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Liberated Texts: The power of books as propaganda

By
ROAPE
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Louis Allday writes how book publishing from the 1960s became an important weapon of strategic propaganda by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. The new website Liberated Texts aims to provide a platform for reviews of works of ongoing relevance that have been suppressed or misinterpreted in the mainstream since their release. Allday argues that books remain powerful tools that have the ability to fundamentally transform one’s worldview.

By Louis Allday

‘Brecht said, “hungry man reach for the book.” Why? Because to get rid of hunger, you have to get rid of the system that produces hunger, and to get rid of that system you must understand it and you can only do that by reaching for the book.’

Prabhat Patnaik

In November 1965, the Deputy Director of the CIA was sent an in-house book review by the curator of the Agency’s Historical Intelligence Collection. Its subject was Kwame Nkrumah’s seminal work, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, first published in London earlier that year. The review largely focussed on “The Mechanisms of Neo-Colonialism”, the chapter in Nkrumah’s book that was said to have most “caught the eye of the press” and was “of greatest interest to the CIA”.

Within the book, Nkrumah analyses in detail the techniques through which modern imperialist powers achieved the objectives they had previously accomplished through overt colonialism and identifies the United States as the worst offender in this regard. In doing so, Nkrumah named names and drew attention to the neo-colonial role of, among others, the CIA, US Peace Corps, USIA and USAID. The tenor of the review is largely neutral, but the author’s concern with both the book’s contents and Nkrumah as a figure more broadly are not hard to discern beneath its superficially objective tone. It concludes by reporting that copies of the book had been sent to a number of CIA departments including the African Division of the Deputy Directorate for Plans (DDP), the Agency’s clandestine service and covert action arm, for study and “whatever action these components consider advisable”.

Only three months later, in February 1966, Nkrumah was deposed as President of Ghana in a coup that was engineered by the Agency. The late June Milne, Nkrumah’s editor, literary executor and long-time confidante, believed that because Neo-Colonialism had demonstrated the workings of international finance capital in Africa in such detail, the exposure its publication constituted was “just too much… the last straw” and led directly to the decision to depose Nkrumah in a coup.[1]

Milne’s speculation is well-founded, not only because of the undeniably explosive content of Nkrumah’s book, but because senior figures within the CIA were already well aware of the dangers of such material to US interests. In the words of its Covert Operations Director in 1961:

Books differ from all other propaganda media, primarily because one single book can significantly change the reader’s attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium… this is, of course, not true of all books at all times and with all readers – but it is true significantly often enough to make books the most important weapon of strategic (long-range) propaganda.[2]

As such, the Agency acted accordingly and developed an extraordinary level of control and influence within the publishing industry. Details of the extent of this reach were revealed to the public in 1975 by the Church Committee, a US Senate investigation into the activities of a number of US intelligence agencies, including the CIA. The most well-known revelations of this committee include details of the now infamous CIA-run programmes MKULTRA, COINTELPRO, Family Jewels and Operation Mockingbird. Less well known are the details it contains on the Agency’s clandestine control over book publishing and distribution which, as per the committee’s findings, enabled it to:

(a) Get books published or distributed abroad without revealing any U.S. influence, by covertly subsidizing foreign publications or booksellers.

(b) Get books published which should not be “contaminated” by any overt tie-in with the U.S. government, especially if the position of the author is “delicate.”

(c) Get books published for operational reasons, regardless of commercial viability.

(d) Initiate and subsidize indigenous national or international organizations for book publishing or distributing purposes.

(e) Stimulate the writing of politically significant books by unknown foreign authors-either by directly subsidizing the author, if covert contact is feasible, or indirectly, through literary agents or publishers.[3]

Utilising this immense influence, before the end of 1967, well over 1,000 books had been produced, subsidized or sponsored by the Agency. Of these works, 25 percent were written in English, with the remainder in a number of different languages published around the world. Sometimes these books were published by organisations backed by the CIA without the author’s knowledge, while others involved direct collaboration between the Agency and the writer.

Frequently, books were published in order to bolster the US imperialist narrative about enemy states, for example, the Agency produced a number of works about China that were intended specifically to combat the “sympathetic view of the emerging China as presented by Edgar Snow”.[4] As the committee’s official report stated, an American who read one of those books, purportedly authored by a Chinese defector, “would not know that his thoughts and opinions about China are possibly being shaped by an agency of the United States Government”.[5] The Agency’s concern extended to book reviews which it utilised to refute the attacks of critics and promote works that it had sponsored. On at least one occasion, a book produced by the CIA was then reviewed in the New York Times by another writer also contracted by the Agency.[6]

In the time that has passed since the revelations of the Church Committee, technological developments have transformed the way in which people consume information globally. The internet has become a new battle ground of propaganda and has been subject to comparable levels of infiltration and manipulation by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. The idea that books remain the most important weapon of strategic propaganda, as determined by the CIA in 1961, would now be contested by many.

However, the terrain of contemporary publishing implies that US intelligence agencies have not ceased to be concerned with the power and influence of books as objects of propaganda. Take one example, since the US’ proxy war against Syria began a decade ago, a raft of books supporting the imperialist narrative have been published, many of them by ostensibly radical and leftist publishers. In many cases, these books are then endorsed and reviewed by an affiliated network of magazines and podcasts, while other works that go against the hegemonic narrative are reviewed negatively or simply ignored entirely.

It is with this historical context and lamentable present reality in mind that the website Liberated Texts was recently established. The site aims to provide a platform for reviews of works of ongoing relevance that have been forgotten, underappreciated, suppressed or misinterpreted in the cultural mainstream since their release. Of course, not all of the works reviewed on the site will have been subject to overt suppression or silencing by imperialist intelligence agencies – the reasons why books that go against prevailing ideas usually do not receive the attention and readership they deserve are countless – but all remain relevant and deserve a wider readership. The same is true of works that do not get translated into English for political reasons, such as the late Domenico Losurdo’s study of Stalin, which his English language publishers, Verso Books, have refused to translate and publish in spite of repeated requests for them to do so. [7]

The life stories of prominent revolutionaries and thinkers are littered with references to how reading individual books or authors changed the trajectory of their life, and notwithstanding the dramatic shift in the educational and media landscape that has taken place in the decades since the publication of Neo-Colonialism, books remain powerful tools that have the ability to fundamentally transform one’s worldview.

Liberated Texts seeks to provide a home for all those people who still believe that to be the case and want to write about books they feel passionate about and believe – whether they were published 100 years ago or in the last few years – remain relevant to the issues of the present moment and deserve to be read and discussed more widely.

Louis Allday is a historian who researches the British Government`s presence in the Persian Gulf, with an emphasis on its cultural propaganda. Allday is the founder of Liberated Texts.

Featured Photograph: The Harlem bookseller and activist Lewis H. Michaux. From 1932 to 1974 he was the owner of the African National Memorial Bookstore in Harlem, New York City.

 Notes

[1] Doreatha Drummond Mbala, Kwame Nkrumah: The June Milne Interview, (2019), 67.

[2] The Church Committee (1975), 193.

[3] The Church Committee (1975), 193.

[4] The Church Committee (1975), 198.

[5] The Church Committee (1975), 199.

[6] The Church Committee (1975), 198.

[7] Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: History and Criticism of a Black Legend (2008)

On the road to Glasgow: South Africa’s green capitalism

By
ROAPE
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As COP26 takes place in Scotland, this blogpost concentrates on South Africa’s interpretation of the green economy. Franziska Müller and Simone Claar scrutinize what South Africa has really achieved, whether this matches with its green ambitions, and how this translates to green capitalism’s wishful thinking.

By Franziska Müller and Simone Claar

Aspiring as a frontrunner in climate diplomacy has been one of South Africa’s global ambitions. Hosting international climate conferences and domestic ‘energy indabas’ seemed a popular strategy to demonstrate both responsibility for Pan-African interests and readiness for clean energy. While the gap between global climate governance, and a largely coal-powered energy mix has been frowned upon, recent political developments paint a slightly different picture. With carbon capitalism still alive and kicking, South Africa’s version of a green economy is materializing, yet at the price of downplaying questions of socio-ecological justice.

As COP26 takes place in Scotland, this blogpost first concentrates on South Africa’s interpretation of the green economy, by taking its energy auction instrument as an example for the arguments over green capitalism’s shape and structure. As COP 26 is dedicated to a stocktaking of domestic carbon reduction policies, we also scrutinize what South Africa has achieved, whether this matches with its green frontrunner ambitions, and how this translates to green capitalism’s wishful thinking.

South African Carbon Capitalism

South Africa has had its fair share of fossilist path dependencies. Pointedly labelled as the “minerals-energy complex” by Ben Fine and Zavareh Rustomjee, the settler-colonial amalgamation of the mining sector, heavy industry and national banking had developed already in the late 19th century. Under the Apartheid regime the minerals-energy complex became a bulwark that granted energy autarky despite the global boycott and the divestment campaigns.

Ironically, after liberation, the moth-balled surplus coal power stations guaranteed nationwide access to energy and ended racialized segregation in the energy sector. With energy monopolist ESKOM in full (but next to bankrupt) control over grid infrastructure, any attempt to defossilize the energy mix was limited to baby-steps. Yet, South Africa’s carbon emissions are about as high as the emissions of all other sub-Saharan African countries put together, with the Kriel area in Mpumalanga identified as a worldwide hotspot for fine dust pollution. Indeed, energy justice has for most of the time mainly been understood as security of supply, whereas environmental or health concerns have only lately found wider attention.

Social movements such as Earth Life South Africa or Mfolozi Community Environmental Justice Organisation protest against coal power stations face much opposition as the symbolic and material power of coal as the root to progress and social security remains unbroken. Anti-coal activists have been facing death threats, and in 2020, Fikile Ntshangas, a long-time activist against open-pit mining at Tendele Coal Mine was murdered. International environmental NGOs have only loosely been connected to these grassroots movements and the opportunity to join forces with trade unionists such as NUMSA has proven unsuccessful.

In this context, – a ‘policy innovation’, that is, the implementation of a carefully curated energy auction instrument, was regarded as a chance to change South Africa’s political economy of energy and to pave the way towards South Africa’s version of green capitalism: transnationalized, socio-economically conditionalized and non-unionized.

Auctioning a just transition? Renewable Energy Auctions and Investment Patterns

The first substantial steps towards adopting the green economy paradigm were taken when South Africa introduced an energy auction instrument – the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producers Procurement Programme (REI4P) – in 2011 (for a broader discussion of REI4P see our article in ROAPE here). REI4P has added 5 GW renewable energy to the national grid, which is why the instrument, and its investment patterns, deserve a closer look. Indeed, REI4P stands for something bigger than just a policy innovation: it represents a shift towards a different political economy of energy, largely driven by transnational energy companies and green finance flows.

REI4P differs from other energy auctions by adding a socio-economic component to the cost-efficiency scoring. Bidders must fulfil both local content requirements and socio-economic requirements such as employment of Black personnel and there is a threshold for local ownership (minimum 2.5%, with a target of 5%). The target was overachieved to a significant degree, with local ownership of up to 40%. In addition, a minimum of 45% for solar and 40% for other technology project costs had to be spent in South Africa. As of June 2021, REI4P has so far awarded tenders to 112 renewable energy projects, of which 92 have reached financial closure. In terms of job creation this has resulted in 40,134 direct, full-time equivalent job years.

Over the timeframe of the successive bidding windows, pricing has dropped considerably, from 2.52 rand per kWh in the first bidding round to only 0.82 rand per kWh in the fourth round, which means that the affordability of renewable energy increases. This demonstrates that, overall, renewable energy is cost competitive with conventional power sources.

The geographic spread of projects across South Africa is however unequal, with most projects (59 out of 112) located in Northern and Western Cape provinces, but few in Limpopo (3), Mpumalanga (2), KwaZulu-Natal (1) and Gauteng (1). While this is mostly due to favourable resource conditions for wind and solar energy in the Northern, Eastern and Western Cape provinces, it also demonstrates a hesitation on the part of investors to implement projects in the more remote and poorer parts of South Africa and on former homelands. Moreover, the creation of eight Renewable Energy Development Zones (the so-called REDZs), where more favourable investment conditions apply, meets investors’ needs but will increase spatial polarization, as six out of eight are located in the Northern, Western and Eastern Cape. This will concentrate the energy value chain geographically by clustering large manufacturers, smaller enterprises and adjacent energy services. However, the new focus on REDZs also means that REI4P’s potential for job creation in precisely those regions which will be hit most by coal decommissioning has not been considered.

Green Investment Patterns

Zooming in on investors and on investment patterns such as ownership or the role of transnationalized capital reveals that REI4P is by and large a transnationally driven project, though with a considerable amount of energy cooperatives with high communal ownership.

The first pattern, transnational capital, is characterized by complex shareholder consortia and an exceptionally high share of inter- and transnational capital, ranging between 40% and 60%, with private equity playing an important role. This is complemented by a lower share of local capital and low involvement of local communities ranging between 2% and 5%. Overall, 31 out of 82 projects (37.8%) fall under this category. In most cases we find one transnational shareholder with a blocking minority who manages all the operative processes. Often companies with a long-standing history are now seeking to tap the potential of the renewable energy market, for instance Enel or Anisol, a subsidiary of the French oil company Total.

Transnational social entrepreneurship, the second investment pattern, is characterized by a high share of transnational investors, complemented by an almost equally high share of community trusts, ranging between 10% and 40% of community ownership. A typical example is the Prieska Solar Power Plant, involving Spanish company Gestamp (60% share), but also the South African strategic equity investor Mulilo, with a share of 40% divided equally between the company and a community trust. This pattern involves South African project developers, pension funds, life insurances and black equity investors, but also development aid agencies and international finance institutions. Socio-economic responsibility is often outsourced to specialised agencies, such as Sofisa Phillips or the University of Cape Town’s (UCT’s) start-up Knowledge Pele, that aim at business consultancy, socio-economic needs assessments and community development programmes. This pattern was found in 26 out of 82 projects (31.7%). Combining transnational investment, domestic black capital and community trusts, this pattern can also be considered a liberal success story building on the idea of African entrepreneurship, while opening up to transnational investors’ interests.

Localised renewable energy ownership, the third investment pattern applies for 25 out of 82 projects (30.5%). These consortia involve smaller, South Africa-based project developers or joint ventures which hold the controlling minority. In these cases, engineering and construction work is performed by domestic companies, thereby guaranteeing a higher rate of local content. The shareholder amount of community trusts is much higher than the 2.5% required by the REIPPPP directives, ranging between 15 and 40%. In contrast to the first and second models outlined above, projects within this pattern are more likely to be financed through debt from national and developmental banks than through equity. Several projects involve traditional leaders and communities on collectively owned land, for instance Tsitsikamma Community Wind Farm, Cookhouse Wind Farm, and Grassridge Wind Farm. In addition, socio-economic programmes are more likely to be designed according to public consultation, with college courses, entrepreneurial education or agricultural consultation as typical features.

Green Capitalism and the run-up to Cop26

This close-up on REI4P provides evidence of the socio-economic and socio-ecological transformations currently happening in South Africa. It shows how two different energy regimes have entered fierce competition: an aging monopolist one representing carbon capitalism, and a diversified, liberal and transnationalized energy regime with a stated aim of green capitalism. Yet this competition faces built-in distortions, some of which we can already pinpoint:

  • Transnational capital and green finance flows gain in importance: Their rising relevance means that renewable energy projects are designed according to criteria such as bankability, scalability, and return on investment, whereas criteria such as energy justice or social welfare may be of minor significance. This trend towards financialization resonates with South African aspirations to become a worldwide hub for green hydrogen, a source of energy which is even more prone to financialization.
  • Green transformation processes face political contestation: Trade unions accurately criticize that green jobs are healthier and argue that they offer lower wages and less social security. Job losses in the Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces pose a danger to social stability, yet REI4P is not designed in a way that would consider these risks. At the same time, communal entities complain that they do not have enough voice to articulate their interests during the energy auctions.
  • Energy poverty is not yet resolved by renewables while fossilists seek to promote the carbon accumulation model. Indeed, with uneven distribution and supply chains being disrupted due to the pandemic, we can spot sudden energy demands, which are difficult to satisfy. Therefore the recent Karpowership deal – a 20-year contract granted to the Turkish Karadeniz group for placing two fossil powerships in front of Durban’s harbour – is so disturbing: a business model designed for late-stage carbon capitalism, aiming at quick-and-dirty energy solutions, offering overpriced energy and endangering marine ecosystems.

