Global Lenin

September 30, 2021

Adam Mayer celebrates a new volume on the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Lenin150 (Samizdat) has a sheer diversity that takes one’s breath away. Authors young and old, queer and old-style Marxist-Leninist, women and men write about Lenin’s work, history and legacy in an anthology that also includes many African and Black voices. Mayer argues that this rich collection proves that Leninism is alive and well.

By Adam Mayer

Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichhorn, the main editor of this magnificent edited volume of socialist theory, history and literary art (especially poetry), as well as a collection of Lenin visuals presented via art photography and a number of other mediums, has created a celebratory tome to mark the 150^th birthday of Lenin. The picture presented in the volume is one of the Leninists’ Lenin (with partial exceptions), but he and his co-editors certainly did not aim at conveying a composite historical account that would include every possible voice from Russian Orthodox priests’ through neoliberal pundits’ and new right fascists’, to the Vatican’s or the Taliban’s conception of Lenin and his historical role. Rather, the work comes together as a well composed symphony with magnificently presented, interwoven themes: with lots of humor, nuance, drama and self-awareness, but also (to use the editor’s favourite term), lots of real, unadulterated, pure joy.

In some cases, themes disappear and re-appear, as when one of our subculture’s favourite taboos, the fact that ‘state socialism’ as an economic system was designed by Yevgeni Preobrazhensky as late as 1926 is mentioned in one of the multiple Introductions (p.6) and then again on p. 229 – but how delightful, how relevant, how deep this discussion on this much forgotten topic here is! Matthew T. Huber’s chapter, for example, goes into the highly controversial topic of the concept’s provenance. Preobrazhensky was initially allied to Trotsky within the Left Opposition and Stalin, after ‘eliminating’ the entire Left Opposition in the 1930s, including Preobrazhensky, unleashed the most ruthless industrialization by dispossessing the peasantry – all in the name of ‘state socialism’.

Such themes, rich and sometimes surprising as in possible connections between Aleister Crowley and Lenin (in Oxana Timofeeva’s intriuguing chapter, ‘What Lenin Teaches Us About Witchcraft’), appear and re-appear in visual rhythms not so much as in a kaleidoscope than as in fireworks – of the most spectacular kind. (And yes, Joffre includes a People’s Republic of China scholar on Lenin, Wang Hui, as well as a Western Marxist theologian (!) who works in China).

Joffre’s Lenin is a decolonial Lenin first and foremost. He is called a “non-White man” (p. xviii) and this is as well, given Lenin’s Tatar features and Russian, Jewish, German/Swedish and also Kalmyk ancestry, as well as sturdy peasant build – but more importantly, his stunning and steadfast opposition to chauvinism and Great Russian (or any other European) ethnic pride, condescension, and “leading role” in the multi-ethnic state he led.

Lenin shines here, throughout the edited volume, as the architect of the Affirmative Action/Positive Discrimination Empire, of the early USSR. This revolutionary state has such a bad reputation among the billionaires of today that one of them, a Russian oligarch (Vitaly Malkin) wrote, published and is sponsoring the free distribution of a work that links this emancipatory, multicultural social construction of the early 1920s to today’s BLM, and to Black Power – even the class enemy notices that Lenin’s legacy is at the core of the liberation of the Black woman and the Black man, as well as Asian, Russian, European and American woman and man (as oppressors and oppressed, of course, are both deformed by the same oppression).

This brings me to Joffre’s background, which is in theatre for peace, and the theatre of the oppressed, in post-conflict and conflict zones: Joffre is someone extremely and pointedly human. Only partly incidentally, my own region (post-‘state socialist’ East-Central Europe) is really the only place that is not represented in this magnificent collection of diverse authors – Hungary, once a country of a 1919 Soviet and of Georg Lukács, is not famous for its Leninists in the last decades. Joffre’s connections are as strong among theorists as within the world of theatre and he presents us with a Swiss female actress playing Lenin (Ursina Lardi) in an interview that enlightens and thrills.

The sheer diversity of the collection takes one’s breath away. Authors young and old, queer and old-style Marxist-Leninist, women and men submitted texts for this anthology, in English, German (translated by Joffre and also by Patrick Anderson), French (translated by Patrick Anderson), Russian (translated by G. Mamedov) and most importantly, Spanish and Portuguese (translated by the Spanish native speaker Joffre). The richness of Latin-American analysis and theory here, could be enough to fill a volume in itself. Indeed, for the average Anglophone speaker, who would be likely to learn about new Marxist ideas from Latin-America chiefly from Naomi Klein’s books (the author of this review includes himself in this category), this collection is a revelation on those riches: Bórquez, Cordero, Boron, del Roio’s interventions are stellar.

Another ‘decolonial’ group of Leninists whose works appear in this reader are ex-Soviet Central Asians: contemporary and late authors from Kyrgyzstan (Mamedov, Bokonbaev), Tajikistan (Suyarkulova). The visuals (edited by Johann Salazar) are photos of Lenin statues, bas-reliefs, mosaics, and frescos that stand (decaying) in the Republic of Kyrgyzstan, as well as images that aficionados of Soviet Bus Stops (also known as Facebook’s Brutalism Appreciation Society, British Brutalism Appreciation Society, etc.) will recognize.

The experiences of Central Asians and Russians are not silenced here – any academic from a global periphery or semi-periphery will understand how important this is. There is (to the utmost satisfaction of the author of this review) even an East German thinker, the son of GDR diplomats, Michael Brie, whose extremely subtle take on how Lenin should inform today’s Left, was not excluded by the authors. Indian voices, Vijay Prashad’s and also a contribution by a South Asian thinker from South Africa, Vashna Jagarnath’s, are also represented. In addition, Lenin’s oeuvre is problematized, criticized, and even (in comradely debate) attacked here (Kevin B. Anderson).

For a review in ROAPE, it is particularly exciting to note that African and Black voices are crucial for the editors. Joffre starts off the compilation with quotes by George Floyd and Langston Hughes (p. xii), commends the USSR for caring, celebrating and even paying royalties for young Congolese poets’ “public self-expression” (pp. 6-8). This is in the spirit of a critical solidarity with Lenin (p. xviii) and the attitude characterized by the quote “to grudgingly defend certain aspects of the 70+ year legacy of the USSR and other Communist experiments (p. ix).” African authors in the collection are: Vashna Jagarnath (pp. 51-60), Michael Neocosmos (pp. 201-212), and Maloadi Wa Sekake (pp. 213-224).

Jagarnath’s essay draws from Issa Shivji’s analysis of NGOization (“Within this context, NGOs are neither a third sector, nor independent of the state”) and stresses the specifically proletarian nature of both the 1905 Revolution in Russia (with its quintessentially proletarian weapon: the mass strike), and that of Lenin’s fight, with relevance today for South Africa and the continent. Three and a half thousand South Africans own as much as the bottom 32 million in the country (p. 53), making South Africa the most unequal country in the world – with 30% in the reserve army of labour. Marikana has 50 communal water taps for 60,000 families: a scandal.

Jagarnath refutes the importance of the technical shrinking of the proletariat in South Africa and elsewhere, by reminding us that Russia in 1917 had less than 20% of the populace classified as workers (and as we know even this is a liberal figure). Even though a minority, the employed, organized worker is an anchor for the compound, and will actively shape the consciousness of the people that she or he helps or lives with. In the West, where the sharing of food in kinship groups or the neighborhood is not seen any more, this is not expected – but in less individualistic, more communal, more humanistic formations, it is widespread still.

Michael Neocosmos of South Africa, a CODESRIA researcher, discusses the problem of the bureaucracy for Lenin after the Revolution. He points out how Lenin wanted to educate the unions, whereas Trotsky wanted to control them (p. 205). He also hails Chinese efforts, including Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in destroying bourgeois culture, and recommends following these examples in Africa (p. 209). Molaodi Wa Sekake, also of South Africa, quotes Ostrovsky on the liberation of humankind, opposes constructing a hagiography even for Lenin, posits that ANC and FRELIMO are today busy turning Lenin into a Trojan horse for neoliberalism in South Africa and Angola (p. 215), where the ANC also uses Lenin to pacify the masses (p. 214), whilst the academy is guilty of promoting pseudo-revolutionary speak (p. 218) – points we find difficult to disagree with! Lenin and the colonial question, Lenin as anti-imperialist (the constructor of the very theory of anti-imperialism) is also discussed (p. 220) in this chapter. There are, he warns, still, racist Leninists.

Whether Lenin was principally a political actor, a political actor-cum-theorist, or a theorist, depends on the authors’ vantage point and analysis. Lukács and his construction/deconstruction/analysis of Lenin’s thought figures strongly here, but other authors of this compendium deny that the idea of the vanguard party would have been central to Lenin’s thought (this is in the opinion of Renault, p. 193, who also calls Lenin “a calculator”), emphasizing his prudence instead of his take on the vanguard party (which he considers entirely tactical!) Others, especially thinkers from Africa, Asia and South America, see Lenin principally as the author of Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism – theory that arguably, may well be seen on par with Marx’s very own contribution to theory, worldwide.

An exception within this collection that presents a decolonial Lenin, is Slavoj Zizek in his chapter. Zizek did not consider this a minor assignment and he offers us here an extremely elegant, well thought-out, as well as scandalously un-decolonial, picture of Lenin. His historical points, even the most controversial that Stalin won against the Left Opposition by offering normalcy after ten years of war and mayhem: this is an argument that one finds difficult to contest. However, Zizek also claims here that “Communism is a European event, if there ever was one.” He brings neo-traditonalist Southern examples of rolling back Euro-centric epistemicide but claims this has nothing to do with Marxism (p. 292). He alleges that “capitalism functions much better when its excesses are regulated by some ancient tradition,” an assertion that is easy to make but more difficult to defend, and one that is easily contradicted by an even cursory analysis of today’s Nigerian political economy (very few would assert that Nigerian capitalism “functions well,” beyond producing profits for a small elite class). But more importantly even, Zizek forgets completely about the entire history of Marxist-Leninist states (from Mali through Guinea Conakry and Congo Republic, from Burkina Faso to Sudan, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, and Madagascar, not to mention the role that Communism played in and around the ANC during the fight against apartheid) and also about African Marxist theory.

From Cabral through Fanon to Rodney, we may here make mention of African radicals, Marxists and (occasionally) Leninists, Eduardo Mondlane, Stephanie Urdang, Bernard Magubane, Ndeh Ntumazah, A. M. Babu, Thandika Mkandawire, Issa Shivji, Ernest Wamba Dia Wamba, Dani Wadada Nabudere, Ruth First, Ifeoma Okoye, Bade Onimode, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, Amina Mama, Baruch Hirson, Govan Mbeki, Yusufu Bala Usman, Claude Ake, Biodun Jeyifo, Akin Adesokan, Biko Agozino, Ali Mazrui, Mahmood Mamdani, Baba Aye, and Usman Tar, as well as the recently deceased giant of decolonial Marxism and Leninism in Africa, Samir Amin. The African People’s Republics, and fighters such as Thomas Sankara, matter for Africa and for the World. Zizek once said that the worst part of Adorno and Horkheimer was that in all their works, one finds no reference to even the very existence of the GDR – and we can only salute Zizek for this incredibly pertinent point. What we see here though, is similar – Zizek is implicitly denying the validity of Africa’s Leninist moment, Marxist history, and the relevance of Communism for Africa (and Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas) by his historical European exceptionalism. This is no small matter. Communism is a global event, if ever there was one.

But Zizek does not define this anthology. The wealth of dialectical analysis here is staggering, and the tone set by Prashad and the South Africans (as well as Joffre’s unequivocal stance on the ongoing Kulturkampf, as it concerns Black people).

It is important to note that none of the contributors to this magnificent, multifaceted gem of a volume, see reason to embrace Lenin’s now increasingly problematic ‘line’ on the question of individual human rights (which of course he had labelled a ‘bourgeois distraction’), or his silence (or worse) on women’s issues as ‘political questions’. This also in turn proves that Leninism is alive and well, as a reflexive universe.

The volume celebrates the genuine political and theoretical achievements of Vladimir Ilyich, the revolutionary vozhd (leader) of the international proletariat, a class that he unwaveringly represented through his praxis, and even, through his political victory. Winning may be the hallmark of truth only for Nazis – but the pull of oblivion and losing, the political death wish, is also real. This volume is an antidote against such a seductive Thanatos in Africa and elsewhere.

Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichhorn (editor), Patrick Anderson (language editor), Johann Salazar (photography): Lenin150 (Samizdat), Daraja Press, 2nd Edition, revised and expanded 2021.

Adam Mayer is the author of Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria published by Pluto Press. Adam teaches International Relations at the Széchenyi István University Győr in Hungary and is a regular contributor to ROAPE.

Featured Photograph: Portrait of Lenin with a book of Pushkin (Kuzma Sergeevich Petrov-Vodkin).

The securitisation of capitalist rule in Africa

ROAPE

September 28, 2021

More CCTV, More Security Forces, and More Classified Budgets: The Securitisation of Capitalist Rule in Africa

Given the recent exposures of crucial weaknesses in their security systems and encouraged by multinational corporations some African governments are turning to surveillance technologies and foreign military support to garrison their economic hubs against violent disturbances.

By Scott Timcke, Jörg Wiegratz, and Chris Paterson

In March 2021, the international press was flush with coverage of Ahl al-Sunnah wa al Jamma’ah (ASWJ) after members of the group had undertaken a limited offensive in northern Mozambique. Coded as Islamist militants, about 200 rebels had captured the town of Palma, an economic hub for Total’s gas operations in the Afungi Peninsula, the site of Africa’s second largest gas reserve. Shortly thereafter, Total evacuated its complex, abandoned equipment and suspended plans to develop a US$20bn gas liquefaction plant. According to some estimates, 3,100 people have been killed and 820,000 displaced. Notwithstanding SADC’s mixed record of regional intervention, subsequently there were calls for their involvement, even suggestions of committing military assets using the familiar rhetoric of ‘responsibility to protect’. In late June SADC approved a standby force, if needed. Still, the regional politics is fraught as SADC’s involvement could erode the legitimacy of the state more than that of the rebels 2000km away. Seemingly, the preference is for targeted military assistance from the US and EU. Indeed in December the previous year, EU parliamentarian Michael Gahler warned “the United States is trying to involve Mozambique in its anti-IS coalition.”

