ROAPE’s Peter Dwyer interviews the South African socialist David Hemson. Hemson was a leading labour militant and trade unionist during the mass working class uprising and strikes in Durban in 1973. In this introduction to the videoed interviews, Peter Dwyer discusses working class politics and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, a history often forgotten or marginalised in popular accounts.
The popular history of the liberation struggle against apartheid, the last great social movement of the twentieth century, contains many incredible characters. Most popular books about the liberation struggle and transition from 1994 give little recognition to the role of, in South African parlance, ‘the masses’. Typical of the best-selling books at the time is an account by staunch African National Congress (ANC) supporter Alistair Sparks in Tomorrow is Another Country. Except for three brief references, there is little mention of the mass struggle and the independent trade unions in Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. Likewise, in The Anatomy of a Miracle, Patti Waldmeir presents apartheid history as a struggle between leaders and that Nelson Mandela was the main reason in ending apartheid and the transition to democracy.
Similarly, earlier public stories that we are told tell the same limited history. One event that captured the attention of the world’s media was the Soweto revolt in June 1976. The image of the 12-year-old Hector Pieterson being carried, lifeless and bloodied, in the arms of Mbuyisa Makhubo with his sister Antoinette Sithole agonisingly running alongside them became one of the most powerful pictures of modern political history. And so, the Soweto Revolt became a defining story and its often argued that it was a turning point in the liberation struggle.
But dig a little deeper, and speak to the not so well-known, and our gaze is turned from the townships and schools of Johannesburg to the workplaces and strikes in 1973 to, what some saw as the sleepy, unfashionable, backwaters of Durban on the tropical east coast.
This interview is a peek inside that story and of the importance of those strikes, the incessant, sordid background to them and the daily indiscriminate police violence for being Black and ‘illegally’ in town, and the same Black people fighting for a pay rise in their newly created unions. The story is also of a small number of white students building meaningful solidarity with those Black workers. Oh yes, and the illegal inter-racial parties, but only after the political organising had ended.
This is also crucially the story of David Hemson whose life was intertwined with those whom he organised alongside and whose lives and political ideas were transformed in the process. As Hemson’s infectious retelling of those times so brilliantly demonstrates, we should never even think about disentangling the activists from the spirit of those times. The entanglement is their lives and those times. In this way Hemsons vignettes of his life enables us to see that everyone’s life embodies something of the common experience of a larger social group and shows us aspects of the experience of classes, genders and ethnicities.
Of course this is nothing new, but it is still much overlooked. Hemson’s passionate reliving of those times in this two-part interview gives rise to information qualitatively different from the lifeless data used in surveys and political science. Although individuals do not exist in a vacuum and have an umbilical connection to the social relations of which they are an active part, its important, again as Hemson points out, that we do not forget the bigger picture or get obsessed with discussing abstract forces.
And so, to the big picture.
From the election of the National Party in 1948, a form of state-led authoritarian capitalism resulted in a process of rapid capital accumulation creating a substantial Black working class that denied their basic human rights, resulting in economic and political crises igniting social conflict. The economic and political stability that had reigned since the early 1960s – after the Rivonia Trial ended in 1964 with the imprisonment of key leaders of uMkhonto we Sizwe, the recently formed armed wing of the ANC – a period often seen as a relative lull in the history of the liberation movement, was shattered in 1973 by a wave of strikes in and around the metropolitan area of Durban and what is today called KwaZulu-Natal.
The impact of Durban was brought home to me when conducting months of interviews with former trade unionists about their experiences as activists prior to joining Nelson Mandela’s first government from 1994. Years ago, as a student of the liberation movement, I’d never appreciated the importance of Durban, led, as I was by the writing on the Soweto revolt. Yet, in getting to know a slightly older generation of activists, forged in trade union activity and township politics, what surprised me was not their reverence for the Soweto revolt but the importance of the Durban strikes. It was during these conversations that one worker described to me how at the time migrant workers returning to his rural town in the Western Cape, some 1500 kilometres away, brought news to their families of the strikes that had “a ripple effect somehow” in the town and the schools.
There were those sympathetic writers such Johann Maree (1987) and G W Seidman (1994) who in hindsight dated the emergence of the all-important new independent unions from the period around the 1973 Durban strikes (unions that would go on to create the giant federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions-Cosatu in 1985). Another Trotskyist Marxist like Hemson, Baruch Hirson, linked the rise of the independent unions to the strikes of the early 1970s, and as a precursor to the Soweto revolt in 1976. Capturing the importance of the Durban strike wave Hirson argued in 1979 that “[t]he strikes of 1973 to 1976 helped create the atmosphere of revolt and showed that the blacks were not powerless…these strikes must be seen as constituting the beginning of the Revolt, and as having affected a far wider section of the population…” (1979: 156).
A Black population that recognised the importance of and respected the new independent unions at the time. In part two of the interview, Hemson, with characteristic infectious excitement, recounts the many inspiring women in the struggle and how one, an elected shop steward called Junerose (Nala-Hartley), would walk through poor, misogynistic and at times violent townships, with thousands of pounds worth of trade union membership money. And was never once touched. To attack Junerose, was to attack the workers union. Politically, what was different at this time was that the activities of such workers and activists like Hemson, resulted in the creation of a new style of independent trade unionism outside of the Congress (ANC) Alliance sphere of influence.
Meanwhile tensions inside the ANC were reflected in the debates about how to relate to the new wave of mass action sparked by the Durban strikes in 1973 and Soweto in 1976 and the growth of independent trade unions. As debates raged inside unions over tactics and political alignment, ANC President-General Oliver Tambo, praised workers who “constitute the most powerful contingent in our struggle”. But this seemed more about trying to curry favour with a new powerful, and still politically independent, workers movement than any change in ANC tactical focus. Also, because as Hemson reveals from his ongoing research and personal experience, the ANC at the time were working with unreliable allies such as the opportunistic Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
So, back to the big picture. The expansion of the economy from the late 1940s to the late 1960s, altered the size, racial composition, and skill levels of the work force, under state-led capitalism enforced by a centralised authoritarian apartheid regime. This resulted in a diversification from dependence on agriculture and mining to manufacturing. This industrialisation process increased the economic dependence by business and the regime on African labour that, as a proportion of the total workforce, increased and gave rise to urbanisation. It provided the platform on which to build independent unions, the development of which was central to events that characterised apartheid from the 1970s onwards. And, as it would transpire, the beginning of the end of apartheid.
A complex process of organisation and agitation, by individuals and groups, both Black and white, involving workers, intellectuals and (mainly white) students like Hemson and the political ideas this process encompassed, was central to the development of the independent unions. Here the politics and ideas of Marxists like Hemson were important. Seeking social and economic justice for Black people, influenced by Marxist ideas (not aligned to ‘Soviet Marxism’ and independent of the Communist Party) they pressed for a practical stress on the exclusive role of the working class at the point of production in the struggle for liberation and for political independence from the ANC or other political parties. Debates over which Hemson and some of his comrades would later be expelled from the ANC.
Of course, activists like Hemson did not, and could not, see where this process would go, but he hints at a different political and strategic approach, one that would be central to his later political work. What is significant about Durban and other strikes in this period is that together with the new methods of organising they indicated an increasing willingness on the part of the workers to become more involved in the emergent unions and draw different political conclusions. Hemson reveals how everything was wide open politically at the time.
Before the African nationalist versions of history were written and globally popularised and mythologised, these were the days before the nationalist politics of the ANC took over the leadership of the broader liberation struggle skilfully steering it towards a reconciliation with business without fundamentally challenging capitalist power relations.
Hemson believes that late night discussions at the time with some of the best worker militants about the need for an independent worker’s party showed the potential to steer the re-emerging liberation struggle towards an anti-capitalist South Africa. This was not to be. The lesson for him, and us, is to seize political opportunities when they arise. Because they may not come round again. Hemson provides us with an indispensable, militant history of working-class South Africa, which contained so many possibilities for liberation.
Peter Dwyer is an editor of ROAPE, and member of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group. A life-long trade unionist, he moved to South Africa in 2003 where he lived and worked in Durban, he now teaches on leadership in the National Health Service in the UK.
Featured Photograph: David Hemson speaking at a mass meeting of textile strikers in 1973 (Note that the copyright for the image lies with the copyright holder David Hemson – please get in touch for permission to use any of the images).
For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers path-breaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive. Please consider subscribing or donating today.
The winner of ROAPE’s Ruth First Prize, awarded annually for the best article published by an African author, is Dr James Musonda. His 2023 article, “He who laughs last laughs the loudest: the 2021 donchi-kubeba (don’t tell) elections in Zambia”, is available to read here.
The prize committee noted the article’s provocative and radical analysis of the 2021 election in Zambia when the ruling party was unexpectedly overthrown. With its foundation in extensive first-hand research, participant observation and activist immersion, Musonda’s account is a worthy example of Ruth First’s methodology in Mozambique in the 1970s as well as her commitment to class analysis relevant to a particular time and place.
In the article, Musonda takes on the way the Zambian political class held on to power through its ruling party, via bribery, violence and oppression and through its linkage with the copper mining companies which dominate Zambia’s economy. The gross failures of the Zambian government and its economic impoverishment of the population have sparked bitterness and a growing awareness that there might be means to resist. In this context, Musonda offers a nuanced account of class relations – never simply ‘elite/mass’ oversimplifications, but distinctions made and evidenced between the diversity of organised workers and auxiliary informal workers, bureaucratic and security state functionaries, and between voters of different backgrounds in terms of gender, ethnicity, economic standing and so on.
Most impressively, Musonda evidences their dynamic interactions as they move towards class alliance for more open confrontation with state power. Evidence of an explicit ideology of protest and rejection and a growing awareness of potential agency emerges. Through underground mobilising led by the trade unions, the corrosive impact of bribery was undermined with the subversive notion of taking the money, but voting for the opposition. Even if this plays out as sabotage rather than outright revolution, it worked and the ruling party fell. Musonda has provided a powerful analysis of resistance to class oppression which deserves to be documented.
James Musonda is a former trade unionist, born and bred on the Zambian Copperbelt where he also worked as a nurse at Mopani Copper Mines. He holds a PhD in Politics and Social Sciences from Liege University. His PhD thesis draws on his ethnography in two underground mines where he worked as a helper and in two mining communities on the Zambian Copperbelt. He dealt with the question of what it means to have a job and be a worker under the neoliberal dispensation tracking subjectivities through the workers’ everyday lives.
He is currently a senior researcher at the Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ) in South Africa, where he leads a project focused on labour and energy transitions in South Africa, Ghana and Kenya. He is the winner of the 2021 Terence Ranger Prize of the Journal of Southern Africa for the best article by a first-time author for the article ‘Modernity on Credit: The Experience of Underground Miners on the Zambian Copperbelt’.
For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers path-breaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive. Please consider subscribing or donating today.
In memory of his father, who passed away earlier in October, Yusuf Serunkuma offers a heartfelt political reflection on his father’s unfulfilled dreams since Uganda’s independence in 1962. Recounting the story of his father’s dismissal from a textile factory in the early 1990s, he illustrates the devastating impact of the neoliberal austerity policies imposed by the World Bank and the IMF on the lives of ordinary Ugandans. These imperialist interventions dismantled the material progress and aspirations of the generation that won independence, and continue to suppress the hopes of both present and future generations.
Yusuf Serunkuma
When I wrote about my father about two years ago – in the Ugandan newspaper, The Observer– I sought to comment on several items, but specifically, the deferred dreams of independence – the promise of modernity – and ruinous staggerings of the National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) which took power in the 1986 and has stayed on ever since. Using my father as synecdoche, I noted that my father’s story – of retrenchment from Nyanza Textile Industry (Nytil) in the early 1990s – echoes many others across Buganda, Busoga and most parts of Central and Eastern Uganda – and many across sub-Saharan Africa. Titled “When the World Bank Visited My Father”, I stressed that for all those Ugandans who had left tilling the land for their sustenance, but instead labour in factories and the service industry – ca. 1950-1995 – concentrated mainly in Jinja town on the shores of Lake Victoria as it intersects with River Nile, and some other industries in parts of Kampala City – their story was one of disappointment and ruin when World Bank and the IMF insisted on privatising our (then and now) peasant-led economies.
We are the children of these men and women. By their dreams being suddenly and permanently shattered, their children were direct victims. We carry their deferred dreams in our souls, and their pains and frustrations continue to shape our daily realities. Sadly, with the IMF and World Bank – and their native co-conspirators – still around, alive and well, insisting on the same policies, we’ll pass these frustrations to our children, the grandchildren of our parents. With key sectors of Uganda’s economy – energy, telecommunication, banking, mining, coffee export, etc. – officially signed off to foreign, white monopolies from Euro-America and South Africa, there is almost no hope for native entrepreneurship and innovation. Consider, for example, that banking interest rates range between 15-35% (sometimes, 40%) and Ugandans, with a monopoly foreign power distributor – UMEME – complaints are endlessly lodged about fraudulent metering. Also, the telecom industry is dominated by foreign companies – MTN and Airtel – and charges the waves the way they feel. High charges are true across Africa making telecommunication – both calling and data – three times more expensive of the global average. Ironically, all of these are happening under the auspices of the World Bank and IMF after the privatisation of public agencies which offered these services as public goods.
Sadly, the Ugandan president, Gen. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni – perhaps the best example of a ‘colonial caretaker’ under the new depoliticised, technocratic, colonial machine – tends to insult Ugandans as lazy to explain the bone-biting levels of poverty across the country. The irony is entirely lost on him that he has been president of this country for the last 38 years. But I will say one more time: Ugandans are neither lazy nor unlucky. Not at all. It is not true that they lack business acumen or entrepreneurial skills, as so-called “developmentalists” tend to caricature us while hawking “saving culture” lessons. But privatisation/ structural adjustment – whose ruins we are yet to fully appreciate – visited Uganda riding on the insecurities and inferiority complex of the NRA/M. This has turned natives into paupers and beggars, who are now running en masse to the Middle East into absolute slave relations.
Notice that wherever IMF and World Bank found insecure, non-ideologically grounded folks in government – like what happened in Uganda – they ran riot. Remember, many countries, especially in North Africa, Ethiopia under Meles Zenawi, and almost all of Asia refused to implement IMF’s selfish policies. Confident leaders in other parts of Africa – such as Tanzania under Julius Nyerere – calmly braved IMF-WB harassment and threats, and found ways of remodelling these selfish policies ensuring to create room, however small, for their native businessfolk and industries. For Uganda, as their friend, Prof. Mahmood Mamdani has noted, these former NRA/M rebels only recently arrived from the bush, simply saw a chance to eat and enrich themselves and thus wantonly auctioned the country – and have continued to this day.
The pains of the retrenched
In telling my father’s story, I noted that my old man fell on bad times after the privatisation of Nyanza Textiles. He was among the “retrenched,” as they euphemised sacking labourers en masse. Like all other retrenched, these bad times hurt his immediate and extended family – and have continued down the years. Comrade Hassan Byekwaso Tibamanya so was my father’s name, before leaving the ruins of Jinja town for the countryside after retrenchment, tried sketching an existence as seller of cut and peeled sugar cane, and sometimes, boiled maize. But this was a man who after 22 years – between 1973-1994 – had grown to the rank of a senior weaver for Nyanza Textiles. Earlier, after a five-year stint with Printpack, he had been trained in industrial paper-manufacture. Both companies had been privatised, which often meant, closure and ruin. Now he had to learn hustling the street at 50 years of age. It was a difficult feat.
Having left the countryside around Lake Kyoga in 1964 – two years after independence – after almost 30 years in urbanised and industrialised Jinja, neither tilling the land nor fishing was attractive anymore. Amidst the confusion, he determined to soldier on with life in the city. But his dreams had been dealt a fierce blow.
As Jinja was losing its glow, my father, who had acquired a great deal of sophistication and taste – he was very dandy and chic – also started losing all his flair. From an evening hanging out with co-workers with whom they had worked for the last two decades, he was now spending it alone after a long working day around Jinja town. It was tough. We started moving houses ending up in the slummy wetlands of Mafubira, a small suburb along Jinja-Kamuli Road. I’ll never forget the image of this man returning from his vending routines, hungry and tired, and as soon as he slumped his tired bones on a chair, and leaned backwards, he would be snoring just a few moments later.
There was more pain coming: a year after retrenchment, the Indian-built, then fairly posh Main Street Primary School where three of his children studied, including myself, became unaffordable. If he managed the school fees, buying or repairing our uniforms was difficult. I still recall the day, at a class assembly when a teacher called me up and pointed to a small hole that was growing at the back side of my pair of shorts. A part of my butt was visible through this hole. The teacher then calmly advised that I tell my parents to stitch it up. The times had hit my father really hard. Indeed, four years after retrenchment, in 1996, he moved from this now dying industrial town to the villages of Mukono closer to Kampala. About that time, he had turned to frying pancakes and vending them on a bike. Then, I had developed some wits, and watched him lose his smile and elegancy, but soldiered on.