On the road to Glasgow, how do these points correspond with South Africa’s nationally determined contributions (NDC) for COP26? Indeed, South Africa has tightened its commitments and has finally agreed on a shift away from coal. The goal of decoupling of emissions and growth pervades the strategy, and echoes hopes and fears so typical for green capitalism.

On a global level South Africa rightfully demands that western nations enhance their pledges for the Green Climate Funds and sign a “just transition partnership”. This resonated with historic responsibilities and claims for climate justice. Furthermore, the NDC repeatedly refers to the “just transition” narrative, for instance for greening value production chains, decarbonizing heavy industry and for restructuring miners’ jobs.

A focus on climate vulnerability and early warning systems gives evidence that there is deep awareness for climate change-induced dangers in the near future. On the mitigation side policies proposed include a carbon tax, company-level carbon budgets and emission reduction, yet the language is weak and does not underscore a sense of strong commitment. While decommissioning of 35 GW coal power stations is a step towards decarbonisation, coal capacity additions of 7.2 GW are not at all in line with the Paris Agreement. Furthermore, REI4P is not expanded rapidly enough, which means targets such as 45% renewables by 2030 or 85% by 2040, seem beyond reach. Not surprisingly, this pace is still rated “insufficient” by the Climate Action Tracker.

In contrast, the discussion and activities surrounding the so-called Climate Justice Charter call for a more radical transformation. Being a product of intense civil society dialogue, the Climate Justice Charter tackles the connection between sustainability, livelihood, production chains, and global political economy. In the field of energy, the Charter calls for socially owned and community-based renewable energy. In practice, this means a rapid shift from carbon capitalism, including divestment from fossil fuels and a deep transformation of the current energy system. One significant difference to the current renewable energy programme is the focus on technology ownership and Pan-African clean tech. In addition, the call for a decentralization of renewable energy production “supported by participatory budgeting and incentives (such as feed in tariffs) for our workplaces, homes and communities” is remarkable.

Returning to our research findings on the different investment patterns in RE4IP, the consequences are to concentrate on localized structures and decentralized energy production. However, adopting the ideas of the Charter would be an opportunity to strengthen social justice to underpin a truly just transition.

Read Franziska Müller and Simone Claar’s full article in ROAPE until the end of November, ‘Auctioning a ‘just energy transition’? South Africa’s renewable energy procurement programme and its implications for transition strategies.’

Franziska Müller is Assistant Professor for Climate Governance at the University of Hamburg and is active in environmental justice movements for more than 20 years. Her research concentrates on energy justice, energy transitions, postcolonial studies, and international political economy, with a regional focus on South Africa, Zambia, and Ghana. 

Simone Claar leads the research group ‘Glocalpower: Funds, tools, and networks for an African energy transition’ at the University of Kassel, and a long-standing trade unionist in Germany’s education union. Her research interests include international political economy focusing on state and capitalism in Africa, green economy and finance as well as renewable energies.

‘It hasn’t fallen yet, the rule is military still’: Lessons from the Sudanese revolution

By
ROAPE
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In the context of the coup in Sudan, Muzan Alneel analyses the Sudanese revolution and the role of the transitionary government. She argues that the deep unpopularity of the now overthrown government sponsored by the UAE and Saudi Arabia, internationally financed, was an expression of both the economic and political counterrevolutions. This long read forms part of a dossier of articles that is published in collaboration with the Transnational Institute (TNI) and Rosa Luxemburg Foundation – North Africa.

By Muzan Alneel

In early December 2018, protests broke out throughout Sudan against the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir. One week into the sit-in that demanded his departure in April 2019, Omar al-Bashir was deposed – after almost 30 years of rule. However, Sudanese revolutionaries did not stop their sit-ins: they continued to rally before the General Command (headquarters of the Sudanese Armed Forces), affirming their commitment to keep protesting until all their demands were met and their desired changes were realized. On 3 June 2019, the 29th night of Ramadan, the Sudanese security forces brutally and simultaneously dispersed all the sit-ins, committing a massacre.

A ‘power-sharing’ agreement was subsequently signed between the Military Council (comprising al-Bashir’s former security council, which has led the country since al-Bashir’s fall) and the opposition coalition (the Forces of the Declaration of Freedom and Change – FFC). Under the agreement, the civilian-military government is to rule Sudan for a transitional period of three years.

Throughout the two years since the announcement of the transitional government, Sudan has experienced various political and economic changes, including signing peace agreements with different armed movements in the country, Sudan’s removal from the US list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, and the ratification of some laws and the amendment of others. At the same time, protests have never stopped: they have occurred at least twice a month during this period.

One chant which has been heard during the ongoing protests in Sudan, and which has become a prevalent part of daily life, is the call ‘It hasn’t fallen yet’: a phrase that follows the call of the December 2018 uprising ‘Just fall’ – referring to the dictatorial regime. The phrase ‘It hasn’t fallen yet’ is a clear expression of the protesters’ rejection of the current situation in the country, and of their will to continue protesting. Other chants include ‘Whether it’s fallen or not, we’re staying here’ and ‘It hasn’t fallen yet, the rule is military still’.

This blogpost seeks to enrich the international revolutionary conversation on the lessons that can be drawn from the Sudanese revolution. Learning these lessons can help us to achieve the revolution’s goals and can also enrich worldwide struggles for a more just world.

Why have the Sudanese risen up?

In early December 2018, angry protests broke out in different Sudanese cities. The bleak economic situation, with people forced to queue for bread and fuel, had ignited a general mood of anger. Atbara city was the site of the most important protest, organized by students at Atbara Industrial School protesting the fact that ta’amiya sandwiches (the most common breakfast consumed by impoverished Sudanese) had become unaffordable as a result of increased bread prices. The students marched all the way to the headquarters of the ruling party, the National Congress Party (NCP), and burned the building to the ground. [1] Pictures of the NCP headquarters on fire soon circulated among the Sudanese. The building looked identical to other NCP headquarters throughout the country, along with their lavish spending, coloured green and provocatively located amidst impoverished and underdeveloped surroundings. The picture ignited hope and the possibility of overthrowing the government suddenly appeared more realistic, despite the arsenal of the security services and their crackdown on protesters.

Although the protesters’ anger emerged in 2018, the economic problems that catalysed it went back much further, resulting from economic policies with a long history. Some of these policies had been implemented by the National Salvation regime of Omar al-Bashir, while some had been put in place under former regimes. Ever since the coup on 30 June 1989, the Salvation government had adopted policies of liberalization and privatization, including the withdrawal of public services. Since the ruling party’s Islamic background led it to adopt an oppositional stance towards the ‘major powers’ (principally the United States and the European Union), it implemented neoliberal economic policies without being able to benefit from the aid that the global financial institutions could have offered. Liberalization empowered the National Islamic Front – the ancestor of the Bashir’s NCP – whose cadres provided, and thus profited from, those public services that the state had abandoned, like education and healthcare. Accordingly, the regime was able to redirect revenues from the state treasury into the pockets of its party cadres.

The history of the Salvation government was marked by a series of failed economic policies and short-sighted decisions, including selling government assets, abandoning service provision, and opening the door to privatized healthcare and education. These policies provoked mass protests throughout the 1990s. Towards the end of that decade, driven by the 1998 US embargo on the country, the regime turned to Chinese companies to act as partners in oil drilling operations in the country. At the same time, the regime strove to re-join the global financial system. It entered into negotiations with a series of US administrations to lift the economic embargo. As part of this process, Sudan accepted to enter into negotiations with the Sudan’s People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) to end the civil war in South Sudan, the longest in the history of the continent.[2]

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the war initiated a period during which public funds and development grants were channelled into construction, contracting companies, oilfield services, and related projects, both Sudanese and foreign. Oil drilling increased in the South, with pipes pumping the resource to Port Sudan, on the Red Sea. An economic boom occurred, manifested in the stability of the currency and a proliferation of building and construction projects, including roads and infrastructure projects (always marred by corruption scandals and the disappearance of public funds). However, the boom was not accompanied by any development in basic service provision, public facilities, or developmental projects, and there were no serious attempts to establish developmental or service projects in the South, or to provide a national plan for economic and social justice.

This treatment of the Sudanese regions – whereby the government depleted their resources but refrained from engaging in development activities and service provision – was nothing new. Before independence in 1956, education and health services had always been centralized in Khartoum (the capital of the centralized administration) and its surroundings. Sudan’s road network reflected this centre of gravity: converging on the political capital, with virtually no intercity roads not passing through Khartoum. Electricity networks and other services were no different. Following independence, governments did not change the colonial approach that prioritized securing Egypt’s southern border, the sources of the Nile, and cheap agricultural exports from Sudan, while cutting public services to a minimum, limiting them to wealth-administering, rather than wealth-producing, regions.

It is not surprising, then, that the Southern population, or any other Sudanese population for that matter, would choose independence from Khartoum’s colonial authority. In January 2011, as the five-year transition period laid down by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement came to an end, the South Sudan population voted in favour of separation.

After South Sudan declared independence, it became clear that the government in Khartoum was unprepared for this new reality. Its loss of control over southern oil led to economic collapse. In 2012 the national currency depreciated by half within one year. In response, the government immediately turned to austerity measures and announced the lifting of fuel subsidies. Protests broke out against this decision, mainly in universities and higher education institutions. Inspired by the Arab Spring, weekly marches took place, coordinated through social media networks. The protests were met with violence and arrests and within two months they stopped. The following year, in 2013, seeking to prevent continued economic collapse, the government announced the lifting of fuel subsidies for a second time. This time, however, it did so only after school break was announced – to limit student protests. The demonstrations that broke out this time occurred on the periphery of the capital and were met with a different level of violence: live bullets were shot at protesters in the capital in September 2013, when more than 100 people were martyred within three days. The violence was perpetrated by the Janjaweed, the semi-governmental militia known for their genocidal massacres in Darfur, whose formation and continued existence had been partly assisted by the Sudanese generals and National Security Services. [3]

Facing these protests against its austerity policies, the government proceeded to look for political alliances to sustain its rule. In January 2014, in accordance with a proposal by Princeton Lyman, the former US Special Envoy to Sudan, al-Bashir called for a national dialogue. His proposal envisaged an alliance between the regime and the opposition, whereby the latter would give up its attempts to overthrow the regime in return for sharing power. In Sudanese politics, this approach is known as the ‘soft landing approach’.

Lyman’s proposal failed and economic collapse continued. In response, the government continued its turn towards Gulf capital, whose need for arable lands coincided with the Sudanese regime’s need for economic support. Sudan’s subordination to the Gulf governments led to the transfer of large areas of Sudanese lands, which were emptied of their indigenous populations, to Gulf capital, and extended to its involvement in the Emirati and Saudi war in Yemen.

Anti-government protests continued during this time. These included protests against land grabs, a two-day strike in 2016 against the lifting of subsidies on medicines, and a journalists’ strike in 2017 against the confiscation of newspapers from printshops, and many others.

The uprisings by the Sudanese against all forms of austerity measures in the 10 years that preceded the December 2018 uprising confirm that lack of economic justice was, and still is, the main driving force behind the Sudanese revolution. The Sudanese rose in revolt against privatizations, the withdrawal of state subsidies, the lack of services, and increased bread prices. It was these policies which, on 19 December 2018, drove the students of Atbara Industrial School to the streets.

How can Sudan’s current reality be read?

The Sudanese took to the streets in various Sudanese cities under the slogan ‘Just fall’ – a total rejection of any form of compromise with the existing regime. In July 2018, the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA) was established as a trade union, being composed of parallel unions (mostly in white-collar sectors), proclaiming its opposition to the regime-controlled official unions. In August 2018, this assembly called for a march towards the parliament, planned to take place on 25 December 2018, to demand an increase in the minimum wage. As protests broke out in early December, and then intensified, the SPA changed the destination of its march to the presidential palace and adopted the call for overthrowing the regime.

In January 2019, in the Declaration of Freedom and Change, the SPA set out its demands, and urged the Sudanese people to adopt and employ various methods of peaceful struggle to achieve them. The demands included the immediate resignation of al-Bashir and his regime, along with the formation of a transitional government, to be charged with nine tasks encompassing economic, political, and legal reforms. The declaration was signed by the SPA and four other bodies representing major Sudanese opposition alliances. They then published the declaration and invited others to sign it too.

While the SPA was widely accepted among the protesters, who were eager for a new leadership, some of the other signatories to the declaration, including existing political parties, were less popular. The Sudanese people’s hostility towards the existing political parties was both logical and justified: throughout the country’s history, these parties have repeatedly compromised and allied themselves with the autocratic regimes they claimed to oppose, and they have repeatedly failed to realize any of their goals, despite justifying their compromises as the road to achieving them. At the same time, Sudan’s centralized and disproportionate development path has created a terrible gap between the country’s wealth-administration centres and the regions, in terms of education, political participation, and political power. The Sudanese parties thus represent the elites created by such a reality: they are agricapital and commercial parties, alongside educated effendi parties.[4] Although some parties, like the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP), have theoretically proposed approaches promoting the interests of the working classes, their effect has barely differed from that the capitalist parties and their elite political ways.

In this context it is clear why the protesters preferred other forms of organization, from neighbourhood resistance committees to professional organizations. The popularity of such organizations is the result of alienation from ideological organization, in favour of geographic or professional organization. This discourse naturally led to calls for the formation of a ‘technocratic’ government, distanced from politics (which the people now perceive as corrupt). The lack of a revolutionary vision among the protesters was the result of the absence of any revolutionary party capable of revolutionary theorization and of introducing a counter discourse.

Upon its publication, more than 20 trade union and factional bodies signed the Declaration of Freedom and Change, on 1 January 2019. More signatures were gathered over the following weeks, reaching more than 100 bodies. Nonetheless, the FFC’s decision-making remained tied to the votes of the first four bodies (the SPA and the major opposition party coalitions).[5] The SPA thus failed to play its expected revolutionary role of liberating political decision-making from the hands of the elite. Its composition and approach, being made up of white-collar individuals pursuing their dominant interests and class choices. Again, this was the result of the absence of an organized revolutionary party that could deliver sound analysis to the public.

The SPA called for the forming of neighbourhood resistance committees, drawing on the earlier experience of the grassroots committees that had been formed during the 2013 protests. The committees became the chief heroes of the uprising, conducting impressive work organizing protests on the ground. Just before announcing the one-day strike in March 2019, the SPA had called for the formation of strike committees, or resistance committees, within specific institutions. However, the scope of these committees’ actions remained limited to on-the-ground resistance: an implicit public consensus had been reached that committees should work at the street level to overthrow the regime, while the political leadership should devote itself to preparing a new government and arrangements for the aftermath of the fall of the al-Bashir regime.

On 6 April 2019 people across Sudan marched to the respective compounds of the Army General Command, where they announced the beginning of the General Command sit-ins, which led to al-Bashir’s fall on 13 April 2019. This signalled a new phase in the uprising. Meetings then took place between the FFC and al-Bashir’s security committee, which had deposed the former president in a coup and was now ruling the country, calling itself the Military Council. These meetings were supposed to discuss the handover of power by the Military Council, but in the days that followed, they quickly shifted into ‘negotiations’ meetings. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) supported the Military Council government through their media coverage and sought to whitewash the image of Council members. The Council brought into its camp Bashir’s leaders of the armed forces, security service chiefs, and minister of the interior, as well as the Rapid Support Forces (the new name given to the Janjaweed).

