Black Lives Matter in the middle of the Atlantic

January 11, 2022

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

By Elizabeth Adofo

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

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

A brief history of race in Bermuda

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

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

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

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

Bermuda and race today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The legacy of Black Lives Matter

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

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

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

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

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

Global capitalism and the scramble for cobalt

ROAPE

January 5, 2022

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

By Nick Bernards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa: The Legacy of Walter Rodney

ROAPE

December 16, 2021

By Lee Wengraf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROAPE

December 15, 2021

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

Can you tell ROAPE readers about your background and work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taifa Hall

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

This is a fever dream

Greased by bruised coffee in oily teacups

University students debating socialism and ujamaa

Reform and Revolution.

This is a fever dream,

Greased by bruised coffee…

Ta! Ta! Ta!

Ssssssssss…

Choking smoke through the window

Heavy breathing and shattered glass under the bed

It is a terrorist attack,

These police raids,

Looking for Rosa and Cabral

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

Ta! Ta! Ta!

Ssssssss…

Suddenly I am drowning in blood

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

…Aha!

An illegal dream we dare to dream,

Greased by bruised coffee in oily tea cups.

University students debating colonialism in Tiananmen square,

Qadaffi’s revolution in Taifa hall,

Opposite Ghandi’s library,

and America’s wing

dwarfed by China’s tower.

I am just a body

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

…that eats and talks.

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

You see breasts and think that I am a woman,

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

harvest osuga and cook it with zeal.

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

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

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

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

To milk the cows,

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

Despite the scorching sun,

Weed the garden and slash the grass,

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

check what is making that noise by the fence.

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

I am just a body,

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

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

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

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

and do not pick their noses.

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

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

and the electrician.

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

… that eats and talks,

…that eats and fucks,

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

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

B802

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

Two years ago, I met you,

A bad boy who made my heart sing,

We debated class struggle in your BMW X5,

I wondered if a socialist could drive a Benzie,

And flavour their steak with Remy Martin XO,

This is socialist type of living,

As I popped one,

Two pills into my mouth,

I watched my face drop as the world flew by.

You gave me a ruby ring,

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

We trafficked majestic trunks from Congo to the Cape

They were royal times of Persian silks,

And pedigree dogs named Biggie, Pac and Bella.

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

As I snorted one,

Two lines of coke,

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

You gave me a Tanzanite key chain,

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

As we trafficked little children from Libya to the Maldives

and promised shipwrecked Syrians national status.

Two years ago, I met you,

A bad boy who made my heart sing,

We debated Marxism in your Cherokee,

I wondered if a socialist could drive an Audi,

And dress in cashmere.

This is socialist type of living,

As I chewed one,

Two grams of psylocibin,

The room came alive in technicolour.

You gave me an emerald bracelet,

“From the communist party to you, my queen”

I wondered about Africans and Marxists,

And African Marxists, coloniality,

Confusions of modernity,

Slavery in the north and child pornography in the East.

This is socialist type of living,

As I shot up one,

Two vials of methamphetamine,

I watched the world fly by,

Dazed in luxurious furs.

From summit to counter-summit: imperialism, Françafrique and decolonisation

ROAPE

December 13, 2021

Aymar N. Bisoka, David Mwambari and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni write about the recent Africa-France summit. The scholar Achille Mbembe was recruited to prepare a report for the summit by speaking to African youth. This blogpost asks what was the real meaning of the summit behind the official pronouncements.

By Aymar N. Bisoka, David Mwambari and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni

At the beginning of 2021, French President Emmanuel Macron approached the Cameroonian historian and political scientist Achille Mbembe to prepare the New Africa-France Summit, which was to take place in Montpellier, France, on 9 and 10 October 2021. The most immediate context of a forthcoming election in France itself in which the French president might be using this occasion to win the Afro-descendant votes should not escape our minds. Unlike previous summits, this one was to welcome a new generation of young Africans from Africa and its diasporas to an open and direct dialogue with Macron. For the first time in history, the summit between France and African countries was held with no African head of state.

As part of the preparation for the summit, Mbembe had to lead a series of discussions in twelve African countries and the diaspora, ahead of the actual event, around themes of common interest. According to him, the aim of these discussions with African and diaspora youth was to “directly and openly question the fundamentals of this relationship [and] to redefine it together.”

Four days before the summit started, Mbembe submitted a 140-page report containing thirteen proposals for a ‘refoundation’ of relations between France and Africa. These proposals focus on an Innovation Fund for Democracy, a House of African and Diasporas Views, migration, employment, intercontinental economic transparency, the transformation of development aid, the voice of Africa on climate change, the narrative on Africa, the rethinking of the relations between Africa and Europe, the restitution of stolen works of art, among others. During the summit itself, twelve young people were selected to discuss with Macron and mount a critique on the issues arising from the proposals contained in the Mbembe Report.

What is the real meaning of this summit beyond the organisers’ pronouncements? How can we understand the controversies and discourses that came out of it? Was this summit simply a way for France to improve its image that has deteriorated sharply over the past four years?

Placing the summit in its historical context

The historical context of this summit is firstly, colonial and neo-colonial (Françafrique) and secondly, a context of increased global connections in which the Afro-descendent population has increased with France and cannot be ignored. Thirdly, it is also a context of insurgent and resurgent decolonization of the 21^st century, which has also seen the escalation of activism – by African youth – targeting colonial symbols of domination in general, and those of French interests in particular. Therefore, a key question arises: Was the summit organised to respond to recent events on the African continent or in France, and to push France to open-up to debates that are uncomfortable but essential?

On the African continent, Senegalese youth protests that vandalised French interests in March 2021 are still fresh in the minds of French policymakers. The youth on the streets spoke loud and clear when they attacked French shops, petrol stations, supermarkets and you can guess that their names did not feature on the French list of the desired invitees to dine with Marcon at the summit. The invited youth were mostly the educated, youth with a pre-existing and official platform and means. There were few, if any, of the young protestors like those who revolted against French interests.

Other recent events in Africa include protests in Mali against the French military presence and the move to hire Russian militias to combat terrorism where the French have failed. On the day the summit was to start in October, Mali’s Premier accused France of training ‘terrorist groups’ and summoned the French ambassador. Youth also attacked French interests in Northern Mozambique, resulting in the deployment of forces from the SADC region and Rwanda.

These are a few examples to show that popular pressure on France informed Macron’s choice of inviting young participants instead of the heads of state to the summit. Throughout his presidency, Marcon has also defended the establishment of the ECO to replace the controversial CFA currency that is part of the French colonial heritage that West African protestors have rejected. French monetary imperialism has been subjected to heightened opposition from African youth.

In addition, recent global events like the #BlackLivesMatter movement instigated debates amongst French intellectuals who aligned with their politicians to dismiss the claims by Afro-descendants in France to have racism directly confronted. These elites dismissed demands to challenge racism in France as irrelevant to France’s past or present, claiming that the French state is based on anti-racist ideals of republicanism. Macron himself declared these are ‘certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States’.

Other prominent intellectuals joined in to argue that contemporary theories on race, gender, and post-colonialism were a threat to the French identity of liberté, égalité, and fratenité. These assertations were made ignoring a long tradition of French-speaking scholars like Aimé Cesaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Frantz Fanon, Cheikh Anta Diop, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Françoise Verges or more recently Norman Ajari, Pape Ndiaye, Nadia Kisukidi, even the academic director of the summit itself, Achille Mbembe, and many others whose works on post-colonialism have critiqued French society.

In fact, debates on the question of identity in France have shown that non-white communities’ lived experiences show that liberté, égalité, and fraternité are empty slogans and merely a façade to the reality of French society. For instance, issues of police brutality against non-white communities, especially the Afro-diaspora, did not feature prominently in the summit, although they concern the community whom Macron might want to lure in next year’s elections.

The summit claimed to break ties with the colonial past, but it was hardly the case as the major problems that continue to strain the relationship between France and its African colonies were not even addressed. Yet, the voices of young people were present on stage and they asked questions, made arguments that have long existed in post-colonial literature. Articulating these views in front of the sitting president and in France was a significant moment. For example, there was a speaker from Burkina Faso civil society who asked Macron to stop patronising Africans, and that a change of vocabulary was needed to move from aid to partnership. Nevertheless, even partnership is not radical enough; the correct demand must be for reparations and restitution. Such a demand would constitute a total turn in what mainly were political and diplomatic debates.

