ROAPE’s Bettina Engels reviews a new Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism which, she argues, presents a variety of important Marxist thinkers and successfully demonstrates the wide range of theoretical approaches of those who have engaged with Marxism.
By Bettina Engels
The number of publications under the label of Post-Marxism, Post-Foundationalism, Post-Capitalism and Post-Politics has considerably increased during the last decade, including several edited volumes. What clearly distinguishes this handbook from most of these other publications is that it refers to Marxism and Post-Marxism and presents classical Marxist writers such as Marx and Engels themselves, Luxemburg, Kautsky and others, in one compilation with contemporary prominent Marxist scholars such as Samir Amin, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and David Harvey. By doing so, it eventually made me understand what ‘Post-Marxism’ as a label means. Post-Marxisms, as the editors define it, is a “theoretical and political framework that simultaneously is itself influenced by Marxisms but seeks to go decisively beyond it” (p. 1).
Yet, the prefix ‘Post’, seems somehow confusing, as it suggests some kind of chronology, that Marxism was ‘over’ or completed and now we were in the Post-Marxist era. Of course, neither the editors nor authors who consider themselves Post-Marxists in general affirm this, but the term still suggests it. So maybe ‘Marxism +’ would be a more appropriate label.
Post-Marxism as a ‘self-adopted label’ came up in the 1980s “to characterize a particular means of escape from the widely proclaimed ‘crisis of Marxism’ that followed the decline of the 1960s radical movements” (p. 1). Still, it remains somehow vague to me what exactly characterises ‘Post-Marxism’ — for example, would we label Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak and David Harvey as ‘Marxists’ or ‘Post-Marxists’? Nor is self-identification the only criterion – at least to be included in the handbook. According to Terrell Carver, the author of the chapter on Judith Butler, Butler herself “does not identify as a Marxist or Post-Marxist” (p. 435).
The volume is structure in nine parts, most of them starting with a longer general chapter followed by shorter pieces on individual thinkers (45, altogether) and three on specific topics (on ‘African Settler Societies’, ‘Ecological Marxism’, and ‘Covid-19’). The editors outline that they are aware of the problem of selecting some names and excluding many others. With that said, it might have been an alternative to focus less on individual figures and ‘big names’ and more on debates, controversies, and topics, which would have possibly shifted the focus from thinkers and writers slightly more towards Marxist political practices and class struggles.
Notwithstanding, many chapters – brilliant pieces by ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig on Frantz Fanon and by Marcel van der Linden on Immanuel Wallerstein, for example – succeed to present the life of the respective thinker and at the same time core concepts and debates in Marxism, such as class consciousness and class struggle (Wallerstein), the role of the peasantry in revolutionary struggles (Fanon), and the relationship of capitalism and imperialism (in the chapter on Samir Amin by Yousuf Al-Bulushi).
The order of the volume is more or less chronological. Unsurprisingly, it starts with a chapter each on Marx and Engels. Part 2 is dedicated to the era of the Second International, the ‘Age of Imperialism’, presenting chapters on Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky. This is followed by a section on the era of the Russian Revolution, with contributions on Trotsky, Gramsci, and Benjamin, among others. After these chronological parts, part 4 of the handbook, under the heading ‘Tricontinental’, pools ‘Marxism outside Europe’ (the title of the conceptual chapter by Vijay Prashad that introduces the section): Vladimir I. Lenin, James Connolly, José Carlos Mariátegui, Mao Zedong, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, and a chapter by Allison Drew on ‘Marxist Theory in African Settler Societies’.
This might, at a first glance, suggest a dichotomy of ‘Europe and beyond’, or ‘The West and the rest’ (as Stuart Hall has put it). However, the following sections of the handbook also include chapters on authors from various parts of the world and with various identities, though still the clear majority are men from Europe and North America.
In view of how much have already been written on Sartre, Gramsci, and Poulantzas, for example, and of course on Marx and Engels themselves, Trotsky and Lenin, many readers might have benefited more from chapters on Steve Biko, Amílcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Claudia Jones, Thomas Sankara, Walter Rodney or others. Moreover, these were all thinkers, writers, and political activists at the same time, they also have lots to say about political practice, about modern class struggles and national (liberation) politics. The historical experiences and theoretical thinking of these activists cannot be substituted from reading contemporary writers from Europe and North America, whether or not they identify as Marxists or Post-Marxists. I am unable to provide examples of Marxist writers and activists from Latin America, Asia, and the ‘Arab world’, as I am myself unfamiliar with Marxist debates and activities in these world regions. So, I would have enthusiastically read such chapters (rather than one on Habermas, for example).
Part 5, ‘Renewal and Dispersal’, deals with the 1960s and 1970s, namely with Sartre, Althusser, Hobsbawm, Poulantzas, Wallerstein, Amin, and others. Parts 6 (‘Beyond Marxism?’), 7 (‘Unexplored Territories’) and 8 (‘Hidden Abode’) present a variety of important contemporary Marxist thinkers and successfully demonstrates the wide range of theoretical approaches and the analytical focus of those engaging with Marxism: from Laclau and Mouffe, Negri and Badiou (all in the section titled ‘Beyond Marxism?’) and radical economists such as Henryk Grossmann and Kozo Uno (‘Hidden Abode’) to Marxist political ecology and feminism.