Unsurprisingly, the protesters rejected the Military Council’s rule, but negotiations continued between the FFC and the Military Council, with Gulf governments supporting the Military Council through grants and media coverage. Ambassadors from Western countries backed a ‘peaceful transition by negotiation’, which was promoted by European and American advisory centres. In parallel, the protesters attributed the power held by the FFC negotiators to their own commitment to the sit-ins and other forms of resistance and protest. They led marches within and through cities and shut down the streets any time the Military Council was slow to negotiate or insisted on conditions that they refused. However, during the period of the negotiations, the sit-ins faced repeated crackdowns by the security forces. On 13 May 2019, the eighth day of Ramadan, security forces attacked the General Command sit-in in Khartoum, in what would come to be known as the first massacre of the revolution.

The eighth of Ramadan massacre unleashed a wave of anger on the streets and kindled the protesters’ all-out rejection of the Military Council. Chants of ‘100% civil’ rose against negotiation proposals at the time that offered joint rule between the military and civil leaders. There were also calls for a general political strike, to force the military to hand over power. The political leadership of the FFC was slow to heed the calls for a strike, with some even publicly opposing the call. The street’s fear that the elitist parties would give in once more to their addiction to compromise and fear of radical change was thus borne out. This coincided with meetings between the leadership of the FFC parties and EU and US government representatives, and repeated visits to the UAE. The protesters’ refusal of these shady international manoeuvrings was reflected in their chants and songs, and their efforts to ensure accountability of the representatives of the political leadership through the sit-in squares and their platforms. At the time, thanks to its anti-negotiations position, the SCP managed to garner considerable public trust, at least in comparison with the rest of the FFC. However, the SCP could not escape its elitist essence and unrevolutionary policies, ultimately preferring to preserve the opposition alliance rather than side with the revolution and protect it from compromise.

The SPA call for a political strike was officially made following weeks during which grassroots organizations had been pushing for a strike. Once the strike was announced by the SPA, these organizations published statements of their readiness to strike, and they publicized the planned strike in their speeches in the sit-in squares. [6] The political strike represented an intensified confrontation between the protesters and the Military Council. The Council arrested strikers and threatened to fire and replace them, as Gulf financial and media backing for the Council increased. The strike ultimately took place on 28 and 29 May 2019, completely paralysing the country, including its airports, seaports, institutions, and markets.

A week later, in June 2019, the Military Council responded to the strike with a series of massacres. The security services simultaneously attacked the sit-ins across 14 Sudanese cities. Survivors’ testimonies document brutal scenes of rape, torture, and murder. In some cases, the bodies of the dead as well as the living were tied up, weighted down with stones, and thrown into the Nile. The massacres resulted in more than 100 martyrs and hundreds of wounded and rape victims, while the search for the disappeared is still ongoing.

The Military Council then announced its withdrawal from all negotiations, stating that it would hold elections in six months; it also shut down the internet throughout the country, to ensure a media blackout (though the Sudanese in the diaspora helped report the massacre). This did not stop the neighbourhood resistance committees and they organized a march in rejection of military rule. More than seven million Sudanese women and men took to the streets in displacement camps, cities, and villages on 30 June 2019, demanding civil rule. Thanks to the 30 June march and international popular support for the Sudanese revolution, the military retreated from its previously announced positions on holding elections and rejecting negotiations.

Nonetheless, the military continued to receive generous international backing. The Emirati and Saudi governments announced grants and loans to support the Military Council. Likewise, the African Union sent its own mediators to call for dialogue between the opposition leadership and the Military Council, which had led the massacre. Inter-state coordination of investments and interests emerged through the so-called ‘Friends of Sudan’ meetings, which began in Washington in May 2019. The attendees comprised the United States, Germany, the EU, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Ethiopia.[7] This group supported a power-sharing approach between the civil leadership and the Military Council. Their aim was to ensure a regime that preserved their ongoing investments and to use the moment of change to open up investment opportunities that had previously been closed either due to the US economic embargo on Sudan or as a result of al-Bashir’s failure to embark on full liberalization. In essence, these states’ positions on Sudan were no different from the similar positions they held on other movements for change in the region, whether in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, or others.

Official external pressure, then, was brought to bear to reinforce the very political and economic approaches against which the Sudanese had revolted. But without a revolutionary party, the guiding discourse on the street was reduced to justifying partnership with the military to spare blood and stop the violence. Likewise, public access to the details of negotiations and agreements was limited to occasional leaks, instead of official public statements, and the political leadership (the FFC) met with foreign ambassadors, delegates and mediators more than they addressed the public. The absence of a revolutionary leadership, then, resulted in wasting the fruit of the revolutionaries’ resilience in the face of the Military Council, and their defiance of the post-massacre oppression. Calls for forming a qualified technocratic government circulated, side-lining the treacherous political parties. Opportunistic actors among the parties making up the FFC promoted such discourses to obstruct analysis of their compromised positions or their international allies’ interests.

Unsurprisingly, this climate produced the current government, which is a military and civil partnership sponsored by the UAE and Saudi Arabia, internationally financed, and staffed by former employees of developmental organizations. This government is therefore an expression of both the economic and political counterrevolutions. In one of his first public speeches, the first transitional Minister of Finance mentioned that the economic objective of the Sudanese revolution was to bring Sudan out of its debt crisis.[8] This represents a complete shift and distortion of the objectives of the revolution, which were to provide economic justice for the impoverished majority of the Sudanese, and to overturn austerity measures. Debt repayment thus became the main justification for plans to further lift subsidies, float the currency, and introduce foreign investments, in a manner no different than al-Bashir’s policies in his later years. The only difference between the former and the latter is the international support given to the current government. The transitional government claimed that a return to the international market and the imagined material wellbeing this would bring were dependent upon such decisions.

The implications of the absence of a revolutionary party are again clear here: it has produced a vacuum as regards progressive discourse on internal and external political questions. It has also enabled the transitional government to present development grants and debt exemptions as revolutionary economic victories – despite the impact of their crushing neoliberal conditions on most Sudanese lives. While the SCP attempts to offer a discourse that rejects liberalization, it is incapable of influencing the masses. The latter have lost trust in the party as a result of its fluctuating positions and its insistence on coalescing with reactionary parties, whose positions the SCP simultaneously critiques in its statements. In the public imagination, this kind of strategy has rendered the party a disrupter that speaks much and resolves little, and lacks seriousness. In the meantime, through their coordinating committees and different alliances, neighbourhood resistance committees have released statements and views against liberalization, but they lack political experience and have prioritized the preservation of the transitional government. Slogans like ‘Yes to reforming the revolutionary path, no to overthrowing the civilian government’ have been voices by the resistance committees, which seek to ensure the military does not seek to ride the wave of protest – as happened in the Egyptian scenario. Nevertheless, as a result of its counterrevolutionary decisions in economic and other domains, support for the civilian government has been steadily declining.

Possible paths for the Sudanese revolution

The revolution must continue in order to halt the economic violence being practised against the impoverished Sudanese masses. This requires drawing lessons from the Sudanese revolution, both its successes and its limitations and failures.

Since August 2019 there have been (increasingly serious) attempts to form organized alliances between different groups of neighbourhood resistance committees, labour organizations, and factional bodies to pursue demands against the harmful transitional economic policies. These alliances would not have developed had it not been for the lessons learned from the recent history of elitist political leadership decisions and their predispositions. Alongside the internal organization of resistance, such alliances constitute the clearest road towards creating a principled front against counterrevolutionary policies. This could lead to the establishment of a revolutionary party, or an organization that partially plays that role.

However, such an auspicious scenario that foresees a sustained Sudanese revolution that continues until its goals are achieved must not distract from the dangers that underlie the counterrevolutionary global alliances. Overthrowing the cross-border global counterrevolutionary alliances cannot be achieved except through a cross-border global resistance. This requires consolidating global solidarity and channels of communication with communities that have been harmed by similar liberalization policies to those currently applied in Sudan. It also requires supporting all forms of resistance to autocratic regimes, especially those engaging in direct economic interventions in Sudan, with invested capitals in its resources, first among which are the Gulf countries – who are responsible for the lion’s share of counterrevolutionary interventions. At its core, cross-border solidarity is no different from ‘national’ solidarity campaigns: just as populations affected by goldmining in Sudan make alliances with those affected by oil drilling in the country, allied around their joint demand to protect their environment from the effects of extractive industries, so it is both possible and imperative to join forces with the common interests of miners in Morocco, for example, who demand safe working conditions, and with environmental activists fighting against the impacts of mining in South Africa.

The path to realizing the goals of the Sudanese revolution thus requires an organized Sudanese working class, which has the largest stake in achieving the revolution’s goals. It also requires forming a strategic alliance with anyone engaged in anti-imperialist resistance who shares similar goals, within Sudan’s borders and beyond. Only then shall it ‘Just fall’

Muzan Alneel is a is co-founder of the Innovation, Science and Technology Think-tank for People-Centered Development (ISTiNAD) in Sudan and is a non-resident Fellow of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP), focusing on a people-centric approach to economy, industry and the environment in Sudan.

A version of this blogpost forms part of a dossier of articles that is published in collaboration with the Transnational Institute (TNI) and Rosa Luxemburg Foundation – North Africa and the full dossier can be accessed here. 

Featured Photograph: The strike on 28–29 May 2019 – Revolutionaries in the street lift strike signs before Rapid Support Forces cars in Khartoum, text on paper: “Are you on strike or are you Ummah #CivilianRule” (Ummah Party, one of the biggest parties, which announced its refusal to strike).

Notes

[1] The ruling regime established the NCP in 1998. Its members came from the National Islamic Front (NIF), which led the government that ruled Sudan from 30 June 1989 until President al-Bashir was deposed on 11 April 2019.

[2] The civil war in South Sudan pitted the ruling North against the southern Sudanese. Under the banner of the SPLM, the southerners demanded greater local governance. The first round of the war began in 1955, and lasted until 1972. War broke out again in 1983, and ended in 2005, upon the signing of the Comprehensive Peace (Naivasha) Agreement.

[3] The War in Darfur began in 2003. Insurgent movements that had risen up against the persecution and marginalization of the area’s population fought the Khartoum government. The government armed some Darfuri tribes to fight in its stead, later termed the Janjaweed militias. The United Nations has estimated that 80,000 to 500,000 people were murdered in the Darfur genocide, while President Omar al-Bashir stated that the death toll did not exceed 10,000.

[4] The term effendi, was used throughout the Ottoman Empire to address government officials. In Sudan, effendisrefers to the educated people who were employed by the state after the end of the Anglo-Egyptian colonization. These groups received privileges and opportunities, and constituted the bigger part of the upper middle class in Sudan. They were well-represented politically and were the recipients of favouritism from consecutive regimes.

[5] The opposition parties that signed the Declaration of Freedom and Change after its publication were the SPA, the National Consensus Forces, the Sudan Call Forces, and the Opposition Unionist Assembly.

[6] At this point in the Sudanese revolution (April–May 2019), ‘breaking the line’ became a cardinal sin. Grassroots organizations were therefore unable to propose any ideas that contradicted the hirak’s leadership, which, to the public, was the SPA. Accordingly, proponents of a strike used their statements to announce their readiness for a strike, whenever the ‘leadership’ called for it, and urged the SPA to make such a call.

[7] Despite its clear and constant involvement in counterrevolutionary politics in Sudan – including al-Burhan’s visit to Egypt right before the massacre – and its occasional attendance of Friends of Sudan meetings, Egypt is not an official member of that group. This can be viewed through the complex lens of the Egyptian–Ethiopian conflict over regional leadership, and Egypt’s wish to operate as the first Emirati arm in the region.

[8] Dr Ibrahim al-Badawi, Minister of Finance and Financial Planning, in a meeting promoting a shared vision of the private sector and the transitional government, organized by the Sudanese Businessmen and Employers Federation, held at Sadaqa Hall on 7 December 2019.

Ecological justice in Kenya: life and struggle in Nairobi’s informal settlements

By
ROAPE
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ROAPE interviews the Kenya environmental activist and socialist, Irene Asuwa. She talks about the struggle for climate justice, and social and economic change. Introducing a short film on a major dumpsite in Nairobi, Lena Anyuolo explains the environmental waste and devastation caused by multinationals, facilitated by the Kenyan government.  

Could you please tell roape.net readers a little about yourself, your background and activism? 

Irene Asuwa: I co-convene Ecological Justice. A collective of community groups reclaiming, rehabilitating and transforming green spaces. I have been actively involved in amplifying community voices in climate justice online and offline for a while. I support outreach at Ukombozi library, a progressive library that supports organizers and communities in doing political outreach activities through dialogues, films, art and study sessions. I am also a member of Revolutionary Socialist League an organization that is organizing towards a socialist revolution.

If I can turn briefly now to you Lena, you have been involved in a short film on the Dandora dump and anti-capitalism in Kenya, can you explain your involvement in this film and the purpose of it? 

Lena Anyuolo: The film was part of a series called Capitalism in my city. Capitalism in my city is collection of articles and videos about the reality of living the crisis of capitalism in informal settlements. It is not told in an academic tone as most analysis do. Rather to make it accessible, we wrote about our experiences as we live them. The dumpsite is a great injustice to our community as you can see in the film that the waste that affects us isn’t generated by us. The dumpsite affects us by causing health issues such as respiratory infections and cancers due to the toxic effluents that come out of it.

On Saturdays, when the trucks line up to deposit the waste from upper class neighborhoods, the stench and traffic leading to the site is unbearable. We are structurally neglected and denied social justice rights such as healthcare. There is only one level 5 hospital to serve the whole of Embakasi. Dandora is a large neighbourhood, requiring such amenities especially as we are subject to terrible living conditions.

In the film, we wanted to show how we live to rouse ourselves into action because we are not condemned to hopelessness. That is why in the film, and in the first video on the ecological crisis by Brian Mathenge, we are keen on reminding ourselves that no effort is too small. A better world is possible through constant study, praxis and solidarity. We shall win. We are angry about our conditions because they are unfair and unjust, and we are using anger constructively to change our conditions through avenues like this film and ecological justice.

The making of this film was not easy. We had limited technical skill. We sought the help of our comrade, Davis Tafari as the director of photography. Through him, we also gained access to the dumpsite – it is an area fraught with violence due to the scarcities created by capitalism. We then sought Susan Mute, a comrade who is part of another ecological organization called Haki na Mazingira, and others from Mathare’s green movement to enrich the discussions.

I was involved overall as co-editor of the Capitalism in my city series.

You are also a member of a Kenyan national grassroots’ Ecological Justice movement – ahead of the COP26 climate talks in the UK, would you explain to us the nature of the groups work and campaign? As a socialist, and a revolutionary, how do you see your intervention in the justice movement? 

Irene Asuwa: Ecological Justice is a collective of community ecological groups in Nairobi and parts of Western Kenya. We organize in a number of ways. Much of our work is through political education. It is important that people understand the global economic and political system and the impact it has on the people. The ecological crisis is a direct natural consequence of the global hegemony of capitalism and imperialism. Through the climate triggered emergencies there are glaring crimes of capitalism against nature, and humanity as part of nature. Through study cells and community resource centers the groups have access to progressive literature and films. These help people to connect the environmental apartheid to the general militarization of the country and the region.

We also organize the ‘Young Eco Warriors Collective and Eco Schools’. There are groups that have children who are naturally enthusiastic about ecology. These children are groomed to understand and make interventions to mitigate the immediate impacts of the ecological crisis and grow up as ecologically conscious people. Most children spend a lot of their time in schools. We support them to have green spaces in the schools to help reduce pollution since most of the schools in urban areas are situated in heavily populated areas.

We are equally involved in ‘Art for Liberation’. There are a number of artists in the collective who use art to sensitize people on the importance of protecting the ecosystem through spoken word, graffiti, landscaping, acrobatics and other form of sports to mobilize and educate people.