The other unique feature of this summit was the fact that they asked Achille Mbembe to take on the task as intellectual scholar for the forum. Was this a radical gesture by the president to engage an African intellectual – a one-time outspoken critic of France’s policy in Africa, rather than another politician? Mbembe traveled around the continent to listen and record divergent voices about Africa’s relationship with France. Mbembe’s involvement in the 2021 summit leads us to ask three questions we explore below.

Firstly, the gesture to endorse an African intellectual with ties to France was intriguing. Was this a sign that the French establishment are taking African intellectuals seriously? It was indeed curious for Mbembe to accept this task with its high risks of being accused of doing the clean-up work for an imperial power which has never left Africa and is increasingly being exposed for its continued neo-colonial, exploitative relations with the continent.

Secondly, Mbembe’s involvement and young civil society activists who voiced criticism can also be viewed cynically as part of the French strategy to divert attention to real issues, namely CFA monetary coloniality, the presence of its troops in Mali and France interference with the monetary reforms spearheaded by ECOWAS. Or was it to collect data on the changing pattern of West African consciousness and capture the new vocabulary of African youth as part of an effort to monitor debates, listen to frustrations, then re-align French interests across the continent accordingly? Or can this be a case of a ‘cognitive empire’ needing data to sharpen its tools and recruit new allies? Doubtless, though, is a popular demand for Europe in general, and France in particular, to embark on de-imperialisation as part of an essential pre-requisite to redefine relations.

Thirdly, the much-publicised summit was held in France. The selection of these young participants was preceded by a preliminary consultation with France. Even if it is argued that these debates had started during previous meetings on Macron’s visits to the African continent, the summit in Montpellier was a platform to send a message to Macron’s electorate that he cares about minority issues, and to African youth that France cares where their governments have failed, and to other world powers competing for Africa’s resources, that France is in a leadership position and in touch with ‘authentic’ issues.

The counter-summit

The counter-summit was an eye-opener. A collective of associations, unions, and political parties organised a counter-summit to denounce the Françafrique (the term used to describe the continued and unabated influence of France, its government, and businesses, over its former colonies). Their objective was to unmask ‘the hidden face’ of the ‘New Africa-France summit’ and to challenge France’s policy in Africa. For most of the detractors, the summit was simply a publicity stunt to restore the image of France, which has deteriorated sharply in recent years, particularly in the eyes of African youth.

It is indeed true that several events of the last three years were behind the demonstrations against France in Africa and, therefore, Emmanuel Macron had an interest in a charm offensive to try and restore the image of his country in many regions of the continent.

The counter-summit registered the participation of significant political figures such as Mireille Fanon-Mendès-France, daughter of Frantz Fanon, and Miriam Sankara, the wife of the African hero, Thomas Sankara from Burkina Faso. For those attending the counter-summit, Macron’s announcements for a change in France-Africa relations over the past four years were being challenged as nothing but the usual operations of colonial seduction to give neo-colonial relations a new lease of life.

For example, the reform of the CFA franc, in favour of the future West African currency ECO, still guarantees a central role for France in the monetary policy of West African countries. Also, the announced end of Opération Barkhane is, like other previous military operations in Africa, part of a strategic redeployment towards maintaining French influence through military cooperation and the action of Special Forces.

Macron’s France has therefore never introduced a break in its African policy but, on the contrary, continues to increase its neo-colonial influence in Africa strategically to fight against growing criticism, particularly from young protestors. These are the reasons why this summit was considered as a symbolic renewal of old Franco-African summits, by using topics such as ‘Youth and actors from the diaspora, entrepreneurship, culture and sports’ to continue to revive the same colonial practices of France in Africa.

The counter-summit of a hundred organisations and supported by several political parties and unions succeeded in organising itself around a message which clearly showed what the meaning of “putting an end to the coloniality of France-Africa” had to involve. The meetings, debates and events they organised on the side-lines of the official summit showed a great mistrust towards Macron, based on their deep knowledge of existing contradictions between France’s discourse and its actions in Africa.

It emerges from these debates that this is not the first time a French president has promised to put an end to France-Africa coloniality, including president Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012) and president François Hollande (2012-2017). These presidents always talked about cosmetic change and a change of style in their relationship with Africa, but not the kind of rupture that the counter-summit participants were asking for.

An example of changing styles over time is how from President Charles de Gaulle (1959-1969) to Jacques Chirac (1995-2007), France had a personal relationship with African presidents, in order to maintain its influence on the African continent. The style then changed with Sarkozy and increased with Francois Hollande, with more emphasis and focus on ‘democratisation’, but still insisting on positioning a relationship with politicians and the Élysée (the official residence of the French president). More recently, the gradual disappearance of former dictators in some African countries has not allowed the Élysée to establish personal and deep relations with certain African presidents. Therefore, it was necessary to change the former way of doing things, in order to maintain, above all, the influence of France in Africa.

Sarkozy, who did not appreciate the need to change the old model of the France-Africa relationship, paid dearly in a lawsuit related to his relations with President Muammar al-Gaddaf. Macron thus had no choice but to try and refigure the relationship in a different way. Yet, this does not mean that the core of France-Africa coloniality has altered in any way.

This is what the counter-summit meant in demanding a sign from Macron, showing that there really was a will for radical change. This would consist of France’s commitment towards five very specific points: (a) ending its military presence in Africa, (b) ending the neoliberal trade policy of France and the EU in Africa, (c) stopping support to presidents who remain in power in an undemocratic manner and French interference in the internal political and economic affairs of African countries, (d) cancelling the odious and illegitimate debts of African countries, (e) respecting the freedom of movement and settlement of people as well as putting an end to expulsions of asylum seekers from France in accordance with international treaties.

Some post-colonial thinkers, including Mbembe, argue that we should not only see cynicism in France’s declaration of its desire to improve its relations with Africa. Sometimes the will is there, but differences still appear on the issue of what a healthy multilateral relationship means. Though, we would argue, that beyond cynicism, there is above all an issue of ideological and cognitive incapacity which is at stake in the official French political imagination.

For those who follow topical issues in French politics, there is still in its political world a kind of nostalgia for the French empire, power and influence in the world, which ultimately makes imperialism a criterion of the greatness of a state. According to Achille Mbembe, this deep rationality implies that “France is struggling to enter into the ‘decolonial’ world that is coming” . For this reason, the counter-summit argued that the official summit organised by Mbembe was unable to break with this imperialist baggage which is at the very foundation of the French state.

The empire and its technologies of domination

The cognitive empire sustains colonial relations. It continues to invade the mental universes of its targets. It maintains surveillance over new knowledge which is not informed by colonial and capitalist interests. What sense do we make of the fact that the summit took place within a context in which conservative politicians in alliance with conservative intellectuals were mounting a push-back against critical race theory, intersectionality theory, post-colonial theory, and decolonial thought? These are frameworks that emerged from the battlefields of history and struggles against racism, enslavement, colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. It is these frameworks that the current insurgent and resurgent decolonisation of the 21^st century is building on, with students, youth and other progressive forces at the forefront.

The new world now has a critical language with which to propose and imagine a future beyond racism, colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. The counter-summit was inspired not just by rethinking but unthinking all toxic colonial relations. Summits have been well-known techniques of sugarcoating colonialities. The long history since the 1958 referendum in France has amply demonstrated that colonial relations do not need reform but abolition for any genuinely new relations between France and Africa. What is needed is a double rupture—which is simultaneously epistemic and systemic.

Aymar N. Bisoka is a lawyer and political scientist and assistant professor at the University of Mons. He also teaches at the Catholic Univesity of Bukavu, Congo Democratic Republic of the Congo and is a Meaning-Making Research Initiative (MRI) fellow CODESRIA, Senegal. In addition, Bisoka is a researcher at the Conflict Research Group (CRG) at the University of Ghent, Belgium.

David Mwambari is a Lecturer in African Security and Leadership Studies at the African Leadership Centre, King’s College London and is a Meaning-Making Research Initiative (MRI) fellow CODESRIA, Senegal.