I am not sure whether I find it felicitous to subsume postcolonial (Stuart Hall), ecological and feminist thinkers (Butler, Mohanty) under ‘Unexplored Territories’. These may be indeed fields of thinking and analysis that are somehow at the margins of Marxism, however, they are far from being ‘unexplored’, and I would be more cautious to use territorial notions referring to postcolonial and feminist theory, given the ambivalence of the term and the debates on it in both theoretical fields. Part 9, ‘Marxism in an Age of Catastrophe’, contains a single chapter by John Bellamy Foster and Intan Suwandi on Covid-19.
The book presents an invaluable resource particularly for teaching, in Political Economy and in Critical Political Theory in general. Already the introductory chapter provides an excellent, encompassing and thorough overview and genealogy of Marxist theoretical debates. The editors have accomplished an impressive work in compiling a comprehensive collection of chapters by inspiring young contributors alongside some of the most experienced Marxist authors, who could have equally deserved being the subject instead of the authors of chapters!
With so many profound and nuanced contributions, the compilation succeeds in presenting the variety and range of classic and contemporary Marxist thinkers, but at the same time maintaining a clear focus and not randomly offering any critical perspective as ‘Marxist’. It is left to readers now to decide whether or not ‘Post-Marxism’ presents an appropriate label, academically or politically. In any case, the volume provides a promising starting point for this discussion.
Bettina Engels teaches at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, Freie Universität Berlin, in Berlin. Bettina is an editor of ROAPE.
Featured Photograph: Diego Rivera, ‘Mexico Today and Tomorrow,’ featuring Karl Marx, History of Mexico murals, 1935, fresco, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.
Heike Becker writes about the recent agreement between the German and Namibian governments for special “reconciliation and reconstruction” projects to benefit the Ovaherero and Nama communities that were directly affected by colonial genocide. Becker asks what are the possible international ramifications of the Namibian-German agreement? Will the deal possibly turn the tide more broadly for reparation claims from ex-colonies of the empires of European colonialism?
By Heike Becker
“Words cannot be found to relate what happened; it was too terrible.” This is how Jan Kubas, an eyewitness of the events that followed the battle of Ohamakari in what was then called German South West Africa, now Namibia, in 1904, articulated his struggle to express his memories of the German pursuit of the Ovaherero into the parched Omaheke desert. Kubas was a member of the racially-mixed Griqua people who lived at Grootfontein near the area where following the extermination order by German general Lothar von Trotha, thousands were driven into the barren Omaheke.
In 1904 and 1905 the Ovaherero and Nama people of central and southern Namibia rose up against colonial rule and dispossession. The revolt was brutally crushed. By 1908, 80% of the Ovaherero and 50% of the Nama had succumbed to starvation and thirst, overwork and exposure to harsh climates. Thousands perished in the desert; many more died in the German concentration camps in places such as Windhoek, Swakopmund, and Shark Island.
A century after Jan Kubas struggled to articulate the horrors he witnessed in 1904, the German government has, at long last, officially acknowledged the colonial genocide. An agreement between the German and Namibian governments was recently concluded. According to the agreement, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will soon travel to Windhoek and offer a formal apology for the first genocide of the 20th century; the deal also stipulates additional German development aid for Namibia. These funds, to the amount of 1.3 Billion Euro, will be paid over the next thirty years. They will be earmarked for special “reconciliation and reconstruction” projects to benefit the Ovaherero and Nama communities that were directly affected by the genocide.
There are many open questions, however: What are possible international ramifications of the Namibian-German agreement? Will the deal possibly turn the tide more broadly for reparation claims from ex-colonies of the empires of European colonialism?
Penetrating questions need to be asked also about the extent to which Germany is committed to “working through” its violent colonial past. Has it, following decades of avoidance, truly committed to addressing its painful colonial past? Can the restitution of looted cultural objects and human remains from the postcolonial metropole’s museums and academic collections be considered a serious and sufficient effort at decolonization? What are the limitations of recent challenges to the historical staging of former colonial empires in the public space, such as monuments, and the renaming of streets, which were named after colonial despots?
And in national as well as transnational perspectives: What could be the next steps in going beyond dealing with the colonial past in purely symbolic terms? What kind of new solidarities are being forged in moves towards decolonization, racial justice and re-distribution?
Reactions
When the announcement that after almost six years of bi-lateral negotiations an agreement had been initialled by the Namibian envoy, Zedekia Ngavirue, and his German counterpart, Ruprecht Polenz, the German government and mainstream media celebrated this as a political and moral triumph: “Germany recognises Genocide” broadcast the main news bulletin of the state television ARD on 28 May 2021. The deal was quickly dubbed the “reconciliation agreement” in German discourse. The leader of the German delegation, Polenz remarked confidently that with the promise of special aid Germany would ensure that the acknowledgment and apology did not remain lip service.
The Namibian government’s announcement was much more subdued. President Hage Geingob’s spokesperson cautiously expressed that the agreement was a “first step in the right direction”. However, associations of the affected communities, the Ovaherero and Nama, whose ancestors had been victims of the genocide, were a whole lot more critical. They criticized the agreement on substantial as well as procedural grounds: For one, the German government had succeeded to enforce its stated principle not to pay reparations for the crimes committed during German colonial rule. And, as they had done for years, descendants of the victims protested that they had not been properly involved in the process. Ovaherero traditional leader Vekuii Rukoro, who sadly succumbed on the 18 June to the terrible Covid surge currently haunting Namibia, called the agreement “an insult“; a statement, which made front page headline news on the The Namibian newspaper.