We are stiving towards having people understand that humans are part of nature. That we have the obligation to change our production and consumption models that have become entirely unsustainable. We want to see the climate justice conversation coming from bottom up and interventions happening from within the communities. We also need to get people to understand the climate crisis can only be resolved by a systemic shift. That products of nature are public goods that should be accessible to everyone. It is our obligation as part of nature to be good custodians of natural resources for future generations.

Broadly speaking, what is the state of the ecological crisis in Kenya and East Africa generally? 

Irene Asuwa: The genocide is worsening. People are being further alienated from nature and its projects. We are getting more and more pauperized to the extent that we can barely access very basic necessities like land which is the main means of production, water, food, decent housing and green spaces. There are things that nature provide for free, yet they are being privatized day by day. People use natural things like light and water as a bargaining chip to get people to pay more for bare minimum housing.

There are more punitive agricultural laws and policies being passed, particularly seed laws that are very retrogressive and repressive. These laws criminalize small holder farmers and makes them dependent on corporations. A lot of harmful synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that are carcinogenic and destroy the ecological system are still being dumped in the Kenyan market. Kenya is also considering legalizing GMOs.

There is an attack on green spaces. More parks, riparian land and community open spaces are being seized to put up concrete. There is an obsession of greying the country and the region at the expense of the ecological system. Public green spaces are being militarized through fencing, military and police presence. People are being charged to access them. There are “conservancies” mushrooming and taking up large chunks of community land in the guise of conserving wildlife and taking care of endangered species. As a result, communities have been displaced, evicted and lives have been lost in the conflicts that have escalated in those areas.

Corporations are mining unethically, leaving behind damaged land, death and making children vulnerable thanks to unethical extractive practices. Communities are subjected to the danger of open quarry mines, toxic waste, below survival wages in very inhumane working conditions and health risks that come from working in hazardous mines and factories.

An insatiable appetite for fossil fuel is also sweeping across the region – despite international claims to the contrary. Foreign banks are pouring investments into oil, gas and coal projects, for example, the proposed Lamu Coal Plant, Turkana Oil, East African Pipeline among others. These projects do not make any economic or social sense. As we know, fossil fuel is obsolete, any society that claims it is advanced should and must keep them in the ground.

There have been a series of calamities across the country, so witness the rise of Nam Lolwe, Lake Naivasha and Nakuru which has caused floods. There is a looming drought in Northern Kenya, as well. We are trying to recover from a recent locust invasion and there is a possibility of another wave.

The attack on green spaces is also worsening the state of our mental health as we have limited areas to unwind with the commodification of the environment. The crisis is here, but so also is the struggle against capitalism and its destruction of nature.

Irene Asuwa is a community organizer and the co-conveners of Ecological Justice, a collective of community group championing for climate justice.

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

Featured Photograph: Dandora is the largest dumpsite in East Africa (11 March 2017).

Oil, capitalists and the wretched of Uganda – an interview with Yusuf Serunkuma

By
ROAPE
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In an interview with Yusuf Serunkuma, ROAPE asks him about his forthcoming book on oil, capitalists, and livelihoods in western Uganda. The book is a co-edited volume with Eria Serwajja and brings together six junior Ugandan scholars and activists.  Serunkuma details the struggles of rural people to confront and harmonise interests with oil explorers, with environmental destruction and compensation that has turned lives upside down  

ROAPE: For roape.net readers can you pleased tell us something about your background and work?

Yusuf Serunkuma: I’m a scholar and activist based at Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR), Makerere University. I’m an anthropologist (eyes on Somalia/Somaliland), who also studied political economy/Agrarian studies. I wrote The Snake Farmers (2015), a play inspired by debates on foreign aid, and endless violent conflict, and media and secondary schools in East Africa found it useful. I write a column in the Ugandan weekly newspaper, The Observer.  I have also written for Pambazuka, roape.net and a host of other publications.

You are publishing a new book on oil and Uganda; can you tell us about the book and how you came to write it?

We focused on the window between discovery and actual extraction, that is, before the pipes begin to flow (exploration, calculations, displacement, resettlement, compensation, waiting, speculation, anxiety, and all related aftermaths), and this is the first book-length publication on the subject that specifically speaks from the vantage of point of the displaced – and develops analyses from these voices without the noise in Kampala.  Focus is given to items such as food, land, compensation itself, the environment, violence that displaced persons suffered, education as schools were closed for years, etc. Our focus is narrow but deep, and we ask questions about the extent of state involvement in the lives of ordinary folks, who tend to be “the first ‘extractions’ from the earth,” but are simply unwanted!  We prioritised the view of uneducated and poor folks (by far the majority in rural areas, even when they received handsome compensation packages), children, rural country women, etc. How do they play in the larger view of things – and how did they end absolute impoverishment?

A camp in Kigyayo village where persons displaced to create space for Hoima Sugar Ltd settled themselves. This settlement is on church land, which was gracious enough to allow them to stay.  Over 5000 people were violently displaced to create space for sugar farming.

The experience of Nigeria and the Niger Delta looms large, as do many other resource rich countries on the continent, and the manifest failure to harness wealth in the interests of development and the poor – what some academics have called the ‘resource curse’. What transformations have the arrival of the oil industry in the country prompted? Has it brought an economic boom, as many thousands were led to believe?

From the vantage point of the persons in western Uganda (specifically, Hoima and Buliisa), ever since the discovery – even with the sumptuous compensation packages to some people – it is difficult to point to tangible transformations by the time of our fieldwork. There are new roads in the area, but those have not translated into food and water for the people, nor have they translated into improved livelihoods. Maybe it is too early to tell, but also our fieldwork does not seek to speculate on the future benefits, but the state of affairs as they were then. Afterall, what sort of ‘development’ would hurt people for 15 years before making lives better? Part of our contention is to highlight the plight but also make visible the accumulation of discontent, which could possibly end in the so-called oil curse. The over-accumulation of neoliberal interests in the area is one of the undercurrents of our fieldwork.

Interestingly, and extremely relevant for a publication like ROAPE, you write powerfully about the compensation that was paid to those evicted to make way for the construction of the refinery in Hoima. Please tell us about this process and the impact this has had on communities and people in the affected areas.

What happened is that after lengthy negotiations involving local influential elders, and NGOs, such as Benon Tusingwire of NAVODA (Navigators of Development Association – a local NGO), and civil society activists, there are persons who actually received sumptuous compensation packages. These became our focus when by the time of fieldwork, which took place about two years after their compensation packages arrived, were considerably worse off than before. We found them disgruntled. It is easy to dismiss their disgruntlement as their own fault after they misused their monies. But that would miss the point and underplay their condition as poor, uneducated people who were turned into (Uganda shillings) millionaires overnight – and this new condition simply destroyed them.

What happened was that after being displaced by the state under state-citizen paternalistic arrangement, when compensation came, the relationship turned into a market arrangement, as if these people had sold their land on a willing seller, willing buyer arrangement. By switching the relationship (from a state-paternalistic one, in which the displacement happened, to a market-oriented relationship), which was easy and cheaper, the state abandoned its duty of ensuring that the displaced rebuilt their lives. The idea is to rigorously critique the supremacy of compensation; it should never have been reduced to just money. These people were never willing sellers.

Activist Benon Tusingwire and researcher Kenneth Nkumire speak to children of displaced persons in Kigyayo camp during fieldwork in 2017.

Ahead of COP26 in Glasgow, in the UK, there is an important aspect of your book that reflects on the environmental impact caused by oil and gas exploration. You write about how oil related activities have led to rivers drying up and surface and ground water becoming polluted. Please tell us about the environmental implications to the region’s ecology.

I think because Uganda is in sub-Saharan Africa, there are no robust campaigns to care for the environment, because people think with the rains, the climate impacts are less visible. But by the time of fieldwork, locals told us 13 rivers had dried up in Buliisa where most exploration has happened. This had never happened before. These rivers had been reclaimed or turned into landfills and because of their smallness, they could not survive. Only three were still flowing. Flaring was also happening within a five miles radius. No one was taking stock of waste disposal. None. Bungoma Forest was being cut down by Hoima Sugar Ltd, which was established under the premise that they’ll need to supply sugar to the city in the wake of the oil boom. Yet as the rains continue to fall all this gets forgotten.

Your book also brings in the question of gender and I wonder whether we can discuss this. You argue that the oil and gas industry in the country impacts on women in destructive and distinct ways – can you tell us what your research revealed?

It was a disaster for women and children. In most rural areas, women have tended to be the main breadwinners – farming on their husbands’ plots! This enables most women to enter into peasant relationships selling their small surplus and earning a little income. But while compensating for these plots, only the man was considered as owner and thus beneficiary. He was the sole signatory to the money. In the end, the woman received no money and most husbands failed to buy other pieces of land. Often men, in complete disregard for their wives, spent the money marrying more women, and living lives they had seen on TV.  Then, with schools closed in the refinery area, for example, without new ones built, many children were denied education because the next schools were over ten miles away, and this is a rural area, with the only means of transport being on foot. It was a disaster.

A victim of the dispossession shows up pictures of what happened to one of them during the violent eviction.

Your attention to the voices of those directly impacted by this ‘new’ extractive industry in a model neoliberal country on the continent is particularly powerful. What were your hopes writing this book? What does the story of Uganda’s oil and gas bonanza tell us about the continent’s political economy and the continued struggles for autonomy and development?

Presently, the sector continues in a long and very secretive pause. Not much information is available to the public. Agreements remain hidden, and very little is known to the public (which is typical in neoliberal clandestine manoeuvring). In Kampala, a crude pipeline project was concluded (including Tanzania and Uganda, and Total), the Total executive Patrick Pouyanné was in Kampala and entered agreement with the government of Uganda. An airport is being constructed in western Uganda etc, but this is not our concern, or of any use to the people of the region – for the last 15 years since the evictions happened.

Capitalist exploitation tends to conspire with states to bamboozle the poor with big infrastructural investments (frequently useless and unnecessary) while the real devil is hidden in the fine print of agreements. Our intention is to make visible and permanent the lives of the poor in the oil conversation.  Many lives are continuously being wasted in this period, which sends a signal to what will happen once the oil in the pipes begin to flow.

Researcher, Doreen Kobusingye taking notes with women affected by violent eviction in Rwamutonga, Hoima District. Another 200 people were violently displaced from 700 hectares to create space for “a waste management plant” by McAlester company owned by Americans, Chris Burden, Leonard Durst, Rochelle M. Gibbles.

Finally, what sort of resistance organised or otherwise has there been by the communities impacted, and are there any organisations helping to advocate or assist these communities? 

There has been resistance and negotiations. At the peak of the conflict, residents resisted with protests in the areas, but were often violently suppressed and many ended up in jail. There have also been organisations at the forefront, leading resistance, but also negotiating, and pushing for better packages. Organisations such NAVODA negotiated compensation packages, negotiated native-settler wrangles; Global Rights Alert, and the National Association of Environmentalists (NAPE), who have utilised their “Community Radio” to report atrocities in record time, but also keep an eye on the wreckage to the environment.

Capitalist exploitation tends to be extremely violent, but these groups have tried to push back with limited success. You must appreciate that their capacity against the capitalist machine enabled by a Museveni secretive and comprador regime is surely miniscule. With a long pause in oil related activities, and a judicial system that takes ages, in the end people are broken, and crushed.  Others fall into poverty, some die, while others are bought off or imprisoned. Prominent activists such as Benon Tusingwire, Richard Oribi, and journalist Robert Katemburura have received threats for being at the forefront of some of these campaigns.

Yusuf Serunkuma and Eria Serwajja’s edited book, Before the First Drop: Oil, capitalists and the wretches of western Uganda will be published on 1 December 2021 with Editor House Facility (EHF), Kampala and will be available in bookshops in Uganda and on Amazon. Roape.net will be publishing extracts of the book later in the year.

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

African Socialism in Tanzania: Karim Hirji’s The Travails of a Tanzanian Teacher

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ROAPE
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Zeyad El Nabolsy writes about a fascinating first-hand account of how Tanzanian Marxists interpreted and criticized economic, social, cultural, and political developments in the country in the 1960s and 1970s. El Nabolsy celebrates Karim F. Hirji’s memoir, The Travails of a Tanzanian Teacher which provides a vital and critical Marxist account of Julius Nyerere’s reforms.

By Zeyad El Nabolsy

Tanzania in the 1960s and 1970s was a beacon of progressive politics on the African continent. The country served as a base for Southern African liberation movements as a key “front-line state”, and assumed the mantle of Pan-African leadership in the aftermath of the coup against President Nkrumah of Ghana in 1966. As such, it attracted radical scholars and activists from all across the African diaspora, including Walter Rodney, Malcolm X, and Kwame Ture.[1]

Under its first president, Julius K. Nyerere, it embarked on a program of development guided by the ideology of “African socialism”. Nyerere argued that traditionally Africans had “lived as families, with individuals supporting each other and helping each other on terms of equality” based on communal ownership of land.[2] Thus, “traditional African society was a socialist society”.[3] At times, Nyerere seemed to imply that there were no classes in Tanzania and consequently; it did not make sense to adopt a theory that emphasized the role of class struggle in bringing about social transformations.[4] To this extent, African socialism was advanced by its proponents as an indigenous version of socialism that was more suitable for African conditions than Marxism-Leninism.

A fascinating first-hand account of how Tanzanian Marxists interpreted and criticized economic, social, cultural, and political developments in the country during this period is provided by Karim F. Hirji’s memoir,The Travails of a Tanzanian Teacher (2018).[5] Hirji was involved in Marxist political organizations in Dar Es Salaam, and even though his Marxist orientation eventually led to his internal exile, he remained active as a Marxist scholar and activist in Tanzania, and he still contributes articles to progressive outlets on the African continent such as Pambazuka News.

Hirji’s book, somewhat overlooked since its release, offers a compelling analysis of the history and sociology of the sciences in Tanzania, with a focus on Hirji’s own field of statistics, from the post-independence period through to the 2010s. The first chapter provides an overview of Hirji’s career as a teacher. The second presents an account of Hirji’s experiences as a teacher under training, especially in light of the Arusha Declaration of 1967 and the turn towards building socialism in Tanzania, and the philosophy of education for self-reliance that Nyerere attempted to institutionalize. The next four chapters provide a detailed account of Hirji’s years as a teacher at the University of Dar Es Salaam (UDSM) from 1971 until his dismissal and internal-exile in 1974.

Of particular interest is chapter five, which provides a detailed account of the confrontation known as the “Akivaga Crisis,” which took place in July 1971.[6] This incident saw progressive students and faculty, in alliance with campus workers, face off with the UDSM’s governing body. Hirji also provides a critical literature review of what has been written on these events (Appendix B: Akivaga Crisis in History), which is an invaluable source for anyone who wants to acquire an understanding of their importance. The events in question derive their significance from the fact that they can be interpreted as showing the limits of TANU’s progressive politics.[7] In a confrontation between the party’s appointed university administration on the one hand (which by all accounts was not tremendously competent) and progressive students, faculty, and campus workers on the other hand, the party employed the coercive apparatus of the state to back its appointed men. Even when it appeared that the people whom the party was backing were further away from the ideals of African Socialism than the students whom they were confronting.

Hirji criticizes the exaggerated role which has been attributed to Walter Rodney by other socialist scholars, such as Haroub Othman and Issa Shivji.[8] Hirji asserts that, contrary to what is sometimes claimed, “Rodney kept a low profile during the crisis”.[9] Hirji thus provides a much-needed corrective to the one-sided accounts of intellectual and political life at UDSM during the early 1970s which tend to center on Rodney.