While there is debate whether ASWJ have a relationship with the Islamic State, the US Department of State has nevertheless labeled the group as ISIS-Mozambique. Such a framing is indicative of how counter-insurgency epistemologies perpetuate the conflicts in which they are applied. While it is not impossible that ASWJ may draw inspiration from conflicts abroad in the North Africa or Middle East, there are nevertheless many local drivers of the conflict, with resentment at economic marginalization of rural populations being a significant factor, especially in the wake of Cyclone Kenneth in 2019 and COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2020. A counter-insurgency approach will do little to address the foundational grievances of economic exclusion, poverty, and inequality; but it does reiterate that securitization of capital is an imperative.

Without more attention to these local factors, much of the South African and international media analysis “falls short of levels of precision” needed to account for the various layers of inequalities and resource conflicts that certainly predate Total’s e nclave extractivism, but which Total’s arrival amplified. These key factors underscore the findings by Michael Watts, Ike Okonta, Dimieari Von Kemedi and their many collaborators in their decades long study of the political ecology of oil in the Niger delta and the rebellions spawned by the presence of multinational companies facilitated by governments which at best were fairly distant to ordinary people, but more typically pursued interests that were hostile to local populations. So instead of the partial frame of counter-terrorism advanced by SADC and the US government, well contextualised media reporting might improve the public understanding of the situation in Mozambique through framing it as, amongst others, the long-standing economic neglect of rural citizenry by central governments compounded by capitalist penetration of the extreme periphery. Among other factors, this penetration causes impoverishment through the destruction of livelihoods, like fishing communities in the Cabo Delgado province tapped for forced resettlement to make way for Total’s construction. But this sort of broader line of enquiry/explanation is complicated and harder to investigate because for example reporters visiting Mozambique’s north require the cooperation and protection of a media-hostile state and of local power brokers, including foreign armies. Altogether the reality of these working conditions narrows the prospect for holistic reporting, especially for journalists stationed in the region who have to have repeated encounters with state officials for other reporting.

One subtext in the subsequent regional and international press reports expressed astonishment at how Islamic fundamentalists had besieged the supposedly well-guarded oil complex, a symbol of capitalist ambition and power. Composed of global capital driving foreign direct investment and the local Mozambique political class, this complex’s anticipated operations in the Afungi Peninsula was positioned as a potent expression of the Africa Rising narrative. The project was not supposed to be attacked, let alone be abandoned due to a relatively minor rural rebellion so in effect the event exposed how the various weaknesses in the Mozambican state meant it was ill-equipped to secure capital on this occasion. Quickly questions were being asked. How and why had security forces failed to contain the attack? What kind of local group wished to eject businesses that could bring prosperity to their region? What is their plan, their agenda? Capital seldom experiences ambushes and defeats on this scale by opponents like these, in such dramatic fashion in front of the cameras, in this corner of Africa or in fact anywhere else on the globe. The question is now what kind of actions do states like Mozambique and others that face similar opponents take to secure a favorable business climate and preemptively contain threats against capital, or at least ensure they do not attract headlines and media attention that jeopardize share prices and major business plans.

While having important differences and proximate explanations, there are two other recent events that also speak to the evolving relationship between capital, the state, and securitization. The first, in June 2021 was an assassination attempt on General Wamala, a core member of Uganda’s National Resistance Movement government. The attack occurred outside his home, in a residential area of Kampala, by assassins on motorbikes. Wamala’s daughter and driver were killed. The events were captured on CCTV and shared by the state with the general public. Uganda has in the past few years witnessed a string of highly controversial and publicly debated high profile murders that included representatives of the state, parliament, and the Muslim community among the killed. Similarly, in July 2021 images of the storming of commercial centres and looting of shopping centres in South Africa invoked the need for greater institutional security, despite prominent warnings of an emerging South African security state. Again, there are unique contextual factors, but both cited events in Uganda and South Africa, were embarrassing, temporary defeats of already highly guarded, securitised socio-political orders. Accordingly, might the state and capital insist upon more CCTV, more security forces, and more classified budgets to deliver on the promise of security in insecure times?

Already there are signs of an escalation in securitization. In Uganda, the government spent US$126 million to purchase a 3,200 camera CCTV system from Huawei for Kampala. Nominally, this system is in response to a violent crime wave, the system forms part of Huawei’s Safe City initiative, which has been rolled out in more than 200 cities worldwide. Following cities like London which pioneered the introduction of mass CCTV systems in mid-1990s after the 1993 Bishopsgate bombing, this initiative has seen Chinese cities become some of the most-surveilled urban areas in the world (there are 2.6 million cameras in a city like Chongqing, Sichuan providing 168 cameras per 1,000 people). While citizens have a right to safety – and there are moral panics generated by a surveillance culture especially in the West when Chinese companies are involved – arguably the deeper reason for this procurement is the securitization of capital and of capitalist class rule. After the latest attack on the minister, President Museveni announced plans to put a tracking system in every vehicle; in this case with the help of a Russian company. While politicians and activists have pushed back on these plans, these latest developments are consistent with the evolving character of neoliberal capitalism in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa.

There is a larger context to the coarticulation of massive wealth accumulation borne from capitalism and the militarised political economy which helps secure it. Uganda was regarded as emblematic of the dividends from adopting the neoliberal reform package. These reforms produced a restructuring in the late 1980s onwards as the National Resistance Movement came to power following the civil war. Beginning as a rebel movement formed to oppose authoritarian governments, the NRM and Yoweri Museveni’s government has been in power for more than 35 years. Through becoming the kind of polity they replaced, the NRM is intensifying surveillance practices to preserve aspects of ‘no-party democracy’ including controlling consent and dissent. The result is arguably a form of transactional citizenship for sections of society. Provided citizens do not aid political opponents, they will be kept safe. This exchange is offered in context of highly neoliberalised society where, as Achille Mbembe writes, the “privatization of public violence, the appropriation of means of livelihood, and the imaginations of the self” characterise everyday life.

As earlier neoliberal reforms set in motion changes in the order of Uganda, so it is probable that neoliberal securitization in the 2020s in tandem with discourses of national development will further shift what political actions are regarded as acceptable/unacceptable and whose views are subsequently coded against the axes of good/bad, legitimate/illegitimate, and right/wrong. If that is the case then the new surveillance system will prompt a revisiting of the classic question of “who is to be protected, by whom, against what and whom, and at what price?”, as Mbembe writes.

Returning to Mozambique’s north, the coincidence of the state’s embrace of enclave extractivism and retrenchment from governance in the north, has come at a high cost to residents already pressured by decades of underdevelopment and some of the most devastating climate change impacts on the planet. Humanitarian development aid to parts of Cabo Delgado has been stopped by the provincial government due to insurgent activity. Indeed, Joseph Hanlon, whose newsletter suggests deliberation in the displacement of local populations by insurgents, mercenaries, and the government, with each having something to gain. But this mediation would take place in a climate where some African states are keen to embrace foreign military intervention and more hi-tech militarised surveillance systems in accordance with modernist developmental models. While the details of each case matter considerably, there are some general conclusions to be drawn. First, making security enclaves will reshape the political space regardless of whether they are in urban or rural areas. Second, any restructuring is a conflict-ridden process with political outcomes rarely known beforehand. While these matters can still be contested, in the interim demilitarisation does not seem to be on the agenda because the institutionalisation of patterns around militarised ‘solutions’ and escalating foreign militarization with state and private variants providing further evidence of a colonial present consistent with the long history of violent capitalist accumulation on the continent.

Scott Timcke is a comparative historical sociologist who studies race, class, and technology in modernity. He is a research associate with the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Change and a fellow at the University of Leeds’ Centre for African Studies where he studies the overlap between, algorithmic capitalism, FinTech and neocolonialism. His second book, Algorithms and The End of Politics was released in February 2021.

Jörg Wiegratz is a Lecturer in Political Economy of Global Development at the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, and Senior Research Associate, Department of Sociology, University of Johannesburg. His recent books include Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transformation (co-edited with Giuliano Martiniello and Elisa Greco). He is a regular contributor to roape.net and a member of the Editorial Working Group.

Chris Paterson is Professor of Global Communication at the University of Leeds. His research focuses on revealing the unseen processes which create international news, and on analysing communicative processes which disadvantage the Global South. His co-edited book Africa’s Media Image in the 21st Century: From the “Heart of Darkness” to “Africa Rising“ was the first book in over twenty years to examine the international media’s coverage of sub-Saharan Africa.

Featured Photograph: CCTV monitor room at police HQ in Kampala, Uganda (17 April, 2017).

Sankara’s elusive socialism

ROAPE

September 23, 2021

Jean-Claude Kongo and Leo Zeilig look at Thomas Sankara’s reforms in Burkina Faso in the 1980s. Sankara understood that Africa had to find its own path to development, and this would require redistribution of wealth and severing the ties with imperialism. Yet ultimately Sankara’s project of transformation proved too weak.

By Jean-Claude Kongo and Leo Zeilig

Thomas Sankara’s project of transformation was dramatically uneven. With his comrades, Sankara attempted to push through radical reforms. With his personal incorruptibility and deep commitment to transforming Burkina Faso’s diabolical underdevelopment, he remained an intransigent figure of opposition to the emergence of neoliberalism, privatisation and the marginalisation of Africa. Sankara understood that Africa had to find its own path towards development. This development had to include not only opposition to the corrupt local elite, by wide-ranging redistribution of income and wealth – but also freedom from imperialism, by severing the lines of economic and political slavery with the North. In all of these ways, he was right and remains worthy of our celebration and study.

Yet the strategy and politics for pursuing the transformation Sankara sought were deeply flawed. This is not a matter of simple ideological disagreement. By using and creating institutions and organisations from above to implement his project for Burkina Faso, he failed. Sankara’s tools for transformation proved too weak.

If this conclusion seems cynical or indicative of acquiescence, it is neither of these. If the need for such transformation remains vital on the continent, then we need fraternally and critically to assess how previous radical projects have failed. Sankara’s years provide us with vital lessons from which to judge and assess the project of emancipation and on how to make subsequent projects more resilient.

Sankara was greater than the totality of the speeches and declarations he made at international forums, great as these were. He fought against a world economy that was set up to crush initiatives such as his, even in dreadfully poor, economically marginal countries such as Burkina Faso. The enemies of the regime were national and international. Even such a top-down project posed too great a threat to many important interests.

A key action, indicative of the top-down nature of the project, was the setting up of the CNR (Conseil National de la Révolution – National Council for the Revolution), charged with directing and coordinating transformation from the top of the military command structure.

Some of the top-down initiatives were successful and incredibly audacious, and thousands of people are alive today as a direct result of them. In primary healthcare the regime scored some of its greatest successes. To give just a few examples, infant mortality fell from 200 in every thousand births in 1982, to less than 150 in 1984; local pharmacies were built in approximately 5,800 of the 7,500 villages. Even more impressive was the programme of mass vaccination: between 1983 and 1985, 2 million children were vaccinated against a range of illnesses. In addition, tens of thousands – including many poor peasant farmers, men and women – were for the first time given access to education and literacy. School fees were reduced, and thousands of classrooms and school premises were built. All of these were real achievements – even if progress was uneven and hard to sustain. Yet the regime’s own decision to sack striking teachers in 1984 had a devastating impact on the lives of thousands.

Despite these achievements, the government was still locked into a deeply unequal relationship with the world economy, and the recession that rocked the continent stung and provoked Burkina Faso’s radical government. The country was dependent on gold and cotton, with cotton comprising half of all export revenue. Although cotton production increased from 60,000 tonnes a year in 1980 to 170,000 tonnes in 1987, the actual income levels, despite this increase, barely rose. The price of cotton continued the inexorable fall it had suffered since 1960 – and Sankara was powerless to affect this.

Prices of cash crops, as Sankara knew, significantly contributed to the country’s overall instability (and underdevelopment). Valiant though they were, attempts to diversify the economy into production and manufactured goods were important, but remained largely symbolic. Food instability – another target of reform by the CNR – deepened in the 1980s, so in 1984 and 1985 the government was forced to import food, triggering a dramatic trade deficit. Foreign investment – the holy cow of contemporary African finance ministers – remained pitifully low under the CNR, so the deficit was filled by long-term borrowing that by 1987 had doubled the country’s debt burden. Economic and financial independence remained a dream.

The regime’s relationship with the World Bank was fraught. The original aim of the government was to extend Burkina Faso’s potential, to make the maximum use of the country’s resources. Gold mines were opened; there was an attempt to build a railway line in 1985 – undertaken by the regime itself after the World Bank and other donors refused funding – to connect manganese fields in the north-east to the rest of the country; local businesses were subsidised; and a poll tax on local farmers was lifted.

The project was not so much anti-capitalist as national capitalist development, and the World Bank was not always opposed to many of the measures: the Bank found in 1989 that economic growth in Burkina Faso between 1982 and 1987 had been ‘satisfactory’. The report noted that agriculture had performed particularly well, with an annual increase in added value of 7.1%. The reasons for this were linked to several reforms pushed through by the government, including improved land utilisation in the south and south-west, and impressive use of technology in cotton production.

At a time when structural adjustment was being implemented across the continent as a condition for accepting IMF or World Bank loans, Burkina Faso managed to avoid external adjustment. The reason was that Sankara had been able to impose his own form of ‘restructuring’: he ensured that there was considerable control over budgetary expenditure, with a reduction in public-sector employment accompanied by attempts to generate private capital investments in manufacturing, in line with imposed ‘reform’ packages elsewhere on the continent at the time.

The genuine and committed efforts at agricultural reform included ‘austerity’ measures designed to reduce the state deficit, and as a result the income levels of state employees, teachers and civil servants suffered, and levies were raised on workers to fund development projects. Nevertheless, these efforts – attempting to make up for underdevelopment because of the country’s incorporation into the global economy less than a hundred years before – were understandable; what other tools were available to achieve such development and to alleviate the region’s terrible poverty and suffering?