Members of the victim associations took to the streets of Windhoek. Even those representatives of the affected communities, who had in the past been more amenable to the negotiation process, expressed their concerns in growing numbers. They particularly questioned the amount of the payment package, which was far lower than what had been expected by the Namibian government, who had rejected, in 2020, the earlier German offer of 10 million Euro compensation. While the amount offered now is an improvement on last year’s, it still falls short of Namibian expectations, as even Namibian Vice-President Nangolo Mbumba admitted although he officially accepted the German offer on behalf of his government.
For Namibians, and the descendants of the genocide victims in particular, it is not all about the amount of money though. Activist and politician Esther Muinjangue, the former Chairperson of the Ovaherero Genocide Foundation, now an opposition MP, and also Namibia’s Deputy Minister of Health and Social Services, cut to the chase when she unequivocally stated that “development aid can never replace reparations”.
The Namibian government’s official response on 4 June 2021 clearly attempted some damage control and referred to the agreed “reconstruction and reconciliation” payments as a “reparations package”. This is in distinct contradiction to the official language of the agreement that these payments were decidedly not reparations but an additional set of development aid. Three weeks after the announcement of the agreement, and what the German government had obviously hoped would bring closure to a painful past, there’s only one phrase to describe the situation: it’s a total mess.
Reparations
When former German Foreign Minister Joseph ‘Joschka’ Fischer visited Windhoek in October 2003 he went on record to say that there would be no apology that might give grounds for reparations for the genocide, which was committed by German colonial troops in Namibia. Fischer’s rather undiplomatic words are indicative of the intense and heated, historical and present relations that are at stake.
There is an underlying conjecture of the German-Namibian negotiations: what are the potential international ramifications of accepting legal, political and moral responsibility of reparations for colonial violence and genocide. Colonial Germany may have committed genocide, according to the UN definition, “with intent to destroy, …, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” only in Namibia; but it certainly carried out atrocities and mass killings also in other colonial territories. Esther Muinjangue nailed it when she said: “We know that the German Government is guilty equally when it comes to the people of Tanzania or when it comes to the people of Cameroon. So, they want to safeguard themselves.” The German government fears more claims from ex-colonies; it also fears claims from European countries such as Greece, which have never received compensation for World War Two war crimes.
Then there are the shared postcolonial anxieties among the former colonial empires. Would Germany’s acceptance of its colonial past open the floodgates to a surge of claims by formerly colonized nations, in Africa as elsewhere, against their erstwhile colonizers? Muinjangue thinks this a likelihood: “all countries that were present at the Berlin Conference of 1884 and divided up the African continent are guilty: France, Britain, Belgium, and many others. They all have blood on their hands – and they all fear that one day they will have to pay reparations for their crimes.” The fears of former empires, such as Britain, France and Belgium, have been the proverbial elephant in the room.
Not without us…
If any agreement between a former colonizing power and the formerly colonized should stand a chance of bringing about justice and reconciliation, the descendants of those affected must be closely listened to. This means that they should be appropriately included in the negotiations. This has been the vocal persistent demand of genocide victim groups for an inclusive process under the slogan “not without us” ever since the negotiations between Namibia and Germany began in 2015. In January 2017 representatives of Ovaherero and Nama traditional authorities filed a lawsuit in New York, which although ultimately unsuccessful, sent a strong message to Germany and the Namibian government that negotiations “without us” remained unacceptable for those whose ancestors were killed in the genocide.
A common grievance, often expressed in Namibia, questions Germany’s pronounced difference of responding to different victims of genocide. Ever since 1990, descendants of those who suffered under the colonial genocide have often asked me, why did Germany pay generous and easily negotiated reparations to Israel after the reparations programme, which was created when Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany and Israel signed the Luxembourg Agreement in 1952, but has been so recalcitrant regarding Namibians? Why did the German government readily include the Jewish Claims Conference as representatives of Jewish non-governmental organisations but insisted on government-to-government only talks with Namibia? Is it “because we are Africans”, with these words Namibians regularly express suspected racism.
Restitutions: Symbolic reparations, not quite…
Symbolic commemorations of Germany’s African genocide have taken place over the past few years. If not without controversy, human remains of genocide victims were repatriated from Germany to Namibia in 2011, 2014 and 2018. These had been shipped to academic and medical institutions in Germany, and had remained there until recently.
In 2019 some significant items of cultural memory, which had been stolen during colonial conquest, were returned to Namibia from the Linden Museum in Stuttgart. These included the slain Nama leader Hendrik Witbooi’s Bible and his riding whip.
Other former German colonies have also begun to claim restitution. In 2018 Tanzania’s ambassador to Berlin requested the repatriation of human remains, which are being stored in German museums and academic institutions. In Berlin alone the remains of 250 individuals were identified, and more are suspected to be in Bremen, Leipzig, Dresden, Freiburg, and Göttingen. Provenance research on the human remains from former German East Africa also include about 900 remains of colonized people from Rwanda, which together with today’s Tanzania and Burundi formed colonial German East Africa. Also, in 2018, the President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation promised funding for future provenance research in transnational collaborations on collections of human remains with the perspective of repatriation to Cameroon, Togo and Papua New Guinea.