To be clear, Hirji does not aim to undermine Rodney’s significance as a scholar and activist. Hirji was a member of the University Students’ African Revolutionary Front (USARF), a student Marxist group which was active on campus and formulated criticisms of Nyerere’s policies from a Marxist perspective. It was as a member of USARF that Hirji first met Rodney at UDSM in 1969, after a lecture he delivered entitled The Cuban Revolution and its Relevance to Africa. Hirji then developed strong personal and working ties with him. In fact, Rodney’s attitude towards students, whom he considered his peers and comrades, is evidenced by the fact he asked Hirji, still an undergraduate at the time, to provide feedback on the manuscript of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. This assistance is acknowledged by Rodney in the preface of his seminal work: “special thanks must go to comrades Karim Hirji and Henry Mapolu of the University of Dar es Salaam, who read the manuscript in a spirit of constructive criticism”. Hirji has also recently defended Rodney against some common criticisms in his 2017 work, The Enduring Relevance of Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Hence, his criticism of the inflated role assigned to Rodney in other accounts of the Crisis is not motivated by any hostility towards him. Hirji clarifies that Rodney kept a low profile – not because he was afraid – but rather because he did not want to do anything that would feed into the university administration’s narrative of “foreign interference” as the cause of the Crisis.

Hirji’s tenure as assistant lecturer, during which time he was actively involved in attempts to develop courses that would breakdown disciplinary boundaries, is detailed in chapter six of the book. This involved the introduction of two new courses: East African Society and Environment (required for all social sciences students) and Development Studies (required for all non-social sciences students).  The seventh chapter of the book discusses Hirji’s 18-month stint as a bureaucrat following his dismissal from UDSM in 1974. The reason for his dismissal was his critical stance towards some of Nyerere’s policies – specifically, his critique of the policy of “education for self-reliance” published in 1973. Hirji argued that the requirement for manual labour was imposed on teachers without any planning. This meant that most teachers were unenthusiastic about it. He also pointed out that despite “the idealistic rhetoric, white collar jobs paid much more than manual work” and it was unpopular with many African students who associated manual work with colonial education. In Hirji’s view, the kind of political education which would have made it clear to students that manual labour, as mandated by the policy of education for self-reliance, was different from what took place under colonialism was altogether absent. Instead, students were only taught political education in an “insipid, sloganeering style”.[10] For his trouble, Hirji was dismissed from UDSM and appointed as a bureaucrat in the Regional Planning Office of Rukwa region, with a posting in Sumbawanga, the regional capital.  Sumbawanga was previously used by the British as a place of internal exile and Hirji clearly understood his appointment in such terms.

Hirji’s experiences as a cog in the machine of the Tanzanian bureaucracy were decidedly negative. No real work was done by his office, and his boss was simply not interested in deploying Hirji’s statistical knowledge (a planning office that does not care much for statistics does not inspire much confidence!) In fact, Hirji notes that he was not really expected to produce much, and that he could get away with spending the workday reading newspapers and other materials in the office, so long as he pretended to be doing something. It is noteworthy that Hirji’s appointment took place just two years after the Tanzanian government had unveiled its new regional administration system, which was purportedly aimed at increasing popular political participation through decentralization. Hirji notes that for all of Nyerere’s exhortation of self-reliance, this decentralization project “had been constructed for Tanzania with the expertise of the McKinsey Corporation, a global American consultancy firm that facilitates the smooth operations of the international capitalist order”.[11]

In general, Hirji is rather harsh in his assessment of Tanzania’s development programs under Nyerere. He points out that despite the rhetoric of self-reliance; Tanzania was dependent on foreign donors, who drove the country’s educational policies even during the 1960s and 1970s.  Moreover, while TANU deployed the rhetoric of “African socialism”, workers had no say in how the nationalised public-owned companies were managed.[12]  Hirji is especially critical of the forced villagization program which was launched in the 1970s. While the aim of the villagization program was to concentrate rural inhabitants in villages so that services could be more easily provided, inadequate planning meant that farmers who were forced to move to the new villages often had to wait a year or more in order to get deep wells dug in them.[13]  Hirji’s criticisms of the Ujamaa period are not directed at undermining the significance of the achievements of the independence struggle, but rather to take aim at excessively nostalgic treatments of the period.[14]

One striking feature of the book is Hirji’s sociologically self-conscious account of his role as an individual teacher and of teaching in general. During his time as a bureaucrat, he recounts his founding of a mathematics club at the local secondary school. Hirji did not separate his role as a teacher of mathematics from his role as a Marxist educator. He gave lectures to the students on mathematics, but also incorporated a Marxist account of the history of mathematics into his lectures: “the students are fascinated by the diversity of ways in which mathematics developed in ancient Babylon, India, China, Egypt, and Greece. I venture into the general history of those societies as well, and relate mathematics to the level of economic development”. [15] This approach seems to have been pedagogically successful, since it allowed students to understand mathematics as a fundamentally human practice whose abstractions can, in the final analysis, be historically traced to human social activities.

Hirji’s sensitivity to sociological questions pertaining to science and mathematics education and research in Tanzania is evident throughout the book. One example points to the costs of what Paulin Hountondji describes as “extraversion” in scientific research and training on the African continent, i.e., externally oriented and directed practices of research and teaching.[16]  Due to donor dependence, an approach to the teaching of mathematics that was shortly to be abandoned in the US was imported into Tanzania during the late 1960s with funding support from USAID. The approach in question, “Modern Maths” centered on a set of pedagogical techniques developed in the US in an attempt to catch up with Soviet advances in science and technology. It aimed to modernize the teaching of mathematics in the country by placing an emphasis on the introduction of general and abstract concepts at the beginning of instruction before moving onto concrete exercises. Students would begin by considering such questions as “‘What is a number?’ ‘What is a variable?” function?’ ‘What is an equation?’”[17] This approach to teaching mathematics was in place in the US from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. However, by the mid-1970s, it had clearly failed due to its over-emphasis on abstract elements. This makes it all the more remarkable that it was adopted as the primary teaching approach to mathematics in Tanzania in the late 1960s and 1970s. What this means is that Tanzanian students were subjected to a second-hand, cast-off curriculum that was on the way to being abandoned by its donors in their home country. A more devastating example of the long-term consequences of scientific dependency and extraversion at the level of both teaching and research would be hard to find.

Chapter eight provides an account of Hirji’s role as a teacher at the National Transport Institute, while the last three chapters of the book provide an assessment of the state of universities in Tanzania today – as well as Hirji’s own teaching philosophy. Hirji paints a grim image of the present condition of Tanzanian universities, especially since he situates his account within the context of the imposition of structural adjustment programs on Tanzania – Nyerere was eventually forced to enter into negotiations with the IMF between 1981 and 1985.[18] The salaries of professors were cut dramatically as part of the austerity program. Universities are now run on a business model with students occupying the role of customers. Naturally this places pressure on faculty to pass failing students and to lower academic standards. Moreover, because many academic institutions depend on foreign funding, their academic programs are sometimes guided by foreign academics and administrators who often do not know what they are talking about, but are tolerated because they provide funding.

However, Hirji is careful to point to internal problems as well. Hirji himself refuses to lay all the blame at the feet of international financial institutions. After all, it was TANU’s failure to restructure the Tanzanian economy that provided the opening for international financial institutions to swoop in. For example, while Hirji recognizes the significance of the expansion of university education under Nyerere — in 1971 Tanzania had one university with less than 3,000 students, by 2017 it had fifty universities with around 200,000 students — he also notes that there was a decline in the quality of the education that was provided. In the 1970s, degrees obtained at UDSM were recognized by other universities (e.g., in the United Kingdom), but this is no longer the case today. Understaffing is a serious problem with professors lacking adequate numbers of teaching assistants. In fact, Hirji had no teaching assistants during his time as a professor at Muhimili University of Health and Allied Sciences, MUHAS. The situation in Tanzanian universities became so dire that, in 2017, 19 universities were ordered not to enrol new students and a further 22 were prohibited from enrolling new students in 75 programs. Clearly this is a recipe for the perpetuation of dependency on foreign “experts” with all the connected negative consequences. Hirji provides us with an important account of the different factors which have contributed to the crisis of the university in Tanzania. Yet, he does not explicitly provide answers to the question, what is to be done? Nevertheless, readers who are interested in a Marxist account of the historical origins of the current plight of universities in Tanzania will find this book of tremendous use.

Overall, Hirji’s book is an excellent account of the dilemmas that Marxists faced during the Bandung-era. In countries like Tanzania, where a progressive nationalist government was in power, Marxists had to make difficult decisions in relation to the extent to which they should support their governments in their struggle against imperialism (the “national question”) while also pushing for the recognition of the importance of internal social transformations (the “social question”). Perhaps the primary failing in this respect is that Marxists in Tanzania (and in other places where similar conditions prevailed) were unable to convince those in power that an adequate resolution to the national question required internal social and economic transformations. This book shows how, absent the requisite internal structural transformations, the rhetoric of self-reliance can lead to a path that terminates in the most humiliating forms of dependency.

Karim F Hirji’s The Travails of a Tanzanian Teacher (2018) is available here.

Zeyad el Nabolsy is a PhD student in Africana Studies at Cornell University. He works on African philosophy of culture, African Marxism, the history and philosophy of science in the context of modern African intellectual history, and history and sociology of philosophy in the context of global intellectual history. 

A version of this blogpost was originally published as ‘African Socialism in Retrospect: Karim Hirji’s The Travails of a Tanzanian Teacher’ on the new website Liberated Texts. 

Featured Photograph: President Nyerere of Tanzania visited China and was received by Premier Zhou Enlai (18 June, 1968).

Notes

[1] Seth M. Markle, A Motorcycle on Hell Run: Tanzania, Black Power, and the Uncertain Future of Pan-Africanism, 1964-1974 (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2017), 48.

[2] Julius K. Nyerere, “Principles and Development: June 1966.” In Freedom and Socialism [Uhuru na Ujamaa]: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1965-1967 (Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1968), 198-99.

[3] Julius K. Nyerere, “Principles and Development: June 1966.” In Freedom and Socialism [Uhuru na Ujamaa]: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1965-1967 (Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1968), 198-99.

[4] Nyerere, “Education for Self-Reliance: March 1967.” In Freedom and Socialism(1968), 276.

[5] This constitutes the third volume of Hirji’s memoirs. This first volume, Growing Up with Tanzania: Memory, Musings and Maths (2014) dealt with his childhood in Tanzania. The second volume, Cheche: Reminiscences of a Radical Magazine (2010), which was edited by Hirji and included contributions by others, provided an account of radical student movements at the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) during the 1960s and 1970s.

[6] It is so-called in reference to the student leader Symonds Akivaga whose dismissal and deportation to his home country of Kenya became a key issue in the struggle between the students and the university’s governing body.

[7] TANU or Tanganyika African National Union was the ruling political party headed by Nyerere.

[8] Karim F. Hirji, The Travails of a Tanzanian Teacher, (Montreal: Daraja Press, 2018), 194-198.

[9] Hirji, 197.

[10] Hirji, 87.

[11] Hirji, 89.

[12] Hirji, 133.

[13] Hirji, 106.

[14] Such as Godfrey Mwakikagile, Tanzania Under Mwalimu Nyerere: Reflections on an African Statesman, (Dar es Salaam: New Africa Press, 2006).

[15] Hirji, 99-100.

[16] Paulin J. Hountondji, “Scientific Dependence in Africa Today.” Research in African Literatures 21.3 (1990), 5-15.

[17] UICSM Project Staff, “The University of Illinois School Mathematics Program.” The School Review 65.1(1957), 457-465.

[18] Mwakikagile, Tanzania Under Mwalimu Nyerere: Reflections on an African Statesman, 78-79.

Real and imagined facts in Rwandan history

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ROAPE
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Jos van Oijen writes that Michela Wrong in her new book moves around real and imagined facts and witnesses, revives a double genocide theory based on inflated casualty numbers, re-labels victims, discredits bona fide genocide experts and promotes layman’s opinions as irrefutable evidence, while revising the history of the genocide against the Tutsi. Van Oijen makes an appeal for properly corroborated and verified research.

By Jos van Oijen

My critique of Michela Wrong’s Do Not Disturb in September was by and large a technical discussion to explain how the book allocates undue credibility to fringe theories and recycled myths by neglecting better evidence from forensic investigations, judicial inquiries and academic research. Without this flaw, which affects about two-fifths of Do Not Disturb, it could have been a useful book of 250 pages. Instead, it’s a problematic one that mixes facts and fabrications.

Several commenters – university professors among them – nevertheless manage to politicize my review, using an “us” versus “them” dichotomy. According to their binary logic, the “us” category is reserved for fierce critics of the Rwandan government, like Michela Wrong. In contrast, others who don’t fall in line and highlight major flaws in her work are labeled pro-government and filed under “them”.

Judging by the emails addressed to the editors of the ROAPE website, “us” means good and “them” means bad. Let’s keep in mind, however, that unless fabricated or manipulated, facts have no side. They are what they are, whether they confirm a popular theory or expose it as a hoax. That’s reality, not politics.

In this follow-up post I provide additional examples of myths, recycled in the book, to illustrate my observation that the intuitive method employed by the author is prone to error. Fact checking the information obtained from informants and other informal sources is an essential component of investigative journalism. How else are we to know if a story is based in reality or on a fiction? Intuition isn’t a useful tool to determine this. Feelings and impressions are not facts, they can’t substitute critical thinking.

However, my central argument – that the book would have benefited from applying professional principles and guidelines – does not exclusively concern one author or a single book. Hidden behind the errors there can be myths created decades ago. Their appeals to emotion or to a suggested logic have convinced other authors before Michela Wrong, sufficiently to evade scrutiny for years.

The Hourigan Affair

The manner in which hundreds of scholars and journalists have discussed the story of International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) investigator Michael Hourigan, perpetuates an international conspiracy theory, which, we will see, is not even remotely plausible. The case revolves around a memorandum written by Hourigan in 1997. It was intended for ICTR chief prosecutor Louise Arbour to inform her about intelligence collected from alleged whistle blowers in the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).

Do Not Disturb summarizes the Hourigan Affair as follows: “… when ICTR investigators Jim Lyons and Michael Hourigan, a former FBI staffer and an Australian lawyer, respectively, were approached in 1997 by three former RPF fighters claiming direct knowledge of [Paul] Kagame’s responsibility [for assassinating President Habyarimana], they excitedly called Louise Arbour to say they had compiled a dossier outlining grounds for prosecution.”

Arbour invited Hourigan to her office in The Hague to provide her with the details. A couple of weeks later a meeting was arranged where Hourigan delivered his memo conveying the essence of the witness statements. Unexpectedly, the story goes, Arbour reacted with hostility. She dismissed the information and ended the investigation. “Shocked investigators,” Wrong writes, meaning Lyons, “speculated that Kigali’s various Western “friends” – most likely, the US government – had applied pressure. What prompted her about-turn remains unclear.”

Wrong’s source for the cover-up is a brief interview with Lyons in the controversial BBC documentary Rwanda’s Untold Story. It’s risky to rely on a TV program, however, as they’re rarely adequate sources and should be treated with caution. This one omits the fact that Lyons’ contribution was almost entirely hearsay. When Hourigan met Arbour in The Hague, Lyons was in New York as his one-year contract had expired. He has never met the informants and didn’t discuss the incident with Arbour to get her side of the story.

The “outside pressure” element was debunked in 2010 by Hourigan when he was interviewed about the incident at a conference in Brussels. About his meeting with Arbour in The Hague he said: “I presented her there a memorandum … about informants’ information. She read that, but thereafter it was completely different.” If Arbour’s attitude changed after she finished reading the memo, any clues to the cause of her “about-turn” must be in the text. The section of the memo relevant for this discussion is reproduced below, in Fig. 1.

The many journalists and scholars who have cited the memo tend to highlight statements in the text that appear to confirm a consensus view of fifteen years ago: that Kagame was responsible and that a missile was fired from Masaka hill. The other information has been largely ignored, especially in the academic literature. This is odd because it exposes the affair as a hoax.

Luc Reydams has dedicated an entire journal article to the Hourigan Affair in 2018, titled Politics or Pragmatism. It quotes large portions of an affidavit Hourigan submitted in 2007, but the memo – which was attached to it – and what it claims (that FAR [government] soldiers were responsible and that Camp Kanombe, where the Presidential Guard was stationed, served as mission control), are ignored.

