies of Tanzanian society. Yet much to his and other Tanzanian Marxists’ frustration, hardly any literature by Marx, or any Marxists for that matter, was available in local languages – a circumstance he hopes to change. Now, as his translation is finalized for publication with support from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, he sat down with Loren Balhorn to talk more about the project and the utility of Marxism in a neo-colonial context.

Loren Balhorn: Professor Mwami, you’ve been working on a Kiswahili translation of Karl Marx’s Capital for quite some time. Can you tell us a bit more about the project?

Joachim Mwami: The project originally began sometime in the mid-1980s, when I and one of my colleagues, who unfortunately passed away, agreed that we should translate Capital and divided up the chapters amongst ourselves. But it didn’t actually materialize until 2008 or 2009, when my colleague at the University of Dar es Salaam, Professor Issa Shivji, approached me about the idea.

I finally completed a first draft of all 33 chapters in 2014. I was teaching in Nigeria at the time, and when I came back in 2015 on holiday, I visited a young colleague of mine, Sabatho Nyamsenda, and discussed the work with him. I moved back to Tanzania in 2016 and continued to edit the translation until recently, when Dorothee Braun, who directs the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s office in Dar es Salaam, approached me about hiring someone to finish editing the translation and publish it. I said “excellent”, or, as you say in German, wunderbar!

What is the state of the translation right now?

The manuscript is now being transferred to an expert editor to ensure that the language, concepts, and terminology are consistent throughout the book. This includes a smaller booklet, a guide to reading Marx that I wrote over the last few years.

It sounds like you’ve devoted quite a lot of time and energy to the project over the last few decades. Was it an easy task?

It has been very difficult work on my part because I was doing it on my own. It’s particularly difficult to find the right Kiswahili equivalent for many English words, because the vocabulary in English is very wide and rich compared to Kiswahili. Now that the manuscript is being given to professional editors, I hope they will come up with better terminology than I was able to.

Could you give me an example of a term that was difficult to translate?

For example, the word “commodity”, which is very central in Capital, has been translated as a bidhaa. There’s no problem with this translation. But there are two aspects of commodities: use value and exchange value. Value can easily be translated as thamani in Kiswahili. But use value? I use the word thamani mafao. The other one is thamani mauzo, which translates as “exchange value”. But whether this will easily be comprehended by Kiswahili speakers, I cannot say.

There are also other common concepts, such as the origin of money. Marx tried to highlight the origin of money, and he used certain terminology to do so. For example, value forms. When I translate them into Kiswahili, I’m never really sure if my translation is correct or not. Remember, I cannot refer back to the German original, but that’s not really the problem. The problem is: do the Kiswahili words accurately reflect the meaning conveyed in the English version?

Capital is a very dense and difficult text, even for native English or German speakers. Who do you hope will read your translation?

Capital is essentially a book for the proletariat – the working class, those who are exploited and oppressed by the capitalist system. I’m convinced that if the book is distributed to low-income people, it will have a very positive impact. I may not be able to prove this, but I believe it and it has also been my personal experience.

In 1976, during my undergraduate studies at the University of Dar es Salaam, I happened to teach Marxist political economy at one of the textile mills in the city. I used the same terminology that I’d been utilizing in the university. What I learned is that the workers in the factory were able to understand better when we discussed issues like “What is exploitation?”, or “Who is a worker, and who is a capitalist?” They were able to internalize these concepts much better than my students at the university, who were educated members of the petit-bourgeoisie.

I was one of what they called “militants” at that time and had internalized Marxism at a young age, but when I discussed these ideas with my fellow students, they were unable to understand these concepts: “No, Mwami, we have no exploitation in Tanzania.” This experience proved to me that low-income people can understand Capital. Like I said, I may not be able to prove it, but history will prove me right.

You said you internalized Marxism at a young age. How did you encounter Marxist ideas in the first place?

In 1968 I was employed as a library assistant in Dar es Salaam, and I started reading a lot of literature that was critical of Roman Catholicism and religion in general. In 1972, Walter Rodney published How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and I was one of the first in the library to read it. By then I was a proper nationalist – this was around the time of the Arusha Declaration, when many young people were interested in establishing and implementing socialism in Tanzania.

The University of Dar es Salaam was a reservoir of critical thinking in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the library we had access to a lot of magazines produced by radical students. That’s when I started to imbibe Marxist knowledge. So, in 1975, when I joined the University of Dar es Salaam as a mature student, I was one of the most enthusiastic radicals, reading a lot of Marxist literature, particularly Marx himself. By the time I graduated in 1978, I was really a Marxist – at least in terms of acquisition, if not application.

Was Marxist literature easily accessible?

At the university level, yes. The good thing about that period was that a good number of student radicals in the universities had a very potent influence. They would always encourage us to read more. Whenever we read bourgeois literature, we would be encouraged to read books on the same subject but from a Marxist point of view.

We were also encouraged by radical lectures like Shivji, who taught me at the time, or Mahmood Mamdani, who was also at the university. They encouraged us to use this opportunity to gain more knowledge so that we would be able to confront these “bourgeois” radicals who were always in opposition to us.

So, you were defining yourselves in contrast to the “African socialism” that was the official state ideology of Tanzania?

Exactly. Remember, before I went to the university, I was a pure nationalist, and very enthusiastic about Ujamaa, the African socialism espoused by [Tanzanian President] Julius Nyerere. But as I began reading Marx and other Marxist literature, I learned that this was a rubbish type of socialism, similar to what was introduced in England during the nineteenth century by Robert Owen and so forth, what Engels called “utopian socialism”. That’s when I broke with Nyerere, because he lacked a scientific understanding of capitalism and of oppression and exploitation.