Yet, the debacle of the Namibian-German “reconciliation” agreement points out that the attempts at addressing the German colonial past, including, but not restricted to the shared-divided history of Germany and Namibia, have thus far been at best half-hearted.
Bronzes, a boat & street names
At the same moment that the “reconciliation agreement” was presented in Germany with some fanfare, controversy erupted once again around the Humboldt-Forum. Berlin’s ambitious new museum is housed in the royal Prussian palace in central Berlin; the reconstructed Baroque structure that was built over the past decade at a cost of over 680 Million Euro. In this space in the historical centre of imperial Germany, controversially, ethnographic collections will be exhibited. The Humboldt-Forum has been at the centre of highly critical responses from anti-colonial and black community civil society organisations, cultural workers, as well as historians and anthropologists. Its claim to decolonization has been highly contradictory.
Just before news broke about the Namibian-German agreement, high-profile German politicians loudly congratulated each other for their decision to return some of the hundreds of Benin bronzes kept in German museum collections to Nigeria. Until recently Benin bronzes were meant to occupy pride of place in the new museum in central Berlin, where Germany wants to demonstrates its cosmopolitanism; now German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas celebrated the “turning point in our way of dealing with [our] colonial history”. Quite ironically, just a week later the next prominent scandal of colonial loot hit the news. A new book by the historian Götz Aly revealed the dark history of an artistically stunning vessel looted from former German-New Guinea in 1903.
Berlin’s leading museum officials displayed an astonishing level of ignorance. Even more astounding was the suggestion to continue exhibiting the beautifully decorated 16 metres long boat, that was built by residents of Luf Island in the Western part of the Hermit Group, and who fell victim to German colonial atrocities in the new museum by declaring it “a memorial to the horrors of the German colonial past”. This arrogance is indeed astounding since there is still no memorial in Berlin to honour the victims of German colonialism and genocide in the central Berlin space, near the Reichstag, where Germany honours the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and belatedly, now also the victims of the Porajmos (genocide of the Roma and Sinti), and the Nazis’ persecution of homosexuals.
A tongue-in-cheek suggestion came from a leading historian of German colonialism and genocide. In a column in die tageszeitung Jürgen Zimmerer, Professor of Global History at Hamburg University, asked why not turn the reconstructed Prussian Palace itself into a fitting memorial. His proposition: fill-up its centre courtyard with sand from the Omaheke desert, or break up the castle’s fake Baroque façade with barbed wire in remembrance of the concentration camps in colonial Namibia.
Then there is street renaming, the most noticeable form of postcolonial activism in the German public space. A well-known dispute over street names comes from Berlin’s Afrikanisches Viertel (‘African Quarter’), where from 2004 civil society activist groups have been calling for the renaming of streets, which are currently named after German colonial despots. The members of the long-standing activist group Berlin Postkolonial and other initiatives, now active in cities and towns across Germany, have employed decolonial guided walking tours as a main tool of intervention. Recently, one of Berlin’s oldest campaigns gained success when the former Wissmannstrasse in the borough of Neukölln was renamed Lucy-Lameck-Strasse. The infamous German colonial officer and administrator was thus supplanted with the Tanzanian liberation fighter and politician, who after her country’s independence campaigned for gender justice.
Entangled memory: from violent pasts to new solidarities
The question remains, how much real change can come from the symbolic engagement with the colonial past. A future-oriented trajectory will point out that, beyond symbolic action, Germany’s culture of remembrance has to face challenges for the country to understand its own history within European colonialism.
Public debates in Germany have frequently posited colonialism and Holocaust memory against each other; it is alleged that an expansion of “working through the past” to include the colonial era, would ‘relativize’ the Holocaust. In contrast to this supposed competition of memory, Michael Rothberg’s concept of Multidirectional Memory has recently garnered some interesting, though at times controversial attention in public debate. Rothberg’s intervention, translated into German only twelve years after the original publication of the book in 2009, has become a catalyst for productive dialogues. In a nutshell, Rothberg suggests that memory works productively through negotiation and cross-referencing with the result of more, not less memory.
Berlin-based Ovaherero activist Israel Kaunatjike
An interesting case to explore new ways of thinking about colonial memory, social change and solidarities relates to the historical legacies of racial science and eugenics, which were developed by the anthropologist Eugen Fischer on the basis of research in Namibia in 1908. Fischer’s research was mainly used in the European colonial empires. From 1927 it was further developed under his leadership at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWI-A) in Berlin-Dahlem. From 1933 it became the basis of the Nazi race laws that targeted Jews and other racially and socially ‘undesirables’. Today the colonial roots of racism and inequality, as well as the systematization of racial studies and eugenics in Nazi Germany, continue to raise questions about the politics of remembrance and decolonization.
During excavations on the grounds of the Free University, which now occupies the site of the former KWI-A, hastily buried human remains were discovered. In 2015 and 2016 the University commissioned archaeological expertise on these finds. The KWI-A entertained close connections to the Auschwitz camp. Thus the initial suspicion was that the excavated bones may have belonged to people murdered during the Nazi era. However, when the archaeological report was presented during a well-attended online meeting in February 2021, it turned out that the situation was more complex. Some of the remains seem to have originated indeed in crimes against humanity that were perpetrated during the Nazi terror. Others, however, are more likely to originate in anthropological collections from the colonial era. It appeared impossible to ascertain the regional origins of the remains of the about 250 individuals. This gave rise to new solidarities that originated in entangled forms of remembering the atrocities of the colonial and Nazi eras. Representatives of Jewish, Black, and Sinti and Roma communities now work together to ensure that these human remains are treated with dignity.