My father’s story is true of many retrenched factory workers, folks in the service industry, early urbanites and other cosmopolitans. They could not return to the land – if there was any land to return to – but also didn’t know what to do with land after decades of a different lifestyle and different ethic in the city. So, they passed this lethargy, trauma, and frustration to their offspring. We are the children of these men and women and are trying to refashion our futures amidst the ruins.
Seeing through Nytil
About two years ago, my father learned about a case his former co-workers at Nyanza Textile had won over their denied terminal benefits in the 1990s retrenchment scam. After over 25 years of negotiating with the new ‘colonial caretakers’ in the NRA/M, the High Court in Jinja ordered government to pay them Ush6.2b (about $1.7m). My father had not been among the 3426 claimants when the case was being initiated. So, he asked me to escort him to Jinja City from Kampala to see if his name could be added onto the list of beneficiaries. I was reluctant. I explained that the cost of trying to get his name onto the list – both emotional investment and financial cost – would be much more than any compensation packages that might ever come to his pocket.
I explained that Ush6.2b if evenly distributed to 3426 people, each will get a small unsatisfying cut: about Ush1.8m each (about $482). This is before the lawyers who argued this case carved off some Ush2billion (about $500K) to themselves. Or even more. Hoping there were no handlers and other fixers in between to claim a percentage for themselves, too! I told my old man that the world they had inhabited as young adults had massively changed under Museveni neoliberal order – everyone had become a thief. But the old man’s spirits were still high.
I finally agreed to make the journey to Jinja for the emotional satisfaction of my old man. But this journey turned out to be a journey back in history. We spoke and argued a lot. My mind could not get off these 3500 men and women whose careers and beautifully settled lives as factory workers – just like my father – had been ruined by foreign agencies claiming newly-found benevolence towards Africans. This was just 30 years after independence. Had we not kicked out these pillaging foreigners for selfishly killing and stealing our resources? How quickly had they become our benevolent friends?
I could not stop thinking about all the workers in the other parastatals – in a parastatal and cooperatives-led economy. Over 140 parastatals, public companies, and cooperatives were targeted for liquidation for “interfering” with the market forces of demand and supply, supposedly bad management, and unprofitability. It was a lie. Consider for example Uganda Electricity Board (UEB); Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB), Uganda Transport Company; Uganda Bus Company (UBC); Uganda Coffee Marketing Board (UCMB), Nytil Textiles; Dunlop Tyres, Uganda Breweries, Uganda Distillers Ltd, Uganda Dairy Cooperation (UDC); Uganda Fisheries Ltd; Uganda Hotels (UH); East Mengo Growers’ Cooperative Union; Busoga Cooperative Union; Uganda Airlines Corporation; Uganda General Merchandise, Lake Victoria Bottling Company – just to mention some of them. Hundreds of thousands of Ugandans were employed in these enterprises. If you took an average of 2000 employees in each of these units, this would be 280,000 knocked out people out of work. Remember, this was a country estimated at slightly above 10 million persons. Since these “retrenched” represented the core functioning of the country – the promise of modernity – coordinating the other units, and auxiliary sectors, with the dismantling of these companies and corporations and cooperatives, you have an entire country successfully returned to the stone age.
Serunkuma’s father, Comrade Hassan Byekwaso Tibamanya, in his younger days
A world of tears
In 2020, when the High Court judgment finally came, most of the Nyanza Textiles’ retrenched workers had died. Those still living were too old to fully and personally use their money – if it ever came. But how had they lived throughout these years especially that most of them had been retrenched in their late 40s and early 50s? Consider also that these people had families and extended kindred relations depending on them. Consider an average of five dependants each (280,000 x 5), these are 1.4m people. How did they manage to sustain their families?
The stories are painful: a friend of mine whose father worked in Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB) recalled how his father failed to find his bearing again. Retrenched at 47, he passed away three years later distraught and frustrated. With these times of mass retrenchment coinciding with HIV/AIDs pandemic on the continent, these distraught folks were wasted. No wonder, HIV/AIDS ravaged entire communities – sadly, as Prof. Peter Mugyenyi has told us, European and American pharmaceuticals, hungry for humongous profits, denied Africans life-saving medicines. In the labour units, I learned from a son of the retrenched, Andrew Lubega, who is 52 years old now, that there was sheer pandemonium and confusion. Almost all government agencies had housing estates for their labourers. In Kyambogo Estates, Nsambya Estates and Naguru Estates and several other places. All of a sudden, a father of five found himself without a job, and could not continue living in the labour unit which had been attached to the job. And without compensation.
The hustler sleeps
Old enough, analytical and more reflective, returning from Jinja to Kampala, I told my father about how his tastes, and his dreams had become mine, and how nowadays I was able to locate him in a troubled national/ continental context. I told him about how he and his contemporaries had so transformed themselves in comparison with their compatriots left in the countryside – and how his life had been transformed by the promise of a colonial modernity and the WB-IMF violence of the 1990s. He was all ears, this stuff made so much sense to him. Like several early urbanites, this Junior II graduate cherished reading, and indeed, read with me every night. There would be no dinner before a certain number of pages had been completed. However, once World Bank and IMF arrived, this rhythm died down. My old man had become somewhat angrier, and quieter. But he trudged on. As we drove on, I asked him about the lives of his co-workers in Nytil with whom he had kept in touch. He looked outside of the window, speechless. He then he said, sombrely, pensively, “ffena tugenda kufa!” (We are all going to die). He choked up. I guffawed to distract him. But he remained pensive. I then asked him about how he had met my mother, and who his other lovers were. On this one, he lit up, and it was my turn to answer some questions of his – about almost the same topics.
Dear reader, this man, my father, passed away on the 4 October 2024. He was 80 years old – and the joke he often told was that he was as old as the Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, but did not want to live too long and become a burden to peoples’ lives. It is difficult to say with certainty what my old man died from. I have decided to chasten myself with the thought that “old age.” He too, would agree with me. But a short history of his health locates the beginning of his troubles in the COVID-19 pandemic. Not the flu, but the vaccine. Yes, I’m vaccinated myself. Comrade Hassan Byekwaso was very athletically built and spent most of his last 15 years on his bike vending vegetables in a radius of 10km – every day, to the time of his death. (Even in the month of Ramadhan, which he insisted on never missing despite clear-cut exemptions owing to his age).
I had never seen this man in hospital except for dental and hearing complications. But months after fully recovering from the COVID-19 flu, following intense publicity, the man went for the vaccine. But at 77 then, he instead became sicker than had been during the flu. His coughs became intense and chronic. There was no tuberculosis. More complications then emerged relating to his heart – it had become “musical” as one doctor put it. A couple of weeks before his passing, he suffered a stroke, which put him in a wheelchair for some days. He then suddenly passed in his bed. Indeed, at 80, many things are possible – and our Creator knows best. And as we say in the Islamic tradition, Inna Lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un. (Indeed, we belong to Allah, and indeed, to Him, we return).
Dear reader, I tell my father’s story partly to celebrate his life, but also to mourn him. (I’m actively hiding in writing about him to not feel the depth of the void – writing being one of his dreams for his children, which has lived on). Part of my intention is to remind ourselves about the frustrations and pains our parents, and our generation have had to contend with, and subsequent generations will have to contend with. My father did not stopped talking about never being compensated for this wrongful retrenchment. And while my old man, his former colleagues, and other victims of the so-called “retrenchment” might be dead or aged, their killers (IMF and World Bank) are still here – sticking to the same old policies, quietly, technically killing dreams, and violently wrecking lives apart – for the benefit of western corporations.
This article is a longer version of two pieces first published in the Ugandan newspaper Observer on 9 October 2024.
Yusuf Serunkuma is a columnist in the Ugandan newspapers, The Observer, and a scholar based at KU Leuven and Makerere University. He is the author of The Snake Farmers a play, which is read as a set-book in Rwanda and Ugandan High schools. Yusuf teaches decolonial studies/new colonialism and writes regularly for ROAPE, and the Pan-African Review in Rwanda. His forthcoming, *Surrounded: Democracy, Free Markets and Other Entrapments of New Colonialism* is being published in December 2024 by Editor House Facility in Kampala.
For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers path-breaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive. Please consider subscribing or donating today.
Writing for ROAPE, Thelma Arko argues that while often presented as a solution to the climate emergency, the growth of carbon offset markets are fueling a new scramble for African land and perpetuating colonial-era exploitation. We must move beyond market-based solutions, Arko urges, to embrace strategies that centre on social equity, ecological integrity, and the rights of local communities.
Carbon offset markets operate through the buying and selling of carbon credits. A carbon credit allows the holder to emit one metric ton of carbon dioxide or its equivalent in greenhouse gases. Carbon markets and offsetting practices have been widely embraced as market-based mechanisms to incentivise a transition to a low-carbon economy. These markets provide economic incentives for entities to reduce emissions or invest in offset projects, enabling companies that can reduce emissions cost-effectively to sell their unused credits to those facing higher reduction costs.
However, beneath the veneer of sustainability and development, these mechanisms, particularly in Africa, are unveiling a complex web of injustices, power imbalances, and conflicts over land rights. The very solutions intended to safeguard our planet are, in reality, perpetuating colonial-era land grabs, dispossessing local communities, and entrenching neoliberal agendas that favour foreign interests over the needs of the Global South.
The current structure of carbon markets and offset projects involves the enclosure of vast tracts of land, including primary forests and ecosystems, effectively continuing a legacy of land expropriation. This dispossession of ancestral lands and livelihoods not only prioritizes carbon sinks and conservation areas over the subsistence farming, pastoralism, and cultural practices of local communities, particularly Indigenous peoples, but also disrupts their way of life. The neoliberal framework within which these offset schemes are promoted enables corporations in the Global North to outsource their environmental responsibilities and effectively greenwash their unsustainable practices by purchasing offsets.
It is becoming clear that the pursuit of market-based climate solutions, beyond addressing pressing climate change concerns, inadvertently propagates social injustice and human rights violations that deserve urgent redress.
Carbon markets and their role in climate change mitigation
Carbon markets offer a pathway for industries that face challenges in reducing their carbon footprint, such as the hard-to-abate sectors, to contribute to emissions reduction and drive green investments. They provide a mechanism for these sectors, which cannot easily or quickly reduce their emissions, to still participate in climate change mitigation efforts. This flexibility allows for a more inclusive transition to a low-carbon economy, where all actors can play a part.
Former US Secretary John Kerry delivers remarks at a Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) Conference in Oslo, Norway (Wikimedia Commons, 15 June 2016)
The carbon market undeniably provides several benefits, including driving investments in green technologies and conservation projects, creating economic incentives for emissions reduction, and potentially accelerating the transition to a low-carbon economy. However, the prioritization of market mechanisms and the neoliberal foundation on which it is based undermine collective action and democratic decision-making, perpetuating global inequalities while serving as a pretext for economic expansion, which overshadows genuine environmental progress.
By reducing the value of ecosystems to their carbon storage capacity, this approach enables the privatization of commons. It increases corporate control over forest resources, ignoring the intrinsic value of ecosystems and their broader ecological functions. Through the implementation of such a market-based mechanism, wealthy nations and corporations are able to effectively buy their way out of their emission reduction responsibilities by merely investing in offset projects, while developing countries bear the brunt of climate change impacts and are left to adapt to a changing environment. This dynamic perpetuates the historical extraction of resources and labour from the Global South, fueling the consumption patterns and development agendas of the Global North.
Carbon offset projects perpetuate neocolonial power dynamics by reinforcing dependency relationships. Developing countries, in their pursuit of investment and revenue, may become reliant on carbon offset projects funded by entities from the Global North. This dependency can limit their agency in negotiating project terms, leading to deals that favour foreign investor interests over those of local communities.
The focus on market-based solutions diverts attention from the need for more fundamental structural changes in energy, transportation, and industrial systems. Rather, land grabs, displacement of Indigenous communities, and the destruction of biodiverse ecosystems to make way for monoculture plantations optimised for carbon removal have become the dominant trend of carbon offset projects.
The complexities of land rights in Africa
Land rights in Africa are inherently tied to a complex historical narrative of colonial exploitation, dispossession, and ongoing struggles for justice and recognition. The legacy of colonial land grabs, where Indigenous communities were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands, continues to cast a long shadow over present-day land tenure systems.
Carbon markets and the new contestations for land rights
The emergence of carbon markets has ignited a fresh wave of land rights disputes in Africa, exacerbating the already intricate issues surrounding land ownership and utilisation. The growing demand for carbon offsets has sparked violent land grabs, frequently infringing upon the rights of local and indigenous communities. Several instances of community rights violations have surfaced, with projects being undertaken without adequate consultation or consent from those bearing the brunt of the impact.
Navigating the tensions: Towards equitable solutions
Carbon markets have emerged as a pivotal mechanism in the global effort to combat climate change, offering incentives for emissions reduction and economic opportunities. However, this neoliberal environmental agenda unveils and exacerbates historical and current inequalities, perpetuating a form of neocolonialism that shifts the burden of mitigating climate change to less developed regions.
Carbon markets enable various forms of colonialism – green, carbon, and neo – all of which contribute to environmental injustices and power imbalances between the Global North and South. Green colonialism co-opts environmental narratives to perpetuate power imbalances, dispossession, and environmental injustices. Carbon colonialism allows wealthy nations and corporations to outsource their emissions reduction responsibilities by purchasing carbon credits from developing countries. Neocolonialism is reinforced as the Global North maintains economic and environmental dominance through these market mechanisms.
To build a more just and sustainable future, the structural inequalities and the neoliberal foundations perpetuating global carbon inequalities need to be addressed by prioritising collective action and democratic governance. Regulatory frameworks that protect community land rights and incorporate customary land tenure systems must be strengthened. Local communities and Indigenous knowledge must be centered in decision-making processes regarding land use. Ensure free, prior, and informed consent of local communities for any initiatives impacting their lands and resources. Promote sustainable development aligned with local needs and priorities and provide access to legal support and capacity building for affected communities.
The challenge before us is significant, but so is the opportunity to redefine our relationship with the land, each other, and our shared planet. The path forward requires a fundamental rethinking of our approach to climate change mitigation. We must move beyond market-based solutions that risk perpetuating injustice and embrace strategies that centre on social equity, ecological integrity, and the rights of local communities. Researchers, policymakers, and global citizens have a collective responsibility to ensure that our efforts to combat climate change do not come at the cost of the most vulnerable.
Thelma Arkois currently a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University, where she supports efforts to democratize the discourse around Just Transitions in Africa.
Featured Image: An uncredited cartoon depicting Otto von Bismarck at the Berlin Conference (1884-85) cutting a cake labeled ‘Africa’ with a knife, symbolizing the division of the continent (3 January 1885).
For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers path-breaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive. Please consider subscribing or donating today.
In an interview with ROAPE, Micheline Ravololonarisoa discusses the history of Madagascar, French colonialism and the remarkable student movement in 1972 which she was one of the leaders as a member of the strike committee. Coming from a non-political family, Micheline became a student leader, and then a pan-African activist, based in Kenya, and forced into exile from the continent. She reflects on a life of activism, and Madagascar’s place in Africa.
Before we get started, can you give ROAPE readers a brief introduction to your political history and work?
Micheline Ravololonarisoa: Being from a petit bourgeois family, who did not think much about women in politics. I never joined a political party. Politics was a man’s preserve and, considered to be treacherous so all that was needed was to have a good education in French and on France preferably!
So much for alienation and a colonised mind!
Very few women joined political parties, but there were a burgeoning group of social movements in different spaces.
So, in the last year of my secondary school before university, having read some publications about the World Student Christian Federation, (WSCF) and heard about what they were doing and thinking, I joined the Student Christian Movement in Madagascar (SCM-MPIKRIMA), a progressive, left-leaning protestant student movement, part of the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) and the World Council of Churches. It was a global community of Student Christian Movements committed to dialogue, ecumenism, social justice and peace.
It is through this organisation that I was exposed to the socialist ideology and was “politicised” on issues of justice, equality, women’s participation and rights.
I was part of a group that went to Tanzania on a training course on socialism organised by WSCF. Later on, after my university graduation, I left Madagascar and came to Nairobi (Kenya) to join the WSCF Regional Office for Africa, as a programme officer to lead a project called “Liberation ”. But this was after a period of activism at the height of the student movement in Madagascar itself.
Can you tell us a little about Madagascar’s anti-imperialist political history and political movements?
The people of Madagascar, the Malagasy, like all people from French former colonies, resisted colonialism and launched anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles to oppose French occupation and colonial policies and programmes to chase out the French colonisers from their land which they occupied since 1882.
So the central issue of Madagascar’s political history has always evolved around the liberation struggle, first from the yoke of colonial occupation and then from capitalist exploitation.
Both these two periods saw the emergence of organised popular movements.
As early as 1895, when Madagascar was still a French protectorate, and throughout the colonial period, up to the beginning of 1905, the Menalamba Movement [literally, the ones with red clothes mena(red)lamba is the shawl worn by the combatants in the resistance] was the key anti-colonial movement, organising and leading a revolt against French occupation throughout the island. Their actions were directed not only against the economic policies of the colonisers, in particular the taxation system, but also against capitalist accumulation of those close to the reigning monarch.