Sankara was nothing if not an enigma. He argued for a radical plan of national self-development, condemning in powerful terms the behaviour of ex-colonial powers, financial institutions and global capitalism, yet he also in a sense made a compromise with these bodies while attempting to build up and diversify the economy. This terrible and dangerous dance – weaving between competing and hostile interests – meant that national capitalist interests overrode all others; the regime was left at the end of 1987 without any powerful domestic allies. Sankara was almost without comrades on the left. Left-wing supporters and opponents were condemned and imprisoned, and the unions were often silenced. The trade unionist Halidou Ouédraogo was unequivocal in his verdict, and it was harsh: “We do not understand how foreign socialists can have a positive verdict on Sankara, without having heard the opinion of the trade unions.”

Socialist Labour (Nigeria) hosted a public meeting about the life, struggle and legacy of Thomas Sankara (29 May, 2021).

Yet – and it is important, indeed vital, to qualify this verdict – the appearance and behaviour of the government were impressive. Ministers were no longer overlords and gods, living in the dizzying heights of luxury, extravagance and conspicuous consumption. They received the average worker’s wage, while basic healthcare and education were delivered to the poor. In this atmosphere of national austerity, which was implemented from above and actually included the highest office-holders in the executive, there was a genuine commitment in practice to the national endeavour.

Imperialism was routinely denounced, even directly to France’s then president François Mitterrand during a regular state visit, and the grande bourgeoisie in their turn often came in for denunciation. Unlike anywhere else on the continent, these statements, while frequently limited to the level of rhetoric, were sincerely meant and not accompanied by acts of hypocrisy.

But if Sankara’s project was a valiant attempt at radical reforms, he was unable to turn international market trends in his country’s favour. He forced through what could be seen as economic restructuring and even launched a systematic attack on trade unions. Some studies have concluded that the position of corporations was actually strengthened after 1983, and wages in the public sector fell and food prices increased. Sankara’s project was a self-conscious effort at capitalist modernisation and development, and its characterisation as socialism is confusing and unhelpful.

Ideological clarity

Sankara and his comrades, including supporters in the PAI (Parti Africain de l’Indépendance – African Independence Party), argued that they stood as socialists in the traditions of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Yet, all of them were equally infected by a notion of socialism from above, as state edict and control. They claimed this style of politics for socialism, but in reality it was an attempt at national democratic development.

Despite Sankara’s speeches being full of references to the people, depicting them as ‘leading’ the Burkinabé revolution, the actual agency of these popular masses was tightly constrained. In some respects, the statement of their leading role in the revolution was a declaration of an abstract ‘future’ intent. Babou Paulin Bamouni, one of Sankara’s leading advisors, was clear that the middle class had led the revolution, but that at some later, ill-defined stage, the path would be cleared for the peasantry and working class instead to benefit and take the lead.

The French activist and writer Lila Chouli was scathing about Sankara’s political shortcomings. As we have seen, Sankara’s social reforms were from above, rather than nurturing the self-emancipation of the working and popular masses: indeed, his reforms worked against popular empowerment. The result of this approach, Chouli tells us, was to lead to the regime into conflict with sections of the working class and its organisations. In January 1985 a trade-union front was set up in protest against and to counter the decline in democratic and trade-union freedoms. Although this front remained active throughout the so-called revolutionary period, trade unions and independent organisations were to be considerably undermined as a result of repression of union activity. This included the dismissal of civil servants, and the arrest and torture of activists.

By 1986, less than three years after taking power, the CNR’s authoritarian approach had alienated sections of the Burkinabé population, leaving Sankara and his allies isolated from those in whose name they were acting. This also led to divisions and opposition from some elements within the government.

As Chouli has argued in 2012

the government banned trade unions and the free press as these were seen as obstacles to the CNR’s reforms. Additionally, as an admirer of Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution, Sankara set up Cuban-style Comités de Défense de la Révolution (Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, CDRs). In principle, all Burkinabé were members of the CDRs and critics and opponents were branded ‘enemies of the people’. The actions of the trade unions were considered subversive and could be punished with ‘military sanctions’.

The ruling CNR found itself unable to conduct a meaningful dialogue with other groups and the elusive ‘people’ about its objectives and how to achieve them. Chouli explains:

In the name of wanting to provide socialism for the mass of poor people, they did it without them. Sankara recognised this in his self-critical speech of 2 October 1987. But he and his allies did not have time to restore the severed lines between the authorities and the mass independent organisations of the poor and the working class.

The end of Burkina Faso’s brave – if not socialist – revolution

Sankara’s project was state-led development oriented towards benefiting the poor, as part of a perceived transition to socialism – a socialism that however remained almost completely absent from his official speeches and declarations. Carried out by a military hierarchy and an even smaller political cadre around Sankara, the project was inherently elitist. This is not a criticism, but a description.

What forces were there in Burkina Faso to lead such a struggle against this top-down project? The story of Sankara is one of absences – absence of other social forces, of radical left organisations, of a social base that could have sustained his project. The presence of an ideological and organisational centre for the radical left, in Burkina Faso and the region, could instead have ensured an enduring project of development of the people as part of a radicalising movement – powered by the popular classes – across West Africa and the continent. This could have developed as a practical and realistic alternative.

The militant uprising that finally swept Sankara’s murderer (and former comrade) Blaise Compaoré from power in 2014 came about after an extraordinary period of protest from 2011 among agricultural workers, miners and urban trade unionists, and mutinies in the armed forces. Still, maintaining the momentum of popular protest beyond the sacking of the Assemblée Nationale and Compaoré’s forced and hurried resignation in 2014 has proved difficult. In this sense, Sankara’s predicament – political isolation and the absence of alternative radical forces – remains unchanged today.

Almost a hundred years ago, many of these questions were being posed in practice, in the struggle for democratic transformation and socialism in Russia. That experience spoke of linking democratic and socialist transformation within a single process that had to be international. The international development of socialist politics in the early 20^th century sought to build the capacity for such linking, which would ensure that movements within the nation state could survive – could literally grow over and transcend the barriers of the national state.

Underpinning these ideas was the understanding that national autonomy was a reactionary, impossible pipe dream, and economic evolution – a process that today we describe as globalisation – had broken the fragile edifice of the nation state. The era of permanent and global social transformation as a practical and realistic project of radical development remains the essential path for socialists today.

Although the working class was present in Upper Volta in the early 1980s, sometimes in a dramatic way, it lacked its own consistent organisation and strategy. The national bourgeoisie remained feeble, impotent in the face of crisis and congenitally incapable of resolving Burkina Faso’s dependency and underdevelopment. It was as a result of this real impasse and blockage that Sankara and the CNR were able to emerge. By 1987, the isolation of the ruling military group around Sankara was almost total – trade unions and civil society were increasingly moving against them. Sankara, true to form, refused the option of breaking the regime’s isolation (and principles) by incorporating a wider circle of openly establishment parties. But the crisis and isolation were real.

Sankara’s comrade Compaoré had no such compunction and did not want to see his power overthrown along with Sankara. Knowing that he would fail to persuade his comrade through discussion, Compaoré turned to the violent and bloody murder of Sankara and his loyalists on 15 October 1987. This murder marked the end of the incredibly brave, though mislabelled, Burkinabé socialist revolution.

Jean-Claude Kongo is a teacher and journalist in Burkina Faso. As a student in the 1980s, Kongo was also an active supporter of the Burkinabé revolution. Leo Zeilig is editor of roape.net. Kongo and Zeilig are co-editors of Voices of Liberation: Thomas Sankara (HSRC Press, 2017).

Ethnonationalism, imperialism and the working class in Ethiopia

ROAPE

September 21, 2021

Since November last year, Ethiopia has been fighting a devastating civil war with the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front. Hibist Kassa argues that the scale of misinformation on the war, lack of context and attempts to impose false narratives is deeply troubling and pervasive. Kassa calls for a nuanced and historically grounded approach to properly analyse the course of events.

By Hibist Kassa

Since 4 November last year Ethiopia has been caught in a devastating civil war with the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) which has been marked by escalating genocidal attacks on ethnic minorities in Ethiopia. The scale of misinformation and disinformation on the war, brazen lack of context, shameless and downright dangerous attempts to not only impose false narratives, but also impose a narrow human rights agenda skewed to ignore abuses by Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) and its allies is deeply troubling and pervasive.

At the moment, a dangerously simplistic and false narrative labelling the federal government as having an agenda for centralisation, as opposed to the TPLF which is pushing for federalism, is being spread in mainstream media outlets and through scholarly networks. This is drawing on a further over-simplification of the history of empire building and contestation, and the nature of cultural and language identities and their relationship to class stratification.

This year marked the 125^th anniversary of the Battle of Adwa in 1896, a historic defeat of a European imperialist power by Africans, with the unification of divided peoples. Lords, serfs and slaves, women and men, mobilised an army of about 100,000 to defeat Italian troops in a matter of hours. The aftermath of the victory also laid the basis for further empire consolidation and forging of the modern state, a contested historical process that has been foregrounded in the current conflict. A nuanced and historically grounded approach is needed to analyse the ways the centre-periphery tensions shaped autonomy in Tigray, recognise the wide spectrum of debates within the TPLF and how elites have deployed this in the current conflict (I examine this in some detail in the Agrarian South Bulletin here).

While the need to get the analysis right on the crisis is important to inform interventions, we also need to understand the nature of the accumulation strategies of elites, the contradictions in these strategies and where this leaves the working class and the advancement of a progressive alternative from below.

What are the competing narratives?

At the moment, mediation is being proposed as was recently advocated in a statement by African intellectuals, that eerily followed the line of the United States and TPLF on the crisis. A robust response by the Global Ethiopian Scholars Initiative and Jon Abbink have highlighted the problematic nature of the statement, and the need for an understanding of what is really at stake in the volatile Horn of Africa region, where a realignment of geopolitical relations between Eritrea-Ethiopia-Somalia, with South Sudanese solidarity, is potentially decentring US domination in the region, and sealing the decline of TPLF. Understanding the tricky and complicated context of the changes underway, demands also for careful attention to what is left out of the dominant narrative of the crisis.

For instance, it was shocking to hear pro-TPLF commentator, Martin Plaut, and now visiting researcher at Kings College Department of War Studies, declared boldly on 5 February this year, that even though a massacre in Mai-Kadra in Western Tigray was terrible, ‘I don’t care who carried them out’ (see 30:00-31:21). This was a genocide of about 1000 men, the elderly and children who were identified as ethnic Amhara by TPLF youth groups. As the men were being slaughtered, women overheard them say they would come for them next. Zelalem Tessema, Co-Chair Ethiopian Association in the UK, who was on the same panel as Plaut said that this was the ‘Srebrenica massacre’ of Ethiopia. Accountability which was so important for Plaut when examining Amhara militias, Ethiopian federal troops and Eritrea’s involvement, was suspended in the case where TPLF militia and its youth members, who later escaped to join refugees on the Sudanese border. The TPLF has continued to commit atrocities in its vicious expansion into Afar and Amhara regions displacing up to 4 million people.

Meanwhile, a coherent campaign sympathetic to TPLF by the US, EU and UN, including the IMF and World Bank, have focused on aspects of the Tigray crisis pressuring the Ethiopian Federal government to revert to mediations with the TPLF. Even when a unilateral ceasefire was declared by the government, the TPLF has continued to encroach upon other provinces in Amhara and Afar provinces, temporarily occupying Lalibela, and slaughtering civilians, destroying historic Churches in Gondar, there was still no universal condemnation of the TPLF except for the instance where the USAID Director in Ethiopia cited widespread TPLF looting of aid goods.

There has also been complete disinterest in the killings of ethnic minorities elsewhere which have been linked to the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), openly allied to TPLF. In principle, violations by any state and non-state actor in Tigray and other parts of Ethiopia should be investigated, victims provided care and culprits held to account. But the geopolitical power struggle that is ongoing has no interest in this kind of accountability agenda. Instead, human rights violations, whether they be genocide, widespread rape, recruitment of children as combatants and violations against Eritrean refugees, have been ignored when TPLF forces have been identified culprits. Talk of accountability and human rights is just a game in a bigger geopolitical battlefield.

Getting the facts right is key!

To make sense of what is an intensely complex crisis, it is important to focus on the following key facts:

On 4 November, after the Federal Government of Ethiopia had transferred US$281 million to the Tigray provincial government, a ‘lightning strike’ so described by TPLFs’ spokesperson, was unleashed on federal troops who were undertaking joint operations with the Tigray provincial forces. Unarmed soldiers and generals were slaughtered in their pyjamas and their bodies left to rot, while other troops were taken as prisoners. Soldiers with specialised training were later summarily executed, ran over with trucks, and women soldiers were raped. When the news of this shocking attack trickled in, it horrified the general public and ended all attempts to mediate tensions between the Federal government and the TPLF.
Prior to the above attack, tensions had been building between the Federal government based in Addis Ababa and the TPLF. The loss of TPLFs almost three-decade dominance of power in the federal government had aggrieved the committee members. To recall, TPLF itself was a political party, with its own hierarchies and membership drawing from various constituencies within Tigray province.
Normalisation of relations with Eritrea was an extremely significant change introduced by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in 2018. This significant change in foreign policy of Ethiopia was made possible under the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition with new leadership under Abiy Ahmed as a member of Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO). It was a decisive break from TPLF foreign policy which had treated the Eritrean government as a lethal enemy. The latter which has acted as a bulwark against the expansion of the United States’ AFRICOM in the Horn of Africa, and retained some semblance of sovereignty over its national policy space. These former allies who waged war against the Derg (the military regime that ruled Ethiopia and Eritrea from 1974 to 1987), soon turned into foes over the TPLFs ethnonationalist agenda entrenched in the Ethiopian federalist system, redrawing provinces and the entire governance system on the basis of ethnicity. Each province formed standing armies of their own and entrenched the right to secede in the constitution.
Tigray province is in the northern most part of Ethiopia and shares a border with Eritrea, over which war was waged from 1998-2000, when Abiy was then on the frontline as a solider. A peace treaty was only signed in 2018 once the OPDO under Abiy was in power after a wave of popular protests against TPLF. According to Iqbal Jhazbay (former South Africa ambassador to Eritrea) since the Peace Treaty was signed, this provided Eritrea, ‘a previously isolated regime which has stubbornly resisted being turned into a pawn by foreign powers’ a bridge with which to expand its foreign policy influence in the volatile Horn of Africa. Asmara has resisted a regime change agenda, a challenge now facing Ethiopia, under the new Progress Party (PP) under Abiy, which has now had to resist pressure from foreign powers to dictate its relations with Eritrea.
The successful completion of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) has been resisted not only by Egypt and Sudan, but also with backing from the US and Israel. Although GERD was conceptualised and initiated by former Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, its successful implementation did not have full backing of his heirs in the TPLF. The Metal and Engineering Corporation, a mega-parastatal, which was charged with manufacturing parts of GERD, manufactured them below expected standards. This delayed the project and has been suspected as an act of subversion instead of incompetence on the part of the parastatal. The combination of Egypt and Sudan, and the realignment of interests with internal actors, like the TPLF (and now OLF), has created another deadly alliance that threatens stability in the Horn of Africa.
Ethiopia is on the brink of national self-sufficiency in wheat production within two years. The Abiy government has also been setting up bread factories to ensure affordability for the urban poor and working people (especially in a time when food prices continue to skyrocket). In addition to the GERD and its potential to provide renewable energy resource to the Horn of Africa and beyond, these developments should be seen as efforts to strengthen productive capacity in the region and hopefully also address energy poverty that falls on the back of women. It is also a case that the infrastructure investments and Industrial Parks especially in the garments industry, have had keen interest from global brands, but also significantly drawn upon domestic resource mobilisation. All these are signs that concrete gains are being made in the country.
Nonetheless, in spite of the Ethiopian governments commitment to liberalisation, this has not enamoured the regime to donors and the Bretton Wood Institutions. Sanctions have been imposed on government officials to travel to the US. Conditionalities for loans are being attached to ensure mediation with TPLF. The interest of the IMF, primarily influenced by the US, in this conflict is noteworthy.
Bretton Woods Institutions, especially the IMF, have been attaching conditionalities to assistance obliging the government to make concessions to the TPLF. This hard-line towards the PP government is puzzling given that it has declared the country open for business, liberalising one of Africa’s last heavily regulated economies and allowing competition with State-Owed Enterprises, electricity and the telecommunications. The Abiy government has also been a very consistent partner in the War on Terror, especially as it relates to operations against Al-Shabab in Somalia.
This indicates that there are higher stakes in Ethiopia’s forging of alliances with Eritrea and Somalia and the broader goal to stabilise the Horn of Africa in a manner that has not centred Washington and its ‘War on Terror’. Lawrence Freeman, on a panel on Ethiopia Television, “Addis Dialogue”, argues that a global political oligarchic faction that maintains neo-colonial control of African countries in particular, sees any actor operating outside US control as threatening their dominance and needing to be dealt with as a threat. Deacon Yoseph Tafari, Chairman of the Ethiopian American Civic Council, concurs and emphasises that the US had initially misread the Abiy government in the beginning of its tenure, and had to confront the reality of its more autonomous approach to foreign policy and its persistence with state led developmental initiatives such as the GERD. It is this aspect that has informed a regime change agenda.
The TPLF which was the dominant force in the previous coalition government had been able to control the security and governance arms of the state and considerable investments in SOEs. It is an open secret that the TPLF had amassed offshore accounts of US$30 billion. At its height, foreign aid reached US$3.5 billion a year. Two to three billion dollars were lost annually through under and over invoicing of imports. Parastatals had become effective vehicles for accumulation of wealth by the top tier of the regime, with varied forms of patrimonial relations with less powerful actors within the party machinery. Proximity to power had its benefits, but none compared with the accumulation of wealth and deepening inequality that was apparent over the last three decades.

Q & A between Munyaradzi Gwisai and Hibist Kassa which reflects on the state of the working class in Ethiopia today.

MG: The emergent Ethiopian working class was a key player in the 1974 revolution that eventually ousted Emperor Haile Selassie. The wave of strikes helped inspire the popular protests of students, peasants and the junior soldiers. The later eventually wrested power led by the [Marixst Leninist] Derg, provoking a nearly two-decade period of Civil War and instability.

What happened to the Ethiopian working class in this period, in the struggles that ensued… Was class militancy and organisation crushed by repression and war?

HK: As the parastatal, Metal and Engineering Corporation (MetEC) case highlights, trade unions have struggled, and continued to struggle to organise in Ethiopia. IndustriALL Federation has been making important interventions especially in industrial parks. Important analytical work has been done on the super exploitation of women workers has drawn attention to how the accumulation strategy of the state that relies on cheap wage labour and the creation of an enabling environment for foreign direct investment, demands the repression of organised labour.

In response to high turnover of the workforce and a wave of wildcat strikes, there have been some moderate reforms to create a means for workers to raise concerns through the Labour Department inspectors and the provision of district offices. In spite of this, trade unions still need to be able to organise workers on the shopfloor. Resistance to this persist.

Moreover, the tension between the focus on large scale foreign direct investments as a means of enabling industrialisation places this strategy in tension with the dynamic and diversified economic activities by smallholder producers in agriculture, cottage industries and the retail sector. Ethiopia has a history of cooperative associations traced to the Derg regime, but these were demobilised by the TPLF dominated EPRDF regime.

MG: Ethiopia is amongst the top five performing economies in Africa in the last decade with annual growth rates of over 10%. A new, younger and expanded working class must therefore have emerged. If the working class retreated in this period leaving the petite bourgeoisie in charge, was there not a significant growth and re-emergence of the working class in the period after 1995? Quantitatively and qualitatively especially after 2000?

What is the degree of organisation, class consciousness, and militancy of this new expanded class? How does it compare to the leading role played by other working classes in the region recently, in Sudan, Egypt, Kenya for example and does it provide a counter to the petite bourgeoisie and their ethnicity – region based politics and mobilization?

HK: A new, younger and expanded working class has emerged, and its face is that of women migrants. The new subjects arising out of the industrialisation process is that of women workers, who are being superexploited as part of the country’s development strategy. Rural-urban migration, and now with covid-19, urban-rural migration, has become significant.

I think if we are to consider the primarily informal character of the labouring classes or working people (as Issa Shivji says) we needs to use different approaches to analyse the forms of resistance to capital and the state, and the ways in which people are building autonomy from below through their livelihoods and even survival strategies. This expanded approach to resistance and understanding of class helps us better draw the connections between the urban poor and dispossessed masses, and rural communities who in carrying the burden of social reproduction even as a gendered cheap wage labour strategy is imposed from above become a basis for drawing organic linkages with ‘wage workers’ in the formal sector. I think this is an opportunity to think in an interlinked manner and develop a more holistic understanding of what organising interventions can be made by trade unions working in alliance with women’s groups, farmers associations, artisanal miners and casual workers.

Elite wealth accumulation and the gendered working class

It is crucial to also reflect on the nature of corruption facilitated via illicit financial flows and how this has fed into the wealth accumulation strategies of elites in the TPLF dominated ethnic coalition government prior to its removal in 2018. A prime example of this is the mega parastatal, Metal and Engineering Corporation (MetEC).

With about seventy SOEs, seven military hardware manufacturing entities, about 12,500 employees, MetEC is a significant force in the Ethiopian economy. Under the TPLF, it successfully disbanded trade union organising on the shopfloor. In 2014, labour unions confronted the then CEO Knife Dangew and they were dismissed for being focused on rights bargaining and of being wedded to the legacy of the previous ‘Marxist Leninist’ military dictatorship. Instead, the trade union federation was expected to focus on the objective of attaining middle income status. In 2018, a parliamentary review revealed extensive graft, with overpricing of domestic and international procurement of up to US$2 billion, in some cases 400% higher than market prices. He was arrested in November 2018, and charged over the procurement of two shipping vessels, two hotels and a plastics factory.

The description below by Tim Hall of an industrial park, in Hawassa, now in the newly established Sidama province, gives us a glimpse of the pre-Covid situation:

Over 17,000 young women from predominately rural areas and a variety of ethnicities have, from 2017, migrated to work at the Hawassa Industrial Park (HIP), employing around 120,000 mainly women workers at potential full capacity. They face long shifts, low salaries given living costs between 800 to 2000 BIRR a month (US$27–68) and new challenges in an unfamiliar urban context, which are exacerbated by their status and dislocation from familial networks.

The brief description Hall offers above is that of women who form self-help groups on the basis of ethnicity and religion.

While there is a case for understanding ethnicity (or kinship as Archie Mafeje argues) in terms of how it can be an organising element in the labour process, the rigid and impervious colonial conceptions of ethnicity institutionalised by the TPLF cannot be underestimated. As relevant as this is to understand the reproduction of inequalities, in the Ethiopia case, it is also important to weigh how these have been entrenched as an organising principle of society.

The ability to render some groups as vulnerable as in the case of the non-Sidamo women migrant workers in Hawaasa or the migrant farmworkers massacred in Mai-Kadra also needs to be treated with caution. TPLF as a dominant force in the EPRDF coalition had almost three decades with an effective machinery to entrench this in the everyday forms of social, political and economic spheres of society, from ethnic development banks to redrawing provincial borders as in Raya to subsume areas where Amhara ethnic minorities can be disenfranchised.

Beyond this, there is also a dangerous oversimplification of vast periods of history and the association of repressed classes with specific language and cultural groups has fed a dangerous and divisive propaganda. This labels certain language groups as exploiters and oppressors and others victims of dispossession and oppression without a grounded understanding of complex and fluid categories, alongside complex economic and historical processes. These claims have also justified horrific violence by the OLF against the Amharic speaking people such as the disembowelment of pregnant women, the slicing off of the breasts of women and rape.

Progressive scholars, the working class and Ethiopia

Progressive scholars have to build bridges to engage with the intelligentsia in Ethiopia who have persevered through military dictatorship under the Derg in the 1970s and 1980s, and through 27 years of TPLF-dominated rule. Ethiopian scholars have been speaking out, as in this speech in 1994 by Mammo Muhcie in London that is an eerily precise analysis of TPLF as it is today.

In the midst of this conflict, Ethiopian scholars have been repeatedly trying to get their voices heard by the Ethiopian government and the international community. The statement widely shared by African intellectuals (including on roape.net) that presumed Ethiopian scholars cannot speak for themselves therefore came across as deeply condescending. If there is genuine interest in supporting Ethiopian scholars to get their perspectives and analysis on the crisis, and build bridges for meaningful interventions, the first step has to be through a serious and deliberate process of engagement.

There is also a need to pay attention to the accumulation strategies of elites and the manner they fit (or do not fit) within imperialism. Within this, an expanded understanding of a gendered working class is needed, recognising the strategically important role of women’s labour as a source of cheap wage labour. In addition, it is still important to not lose sight of how a liberal government like the PP, in pursuing its own ambitions to assert sovereignty over foreign policy and natural resources, has fallen from grace and is facing the age-old colonial/imperialist strategy of ‘divide and rule’ tactics both at the national level and regional levels through the TPLF, OLF and external actors such as Sudan and Egypt.

This also gives us insight into the accumulation strategy of the EPRDF, which still operates under a constitution and governance system setup by the TPLF dominated government. This draws out a broader lesson to the challenges arising out of an ambitious developmentalist elite in Africa. Although, the TPLF has been subjected to accountability processes after their removal from control of the federal government, there is still a broader lesson here for development in Africa, and this demands further interrogation.

Some on the left have admired the capacity of the ruling class in Ethiopia to pursue developmentalist ambitions with industrial parks as a strategy, for instance. But the limits of this strategy also need to be highlighted, as this also has relied on cheap wage labour and migrant women workers who have been rigidly constrained from organising in trade unions. Wildcat strikes and high turnover of labour has meant this is not a stable accumulation strategy, even on their own terms. It begs a broader question, what is the nature of a viable developmental strategy?

In addition, the pressures arising out of a gendered understanding of working class dynamics lays a basis to consider what developmental alternatives can be fought for. Such an alternative also demands a rupture from the existing imperialist architecture of power to assert control over resources which destabilises the global financial and geopolitical arrangements that the emerging Eritrea-Ethiopia-Somalia relations pose. Failure to recognise this is akin to enabling the catastrophic outcome of interventions in Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, the reason why there has been a robust and vociferous rejection of any possible intervention by the likes of Global Ethiopian Scholars Initiative and Jon Abbink.

Progressives have a responsibility to centre an understanding of imperialism and the national question, as Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros pull together in Reclaiming the Nation, to navigate this terrain and build bridges with the radical intelligentsia and popular formations in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa who want to construct a transformative agenda themselves. A first step has to be rejecting the ethnonationalist, genocidal agenda of TPLF, OLF and their allies.

Hibist Kassa is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for African Alternatives in Cape Town, South Africa. She is also a Research Associate at the Centre for African Studies and Chair in Land and Democracy in South Africa.

Advancing working class struggle

ROAPE

September 15, 2021

ROAPE’s Ruth First prize winner, Lawrence Ntuli, writes about his journey into activism and research. Ntuli’s political activism and research combine to a single objective – helping to advance the struggles of the working class in South Africa. His research into precarious workers who fought through the union and those who engaged in struggle without being led by trade unions was the 2020 winner of the prize.

By Lawrence Ntuli

I was born and grew up in the working class township called Tsakane, located in the far east of Johannesburg, South Africa. Immediately after finishing from high school, in 1996, I became a student of politics and economics at Wits University, Johannesburg. I joined student struggles at university and ultimately I became a member of the South African Student Congress and later I joined a socialist student organisation. I became an activist during a period in which the university was introducing a swingeing neoliberal restructuring plan, called Wits 2001.

In that period, the restructuring plan formed part of a broader programme to transform Wits into a neo-liberal university, orientated towards profit-making and partnership with big business. As a result of this restructuring, tuition fees became unaffordable and many students from poor and working-class backgrounds were kicked out. Similarly, ‘unprofitable’ courses were closed, and some academic posts were frozen resulting in more than 50 academic job losses. Coupled with this, the university outsourced or privatized services it considered as ‘non-core’ and as a result close to 613 workers were retrenched.

However, some of these retrenched workers (250 workers) were re-employed by new private companies which were awarded contracts by the university. As we expected, these workers lost all benefits, wages were halved, and they were not allowed to join a trade union. In other words, the conditions and wages of these workers rapidly worsened compared to when they were previously employed directly by the university.

Yet the effects of university restructuring created favourable conditions for students to build a united front together with the workers. Thus, workers and students formed what was called the Wits University Crisis Committee which ultimately led several protests at the university against restructuring and high tuition fees. I was part of this Committee and helped organise and coordinate the protests.