Such new forms of solidarity are already practiced in civil society and transnationally in the global anti-racist movement. When the global Black Lives Matter movement formed a year ago, young activists got involved in Germany as well as in Namibia. In Windhoek, the movement was directed primarily against the statue of the German colonial officer and alleged city founder Curt von François. Not only the Nama and Ovaherero communities, but also young Namibians from all sections of the population are confronting colonial legacies. Over the past year the young Namibian activists who campaigned against the offensive monument and who support the claims of the descendants of the genocide survivors, have clinched a number of social justice issues as part of their decolonizing activism, and have been calling for an end to sexism, patriarchy, and racism.
In Germany too, civil society activists have played a big role and the “reconciliation agreement” is owed, more than anything else, to their post-colonial remembrance work. Campaigning started around 2004, i.e., the time of the centenary of the genocide. In October 2016, for instance, an international civil society congress, “Restorative Justice after Genocide”, brought together over 50 Herero and Nama delegates and German solidarity activists in Berlin. The participants staged public protests and Ovaherero and Nama delegates held a press conference in the German Bundestag. And now that the, unsatisfactory, agreement is on the table, activists in Germany are again campaigning vibrantly in solidarity with the affected Namibian communities and have taken to the streets of Berlin. The current Namibia solidarity alliance brings together civil society outlets of long-standing, and young groups, who have come together during the past year’s surge of radical anti-racist activism.
The agreement that has been concluded falls short of expectations in many ways. However, it can be an impetus for the former colonial rulers and the formerly colonized to finally begin a meaningful conversation about the difficult divided history. The question arises as to whether the civil society decolonization movements in both Germany and Namibia can influence the future politics of remembrance in both their countries in a way that makes a solidarity-based post-colonial policy of reconciliation and justice possible.
Heike Becker focuses on the politics of memory, popular culture, digital media and social movements of resistance in southern Africa (South Africa and Namibia). She also works on decolonize memory activism and anti-racist politics in Germany and the UK. Heike is a regular contributor to roape.net.
Photographs: The photographs were taken during a rally that was organised in Berlin on 28 May 2021 – it was held during the afternoon of the day when the agreement was officially announced by the German government. The space where the rally was held is on the grounds of where the infamous Berlin-Kongo conference was held in 1884/85 (all photographs were taken by Heike Becker).
Written 25 years ago, Kenya: A Prison Notebook inspired generations and proved a great resource and a handbook in political education in Kenya and beyond. It chronicles Maina wa Kinyatti’s arrest and detention by the Moi regime, and powerfully captures Kenya’s history. From a new collection on the book, Sungu Oyoo introduces a celebration of Kinyatti’s work by young activists and Gacheke Gachihi writes how his life was transformed by meeting Maina wa Kinyatti – the full text of the collection is available at the end of the blogpost.
Maina wa Kinyatti was a university professor and foremost researcher on the Mau Mau (Kenya Land and freedom Army), the liberation movement that engaged the British colonialists in armed struggle for land and freedom. In 1982, he was arrested by state agents for ‘possession of seditious material’ and detained by the Moi regime. Maina wrote Kenya: A Prison Notebook over the course of the next six and half years he spent in detention – mostly in solitary confinement.
Maina’s work and writing remains a constant and painful reminder that the objectives of the freedom struggle the Mau Mau engaged in are yet to be achieved. Kenya is a neo-colonial state. Her economy is in the hands of global capital and imperialism, while constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms are everyday blatantly disregarded with impunity.
Maina’s generation continued with the struggle for a better society and showed great courage by confronting a regime that was prepared to go to any lengths to suppress dissenting voices. Today, another generation is continuing with that struggle in fulfillment of its historical responsibility.
Through this collection of reflections on Kenya: A Prison Notebook, young comrades from various movements and organizations interrogate the lived reality and material conditions of their generation whilst relating them to past struggles and experiences. They reflect on a range of themes; including the purpose of education as a tool for liberation or bondage; the unfinished task of national liberation; intergenerational inheritance of social struggles in Kenya; not forgetting the pain, courage, patriotism and organizing reflected in the book.
These reflections are a celebration of Maina wa Kinyatti and all those who engaged in struggles for a better Kenya and Afrika. They additionally are an urgent reminder of the need to organize more than ever given the lived reality and material conditions of our people – those living in deprivation, those whose rights are suppressed, and freedoms infringed. They are a reminder that struggle, like change, is a constant. These reflections were inspired by a conversation at Ukombozi Library between Gacheke Gachihi, Nicholas Mwangi and Brian Mathenge.
A luta continua!
Sungu Oyoo – Editor
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Reflections on Kenya: A Prison Notebook: Intergenerational inheritance of social struggles in Kenya – Gacheke Gachihi
“9 June 1982: After refusing to sign a written confession statement, I was given back my clothes, blindfolded, handcuffed and taken to the CID headquarters where I was physically abused, photographed, fingerprinted and charged with possession of a seditious publications entitled Moi’s Divisive Tactics Exposed, a document the Police had planted in one of my research files” Prof. Maina wa Kinyatti.