In 1913 the formation of the VVS (Vy, Vato, Sakelika – Iron, Stone, Ramification) movement, was established by a group of Malagasy intellectuals, mainly medical doctors. The main objective of this movement was the intellectual and spiritual preparation of the Malagasy people “to work relentlessly for Madagascar to free the Nation and recover its independence”. VVS’s ambition was to have a political party whose objective would have been to work for Madagascar’s total liberation. Organised in cells of no more than 10 people each, the movement rejected the policies set by the French occupying force to dominate Madagascar and called for solidarity to fight against the colonialists, for equal rights and dignity. VVS’s mobilisation and action were a death threat to the French to the extent that they used all the repressive tools in their power to crush the movement. Although several resistance movements emerged in different regions in the south, north and east of Madagascar, all VVS members after being accused of setting up an illegal association, were arrested, imprisoned and had to wait until the end of the First World War, to be freed in 1921, following interventions by the Protestant churches and French communists’ parliamentarians.
Since the demise of VVS and due to political events in the world, especially the second world war, work of militant political movements has been very limited as the coloniser banned Malagasy citizens from setting up associations. Only advocacy made by reformists who wanted all Malagasy people to have French citizenship and to benefit from the same status and privileges as the French were visible and “tolerated”.
VVS’s political aspirations left an ideological heritage which led to increased nationalist sentiments of many progressive Malagasy people, who wanted total independence.
At the end of the Second World War, and upon the return of Malagasy men who fought on the side of France, the ban on the freedom of association was lifted, and several associations and political parties were born, all advocating for Madagascar’s autonomy – though at this point not independence. The most notable of those was the communist study group, political parties such as PANAMA (Partie Nationaliste Malagasy) who stated clearly that independence can only be obtained through armed struggle. Their stand was to protect national unity, recover national sovereignty and regain independence by all means. A very well-organised party it had relations with several other parties and associations outside of Madagascar.
Refusing to accept that the military junta take power after returning from the prison island Nosy Lava.
The MDRM (Mouvement démocratique pour le renouveau de Madagascar – Democratic Movement for Madagascar Renewal) was established in Paris and Madagascar in February 1946. MDRM became a political party in June 1946. On 29 March 1947, MDRM launched an armed offensive against the French occupation in all the regions of Madagascar from East to West, North to South, including Antananarivo, the capital city, while at the same time preparing to hold its first Congress scheduled for April 1947. Although defeated by the superiority of the French army, and the arrest, imprisonment and killing of most of its leadership, hope for Madagascar’s independence was kept alive.
France granted the paper for Madagascar’s independence in 1960.
Can you tell us about the peasant uprising in the South of Madagasikara in 1971?
Led by the political party MONIMA (Mouvement nationaliste et independant de Madagasacar), this movement was a revolt against the cost of food, and the peasants’ refusal to pay taxes. Violently repressed by the regime, who accused them of conniving with communists, MONIMA was dissolved by government order and several of its leaders were sent to detention in Nosy Lava, the prison island, mainly for political prisoners. Many died of thirst and hunger there. Those who survived detention were released in 1971.
As an activist in the student movement of May 1972, this movement led to the end of the first postcolonial government in Madagascar. Can you talk about this movement and your involvement?
The origin of the student movement in May 1972 and the subsequent popular movement that brought down the first postcolonial government in Madagascar, was the state of education. Madagascar’s education system was an expression of the continuation of French colonial presence and was the basis of social inequality in the country, the latter based on differences and division along ethnic and class lines.
The divisive policy in the content and quality of education was a hallmark of the French continuous policy of divide and rule to keep a firm grip on the training of the country’s elites and to make them the servile implementers of France’s neo-colonial ambitions.
Different progressive social forces, including socialist political parties such as AKFM (Congress Party for the Independence of Madagascar, pro-Soviet) and MONIMA, argued that the country’s political independence granted by France in 1960, is only the first stage on the long path to decolonisation. Independence was only nominal. We had independence (on paper) but we were not independent.
In March 1971, eleven years after France had granted Madagascar, formal independence, students at the College of Medicine in Antananarivo, went on strike to protest their material conditions, and the inequality in the content and outcome of their studies compared to the one provided at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Madagascar. This protest marked the beginning of a period of intense political and economic struggles during which ideological tensions between liberals and socialists reached their peak.
On this intense period of struggle, can you please speak directly to your own involvement?
In 1972 I was in my third year as a student in Malagasy literature and language at the Faculte des lettres et Sciences humaines de Madagascar. On 24 April in solidarity with the medical school students’ demand for a revision of the colonial-era curriculum and the dismissal of French teachers at the school, students from all faculties at the university rose up and soon created a vast nationwide movement that also included secondary school students. Under the leadership of the Federation des Associations d’etudiants de Madagascar (FAEM), of which I was the general secretary, campaigns of information and conscientisation were undertaken, whose objectives were to provide the correct analysis and ideological framework to the demands formulated by the movement. Besides the tasks of conscientisation, serious and systematic efforts at alliance-building with different professional and grassroots organisations throughout Madagascar were undertaken.
For us, this path was two-fold – first, the total decolonisation of Madagascar in the form of the Malagasy people’s full ownership of the intellectual, social, economic and political means of production through the abolition of the 1960 Cooperation Agreement with France that epitomised the ongoing institutional and ideological domination of the former colonial power. Secondly, the creation of a pro-people, Malagasy-owned new social, economic and political framework, implemented and managed through the use of the Malagasy philosophy and language which is the tenet and objective of “Malgachisation” as later expressed in the “Charter of the Malagasy Socialist Revolution” (1975) written by the “Red Admiral” Didier Ratsiraka (1936-2021). [1]
So, assemblies during the strike were moments of intense political work, of education, and conscientisation that gave university and college students the opportunities to analyse, debate and propose and plan the way forward.
Although some of the leaders in the movement were members of political parties, the movement was independent from political parties. Its main objective was to analyse and understand the deeper structural reasons for the inequalities, not only in education but in the Malagasy society at large and search for the alternative that could transform the state of inequality, exclusion and injustice.
We planned for the organisation of the strike and put in place the various instances that will enable analysis, learning, and planning for social and political transformation by all.
As one of the two student representatives of the Faculte des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, and Secretary of FAEM, I was at the frontline of planning and seeking clarity of the purpose of the movement, ensuring participation, and despite the severe repression by the ruling regime, and armed with the “unshakable determination to rid ourselves” of what Lenin criticised as the “prevailing amateurism in struggle,” we began to painstakingly “establish an organisation of revolutionaries capable of lending energy, stability, and continuity to the political struggle” and thus craft the socialist alternative for Madagascar.
We were inspired by experience of students elsewhere and people’s struggles in different parts of the world in particular in Latin America, which we debated during our meetings.
Leaflets were drafted by the Study Commission and distributed throughout the country, courtesy of the solidarity of bus companies who transported them free of charge to different provinces. Also, we members of the leadership committee led daily discussions in schools and during the general assemblies and it was often student representatives who provided direction to the movement.
Can you take us through what happened and what you achieved specifically?
One of the crucial gains of the movement is students acquired the freedom to speak and express themselves in an unconventional way and with new words, quite against the acquired and conventional Malagasy culture, so with no parental censorship. A true emancipation, if not total liberation.
Then, on the night 12 May 1972, as we were having the usual assembly meeting in the university main hall, taking stock of the day’s discussions in the seminars and debating how we were going to build alliances with various social groups, such as worker trade unions, teachers, professional people, parents, the jobless youth, peasants organisations and develop a common position on our response to the proposal made by the government asking us to resume classes and enter into discussion with the government – this was when we were severely repressed.
Meeting with representatives of liberation movements (MPLA and ZANU) in Lusaka in the 1970s.
The strike committee of which I was a member, was meeting at the FAEM office to prepare for the demonstration planned the following morning and the usual meeting of the strike permanent committee (comite permanent) composed of two delegates per school was taking place in the university’s main hall. All the participants in the room were encircled by the FRS – Forces republicaines de securitè – minors of less 18 years old were separated and all the rest of us were arrested and taken to detention in Nosy Lava, the infamous prison island. I was sent to detention like all those who were rounded up .
It is in response to this arrest that protests erupted across the capital city of Antananarivo, while the FRS were using live ammunition to disperse the protesters. It was during this protest that the ZOAM (Unemployed Youth of Madagascar) – whose members were from the poor, “black” quarters of the capital – began to be recognised as a force to reckon with as they provided protection to the unarmed demonstrators. Following the popular protest, the regime started by proposing the establishment of a military junta to take the helm of power. This proposal was a seriously divisive one as some people agreed to it and others, including the student movement was staunchly opposed to it.
This recognition of the ZOAM as a political force who now as representative of the jobless urban, sub-proletariat, able to articulate their own issues and propose their own solution by being represented in decision-making in the movement is one of the defining changes resulting from the popular movement that changed the Malagasy political landscape.
Solid organisation and increased political awareness of the various social forces led to the emergence of a clear theoretical and ideological framework for a “second independence,” but the implementation of these proposals was hampered by the election, via referendum of a transitional military junta (1972-1975) after which President Tsiranana stepped down.
Nonetheless, the framework and the ways to implement continued to be discussed during the “Zaikabe”, the People’s Congress, held in early September 1972.
Prior to the Congress, a National Seminar was held in preparation of the Congress and proposals made by the different categories of actors were considered.
During the congress, proposals on social, economic and political systems to be built were made while peasant organisations representing approximately 15% of the participants demanded the return of their land confiscated by large French capitalist companies.
After the 1972 movement and the holding of the National Congress, implementation of the resolution was left to the government which was the military government. As the aim of the student and popular movement was not to take overpower, but to make proposals on the profile of governance, the military junta, having detected this weakness and played the same kind of politics as the first regime.
Following the movement in Madagascar can you tell us about what you did afterwards?
Following the dismembering of the movement and the military junta’s decision to hold a referendum on the future shape of Madagascar political governance, I saw that we had reached a point of no-return, and I left Madagascar.
Having learned about the role I played in the student movement in Madagascar, WSCF (World Student Christian Federation) gave me the task of leading a programme called the Liberation programme. This was a programme whose aim was to inform, sensitise and mobilise students in African universities to be in solidarity with people in the former Portuguese colonies, Zimbabwe and South Africa and still under apartheid. WSCF wanted to inform, sensitise and mobilise students in Africa under apartheid.
Having learned from my experience in Madagascar that information was key to understanding political dynamics and the search for solutions to address them, I developed an information bulletin simply called “Liberation” on each country with the questions to be discussed with the students during my meetings with students at the universities I was visiting. I also engaged with representatives of liberation movements in different parts of Africa mainly those based in Tanzania and Zambia.
I had the opportunity to meet and join study groups on socialism, class struggles and anti-imperialist struggles, organised by different African social movements and discussed with now well-known socialist thinkers, mainly from East Africa such as the late Babu, Issa Shivji, Mahmood Mamdani, and Yash Tandon, among others, each who greatly enhanced my knowledge but also have fortified my resolve to work for change, liberation, equality and justice as an African woman.
Finally, can you tell us what you read, and what conclusions you reached later in your life from your earlier activism in Madagascar?
As I was based in Nairobi, I had access to books in English, so I avidly read the classics on the theory of African people’s struggle as there was not much on Africa in Madagascar.
The book that most enlightened me, and continues to do so today, is Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). So much so that as part of my programme together with other progressive organisations in Nairobi at the time, and the National Church Council of Kenya, we invited Walter Rodney to come to Kenya and address students at the University of Nairobi University as well as members of various social movements. This enabled us to deepen our understanding of capitalist exploitation and how we can get organised and contribute to dismantling it.
Later on, as I was one of the Commissioner of the Programme to Combat racism of the World Council of Churches, my understanding of Rodney’s arguments helped me to contribute to the movement demanding disinvestment from South Africa and to mobilise students for solidarity with the Australian aboriginal, and the Sri Lankan Tamil.
A lifetime of activism: mobiilsing for social Justice and rights in an unequal world (Martin Luther King’s lecture, 2007).
In 1975 family life brought me to Europe first, in Geneva. I came back to Nairobi in 1978 where I found people that I knew from the social movement had now gone underground in Kenya and were publishing the PAMBANA newsletter which was banned by the Moi Government and several of the comrades I knew then were in detention for that reason. My political work was to provide solidarity to their families to the best of my ability. Until my husband was arrested on a trump-up charge and following his release from detention we had to leave Kenya again for Canada.
In Canada, I enrolled for a postgraduate course on Women Study at the University of Waterloo while also teaching French language at both Waterloo and Wilfred Laurier University until 1991 when we came to the UK where my husband got a job.
I got a job at the Africa Centre first and eventually founded the Agency for Cooperation and Research for Development and was in charge of the West Africa portfolio which focused on Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Tchad, and Mauritania, and developed new programmes in Guinee, Liberia and Sierra Leone
In terms of lessons learned from engagement in politics as an African woman, I would say say, the debates, discussions, and learning during the student’s seminars in 1972 produced knowledge that was useful later in my life. The student movement itself created a radical mutation of consciousness of what was wrong, what needed to change, and how that change could happen and what role I could have in it.
Those debates also brought to the fore the notion of being independent, as opposed to having independence.
Our ambition as students wasn’t to take overpower, but to facilitate the emergence of a democratic state that can respond to the needs of Malagasy citizens and support the realisation of their aspiration.
Political practices today do not seem to allow for such a process to happen, so we come back to the perennial question. What needs to be done?
Micheline Ravololonarisoa has been an activist and socialist all of her life and has worked for years as a writer and development consultant. Micheline lives in London with her husband.
All the photographs in the interview have been provided by Micheline Ravolonarisoa. The feature photograph shows Micheline speaking as the government refused the students demand during the mass uprisings in 1972.
Notes
[1] Malgachisation is not only about the use of the Malagasy language, but also the principle that aimed to harmonise the content and method of education to be in line with the “revolutionary imperatives” of a socialist ideology, towards the “building of a socialist and truly Malagasy state, rooted in the Malagasy philosophy, values, process of thoughts and language.” (Charter of the Malagasy Socialist revolution).
For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers path-breaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive. Please consider subscribing or donating today.
ROAPE’s Ray Bush introduces Volume 51 Issue 181 of the journal, a special 50th anniversary issue on imperialism and Africa. The role of imperialism in undermining African sovereignty and independence has been a recurrent theme in ROAPE since the journal’s first issue editorial back in 1974. Here, Bush interrogates what imperialism is, how it may have changed over time, and with what consequences.
It is an irony of history that coercion, which is so effective that it can afford to be silent, is scarcely recognised as such; it is only on occasions when its effectiveness is diminished to a point where it has to come out in the ugliest of colours that its reality begins to strike us. The deafening silence about imperialism … is thus a reflection of the extraordinary strength and vigour it is displaying at present.
Prabhat Patnaik, ‘Whatever Has Happened to Imperialism?’1
This 50th anniversary issue of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) focuses on imperialism in the African context and beyond. It reminds readers of the structural underpinning to the world economy that produces and reproduces inequality, poverty, war and famine and yet is omitted from almost all analysis of Africa. This editorial interrogates what imperialism is, how it may have changed, and with what consequences. We do this by exploring some of the recurrent themes that ROAPE and its authors have advanced over 50 years of academic activist engagement with Africa’s political economy. Furthermore, this 50th anniversary issue deals specifically with the politics of knowledge production and how the journal managed to separate itself from a corporate publishing house to ensure free and genuinely open access for all its readers. The control of how knowledge is generated and access to it is facilitated is a key dimension of imperialism, and this journal contests this aspect of imperialist hegemony.
Our critical commentary on imperialism in this anniversary issue explores the crises of social reproduction and gender inequality that underpin late capitalism in crisis. We also examine the shifting debate about the international (imperialist) labour migration regime; French imperialism in West and Central Africa; and imperialist intervention in North Africa. In addition, the struggles for people’s power are examined with reference especially to South Africa. A founding editor reflects on why and how ROAPE emerged as a radical journal on African political economy and recent debate about knowledge production in and about Africa. There are also a number of reader reflections on the history of ROAPE, what the journal has meant to some activists, what ROAPE may have done reasonably well in the last 50 years and what it might do better.
Imperialism
Imperialism is a global system of surplus value extraction through unequal exchange between the North and the Third World. Surplus value is distributed unequally determined by class, race and gender and the power of the imperial triad of the United States, the European Union and Japan (Amin 1974; Harb 2024, 15). Capital does not leave any part of the globe untouched: capitalism as a global system subjugates, and the ‘subjugation of the people of the periphery … is an integral part of its modus operandi’ (Patnaik and Patnaik 2017, 141). Historical capitalism is a global phenomenon in which imperialism is embedded. This argument was part of a fundamental contribution made by Samir Amin which featured in ROAPE’s first issue (1974). Amin’s model of global accumulation of capital highlighted two patterns of development. First, in capitalism’s centre, where the dominant economic activity tries to satisfy mass consumer needs and the demand for production goods. Second, there are peripheral systems dominated by the production (and limited import) of luxury goods and exports restricted and shaped by the lack of an internal market (ibid., 9). Accumulation of capital in the core often enlisted the complicity of its working class in helping to subordinate peripheral capitalism and, in the process, among other things produced a racialised and racist view of the world: the rational and efficient North versus an undeveloped, lazy and indolent South. This global system is therefore polarising but it is not immutable (Amin 2019). The core–periphery structure is mediated by a range of classes that include in the core an imperialist bourgeoise and a proletariat; and in the periphery a dependent bourgeoisie and a working class, but also socially differentiated peasantries and persistent non-capitalist modes of production. These themes were discussed at length as part of a dedicated ROAPE issue on the work of Samir Amin (Kvangraven et al. 2021).