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is the Professorial Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence University of Bayreuth. He is also Honorary Professor, School of Education (Education and Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal (October 2020-September 2023), South Africa

Featured Photograph: Emmanuel Macron speaks at ‘representatives’ of the continent at the Africa-France Summit in Montpellier on 8 October, 2021 (Ludovic Marin).

There is nothing past about historical land injustice

ROAPE

December 9, 2021

Ambreena Manji writes how Kenya still faces intractable land problems, including unequal concentration of land in the hands of the wealthy, land grabbing, landlessness, and unresolved historical land injustices. Manji calls for an acknowledgement of Kenya’s roots deep in regimes of land ownership facilitated first by a settler political economy but maintained in new forms today.

By Ambreena Manji

In 2010, Kenya’s new Constitution promised that ‘Historical Land Injustices’ would be investigated by a new body, the National Land Commission. Legislation passed in 2012 gave effect to this promise. The date for submission of claims has just passed (in September 2021) and this is a good time to reflect on our understanding of historical land injustices.

In their chapter on land in a milestone text entitled Public Law and Political Change in Kenya published in 1970, Yash Ghai and Patrick McAuslan wrote that ‘No part of the law of Kenya has raised stronger emotions over the years than the law relating to land and its administration, and none is of more importance at present.’ Over 10 years since the inauguration of the 2010 Constitution, we are faced with seemingly intractable land problems, including inequitable concentration of land in the hands of the wealthy, a propensity for land grabbing, landlessness, and unresolved historical land injustices.

Over the years, official accounts of the land mischiefs committed by the state, politicians and the elite have been made available in a series of official reports. That land reform was an important demand in the process of constitutional reform – and that it is a key idea in Kenyan history – is beyond doubt. Nonetheless, land reform can mean many things. But land reform has come to be reduced to land law reform. This has excluded critical debates: it has foreclosed discussions of redistributive politics. In fact, Kenya’s gini co-efficient on land has worsened since the inauguration of the 2010 Constitution. It is impossible to understand why without acknowledging the economy’s roots deep in regimes of land ownership that were facilitated first by a settler political economy and then, post-independence, by an elite that reserved for itself access to and ownership of land on a massive scale.

Land wrongs in Kenya do not fit the neat temporal categories of law and policy constructed around terms such as ‘historical land injustice’. The proceeds of land wrongs circulate and recirculate in the economy. Current land injustices shape the country’s political economy. The colonisation of Kenya centred on the redistribution of land from Africans to Europeans, the banning of Africans from owning the most fertile and productive land, and the disbarment of Africans from growing cash crops that might compete with colonial agriculture. Efforts to address the resulting skewed ownership and control of land that was a legacy of colonialism were necessarily a part of the political settlement entailed by decolonisation. It was tied up with ending colonial subjugation, asserting rights to territorial space and, importantly, demanding recognition of the existence and rights of citizens. Kenya’s leaders who emerged out of land reform in this period would cooperate in the preservation of European interests and could be relied upon to check any more militant demands. As Karuti Kanyinga has rightly pointed out, this period saw the defeat of a radical movement by an emerging liberal elite which consolidated its power through controlling both land and the dominant ideologies of land.

Taking racial form in the colonial period, after independence an African elite did not carry out a radical break with this model of land relations. We need to understand, from a political and sociological and not just a legal point of view, how the nature of the colonial state which Yash Ghai has described as being ‘without a trace of constitutionalism’ is linked to the subsequent ‘predatory nature of its descendant, the independent state’.

For those interested in conservatism in other domains, including in personal law, the wider connections are important. Robert H. Bates has convincingly shown in his study of rural transformation in the ‘White Highlands’ and the ‘native reserves’ that political struggles over land rights were also family struggles over kinship. A conservative bent about property rights (and by extension about family, sexuality, and reproductive rights), was built into the new order as it was under construction.

There is scarcely a region of Kenya that has not suffered from historical land injustice, whether by displacement to make way for European settlers or to create game reserves, through evictions for mining concessions or from forests, because of unjust allocations under settlement schemes, or by displacement as a result of politically motivated clashes or irregular and illegal land allocation processes. Although the historical, social, and psychological impacts of these dispossessions cannot be captured by any one description or term, the label ‘historical land injustices’ has come to be used as something of a shorthand for a range of land wrongs. The term has entered policy and legal arenas whilst also having multiple meanings in the everyday language and the daily politics of those struggling over land.

But we must recognise how deeply the present-day economy is rooted in the racial exclusivity of the colonial period which was continued after the end of the colonial period. Dispossession continued when racial exclusivity in access to land was transformed into what Issa Shivji has described as an ethnicized land question. Kenya’s land question cannot be understood apart from its status as a settler economy in which the hegemony exercised by the colonial state underpinned dispossession of land on a massive scale. When the ‘enclave(s) of super-exploitation and racial privilege’ thus created were Kenyanised so that land ownership was no longer racialised, the fundamental relations of production and accumulation did not change.

There is nothing past about historical land injustice. Land injustices are sedimented in the political economy. It is not possible to isolate present and past historical land injustices and it is not possible to understand Kenya’s political economy separate from an understanding of how the normal and the supposedly abnormal (corruption, land grabbing) are co-dependent. Historical land injustices have never been sealed off from apparently ‘properly functioning’ politics and economics.

Taking seriously the continuities between the colonial past and the recolonising practices of the present enables us to connect historical and present land injustices. Intricately connected, the land injustices of the past enable and deepen those of the present, structuring the economy, determining who owns what, and deeply affecting class formation. Although a neat temporal break is inscribed in law and policy by the distinction between past and present land wrongs, this is conceptually inaccurate. If we are to think meaningfully about Kenya’s ‘settler colonial present’ we need to keep in mind the structures of dispossession created by and since colonialism. Forced taking and violent dispossession is not incidental to the economy but is fundamental to it.

We can draw parallels here with the legal framework for land restitution in South Africa which similarly failed to grasp the psychological and social harms done by apartheid but, as Theunis Roux has argued, framed land wrongs as unjust seizures that could be reversed. It viewed apartheid as a legal scheme, and which therefore assumed it could simply be ‘unlegislated’. However, to claim historical land injustices have been committed is also to claim that spiritual harms have been caused by dispossession that cannot easily be reversed. Finding a language for these harms when before the law courts has been a major challenge. For example, when making such claims, indigenous peoples such as the Ogiek, Sengwer or Endorois have met with scepticism and suspicion.

Calls by indigenous groups for recognition can also inherently be calls for a different way of distributing resources and power within the state. Failed by the post-independence state first by being deprived of access to their most vital means of production (such as grazing cattle) and reproduction (for example, religious and cultural rites), and then by a failure of the courts to recognise their legal claims, indigenous people illustrate the ongoing struggle against land injustice.

This blog follows the British Institute in East Africa (BIEA) annual lecture ‘Dispossession is Nine Tenths of the Law’ delivered by Ambreena Manji on 3 November 2021. The lecture is available to watch here.

Ambreena Manji is Professor of Land Law and Development at Cardiff School of Law and Politics. She is the author of The struggle for land and justice in Kenya (James Currey/ Brewer & Boydell 2020).

Featured Photograph: members of a farming group in Machakos, Kenya farms a small plot where they grow oranges, avocados, vegetables, maize (14 October 2010).

‘Any bystander is a coward or a traitor’ – Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary challenge

ROAPE

December 6, 2021

Sixty years after his death from leukemia at the age of 36 on 6 December 1961, and the publication of The Wretched of the Earth, Timothy Wild reviews a new book which reminds us of the relevance of Frantz Fanon. Fanon’s work, Wild argues, continues to engage people by its brilliance, rage, analysis, and hope that the poor can be the authors of their own destiny.

By Timothy Wild

From the end of May until a few days before Remembrance Day (November 11) flags at Canadian public buildings were flown at half-mast. This unusual occurrence was in recognition of the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves containing the remains of Indigenous children on the sites of former Indian Residential Schools. The unearthing of the graves shocked many non-Indigenous Canadians, but it came as no surprise to Indigenous Peoples themselves who had long maintained that the graves were there and more would be discovered. They knew that some of their children never came home from these institutions; but their concerns went unheard or were dismissed. Many of the children who did return home were scarred for life, and this trauma then had an impact on the psychosocial wellbeing of future generations. Overall, this chapter is yet another tragic dimension in the history of settler colonialism in Canada.