French professor André Guichaoua, who is widely regarded as a leading expert on Rwanda, has published the memo on his website as an annex to his book From War to Genocide. However, the places where it mentions Camp Kanombe are covered with black bars (see Fig, 1). Why his readers aren’t supposed to take note of that information remains unclear. Guichaoua didn’t respond to questions.

Figure 1: The original text is quoted on the left; Guichaoua’s Annexe 49 is on the right

We can imagine Louise Arbour’s astonishment when she read the memo. If the suggestion that the assassination was a joint venture of the RPF and FAR was farfetched, there were more glaring errors: Gasogi Hill as a shooting location, for instance. Even in 1997 it was understood that the missiles were fired from the left side of the plane. Gasogi was on its right. Not helping matters was Hourigan telling Arbour that, like Jim Lyons, he had neither met the witnesses, nor verified their information.

The team member who handled the informants was Amadou Deme. This is a notable aspect because in his 2014 memoir Deme describes his close friendships with genocidaires like Georges Rutaganda and Aloys Ntabakuze that go back to the pre-genocide era. This raises questions about the integrity of the investigations he had been involved in. In the memoir, Deme still refers to his genocidal buddies as “falsely accused heroes”.

Unsettling as this knowledge may be, it doesn’t seem to bother Filip Reyntjens, another leading expert according to some. In his 2020 Working Paper on the Habyarimana assassination, Reyntjens still evokes the obsolete information of Hourigan and Deme as credible evidence to support his own conclusions.

When I contacted Louise Arbour about this case, she explained that she didn’t know Hourigan very well when he contacted her. She wasn’t encouraged by what she learned when she inquired about him. “I felt at that time that our capacity to investigate thoroughly that event was seriously compromised: our resources (human and otherwise) were not adequate to the task and our operating from Kigali made it even more problematic.”

Arbour wasn’t surprised at the negative reactions to her decision to shelve the case: “The lens of a journalist, or that of a historian, is obviously not the same as those of a prosecutor, constrained by rules of legal relevance, admissibility of evidence and a very high standard of proof, all necessary to engage personal criminal responsibility. I did not think at the time that we could meet those standards in that case.”

An analysis of the relevant jurisprudence by ICTR defense lawyers Peter Robinson and Golriz Ghahraman supports Arbour’s decision. It  concluded, “… the inconclusive determination of whether the attack constituted perfidy or treachery, or instead a permissible ruse of war, makes it more prudent not to bring such a prosecution, and to leave the debate to scholars and historians.”

Whether it is wise to leave it up to scholars and historians in this polarised academic field is contestable as well. The tendency to resist new information that threatens one’s belief, is a major factor on both sides of the debate. The examples in this and my previous blogpost demonstrate that influential scholars may have great difficulty adjusting to evidence which emerges after they’ve already formed their opinions and published their analyses.

Michela Wrong, primed by a man on TV and unaware of the factual and historical facets of her information, displays the same dismissive attitude towards research that invalidates the stories she believes to be true and has staked her reputation on.

Re-labeling genocide victims

The next example is one that I mentioned briefly in my previous blogpost. But due to its nature – the recycling of a hate radio message from May and June 1994 – it merits a more detailed description. The flaw in Wrong’s method is quite similar to the one in the first example. She apparently found the story in a fringe report, didn’t verify it, and took it as credible evidence to support her argument.

On 25 April 1994, fishermen from the village of Kasensero in Uganda noticed the remains of Rwandan genocide victims floating in the Kagera river, close to where it flowed into Lake Victoria. Over the next few weeks, tens of thousands of bodies would follow. In the first weeks of May they were reported from Butare in southwestern Rwanda, 900 kilometers upstream from Kasensero, all the way to Musoma, 250 kilometers across the lake in Tanzania.

A clean-up operation retrieved 11,000 bodies from along the shore, but the total number of victims in the lake was estimated to be in the range of 25,000 to 50,000. Because the operation was sponsored by Western aid organizations, international journalists flocked to Uganda to report the story. Most victims were women and children, they wrote, murdered in the most horrific manners. Here was tangible evidence of systematic killing on such a massive scale that the regular deflections and excuses of the Hutu Power government in Rwanda no longer sufficed.

This PR problem was resolved quickly by mirroring foreign news reports on the Rwandan radio stations with the difference that the perpetrator-victim roles were reversed. The alternative version broadcast by the hate radio towards the end of May and throughout June blamed the RPF for the catastrophe and re-labeled the genocide victims in Lake Victoria as innocent Hutus killed in RPF territory.

This version was kept in circulation after the genocide was over, first by the ousted regime and army leaders, followed by a motley crew of genocide deniers and lawyers of genocide suspects. The latter group finally managed to push it into the mainstream media by persuading journalists it was one of the examples of long suppressed evidence of RPF atrocities.

The persuasive element in the story was the fact that after the RPF had captured the town of Rusumo on 30 April 1994, a large stretch of the Akagera river was under their control, although most of it was in a game reserve. Wrong’s colleague Judi Rever rehashed the story in her book In Praise of Blood: “Near the end of April, the most southern prefecture of Kibungo was securely held by the RPF. The refugees escaping to Tanzania were therefore not Tutsis, but Hutus being chased and killed by the RPF. The corpses dumped in the Kagera from late April onward were Hutus.”

This explanation sounds reasonable until one takes a look at the map (see Fig. 2 below). The Akagera isn’t the only major river in Rwanda. Upstream from Rusumo lie the Nyabarongo and the Akanyaru. These rivers meander through regions where in April 1994 most Tutsis were concentrated before their combined currents discharge into the Akagera.

The troops movements as depicted in Alison Des Forges’ Leave None to Tell the Story and other sources suggest that on 1 May 1994, around 90% of the riverbanks along the main rivers in inhabited areas were in government territory. A few reports incriminate RPF troops suggesting they’re accountable for at least some of the victims. However, the genocide in the rest of the country did not abate after the RPF took Rusumo, which implies that the vast majority of bodies reaching Lake Victoria towards the end of May and early June would still have been genocide victims. For a general idea of the situation, I’ve combined the data in Fig. 2.

Figure 2: Map of rivers in the region.

The version in Do Not Disturb is slightly different from the Radio Rwanda/RTLM/Judi Rever version. Wrong writes: “Reporters would later recall, with retrospective unease, how eerily quiet the first areas captured by the RPF had always seemed. When bodies with their hands tied kandoya-style behind their backs surfaced in Lake Victoria, brought by the Kagera and Nyabarongo Rivers, many observers wondered how fresh genocide victims could be washing down from areas the RPF had long cleared of interahamwe.”

The “fresh genocide victims” element caught my attention. The distances by river between Rwanda and Lake Victoria seemed too great for a dead body to arrive in Lake Victoria and still look‘fresh’, given the tropical conditions. The stretch from Butare and Gikongoro to Kasensero is more than 900 kilometres. From Rusumo it’s still 525 kms. But I always try to check such extraordinary claims, just to be sure. In this case I received help from an engineer at Delft University of Technology and two other specialized scientists. The exercise led me to conclude that if fresh bodies indeed surfaced in Lake Victoria, they would have been thrown in locally, not in Rwanda.

So where did Michela Wrong get those ideas? The only reports I could find which mention fresh bodies in the water are from the post-genocide period and they do not refer to Lake Victoria. The scale is incomparable as well. In July 1994 a UNHCR spokesperson told journalists: “We are seeing between 10 and 20 bodies a day floating down the river past Ngara [in Tanzania, opposite Rusumo], “some of them are very, very fresh bodies, so the killing continues.”

Did Wrong mix up the reports? There is a more likely explanation. When I was reviewing publications authored by Paul Rusesabagina a couple of weeks ago, I came across a version of the ‘lake bodies story’ that’s almost identical to Wrong’s. In his report ‘Compendium of RPF crimes‘ from 2006, the details and opinion are all the same, which suggests that the mistake originates with him. Wrong could have read it, paraphrased it in her book, and forgot to credit it to Rusesabagina.

Moral choice

In Do Not Disturb, Michela Wrong moves around real and imagined facts and witnesses, revives a double genocide theory based on inflated casualty numbers, re-labels victims, discredits bona fide genocide experts and promotes layman’s opinions as irrefutable evidence, while she casually revises the history of the genocide against the Tutsi as if she’s redecorating her living room. This can’t all be explained in detail without turning this blog into another book. Most omissions and distortions have layers of facts, or a history attached to them, as demonstrated by the examples above. Unfortunately, people generally remember false facts and alternative histories better because they’re simple and catchy compared to the refutations that are often more complex and require some effort to understand.

Other reviewers have highlighted how Wrong portrays her informants as Prince Charmings, and their former comrades as scary monsters. She even defends an informant who is in prison for embezzling a few hundred thousand pounds from a charity. Proximity matters. So does cognitive dissonance. Two of these Prince Charmings who play a prominent role in the book, fell out with each other as well, one now accusing the other of genocide. And the dissidents who claim to be witnesses of the plane attack have refuted each other’s testimonies before the investigative judges. Such bubble-bursting details are rationalised in passing and remain largely obfuscated in the book.

Journalists and scholars who write about Rwanda and the genocide are from a wide spectrum of disciplines and backgrounds: historians, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, criminologists, forensic scientists, political scientists, law professors, human rights activists, linguists, economists, medical doctors, engineers, and so forth. Besides these we have of course the genocide survivors and other eyewitnesses, priests, attorneys, diplomats, aid workers all contributing to the literature. The advantage of this diversity is that together they produce a multifaceted perspective providing opportunities for reaching a comprehensive analysis of the genocide, its history and aftermath, and to learn from it.

But it also causes friction, misunderstandings and personal resentments that, while they endure, hinder rather than advance our understanding. Everything will stand or fall on the quality of the data and the ability to identify independently established facts from opinions. Theories and judgments should follow the evidence, not the other way around. If a claim is made that according to science, the laws of nature, or the logistics involved is simply not possible, it must be discarded, and the theories should be adjusted accordingly. Unfortunately, not everyone is prepared to do that.

Let me conclude this blogpost by reminding the reader that my critique of Do Not Disturb has addressed methodological flaws that affect about two-fifths of the book. The other 250 pages are largely accurate and worth reading. As long as the author checks her facts and makes clear distinctions between personal feelings, beliefs, assumptions, opinions, facts, and evidence, there’s no crime in letting people have their say, even if what they say is sometimes offensive.

Jos van Oijen is an independent researcher from The Netherlands who publishes on genocide-related issues in various online and print media. His first blogpost on Michela Wrong’s book Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad on roape.net can be read here.

Featured Photograph: The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania.

Bringing global capitalism back into the picture – social protection programmes in Africa

By
ROAPE
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Anna Wolkenhauer writes that there is a much to be criticised about recent social protection programmes in Africa. Though these programmes will not end global capitalism she urges scholar-activists to recognise that they may provide a momentum for posing unresolved social questions at national and global levels. Wolkenhauer argues that these programmes are creating a window of opportunity that can be seized by a radical coalition for developing anti-capitalist alternatives.

By Anna Wolkenhauer

The recent wave of social protection programmes, that have swept across African countries since the turn of the millennium, has generated mixed reactions. On the one side, especially cash transfers are seen as effective and revolutionary ways of eradicating some deeply entrenched impoverishment, and the larger social protection agenda raises hopes to be potentially transformative. On the other, social protection has been criticised for remaining stuck within in the confines of the neoliberal paradigm. Critics point to the decoupling of social policies from issues of production, the anti-democratic policymaking by donors that promote social protection, and their narrowing of the policy choices of African governments through the imposition of hegemonic ideas, as well as the ideological nature of the global justice discourse within which they are embedded. Instead of buying into such programmes, it has been suggested, the left should work towards a more radical imagination that can underpin a popular counter-hegemonic project of real decommodification. So, the search for progressive, holistic forms of social policy in the African context remains an unfinished project.

In this blogpost, I side with the critical voices but call for some strategic and pragmatic opportunism. My simple argument is that, yes, there is a lot to be criticised about the recent social protection policies, and no, they are probably not going to end global neoliberal capitalism. But we should nonetheless acknowledge that they are creating a window of opportunity that can be seized by a scholar-activist coalition for developing more radical imaginations. Building on what is there, more transformative visions for welfare and development can be brought (back) into the picture, and scholars should play their part in re-politicising that debate. This, I argue, requires the contextualisation of present welfare states within global financialised capitalism, the excavation of historical visions, and the formation of coalitions with those on whose behalf social protection policies are made – and who have for too long been excluded from political negotiations. After briefly introducing the current state of social protection, I will look at each of these three imperatives in turn.

According to the African Union, social protection is meant to “ensure minimum standards of well-being among people in dire situations to live a life with dignity, and to enhance human capabilities”, and “includes responses by the state and society to protect citizens from risks, vulnerabilities and deprivations”. During the COVID-19 pandemic, existing schemes like cash or food transfers provided an important basis for several governments to scale up support to people affected by lockdowns. Nonetheless, the long-term sustainability of African social policies remains as uncertain after the pandemic as it had been before, being threatened by a limited resource base, economic extraversion, lack of diversification, and capital flight. The expansion and institutionalisation of social protection is hence an ongoing project. The current campaign within the UN for a global fund for social protection aims at building a transnational redistribution mechanism that is based on social rights instead of charity.

While buffering some effects of the ongoing health and economic crises, and while contributing to a certain level of decommodification, social protection cannot substitute for “development proper.” If development has been reduced to complementing private sector-led market integration with poverty reduction, a long-term equitable sharing of wealth will not materialise. Yet, the fact that social rights have been brought back onto the global development agenda, coupled with the growing attention paid to research and evidence, as well as the partial strengthening of states in the course of rolling out social policy, creates an opportunity for re-connecting social policy with longer-term structural transformation. But for collectively building an alternative vision of social change, scholarship will have to stop reproducing the mainstream policy consensus. I am making three suggestions.

  1. Bring global capitalism back into the picture. In his recent critique of congratulatory social protection scholarship, Alf Gunvald Nilsen argues that the underlying power structures leading to inequality and precarity are too often overlooked. As “cash transfers are unlikely to have a transformative impact on the power of capital in production”, he calls for instead addressing exactly those “asymmetries of class power” to achieve “greater equality and freedom”. I endorse his proposition. Thinking too long about the nitty-gritty of targeting procedures and effectiveness measurements, researchers are at risk of losing sight of the bigger picture: the growing concentration of wealth that is captured by a small elite. Understanding what the neoliberal turn means, necessitates a look at class relations. It is not characterised only by a retreat of the state – even though this has been a core pillar of austerity since the 1990s. But more importantly, the neoliberal era rests on a set of global institutions that protect global capital from democratic interference and facilitate its unhindered movement around the world. The consequences are seen in diverse places: foreign investors who crowd out local owners, attacks on labour regulation, precarious working conditions and the privatisation of social services. The task of critical scholarship must be to understand these structural causes of social problems, and move the focus away from the individual level, where social protection all too often looks. This is pertinent for illuminating where real change would have to start.
  2. Rehabilitate historical solutions to social questions. In the search for more transformative visions for equality and freedom, scholars should tap into the wealth of historical experiences of state-led development. The dominant accounts of incapable and inefficient post-independence African states that worsened the economic crises on the continent need a serious counterbalance. The common-sense assumption that states are likely to fail continues to legitimise replacing them with technology, the market, and/or self-responsible business people (kick-started with the help of social protection). Welfare provided by many post-independence governments was not without problems but based on much more holistic approaches to long-term economic inclusion. At the very least, the plans of the time reflect much more ambitious visions of social transformation, political and economic independence, and inclusive nation building. Taking a longue durée perspective can thus be fruitful to bring out the “social policy effects” of other forms of state intervention than social protection in the stricter sense. Supporting agricultural cooperatives, implementing land reform, collectivising ownership of businesses and the means of production should not be dismissed as experiments of the past but scrutinised for lessons for the future.
  3. Form coalitions with the intended “beneficiaries” of social protection. In developing more transformative visions for social justice, engaged scholarship can give voice to those people for whom social protection is supposed to work but who are many times not part of the political process. Recent social policies have often not been introduced in response to popular political demands but in a top-down manner; thought out by politicians, technocrats and “experts” at the centre. Where only a relatively small number of people work in formal employment, unionisation levels are low, and as unions concentrate on social insurance policies, the self-representation of recipients of social assistance is largely absent. However, new policies like cash transfers have generated a new interest in speaking to “the poor.” They are frequently interviewed and surveyed in order to find out how social protection is influencing their lives and how it could be improved. Capitalising on the political interest in study results, research that goes beyond asking predefined questions about predefined programmes could bring new ideas into the discussion. One facet of neoliberalism is the narrowing of the range of thinkable solutions. To escape these confines is a precondition for formulating alternative futures, and would benefit from a powerful coalition of reflexive scholarship and imaginative communities.