Amin developed Lenin’s theory of imperialism that was characterised by the dominance of the export of capital by nineteenth-century monopolies in chemicals, engineering manufactures and trade (Lenin 1975). Lenin’s view was that imperialism was shaped by the historical tendency of the concentration and centralisation of capital and it was the highest stage of capitalism. Weary of definitions for being unable to embrace the historical complexities of social, political and economic processes, Lenin nevertheless argued that imperialism had five basic features:
1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; 2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this ‘finance capital’, of a financial oligarchy; 3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; 4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations, which share the world among themselves and 5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. (Lenin 1975, 106)
While it is often overlooked, one of Lenin’s enduring legacies was ‘the tremendous significance of Africa in both the global political economy and the struggle for human freedom’ (Pateman 2022, 300; see also Joffre-Eichhorn and Anderson 2024).
The mechanics of imperialism and the role of some of its main actors have changed since the turn of the twentieth century. The ‘territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers’ for example has been challenged by struggles for national liberation and decolonisation yet, as Samir Amin often noted, the importance of Marxism was its method of analysis and action, not ‘as a group of propositions drawn from use of that method’ (Amin 2019, 405). His theory of imperialism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was still shaped by the monopolies of the imperial triad in weapons of mass destruction, technology, financial flows and their control, planetary resources, communications and their infrastructure (see also Abdel-Malek 2008 [1977]). But the dominance of these monopolies has shifted towards the management of war and waste. As we note below, imperialism continues to be a structural relationship where unequal exchange ensures value added to the economies of the triad. This follows the continued asymmetry between tropical and temperate regions where Northern capitalism relies on the access to commodities that it cannot produce, where it does not (yet) have substitutes, tropical fruits and vegetables, edible oils and fibres and where production depends on small-scale farmers and the persistence of pre-capitalist relations of production (Patnaik and Patnaik 2017, 147). And there is a recent increase in the role played by artisanal small-scale miners in accessing rare metals, cobalt and lithium in the Democratic Republic of Congo for Western clean energy and transport infrastructures (Radley 2023).
This asymmetry has two implications. First, obtaining a large range of goods that simply could not be produced in the temperate regions from the tropical landmass, and doing so in growing quantities because of capital accumulation, was, and remains, a perennial necessity for capitalism. And if increasing supply price is to be avoided, then there is no alternative to obtaining such goods at the expense of their local absorption. This, in short, remains a perennial feature of capitalism. (Patnaik and Patnaik 2017, 147)
This value transfer to Northern-based multinational corporations (MNCs) and financial-sector service and banking institutions results from among other things the payment of wage rates in Africa and elsewhere at less than the costs of social reproduction. The contemporary period, however, is driven less by capitalists crudely intensifying the rate of exploitation, lengthening working days and advancing ‘super exploitation’. Imperialism is now driven by especially US financial and military class interests that seek to ameliorate the crisis of late capitalism by advancing a win–win strategy of waste production, militarism and war-related accumulation. War is now a market for the production and reproduction of imperial hegemony and a leading capitalist sector (Capasso and Kadri 2023).
Herein lies a partial explanation for the persistent role that force and violence plays in the subjugation of radical African voices and social movements. Accumulation by dispossession was seen by Marx as a (short-term) process at the early formative period of primitive accumulation. Yet it is a persistent and systemic feature of imperialism. Dispossession and control of local producers is a means by which global capitalism imposes income deflation on the periphery. In addition to promoting law and order, the securitisation of producers ensures that supplies of ‘tropical goods (and temperate goods in winter) can be obtained by the capitalist sector without any threat of an increasing supply price’ (Patnaik and Patnaik 2017, 148). The most compelling articles in the history of this journal have focused on historically shaped relations of the ‘central contradiction of imperialism and national and social revolutions’ (Abdel-Malek 2008 [1977], 129). These ‘revolutions’ go beyond particular accounts of social and political struggles for the liberation of South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau and Namibia, many of which have been reflected in some detail in ROAPE. Many critically engaged accounts with various struggles around resources, land and extractives, MNCs and financialisation have not prioritised a view of national liberation at their core. Yet the strengths of ROAPE are evident around the debates of imperialism and political struggles that have strived to counter the policies of local elites and metropolitan capitalist interests (Ajl 2018, 2021). Many articles may have been overfocused on narrative accounts of ‘big issues’ – variously, corruption, economic reform (issue nos. 47 and 63), democracy (nos. 49 and 54), mining (nos. 12, 168 and 173), gender (no. 149), the environment (nos. 74 and 177–178) and religion (52).2 These themes have often been sandwiched too briefly in between analyses as to why the deleterious consequences of underdevelopment took the form that they did. ROAPE has not favoured a template of what struggles should and should not be supported in Africa but some of the most analytically engaged articles have explored elements of an agenda mapped in the ‘genuine dialectical pattern [of] inter-relations between hegemonic imperialism and anti-hegemonic national liberation movements’ (Abdel-Malek 2008 [1977], 129; in ROAPE see, inter alia, Allen 1995).
ROAPE and imperialism
A recurrent theme in ROAPE has been the role of imperialism in undermining African sovereignty and independence (inter alia, Zeilig 2014). The founding editors noted in the first editorial of the issue, in which Amin explained his theoretical model of accumulation and development:
This review is published with the express intent of providing a counterweight to that mass of literature on Africa which holds: that Africa’s continuing chronic poverty is primarily an internal problem and not a product of her colonial history and her present dependence; that the successful attraction of foreign capital and the consequent production within the confines of the international market will bring development; and that the major role in achieving development must be played by western-educated, ‘modernizing’ elites who will bring progress to the ‘backward’ masses. (ROAPE 1974, 1, emphasis added)
The editorial continued to indict leaders who inherited power at independence, confirming Frantz Fanon’s description of them as ‘spoilt children of yesterday’s colonialism and of today’s national governments’. The founding editors of ROAPE promised a journal that would be dedicated to the task of:
understanding, and countering, the debilitating consequences of a capitalism which stems from external domination and exploitation and is combined with internal underdeveloped and equally exploitative structures. … Class analysis should also be indicating the prospects for transformation and in particular isolating the class alliances that will have to be generated and the approach to their struggle with the entrenched interests maintaining underdevelopment (ROAPE 1974, 7–8).
The 1970s were heady years of optimistic engagement with national liberation movements, offering solidarity and support for struggles against South African racism and victory against Portuguese fascism in Lisbon and its forced removal from lusophone Africa. Early issues of the journal were thus inflections on the rise of new capitalist dynamics of transnational capital, the roles and impact of multinational corporations, debates on neo-colonialism and the state (issue nos. 2 to 5) and whether there was capitalism in Africa (nos. 8, 14, 22 and 23), and intense debate about liberation in southern Africa (nos. 11 and 18).
Self-criticism by the editorial working group (see, for example, issue no. 32 from 1985) was often evident in early issues – something that diminished in the pages of later volumes. Early optimism of engagement with revolutionary moments of struggle was replaced and very soon overtaken by the crisis of late capitalism and its calamitous impact throughout the continent. ROAPE has been focused almost continuously on analysing the crisis of capitalism and the different dimensions of how imperialism has subordinated chances for progressive movements and sovereignty. Many early issues thus centred on structural adjustment, poverty reduction papers and the role that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund played in imposing the will of international capital in Africa. The declared early self-importance of ROAPE’s initial suggestion of its role in ‘devising strategy for Africa’s revolution’ gave way to developing critiques of capitalism and its slump, the restructuring that followed in the 1980s and 1990s and the enhanced role of the imperial triad in setting parameters for African liberation. The journal was also keen, in its retrospect and prospect after 10 years of publishing, to explore ‘which classes constitute friends and enemies of [the] revolutionary process’ (ROAPE 1985, issue no. 32, 6) in the struggle for socialism in Africa. Editors noted in the same issue that they had perhaps been ‘simplistic’ and ‘naively ambitious’ in seeing African development in terms of armed liberation struggle or neo-colonialism. Nevertheless, there has always been an optimism regarding how socialism can be developed and by which social forces (inter alia, issue numbers 139 (2014); 69 (1996); 77 (1998); 96 (2003); 127 (2011); and 155 (2018)).
ROAPE has reported on the shifts in the character of imperialism since the early 1970s (issue nos. 32 (1985); 38 (1987); 50 (1991); 66 (1995); 77 (1998); 80 (1999); 95 (2003); 102 (2004); 103 (2005); 104/105 (2005); 113 (2007); and 132 (2012)). It has done so mostly to explore the impact of imperialism, which big issues have highlighted capitalism in crisis, and how it is evidenced in Africa. In doing this the journal’s archive is a stockpile of academic and activist reportage on Africa’s struggles with class forces that mostly emanate from the global core but are not always reducible to it. In other words, ROAPE contributors have explored not simply the dynamics of imperialism from the global North but also how capital accumulation under imperialism has been historically mediated by African classes. As Bracking and Harrison noted in ROAPE issue 95,
clearly capitalism continues its expansion and deepening across and within space, but its social forms are diverse and historically-constituted, not derivative of a form of ‘metropolitan’ capitalism, no matter how strongly they might be influenced by the latter. (Bracking and Harrison 2003, 7, emphasis in original)
Bracking and Harrison put paid to any notion that became popular among bourgeois commentators after the fall of the Berlin Wall: that there was a post-imperial world order. They listed five ongoing features of imperialism noted by Fred Halliday (2002) which were similar to the analysis of Amin regarding the inexorable expansion of capitalism as a socio-economic system on a world scale: the role of capitalist competition, the continuous drive for expansion and resulting war, and persistent reproduction of inequalities on a world scale (Bracking and Harrison 2003, 7). It is important to note that imperialism is not simply or cannot be reduced to territorial control or occupation by economically powerful states – although that also continues, and powerful US economic interests do imperil African sovereignty. Imperialism ‘is not, and has never been, a static and unchanging reality of power and domination’ (Wai 2014, 491). It has a powerful ideological underpinning that elevates Western culture and history as being universally hegemonic and in so doing continues Western post-Second World War racialised modernisation theory: that the West shows itself as an exemplar to Africa to help it emulate a particular pattern of modernity. While there have been continuities in how imperialism plays out, not just in Africa, there have also been several important discontinuities and of course resistance to it. Put simply, the US has difficulty in maintaining global hegemony in the twenty-first century.
There is now ‘a period of flux for imperialism’ (Ghosh 2021, 9). US hegemony is challenged by its defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq. And while the US is chastened by the Ukraine political leadership for stalling and not immediately meeting demands for materiel, it may be that elites in Washington desire to extend and deepen the consequences of Russia’s ‘special military operation’ for as long as it can – and benefit financially in the process. War is good for business. The US is certainly keen in its support for genocide in Palestine and critical of South Africa’s leading role in the case brought against Israel in the International Criminal Court. The presence of US military in West Africa is also challenged in Niger, where Washington has been forced to withdraw more than 1,000 military personnel (Tait 2024). This does not mean that the global system and financial architecture of capitalism is immediately imperilled, although the rise of the BRICS bloc of nations is often written up in that way (inter alia, Chakraborty 2018; Chatterjee and Naka 2022; Duggan, Ladines Azalia and Rewizorski 2022). Neither does it mean that US militarism is less evident or violent, either directly or through its proxies. And it also does not immediately imply that African states can easily and quickly develop sovereign national projects. It means, instead, that opposition and resistance to US economic and military intervention are intense; that imperialism does not easily meet the interests of large financial capital; and that the ideological mask of the US (and EU) – in promoting growth in Africa, and elsewhere, while declaring concern for poverty reduction – has been exposed as a patronising agenda of self-justification and the status quo. It has also meant a more expansive and broader definition of imperialist interest in advancing control over economic territory. Attempts to generalise control over African resources, often in competition with China, have accelerated in the twenty-first century, and so too has the capitalist impulse to commodify all aspects of human activity, including basic amenities and social services (Ghosh 2021, 10).
Imperialism and war
Mainstream discourse about Africa, poverty, conflict and war continues to invest hope and support for Western investment to resolve the contemporary continental debt and financial crisis. The African Development Bank notes a number of recent external shocks – conflict in Ukraine, post- Covid-19 recovery and subdued global growth – as having an impact on Africa’s economic performance. The horrors of the continent’s economic and social malaise are much reported and of course heavily felt by workers and farmers in Africa. The average debt to GDP ratio in sub-Saharan Africa ‘almost doubled in just a decade – from 30% at the end of 2013 to almost 60% … by the end of 2022’ (Comeli et al. 2023). But since 2010 public debt in sub-Saharan Africa has more than tripled – it is now in excess of US$1.14 trillion (World Bank 2023). Countries have tried to finance the difficulty in providing even modest public service provision by increasing public debt. That has led to historically high fiscal crises of the state – the gap between income and expenditure. More worrying, however, is the composition of sub-Saharan Africa’s debt. After the 2008 financial crisis, African countries were encouraged to borrow at much higher rates of interest than was hitherto the case and to borrow from private lenders. An increasing and higher element of the continent’s debt is now owed to private equity investors and banks than has ever hitherto been the case. The move away from bilateral and multilateral borrowing is more costly and precarious, with heavy penalties for default. In eastern and southern Africa, for example, the private sector now accounts for at least 19% of regional financing as countries secure funds from international markets by issuing bonds, as has been the case in Kenya and Rwanda (Prasad, Sedlo and Allen Massingue 2022). Foreign capital continues to be seen as a panacea to supplement African domestic investments’ liquidity, but servicing external debts often requires further borrowing which keeps the financial system in place (Sylla and Sundaram 2024). A counter to this has been Chinese financing for development, a worry for the international financial institutions as they have little accurate knowledge of the extent of this, and, unlike Western donors, China does not impose conditionalities on its lending and debt relief. In April 2024 China cancelled an unspecified amount of Zimbabwe’s interest-free loans. Harare remains ineligible for financial support from the international financial institutions for a number of reasons, including default in the 2000s and US pressure to open the economy. Zimbabwe owed at least US$12.7 billion of its total public debt of US$17.7 billion to external creditors. While mainstream critics repeated the mantra that China will increase its political leverage over Zimbabwe, China’s ambassador to Zimbabwe noted that the ‘loans are not intended to foster dependency but to strengthen bilateral relations and economic cooperation’ (Buyisiwe 2024).
The increased cost and precarity for borrowing undermine any wishful notion that UN Sustainable Development Goals may be even partially met (African Union et al. 2023). More than 282 million people in Africa (20% of the population) were undernourished in 2022 – an increase of 57 million people since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. At least 868 million people were moderately or severely food insecure and more than 342 million were severely food insecure. The majority of Africa’s population in 2021, about 78%, could not afford a healthy diet – compared with 42% at the global level. The cost of securing a healthy diet has been increasing: it was estimated at 3.57 purchasing power parity (PPP) dollars a day in 2021 in Africa – higher than the threshold for extreme poverty, which is seen to be 2.15 PPP dollars a day (FAO et al. 2023, v).
Despite the relentlessly gloomy evidence for Africa’s economic and social outlook the African Development Bank insists that while the continent’s ‘growth momentum’ is stalled, because of ‘significant headwinds, Africa has also shown remarkable resilience’ (AfDB 2023, iii). The historically dominant tropes of the economic mainstream are repeated by the AfDB noting the continent’s stock of ‘huge natural wealth’ and the need for all stakeholders to ‘put in place all the necessary legal and fiscal apparatus’ to address ‘structural barriers to private investments’ in promoting ‘climate actions and green transitions’ and ‘to improve the management of their natural resources’ (AfDB 2023, iv).
The language and rhetoric of the international financial institutions and development agencies remain similar to those of the protagonists for continental economic reform in the disastrous lost development decades of the 1980s and 1990s. They argue that growth can be increased and sustained on the continent if private (foreign) investment can be encouraged by developing a more secure political environment to facilitate the easier removal to the global North of the continent’s natural resource base. This would be simpler if there was a reduction in ‘unresolved internal conflicts’ (AfDB 2023, 6). The mistake in such analyses is that conflict is seen to be local and national and usually shorn of any (colonial) historical past and context. The crisis of late imperialist capitalism is revealed most starkly in what Ali Kadri has called a ‘global waste phenomenon’. The evidence just mentioned for African debt and poverty, hunger and impoverishment is not accidental or the result of poor local policy, although there may be some of the latter. Africa’s impoverishment is the outcome of unequal development and is systemically entwined with the US-driven imperialist system (Kadri 2023). Kadri notes that there are more ‘prematurely wasted people and pollution in evidence today than all the commodity wealth on display’:
Capital has become manifest as a system of relations whose activities have placed the planet beyond the point of no return. Global society is repressed and made to pay for and consume the waste. Standard theory says that the use values of commodities are stripped away from their social producers and sold. Since the heap of harmful commodities, the waste, is way higher than the heap of useful or sane commodities, waste products are also stripped away from social producers and sold back to them. (Kadri and Leukefeld 2024, 146)
Ali Kadri’s argument draws attention to the need to understand the changing historical character of capitalism and to how explanations of the contemporary African crisis can only be fully understood in how centuries of value extraction have generated impoverishment on the continent. Profits create waste, and costs of dealing with waste are borne by society. In Africa the costs of social reproduction are so suppressed that often only bare life is possible and destitution is widespread. Impoverishment in Africa feeds the economic and social reproduction of the North.