Residential Schools, the last of which closed in the mid-1990s, were an instrument purposefully designed to undermine the culture and nuanced connections of Indigenous Peoples to time, each other, and the environment. The government and mainstream Christian Churches acted in strategic solidarity in a long campaign structured to annihilate Indigenous cultures, both figuratively and literally. The schools were just one of the tools used by settlers, and their superstructure, to impose control over the totality of economic, social, cultural, and extractive relations. This campaign has resulted in social dislocation, loss of resources (including land and natural resources) and inter-generational trauma and marks the fact that the dark history of colonialism is still an eternal present in post-colonial Canada.

Part of my journey of understanding this dark history has involved reading and re-reading books on this ever-present historical tragedy, and that’s how I approached a closer study of Glen Sean Coulthard’s book Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Legacies of Recognition (2014). Using the work of the Martiniquen born, French educated and Algerian by choice psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) as a foundation – particularly Black Skin, White Masks – Coulthard argues that the conventional politics of recognition currently undertaken in Canada needs to evolve into “a resurgent politics of recognition premised on self-actualization, direct action and the resurgence of cultural practices that are attentive to the subjective and structural composition of settler-colonial power”. In expanding on Marx by, for example, considering the impact of dispossession of land, as opposed to implementation of proletarian status on Indigenous Peoples, Coulthard applies a Fanonist framework to the current operation of neo-colonialism in Canada, and blends the psychology of the individual with the structural of the collective in his trenchant analysis and, equally important, call for action.

Obviously, the need for attention to the ongoing alienation and dislocation caused by colonialism in postcolonial societies is not only a Canadian phenomenon. The ongoing importance and wide-spread influence of Frantz Fanon in terms of both theory and practice reflects that fact. Admittedly, there have been highs and lows in terms of Fanon’s place in the academic canon, due in large part to criticism regarding his framing of the role of violence in the process of decolonization, together with the fashionable disregard for meta-theories of liberation. However, his works continue to inform counter-hegemonic theory and practice around the world, and his words and ideas are as refreshing as ever. Fanon continues to engage people by his brilliance, his candour, his analysis, his guarded optimism and his sense of people being agents in their own destiny.

Coming sixty years after the publication of The Wretched of the Earth and his death from leukemia at the age of 36, Fanon Today: Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth, edited by activist and scholar Nigel Gibson, provides a solid overview of the relevance of Frantz Fanon to the work of those of us who still believe that a just and humane world is both necessary and possible. Throughout the volume the contributors provide space and examples of a Fanonist development of radical humanism, which provides for the psychological development of the person within the context of consciousness raising, collective action and structural change. Through a variety of examples, the book also clearly demonstrates the fact that the agents of change do not simply have to be the usual suspects of the industrial working class but includes – and must include – the peasantry and the various manifestations of the lumpenproletariat. As noted by Gibson, “Fanon’s new humanism is a politics of becoming, based on the fundamental transformation of paralyzed Black and colonized subjects into new human beings through the liberation struggle” (p. 300).

Gibson then modestly concedes that the volume is “by no means exhaustive: it is rather something fragmentary, reflecting the moment” (p. 9). While that is a fair statement – I will comment on some of the gaps later – the bottom line is that this is an excellent book and marks Gibson’s long-standing commitment to ensuring that Fanon remains accessible and relevant to a wide-range of audiences, academic and popular. The theory is certainly there. All the chapters, for example, pay attention to the role of consciousness-raising, the psychological trauma (indeed mental illness) caused by oppression, the blend of individual development and collective growth, the need for democratic discourse and leadership, and the destructive role played by the national bourgeoisie in alliance with outside forces.

However, in line with Fanon and respect for the development of mass support and organic intellectuals, the theoretical content of the book is woven together in a wonderfully accessible collection of essays demonstrating the ongoing importance of Fanon in a range of settings and on a diversity of social issues. Taken together the work provides multiple examples of the emancipatory potential of the “living politic” which is “the thought from the ground about the reality of our lives” as discussed by the South African activist S’bu Zikode (p. 124).

The book is divided into three sections. The first section contains several chapters written by ‘Fanon Militants’ and provides essays on Fanonist practices in a number of settings including Kenya, Trinidad and Tobago, South Africa, and Palestine. For me, the core element of this section can be found in the idea of “consciousness raising”. Subjects covered include the use of radio by a diverse group of women in England as a means of developing a person’s optimal psycho-social functioning, the deconstruction of the class and gender ridden term “White Syrian” and what it means to confronting the brutal Assad regime, and the experience of being Black facing daily racism, “systematic terror” and micro-aggressions in an overtly racist Portugal and Trinidad and Tobago, casting people into a zone of “non-being”.

The impact of Fanon on Black Consciousness is also clearly animated in this initial section of the book. Chapters on Fanon and the emergence of “New Afrikan Communism” and his influence of Black people imprisoned by the prison-industrial complex are two of the themes specifically associated with that longstanding link. A particular highlight of this section was contained in a chapter written by Toussaint Losier where he discussed the role played by Owusu Yaki Yakubu and how he developed a way to closely read Fanon which would engage his fellow prisoners, including those held largely incommunicado in the brutality of long-term solidarity confinement. The extension of Marxist thought, together with a dash of Freud and Hegel, shines through in this section in the intersection of race, gender and class. Taken together this section provides a mix of those structural variables, and how they fit together as an organic whole rather than a linear progression of mutually exclusive sociological categories.

The second section – ‘Still Fanon’ – moves into a more theoretical approach to the application of Fanon to transformative change and provides a number of excellent examples of why Fanon is still relevant and, perhaps more importantly, needed as a guide to engaged mass political action. As noted by, for example, David Pavon-Cuellar, in a passionate call for change and justice makes the important point that the “Wretched of the Earth are still here”. Pavon-Cuellar does not mince words and he insists on using the term “Third World” as opposed to “Global South” in his analysis. He argues the point that the historical example of de jure decolonization has not actually provided for the wellbeing of the rural and urban poor. Building upon the remarkable resilience of capitalism to do what it needs to ensure its domination and insatiable appetite, Pavon-Cuellar notes that “Colonialism had to change to stay the same” (p. 233). He puts it bluntly when he argues that the “current globalization of this neoliberal capitalism is the consummation of colonialism. Similarly, imperialism triumphs and disguises itself in the new global consensus” (p. 246).

Building upon this blend of passion and informed analysis, a major theme in this section of the book is related to the role played by the “national bourgeoisie” in terms of propping up the systems of oppression, exactly as highlighted by Fanon himself. The article by Ayyaz Mallick on Pakistan gives clear examples of the role played by national governments in terms of meeting the similar needs of a variety of global players, such as China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States, and the crises that result from this difficult balance.

Nigel Gibson contributes an important contextualizing chapter to this section of the book where he locates Fanon as both “a clinical practitioner and as a political practitioner” within the dynamic of movement. By paying attention to both the internalization of colonial messages and the environment constructed by post-colonial capitalist relations, Fanon provides a way to support the development of “disalienation” and the common good. As noted by Gibson, reflecting the dynamic of theory and practice has to be undertaken in unity with the people and is related to an evolving and tentative process of becoming, rather than a static case of being “…a moment of becoming is always incomplete. For me, this is an essential element of Fanon’s anti-formalist dialectic” (p. 283).

The final section of the book is loosely arranged around the idea of Fanon’s homes, essentially places he lived (such as Algeria in “The New Algerian Revolution”, the chapter by Hamza Hamouchene) together with places where his thinking has had a significant impact. These include the influence Fanon had on Black Consciousness in America, excellently chronicled by Lou Turner and Kurtis Kelley and on the growth of the Irish Language in the North of Ireland, powerfully presented by Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh. To me, however, this section was the most uneven in terms of readability. For example, I found the essay on postcolonial criticism and theory too academic for a book that attempted to make Fanon more accessible.