Jimi Adesina criticises that even “civil society” has been in part manufactured by the donor community in order to lobby for their social protection agenda. The African Platform for Social Protection, for instance, that has continental headquarters in Nairobi and connects 27 national-level equivalents, was set up in 2008 – supported by international donors. Its expressed aim is to “support the development of effective national social protection policies and programmes and thereby contribute to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals and the goals of the African Union Social Policy Framework”. So, one could argue – as Adesina does – that they were created from above and have bought into the mainstream narrative about cash transfers, poverty reduction, and the MDGs. More mainstream than revolutionary, maybe. However, this should not be a reason to miss out on tapping into these evolving structures and to look more closely where connections with the “grassroots” already exist or could be formed. Rather than dismissing them as manufactured, we should work with them, in order to re-connect to those for whom the present order is not enough. By way of an example, the Southern African Social Protection Experts Network has brought policymakers, scholars, and civil society together, including activists, who represent marginalised and otherwise silenced groups. Creating such fora for interaction and avenues for people to exercise their voice, must be a crucial step along the way towards more equality and freedom. If this is enabled by structures that were initially donor-funded, I would call it a pragmatic starting point rather than a non-transformative compromise.

In sum, scholars and activists should dare the balancing act between becoming more practically useful, while radicalising their critique of the status quo. Present social protection policies might not be the solution for ending exploitative global capitalism, but they are providing a momentum for (re-)posing unresolved social questions – at national and global levels. This momentum should be seized. But to have more real-life significance, research must escape the neoliberal mindset, by scrutinising the underlying structures that reproduce inequality, by dusting off historical imaginations, and by forming coalitions with all those activists out there. To envision alternative futures can be one important impetus to moving social protection discourse and practice forward.

Anna Wolkenhauer is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Bremen, Germany. She wrote her PhD thesis on state formation and social policy in Zambia and has been involved with social protection advocacy in the SADC region since 2014.

Featured Photograph: Market in Ghana (Eric Nana Gyetuah, 14 November 2017).

Extracting Profits – imperialism, climate change and resistance in Africa

By
ROAPE
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In an extract from the preface of the African edition of her book, Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism and the New Scramble for Africa, ROAPE’s Lee Wengraf writes about the failure of the system we live under to resolve the crises it produces, and the centrality of resistance to build an alternative to capitalism in Africa and worldwide.

By Lee Wengraf

2018 seems like a lifetime ago. When Extracting Profit came out that year, the Covid-19 pandemic was two years away. Since then, the world has been plunged into a devastating crisis, with 4.5 million lives lost globally, including close to 200,000 reported deaths on the African continent. The depths of loss and destruction have been immense, both in human and social terms. The overall theme of the book, however, remains the same: the failure of the system we live under to resolve the crises it produces, and the centrality of resistance to build an alternative to capitalism in Africa and worldwide. A number of trends have become more pronounced in the context of a pandemic in the neoliberal era. African economies heavily reliant on oil and other commodities were thrown into recession as the world economy ground to a halt; the inequality of access to healthcare, jobs and services has only accelerated under a system of global vaccine apartheid; and, finally, the fall-out has produced a new round of indebtedness among African nations to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, as well as G20 nations including China who holds the largest percent of bilateral African debt. Some older debt payments have been rescheduled but only a tiny portion have been forgiven. The economic pain is sure to reverberate well into the future as African governments turn to budget cuts when loans come due.

Within the span of the pandemic to date, the economic volatility experienced by oil producing countries has seesawed at lightning speed. By mid-2020, global oil prices had fallen into negative territory when a significant drop in demand led to a glut in supply. The gross domestic product (GDP) of many oil-producing nations in Africa crashed to levels not seen in years. Countries such as Nigeria imposed brutal cuts and retrenchments on workers. According to the IMF, the country’s GDP shrunk in 2020 by 1.8%, with predictions of a 2.5% growth in 2021. Since that time, oil has “re-bounded”: as of August, 2021, the price of Brent crude had climbed back to $65 per barrel. Yet the IMF does not expect most African countries to return to pre-pandemic per capita income levels until 2025.

African economies are unevenly integrated into the global system, meaning that the centers of capital accumulation primarily lie elsewhere. The deeply unequal global distribution of Covid vaccines mirrors this unevenness: the lack of access to vaccines across the Global South has been nothing short of criminal. By late summer 2021, when countries in the Global North began rolling out plans for booster shots, only about 24 million people in Africa, just 1.7% of the population, were fully vaccinated. Activists are now re-visiting the lessons of successful struggles for full access to generic HIV drugs such as South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), demanding an end to Covid vaccine patents and free healthcare for all.

*

The pandemic has erupted at a moment of climate emergency. The inextricable connection between fossil fuels and environment-destroying extraction has been well-established for decades but the crisis has unfolded since 2018 at a breath-taking pace. Sites of extraction have devastated communities across the continent, from gas flaring and oil spills to ground-water and soil contamination. In 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a stunning warning that the globe is approaching permanent, irreparable harm, and that a major structural intervention is the only hope to avoid disaster. The evidence for these conditions has never been in short supply in Africa, as elsewhere: the Amazon Basin, now a net emitter of carbon dioxide; unprecedented levels of hazardous weather conditions, from flooding to fires; and the frightening rise in global temperatures.

The scale of the crisis has become so massive that capital and the ruling class are now compelled to grapple with the problem. Fossil fuel producers and political leaders have set targets for reduced emissions. But to date, globally, the proposed “solutions” are limited to the same market-based framework of carbon off-sets: machinations which provide a way to maintain fossil fuel production under the guise of “net zero.” Shell, for example, plans on growing its gas business by 20% over the next five years despite its declared emissions targets. That fossil fuel industries are even contemplating emissions curbs is a testament to the power of the global climate movement who have long demanded a just transition to truly sustainable resources. Yet activists have rightly denounced the non-solutions on offer as greenwashing distortions by the oil industry.

A new race for these so-called green investments is escalating, fueling competition between oil and gas companies aiming to diversify their portfolios. In early 2021, corporations such as BP and Total spent unprecedented amounts to lease offshore wind projects. The same dynamic is unfolding with other products such as water and solar-based energy supplies. Unsurprisingly, oil and gas companies are not exiting the world stage quietly. The scale of their investment in a polluting industry is just too large. The world’s largest banks have provided $3.8tn to fossil fuel companies since the signing of the Paris agreement in 2015. In a highly competitive “green” future, these corporations are relying on their climate-destroying businesses to fund the inevitable and costly “transition” to a more sustainable, albeit market-based, one. And much as the prices of primary commodities like oil are subject to the boom and bust cycles of the unplanned and unregulated market under capitalism, today there’s a glut in renewable technologies. The over-supply in the renewables industry will inevitably face the same contradictions as fossil fuels: the same cycles of declining profitability, collapse, and job loss.

African nations are among the least prepared for a shift to renewables because of the scale of the investment required and fossil fuel-producing states in Africa are heavily reliant on those exports for revenue; nations such as Angola, Nigeria and South Sudan rely on oil for almost 100% of their foreign exchange earnings. Yet according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the African continent represents the most dire need with regards to access to electricity: they project that by 2030, up to 650 million people – 80% of the global total – will not have access.

The contradictions of sustaining fossil fuel-based economies in an evolving climate crisis have compelled an array of what environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey has called “techno-fixes”: so-called “clean” geoengineering technologies representing innovation and industrial growth in some African nations. Yet a strategy that seeks “value adds” in environment-destroying industries places economic growth on a collision course with any possibility of a sustainable transition. As activists and critics of extraction-based economies have long pointed out, “green” strategies cannot be merely layered upon destructive industries; the underlying basis of the economy must be undone in its entirety, and quickly. 

*

In May 2021, the IEA made a stunning announcement: in their report Net Zero by 2050, they declared that to realize this goal, all fossil fuel projects must cease by 2021. For the energy body to issue such a warning underscored the accelerated reckoning confronting the oil and gas industry. But for the Global South in particular, as Namibian activist Ina-Maria Shikongo has pointed out, the framework of “net zero” grants a cover to corporate practices to pollute still further. The dynamics of colonial and post-colonial state-building in Africa tended to produce nations with a weak regulatory environment, reinforced with structural adjustment conditionalities imposing privatization and liberalization. At a moment when fossil fuel production is under fire, high profile extraction projects in Africa are making headway, seemingly beyond the glare of regulatory scrutiny. Harmful exploratory drilling is currently underway in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Okavango spanning Namibia and Botswana, threatening to displace the San indigenous people and the area’s extensive wildlife. The French oil giant Total along with the Chinese state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation are building the controversial East African Crude Oil Pipeline through regions of Tanzania and Uganda rich in biodiversity.

As Shikongo suggests, the growing pressures towards tighter corporate emissions standards beg the question of whether their “carbon footprints” will be exported to Africa and elsewhere in the Global South. In many ways, this is not a new development: studies have shown that the continent has long been a dumping ground for pollution from the Global North. As oil prices experience a new boom and consumption surges relative to a decade ago – the pandemic-driven price volatility notwithstanding – pressures to hold onto fossil fuel investments will continue, intensified by the cost of transitioning to sustainable technologies that will run into the trillions of dollars. The political leaders of poor nations like Namibia – currently without any onshore oil extraction – will be compelled to navigate the tension between their own environmental commitments and the revenue-generating opportunities drilling offers.

The “new scramble for Africa” of the twenty-first century has been a rush for fossil fuels: oil, minerals and natural gas. With an accelerating turn to sustainable energy sources, the global race for raw materials used in clean energy is on, many of which are plentiful on the African continent such as lithium, copper and cobalt for electric vehicles. But just as the drive for raw materials has been an engine for imperialism in Africa in both the colonial and post-colonial eras, the dynamics of the current global turn to renewables echo those historical relations: extraction and export with minimal industrial development. Oil majors’ massive investments in the manufacturing and marketing of green technologies predominantly takes place in the Global North and China. Construction in Africa of urgently needed alternative energy plants such as wind and solar farms are a minuscule portion of global development. The need for a world based on renewables is urgent. But as long as these energy sources are tied to the oil industry, and the market in general, the limitations and contradictions of meeting human need in a capitalist society will prevail.

*

China currently dominates clean energy manufacturing and technological development, and controls access to large shares of the world’s “green minerals.” China’s long-term strategic orientation on primary commodity extraction and infrastructure development in Africa, for one, shores up their competitive edge in a sustainabls- dominated landscape. These conditions further sharpen the rivalry between China and the United States; the dynamics of a competitive global system under capitalism promises that a “green” imperialism and a struggle over control of those resources will emerge.

When Extracting Profit was written, the Obama presidency in the US had recently concluded, a period marked by a widened military footprint through the US military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) and an escalation of drone warfare. Yet in 2018, the US declared a shift in global imperial strategy from “counter-terror” to a focus on “peer competitors,” chiefly China but also Russia and other powers. For Africa, the US foreign policy establishment recognizes that China’s investments are a long-term, strategic priority, one that it has been pursuing on a range of fronts and from which it will not easily retreat.

As the Daraja edition of the book was going to press, the 20-year US war in Afghanistan was brought to an ignominious end with the return of the Taliban to power. With US credibility weakened, how the geopolitics of the inter-imperial rivalry between it and China will unfold, and the implications for Africa, is unclear. On the one hand, if the center of gravity of these tensions shifts more decisively to the Pacific, the strategic importance of Africa’s proximity to the Middle East – and US concerns with “stability” on the continent in general – may also shift. On the other hand, US support for “war-making” in Africa has taken on a dynamic of its own, where states and the African Union now have an apparatus to pursue their own security agendas including safeguarding energy resources. As Samar Al-Bulushi has pointed out, “While each of the governments in question are formally allies of the US, their actions are not reducible to US directives.” More broadly, intensifying inter-imperial rivalries – compounded with the drive for sustainable resources and the instability of the climate emergency – promise to reverberate globally. The world’s major powers undoubtedly will still aim to project power and minimize instability threatening investment potential in Africa through alliances with local ruling classes nurtured in the name of “partnership.”

*

In 2021, oil and gas corporations suffered a series of stinging losses in decades-long legal challenges brought by residents of oil producing communities.  Most recently, a Nigerian court settled a 30-year-old claim against Shell for a spill that took place during the 1967-70 Biafran war, ordering damages of over $111 million. All of these legal victories are the culmination of grassroots organizing sustained and grown over a long period of time.

The current fight to stop drilling in the Okavango in Namibia has birthed a coalition of indigenous and environmental justice organizations across southern Africa, determined to halt potentially irreversible harm. Across the continent, activists are demanding a carbon-free future for all, Global North and South alike. They have also been forced to take on the state violence of governments relying on repression to manage the crisis of poverty exacerbated by the pandemic lockdown. The Nigerian police deployed their Covid task force to confront the massive #EndSARS revolts against police brutality. Social movement forces such as the Mathare Social Justice Centre in Nairobi have reported on heightened violence of the police under lockdown conditions including the murder and detention of those who resist. Struggles against policing and militarization resonate far beyond their borders, against a backdrop of the global Black Lives Matter movement.

Since the book’s original publication, the scale of the climate emergency has accelerated a consciousness of our shared future. The solutions on offer from the ruling classes worldwide are proving utterly bankrupt in both the immediate and the long-term, growing an awareness that a sustainable transition must be driven by social need and not profit. Beneath the empty promises for a cleaner environment and the pandemic’s end, the contradictions of the twin crises have exposed how deeply wedded corporations are to accumulation at all costs. They will not voluntarily break from a system that has served the capitalist class so well. It will require resistance and organization on a previously unseen scale. Linked struggles across borders – from pipelines to public health demands – are gathering strength, at a moment when they are desperately needed. The urgency of an alternative to extraction and the climate nightmare, inequality, imperialism and the war on terror was the original impetus for writing this book. That reality is no less true today.

The new African edition of Lee Wengraf’s book Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism and the New Scramble for Africa published by Daraja Press is available here

Lee Wengraf is an activist based in New York City, contributing editor to the Review of African Political Economy and author of Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism, and the New Scramble for Africa (Daraja Press, 2021). Follow her on twitter here.

Featured Photograph: The photo shows an oil spill from an abandoned Shell Petroleum Development Company in Olobiri, Niger Delta (Ed Kashi, 2004). The image is taken from the cover of Wengraf’s book. 

The Hate Paradigm – How Africa was demonised in the West

By
ROAPE
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Reviewing a new book, the Congolese historian, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, asks how Africa was demonisation by non-Africans, and Westerners in particular, to generate the hatred and discrimination against Black Africans and their descendants until today? Nzongola-Ntalaja writes that Manufacturing Hate: How Africa Was Demonized in Western Media by Milton Allimadi provides excellent answers to this question, with powerful examples of institutionalised racism from major Western media.

By Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja

In his award-winning and highly acclaimed book, The Invention of Africa (1988), Congolese philosopher V.Y. Mudimbe provides a compelling analysis of how the idea of Africa was initially conceived by non-Africans as “a paradigm of difference.” By this he means the way Europeans looked at Africans as “the other”. Even today, after students of human origins have conclusively shown that fully modern homo sapiens, the ancestors of all humanity, evolved entirely in Africa before spreading to other parts of the world, racists in the West and other parts of the world continue to believe in the inferiority of Black Africans and their descendants.