There is here a continuity in Lenin’s theory of imperialism, namely the persistent role that war plays in resolving contradictions of financial capitalism:
Given the phenomenon of waste, we know for a fact that capitalism commodifies all forms of life, like water, trash, and even human lives. With so many wasted lives, people dying before their time, and wasted nature being produced, commodified and priced, and also sold for profits in their own market gestation time, the militarism as a domain of accumulation … has evolved into the primary domain for the whole capitalist system. (Kadri and Leukefeld 2024, 148)
This argument is borne out in the evidence for increased military spending, the genocidal imperialist war in Palestine and the role of Israel’s meddling in Africa generally and the war in Sudan in particular. World military expenditure rose for a ninth consecutive year in 2022 to an all-time high of US$2.4 trillion. For the first time, in 2023 military expenditure rose in all geographical regions and the US is the major spender and supplier of weapons. US military spending in 2023 rose by 2.3% to US$916 billion, representing 68% of NATO military spending (SIPRI 2024). In Africa the biggest military spenders are the Democratic Republic of Congo with an increase of 105% in 2022 and South Sudan with an increase of 78% compared with 2022. Algeria’s military spending grew by 76% to US$18.3 billion – the largest level of expenditure ever recorded in the country, made possible by increased revenue from hydrocarbon exports after the Ukraine crisis. War is at the heart of imperialism. Capitalists gain from profits generated in the process of war – militarism generates demand – and the class actors gaining from higher profits increase their power and influence on decision-making in the imperialist triad. War also reduces life expectancy relative to its potential. In stark terms, Kadri notes, ‘It is the shorter life expectancy of the South relative to the North, which becomes the benchmark that signifies the divergence between the moneyed form of Northern wealth relative to its Southern counterpart’ (Kadri and Leukefeld 2024, 162).
‘We are all Palestinians…’
Devaluing human life in war, or more accurately genocide, is most recently evident in Palestine. Nelson Mandela (1997) was clear that ‘we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.’ Israel’s military spending in 2023 reached US$27.5 billion as it bombed Gaza after the Hamas attack in October 2023, killing indiscriminately more than 38,000 Palestinians (mostly civilians) in the following nine months. The accumulated effect of the genocide, however, is estimated to be more than 186,000 deaths. This figure for Palestinian deaths caused by Israel highlights the indirect health implications beyond the direct harm of violence taking account of those who have not been recovered from under the rubble of bombing, the indirect results of the destruction of Gaza’s health facilities, food distribution and other public provision (Khatib, McKee and Yusuf 2024). The genocide is an imperialist war. It is a stark example of how settler colonial Israel continues to try and separate people of Asia from the African masses generating the spoils of war for Washington and European elites. ‘Israeli aggression is itself a rudimentary step in global capital accumulation, that is, it adds to accumulation by militarism on a global scale; it will not cease’ (American Friends Service Committee 2023; Kadri and Leukefeld 2024, 150).
Israel, pound for pound, is the best investment the US has ever made. Israel is the purest expression of Western power, combining militarism, imperialism, settler colonialism, counterinsurgency, occupation, racism, instilling ideological defeat, huge profitable war-making and hi-tech development into a manticore of destruction, death, and mayhem. (Ajl 2024a, 3)
Since the early years of the construction of the state of Israel the US has viewed the settler colony as a vehicle for advancing Washington’s regional and strategic interests. As US President Joe Biden noted in 1986 and subsequently repeated, ‘if there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one’ (Ayyash 2023). This was first evident in the 1956 attack on Egypt with the Tripartite Agreement and then with arming the state in its war against Egypt and other frontline states. Israel has from its inception persistently interfered in Africa with military, economic and social mechanisms to undermine sovereignty and promote authoritarianism and violence, advancing imperialist interests and militarisation (Dowling 2023). Tel Aviv helped in the proxy war and sanctions against Libya (Capasso 2020, 2022) and has long acted as trainer for African armed forces, notably special forces and presidential guards in, for example, Equatorial Guinea and Uganda. Although Israel may only account for 1% of weapons transfers to sub-Saharan Africa, small arms weapons and armoured vehicles feature significantly. They were allegedly important during the Rwandan genocide, and Israel plays a significant role as a broker in facilitating arms transfers to the continent. Israel, with a reputation for ‘loose export norms’ (Dowling 2023), has not ratified the Arms Trade Treaty and it has three offices of the Israeli Weapons Industries in Africa – the largest for any continent. Israel remains secretive about its arms deals but there is evidence for deals with Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Chad, Lesotho, Rwanda, Uganda, Nigeria and the Central Africa Republic (Wezeman 2011). Israel also offered to supply nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa in 1975 (McGreal 2010).
Sudan
The genocide in Palestine may have pushed war in Sudan off the media agenda. However, there was little reportage or international concern to reduce the conflict even before Israel’s destruction of Gaza. This is despite famine in Sudan being mapped long before its impact in April 2024. Sudan has the world’s largest number of people facing acute food shortage, with mortality projections in June 2024 to be in excess of 2.5 million, or about 15% of the population in Darfur and Kordofan (Borger 2024; Medani 2024). More than 11 million people have been displaced within the country or become refugees especially but not only in neighbouring Chad. The UN has noted that war has created the world’s biggest internal displacement, leading to an acute crisis of food access and production affecting more than 25 million people (half the population), as violence has destroyed livelihoods and access to income, disrupted farming, and in 2023 reduced food production by an estimated 46% (OCHA 2024). The war in Sudan has rather inappropriately been labelled ‘war between generals’ (Ahmed and Johnson 2024), as fighting erupted in April 2023 between soldiers loyal to the head of the armed forces, General Abdel Fattah al-Burnhan, the de facto ruler at the time, and General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, who is head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which combines a number of different militia. The successful toppling of the government of dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019, after 26 years in office, failed to consolidate or promote democratic deepening and transition to sustained representative politics. Opposition forces were frequently frustrated by remnants of al-Bashir’s regime. Instead, a military coup in October 2021 replaced a broad-based coalition of opposition forces as the RSF and the Sudan National Army became impatient at any possible restrictions placed on the military by a civilian transition. The military was anxious at attempts to curb its corporate power derived from its economic assets and opportunity to generate private wealth in agriculture, manufacturing and trade. Rumours also spoke of sections of the army wanting to reassemble Islamist forces close to the ousted dictator al-Bashir by mounting an offensive against the RSF. The coup may also have been a pre-emptive strike triggered by possible US impatience with the pace of a democratic transition.
Massacres of civilians and targeted killings, especially in Darfur, were a harsh reminder of atrocities committed in the early to mid 2000s by the Janjaweed militia, from which the RSF emerged, killing up to 300,000 black Africans – something for which the International Criminal Court indicted al-Bashir. The latter had admitted that while he did not have any links to the Janjaweed, he had helped form militias to defend the country against what he called dissident elements and foreign influences that he declared were targeting Darfur’s resources and threatening to break up the unified state of Sudan.
Herein, and perhaps somewhat ironically with the comments from al-Bashir, lies a glimpse at the reasons behind Sudan’s war, the levels of violence, imperialist interests and displacement in Darfur and Kordofan. ROAPE has previously explored different dimensions to recurrent and systemic crises of Sudan’s political economy. A special issue (no. 26, 1983) was pathbreaking in documenting and exploring a number of different dimensions to class politics and social transformation. It was an issue that was initiated and led by Sudan scholar-activists and examined the context of the country’s then economic crisis, class formation and agrarian transformation. The analysis of what became known as Sudan’s second civil war (1983–2005) was deepened by Alison Ayers (2010), who challenged the mainstream tropes regarding the causes of conflict and ‘civil war’. She argued that it was mistaken to reify focus on combatants or insurrectionary forces without examining how political violence was historically constituted.
Ayers assembled a compelling argument that an appreciation and explanation of civil war needed to be structured by an analytical and methodological approach that framed conflict in the context of ‘technologies of colonial rule’ that produced and reproduced fractures in social relations of race, religion and ethnicity which became mechanisms for military mobilisation. Second, she argued for the need to explore the context of the Cold War and subsequent geopolitics that worsened conflict. Third, she stressed the importance of understanding the impact that Sudan’s incorporation into the world economy has had for the ‘dynamics of accumulation, based on primitive accumulation and dependent primary commodity production’. In other words, while it may be commonplace to see violence as the result of individuals and lawless militaries and militias, we only get a more analytically precise explanation for violence, and genocide, if wars are seen as not new or extraordinary or internal but ‘crucial and constitutive dimensions of Sudan’s neo-colonial condition’ (Ayers 2010, 153).
The mistake of characterising the current civil war as one of ethnicity or battles between two warring generals has also been critiqued in a more recent issue of this journal. Mark Duffield and Nick Stockton (2024, 106) have provided an outline of ‘an historically and empirically grounded explanation for the post-colonial destruction of the nation states of Somalia and Sudan’. In doing so they placed centre stage the economic and political processes of primitive accumulation in the greater Horn. In Sudan they highlight that the violence, death and destruction in Darfur results from land clearances ‘to convert socially tilled soils and water resources used for autonomous subsistence into pastures for intensive commercial livestock production’ (ibid., 107). They document a pattern of ‘ecological strip mining’ (ibid.) that dispossesses local Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit communities, ‘freeing’ labour to work – but without employment opportunities – and dispossessing households of assets, particularly livestock, without which the indigenous population become destitute, and refugees, if they manage to escape slaughter at the hands of the RSF.
Sudan reminds us of capitalist and imperialist pressures that underpin war. They do so by highlighting that capitalism is intrinsically a violent process. They highlight how primitive accumulation is not a short-term or temporary process in the formative period of capitalist development, but more permanent and recurrent. Looking at the Horn as a regional economy Duffield and Stockton reveal that even during the height of the humanitarian crisis where aid and development assistance was intense, Sudan (and Somalia) continued to export large volumes of livestock to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Their argument is that the changing demands for food production, and consumption, create the demand for primitive accumulation and violence in Sudan (see also Woertz 2014). The demand for meat in the UAE has stoked dispossession in Darfur as the ideological rhetoric of warring factions is expressed in terms of racialised Afro-Arab binary and militia dehumanisation of people with black African identity who may be Masalit, Fur or Zaghawa (Thomas 2024). There has been much written about Hermedti’s wealth and ownership of gold mined in western Sudan, but the RSF and their UAE financiers have also driven a commodification of land and labour through violent dispossession and displacement of local populations, so that land could be mined for livestock production and export. The endless wars in the Horn, and especially Somalia and Sudan, are not humanitarian disasters per se characterised by essentialist ethnic and regional conflict or megalomaniacal army officers.
The violence and disaster for the majority of Sudanese is the outcome of deep-seated and intense primitive accumulation in Darfur and parts of Kordofan that rewards not only factions of Sudan’s military but also regional actors like the UAE and Saudi Arabia. These two states have vied for expanded regional hegemony and suppressed internal dissent and support for the Arab uprisings in 2011 (Mahjoub 2024). The UAE has been pivotal not only as a market for livestock to feed its population but also as a supplier of arms to the RSF – supplied to the UAE from the US and UK among others. The UAE has been the destination for gold produced in RSF strongholds and a financial centre for RSF ‘front companies to provide weapons, supplies and financing services’ (Mahjoub 2024). The UAE has also helped to manage and groom the image and PR of the RSF (Lynch and Gramer 2019). It would also seem that members of the Sudan Armed Forces and especially the RSF have been variously integrated into the UAE’s military system, helping wage war against Ansar Allah – the Houthi movement – in Yemen. The attempts to exert political and military influence in the greater Horn has also been evident in the roles played by the UAE, Saudi Arabia and also the US, in seeking to shape discussions for a post-genocide Sudan (Wanni 2024).
Agendas
Anniversaries are moments to reflect on what has been done and to think how they may have been done differently. In the editorial that marked ROAPE’s 30th anniversary, editors considered what might be at the top of a radical agenda for transformation in Africa (Bujra et al 2004). They asked what kinds of themes were important to explore as part of a ‘renewal’. There were, they argued, five dominant issues: ‘globalised capitalism’; US militarism and unilateralism; the reproduction of labour and society; states, state failure and conflict; and resistance and ‘solidarity’ today. These have been crucial themes to help understand African political economy and struggles to promote a radical transformation. Editors in 2004 reiterated the importance of class analysis in the context of ‘prevailing conditions of primitive accumulation’ (ibid., 559). I have highlighted this in the case of Sudan and importantly I have shown how local and national class struggles are often shaped by, but not reducible to, the consequences of US imperialism. This is a theme developed in this issue.
Imperialism is the key framework within which contemporary political economy in Africa is shaped and it is an imperialism that is evidenced by the collective military, economic and social power of the triad, US, EU and Japan. The US may dominate militarily but it cannot govern as unilaterally as it might wish, and China’s increasingly global presence challenges Washington’s imperialist hegemony. ROAPE will need to explore the role of China in Africa in more detail. This has begun with the Roape.net collection of essays from The New School symposium of December 2023 ‘The African Continent and China: Counter-Hegemonic Narratives’. Yin Chen and Corrina Mullin (2024) and others in that collection expose the limitations of most scholarly prevailing narratives and stereotypes about China. They challenge the false equivalences of comparing China to hegemonic Western states or that China can be characterised as imperialist. This contrasts sharply with several previously posted blogs on Roape.net (Wengraf 2018; Plys, Lô and Mohamed 2022). It is too simplistic to call China imperialist. It is a reductionist assertion implying proximity to and reifying elements of Lenin’s definition that imperialism is defined by domestic monopoly capitalism and increased presence of capital export in the world market. At least two themes can be developed and interrogated further: the character of China’s domestic development policy and the impact of Chinese political, economic and social relations in Africa.
Reflecting on the character of China’s development strategy can help with regard to the possible emergence of national sovereign projects in Africa as a form of delinking (Amin 2019; Ajl 2024b). China has promoted an anti-systemic position managing local and national capital accumulation that is not simply subordinated to the international law of value. In this context,
the governing classes of the periphery [can] actively insert their countries into the world trade system with the strategic aim of achieving a gradual growth in the level of the population’s scientific and technical sophistication. (Macheda and Nadalini 2021, 120)
The Chinese Communist Party has promoted and embedded an escalation of the technical capabilities of the national labour force and done so by
safeguarding the country from two typical pathologies affecting the peripheral capitalist countries in which the development of productive forces is subordinated to the pursuit of profitability: the halting of the growth in formal employment and wages, and the regression of the country’s productive structure towards the non-tradable sector. (ibid., 136)
China may be the world’s largest economy as measured by purchasing power parity, and recent growth has been fuelled by increased demand for imports of raw materials from across the Third World, not just Africa. Yet, as Lenin argued, imperialism is characterised by ‘superprofits’ shaped by the global supremacy of the majority of humankind by a minority of dominant states (Li 2021). While China’s foreign assets are greater than its liabilities, it is important to note that the structure of its assets is different from foreign investment in China (State Administration of Foreign Exchange 2023). Foreign capital in China attempts to benefit from the country’s cheap labour supply in manufactures for export where rates of return were between 5 and 6% between 2010 and 2018. In contrast, China’s total overseas assets are mostly held in reserve assets, currencies including the US dollar with investments in ‘low-return but “liquid” instruments like U.S. government bonds’ (Li 2021). The rate of return on China’s overseas assets in the eight years after 2010 averaged 3%. The implication of this, among other things, is that Chinese foreign assets are largely in the form of a claim for future access to US and other goods and services, yet these are likely to be unobtainable: deploying them to boost industrial growth is likely to plunge the planet into an ecological abyss.
China is not a country of the capitalist core. It is a net provider of surplus value to the capitalist world system and it is not a net recipient of surplus value from the world periphery. ‘China is thus best described as a semi-peripheral country in the capitalist world system’ (Li 2021). It also, of course, provides a brake on imperialist military aggression by the triad, political support for sovereignty in Africa by not seeking conditionality for its aid and loans and a possible mirror for alternative development strategies that are driven first and foremost by national and then regional plans for development.
This leads to the second important focus on China that ROAPE can help develop: a more systematic analysis of the impact that Chinese investment, lending and infrastructure development, including the role of experts and expatriate labour, has on prospects for radical transformation in Africa. A lot of commentary on the role of China in Africa has come from Western media echoing business anxiety, particularly from US, Canadian and European mining and energy conglomerates being pushed aside by China’s race for African raw materials. The actual levels and impact of Chinese investment and foreign lending remain opaque, and it is too soon to argue convincingly what the long-term implications are for Chinese links with particular states or the continent as a whole.