This may also have been related to the fact that this section also contained the transcription of a meeting between some of the leaders of the South African landless activist group Abahlali baseMjondolo and Nigel Gibson, which was beautiful in its integrity, honesty and dignity. What spoke to me most about this particular chapter was that it provided a sense of Fanon happening in real time and spoke to Gibson’s demonstrated desire to link Fanon with “the reader’s own lived experience” (p. 10). In this discussion, Gibson provided an overview of certain sections of The Wretched of the Earth – which he prefers to call Les damnes de la terre in its original French – and then members of Abahlali baseMjondolo spoke about concrete application of Fanon’s works. To my mind at least, this chapter made the essential point that “awakening is a constant process” (p. 433). By putting Fanon into this process, and extending our understanding of Marxism, the argument is made that this can result in a “living communism” (p. 433).

The second section of the third part of the volume, dealt exclusively with Brazil, and contained essays on COVID-19 and the impact on Black people in Brazil together with pieces on “Black Female Intellectual Production” and one on the economic exploitation of Amazonia. These were undoubtedly interesting pieces, and they dealt with pressing socio-political issues related to the daily operation of both neocolonialism and neoliberalism. However, it is still unclear to me why Brazil was chosen as a focused topic for this section. Fanon noted that Rio as a city and construct was an offence to Indigenous people, and talked about the exploitation of young Brazilian women, but why three chapters were devoted to specific issues in Brazil was not immediately apparent. As mentioned, the issues are important, but they could have been examined within other contexts, particularly given Gibson’s previous comment about the content not being exhaustive.

Inevitably a lot is left out, and the list of what should or could have been included will be large, depending on one’s area(s) of interest. For example, I felt that more attention could have been given to Indigenous politics and Fanon in North America. As I have suggested, Coulthard has made a solid contribution to this nexus and that foundation could certainly be built upon, and it would have blended well with the work of Abahlali baseMjondolo and the need for a decommodification of land.

Furthermore, although there was an essay on racial and class-based injustice in Trinidad and Tobago, a chapter on current events in the Caribbean would have been useful, especially given Fanon’s relationship to the area, particularly the French Caribbean. I would also like to have seen greater attention to the ongoing influence of Fanon in southern Africa. I know that this was neither a history nor a biography, and Gibson has commented significantly elsewhere on Fanon and South Africa, but the influence of Bantu Stephen Biko was tremendous, both in and out of the country. In the South African Communist Party, though they continue to maintain the idea of a two-stage revolution, there were individuals who had read and digested Fanon – Chris Hani for one. Further analysis of this in relationship to the neocolonial project of white monopoly capital would certainly have been welcomed. I would also have liked to read about what role, if any, Fanon has played on the political consciousness of Zambians and civil society, given their almost textbook experience with neocolonial relations, extractive commodity dependence, the wrath of international funders, the IMF’s Structural Adjustment forays and, most lately, crippling foreign debt to both China and Europe.

Finally, in light of the selfies, compromises, the self-serving displays of Clinton, Blair and Obama, and empty promises of COP26 in Glasgow, I think a discussion of Fanon and his impact on eco-socialism would have been of considerable merit and could also serve to engage a new field of activists, especially younger people. I believe that Fanon’s notions of consciousness raising, and healthy ego functioning, lend themselves directly to a green movement. I regard this as a missed opportunity in the book, especially when issues related to the alienation of land, the neocolonial extraction of resources and the psychosocial implications of environmental change for the rural poor and lumpenproletariat where themes raised throughout the book. Fanon can certainly inform the eco-socialist movement, by literally placing the person within their environment.

Still, Gibson’s volume is an excellent companion to Fanon’s works. It is not only suggestive of how one can read Fanon, but also how it can be applied in a transformative politics. The bibliographies accompanying many of the chapters provide the reader with specific area and topic guides.

Ultimately, though, the major point is that Fanon is still relevant sixty years after his death in 1961. As he wrote in The Wretched of the Earth “[e]ach generation must discover its mission, fulfill or betray it, in relative opacity”. Certainly, a much-needed call to action. Individuals continue to be subject to the daily pain of alienation, they experience the daily indignity of threats to their various and multiple experiences of well-being. Millions face very real threats to their survival, both physical and psychological. Despite the hope that existed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, decolonialization did not help people on the social, cultural, and economic margins of these newly “independent” nations. The national bourgeoisie mimicked their colonial masters and enriched themselves at the expense of the poor. The brutality simply took another form, and the exploitation continues apace.

Nigel Gibson and the other contributors to the book remind us that Fanon can help support the process of disalienation and promote opportunities for hope over fear; but this needs democratic relationships and the ability to listen. It also requires not only consciousness but the will to collectively act on that collective awareness. Following from this it requires organization. As suggested by Pavon-Cueller, “The still wretched of the earth need from their allied intellectuals the continued reading of Fanon in a militant, politically committed way, and not just for academic research or reflection” (p. 246). As the book constantly reminds us, we need Fanon to help animate the struggle so we can all breathe more freely and easily.

Nigel Gibson, ed., Fanon Today: Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth (Daraja Press 2021).

Timothy Wild is a social worker in Calgary, Canada. He has worked with the JCTR in Lusaka, Zambia and he is particularly interested in the intersection of community development and social policy.

Structural inequalities and the political economy of citizenship

ROAPE

November 30, 2021

By Baindu Kallon

Baindu Kallon reviews Robtel Neajai Pailey’s new book, Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa, which looks at dual citizenship and unpacks the relationship between citizenship, identity and development in Liberia, Africa’s first Black republic. The issues in the book, Baindu argues, reflect the lasting legacies of structural inequalities and exclusion that have shaped Liberians both at home and abroad.

The discourse around dual citizenship, or being a national of more than one country, is often praised as a move towards progress. It recognises that people move and that their identities and feelings of belonging transcend borders while identifying dual citizenship as a tool for encouraging economic development in the homeland. There is an extensive body of research on diaspora finance, remittances and diaspora investments, and its impact on economic growth and stability. But is dual citizenship as transformational as it seems? Robtel Neajai Pailey’s book Development, (Dual) Citizenship and Its Discontents in Africa examines this question by unpacking the relationship between citizenship, identity and development in Liberia, Africa’s first Black republic. Through interviews and analysis of the political economy and history of Liberia, Pailey illustrates an “unresolved historical crisis of citizenship”, which impacts the effectiveness of dual citizenship as a solution to further Liberian development (123). Thus, the debate on dual citizenship is not just a question of identity nor is it only a potential avenue towards development. Rather it reflects the lasting legacies of structural inequalities and exclusion that have shaped Liberians both at home and abroad.

Reproducing inequalities? Citizenship for homelanders and the diaspora

The discourse around dual citizenship in Liberia came to the forefront in 2008. Four senators introduced a bill that would allow Liberians by birth and foreign-born children to retain two citizenships. The bill was controversial and has yet to be passed, making Liberia one of seven African countries that do not recognise dual citizenship. Pailey explores the controversy surrounding dual citizenship through the voices of homelanders in Liberia’s capital Monrovia and Liberians in the diaspora, specifically London (UK); Freetown (Sierra Leone); Accra (Ghana); Washington D.C. (United States). It’s important to note the inclusion of Accra and Freetown as locations where the Liberian diaspora reside. In scholarship on diasporas and migration, far too often the focus is on the migrant journey from the “Global South” to the “Global North”. This focus ignores the fact that south-south migration, within subregions, is much more prevalent (33). Thus, by adding the voices of Liberians in Freetown and Accra, Pailey challenges the mainstream narrative and addresses a critical gap in migration and diaspora studies.

Pailey interviews more than 200 Liberians, dispersing and analysing their opinions and experiences through the book. These interviews are a key strength of the book. Their insights anchor theories on citizenship into active practices and interactions that Liberians navigate. Action, in Pailey’s analysis, is viewed through the lens of development. This could include moving back home to rebuild Liberia after the country’s civil war (1989-2003), paying taxes to the Liberian government or engaging with diaspora organisations. Interaction refers to the role of the Liberian government and their engagement with citizens abroad and at home as well as citizen-citizen engagement. For the homelanders and those in the diaspora, the expression of citizenship is not only about legal entitlements and rights but also how this is translated into the practice of developing the country and interaction with the Liberian state.

The political economy of belonging

Pailey connects these markings of citizenship through the term the political economy of belonging. Coined by Pailey, the political economy of belonging views citizenship from three lenses: identity (passive), practice (active), and a set of relations (interactive). These actions are shaped by “a set of practices and interactions embodied in the life-worlds and social locations of actors in Liberia and across transnational spaces” (51). In other words, citizenship for Liberians is shaped by lived experiences and their location. This in turn impacts how they practice citizenship as well as their interactions with both the state and other citizens. These varying experiences come to head within the debate on dual citizenship.