According to the American historian Christopher Ehret, the peoples of Africa “participated integrally in the great transformations of world history from the first rise of agricultural ways of life, to the various inventions of metalworking, to the growth and spread of global networks of commerce”. Ehret also shows how the Afrasian civilization, which originated in the Horn of Africa, expanded into the Ethiopian Highlands, and had a great impact on the Red Sea Hills and in Egypt. Contacts with the outside world before the Atlantic era were also established through the trans-Saharan trade involving the great West African empires and the historic scholarly centre of Timbuktu, on the one hand, and through the trading city-states along the Indian Ocean coast, on the other.

Given this implication of Africa into the world system on largely equal terms, how did its demonization by non-Africans, and Westerners in particular, originate to become a major factor in the hatred and discrimination against Black Africans and their descendants until today? In Manufacturing Hate: How Africa Was Demonized in Western Media, Milton Allimadi provides excellent answers to this question, with mind-boggling examples of institutionalized racism from The New York Times and other major Western media. The book is divided into four parts, each examining a key aspect of the demonization of Africa, namely, (1) How the primitive image of Africa was created and universally disseminated; (2) How the great African military victories against European imperialists have been trivialized; (3) The covering of Africa by racist correspondents and editors of Western media; and (4) How Africa is relegated to the backwaters in these mass-consumption publications.

Allimadi is correct in tying the primitive image of the African by Westerners to “the expansion of the European capitalist economy on a global scale” (p. 4). To rationalize slave labour and the looting of Africa, the Africans themselves had to be dehumanized. For those who reaped benefits from slave labour like Thomas Jefferson, and the states and industrialists for whom the so-called explorers served as intelligence gatherers for Africa’s abundant natural resources, needed to dehumanize enslaved Africans and the inhabitants of the lands to be looted, respectively. Owned or sponsored by capitalist entrepreneurs, Western media treated Africa as a case of isolation and difference. With their very humanity denied, Black Africans were portrayed as “barbarians,” “primitives,” “tribal people,” “uncivilized,” and “peoples without history.”

One of the most idiotic acts of the European intelligence gatherers was their claim of “discovering” rivers, lakes, and mountains, which they then baptized with the names of their kings, queens, or other illustrious persons, when these natural sites already had local names. For example, Samuel Baker renamed the lake known as Luta N’zige, one of the sources of the River Nile on the border of Uganda and the Congo, “Lake Albert,” in honour of the husband of Queen Victoria, the British monarch. Unfortunately, the rulers of postcolonial Africa have kept most of these European-given names, including Victoria Falls, Lake Victoria, and Lake Edward.

Another interesting example of European arrogance and its limits is shown in chapter 4 of Manufacturing Hate, in which Allimadi recounts the conversation between Baker and Comoro, an elder and an organic intellectual of the Lotuko people of South Sudan. In this encounter between Baker, an allegedly superior human, and an African “savage,” it was the latter and not Baker who won virtually all the arguments. Of the two, it was the African who grounded his discourse in material reality instead of superstition.

Likewise, Allimadi shows how the European myth of African docility is contradicted by armed resistance to the colonial conquest by great African warriors such as Muhammad Ahmad al-Mahdi of Sudan, Samori Ture of what is today Guinea, and Empress Taytu Betul and Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia. The victories at Khartoum and Adwa are discussed at length in Part II of the book. The author is obviously happy to celebrate the victories of African armies over better equipped European imperialists, but also to “dispel the myth of imperial invincibility and the canard that Africans welcomed European domination” (p. 42).

While acknowledging the charisma and popularity of the Mahdi, Allimadi does not place the Mahdist movement in Sudan within the overall Sufi resistance to European colonialism in the 19th century, which includes Samori Ture and other jihadists like Al-Hajj Umar Tall of the Tukulor Empire. As a Nubian Sufi leader of the Samaniyya order, Muhmmad Ahmad defeated the Egyptians in 1883 and was declared the Mahdi. His next challenge, and a very big one, was his ten-month siege of British and Egyptian forces in Khartoum, Sudan, who were commanded by the highly decorated General Charles George Gordon, nicknamed “Chinese Gordon” for his exploits in China. The Mahdists defeated his army and killed him on 26 January, 1885. Mahdi died unexpectedly five months later, but his Dervish state survived for 13 years under his successor, Abdullah ibn Muhammad al-Khalifa, until the defeat of the Mahdists at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 by General Horatio Herbert Kitchener.

The other glorious victory over imperialism was the one engineered by Empress Taytu and Emperor Menelik II at the Battle of Adwa, where an Italian army of 17,000 troops was annihilated in a single day, between 6:00 a.m. and noon on 1 March,1896. With the Ethiopians using European weapons of the same quality as those of the Italians, this encounter demonstrated that given the same arsenal, Africans could, with appropriate strategy and devotion to the task at hand, defeat European armies. Adwa is widely celebrated across Africa and in the African diaspora worldwide as “Africa’s victory.”

On the other hand, falsifying reality in the name of “the manifest destiny” of the white man, The New York Times, as cited by Allimadi, depicted the attempted Italian conquest as a noble task designed to impose “civilization and Christianity over barbarians and savages, over unbelief, over habits of ferocity, over brutal ignorance of every human law, religious, social, and civil” (p. 47). As Allimadi points out, Christianity was established as Ethiopia’s state religion in 330 CE. Ironically, the newspaper clearly indicated in the same article the real Italian objectives, which were mainly economic, and the main reason why the Times was behind colonial conquests in Africa.

Italy’s defeat in Ethiopia was greatly felt as humiliation, not only for being denied access to Ethiopia’s economic and strategic assets, but also for a white country to be defeated by a black one. Benito Mussolini, the Italian Fascist dictator, could not rest until he could avenge the humiliation of 1896. With large armies in its neighbouring colonies of Eritrea and Italian Somalia, Mussolini had no great difficulty invading Ethiopia on 3 October 1935, with 30,000 troops, 1,000 trucks, and large supplies of mustard gas. Once again, The New York Times on 6 May, 1936, applauded Mussolini’s show of force with fifty planes flying over Addis Ababa, the Ethiopia’s capital, forcing Emperor Haile Selassie to leave the capital and go into exile. The Italians committed heinous war crimes and crimes against humanity, with their reckless use of mustard gas and the imposition of a veritable reign of terror all over the country.

Allimadi’s discussion of the retaliation against Mussolini’s occupation of Ethiopia between 1935 and 1941 is incomplete, since he devotes only one paragraph of chapter 8 to this important fight for the recovery of the sovereignty of a state that had been in existence since Biblical times. It is true that the mobilization of African American and Afro-Caribbean volunteers for military action in Ethiopia did present enormous logistical challenges, but some of these men did make it to the Motherland to fight Italians, as shown in Joseph E. Harris’s book African-American Reactions to War in Ethiopia, 1936-1941. The father of the late Howard University professor Abiyi Ford was one of them.

The author credits the defeat of Mussolini’s army in 1941 to “British forces in Africa … fighting with Ethiopian guerrillas” (p. 54). But this is not the whole story. The Allies had entrusted this task to the British because of the latter’s colonial presence in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, British Somaliland, Kenya, and Uganda. Thus, except for officers, the “British forces” in question were mostly Africans from these colonies and those from Nigeria and Southern Rhodesia, plus troops from India. A very important addition to the Abyssinian Campaign of 1941 was a large contingent from the Belgian Congo, solicited by the British from the Governor General of the colony, with the obvious agreement of the useless Belgian government in exile in London, financed to the tune of £40 million from its rich colony.

On 29 February 2012, I received an email from Lensa Idossa, an Ethiopian student at Columbia University, asking me to explain why there is a place in his town of Dembi Dollo in Western Ethiopia called “The Congo Cemetery.” I replied that hundreds of Congolese soldiers from the Force Publique (FP), the colonial army, had died to free Ethiopia from Italian Fascism. Three major victories were won by the Congolese as follows: 11 March 1941, at Asosa; 23 March at Gambela; and 3 July at Saïo, which is now known as Dembi Dollo. Here, nine Italian generals, one colonel, 370 officers, 2,574 Italian non-commissioned officers and soldiers, and 1,533 Eritrean non-commissioned officers and soldiers surrendered to the FP. Thus, if the Battle of Gondar under British command in November 1941 was the ultimate defeat of Italy in Ethiopia, its capitulation to the Belgian Congo at Saïo had been a blow from which it could not recover fully. More than 500 Congolese lost their lives during the “Abyssinian Campaign,” including 245 soldiers (of which 42 were killed on the battlefield and 195 due to gun wounds or disease) and 274 porters.

For two years after my email exchange with Idossa, a fire inside me urged me to visit the battlefields where Congolese soldiers fought in 1941. I finally found my way to Western Ethiopia with a three-day visit to Gambela in early August 2014, including a full-day trip to Dembi Dollo, site of the FP’s greatest victory and the “Congo Cemetery,” on 3 August, and a two-day trip to Asosa from 6-8 August. These visits were all very disappointing. Except for the Ethiopian citizens who were kind enough to show me around, there were no plaques for the battlefields and the cemetery in Dembi Dollo. Some of the graves were still visible but the whole area was simply bush and likely to disappear if the Ethiopian and Congolese governments fail to honour this burial ground.

If Allimadi is correct about the trivializing of Africa’s military victories by Western media, African governments must also be blamed for neglecting to mark the sites where they took place for historical memory and to honour the soldiers who died there.

Part Three of the book focuses on biased reporting on Africa by Western media, with examples from The New York Times, Time magazine and other publications, most of which were for  long-time supporters of the apartheid system of white supremacy in South Africa. Freedom fighters like the Kenyans of the Land and Freedom Party, who were derogatorily referred to as “Mau Mau,” their counterparts in the fight against settler colonialism in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa, and South West Africa (now Namibia), as well as those fighting against Portuguese Fascism and ultra-colonialism were invariably called “terrorists.” The crimes committed by the white minority regimes in settler states and the Portuguese in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique were far greater in savagery than anything carried out by freedom fighters. Allimadi relates information from hearings by UK courts with documented evidence of “barbaric forms of torture by the British colonial authorities” during the “Emergency” in Kenya between 1952 and 1956.    

In the case of the Congo, it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that “Mobutu handed Lumumba over to Tshombe” (p. 76) because the assassination of Patrice Lumumba was a joint undertaking by the United States and Belgium, and Moise Tshombe was a Belgian puppet whose Katanga province was under the full control of Belgian civil servants and military officers. Moreover, Tshombe did not “preside” over Lumumba’s demise (p.114), as this was the work of a Belgian execution squad.

The strongest point Allimadi makes with Congo’s example is the double standard in the Western media’s valuing of white lives compared to those of Blacks. Following the Belgian paratrooper drop in Stanleyville (Kisangani today) from US military transport planes on 24 November 1964, Time magazine and other major Western media had no shame focusing their attention on one American medical doctor and the other 70 whites killed, and simply mentioning that over a thousand Congolese were also killed in a tragic drama involving the Belgian paratroopers, racist white mercenaries, and Lumumba’s followers then in control of the city. For these media, the life of one white person was obviously more important than that of a multitude of Blacks.

In Part IV, Allimadi looks at how Africa is relegated to the backwaters from a Eurocentric perspective, which continues to perpetuate the Black inferiority complex, the identification of Africans with “tribesmen,” and the Western media’s cavalier approach to Africa. First, Allimadi takes Alan Cowell to task for his patronizing and racist article in The New York Times Magazine of 5 April, 1992, in which he argued that the Congolese have failed to manage the state inherited from Belgium, on account of Cowell’s failure to seriously examine the underlying causes of state fragility in the Congo, including the Belgians’ own responsibility for state decay. Then, he rightly dismisses Paul Johnson’s plea on the 18 April, 1993, issue of the same magazine for the recolonization of Africa. Allimadi’s response to him, which applies to Cowell and all other adherents of Eurocentrism, is worth quoting. He writes that Johnson “conveniently ignored the reality of the colonial agenda—to exploit Africa’s resources and cheap labor, to continue enforcing trading patterns that benefit industrialized countries at Africa’s expense, and not to prepare Africans to … run their own affairs” (p. 93).

The third major writer that Allimadi takes to task is the notorious Afropessimist Robert D. Kaplan, whose doomsday scenario of Africa’s plunge into endless poverty and disaster is outlined in his article in The Atlantic Monthly of March 1994. Closely related to this relegation of Africa to the backwaters is the pseudo-scientific division of the people of Africa into different “tribes” or creating “noble Africans” versus “true Negroes” as Alex Shoumatoff does in his provocative and racist article on Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda in The New Yorker of 20 June 1992.

Despite their short length, chapters XIV and XV, on “Africa and the Black Inferiority Complex” and “Africans Are Not ‘Tribesmen’,” respectively, are extremely useful in consciousness raising for Africans and their descendants in the African diaspora worldwide. Allimadi does a great job in going back to the classics like The Black Jacobins of C.L.R. James (1938) and Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon (1952), which ought to remain required reading for combatting the inferiority complex and negative stereotypes likely to lead to self-hatred and rejection of the Black heritage and the 1960’s empowerment motto that “Black is Beautiful.”

As for “tribe” and the “tribal,” these are notions invented during the transatlantic slave trace and codified by anthropology as the colonial science par excellence to divide and conquer the peoples of Africa. Today, the use of these terms in connection with African ethnic groups comprising millions of souls in virtually all occupational categories of the modern world and some of which outnumber many European countries in population is nothing but ridiculous.

Overall, this is an outstanding work of scholarship, and one that should be read by undergraduates and students enrolled in studies of journalism and communications generally, as well as by the general public. It is very timely, given the increasing migrations of peoples of colour to Europe and North America, which is being exploited by right-wing extremism. The latter is once again raising its ugly face against black and brown peoples in a struggle to reinforce white supremacy and privilege.

Since this book is about the Western world, it is imperative to note that in this age of globalization, the demonization of people with black skins is not limited to whites in Europe and the Americas. African merchants and students in China complain about xenophobia, racism, and outright discrimination in doing business, housing, and the job market. But one area of the world for which a study of the kind that Allimadi has produced is urgently needed is the Arab world, which comprises North Africa and Sudan. The Darfur conflict over the last 20 years pitting Sudanese of Arab culture against those of African culture has involved crimes of genocide, as brown and black Arabs have been killing and raping non-Arab Blacks, whom they call abd or “slaves,” to confiscate their lands and ethnically cleanse them from areas they have lived in for centuries. Likewise, Black African migrants in Libya seeking an imagined Eldorado on the other side of the Mediterranean and Black Libyan supporters of the late head of state Muammar Qaddafi have been tortured, raped, killed, or reduced to commodities for human trafficking since the NATO invention of 2011, mostly for their skin colour.

The millennium-old Arab/Muslim slave trade has a lot to do with the complicated relations between Arab and Black Africans. Since the incorporation of North Africa into the Dar al-Islam in the 7th century CE, the region of the continent below the Sahara Desert became the Dar al-Kufr, the abode of the unbelief, or the Dar al-Harb, the realm of war, where captives could be found for enslavement. For both Arabs and the Amazigh or “Berbers,” the bilad as-Sudan, or the “land of the blacks,” became “a paradigm of difference,” as it was for Europeans. Generally, North Africans are reluctant to identify themselves with Africa. What does the future hold in store for African-Arab relations?

Milton Allimadi’s book Manufacturing Hate: How Africa was Demonized in Western Media can be purchased directly from the publisher here.

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, a Professor in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill is the author of numerous books including Patrice Lumumba (2014)  and The Congo From Leopold To Kabila: A People’s History (2002) which won the 2004 Best Book Award of the African Politics Conference Group (APCG). Read the roape.net interview with Nzongola-Ntalaja conducted by ROAPE’s Ben Radley here.

A version of this review was posted on Black Star News (New York) on 13 September 2021.

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