Imperialism shapes capitalist interests of profitability and security, labour supply and its reproduction, all themes this journal will continue to expose. But does a journal have a responsibility that goes beyond reporting and relaying publishable submissions? ROAPE certainly has a responsibility to report on different African-based opposition forces of workers and farmers that have, for example, recently contested US and French militarism in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Senegal. ‘The South continues to be the “zone of storms” – repeated revolts, some of which are potentially revolutionary’ (Amin 2019, 404). Future issues of this journal might extend the list of important themes by including contributions that go beyond documenting examples of resistance to local dispossession and US militarism to map out alternative strategies that can advance national sovereign projects for justice and democratic decision-making that actively reduce imperialist intervention and local ruling class power and authority, including the possible role of the military in Africa in advancing a radical agenda for change. To what extent are there social movements that assemble alternative agendas with workers and peasants at their core, and which are deliverable rather than utopian abstractions from reality? And what are the organisational structures that might ensure the delivery of such agendas? What does national liberation or sovereignty mean, and under what kinds of conditions can social movements seize state power to make and deliver development policy that will advance living conditions for the poor, successfully breaking from imperialist dominance? This agenda, moreover, will take place in the context of an accelerating climate emergency where labour is displaced and dispossessed not only by deleterious consequences of foreign and local capitalist penetration, but also by ecological storm, famine and challenges to the maintenance even of bare life.
ROAPE helped with developing these agendas with African activists by holding three Connections workshops, which took place in Accra in November 2017, Dar es Salaam in April 2018, and Johannesburg in November 2018. The focus for these meetings was on African activists, trade unionists and researchers exploring agendas for radical transformation, industrial strategy, political change and policy reform. We will help advance more of these kinds of meetings in the months to come, where African activists set agendas for debating and planning revolutionary transformation. In these circumstances the journal becomes more than a vessel for assembling critiques of capitalism and imperialism, of adding to the criticism of US- and EU-led policy practices hidden under a rhetoric of Africa rising or optimism for (eventual) growth. The journal becomes a vehicle to help advance ‘practical utopianism’ – radical thinking that highlights the range and scope for African futures (Saul and Leys 1998; Bush 2021).
Articles in this issue
Articles in this issue deepen and advance many of the themes raised in this editorial. Peter Lawrence reflects on 50 years of ROAPE. A founding editor, he examines the role of ROAPE as a journal committed to the production of knowledge in the service of the struggle against global capitalist imperialism. He does this by situating the debate about knowledge production in and on Africa in the context of how ROAPE began as a radical left journal in the early 1970s. He reflects on some of the tensions within the editorial working group over time, highlighting, among other things, the challenges confronted by engaged scholars on Africa and the role of activism in promoting radical transformation. He also underlines the decision of the editorial working group to leave a global publishing house at the end of 2023 to ensure that ROAPE remains entirely independent, now with genuinely free and open access to all readers and doing this with the platform ScienceOpen.
Extending some of the themes linked to African knowledge production, Luke Sinwell interrogates the meanings and practice of 30 years of scholar-activism in South Africa. He looks at the dynamic relationship between race and class and knowledge production and what radical transformation might mean in that context. He argues that outside mainstream politics the left has lost its way in supporting grassroots political struggles. He argues that it is necessary to recognise that point and embrace new ways of making contact with and learning from local political struggles. Offering lessons for elsewhere in Africa he invokes Walter Rodney to ‘ground together’ to embrace and develop a myriad of streams of restlessness, discontent and militancy in South Africa.
Matteo Capasso and Essam Abdelrasul Bubaker Elkorghli demonstrate how US-led imperialism is the fundamental contradiction to be assessed when looking at development and underdevelopment in northern Africa. They detail how US imperialism tries to integrate different social formations in northern Africa into the circuits of capital in a number of distinct but integrated forms, ideologically, militarily and financially. They also highlight, however, that while the power of the US to disrupt organisational capacity to promote independent sovereign political economy continues, there have also recently been attacks that have shaken US hegemony – the ongoing national liberation struggle of Palestine and military-inspired coups in West and Central Africa against neo-colonialism. As they note, ‘The lessons from these revolutionary moments are clear and must not be underestimated’ for the region of North Africa.
Ndongo Sylla develops the themes of hostility and opposition to imperialism. He does so by exploring the changing role of French imperialism in West and Central Africa, interrogating the reasons behind coups in francophone Africa. He critiques mainstream views that see coups as representing a ‘backsliding’ of democracy or consider that the ‘epidemic’ of coups reflects a move towards unconstitutional challenges to law and order and to liberal democracy. He instead develops an analysis of the importance of the historical backdrop to different military interventions: the common themes between them, not the least the role of French occupation and continued destabilisation led from Paris, and what distinguishes the coups in relation to the specificity of the country cases. By exploring what is historically specific to the different military interventions Sylla asks how coups can be progressive in the struggle for radical political transformation. He notes among other things the role that youth, workers and peasants play in contesting imperialism and its multifaceted consequences.
Hannah Cross takes apart the international migration regime to highlight how it reveals imperialist power in West Africa and the Maghreb. She demonstrates the role played by the EU and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in promoting and underpinning US imperialism. This is achieved under the guise of promoting the global governance of migration, which advances the social relations of production on an international and local scale. She also compares global migration governance with structural adjustment as a set of border and development policies that sustain dependent relations between the elites of indebted African countries and the international capitalist class. In doing this she highlights the clear institutional parallels between the IOM and the international financial institutions. Global migration governance, for Cross, creates widespread chaos and displacement in the advance of finance capital.
Lyn Ossome deepens our understanding of gender inequalities and how they are part of the structural character of imperialism. She explores conditions of global capital accumulation and how the consequences of the immiseration it creates generates a gendered labour substratum of core–periphery imperialist relations. Elaborating this, she highlights processes and implications of gender inequalities, focusing on how the crisis of social reproduction is revealed in relations between the core and the periphery, especially in contemporary agrarian questions of access to land and the commons, the centrality of land reform as a basis of development for liberation and how these themes constitute struggles for national sovereignty and national liberation. Ossome argues that all considerations of, among other things, food and nature, land or nation cannot proceed without analysis of gendered labour regimes that are ‘trapped under the immiserating weight of capitalist accumulation’. ‘The anti-imperialist wars we continue to wage are nothing if they do not retain a focus on [these] materialist feminist histories.’
Ray Bush is Professor Emeritus of African Studies at the School of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Leeds. He is also a leading member of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group.
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Reflecting on the mass protests that recently shook Kenyan society from top to bottom, Joel Mukisa argues that we must go much further than a choiceless democracy to find answers. A systematic questioning of the underlining political and economic structures underpinning the choices on offer must be undertaken.
By Joel Mukisa
If you asked a think-tank team leader, a social sciences Professor at Nairobi University if they anticipated the scale and popularity of the protests that rocked East Africa’s economic powerhouse Kenya, only a few months ago many honest people would simply retort, NO!
The protests that rather appeared spontaneous characterized mainly by a young generation of Kenyans known as Gen Z protesting the Finance Bill (an annually produced document that lays out the government’s fiscal strategy) that would introduce a cocktail of new taxes on essential and basic commodities. This comes on the heels of an economy recuperating from the COVID-19, Ukraine War, the decpreciation of the Kenyan shilling,massive unemployement, massive debt and a divisive election.
The protests were characterized by incidents of violence among the deaths, shootings by Kenya’s Police, deployment of the Armed Forces, looting, plunder and the most dramatic, setting the national parliament ablaze. This all came as a surprise especially to Africanists that have viewed or tounted Kenya as a radical break with what it stereotypically labelled African.
Kenya is characterized as democratically stable and having strong democratic institutions. So the force meted out by Kenya’s police or even such rabid dissent with a leader of William Ruto’s stature and credentials can seem to be confusing. These tribeless protests can not be understood under the banal templates of “ethnic madness.” This is why I argue we must understand this protest movement as merely examples of something broader than even the protestors were saying which is characteristic of contemporary social movements.
Nomeclature
It may sound bourgeoisbut before we begin to understand the systemic shifts and questions the protest generated, we should understand it by the name under which it moves. The protests begun under the #OccupyParliament. Which was symbolic of the need to take a sovereign democratic institution and its symbolic power into the hands of the majority. This was after and slightly before parliament debated and passed the Finance Bill.
Despite objections raised and wide mass distemper against the law, parliamentarians of the Kenya Kwanza (the main party of governement) hurriedly passed the law with amendments from the minority. Government claimed that it had listened and hence the amendments. The tone shifted with Gen Z clarifying that they wanted: “Reject Not Amend.” The Amendment signalled the state’s ability to offer more if push came to shove and many urged those protesting to up the ante, and their gamble paid when Kenya’s President William Ruto declined to ratify the impugned Bill sending it back to Parliament.
It is in this context of democracy’s failure that #OcuppyParliament must be understood.
#OccupyParliament is not a fresh lexicon in the Antropocene. It first emerged in 2011 with the #OccupyWallStreet as a left-wing anarchist movement against economic inequality, corporate greed and the influence of money in politics that had begun in Zuccotti Park, in New York City’s financial district, and lasted from September 17 to November 15, 2011.
How can we better situate #OcuppyParliament without reducing it to an analogous analysis but rather steeping it within both its national, regional and international histriocity.
We can glean from the foregoing that from the onset #OcuppyMovements are mobilized online, overcoming differences emanating from historical injuries such as race, tribe (in the African context) and class, gender (not so much) as bodies assemble on the streets to make the point that life is nolonger liveable.
CNN journalist Larry Madowo interviewed two people who have been subject of humor and caricature. He asked them why they were on the streets. What particular grievances they had against the state that perhaps prompted them to come to the streets? The answers shifted from incoherent and incomphrensible to muffled and inarticulate hinting at a systemic problem from which the Finance Bill is the starting blocks through which mass hysteria could be immediately articulated.
Kenya is part of what has been termed as the African crisis or African Tragedy. The foregoing are adjectives for endemic poverty, high unemployement rates, inflation, corruption, deterioting terms of trade, cronynism and debt dependence. These were in recent times compounded by the Corona Virus pandemic, a war in Ukraine, among an array of other international factors. In such a fix with a near financial crunch just pending, the Kenyan leadership was forced onto the IMF who imposed the usual straitjacket.
The IMF insists that the crises are budgetary, i.e, that government expendintures have excedded revenues and the demand for foreign exchange outstripped supply. The short term antidote is to freeze wages, cut social programs and subsidies. Secondly, increase production from the supply side by transfering resources from the classes which have a tendency to consume to those that have a tendecy to invest. The recommendations at times include regressive tax regimes on the middle class. A middle class that been vanishing since 2008 during the Kibaki administration. It’s the same middle class on whom the new taxes would be imposed – joined by their dependant subaltern kith and kin on the streets in protests that were reminiscent of the 20th century bread riots that too, opposed IMF and World Bank Austerity.
Kenya’s path on this neo-liberal financing model must be one of the most ambitious on the continent and has been sustained across decades without proper scrutiny of its nefarious, cataclysmic implications such as the wide and dispropriate levels of inome inequality that has been an enabler in the reproduction of a political caste or aristocracy from which “alternatives” in the multi-party dispensations are to be chosen. The political economist Thandika Mkandwire refered to this as choiceless democracy given that it restricted sets of policy options available to African states, which find themselves strangled by a skewed international economic structure, the neoliberal economic and security demands of donors, and the pervasive presence of foreign NGOs and development agencies.
If the current state of democracy is limited in its scope to tackle the pervasive issues that bedevil us today and institutions of the global economy such as IMF and World Bank remain unfazed as we stand in the hot African sun to elect leaders, then democracy as it has been sold to us has failed.
So do we do as part of the #OcuppyParliament movement? Do we continue reforming the political system to which this mess is greatly attributable. As Zizek reminds us here, Marx’s key insight remains as pertinent today as it ever was: the question of freedom should not be located primarily in the political sphere – i.e. in such things as free elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, respect for human rights. Real freedom resides in the ‘apolitical’ network of social relations, from the market to the family, where the change needed in order to make improvements is not political reform, but a change in the social relations of production. We do not vote concerning who owns what, or about the relations between workers in a factory and their bosses. Such things are left to processes outside the sphere of the political, and it is an illusion that one can change them by ‘extending’ democracy – say, by setting up ‘democratic’ banks under people’s control.
The democractic illusion may thus be the real impediment to real time transformation of the social relations of production and the start of a conversation on the politics of redistribution that has been supplanted by the discourse of recognition that has atomized emanicipatory struggles.
Ruto is not the problem, the problem is sytemic and Kenyans should use this moment as an opportunity to seach for a new mode of democracy that is emancipatory. To return to the start of this blogpost, the answer as to why no one could have predicted this kind of event is simple, it required imagination, a break with the past for which most social sciences are totally incapable.
This blogpost examines how climate finance mechanisms and policies, while ostensibly designed to support sustainable development in Africa, have reinforced neocolonial economic structures and exacerbated financial vulnerabilities across the continent. To confront the challenges, Thelma Arko argues that African countries must strengthen regional integration and South-South cooperation to reduce dependency on external powers.
By Thelma Arko
Despite their minimal contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, African countries bear a disproportionate burden of climate change impacts while struggling with mounting debt, limited fiscal space, and vulnerabilities in emerging carbon markets. This blogpost explores the interconnected dimensions of climate finance, debt, and economic challenges facing African economies, revealing how ostensibly well-intentioned climate finance initiatives have paradoxically reinforced neocolonial economic structures and deepened the financial vulnerabilities of African nations. The analysis exposes how climate finance mechanisms, carbon markets, and evolving global climate finance strategies, including the “new collective quantified goal on climate finance,” often serve to perpetuate global inequalities and maintain Africa’s economic dependency. By synthesizing these multiple financial jeopardies, the article underscores the urgent need for a radical transformation of the global economic order. It argues for a fundamental break from the exploitative tendencies of global capitalism, advocating for African-led solutions that prioritize self-determination, equity, and sustainable development. The blogpost concludes by proposing strategies for African governments to assert their sovereignty, challenge existing power structures, and forge a new path towards economic liberation. These include demands for comprehensive debt cancellation, challenging the strategy of current market-based climate solutions, promotion of local autonomy and South-South cooperation, and exploration of alternative economic models.
Climate finance mechanisms, ostensibly designed to support sustainable development, have instead reinforced neocolonial economic structures and exacerbated the debt crisis in many African countries. This growing debt burden and the resulting constrained fiscal space are not mere coincidences but rather symptoms of a global economic order deliberately structured to perpetuate dependency and facilitate wealth extraction from the Global South. Carbon markets and other market-based climate solutions emerge, risking further entrenchment of global power imbalances and the commodification of nature and potentially deepening the financial vulnerabilities of African economies. The proposed “new collective quantified goal on climate finance” represents a shift in approach that, while aiming for inclusivity, may inadvertently increase pressure on already strained African economies. This calls for an urgent examination of global climate finance strategies. Addressing these interconnected financial jeopardies facing African economies requires a radical transformation of the global economic system encompassing comprehensive debt cancellation, rejection of market-based solutions, prioritization of African-led initiatives, and exploration of alternative economic models that serve the interests of African people. To achieve this, African countries must collectively assert their sovereignty, challenging existing power structures and forging a new path that prioritizes self-determination, equity, and sustainable development.
Despite Africa’s minimal contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, the continent disproportionately bears the brunt of climate change’s escalating impacts, underscoring the urgent need for significant financing to enable African countries, particularly vulnerable developing nations, to mitigate and adapt to these impacts. Acknowledging their historical responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions, developed nations in the global north pledged to mobilize USD$100 billion annually from 2020 to 2025 to support climate-related actions in developing countries. However, until recently, the failure of developed countries to fulfil this promise hindered Africa’s ability to build adaptive capacity and implement necessary measures for economic resilience against the impending consequences of climate change. With the transition from the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Agreement, all countries, including developing nations, are required to contribute to reducing their emissions as outlined in their voluntary Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Nonetheless, the achievement of most NDCs of developing countries is contingent upon receiving the promised climate finance.
Various actions and policies have been introduced to advance efforts to limit climate change. However, as most of these actions are structured within a capitalist system, they tend to perpetuate and exacerbate inequalities, inadvertently creating multiple financial jeopardies for African economies and challenging their development paths. While the pursuit of decarbonization and climate resilience is necessary, it has also exposed the deep-seated structural inequalities within the global economic order and given rise to new forms of economic precarity.
I am exploring the complex interplay between climate finance, policy actions, and their impacts on African economies. Firstly, the escalating debt burden of African economies has become a pressing issue, intensified by the ironic impact of climate finance mechanisms that were originally intended to foster sustainable development. Secondly, the mounting debt burden, coupled with economic challenges, constrains the financial resources available for climate action initiatives. Thirdly, the continent’s engagement with carbon markets introduces potential financial risks due to structural inequalities. Lastly, the proposed “new collective quantified goal on climate finance” presents a double-edged prospect. While it signals a promising shift towards inclusivity, there are concerns about further burdening developing nations that are already grappling with economic strain.
The Debt Burden
The debt situation in African economies is a pressing concern, hindering their ability to finance domestic spending and investment and complicating efforts to address climate change and achieve sustainable development. As of early 2023, the developing world faced an astonishing debt burden, totaling nearly USD$100 trillion. African countries have been among the hardest hit, facing a perfect storm of factors contributing to their financial distress.