The respondents’ life experiences and ability to practice citizenship is rooted in their socio-economic positions. With recent mass emigration and armed conflicts, the changes in socio-economic positions created “diametrically opposed” life experiences that reinforce broader structural inequalities (108). For example, some in the diaspora, specifically in Western countries, view dual citizenship as a means to further development, given their ability financially to invest in property, build businesses or engage directly with capacity building in Liberia. However, some homelanders argued that granting dual citizenship would further widen the gap between the rich and poor. This points to the issue of income inequality in post-conflict Liberia. Homelanders are paid by the government at much lower “local” rates versus the diaspora who have returned home. The varying experiences of Liberians also point to unequal access in terms of land tenure, as returnees aim to claim their abandoned land that homelanders have taken over. Often these varying socio-economic positions reflect and reinforce structural inequalities. This in turn shapes the dual citizenship debate from the perspective of those in the diaspora and homelanders.

Linking the discourse around citizenship to structural inequalities is important to note. As Pailey rightly points out, the conversation around dual citizenship is one about Human Rights in a globalised world where people are increasingly more mobile. While this is true, motivations behind migration journeys, as to why people move and who stays behind, are nuanced. Migration is also a question of one’s ability to travel, gender, social connections, finances – all of which are tied and reflected in the broader global inequalities. The discourse on dual citizenship and development often divorces it from the complexities of the relationship between global inequalities and migration. Failing to do so presents a narrow view of citizenship and it’s often from the perspective of the diasporas and development organisations in the West rather than the homelanders themselves. To grapple with the true impact of dual citizenship, the discourse must be grounded in a greater understanding of its relationship with structural inequalities.

Pailey explores what could be argued as a quite clear divide between homelanders and those in the diaspora, specifically based in London and Washington D.C. One group is for dual citizenship while the other is against it. Yet less discussed in this conversation are the experiences of those based in the “near” diasporas of Accra and Freetown. For them, the conversation is more nuanced. Pailey touches on the reasons why briefly – ranging from the fluidity of identity between Sierra Leoneans and Liberians to the fact that many Liberians in Accra and Freetown are registered as refugees. Given this, what does the experience of being a refugee mean in terms of citizenship and belonging? Would the “near” diaspora, specifically those who are not refugees, benefit from dual citizenship or also further raise tensions between homelanders. For Pailey, these questions fall outside of the scope of the book, given the fact that those based in Western countries are much more likely to be engaged in development via government institutions and external donors. However, given the need for a greater understanding of the experiences of migrants in the Global South, a deeper examination of citizenship and identity for those in the “near” diasporas is much needed.

A history of conflict and post-war development

Citizenship, and its connection to socio-economic inequalities, can be identified through Liberia’s history – from the founding of the nation-state by Black settlers to post-war contestation over income, land tenure and transitional justice. As Liberia transitioned from a country of immigration to emigration so did the configuration of citizenship for Liberians. Initially, with the arrival of the Black settlers, citizenship was passive. It was conditional and “excluded all non-blacks and most indigenous, women, and non-Christians” who predominantly resided outside of the capital (113). With the rise of Charles Taylor in the 1990s, citizenship became active through protest and ultimately armed conflict. Rural spaces previously excluded from citizenship took arms to unseat “an elitist urban leadership made of autocrats” (126). Within this transition from passive to active is the underlying political, social and economic inequalities that were reinforced through citizenship. It created “tiers of citizenship”, life experiences shaped by structural inequalities, which carry through to post-war Liberia today (113).

With post-war reconstruction came the return of those from the diaspora, as many transnational Liberians took positions of power in the government. Pailey refers to this dominance of Liberians from abroad in homeland policies as a ‘diaspocracy’ (199). In neoliberal development practice and policy, returnees are seen as a positive force for change and development. Members of the diaspora coming home are “experts” and can help “recommit Liberia to the peripheral capitalist path to development” (182). Often this development path is driven by international organisations and NGOs, and it has so far generated little in terms of improving the lives of the ordinary Liberians. While some repatriates challenge this neoliberal development, many actively support it, though it may well prove detrimental for the country. As noted throughout the book, returnees can often be out of touch with the conditions and needs of homelanders. Given this, the policies and initiatives pushed, in line with external post-war development programmes, often do not reflect the domestic realities. With a lack of homelanders involved in the government, the viewpoints from the ground are often lost when creating a national agenda, leading to mixed outcomes from development initiatives.

Additionally, the return of the diaspora gives rise to “a new political elite…” (201). Some homelanders felt that this new political class invalidated their professional experiences and knowledge “thus resulting in low levels of motivation and outputs” (202). On the one hand, the divide between homelanders and returnees reinforces the power imbalances that helped spur Liberia’s armed conflicts in the first place. Again, tiers of citizenship emerge within the political sphere as one group is valued and prioritised over another. On the other hand, it also reflects a broader, global perspective that prioritises knowledge from those in the West, and subsequently places it at a higher value whether through coveted government positions, compensation or more. In development discourse, there are growing calls to “decolonise” the sector through localisation, a way to enable communities to lead development efforts. Yet localisation perpetuates the same colonial system, one where expertise, funding and knowledge continue to be concentrated with the Western-educated elites, rather than adapting to those closely linked to local realities.

What does it mean to be a citizen?

Who gets to claim Liberian citizenship? Is it the returnee from London, the Liberian with refugee status in Accra or the homelander living in Monrovia? Pailey unpacks the debate of dual citizenship by sharing the life stories of Liberians at home and abroad (read a recent interview with Pailey on roape.net here). Their narratives reflect the broader structures of development, inequalities and post-war nation-building. Doing so outlines how citizenship can be a tool for post-conflict development as well as a vehicle to reinforce inequalities. For a continent that too often sees its conflicts and subsequent post-conflict solutions reduced to regional, ethnic or religious identities, Pailey’s book is a refreshing and nuanced take on post-war peacebuilding. It illustrates that citizenship is not just a question of identity, nor is it a stagnant set of legal rights and privileges. Instead, it is constantly reconstructed and renegotiated through life experiences of Liberians that are shaped by the structural inequalities that impact the country and more broadly the African continent today.

Baindu Kallon holds a MA in African Studies from SOAS and has a keen interest in economic development and migration policy in West Africa. Baindu is a community activist and works with black creatives in the UK.

Featured Photograph: Built in 1957, the Capitol Building in Monrovia is the seat of the country’s bicameral legislature (David Stanley, 12 March 2012).

China’s spatial fix and Africa’s debt reckoning

ROAPE

November 25, 2021

Ahead of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), Tim Zajontz looks at the immense amounts of debt African governments owe Chinese lenders. This debt is central to capitalist accumulation and financial extraction from the African continent. Zajontz argues that Chinese capital is now pivotal to the global circuit of capital and China, just like other creditors, uses debt for the conquest of Africa and its resources.

By Tim Zajontz

From 29-30 November, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) will gather for the first time since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic at the ministerial level. While the official narrative around the 8^th FOCAC meeting in Dakar reiterates ‘win-win cooperation’ (合作共赢) and promises to ‘Deepen China-Africa Partnership and Promote Sustainable Development to Build a China-Africa Community with a Shared Future in the New Era’, the unburdened enthusiasm that once surrounded high-level FOCAC meetings is long gone. Particularly, the immense amounts of debt that some African governments owe Chinese lenders have become a delicate issue affecting Africa-China relations. Several African governments are currently negotiating with creditors and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) how to restructure and manage their debts. It is clear now that, after a decade of unfettered lending from Chinese and non-Chinese creditors, the post-pandemic ‘payback period’ will come at immense social costs. Africa’s debt owed to China will therefore be high up on the agenda of in camera meetings between African and Chinese officials in Dakar.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic added urgency to the matter, China’s rise to become the world’s largest bilateral creditor, holding 57% of low-income countries’ bilateral debt in 2020, has caused controversies in African capitals and beyond. Chinese overseas lending has been infamously branded as ‘debt trap diplomacy’ and politically instrumentalised by the Trump administration and other hypocrites in the West. The latter have been quick to accuse China of leveraging its influence in Africa through loans, whilst they have usually remained entirely silent regarding the complicity of Western capital in the systematic underdevelopment of the continent. There have since been commendable research efforts to demystify the ‘debt trap’ narrative and to shed light (especially by means of more reliable data) on a topic that is complicated by the opacity pertaining to African debt exposure to China. Accordingly, the China-Africa Project, a news outlet covering Africa-China relations, has recently put to rest the narrative of a ‘Chinese debt trap diplomacy’.