25 Years ago, Professor Maina wa Kinyatti wrote Kenya: A Prison Notebook, borrowing from the narrative of the great revolutionary and organic intellectual Antonio Gramsci, a political prisoner during the fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini in Italy during a period when Europe was undergoing a capitalist-imperialist crisis of fascism.
Maina wa Kinyatti, a revolutionary and freedom fighter, spent 6 years in Prison primarily for writing Kenya’s correct history and for being a member of the Mwakenya December Twelve Movement (DTM) movement (an underground socialist movement in Kenya in the 1980s) that fought for democracy and social justice in Kenya during the Kenyatta–Moi dictatorships. In blood and tears, he wrote one of the most beautiful and glorious chapters of the history of our resistance as a people – a history of constant struggle in defense of democracy and our collective memory, dignity and social justice.
Published 25 years ago, Kenya: A Prison Notebook remains relevant and continues to inspire new generations of freedom fighters, students, peasants, and social justice activists. It has sparked a re-imagination of political education and provided the social justice movement with great insights into the true history of resistance in Kenya, including lessons learnt during the struggles of Kenya’s underground movement, popularly known as Mwakenya.
It was in 2003 when, through Tirop Kitur, I got a copy of Kenya: A Prison Notebook from the then Release Political Prisoners (RPP) offices along Nairobi’s historic Cabral Street. RPP was a political organization started by mothers of political prisoners and Kenyan exiled communities in London agitating for democracy and the release of all political prisoners in Kenya. Comrade Tirop had been one of the Mwakenya detainees and was a political activist alongside Karimi Nduthu – first RPP coordinator, a great revolutionary and urban guerrilla assassinated by the Moi regime in 1996. Karimi Nduthu was at the time of his assassination creating a political path for the mass movement anchored on the struggles and human rights work that RPP was engaged in. Indeed, the seeds for today’s grassroots social movements in Kenya emerged from the struggles of RPP and the Mwakenya movement – just as the seeds of RPP and Mwakenya had emerged from the struggles that preceded them.
The book opened my eyes to Kenya’s beautiful history of struggle, especially the resistance by ordinary people against the British imperialist backed Moi dictatorship. It sparked my anger and passion against injustices and human rights violations. It exposed me to the evils of the Moi regime, the blood that was shed and the price paid by many university intellectuals, workers and peasants during the struggle for democratic rights, including the freedom to organize and protest. It is through continuous organizing and protests such as the Saba Saba March in 1990 among other political activities that Moi’s 24-year-old dictatorship was removed from power in 2002.
The book became one of my best pieces of history and an authoritative reference on Kenyan struggle and resistance and has inspired me into buying copies for my comrades as part of political education.
True to its nature, the neocolonial state firmly opposed any political organizing and research on the Mau Mau Movement that Maina Wa Kinyatti was bringing to light to educate the Kenya masses on our true history. Maina Wa Kinyatti was one of the senior cadres of the DTM that was organized by progressive university intellectuals, political activists and workers. The movement showed great courage by organizing during the Moi regime, including in Kenyatta University where it conducted underground political study cells.
Due to fear of change and resistance the regime embarked on a mission to cleanse radicals and Marxist professors from Kenya Universities, destroying the culture of education and hitherto vibrant battle of ideas in university spaces. In the universities and other public spaces, the state removed progressive books by Karl Marx, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Steve Biko, Malcom X and any material that challenged the neo-colonial state and British imperialism in Kenya.
During Moi’s reign, marked by ethnic mobilization and backward politics, university education in Kenya took a nosedive, destroying the foundation of generational values and a culture of patriotism that liberation movements such as the Mau Mau had inspired. Moism took Kenya down the path of economic destruction and neocolonial poverty and entrenched divisive ethnic politics that is at the core of Kenya’s political mess today.
Maina wa Kinyatti was arrested and sentenced to six and a half years in prison for ‘possessing seditious material’. The Imprisonment of Maina Wakinyatii, Ewdard Oyugi, Kamonji Wachira, Katama Mkangi, Willy Mutunga, Ngugi wa Thiongo, and many others derailed the growth of an ideological political base in Kenya for progressive politics and the social justice movement.
Maina Wa Kinyatti with Gaceke Gachihi
I first met Maina wa Kinyatti in 2000 and much later, we began organizing political study sessions at the Polytechnic Institute in Nairobi as part of introducing us to class struggle and the history of resistance in Kenya. Subsequent study sessions forged our comradeship and led to an opportunity to launch one of his books, History of Resistance in Kenya in 2008. Maina Wa Kinyatti and his wife Mumbi Maina have since then become my teachers on love for our people and the struggle for liberation in Kenya and Africa.
As we mark 25 years of Kenya: A Prison Notebook we celebrate comrade Prof. Maina wa Kinyatti as a great freedom fighter, revolutionary intellectual and a mentor to our generation’s struggle for freedom and social justice.
As the Czech writer Milan Kundera once said, “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. Prison Notebook is an epoch of memory that we will never forget. An epoch of history that will continue sparking fire against injustice across many generations in Kenya. It’s a permanent spark of our fire of resistance, love of our country and a memory of the sacrifices of comrades of the Mwakenya-Decemeber Twelve Movement.
The book 25 Years of Kenya – A Prison Notebook: Reflections can be downloaded and read for free here.