The COVID-19 pandemic further exacerbated the debt situation in African economies. Governments incurred additional debt to shield their economies and provide relief to citizens. The subsequent energy crisis and the Russia-Ukraine war also played a role, leading to reduced capital inflows and increased outflows for African countries. This confluence of events pushed many African nations into a highly vulnerable financial position, with limited options for recovery.
Africa’s greater susceptibility to climate risk has resulted in higher interest rates on loans. As external official development assistance declined, many African governments turned to International Capital Markets for funding, attracted by initially low-interest rates. However, the rapid depreciation of local currencies against foreign currencies has further worsened the debt crisis, making repayment even more challenging.
In response to the pandemic, many African countries relaxed their monetary and fiscal policies, providing fiscal stimulus packages to support their economies. However, these measures unintentionally increased debt vulnerabilities, especially as public revenues declined. The recent commodity price shock has further strained government finances, forcing difficult choices between debt repayment and the affordability of essential goods like fuel, food, and fertilizer.
The intersection of climate finance, debt, and economic dependency presents a complex situation, particularly for developing nations in Africa. While climate finance is crucial for funding climate action and investments in renewable energy infrastructure, it has inadvertently contributed to a mounting debt burden, constraining the fiscal space for countries already struggling with debt servicing. This debt crisis has far-reaching implications, and understanding the interplay between these factors is essential for devising effective solutions. While climate finance plays a vital role in driving climate action and promoting investments in renewable energy infrastructure, it has, unfortunately, contributed to the growing debt burden on countries, especially those in the developing world. This dynamic limits the fiscal space available for these nations to invest in much-needed sustainable development initiatives. The debt crisis has severe impacts, and African nations find themselves in a particularly vulnerable position as they grapple with the dual challenges of debt servicing and the slow economic growth caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequences of climate change.
The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed an extra layer of strain on developing countries, exacerbating their financial precarity. It has led to escalating public debts and further reduced funding for essential services and pressing development needs. The path to global economic recovery has been fraught with challenges, including surging food and energy prices, rampant global inflation, and supply chain disruptions from the Russia-Ukrainian conflict. These factors have collectively diminished developing countries’ access to cheap credit and financial flows, further constraining their fiscal space.
The current dynamic has created a vicious cycle, hindering developing countries’ ability to invest in much-needed climate action and adaptation. As economies struggle with recession and rising unemployment, investing in renewable energy and climate resilience becomes increasingly difficult, especially for African nations. Adding to the challenge is the imbalance in climate finance allocation. While mitigation efforts have received significant attention and funding, adaptation and addressing “loss and damage” in the most climate-affected nations have been relatively neglected. This imbalance further exacerbates the financial strain on countries already struggling to cope with the impacts of climate change. Despite this, these same countries are expected to shoulder the financial burden of investing in expensive technology infrastructure for their energy transition.
Africa holds immense potential for renewable energy development, but realising this potential comes at a cost. The continent requires approximately USD$25 billion in annual investment to harness its renewable energy resources effectively. However, the high cost of debt servicing makes it practically impossible for many African countries to allocate sufficient funds for the deployment and expansion of renewable energy technologies. This imbalance hinders Africa’s ability to transition to cleaner energy sources and adapt to climate change.
Financial Vulnerabilities to the Carbon Markets
As African countries grapple with mounting debt and limited fiscal space for climate action, they are increasingly turning to alternative mechanisms for financing their climate initiatives. One such mechanism that has gained prominence is carbon markets. These markets are presented as offering both opportunities and challenges for African economies, but in reality, further complicate the financial landscape in the context of climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Carbon markets have emerged as a popular mechanism for meeting emission reduction targets, promising to generate reliable financial flows for renewable technology investments and support climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. However, these market-based approaches pose equality challenges. While they offer potential financial inflows that could alleviate some of the fiscal pressures, the structural inequalities within these markets could exacerbate the already precarious financial situations of these nations.
This system creates several challenges for developing countries. There’s a risk of overselling credits, which could hinder a country’s ability to meet its own NDC commitments, potentially necessitating more costly or challenging measures to achieve these targets. Countries must, therefore, carefully balance their emissions reductions and authorisations to benefit from ITMO sales while staying on track with their NDCs.
Moreover, high-quality carbon projects often require significant initial investment, presenting another barrier for cash-strapped developing nations. This creates a precarious situation where these countries are expected to contribute to global climate mitigation efforts through potentially underpriced carbon credits while simultaneously bearing the brunt of climate change’s economic and environmental impacts. The delicate balance between emission reduction targets and financial incentives puts additional strain on countries already grappling with limited resources. Developing nations, especially in Africa, find themselves in a difficult position of trying to benefit from carbon markets while ensuring they don’t compromise their own climate goals or sustainable development objectives.
What are the Implications of the “New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance”?
For African nations already struggling with unsustainable debt levels and limited fiscal room for manoeuvre, the NCQG’s broader approach to climate finance contributors could present and the following risks (and possibilities):
Potential for increased resources: The expanded pool of contributors could theoretically increase the overall funding available for climate action in Africa. This could help alleviate some of the fiscal pressures, potentially freeing up resources for debt servicing and domestic climate initiatives.
Risk of additional financial burden: However, the inclusion of developing countries as potential contributors could add to the financial strain on African economies. This expectation of contribution, even if minimal, could further limit the already constrained fiscal space these countries have for addressing climate change and meeting development goals.
Impact on debt dynamics: The shift towards market mechanisms and carbon trading under this new approach could interact with existing debt issues. While it might offer new avenues for generating climate finance, it could also expose African countries to new forms of financial risk, potentially exacerbating debt vulnerabilities.
Capacity challenges: The proposed core-periphery arrangement and emphasis on reshaping financial systems will require significant capacity building in developing countries. This need for enhanced financial and technical capacity comes at a time when many African nations are already struggling to balance climate action with economic recovery and debt management.
Implications for climate finance accessibility: The new approach could potentially alter the dynamics of climate finance accessibility. While it aims to increase overall funding, there’s a risk that the most vulnerable countries – often those with the highest debt burdens and least fiscal space – might find it more challenging to access these funds if they’re expected to contribute or compete in more complex financial mechanisms.
The implementation of the NCQG must consider the existing financial challenges faced by African countries and aim to complement, rather than complicate, efforts to address debt sustainability, expand fiscal space for climate action, and create fair and beneficial engagement with carbon markets. The success of this new approach will largely depend on how well it can integrate safeguards and support mechanisms that recognize and address the unique financial vulnerabilities of African economies. Only then can we hope to create a more sustainable model of climate finance that truly enables African nations to pursue effective climate action without compromising their economic development goals.
Conclusion
The continued exploitation of African economies by global financial institutions and the perpetuation of neocolonial structures demands urgent and radical redress. African governments must recognize that the current global capitalist order is fundamentally designed to maintain their dependency and subjugation. True economic liberation lies not in minor adjustments, but in fundamentally challenging these power structures and forging a new path that prioritizes self-determination, equality, and sustainable development. Breaking free from the chains of global financial domination requires not just courage and unity, but a revolutionary commitment to transformative change. African governments and peoples must chart their own path, guided by their unique histories, cultures, and aspirations, rejecting imposed “solutions” that serve external interests.
Delinking from the exploitative tendencies of global capitalism does not mean isolationism or rejection of international cooperation. Rather, it entails a strategic reorientation of economic policies and practices to serve the interests of African peoples and their long-term prosperity. This involves a comprehensive reassessment of existing debt structures, trade agreements, and investment frameworks that perpetuate massive global inequality and undermine African agency.
African governments should assert their sovereignty and collectively advocate for a just international economic order. Unsustainable debts are created by a profoundly unjust financial system and the exploitation of poverty, and the weak position of vulnerable African countries. Fair, transparent and inclusive trade terms that challenge exploitative conditions imposed by global financial institutions are needed.
African countries must strengthen regional integration and South-South cooperation to foster mutual economic development and reduce dependency on external powers and present a united front and speak with one voice. The role of civil society and grassroots movements in demanding economic justice and holding both African governments and international institutions accountable is paramount. These movements must be supported and amplified to ensure that those in positions of power defend the interests of the common good.
Thelma Arkois currently a Postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University and a research fellow with UNU-INRA, where she supports efforts to democratize the discourse around Just Transitions in Africa.
Featured Photograph: Raya Azebo, Tigray – A man climbs a hill and looks out towards the sunset (26 June 2016).
Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region has received much critical acclaim since its publication with Pluto Press in October 2023. Here, while acknowledging the usefulness of such a volume in the current climate and highlighting several must-read chapters, Max Ajl sees a missed opportunity in how the book is framed by its co-editors, Hamza Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell. Missing a broader anti-imperialist politics, among other issues, Ajl argues that the edited collection loses its political edge and is unable to help address the problems it identifies.
The Israeli-US genocide in Palestine has re-focused global attention on colonialism and its centrality to capitalism. And it has shown peoples’ need to live free of violence in a state safe from external onslaught. These issues, under the umbrella of the national question, have long been part of liberation thought. Yet, while there are important traditions of Third World political ecology – indeed, thinkers like Amilcar Cabral and the academic field generally trace their taproots to colonial and neo-colonial under-development and ecological destruction[1] – the systematic oppression of entire nations has not necessarily been front-and-center amidst that paramount concern of contemporary environmentalism: climate change, and plans to allay, mitigate, or simply survive it.
In this context, it is useful to have the important collection of the political ecology of accelerating North-South plunder and dispossession in the Arab region assembled in Hamza Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell’s edited volume, Dismantling Green Colonialism, recently out from Pluto. The book’s scope spans Morocco to the Arab Gulf, stopping on the way in Egypt and Palestine. Within the region, or rather in an Arab region, where political manifestations of imperialism and anti-imperialism, including collapse of state sovereignty, sanctions, war, and resistance are front-and-center, the collection (which swiftly appeared in Arabic translation) brings useful nuance and information about the economic aspects of imperialism to its readership.
The editors use the overall approach of an integrated world system: “Rich local elites collaborate with multinational corporations and international financial institutions,” producing a region “integrated into the global capitalist economy in a subordinate position: colonial/imperial powers influenced or forced the countries of the region to structure their economies around the extraction and export of resources…coupled with the import of high-value industrial goods. The result was a large-scale transfer of wealth to the imperial centres at the expense of local development and ecosystems.” Such “unequal and asymmetric relations…preserve…the role of Arab countries as exporters of natural resources, such as oil and gas, and primary commodities that are heavily dependent on water and land, such as monoculture cash crops.”
The chapters cover a wide range, and some are must-reads for those wishing to better understand the political ecology of Arab region capitalism. The chapter on Egyptian electricity commodification by Mohamed Gad, for example, is excellent in showing the erratic advance of subsidy removal and marketization of energy that is a critical tool in dismantling the Arab socialist social compact. The 2014 energy crisis was used to replace public with private finance in the energy sector, turning public energy providers from institutions tasked with providing a service to ones tasked with selling a service in market competition with private firms. He also usefully challenges the dominant World Bank interpretation of that history. He also explains how pro working-class policies within the state were slowly excised under various stages of non-democratic rule.
Thousands of Anti-Mubarak protestors taking to the streets of the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria (Wikimedia Commons 2011)
On Jordan, the work of Asmaa Mohammad Amin shows how the state, through phased restructuring, cleared the way for a withdrawal from overall electricity distribution networks, leading in the 2000s to mixed state-private compacts in the generation sector. She then narrates capitalist capture of the renewables transition, leading to its eventual stalling.
Karen Rignall’s wonderful chapter on Morocco is based on fine-grained empirical work on the class contradictions in the so-called “communities” affected by mega-renewable construction. She does not merely show the global commodity chains linking plant construction – chains whose links are often connected to fossil power – but furthermore asks, “how do we translate these complex relations for residents so that they can make the links between their local realities and global processes”? She furthermore explains how movements often seek to socially embed environmentally destructive projects, rather than merely to stop them. It is a model of discussing social agents of transformation through careful economic anthropology, careful empirical work, and integration of theory and research.
In a gem of a chapter, Chafik Ben Rouine and Flavie Roche discuss the prospects and possibilities of a neo-colonial versus sovereign green transition in Tunisia, which they define as “democracy and sovereignty over public goods and the environment.” They show how “focusing on communities’ interests in the design of an energy transition must involve taking steps away from the current financial, profit-based system and include consideration of other dimensions…the social and environmental sectors that may depend on those sources in various ways. The idea is to get away from narrow visions and goals and to consider the way in which renewable energies should be developed.” They link industrialization and wind turbine manufacturing to the possible renewable transition in the broader framework of the struggle over privatization or the maintenance of state ownership of STEG, the state energy company.
Indeed, Rouine and Roche tie industrialization and energy transition to making jobs, using a holistic analysis for how to conceive of just transition so as to avoid an over-focus on small-scale agriculture that sidesteps the need for a multi-sectoral development model to soak up the region’s labor reservoirs. Job creation has to include stimulating all branches of a given sector. As they write, “In this respect, the local production of the technologies required for renewable energy projects would offer strong potential for new job creation, since low dependency on imports means more employment.”
Overall, the book laudably brings to our attention important aspects of the concrete struggles local forces face against neo-colonialism, particularly within the energy sector. Indeed, they are not merely accounts of action but map out what could be done on the local, sub-national, and national scales to bring more justice to the much-ballyhooed “green transitions” that dominate development chatter. On their own, they are – with a few exceptions – informative and valuable studies.
It is unfortunate, then, that the book is far less than the sum of its parts, in no small part attributable to the confused, confusing, contradictory, and erratic theoretical and methodological armory deployed by Hamouchene and Sandwell, which recurs, furthermore, in Hamouchene’s single-authored chapter, and most of the public press around the book. The apparatus, meant to frame and direct the reader, is oriented around the broadest questions, indeed the putative purpose of the book itself: what is the nature of the colonialist or imperialist system to which the authors refer, and what is its relationship with capitalism?
Their answer, in essence, is primary commodity or energy export. They argue that this orientation, and attendant regional under-development, is produced and reproduced through economic processes, and this form of neo-colonialism (which they confusingly label green colonialism) is the region’s major struggle. However, this is neither an accurate sociology of the region’s social formations, nor of the challenges they face. Nor do these inaccurate diagnoses point to the kinds of large-scale planning efforts required to break from underdevelopment, or the political shifts needed to move to large-scale integration, and regional and pan-Maghrebi or pan-Arab plans.
This inaccurate and partial portrait is painted through a series of errant brush strokes. First is the use of extractivism rather than social formation – the types of classes which exist in a society – and value flows, or how imperialism hoovers up labor-hours from the periphery. Hamouchene and Sandwell, notably, collapse the concrete materials whose trade produces underdevelopment, with underdevelopment itself. Yet, extractivism confuses a technical system – extraction of minerals like oil or under-processed agricultural riches – with a mode of accumulation.[2]
In fact, it is simplistic to argue that commodity export produces underdevelopment or that it is the sole or primary means of damaging Third World environments, especially in the late neo-colonial period. The US, for example, has been a major wheat supplier to the Arab region through PL-480 counter-insurgency food aid, an element of its domination of the region, and export-oriented industrialization has been a major mechanism of underdevelopment since the 1970s.
Treating primary commodities as the source of underdevelopment has the effect of reducing political ecology to its agrarian or resource-extraction components. The result is to mischaracterize the Arab-Iranian regions’ social formations, on multiple levels, even taking the economistic and empiricist approach – that is, considering what the region produces, rather than what the region has been prevented from producing, and even being, by imperial violence.
Taken as a regional aggregate, because of oil, primary goods certainly dominate exports, but Tunisia’s major exports, for example, are, by quantity, first, insulated wire and coming in fourth, men’s clothing; motor vehicle parts aren’t far behind. Plastics and electrical machinery are Egypt’s second and third exports. Saudi Arabia’s non-oil GDP is ever-increasing, while as Hanieh notes in his chapter, “the petrochemicals sector serves as another important conduit for private wealth accumulation in the Gulf.”
The region’s market-based interaction with the world system is simply not, when taken on a country-by-country basis, particularly extractive. Foregoing analysis of the political ecology of Arab world industrialization in fact sidesteps engagement with a rich literature examining the problems of the new international division of labor based on export-oriented industrialization, incubated at institutions like the Algerian Centre de recherches en économie appliquée or Dakar’s African Institute for Economic Development and Planning.
Elsewhere the term becomes a Procrustean bed into which ill-fitting facts are jammed. In an otherwise excellent study on the neglected Sahrawi struggle, wherein Joanna Allan, Hamza Lakhal and Mahmoud Lemaadel carefully document underdevelopment indexed in exposure to energy shortages, they refer to “tourism and cultural appropriation…as forms of neocolonial extraction.”
Defining everything in reference to extraction is not helpful. Tourism is a service sector. It does not rely on extraction, but rather cheap wages, and such wages are simply part-and-parcel of dependent capitalism. Yet, there is little attention, throughout the book, to the mechanisms that ensure peripheral labor remains undervalued (labor reservoirs are mentioned, barely, yet the mechanisms to keep them in place are absent).