In a recent article in ROAPE, I reflect on the scholarly debate on debt in the rapidly growing field of China-Africa studies and call for a critical research agenda which problematises the function of debt in late capitalism and calls into question dominant development paradigms and policies that have sustained Africa’s financial dependency. According to World Bank figures, the external debt stock of ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’ has more than doubled throughout the 2010s, from $305 billion in 2010 to $705 billion in 2020.

After highly indebted African states had seen debt write-offs under multilateral debt relief initiatives in the 2000s, Africa’s current debt cycle commenced against the background of the ‘commodities super cycle’ and related ‘Africa rising’ narratives. African governments, now with relatively clean balance sheets, rushed onto global capital markets, and increasingly to Chinese policy banks, to sign bonds, loans and export credits. Debt accumulation in Africa has since been further fuelled by the now hegemonic paradigm of ‘infrastructure-led development’, which, as described by Seth Schindler and J. Miguel Kanai, is promoted by a ‘global growth coalition’ that advocates ‘financing and financializing infrastructure’ to get African ‘territories right’ for their seamless integration into global markets.

Much of the scholarly debate around African debt owed to China has been focused on providing an evidence-based corrective to the ‘debt trap narrative’ – doubtlessly a commendable effort. However, we must not risk reducing debt to its discourse but expose its centrality to capitalist accumulation generally and financial extraction from the African continent in particular. Just like capital, debt is a social relation marked by asymmetrical material relations and power differentials between debtor and lender. As Tim Di Muzio and Richard Robbins argue in Debt as Power, ‘debt within capitalist modernity is a social technology of power […]. In capitalism, the prevailing logic is the logic of differential accumulation, and given that debt instruments far outweigh equity instruments, we can safely claim that interest-bearing debt is the primary way in which economic inequality is generated as more money is redistributed to creditors.’ It is primarily the asymmetry inherent to the debt relationship and resultant power differentials – not only the politicised ‘debt trap’ narrative, flawed and problematic as it is – that have made it increasingly difficult for the Chinese government to sustain official narratives that suggest the horizontality of relations between China and the global South.

Chinese (state) capital is now pivotal to the global circuit of capital and, just like other creditors, employs the social technology of debt in Africa and elsewhere. The massive increase in Chinese overseas lending over the last two decades has been central to efforts to address chronic overaccumulation within the Chinese economy through what David Harvey called ‘spatio-temporal fixes’, the geographical expansion and temporal deferral (for instance by means of debt financing) of surplus capital. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has become the superstructure to organise a series of such ‘fixes’ and the African continent – in line with the logic of uneven geographical development that is inherent to capitalism – a welcome outlet for Chinese surplus materials and finance capital.

It is now clear that several African governments have overextended themselves by taking on unsustainable amounts of loan financing (both from Chinese and non-Chinese sources). While Chinese lenders have been lenient to reschedule debt payments amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, African governments cannot expect blanket debt forgiveness from Beijing. China’s current spatio-temporal fixes need to see returns eventually.

As the IMF is yet again visiting Addis Ababa, Lusaka, and Nairobi to resurrect fiscal discipline and to ensure debtor compliance for the post-pandemic payback period, it is high time to acknowledge that periodic cycles of debt financing, debt distress and structural adjustment are systemic features of Africa’s integration into the global capitalist economy. It seems apposite to remember Thomas Sankara who – three months before his assassination in 1987 – argued that, ‘controlled and dominated by imperialism, debt is a skilfully managed reconquest of Africa, intended to subjugate its growth and development’. At the time, several African countries had plunged into severe debt crises which paved the way for externally ‘prescribed’ structural adjustment programmes and heralded the era of disciplinary neoliberalism, long before the latter ravaged capitalist heartlands.

Today, three and a half decades after Sankara’s famous speech at the Summit of the Organisation of African Unity, history appears to repeat itself, as Africa is yet again grappling with ‘the issue of debt’. It remains to be seen whether this time around African leaders can form the ‘united front against debt’ that Sankara called for in 1987. The upcoming FOCAC ministerial meeting in Dakar will give a first indication to this effect.

Tim’s article in ROAPE, ‘Debt, distress, dispossession: towards a critical political economy of Africa’s financial dependency’ is available to access for free until the end of December.

Tim Zajontz is a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Freiburg, Germany, as well as a research fellow in the Centre for International and Comparative Politics at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. @TZajontz

Featured Photograph: Chinese President Xi Jinping walks with former South African President Jacob Zuma to the Union Buildings in Pretoria (2 December, 2014).

Social Policy in Africa: The root causes of social problems

ROAPE

November 23, 2021

Anna Wolkenhauer commends a new book, Social Policy in the African Context, edited by ROAPE’s Jimi Adesina, which rescues social policy from the assault of neoliberalism by carving out the necessary space for sovereign and transformative policymaking that can tackle the “root causes” of social problems. With its timely and important intervention into the debates on radical social policy in Africa, this collection, she argues, contributes a significant step forward.

By Anna Wolkenhauer

Achieving socio-economic equality and development is an unfinished project on the African continent. While grand visions exist, many national and global initiatives remain piecemeal and palliative, certainly since the neoliberal turn. Although the reigning dominant doctrine for development includes a concern for welfare, much social policymaking has been criticised for being too narrowly concerned with poverty reduction and thus insufficient for making a significant dent in existing power relations. Especially in a development context, however, social policy must address the larger picture by connecting issues of production, reproduction and protection, as Thandika Mkandawire has so powerfully argued. He called for acknowledging and fostering the transformative potential of social policy, and his intellectual legacy is a gift in the continuing pursuit of transformation on the continent. After his death on 27 March last year, it now falls to his long-time companions as well as the new generation of scholars to keep the agenda alive. The volume reviewed in this blogpost, edited by ROAPE’s Jimi O. Adesina and published by CODESRIA in August this year, is dedicated to Thandika and his vision – it makes for a worthy tribute.

The professed aim of Social Policy in an African Context is to rescue social policy from the assault of neoliberalism by carving out the necessary intellectual space for sovereign and transformative policymaking that is able to tackle the “root causes” of social problems, as Adesina argues. Indeed, the book argues that visionary policies require intellectual grounding, reflection, and innovation; scholarship that conceptually expands the universe of thinkable strategies and empirically interrogates the appropriateness and effectiveness of social interventions. The book is based on the Social Policy in Africa conference of 2017 (which takes place bi-annually, again on 22-24 November, 2021) and assembles a total of 14 chapters, which study social policy in a variety of country contexts and fields. While each would merit a thorough review on its own, I will concentrate on what I consider the key overriding insights that the contributions collectively produce. Overall, the book constitutes an important step forward for critical social policy scholarship but also demonstrates that there remains a lot left to be done not only in formulating emancipatory visions but also in understanding better the impoverished form of social policy that we are up against.

What becomes more than clear throughout this volume is the importance of adopting a long-term view on social policy and seeing it as part and parcel of the ongoing project of decolonisation, development, and nation-building, as Tade Akin Aina argues in the second chapter of the book: “Africa needs to move towards sustainable, inclusive and democratic development more than ever before” (p. 13). Social policy develops over the longue durée; welfare states need to be negotiated and borne by all relevant social forces: governments, formal and informal workers, and society at large. In Africa, this process has been cut short, and the current focus on social policy must be seen as a return to what had essentially started at independence. As Katja Hujo argues in chapter three, the formation of social policy systems began long ago but was “aborted prematurely, with the state losing its steering and coordinating function in both social and economic policy” (p. 35). I see this and Aina’s claim that “the aims of the African project remain fundamentally unchanged yet unfulfilled over the past five decades” (p. 20) to be very much in line with how Thandika Mkandawire spoke about “Africa rising” some years ago, emphasising that the growth at the time was actually a recovery from the recession that structural adjustment had produced during Africa’s “lost decades”. In this unfinished recovery, social policy has a vital role to play.