It was during this time that I began to campaign against precarisation of work, in addition to campaigning for affordable and accessible education. Unfortunately, our struggle was not strong enough to defeat either restructuring or prevent precarisation of work. We only managed to delay the implementation of outsourcing, but in the end we lost the battle – outsourcing went ahead.

Subsequently, together with other student activists, we decided to continue supporting workers who entered precarious employment because of outsourcing. In addition to supporting a demand for the reversal of outsourcing, we also supported their struggle for better conditions and wages including the right to join and form a trade union. With this in mind, we supported several general meetings and protests organised by precarious workers. This experience without doubt stirred my interest in the struggles of precarious workers – in this sense my activism and research are entirely linked.

After I left the university, I continued to support worker struggles. Hence, I became active in the now defunct Anti-Privatization Forum (APF). The APF was a social movement which was made up of 21 Community based organisations fighting against the effects of neo-liberalism, for example, outsourcing and privatisations. In the APF, I assumed the role of labour coordinator. This role allowed me to work with various types of precarious workers. The vast majority of these workers were either unorganised or lacking trade union representation, those who were unionized were rarely serviced by their trade unions. In other words, trade unions did not address their grievances, or respond to their demands. As a result, we gave them various types of support including writing and printing leaflets for them. Most importantly, we organised community organisations affiliated to the APF to support their struggles. For example, when they were involved in a strike, we built support and solidarity for the strike.

Around 2007, I was employed as a Publication Officer at the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (NEHAWU). NEHAWU is a trade union in South Africa with a membership of 235,000, it is the largest public sector union in the country. It organizes state, health, education, and welfare workers. I worked for only nine months with Nehawu. Afterwards, I was employed as a director (of research and program monitoring) by the local government department – Gauteng Provincial Government.

Even though, I was employed by the government, I remained in touch with workers struggles and I supported several protests. This continuous association with workers motivated me to pursue a doctoral degree on the union response to precarisation of work, focusing on South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU) and the union’s resistance to privatisation in the period between 1999-2003. At the same time, my interest in workers struggles made me to leave government employment and join SAMWU as a national research officer.

SAMWU is the largest trade union in the local government sector and affiliated to the Congress of South African Trade Union (COSATU). It was one of the trade unions which fought strongly against privatization in the 1990s and 2000s, but it lost this fight. Both privatisation and outsourcing in the local government sector continued unabated. Increasingly outsourcing took different forms in different municipalities and even within a single municipality. For workers, privatisation threatens trade union representation, collective bargaining, job security, pay, benefits, occupational safety, and health protection.

With the previous experience of working with precarious workers, in SAMWU I work in the field of precarisation of work, write and put together articles and booklets, and organised workshops, etc. The rationale was to aid various union campaigns against precarisation of work.

So, in one way or the other, my work in the field of precarisation of work led me to conduct research on the subject, with the title The strategies and tactics of fighting against precarisation of work: a comparative study of precarious workers’ struggles in two South African municipalities. In fact, this research was focused on ascertaining the tactics or strategies which can assist precarious workers to win in their struggles. The conclusion was that precarious workers prefers to fight via the trade unions, not through other, alternative forms of organisations such as cooperatives or NGOs, as other writers have argued elsewhere. When precarious workers fight back independently, it is because trade unions have refused to represent them and not because they seek to build alternative forms of organisations. The workers who were studied were convinced that only a trade union could win both better pay and conditions.

As an activist, I am thrilled to be chosen by ROAPE as the winner of the Ruth First Prize. Most importantly, it is an honour to be associated with a journal which is known for supporting radical transformation. At the same time, I am also delighted to win a prize inspired by the work of Ruth First, a Marxist whose life was committed to the struggle against class and racial oppression. The Ruth First Prize without doubt will boast my confidence to continue research that is focused on advancing working-class struggle.

Lawrence Ntuli is employed as a researcher by the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (SAMWU) and is currently completing doctoral studies. He is an activist and his areas of research includes precarious work, trade unions and local government. Ntuli is writing a history of SAMWU with the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit at Rhodes University.

Featured Photograph: Striking municipal workers in Boksburg, South Africa in July 2009 (Heather Elke – 27 July 2009).

Big Pharma and vaccine apartheid

ROAPE

September 14, 2021

In this report on the TWN-Africa and ROAPE webinar on vaccine imperialism held last month, Cassandra Azumah writes that the unfolding vaccine apartheid which has left Africa with the lowest vaccination rates in the world is another depressing example of the profit and greed of Big Pharma facilitated by imperialist power.

By Cassandra Azumah

The webinar on ‘Vaccine Imperialism: Scientific Knowledge, Capacity and Production in Africa’ which took place on 5 August 5, 2021, was organized by the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) in partnership with the Third World Network-Africa (TWN-Africa). It explored the connections and interplay of Africa’s weak public health systems, the profit and greed of Big Pharma enabled by the governments of the industrialized Global North, and the Covid-19 pandemic from a political economy perspective. This report summarizes the main discussions held during the conference, including an overview of each of the main points discussed. The webinar was the first in a three-part series of webinars scheduled by the two organizations under the theme Africa, Climate Change and the Pandemic: interrelated crises and radical alternatives.

The format of the event involved keynote presentations from three speakers, a five-minute activist update on the COVID-19 situation from two African countries, and an interactive discussion with participants. Chaired by Farai Chipato, a Trebek Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa and ROAPE editor, the session included presentations from Rob Wallace, an evolutionary epidemiologist and public health geography expert at the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps; Tetteh Hormeku, Head of Programmes at Third World Network-Africa (TWN-Africa) and Marlise Richter, a senior researcher at the Health Justice Initiative in South Africa.

The current state of the pandemic – Rob Wallace

Rob Wallace began the session by providing a global perspective on the current state of the COVID-19 pandemic. He presented data showing that though the total number of vaccinations are increasing, the percentage of people fully vaccinated is concentrated in the West. We are currently experiencing a third wave of the pandemic, which is being driven by the delta variant. Though the cases in Africa are relatively lower than in other parts of the world, it is still a marked increase from the first and second waves which were less severe. This is not the trajectory that was predicted for COVID-19 on the continent in the early days of the pandemic. Marius Gilbert et al had speculated that Africa would be vulnerable to the virus due to a lower public health capacity and underlying co-morbidities that might increase the spread and damage of the virus. However, the incidence of the virus has played out in a different way, Africa’s cases are not as high as that of other continents. The possible reasons that have been given for this are: demographics (a younger population), open housing (which allows greater ventilation), and an ongoing circulation of other types of coronaviruses which have induced a natural, partial immunity in the population.

Wallace also commented on herd immunity, stating that it is not a panacea for defeating the virus. He referenced a paper by Lewis Buss et al on COVID-19 herd immunity in the Brazilian Amazon which found that although 76% of the population had been infected with the virus by October 2020, they had not achieved herd immunity (which is usually estimated at 70-75%), and proliferation of the virus was ongoing. He pointed out that the key lesson from this study is that there is no magical threshold for herd immunity; it may be different for different populations or there may be no threshold at all.

Likewise, he contended that defeating COVID-19 has little to do with vaccination as a silver bullet, but much to do with governance and the wellbeing of the population being at the crux of any public health decisions a government would take. A multi-pronged approach should be taken to defeat the virus, one that includes vaccinations, wearing of masks, social distancing, and testing and tracing. He argued however, that in the neoliberal regimes of the industrialised North, dealing with COVID-19 is organized around profit.

This was not the case in the early days of the outbreak. Initially, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US were in favour of having open medicine and making sure any pharmaceutical products produced to fight the virus were free to all. To this end, WHO developed the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP). However, the lobbying of Big Pharma and the likes of Bill Gates worked to centre the COVID-19 response around the model of intellectual property rights. This has had a considerable impact on the evolution of the virus, allowing it enough room to evolve such that pharmaceutical companies can make profits by selling booster shots of the vaccine. According to Wallace, this speaks to the “sociopathic nature” of the neoliberal regimes in the Global North who are willing to put the profits of Big Pharma over the lives of people. He opined that we need to act in solidarity to create a system in which disparities between the Global South and Global North are removed.

Health justice and the pandemic in South Africa – Marlise Richter

Marlise Richter’s presentation shed light on the work of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the lessons that can be learnt from their struggles for access to medicines (in particular ARVs). She pointed out that the TRIPS agreement (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights – TRIPS – is a legal agreement between member states of the World Trade Organisation) had a big impact on how the HIV/AIDS epidemic was addressed, resulting in a limited number of ARVs reaching the Global South.

The HIV epidemic was particularly acute in South Africa, the number of people living with the virus ballooned from 160,000 in 1992 to over 4.2 million people by 2000. At this time, ARV’s had been developed but were unaffordable in Africa, costing up to US$10,000 a year in 1998.

The TAC used multiple strategies such as skilled legal advocacy, high quality research, social mobilization, demonstrations, and public education to fight the pharmaceutical industry and their abuse of intellectual property rights protections. It joined the case brought by the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (PMA) against the South African government for allowing parallel importation of drugs in order to bring down prices of medicines. Its intervention contributed to pressuring the PMA to withdraw its claims in 2001. In addition, it applied pressure at the 13th International AIDS Conference in Durban in 2000 by staging a march to highlight the danger of President Mbeki’s AIDS denialism and demanded access to ARVs in Africa.

From 1999 onwards, the TAC also campaigned for a national prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV. This case was won at the high court and precipitated a national ARV roll-out plan in April 2004. Finally, in 2002, TAC and the AIDS Law Project filed a complaint with the Competition Commission against GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Boehringer Ingelheim arguing that they violated the competition law by abusing their dominance in the market and charging excessive prices for ARVs. This forced the companies to reach a settlement in 2003 leading to a drastic cut in ARV prices. By employing these tactics, the TAC and other activists were able to transform both the national and global conversation on drug pricing, eventually leading to South Africa having the largest HIV treatment program globally and pharmaceutical companies reducing the prices of ARVs.

Following the success of the campaigns to provide access to ARVs in Africa, activists in the Global South fought for the Doha Declaration. The Doha Declaration waived some of the provisions in TRIPS in order to prevent public health crises and promote access to medicines for all. However, Richter commented that not many of these flexibilities have been used. She posits that this is due to immense political pressure from the West. The US in particular has singled out governments that seek to use the TRIPS flexibilities and placed them on the US Special 301 Watch List.

Returning to the present, Richter presented data that showed that on 3 August, there have been just under 200 million confirmed cases and over 4.2 million deaths of COVID-19. 28.6% of the world’s population has received at least one dose of the vaccine with 14.8% fully vaccinated. But to give a sense of the disparity in vaccine administration across the world, she indicated that 4.21 billion doses have been administered globally with 38.67 million administered daily, but in low-income countries only 1.1% of people have received at least one dose. Narrowing it down to Africa, only 1.58% of the population has been fully vaccinated. This variance in administered vaccines is also present across the continent. In July 2021, Morocco had 28.9% of its population fully vaccinated, Botswana and South Africa had 5.3% and 5% of their populations fully vaccinated, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo had 0%. These incongruities are also evident when we assess the number of vaccines promised against vaccines delivered, with South Africa receiving only 26% of the vaccines promised. Continuing at the current pace, it would take South Africa two years and three months just to vaccinate 67% of its population.

Richter quoted the WHO Director-General saying, “The world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure – and the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries.” Following from this, she believes that it makes ethical sense and public health sense for vaccines to be distributed equitably amongst the world’s population. In a bid to fight for vaccine equity, South Africa and India co-sponsored the TRIPS waiver in October 2020. If successful, this waiver will bring about flexibilities in the TRIPS agreement which would have an immense impact on the manufactured supplies of vaccines and other medical goods. For the waiver to be passed, a consensus amongst all member states of the WTO needs to be reached. While the waiver is supported by over 100 countries (predominantly in the Global South), it has been blocked most notably by the EU, Australia, Norway and Japan, countries which have enough vaccines to vaccinate their population many times over. Putting this into perspective, in January 2021 the EU had 3.5 vaccines per person and Canada had 9.6 vaccines per person, as compared to 0.2 vaccines per person in the African Union. By blocking this waiver, the industrialised North is further entrenching the extreme inequalities currently faced by the Global South.

Richter concluded her presentation by speaking on a recent development in South Africa, where Pfizer-BioNtech has recently signed a ‘fill and finish’ contract with the Biovac Institute. She claimed that while this is a first step in developing manufacturing capacity, it is not enough to achieve vaccine independence because it does not include the sharing of Pfizer-BioNtech’s technology or know-how. In addition, the ‘fill and finish’ approach does not address issues of security of supply, nor does it allow local manufacturers the freedom to make their own pricing decisions. She believes that if we start from the premise that health is a human right, as the TAC does, we will regard health equity and especially vaccine equity as essential in the struggle against the pandemic.

The political economy of the continuing fight against intellectual property rights negatively affecting public health goods in Africa – Tetteh Hormeku

Tetteh Hormeku’s presentation was centred around the challenges that African countries have confronted in the process of trying to develop their own pharmaceutical capacity. These challenges go beyond the struggles for the TRIPS waiver and include the impact of some of the choices governments have made. He focused on two interrelated points that frame the predicament of African countries in relation to the current vaccine situation:

1) The vaccine process is dominated by pharmaceutical Multinational Corporations (MNCs) based in the advanced industrial countries and supported by their governments. The controversy around the TRIPS waiver is a clear example of the extent to which advanced countries and their MNCs would like to hold on to their place in the international order.

2) On the non-existent domestic pharmaceutical capacity in African countries, Tetteh explained that he uses the phrase “domestic pharmaceutical capacity” because:

It does not include a subsidiary of an MNC signing a production agreement with a local African company.
The word ‘domestic’ combines both the local character of production and the fact that it is embedded within the nation, its challenges, people, drives and imperatives.
It does not refer to nations alone, but also to regional and continental initiatives.
It captures pharmaceutical capacity beyond the production of vaccines.

Tetteh provided the following case-study to show how these two points are interrelated. 24 February marked the first shipment of COVID-19 vaccines to Ghana, and there was an optimism that it would be the beginning of a steady supply of vaccines to the country – six months later, less than 2% of the population has been vaccinated. Around the time Ghana received this first shipment, it was in talks with the Cuban government for support on the transfer of technology to improve its pharmaceutical capacity.