Gacheke Gachihi is the coordinator of Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC) and a member of the Social Justice Centres Working Group Steering Committee in Nairobi, Kenya. He is also involved in regional social movements and politics. He researches and writes about police violence, criminalization of the poor, social justice, and social struggles, amongst other areas. His articles and video interviews are published by roape.net, Africa Is a Country (AIAC), Daraja Press, Verso Books and others.
Baindu Kallon reviews Hannah Cross’ new book Migration Beyond Capitalism. Kallon celebrates a book that brings a new left-wing response to the narrative around migration. Cross, Kallon argues, effectively demonstrates why an internationalist working-class response is the key to defeating neoliberal power and creating a new world.
By Baindu Kallon
Often the conversation on migration falls into familiar discourse. From the right, it’s the threat of the “foreigner” and the need to protect the nation, rhetoric steeped in racist language and actions. From Liberals and sections of the left, the argument often draws on the appeal of human rights, compounded with the argument that migration benefits the economy and promotes multiculturalism. Both sides of the argument tend to view migration as an issue solely of assimilation or the management of borders. In Migration Beyond Capitalism, author Hannah Cross aims to disrupt and bring a new left-wing response to the narrative around migration. Migration Beyond Capitalism centres migration within labour politics, demonstrating how current migration discourse “tends to ignore or take for granted the role of overexploited migrant labour in successive capitalist orders…” (Cross 9).. Throughout the book, Cross outlines how migration reflects and reinforces inequalities, such as income, gender and race, that are manifested through capitalism. By doing so, Cross presents a global and connected working-class of migrants and native workers that are the key to fighting against capitalism.
Cross grounds this analysis in Marxist theory by posing Karl Marx’s letter on the Irish Question, written in 1870, as a starting point (24). The migration of Irish workers created cheaper labour for the English ruling class. This, in turn, created divisions between the Irish and English working class in English towns and cities, which the ruling class exacerbated through politics, media and more. By dividing the working class, the ruling class ensured that they could control English workers by stopping them from uniting with their Irish co-workers in a struggle for higher wage and better working conditions. Thus two groups of workers with identical material interests were kept apart from one another. Marx argues that the struggle for freedom in Ireland against the English ruling class, and that of English workers, could only be achieved through a unified class struggle.
Migration Beyond Capitalism takes Marx’s writing on the Irish Question and applies it to the migration debate today. Cross examines how capitalism historically and continuously thrives on inequalities and the division of the working class. Cross draws from both the global North and South but places a specific focus on Western Europe and the United States. These divisions emerge through various mechanisms such as Fortress Europe, which is used to privilege movement from EU citizens while criminalising and excluding others. It also emerges through labour exploitation and businesses that demand “…access to specific forms of labour, influencing the laws and policies of the capitalist state” (101). Centring labour within the conversation on migration outlines the inherent inequalities within the capitalist system.
Cross also shows how tensions between workers can be eroded, leading to class solidarity. As evidenced in the 2009 Lindsey Oil Refinery Strikes in the UK, workers went on strike to demand better working conditions, rights and job security (124). Rather than demand that migrant workers be expelled or fired, the unofficial strike argued for migrant workers to be able to unionize and receive union assistance (125). The workers were united in fighting against the poor conditions that they all faced. For Cross, this solidarity is key and can be understood and advocated for by workers by analysing migration through the lens of the political economy of labour.
Understanding migration through labour politics
The relationship between inequality and migration comes through particularly well in the chapter on imperialism and migrant labour in the capitalist world. The common thread in the capitalist world is the focus on capital accumulation, the steady deterioration of labour and disregard of human needs. Cross expertly weaves these themes by analysing the historic, social and economic impact of slavery, colonialism and neoliberalism. Migration became a vehicle for capitalist ambition, by any means necessary – low to no wages, brutalised communities, horrific working conditions and more (53). This erosion of labour continues into the neoliberal era.
This chapter best demonstrates the strength of this book, a clear explanation of how the exploitation of labour, through migration, impacts workers in the global North and South. Development institutions such as the World Bank began “cutting welfare spending…and transformed monetary policy, causing enormous dislocation and harm to local production and livelihoods”, during the early neoliberal period. This coincided with trade unions in the global North becoming “depoliticized and deradicalized, operating in narrow institutional channels that blunt rather than destabilize neoliberalism” (93). Given these changes, workers in the Global South faced the growth of foreign direct investment to build factories built on low waged workers and resource extraction. This, in turn, provided transnational companies, specifically in the global North, with the opportunity to discourage unions from pushing for further demands (wage increases, better working conditions) under the threat of relocating to the Global South. The divide and rule tactic is key to the assault on workers globally. By outlining this tactic, Cross highlights the similar conditions that all workers face, making a well-evidenced case for international solidarity.
Class antagonism and migration
Through the lens of the political economy of labour, Cross demonstrates how the ruling classes use migration as a tool to create class divisions based on race, gender, religion, amongst others. Yet by centring migration, and further class antagonisms, through the politics of labour fails to give equal analysis to other forces that perpetuate and exacerbate class tensions.
For example, in the chapter on class antagonisms, Cross provides an analysis of racism and rightly argues that these divisions are manufactured through the state and media. Cross briefly touches on the fact that capitalism creates “… a false notion of privilege on the native-born white working class” (114). Yet Cross neglects to explore further how and why racist ideologies continue to be an effective tool in creating these seemingly “privileged sections” of workers (127). It is increasingly important to analyse the power of this rhetoric given that a growing response to the failures of late capitalism has been the rise of the Far Right and overall national chauvinism.