A comparison with welfare states in other parts of the world, even though they have developed in different political moments, illustrates that welfare state building takes time. German health insurance, for example, has been scaled up over many decades until it covered all professions and citizens. In the book, Augustine I. Omoruan uses the German, Thai and Rwandan examples to understand why the Nigerian health insurance scheme is not achieving its goal of universal coverage. Having been developed as a response to the negative consequences of privatising healthcare during the 1980s and 1990s, the challenges for the scheme are manifold, including a large rural population, lack of solidarity, inadequate resource mobilisation, the fragmentation of the scheme itself, and the lack of cross-financing with other schemes. The cross-country comparison shows how these challenges might be tackled but also that strategic policy learning and consistency will be key.

Linking social policy and employment, despite wide-spread informal working relationships, is one aspect of the transformative agenda, according to Katja Hujo. She holds that this will require strengthening the bargaining position of informal workers and ensuring that both sectors become interlinked within the construction of a welfare state. She also reminds us that, ultimately, social policy cannot be divorced from economic policies, not least because widening the resource base through economic diversification will be one important component in ensuring sustainable social policy financing.

The importance of thinking about social and economic policies in tandem is highlighted in two chapters that focus on agriculture, a field of growing importance. Clement Chipenda makes clear, based on his research in Zimbabwe, that social protection gains in effectiveness when preceded by the redistribution of land. The Fast.Track Land Reform provided a way for farmers to become food secure by enabling them to build granaries, it provided them with shelter, allowed them to have family gardens and to keep livestock. Where coupled with the provision of farming inputs, the benefits could be exploited even more effectively. Yet, there is often a tendency to prevent the same households from benefiting under more than one scheme, which runs the risk of missing out on important synergy effects. Newman Tekwa then drives the point home that land reform alone, if not coupled with other services, can only achieve so much, and might even have adverse effects, for instance when women need to off-set the “shortfall that results from the deficient provision of social infrastructure” (p. 81).

Aligning social with other policies requires state capacity, and in many places, this, too, needs to be re-built. The chapter by Marion Ouma and Jimi O. Adesina shows not only that state actors are often aware of the need for seeing social policy as part of a larger developmental process, but also that the state is often side-lined by donors who promote specific social policy models based on their own interests. Their discussion substantiates the importance of carving out that space for sovereign policymaking, which will require capacity at all levels of the state. Moreover, social policy not only requires administrative capacity, it also must rest on a broader sense of community and solidarity. At the macro-level, such nation-building has historically been one of the overriding aims that social policy was meant to serve.

Ndangwa Noyoo and Emmanuel Boon make this very clear in their comparison of Zambia and Ghana, where equity and delivering economic growth for everyone were part of decolonisation and development. Kaunda and Nkrumah invested in manufacturing, agriculture as well as universal social services to lend credibility to the new nations. Without idealising either of the two leaders, the authors argue that what had been set in motion after independence could well hold important lessons going forward.

While nation-building seems like an abstract endeavour, I would hold that it ultimately boils down to creating structures of solidarity, belonging, and mutual support at the micro level. The chapter by Kolawole Omomowo and Jimi O. Adesina on communal mutual support structures in two South African townships, demonstrates very well how social policy can contribute to a sense of community. They argue that theself-help groups (e.g., credit and savings associations) in their two case-studies, which combine economic rationality and social values, should be seen as “a reservoir of organic praxis that could inform the broad planning of collective consumption to foster social wellbeing” (p. 182).

Similarly, in their chapter on farming cooperatives in Ethiopia, Kristie Drucza and Dagmawit Giref Sahile present the different forms of social capital that accrue from these groups. They find that while informal groups are declining, formal, state-registered ones are multiplying, and suggest that this might have to do with the specific advantages that connections to the state bring, such as access to inputs. Yet, they hold, top-down initiated structures should take customs and local values seriously and learn from grown informal arrangements.

Informal social protection arrangements deserve special discussion in the African context, given how long communities needed to cope without inclusion in formal schemes. As suggested by some of the book’s contributors, they can offer very valuable insights into what types of social policies work for people in real-life situations. But non-state actors, as Jonathan Makuwira makes clear, not only provide social services but also play important advocacy roles. He draws on examples from Malawi, Ethiopia, and South Africa, where non-state actors successfully lobbied for disability-inclusiveness, adult and non-formal education, and access to comprehensive AIDS prevention and treatment services, respectively, to argue that social policy development is ultimately a political process.

This view presents social protection as a human right that must be guided by universality, justice, democracy, and empowerment, as Hujo spells out; a point that is further underlined by Marlize Rabe’s study of gender relations in South Africa. Rabe describes how the importance of the mining sector in the country has historically contributed to men being disconnected from their families and care work, as well as to dominant notions of masculinity. These notions of masculinity ascribe men with ideas of being the main breadwinner, which exerts additional stress when these expectations are impossible to fulfil. So, social protection, she argues, needs to address these perceptions, too, and cites the example of an NGO that works towards changing gender perceptions and practices among people living in impoverished areas.

This example and other contributions demonstrate that social policy evolution still requires a better understanding of social problems. One of the drivers for social policy is inequality, but this concept is far from straight-forward, as Boaz Munga shows. Focussing on the Kenyan case, he compares the much-used Gini coefficient, the Atkinson and Theil indices, and the Palma index that is based on decomposing for income deciles. The latter addresses the problem that the Gini coefficient tends to gloss over changes at the bottom and top of the income distribution. He then shows the importance of regional variation that has to inform social policymaking. When looking at expenditure shares per decile over time and then disaggregating this for rural and urban households in Kenya, for example, it becomes clear that between 1994 and 2005-06, the expenditure share of the top decile in urban areas increased considerably more (from 23 to 42 percent) while that of the top decile in rural areas fell (from 30 to 26 percent). Practically, this means that addressing inequality within urban areas would be most effective for reducing inequality overall and becoming alert to growing shares of income held by the top decile, I would add, can be one important political lever to put the sustainable financing of social policies back on the agenda – another component of the transformative framework.

Looking at a very different problem, Walid Merouani, Nacer-Eddine Hammouda and Claire El Moudde also demonstrate the practical impact that research could make. Based on survey data, they show that social insurance uptake in Algeria is impeded by future-discounting behaviour and a lack of knowledge about existing social insurance schemes. They then derive practical suggestions such as coupling social insurance with more immediate benefits like child support and call for improving the visibility of the schemes. In addition, this and other chapters exemplify how worthwhile it is to focus on people’s own perspectives. Taking the knowledge, experiences and perceptions of communities seriously will make policies more effective.

To end my review on a slightly critical note, the book could have benefited from a deeper empirical unpacking of what is referred to as the “narrow” or “neoliberal” version of social policy. Katja Hujo states clearly that this version is characterised by “endorsing rather than questioning mainstream orthodox economic recipes and ignoring unequal power relations”, and often appears through targeted conditional cash transfers and privatised social services. But she also points out that the structural adjustment period had not fully resolved the role of social policy, even after the “social turn” had taken hold. Given that the neoliberal response to social problems is far from being a thing of the past, and that the covid crisis and economic recession might even be revitalising the risk approach to social protection, the criticism voiced in this book (and elsewhere) seems to be directed at a moving target. Although several chapters nuance our understanding of it indirectly – as having individualising effects (Omomowo’s and Adesina’s chapter); segregating social schemes for different groups (Omoruan’s chapter); avoiding redistributing the means of production (Chipenda’s chapter); and being blind to underlying societal hierarchies (see Rabe’s chapter), I would argue that we need more work directed at understanding its many faces. We need to interrogate the present moment with its new and complicated economic, political, environmental, and ideological challenges, while picking up the threads of building transformative social policy on the continent. With its timely and important intervention into the debates on radical social policy in Africa, this collection contributes a significant step forward.

Jimi O. Adesina (ed) Social Policy in the African Context (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2021).

Anna Wolkenhauer is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Bremen, Germany. She wrote her PhD thesis on state formation and social policy in Zambia and has been involved with social protection advocacy in the SADC region since 2014. @AnnaWolke0201

Featured Photograph: Community action in Valhalla Park (Cape Town), South Africa (Lindsay Mgbor, 12 February 2013).

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