This date in February also marked the anniversary of the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in 1966. Six months before the coup Nkrumah’s government had established a state pharmaceutical enterprise. After the coup, the military government tried to hand it over to Abbott Laboratories, an American pharmaceutical company, under such outrageous terms that the resulting backlash from the populace led to the abandonment of this plan.

The creation of a state-owned pharmaceutical enterprise in Ghana and in other African countries in the post-independence era was a reaction to colonial policies which deliberately curtailed the production of knowledge and science across the continent. The aim of developing a pharmaceutical industry domestically was to intervene on three levels:

Creating an industry with the technical know-how and the machinery to be able to participate in the production of pharmaceutical products.

Creating an industry which is linked to the process of developing and building knowledge and being at the frontiers of knowledge. This involved creating linkages with universities and scholars.

Making use of traditional sources of medical knowledge. The state pharmaceutical enterprise was in operation until the 1980s when due to the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) it was privatized and unable to compete in the free market.

Tetteh pointed out that two lessons can be taken from this anecdote:

The government strongly intervened to ensure pharmaceutical production was linked to public procurement and public policy. The market for the product was guaranteed (army, public hospitals etc.).
The government intervened to ensure that certain medical products could not be imported into the country. These interventions were crucial in creating the legal and scientific conditions within which the state-owned enterprise thrived until the SAP period.

A key success of the state pharmaceutical enterprise was that it was able to bargain with Big Pharma on its own terms. At the time, Big Pharma needed to negotiate with the state pharmaceutical enterprise to produce their products locally since they had no access to the Ghanaian market. Although Ghana’s intellectual property rights regime replicated and mimicked some of the standards in the Global North, it was an indication of the amount of space countries in the Global South had to develop their own legislation with respect to intellectual property for public health. However, this option is no longer available to these countries. According to Tetteh, TRIPS inaugurated the monopoly that Big Pharma has over technical know-how for medical products. It has also enabled bio-piracy which allows Big Pharma to appropriate African traditional knowledge and patent it for themselves. In the 1990s, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) tried to create an African model law to enable a fight against bio-piracy but was unsuccessful.

Tetteh noted that the current situation highlights the importance of getting the TRIPS waiver, as it is a starting point for building domestic pharmaceutical capacity. The waiver goes beyond just patents and encompasses a host of other intellectual property rights such as copyrights, and industrial design. It covers all the important bases for making medicines in a modern context. Looking back to the Doha Declaration, very few countries were able to make real changes to their laws in order to make use of the flexibilities. This was due in part to the entrenchment of TRIPS in other agreements such as AGOA (the African Growth and Opportunity Act) and the EPAs (Economic Partnership Agreements). However, importantly, there was no real commitment by African leaders to making these changes.

Tetteh argued that African leaders are not making the strategic choices that would eventually lead them to developing independent pharmaceutical industries. Suggesting that South-South cooperation is an avenue to address the current issues the continent faces, he argued that instead of using all their funds to buy vaccines, African countries could have allocated some funds to support phase three of Cuba’s vaccine trials. By doing this, they would have been able to negotiate for a consistent relationship in terms of knowledge exchange and the transfer of technology.

Updates on COVID-19 in Senegal and Kenya

Cheikh Tidiane Dieye provided an update on the COVID-19 situation in Senegal. The country recorded its first case of the virus in March 2020. Since then, the government has put in place measures such as curfews, travel restrictions and the banning of public gatherings to contain the spread of the disease. The Senegalese government did not enforce a lockdown because the country has a large informal sector which would have been negatively impacted by a lockdown.

Senegal is currently experiencing its third wave – driven by the delta variant. The total number of cases has increased significantly over the last year, moving from 9,805 cases and 195 deaths in July 2020 to 63,560 cases with 1,365 deaths as of July 2021. This increase in cases has taken a toll on the country as it does not have the healthcare infrastructure to deal with the virus caseload. The vaccination campaign was launched in February this year, with about 1.2 million doses received, 1.8% of the population fully vaccinated and 3% receiving their first dose.

He stated that Senegal is currently facing two issues:

Lack of access to the vaccines. This is because the country does not have the means to purchase enough vaccines for its population and is currently relying on donations from COVAX. This has resulted in protracted waiting times for the vaccine. These waiting times can cause complications for vaccine administration, since there are people who have received the first dose but must wait for longer than the recommended time of eight weeks to receive their second dose.
A significant part of the population is reluctant to receive vaccines and sensitization campaigns are proving ineffective.

He remarked on one key development in Senegal – the creation of a vaccine manufacturing plant funded by the World Bank, the US, and a few European countries. The plant is expected to produce 300 million doses a year, first of COVID-19 vaccines and then other types of vaccines against endemic diseases. This project will be implemented by the Institut Pasteur de Dakar which already produces yellow fever vaccines.

ROAPE’s Njuki Githethwa provided an update on the COVID-19 situation in Kenya. He mentioned that the delta variant has caused a surge in cases and deaths. There have been currently over 200,000 cases since the pandemic began with the total number of deaths at 4,000 at the end of July. He pointed out that this third wave is affecting the lower classes which were spared in the initial stages of the pandemic. Kenya has received 1.8 million doses of the vaccine, with about 1.7% of Kenyans vaccinated. He noted that if vaccinations continue at this pace, it will take over two years for Kenyans to be fully vaccinated.

According to Njuki, the disbursement of vaccines from the West is being portrayed as a symbol of charity, solidarity, and sympathy. This portrayal is underlain by the West positioning themselves as saints while vilifying other countries like India and China. He also mentioned that there is a class dynamic at play in Kenya regarding the distribution of vaccines. People in affluent areas have ease of access whereas the less privileged wait in long queues to get vaccinated. As a result, most of the population, including frontline workers, are yet to be vaccinated. Schools in the country reopened at the end of July, and only about 60% of teachers have been vaccinated. Njuki touched on the fact that there is an optimism that more vaccines are coming, however the government is not doing enough to sensitise the population. There is still a lot of misinformation and superstition surrounding the vaccines.

Moving beyond the state?

The discussion was further enriched by contributions from the participants. Gyekye Tanoh, for example, noted that in the past the presence of state pharmaceutical enterprises around the continent constituted an active and embodied interest. This influenced the way transnational pharmaceutical companies were able to negotiate, severely limiting their power. However, such a thing is not present today on the continent. In fact, a study from the McKinsey Institute pointed to the fact that the pharmaceutical industry has the highest markups in Africa, meaning that while the continent is not the biggest market, it is the most profitable region in the world. Currently, the interests of Big Pharma dominate, he asked, how do we begin to shift this? Is it time to look beyond the state as a leading agent for change? What can progressives do in this situation?

In response to Gyekye’s question, Tetteh argued that he does not believe that it is time to look beyond the government. In the case of the pharmaceutical industry, the market is created by production and government procurement of pharmaceutical products. Real change cannot be realised without the involvement of the government and well thought out policies. But there is still a role for progressives. Activists need to mobilise and organize around broad paradigmatic changes and clear concrete policy choices that can be implemented in the immediate, medium, and long term.

Wallace added that the objectives of activists in the Global North should be to support the efforts of those in the Global South. This is especially important because COVID-19 is not the only virus that can cause real damage. We need to make structural changes that ensure the Global South is not at the mercy of the Global North whose economic model has contributed to the current situation.

Farai Chipato ended the session by thanking the speakers and participants for their contributions to the fruitful and important discussion. Chipato urged participants to join ROAPE and TWN-Africa for their two upcoming webinars: ‘Popular public health in Africa: lessons from history and Cuba’ and ‘Alternative strategies and politics for the Global South: climate-change and industrialisation.’

Cassandra Azumah works at the South Centre and has a MA in Political Science and Political Economy from the London School of Economics.

Featured Photograph: Children wearing masks to protect themselves against COVID-19 (Aobakwe Absa Basupi, 27 February 2021).

ROAPE’s Ruth First Prize – Lawrence Ntuli

ROAPE

September 9, 2021

The Editorial Working Group of ROAPE is pleased to announce the winner of the Ruth First prize. The prize is awarded for the best article published by an African author in the journal in a publication year.

It gives us great pleasure to announce that the 2020 Ruth First Prize has been awarded to Lawrence Ntuli, reflecting First’s own orientation to working-class organisation and history. The prize is awarded for the best article in that year by an African author published in ROAPE for the first time.

Ntuli was a recipient of the Small Research Grant awarded under ROAPE’s Africa Research Fund in 2013. His excellent piece, ‘The strategies and tactics of fighting against precarisation of work: a comparative study of precarious workers’ struggles in two South African municipalities’, was published in ROAPE volume 47, issue 163, March 2020 (Ntuli 2020).

The prize committee argued that Ntuli’s paper offered a critical and nuanced engagement with debates we have published in ROAPE before, by challenging existing binary understandings of precarious labour. The paper takes on commonly held assumptions through a detailed and rigorous engagement with workers themselves, examining how they experienced precarity and how this in turn influenced their attitudes toward struggle. As one of our committee noted, ‘The reader was left with a clear sense of the strengths of trade union membership, recognition and the ongoing battles for full unionisation among precarious workers.’

The committee noted that the article offered an exemplary piece of grounded activist scholarship in line with the journal’s remit and ethos. It is our great hope that Lawrence takes forward the insights from his research to help shape future working-class struggles against precarity and those who would seek to undermine the power and agency of the working class.

Lawrence Ntuli is employed as a researcher by the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (SAMWU) and is currently completing doctoral studies (Political Science). Previously he worked for the South African government, in the department of local government, as a director of research and programmes monitoring. Added to this, he is an activist in various campaigns, including anti-climate change. His areas of research include precarious work, trade unions and local government. He is writing a history of SAMWU with the Neil Aggett Labour Studies Unit at Rhodes University.

The prize-winning article can be read free of charge on the Taylor & Francis Online ROAPE website here. A list of previous prize-winners and their articles is available here.

Reference

Ntuli, Lawrence. 2020. “The Strategies and Tactics of Fighting Against Precarisation of Work: A Comparative Study of Precarious Workers’ Struggles in Two South African Municipalities.” Review of African Political Economy 47 (163): 45–58.

Michela Wrong’s remake of Rwanda’s untold story

ROAPE

September 7, 2021

Jos van Oijen writes how in the first two decades after the Rwandan genocide, alternative facts and conspiracy theories were the almost exclusive domain of marginal figures and members of the former regime. Today these previously peripheral myths are being fed to a world audience by apparently reputable authors.

By Jos van Oijen

Recent studies show that mainstream media are more effective spreaders of disinformation than fake news websites and social media. This raises questions about the influence of invented facts if the filters ingrained in old school journalism, such as fact-checking and hearing all sides, are abandoned in favour of the more intuitive approach of the post-truth era.

This question is particularly pertinent where the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda is concerned. During the first two decades after the genocide, alternative facts and conspiracy theories were the almost exclusive domain of anti-imperialist activists, elderly catholic missionaries, and members of the former regime, as well as Rwandan Diaspora subcultures linked to them. More recently these previously marginal myths are being fed to a world audience by reputable media like the BBC, Penguin Random House, and The New York Review of Books. This is cause for concern.

Rave reviews

The latest contribution to this new tradition is Michela Wrong’s book Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad. The book relates the turbulent history of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the ruling party in Rwanda, from the perspective of former leaders turned militant political rivals. According to the author, the book is meant to lend a voice to “the other side” and reveal what president Paul Kagame keeps hidden, as it were, under the carpet.

Although parts of the book are probably close to the truth and a critical investigation of current politics in Rwanda and the history of its leaders is a legitimate approach for any journalist, the properly researched topics in this book are intertwined with misconceptions that are given the appearance of credible facts but are obviously not. This blend of accurate and false information presents the reader with the problem of having to guess which is which.

In a New Books Network podcast the author explains that in her opinion even myths created around the campfire may reflect a certain kind of reality: “… the fact that something may not be rooted in actual facts in a way does not mean it’s not true.” For readers less inclined to disconnect ‘facts’ from ‘truth’, the danger is that the book might be mistaken for a historically accurate or balanced account of recent Rwandan history.

Such misapprehension has resulted in a series of rave reviews in prominent magazines and newspapers praising Wrong for her “meticulous research”. In her review, academic Susan Thomson describes the book as “a masterclass of investigative journalism.” To her credit, Wrong dispels that illusion. To Daniel Flitton of The Interpreter, she reportedly declared that she had “… deliberately eschewed the type of journalism that relies on gathering evidence, putting the allegations [to the people concerned] and presenting both sides, believing the Rwandan state has had plenty of opportunities to amplify its message.”

Be that as it may, relaying an unverified history as narrated by disgruntled former RPF officers in exile is one thing, provided Wrong is frank about it, but this covers only 60 % of the book. The remaining 200 pages recycle myths that those familiar with the field have grown accustomed to from shadow literature produced by a more sinister category of dissidents. One of the more distasteful examples re-labels the thousands of genocide victims whose bodies floated down the rivers to Lake Victoria as Hutus killed by the RPF, which recycles a propaganda message broadcast repeatedly by the Rwandan hate radio stations during the genocide. All in all, Wrong’s intuitive methods prove highly vulnerable to the power of suggestion.

Untold Stories

2014 was a turning point in the mainstream media’s framing of the genocide against the Tutsi. This was the year the BBC aired the controversial documentary “Rwanda’s Untold Story”. Apparently using the film as her blueprint, the topics in Do Not Disturb are largely the same, so too are the key informants and their arguments. Most importantly, both the BBC program and Wrong’s book are characterised by the omission of essential documentary evidence vital to make sense of the subject matter.

It’s beyond the scope of this blogpost to name and analyse every relevant piece of evidence overlooked by Wrong and the BBC, or the misconceptions born out of this negligence, but it’s worth examining one topic that’s been a cause of polarisation among journalists and scholars for many years: the rocket attack against president Habyarimana’s aircraft on the evening of 6 April 1994, an event used by Hutu Power extremists as a pretext to seize control of the Rwandan government, kill Hutu political moderates, and start to exterminate the Tutsi minority.