Is Marxism still popular at the universities?

No, it’s gone. There are very few Marxist teachers left. I find that students today are often reluctant to discuss Marxism or to identify as Marxists, for fear of not being able to get a financial grant if they expose themselves. Things aren’t the way they used to be.

Many self-professed Marxist thinkers like, for example, Cedric Robinson or Gayatri Spivak, have argued that classical Marxism is inherently Eurocentric – it offers some useful insights, but it isn’t sufficient to understand social and economic developments in the non-Western world. Do you agree?

No, I don’t. I disagree completely. I think this is the result of a misunderstanding of Marxism and Marx himself. I tend to state the following: Marxism is scientific, but more importantly, it is a scientific philosophy that is completely different from liberal philosophy. Now, misunderstanding Marxism is nothing new. It’s a way of stupefying the minds, especially young minds, and the minds of people who don’t understand what is happening in Africa.

Africa today is a product of colonialism, but colonialism itself is a product of capitalism. You can never understand the present state of affairs in Africa without understanding capitalism and how the two are integrated, and you can never understand the inner core of capitalism without Marxism. The way that economists identify and define “society” is completely … misguided. Society is always a totality, always a whole – this is one of Marx’s most important contributions, to say that society is an “ensemble of social relations”. But you can’t understand these relations with any kind of positivist social theory or philosophy, because they are too tied to physical manifestations. Marxism helps us to understand the invisible processes beneath the surface.

Those who attack Marxism do so for their own reasons. And those who say that Marxism can’t work in Africa are completely wrong – they vulgarize Marx. In fact, in Tanzania, some of us have been using Marx and Marxism to better understand our own social context.

How would you characterize Tanzanian society today, in Marxist terms?

That is a very good question. We classify Tanzania as a “neo-colonial” society. Tanzania was colonized in two or three essential phases, starting with German colonialism and followed by British colonialism. After we won independence, we entered neo-colonialism, a phase which continues until today.

Our argument is that colonial social and economic structures were established under the German and British colonial systems. What Nyerere and the regime after him did was to copy and adopt these social economic structures. They were never abandoned or revolutionized, so we still have the same economic and social structures.

We argue that the basic function of any colony in the world, both today and yesterday, is to create conditions whereby wealth is taken away and transported to the imperialist countries in Western Europe, but also in Asia and North America. Nyerere at least tried to understand these structures and, in a particular way, to change or transform them. But since he used the very awkward method of what we call “utopian socialism”, he did not manage to change the structures. That’s why he failed. Because of this failure, a new social class, which was already being created in the 1960s, was able to consolidate itself as a capitalist class in Tanzania.

This class continues to rule today, but in a subordinate position. It’s not an independent capitalist class. It is subjugated to imperialist powers in Europe, America, and Asia.

What implications does that have for socialist strategy in Tanzania? How can Marxists engage in politics under those conditions?

In my opinion, we must accept that Tanzania is a neo-colonial country, completely different in terms of economic perspectives from Europe, Asia, or America. We have a small group of capitalists and a very, very large peasantry. But at the same time, we also have a small industrial sector and a small working class, and a lot of unemployed people. These social classes are the most important source of mobilization – not people like you and me. Our role is simply to transfer this particular knowledge, Marxism, to their minds, so that they can design their own methods of how to struggle against oppression and exploitation.

Is much Marxist literature available in Kiswahili?

No, I would say there is none, except for a few pieces of literature which some militants have translated from English. But even Marxist books in English are very rare and very hard to obtain in Tanzania. Even some of the books by Professor Shivji, who lives in Tanzania, are not available in bookshops here.

So, there’s a real need for more socialist literature in the country.

Exactly. There are very few Marxists in the country, you can count them on two hands, and even they are very old. There are a few young ones coming up, but they face many problems such as economic pressure which makes it difficult to balance academic and political work. The tempo of learning and publishing is still quite slow.

But I think the future is bright. There is a cadre of young people emerging, people who are questioning why unemployment is rising, why economic disparities are very great, and I am quite optimistic than in perhaps ten years’ time we will have a large number of young people leaning towards a Marxist political orientation.

You work closely with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s office in Dar es Salaam. Has the foundation’s presence had an impact in the region?

The foundation has made a big difference and impact, there is no doubt about that. The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation has sponsored many programmes, allowing us to go out into the villages and talk to workers. It has also sponsored a lot of our publications. Some other organizations have stopped working with us in recent years out of fear of political repression, but the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation has always stood by us. It’s been fantastic.

You’ve translated the first book of Capital. Are there plans to translate the other two volumes?

Before I die, my plan is to at least translate Volume Two. Right now, I am working on Chapter 12 of Volume Two, and I have finished about 250 pages. After that, I will translate Volume Three. Then I can die happily. That is my basic programme.

But more importantly, after the official publication of Volume One, I have plans to start a Marxist course with my best students, where we read and discuss Capital in Kiswahili chapter by chapter and book by book.

Joachim Mwami taught sociology at the University of Dar es Salaam from 1992 to 2013, before joining the faculty at Umaru Musa Yar’adua University in Nigeria. He is currently finalizing a Kiswahili translation of Capital and an introductory guide to Marx for Kiswahili readers.

Loren Balhorn works an English web editor at Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation. In addition, he edits the German and US editions of Jacobin Magazine and serves as a board member of the Historical Materialism Book Series.

The interview first appeared on the website of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and can be found here.

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