This connects to the second chief criticism. Although some chapters, on Jordan and Egypt, for example, clearly show the political production of regional neoliberalism, some of its driving pistons are erased: namely, violence. Imperialism is a sociological and political phenomenon not purely reducible to the transfers of wealth which it exists, in large part, to reinforce, nor reducible to national-box-constrained policy choices. Yemen, Libya, Iraq, and Syria are not covered (the editors’ acknowledgement of the gap does not really help the reader understand the reasons for the omission).
Yet, in each, war was a major causal mechanism of turns away from planning – as in Egypt and Syria in 1970 or Libya in the mid-1980s, or the destruction of Iraqi capacity to move to a more advanced stage of industrialization through decades of war and sanctions starting from 1980.
Indeed, in not attending to war, an opportunity is lost for thinking about the region as a region, because war, alongside oil, is now the Arab-Iranian region’s primary articulation with the world system – indeed, it is through war that the region is divided and demolished, and it is against war, through pan-Arabism, that economic development planning and popular sovereignty took shape and sharpened their edge.
Even obvious themes like weapons sales and their ecological consequences do not appear, while the politics of arms sales and defensive armoring – showing that imperially-induced violence is a critical obstacle to just transition – are not present. Hanieh, for example, in an otherwise empirically careful chapter, does not mention US basing or US arms sales in his account of the Gulf oil industry. Gulf sub-imperialism (or intraregional imperialism) is instead presented as largely interlaced with a new flow orientation to China.
A US soldier patrols a line of helicopters at a US air base in Saudi Arabia (Wikimedia Commons 1991)
This question of sovereignty brings us to the third central problem. Although the book promises a discussion of “green colonialism,” the book refrains from clarifying the distinction between neo-colonialism, and colonialism: a foreign entity controlling political power through violence, causing income reduction, famine, and genocide. More attention to sovereignty’s meaning and what was achieved through decolonization would have led to greater care and distinguishing between the terms.
As the chapter on Algeria states, “public sector institutions must also be managed better, and must be more transparent and accountable.” Indeed, the conceptual difference between the two can point at different strategies. Colonialism implies a struggle for national political sovereignty. Neo-colonialism implies, generally, a struggle for domestic social change, whether involving democratic struggle or otherwise. Meanwhile, military occupation and foreclosed sovereignty – in Iraq, Yemen, Syria – are generally absent in the book, which likewise does not discuss sanctions. Indeed, war is so widespread in the region that even the possibility of green planning is not possible outside considering how to achieve national sovereignty in Syria or national liberation in Yemen.
This is particularly jarring in that many of their “green” challenges manifest through vulnerability to natural disaster driven by previous cycles of imperial violence, as with the 2023 Libyan floods, or the salting of the earth through depleted uranium and white phosphorus in Iraq and the Gaza Strip. Furthermore, how indeed could the region’s resources – in Libya, for example – be placed at the service of the region’s people when imperialist-sowed instability metastasizes, destabilizing not merely North Africa but also the Sahel?
Such blind spots are not helped by a form of fashionable theoretical eclecticism which lurches into incoherence. “Green colonialism” is combined with citations to Walter Rodney and Samir Amin, yet also Patrick Bond and Adam Hanieh, authors whose understandings of capitalism are in fundamental contradiction, and who would agree with one another almost nowhere considering political strategy – Rodney was often a defender of Black nationalism while Bond’s “disdain for black nationalism” has been “blinding.”[3] Where does that leave the national question, then?
Now, why does all this chatter, matter? Why does it matter if we say neo-colonialism versus green colonialism? Some will be tempted to say this is scholarly quibbling, having nothing to do with activism (which perhaps it does not, if activism is reduced to the approved zones of engagement of the international NGO sector). Yet, it matters if we understand that these words are maps of a socio-political battlefield whose contours suggest maneuvering strategies.
The issue is not academic – indeed, what can it mean to imply that theory, the North Star of revolutionary practice, is the province of isolated scholars? – but rather speaks to the very heart of what it means to advocate for just transition. Does it, for example, require political sovereignty? Is that sovereignty national or regional? If political sovereignty is a necessary but insufficient condition for popular development, it is important to delineate how its absence weaves the Arab region into the world system.
Very simply, the US and Israel, as well as the Gulf states, target states or sub-state movements which harbor or arm asymmetric militia hostile to Israel and the US through semi-colonial or settler-colonial occupation, sanctions regimes or proxy warfare. So-called “fossil capitalism,” a frankly misleading terminology introduced by Andreas Malm, rests on the dominance-through-destruction of population centers and states with projects contradictory to the demands of US empire and accumulation.[4] The US agenda is to dismantle “any social platform from which the working class might potentially challenge the hold of US-led imperialism,” and furthermore to engrain “a state of defeat,” in the words of the Arab economist Ali Kadri.[5]
De-development in Syria and Yemen (registered in declining per capita Co2 emissions, and certainly having nothing to do with extractivism) has been part-and-parcel of inducing the regional defeats necessary to stabilize neo-colonialism in Algeria and Morocco as well as Saudi Arabian and Qatari imperialist subcontracting, and these connectivities must be made explicit. Furthermore, development is only permitted in states which do not challenge Israel. Meanwhile, the latter two Gulf states helped persecute the wars on Yemen and Syria on behalf of the US, a fact only obliquely adverted to, and that only once, in Christian Henderson’s chapter.
Residents of Azaz in Syria inspect what remains following aerial bombings (Wikimedia Commons 2012)
If “just transition” lacks social agents or a realistic understanding of the region’s insertion into global capitalism, it also tends to lack programmatic substance. Accordingly, there is an acute risk that the book falls into a folklorist and romantic approach to undoing “green colonialism.” Samir Amin’s delinking – practically the sole southern theory in the book other than extractivism – is more slogan than substance, and a chance is seriously missed for the authors and editors to think through what would truly be necessary to de-link.
For example, Saker el-Nour’s otherwise useful chapter on food sovereignty and ecologically unequal exchange argues that “just transition must empower the local population and redefine development as development that is based on participation, and the preservation and renewal of resources” (123). It is symptomatic of the muddiness of “just transition” discourse that perhaps the central question, agrarian reform and then accumulation from below on the Zimbabwean model, is unposed. Rather, the agrarian question is reduced to participation and ecological transition, a model that cannot speak to the desire and need for land to set in motion any process of auto-centered regional development.
Furthermore, agriculture cannot be warrened off from the macro-model. Agriculture will be central to any green transition within the region, as will energy system upgrading through democratic control over production and use. Yet these, in turn, demand to be nested in a larger project of sovereign industrialization, part-and-parcel of sovereign and auto-centered development, all of which must unfurl on a regional and pan-Arab scale, if it is to happen at all. Ben Rouine and Roche’s chapter is almost alone in thinking about just transition as a holistic economy-wide process enfolding industrialization. Elsewhere, the excellent work on Jordan clearly articulates a proposal for a region-wide pan-Arab energy market within the context of energy sovereignty – yet without mention of Jordanian neo-colonialism, US military basing, or the normalization treaty with Israel.
A plan for “just transition” must deal with this geopolitical contradiction that acts as an absolute barrier to the success of “movements from below” and structural transformation. Indeed, it was not so long ago that the New International Economic Order sought to bring together states to fight against unfair terms of trade, a project which foundered, amongst other shoals, on the US alliance with the Gulf States. The “region” is not just Gulf investments but a US-Gulf Cooperation Council-Israeli military and political alliance. It is, for example, unimaginable that the US would allow sovereign development in Tunisia or Algeria, were it on the agenda, and indeed the US role in promoting neo-colonialism in a US-allied neo-colonial Tunisia in the 1960s and 1970s is well-known.
Neglecting this geopolitical obstacle also means the authors and editors overlook key social agents required for a just transition. Generally, their notion of transition is rooted in economic or ecological struggles but does not extend to any discussion of the expulsion of imperial and colonial forces from the region. While Israel is mentioned, the broader military alliance against it is largely absent. Manal Shaqir, for example, clearly outlines the role of Israel and the neo-colonial Arab states in “eco-normalization” and resistance from West Bank ba’li agriculture. But sources of asymmetric (and indeed armed) resistance which have taken center-stage in the current period are not present. Similarly, Hanieh’s chapter refers to “popular movements aimed at challenging these regimes” in the GCC, yet does not mention Yemen’s Ansar Allah, which has destroyed Gulf oil infrastructure and more recently targeted Red Sea cargo ships.
As the region rapidly polarizes, it becomes clearer than ever that just transition requires Palestinian national liberation and the expulsion of US forces and their sectarian proxies. The forces fighting against Israel and America are to be found in popular discourse, and in the fields, but not in the collection under review. The actual forces fighting the US and Israel remain, simply, unmentionable – indeed, nearly banned from discussion in the academy. Such a gap means that the activist audience of Hamouchene and Sandwell’s book will have no clarity about how to orient to those forces, namely, those actually practicing resistance against the US – a matter which, in fact, is more concrete for Western radicals or revolutionaries than a kind of over-hyped “grassroots” or “movement to movement” solidarity with peoples’ struggles in North Africa and the Arab region, the political agenda implied by the book’s case selection.
Indeed, such a strategy, shorn of broader anti-imperialist politics, is not a vision to challenge “green colonialism.” It becomes essentially purported solutions to problems treatable by country-by-country or city-by-city development programs. Such fragmentation, foreshortening, and denial of politics is more or less the agenda of the international NGO sector, or for that matter the United Nations Development Program, albeit perhaps their more radical segments. These chapters, then, while on their own of considerable merit, lose their political edge, becoming a strategy for a just transition that will remain nice words on paper, and little more.
Featured Image: Cover image of Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region (17 September 2024).
Notes
[1] Alejandro Pedregal and Alberto García Molinero, “The Early Socio-Ecological Dimensions of Tricontinental (1967–1971): A Sovereign Social Metabolism for the Third World,” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, August 30, 2024, 22779760241265565, https://doi.org/10.1177/22779760241265565.
[2] Álvaro García Linera, “Once Again on So-Called ‘Extractivism,’” MR Online (blog), April 29, 2013, https://mronline.org/2013/04/29/gl290413-html/.
[3] Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, “Intervention The Zimbabwe Question and the Two Lefts,” Historical Materialism 15 (August 31, 2007): 171–204.
[4] I elaborate on the incoherence of “fossil capitalism” in my Max Ajl, “Theories of Political Ecology: Monopoly Capital Against People and the Planet,” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 12, no. 1 (March 1, 2023): 12–50.
[5] Ali Kadri, Arab Development Denied: Dynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment (New York: Anthem Press, 2014), 7, 212.
At the beginning of August this year, tens of thousands of Nigerians rose up to denounce the government in a movement that was organised under the slogans #endbadgovernance and #endhunger. For too long, protestors complained, Nigerians had been suffering from hunger, high petrol prices and corrupt and incompetent government. Salvador Ousmane writes about those arrested, imprisoned and tortured, and the many still incarcerated, for the crime of protest.
By Salvador Ousmane
The Nigerian government was clearly very worried by the scale and support for the protests in early August against its anti-human policies of increased fuel prices, higher electric tariffs, unpaid low minimum wages, higher school fees, higher tax rates, higher food prices, higher transport costs and bad governance. They hope that heavy repression will stop future protests against hunger, higher petrol prices and bad governance.
The state tortured dozens and hundreds remain in detention. Some are being held well beyond the constitutional limit of 48 hours before going to court. The High Court in Abuja gave the police a further 60 days for holding over 70 young men from Kano. They are accused of waving Russian flags, that became the symbol of resistance in Kano. This is clearly not illegal in Nigeria.
In Abuja, another 10 people are also being held for the serious crime of treason, incitement to mutiny and levying war against the state. This is despite the complete lack of any evidence for these crimes. They are being represented by Femi Falana who has led and won the defence for four previous treason trials.
The President of the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), Joe Ajaero, was detained by the secret police for 12 hours on 9 September 2024 and stopped from attending the Trade Union Congress meeting in Britain. The NLC gained his release by organising for an indefinite general strike. The NLC in their initial press release over the detention of their President correctly said:
We equally demand that the state frees all Nigerians languishing in various prisons around the country for exercising their democratic rights to protest in the #endbadgovernance rallies around the country.
Unfortunately, these other demands were immediately forgotten with the release of Joe Ajaero the same day. Another trade union leader is still being held in prison after being picked up at 2am six weeks ago.
Eleojo Opaluwa, of the electrician’s union (NUEE) is being held with nine others in Kuje Prison. They face a range of serious charges including conspiracy to commit treason, inciting to mutiny and organising for a war against the state (each charge carry’s the death penalty). These charges arise from alleged organising and participating in the #endbadgovernance and #endhunger protests in early August.
However, the police case is extremely weak, especially as the ten detainees hardly know each other, despite being accused of conspiracy. Five lived in Abuja, but the other five were brought from Kano for waving Russian flags.
Six of the detainees are Muslim and the rest are Christians. They range in age from 21 to 51 years. Five are in their twenties and two are in their fifties. Nine are men and one is a woman. It would be hard to find a more diverse group of people.
The only thing that appears to unite the five detainees from Abuja is that they were all members of a WhatsApp group that was created on 27 July. They are not all admin members of the group, and some of the admin members have not been accused by the police. There were around 450 members of the WhatsApp group at its height with around 30 having left.
The backgrounds of the five detainees from Abuja are:
Michael Adaramoye (28 years) was brought up in a Christian family. He attended Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife. Michael is a writer and content creator by profession. He has committed his intellect and youthful energy to contributing to the building of a better society.
Mosiu Sodiq (29 years) is a young practicing Muslim. He was born and raised in Lagos. He has a diploma from Kwara State Polytechnic, Ilorin. He is a graphics designer and printer based in Abuja where he has lived for more than half a decade.
Adeyemi Abiodun Abayomi (34 years) is a devoted Christian and family man with a three-year-old daughter. He was brought up in Kaduna and graduated from Ekiti State University (TUNEDIK) with a degree in Computer Science in 2016. He ran Iva Valley Books for the last year.
Eleojo Opaluwa (50 years) is a Christian from Kogi State. He is married with four children. He is graduate, he also has a master’s degree in criminology from the National Open University, Abuja. His first child is at university and the other three are still in school. He is the organizer for the Nigerian Union of Electrical Employees (NUEE) in FCT. He is also Vice Chair of NLC for Kogi State.
Angel Love Innocent (51 years) is a Christian. She has one 16-year-old son and works in the real estate business in Abuja and has several other business interests.
The names and ages of the five detainees brought from Kano are: Buhari Lawal 21 years; Bashir Bello 21 years; Suleiman Yakubu, 28 years; Abdulsalam Zubairu 37 years; and Nuradeen Khamis 47 years.
The economy in Nigeria has grown well, especially over the period 2000 to 2015. As a result, the GDP is now at least five times larger than it was at the turn of the Millennium. However, all this additional wealth, and some, has been looted by the tiny corrupt elite. The majority of the population are now significantly poorer than they were at the end of the military era in 1999. This growth in poverty has accelerated massively in the last 15 months. This is primarily due to the new Government allowing the price of petrol to shoot up and massive devaluation of the local currency.
The trade unions have a militant tradition, but their action is increasingly not meeting the required demands. As a result, for example, the real value of the minimum wage (which greatly influences all public sector salaries) has halved over the last five years. In 2019, the then new level of the minimum wage could buy 200 litres of petrol. At the end of July this year, when the recent increase of the minimum wage became law, it would only buy 100 litres of petrol. Recent shortages mean it will only buy around 50 litres or less.
The new president of the NLC, the main trade union centre, Joe Ajaero, has called at least half a dozen general strikes since he took up his position in February last year. However, all the strikes were called off before they were due to start or after not much more than a day.
The mass protests at the beginning of August showed the extent of the hunger in the land. In some places all the young men from a whole community joined massive almost spontaneous demonstrations. This was met with horrendous government repression. Around 40 protesters were murdered by the police and other security forces being shot dead on the protests and tear gas was widely used; perhaps 1,500 arrested and detained with no legal representation or access to the courts.
Millions of Nigerians supported the #endbadgovernance/#endhunger Protests from 1 August. It is this that has upset the government. The police appear to have picked up a random group of people to be punished for the activities of hundreds of thousands – it is obviously beyond the capacity of the Nigerian state to arrest every demonstrator. . We can only hope that all detained demonstrators are found not guilty in the near future.
Many other detainees are being held, especially in the far northern towns and cities from Sokoto in the West, through Kano to Maiduguri in the east. In one court case in mid-September, 37 protesters were released after up to six weeks in jail and 48 were given quite tough bail conditions (paying the equivalent of three years of the minimum wage).
Further protests are being called from 1 October and some local ones are still taking place. Next time these protests need the full support from the NLC. A coalition of the masses in the streets and a robust general strike can easily defeat this government. Then we can begin to see the reduction of hunger, poverty and inequality across Nigeria.
To help the campaign, for more information and to send messages of support please contact: socialistlabour.ng@gmail.com.
Salvador Ousmane is a Nigerian based socialist, writer and editor. He is also a member of Socialist Labour one of the largest socialist groups in Nigeria.
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