After the rocket attack, two theories prevailed. The first was that the Presidential Guard (PG) under the direction of Colonel Theoneste Bagosora had staged a coup d’état to prevent implementation of the Arusha Peace Accords signed by the Habyarimana government and the RPF (as part of this, the PG was going to be dissolved). The second theory was that the RPF had attacked the plane to re-ignite the civil war and force its way to power by military means since they feared losing the planned future elections agreed under the Arusha Accords.

Wrong doesn’t discuss the first option and dismisses another explanation in which Habyarimana’s widow was behind the assassination. This omission leaves the RPF exposed as the prime suspects. In her book, Wrong uses the same informants and documents as the BBC documentary, including several RPF dissidents who are presented as witnesses but reject any personal involvement in the planning and execution of the attack. They merely recycle arguments from a redundant whodunnit-debate that used to focus on the question from which location the assassins had fired the missiles.

Before 2012, some observers thought the missiles were fired from the Kanombe military camp, where the PG were stationed, while others, like the dissidents, claimed the crime scene was “La Ferme”, a spot in the valley below Masaka hill. Belgian scholar Filip Reyntjens describes the significance of that debate as follows: “The importance of identifying the firing zone is considerable, because it is unlikely that the RPF would have carried out the attack from the military domain or its immediate surroundings, but it could have accessed the area of Masaka.”

Forensic investigation

Not mentioned by Wrong and the BBC is that the matter of the shooters’ location was settled a decade ago by an independent on-site forensic investigation. In 2010, French judges Nathalie Poux and Marc Trévidic received permission to investigate the crash site in Kigali. They brought along a multidisciplinary team of specialised scientists who inspected the wreckage, established the lines of sight of eyewitnesses, and examined six firing zones that were mentioned in the various witness accounts, including La Ferme and Kanombe. Their findings were published in 2012, in a 338-page technical report. Because many scholars and journalists are not scientists, I’ve visualised the relevant information in Figure 1, using coordinates mentioned in the report.

Figure 1

The scientists first determined the plane’s position in the air when it was hit by a missile, and the part of the plane that was hit: the underside of the left wing. Their inspection of the damage revealed that the missile that hit the plane (another one had missed) had ruptured a fuel tank which caused the kerosene to escape and explode in mid-air. The damage to the wing then caused the plane to crash. This information, combined with other data they collected, led the scientists to conclude that the firing zone could not have been in the Masaka area as the RPF dissidents suggest. I’ll briefly explain the main arguments behind this conclusion:

The fact that the left wing was hit from below limits the area from where the missiles were fired to a left-front angle. La Ferme was located outside this area, to a left-rear angle. If the missiles were shot from La Ferme, they would have approached the airplane from behind, guided by their infra-red sensors to the engines attached to the tail, diagonally above the wings. The wreckage showed no missile damage to these parts of the plane and a miss would not have hit the underside of the wing.

The second reason was the distance to a group of Belgian doctors and a French officer in Kanombe, who heard the missile shots a few seconds before they saw the light of the fuel explosion. These facts limit the radius within which the shots were fired. La Ferme was more than 2 ½ kilometres away, far outside this radius. The sounds of shots from that area would have reached the ears of the witnesses after they saw the explosion, not before.

The third reason was the direction of the missiles as observed by the doctors in Kanombe. Through a window of the residence of surgeon Massimo Pasuch and his wife Brigitte, looking in the direction of Masaka, they saw bright missile trails going from right to left. Although they were looking in the Masaka direction, La Ferme was hidden from their view in the valley, a hundred meters below their position. The doctors could not have seen the trails of a missile from La Ferme until it rose up from the valley, which would have been to their left (indicated in blue in Fig. 1).

There were several other facts leading to the same conclusion. While none of the evidence supported La Ferme as the crime scene, it does fit an area in the eastern part of the Kanombe military camp. The scientists concluded that the shots must have been fired from an area of about 2.6 hectares east and south of locations 2 and 6, provided there was a clear view towards the approaching plane. In 1994 this zone was partially covered by a woodlot which further limits the shooting zone to an area of about 1.5 hectares (in Fig. 1, this zone is indicated in green).

Fringe theories

Critics like Barrie Collins and Filip Reyntjens have argued that the results produced by the acoustics expert are unreliable because the circumstances at the test location in France deviated from those in Rwanda. But when I asked Reyntjens to indicate how much it affected the sound velocity, he admitted that he lacks the technical expertise to answer that question. Another point of critical importance concerns the possibility of evasive maneuvers by the pilots, but none of the eyewitnesses has mentioned the type of aerobatics necessary for linking the wing damage to a La Ferme-missile. Moreover, in that scenario, the plane would not have crashed where it did.

These results do not entirely rule out the RPF as suspects, but no theory has been suggested in which they infiltrated their enemy’s military domain, waited for the plane to arrive, shot it down, and escaped without being spotted. On the other hand, the fact that the firing zone was a short stroll from the Kanombe barracks, warrants a more critical look at other scenarios and suspects. Unfortunately, Wrong’s ‘intuitive method’ left no room for reading the scientific report and then discussing it in her book, let alone confronting her informants with it.

Unfortunately, there are dozens of examples of such poorly researched topics in Do Not Disturb. Several hair-raising mistakes could have been prevented simply by looking at the map. Usually, scholars and journalists who dismiss scientific facts without a proper refutation, while clinging to unrealistic theories because it’s their belief, are viewed as having entered the realm of pseudo-science. It’s a mystery why this behaviour is deemed acceptable, even encouraged, in the context of Rwanda and the genocide against the Tutsi.

Considering that the public has a right to accurate information, the editors of mainstream media outlets and academic journals, persuaded to publish fringe theories because they come wrapped in a compelling, well-written story, should do a better job upholding the ethical standards of the trade and prevent gross errors and disinformation from taking on the appearance of credible facts. A good story is not necessarily an accurate story.

Jos van Oijen is an independent researcher from The Netherlands who publishes on genocide-related issues in various online and print media.

Featured Photograph: Michela Wrong and Mathilda Edwards from the Writivism Festival 2015 (26 June 2015).

African intellectuals call for urgent action on Ethiopia

ROAPE

September 1, 2021

As the situation in Ethiopia continues to deteriorate, ROAPE posts an urgent call by dozens of leading African intellectuals for dialogue and mediation.

In this truly Pan-African call over 50 of Africa’s leading intellectuals including Achille Mbembe, Boubacar Boris Diop, Godwin Murunga, Ato Seyki-Otu, Imraan Coovadia, and Souleymane Bachir Diagne demand an end to the conflict in Ethiopia. The letter been published in English, French and Amharic in a range of publications, African Arguments, Jeune Afrique and many other newspapers and websites.

We write this letter as concerned African intellectuals on the continent and in the Diaspora. Many of us have dedicated our professional lives to understanding the causes and potential solutions to intra-and inter-African conflicts. We are appalled and dismayed by the steadily deteriorating situation in Ethiopia – so tragically illustrative of the continued lack of uptake of the abundant commentary produced by African intellectuals on how to resolve African conflicts.

We are deeply disturbed by the ongoing civil war in Ethiopia — which some refer to as a regionalized internal conflict, given Eritrea’s role within it. We note with dismay that protagonists to the conflict no longer include just the Tigray Defence Force (TDF) and the Ethiopian National Defence Force (ENDF) together with the special forces from Amhara, but now also include the Oromo Liberation Army on one side, and on the other side, special forces from several other regions, as well as numerous conscripts. We note too, the advance of the TDF into Amhara and Afar regions, which, despite the TDF’s claims to be seeking to enable humanitarian and other supply access chains, is contributing to the expansion of the conflict across Ethiopia.

Ethiopia is of continental significance, not only for its record of successful resistance to European imperial expansionism, but also for its being the home of the African Union (AU), our inter-governmental institution whose lack of effective engagement on the situation in Ethiopia we also find deplorable. The AU, its member states — particularly Ethiopia’s neighbouring states — must not allow Ethiopia to dictate the terms of their engagement in seeking resolution to this conflict.

We condemn the fact that the conflict is affecting ever-increasing numbers of civilians — the deaths, the sexual violence, the refugee outflows, the documented hunger and unmet medical and psychosocial needs, the reports of widespread and targeted illegal detentions (especially because of ethnicity), the enforced disappearances and torture in captivity. We also condemn the destruction of hard-earned physical and metaphysical infrastructure across Tigray, as well as other regions of Ethiopia, including institutions of higher learning, houses of worship and cultural heritage. Ethiopia and its peoples have suffered enough. Ethiopia cannot afford any further destruction.

All Ethiopians must recognize that a political rather than military solution is what is now called for, regardless of the claims and counterclaims, legitimate and otherwise, as to how Ethiopia has come to this place. Retributive justice, including the seizure and counter-seizures of contested land, and the detention of family members of recently outlawed political groups heightens tensions, leading to generational cycles of violence.

Ethiopia is on the precipice; we must take action. We therefore call on:

The Ethiopian government and the national regional government of Tigray to respond positively to the repeated calls for political dialogue, including with the affected and implicated groups in the Amhara and Oromia regions;

The Ethiopian government and the national regional government of Tigray to make positive use, in such dialogue, of the numerous African intellectuals who have put forward their views on pathways out of conflict;

Neighbouring countries to exercise maximum pressure on the Ethiopian government and the national regional government of Tigray to—under the framework of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and the AU—submit to external mediation of this conflict;

The IGAD and the AU to proactively take up their mandates with respect to providing mediation for the protagonists to this conflict—including providing all possible political support to the soon to be announced AU Special Envoy for the Horn;

The rest of the international community to continue to support such IGAD and AU action with the carrots and sticks needed to get the protagonists and all other stakeholders to the table, keep them there and determine a political solution leading to more broad-based national dialogue on the future of the Ethiopian state.

We urge all Ethiopian leaders and civic groups to demonstrate the magnanimity and vision needed to reconstruct a country that has suffered far too long already. We call on any negotiated political settlement to include a process of public accountability for mass atrocities committed across Ethiopia. The history of the African state attests to the efficacy of an alternate path committed to truth, peace, justice and reconciliation.

Signed:

Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Professor of French and Philosophy, Director of the Institute of African Studies, Columbia University
Mamadou Diouf, Leitner Family Professor of African Studies, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, Columbia University
Elleni Centime Zeleke, Assistant Professor, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, Columbia University
Godwin Murunga, Executive Secretary, Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA)
Boubacar Boris Diop, Award winning author of Murambi, The Book of Bones and many other novels, essays and journalistic works
Achille Mbembe, Research Professor in History and Politics, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand
Jimi O Adesina, Professor and Chair in Social Policy, College of Graduate Studies, University of South Africa
Ato Sekyi-Otu, Professor Emeritus, Department of Social Science and the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought, York University
Felwine Sarr, Anne-Marie Bryan Distinguished Professor of Romance Studies, Duke University
Imraan Coovadia, Writer, essayist and novelist, Director of the creative writing programme, University of Cape Town
Koulsy Lamko, Chadian playwright, poet, novelist and university lecturer
Willy Mutunga, Former Chief Justice, Supreme Court of Kenya
Maina Kiai, Former Chair, Kenya National Human Rights Commission, Former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association
Rashida Manjoo, Professor Emeritus, Department of Public Law, University of Cape Town, Former UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women
Siba N Grovogui, Professor of international relations theory and law, Africana Studies and Research Centre, Cornell University
Nadia Nurhussein, Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies, Johns Hopkins University
Martha Kuwee Kumsa, Professor of Social Work, Wilfrid Laurier University
Mekonnen Firew Ayano, Associate Professor, SUNY Buffalo Law School
Dagmawi Woubshet, Ahuja Family Presidential Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
Awet T Weldemichael, Professor and Queen’s National Scholar, Queen’s University
Abadir Ibrahim, Ethiopian Human Rights Activist and Lawyer
Michael Woldemariam, Associate Professor of International Relations and Political Science, Director of the African Studies Center, Boston University
Safia Aidid, Arts and Science Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History, University of Toronto
Abdoulaye Bathily, Professor of History, University Cheikh Anta Diop
David Ndii, Kenyan Economist
Siphokazi Magadla, Senior Lecturer in Political and International Studies, Rhodes University
Fred Hendricks, Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Humanities, Rhodes University
Pablo Idahosa, Professor of African Studies and International Development Studies, York University
Ibrahim Abdullah, Department of History and African Studies, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone
Seye Abimbola, Senior Lecturer, School of Public Health, University of Sydney
Makau Mutua, SUNY Distinguished Professor, SUNY Buffalo Law School
Salim Vally, Professor, Faculty of Education, University of Johannesburg, Director, Centre for Education Rights and Transformation
Muthoni Wanyeki, Kenya Political Scientist
Dominic Brown, Activist and Economic Justice Programme Manager, Alternative Information and Documentation Centre
Michael Neocosmos, Emeritus Professor in Humanities, Rhodes University
Zubairu Wai, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Department of Global Development Studies, University of Toronto
Alden Young, Assistant Professor, African American Studies, University of California
Benjamin Talton, Professor of History, Department of History, Temple University
G Ugo Nwokeji, Associate Professor of African History and African Diaspora Studies, Department of African-American Studies, University of California
Lionel Zevounou, Associate Professor of Public Law, University of Paris Nanterre
Amy Niang, Professeur associé, L’Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique
Sean Jacobs, Associate Professor of International Affairs, Julien J Studley Graduate Programmes in International Affairs, The New School, Founder and Editor of Africa is a Country
Abosede George, Associate Professor of African History, Barnard College
Dr Abdourahmane Seck, Senior Lecturer, Université Gaston Berger
Nimi Hoffmann, Lecturer, Centre for International Education, University of Sussex, Research Associate, Centre for International Teacher Education, Cape Peninsula University of Technology
Maria Paula Meneses, Vice-Presidente, Conselho Científico do CES, Centro de Estudos Sociais, Universidade de Coimbra
Ibrahima Drame, Director of Education, Henry George School of Social Science
Cesaltina Abreu, Co-Director, Laboratory of Social Sciences and Humanities, Angolan Catholic University
Lina Benabdallah, Assistant Professor of Politics,Wake Forest University
Oumar Ba, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Department of Government, Cornell University
Samar Al-Bulushi, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California
Nisrin Elamin, Assistant Professor of International Studies, Bryn Mawr College
Marie-Jolie Rwigema, Incoming Assistant Professor, Applied Human Sciences, Concordia University
Eddie Cottle, Postdoctoral Fellow, Society, Work and Politics Institute, University of the Witwatersrand
Amira Ahmed, School of Humanities and Social Science, American University of Cairo, Convenors’ Forum of The C19 People’s Coalition
Ibrahim Abdullah, Department of History and African Studies, Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone
Jok Madut Jok, Professor of Anthropology, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University
Ebrima Sall, Director, Trust Africa

We stand in solidarity with all Ethiopian intellectuals in-country who want to speak out against the war but feel unable to do so due to fear of retaliation.

Featured Photograph: Jean Shaoul, ‘Brutal conflict in Tigray threatens breakup of Ethiopia’ World Socialist Website (12 April 2021).

On Walter Rodney’s Legacy: when anger and organising took over

ROAPE

July 29, 2021

ROAPE’s Chinedu Chukwudinma speaks to Anne Braithwaite about Walter Rodney’s assassination, and the activism of the Working People’s Alliance-Support Group in the UK. As a founding member of the group, Braithwaite explains that though Rodney was betrayed, then assassinated, his body destroyed and concerted efforts made to tarnish his record, people around the world continue to develop and build on his immense legacy.

You can read the first part of the interview here.

The Working People’s Alliance in Guyana became a political party at the height of strikes and mass protest against Burnham and the People’s National Congress in the summer and autumn of 1979, known as the civil rebellion. How did you and others feel about the civil rebellion and its impact on the working people whether African or Indian?

I think there was unity. Absolutely! I think that unity was what alarmed both can PNC and the PPP (People’s Progressive Party) because, in an incredibly short period of time, Rodney and the WPA had actually succeeded in uniting working people in Guyana. That is when Burnham and the PNC decided Rodney had to be permanently removed because cross-community unity undermined their whole foundation of political power.

When a doctor family friend who lived in London learned that I worked with the WPA Support Group, he summoned me, sat me down in his surgery and asked: “Does your mother know what you’re doing here?” I tried not to laugh and said, “Yes, I believe so.” He could no longer contain himself. He became totally exasperated with me, wagged his finger actually touching my forehead and said, “I’m warning you about those Indians child!” But that’s the kind of experience not uncommon to Guyanese working for grass roots power across the ethnic divide.

My other question is, you know, between the members of the WPA support group, did you have any political debates? If so, what were those debates about?

Absolutely! For example, one of the major early debates was on whether non-Guyanese people should be allowed as group members. I had to overcome my own nationalist limitations, then work to persuade others. Makini Campbell, an American and Horace Campbell, a Jamaican, among others, were founding members. But most members were of Guyanese heritage, an exciting microcosm of Guyana’s multi-ethnic possibilities. Other debates were around how we advocate for WPA in Guyana, which UK community, activist and political groups to collaborate with, and how, given their various ideological nuances.

I was working full time and also had a part-time job, yet I had a very full social life, with lots of politicking. Yet a good rave remained an agenda feature. One of the things the support group often did was to host combined events [cultural, rally, rave] at particular venues that were suitable, like the Covent Garden Africa Centre, Clapham Common Methodist church hall which was also the Queen other Moore Saturday school and the Abeng in Brixton. Turning political meetings into parties became a really good way of recruiting.

Walter Rodney was somebody who loved partying, and I was probably with him at parties than any other place. In parties those days, you’d have floor-to-ceiling speakers so, any conversation on the dance floor was impossible. We called parties where you hold your glass in one hand, nibbles in the other, and chat, English parties. We did not do English parties

I was told that Rodney and WPA did not address people by proclaiming their socialist ideology or using complex jargon and concept in Guyana. It seems like they always spoke to people in a language the people could understand.

An issue for me within the WPA Support Group was when others who would have studied various political theories and ideologies ask, have you read this or that? And I would say no. They might then reply with a smirk and say “You mean, you’ve not read The Wretched of the Earth you’ve not read this, you’ve not read that. You want to be an activist and you haven’t read these things!” And that used to irritate me so much that it made me less inclined to read that kind of stuff.

Rodney often said things that made me want to think, but I recall him using few ‘isms’ in public meetings or private discussions that I was part of, nor in my conversations with him. So, I did not feel put down by the way Rodney spoke or related in ideological terms. People in Guyana listened to him at public meetings were able to understand and tell you what Rodney had said. When I visited my village, people there like my grandmother, who had no discernible prior political interest, would say things that would make me think again, oh, she’s listening to Rodney. So yes, Rodney had a huge communication gift.

There were some ideological tensions in the Support Group, but I would mostly tune out of those. When it came to what to do next, I would re-engage. And when we had to write stuff, put out event leaflets etc., that was quite challenging for me to be clear and not use wrong terminology. I would always have others do it or check what I wrote.

So, if we come to the tragic moments when Walter Rodney was assassinated in June 1980. How did you feel when he passed? What did you and the Support Group do in the aftermath?

Of course, Rodney’s assassination is imprinted on my mind. The support group had only been going for a short while. I had accounting exams all that week, and finished on Friday 13 June 1980, with a wonderful celebration dinner with friends from Barbados who were honeymooning houseguests, it was an indulgent evening. The telephone woke me at about three am with the horrible news: Rodney was assassinated and his brother Donald seriously injured. The WPA Support Group convened an emergency meeting early that morning to plan action.

Rodney’s murder was a massive shock worldwide, and particularly frightening for those on the ground in Guyana. But anger and rage soon took over and intensified the Support Group’s work here. Many Guyanese, Caribbean people, radical activists would have said, “no, no, Burnham would not kill Rodney”. WPA supporters and others were attacked and killed before: Father Darke, Ohene Koama and Edward Dublin, but they won’t dare kill Rodney. There was all kinds of harassment and terrible things happening, but they were people who believed that Burnham would kill other people, but not Rodney. People who were supporters of Burnham and his PNC party saying “No, he won’t kill Rodney”. There was one particular person who couldn’t speak to me after the murder, because he was one of the people who swore loudly that they wouldn’t kill Rodney. I think very few PNC supporters believed that it was anything other than an assassination by the state, that was masterminded by Burnham. Although people found ways of making excuses or justifying it, there was never much doubt about who killed Rodney.

The WPA Support Group’s activities in England intensified. In 1982 when Princess Diana and Charles got married, Prime Minister Burnham came to the UK to attend the wedding and meet with the Guyanese community. The Support Group picketed the Grosvenor House Hotel meeting as attendees arrived, then circumvented security to enter and break up the meeting. That was an important and effective symbolic confrontation. On another occasion, Burnham was in London for Commonwealth heads of government meeting, I think. PNC supporters organised a huge meeting at Battersea Town Hall. That meeting too was picketed and we broke it up.

Wow! Really you broke up the meeting?

Oh we broke up many meetings! Anytime the PNC attempted public meetings that we heard about, especially when senior politicians or big names came from Guyana we planned for them. So, eventually they were restricted to small, semi-secret events. We also regularly picketed Guyana’s High Commission around repressive events in Guyana. Some Guyana high commissioners had a particularly difficult job at the time. Whenever they attempted any public appearances, we would challenge them and picket. I mean it was a normal part of what we did.

The WPA Support Group seems to have operated long after Rodney’s death and well into the 1980s…

One of the things that really helped to sustain our work here was that Senior WPA members from Guyana would often come to London for fundraising, academic or personal reasons. People like Joshua Ramsammy, Clive Thomas and Moses Bhagwan. Usually senior WPA men, Andaiye being the exception. After Rodney assassination Andaiye spent a couple years in London as WPA International Secretary. So, we had a reasonable flow of senior people back and forth. And of course, one would have meetings with them. Everyone in Guyana had [and still have] close family residing outside Guyana. Many who lived at subsistence levels in Guyana would travel, if only to buy goods abroad and resell them in Guyana. So, a lot of travel overseas was part of the ordinary Guyanese life. London was also quite an important hub for travelling to other places like Europe and North America.

On a tangential matter, Guyana’s emigration epidemic since the 1960s – believed to be the worst of the Caribbean – remains unaddressed.

**The cover of “The Struggle Goes On!” by Walter Rodney, 1979.**

When and why did the WPA Support group’s activities come to an end?

It was a slow petering out rather than a sudden stop. Andaiye was here, as I said, as international secretary for a couple of years. And we continued working, campaigning, fundraising. There were various campaigns that some of us worked with like the Justice for Walter Rodney campaign which Helena Kennedy and then Richard Hart chaired, also the Campaign Against Waste Dumping in Guyana (CAWDIG). Lots was going on.

The difficulty the Support Group had was that communication and information from the WPA had all but dried up after Andaiye’s return to Guyana. There was no email or internet in those days and telephone calls were very expensive. No materials, no Daycleans [the WPA newspaper]. With hindsight I recognised that Rodney’s death had dealt the party itself a fatal blow, and by the late 1980s it had ceased to be a mass party, or even a pressure group.

In the early 1990s when Clive Thomas was visiting London, some of us arranged a public meeting. Thomas wowed a packed Commonwealth Institute audience, talking about Burnham’s PNC government’s disgraceful plan to import toxic waste from the United States. An elite Guyanese friend of Guyana’s government had negotiated a lucrative deal with private US companies which was being sold to the Guyanese as “…we can burn it to generate electricity and end blackouts forever”. Some people in Guyana were saying “Yeah, if it means no more blackouts, we want it.” Quite reminiscent of current oil and gas and other natural resource exploitation and environmental protection concerns. It was only by raising the alarm with information unearthed by Friends of the Earth, that Burnham’s government quietly dropped the plan.

At that time, I thought that that was like old Support Group times – a full house and a great meeting.

It seems that the WPA had lost its soul with Rodney’s murder. They were never able to rekindle Guyanese working people’s interest, nor engage with workers’ struggles on the ground. There were no WPA public meetings, no workers’ campaigns, no discussions, no party manifesto. A flurry of activity in 2005 to commemorate the 25^th Anniversary of Rodney’s assassination took some overseas-based WPA associates to Guyana and produced some material.

In 2010 the WPA rump (mostly a tiny, old male elite) decided that the way to remain relevant was to join the PNC. Most of the earlier senior WPA women had left the party and were either doing social activist work in Guyana or had emigrated. That so-called coalition with the PNC [A Partnership for National Unity – was a coalition formed in 2011 and comprised the PNC and the WPA] was hard to believe. And the PNC has done what it has always done with previous coalition ‘partners’, namely isolate then destroy them.

In the UK, I think there are WPA-related documents, such as pamphlets, pages of Dayclean and press releases that came from the WPA Support Group, which have been stored at the London Metropolitan Archives and the George Padmore Institute. I wanted your opinion on what you think has been done so far to honour Walter Rodney’s legacy?

You find that people continue referencing Rodney and his work internationally, in every continent, in the world. I think to myself, this guy died at age 38 and continues to inspire. Yet he never held senior office anywhere, never held any lofty positions outside his family. That in itself is a huge legacy that he’s left, and that people can continue to recognise his work and his contribution all this time and that his work remains relevant in 2021. When I travelled to places like Malaysia, or Thailand or Japan, let alone Zimbabwe, essentially everywhere I go, you can meet people who knew Rodney or knew his work. I just found that really amazing.

In Guyana, the PNC, in assassinating him, removed his body. What they also attempted to do was to destroy his legacy, and they continue to try to do that. I think their position now is to say things like, “Oh, yes. You know, Rodney was very bright, but maybe a bit impetuous.” It depends on who they’re speaking to. If they think they’re speaking to intellectuals, they say, “his work was brilliant. But he didn’t understand working people and practical organising on the ground. The people weren’t ready.” To African nationalist they say, “but you know, he was trying to destroy a black man, a black leader.”

But I think Rodney’s legacy in Guyana is massive. It’s huge, because at least senior politicians are now acknowledging that there are ethnic issues in Guyana. In Guyana in 1972 Burnham’s PNC was saying “…there’s no race problem here in Guyana. Look, we have Indian friends in our party, too.” The PPP would do the same. But the leadership of these parties are still just thinking about how they can use their position at the top of the race-based parties to leverage state and resource power to enrich and glorify themselves and dole out patronage. It’s all about how the elites are going to get their hands on the ‘corn’. Rodney’s legacy exposed that deception.

In Rodney’s name we must continue to ask these questions: Is multi-ethnic organising, independent of the two ethnic-based parties that have comprehensively failed Guyanese for the last six decades possible? Or is Guyana doomed to decades more division and destruction?

What was your favourite moment in the WPA support group?

Moments that stick out in my mind are times when we challenged the PNC here in London. We broke up their meetings and faced them down to the extent where I think the PNC wouldn’t attempt to do too many big public things here, even when they were in office. President Granger [PNC President of Guyana from May 2015 to August 2020] only had one public meeting here, while he was president for the last for the previous five years. I don’t think they would have the nerve to do it, simply because there was too much opposition.

Everyone in Guyana feared Burnham. People in London would say to you, “I can’t picket because I’m on a scholarship. And my scholarship will get taken away.” Scholarships got taken away anyways, whether these people came to the pickets or not. But being able to go into meetings and challenge them to their face was to puncture that god-like image that the PNC ministers had. That meeting we disrupted in Battersea Town Hall in the 1980s was one of those meeting that people still remember.

Importantly ‘big man’ politics was effectively challenged and there remains the hope that youth will carry on the struggle.

Rodney was betrayed, his body destroyed, and concerted efforts made to tarnish his legacy. But I am most proud of the WPA-Support Group UK’s role in nurturing young community and scholar-activists to develop and build on Rodney’s immense legacy.

This is the second of a two-part interview, the first part is available here.

Anne Braithwaite is the co-chair and treasurer of the Walter Rodney Programme under the auspices of the Pluto Educational Trust (PET) in London.

Featured Image: This image was first published in New Frame, ‘From the archive: Walter Rodney’s last speech‘ (25 March, 2021).

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Global Lenin

The securitisation of capitalist rule in Africa

Sankara’s elusive socialism

Ethnonationalism, imperialism and the working class in Ethiopia

Advancing working class struggle

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ROAPE’s Ruth First Prize – Lawrence Ntuli

Michela Wrong’s remake of Rwanda’s untold story

African intellectuals call for urgent action on Ethiopia

On Walter Rodney’s Legacy: when anger and organising took over

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