The need to divide workers, created and maintained by capitalist ambition, is also supported through the narrative of the nation-state. For many Western countries, those who belong to the nation or ‘imagined communities’ are centred as being white/Anglo, heterosexual, Christian and male. Those who traverse these boundaries are the ‘others’. On the one hand, this becomes a way in which the state racialises and scapegoats migrants during economic hardship. On the other hand, the narrative also deems migrants suitable for ‘low skilled’ jobs that native workers seemingly refuse to take, further strengthening racist hierarchies while creating class divisions and racist narratives to reinforce them.
The strength of the nation-state narrative comes through clearly in the example of Medhi Hasan challenging Paul Collier on his assertion that “indigenous British have become a minority in their own capital” (115). Hasan correctly asserts that the census shows that 63 per cent of London’s population is born in the UK and rather it’s the white British population that is a minority. Cross uses this example as a way in which to demonstrate how poor interpretation of data, or science, is used to reinforce racist ideology. While this is true, it also is quite apparent that Collier equates indigenous, or belonging to the British nation, to being white. This presented a missed opportunity to explore how ideas of belonging are reinforced by the demarcation of borders and citizenship rights. In the context of migration, this creates further tensions between migrant and native workers, often perpetuated by the spread of racist ideology. The fact that it’s reinforced by politicians, the media and leading Oxford professors, such as Collier, only strengthens the argument that racism is a system and ideology that benefits the ruling class. In the end, the mechanisms that support racism and class divisions are powerful and interconnected. Thus it deserves a further analysis of the whole system, from the economic to the political and social perspective, rather than within the boundaries of labour politics and migration.
An “open borders” approach?
Cross ends Migration Beyond Capitalism with an appeal for the left to distance itself from the rallying slogan for ‘open borders’. Instead Cross advocates for equality of movement, a radical transformation of migration politics which “highlights the inequalities between countries and people and can be at the centre of a progressive migration regime” (175). It’s important to note that Cross argues against an open borders rallying call because it “…can seek advancement by means of alliances with opportunistic and harmful forces, thus preventing systemic change and failing to persuade those beyond the activist grouping” (170).
The open borders slogan is co-opted by those who push for migration as a means to provide “low skilled” jobs that benefit the economy. As Cross correctly states, this fails to address the root causes and ignores the inequalities reflected through migration. However, the rhetoric of open borders should not be discounted, especially given that abolishing borders is a key socialist argument. Given this, it’s important to be explicit in this stance, rather than back away from it. The call for open borders and the equality of movement argument are not dichotomies, both fight for the same future – one that benefits the working class with the dismantling of militarized borders. As such, the issue is not so much the call for open borders but instead how the slogan is co-opted in global discourse. Thus, an open border argument must be made but distinguished in its meaning by centring it around labour politics. Not only would this highlight how borders are used to serve capital accumulation but also grounds working-class interests within the open borders argument. Doing so only strengthens the argument for the equality of movement that Cross advocates for so powerfully.
International solidarity and the working class
The fight for migrant rights cannot be articulated as a moral or human rights issue. Instead, it’s a question of survival for both migrant and native workers that have experienced the deterioration of wages, living conditions and more. Cross analyses migration with a labour centric approach – outlining the global attack on workers while more importantly, highlighting the connections and advocating for international solidarity. Cross’ approach provides a much-needed reorientation on the discussion around migration. By doing so, Cross effectively demonstrates why an internationalist working-class response is the key to defeating neoliberal power and creating a new world.
Baindu Kallon holds a MA in African Studies from SOAS and has a keen interest in economic development and migration policy in West Africa. In her spare time, Baindu is a community activist and works with black creatives in the UK.
When Guyanese Revolutionary Walter Rodney returned to Guyana in the mid-1970s, he joined a socialist organisation called the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) to fight against Fordes Burnham’s dictatorship. By 1979, the WPA’s advocacy for unity between Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese, bread and justice drew thousands of Guyanese working people into its ranks. The WPA also attracted support from members of the Guyanese and wider Caribbean community in England. One of them, Anne Braithwaite, spoke to ROAPE’s Chinedu Chukwudinma about her experience as a founding member of the WPA Support Group UK ahead of the 41st anniversary of Walter Rodney’s assassination.
Tell me about your early years in Guyana and the UK, how did you become politically involved, where did it start?
In Guyana, I was not politically active at all. Guyana gained independence when I was in the middle of high school in 1966. Looking back, I’m amazed that I didn’t do more and that I wasn’t more engaged with independence. I think having fun really was my main thing at school and between school and coming to England. Not a lot of political engagement at all. My parents were sort of typical; you know, I guess working class with middle class ambitions. My mother was a nurse and was meant to be very good at school. She was one of those really bright girls. She was that kind of hard-working person, but not herself directly political. My father came from what would be considered aspiring middle class, but he himself never exerted himself too much about getting into the middle class. He was somebody who was into enjoying life and, you know, just doing what he liked. He was a security guard and was happy with that.
Going on to school, I spent formative years in primary school in a village in Guyana called Victoria. I realised later on that one of the teachers must have told my parents that they should put me in for the scholarship as it was called at the time. And so, they decided to send me to school in Georgetown where my aunt was a teacher, which was quite far from where we lived at the time. My parents lived in Lodge while my aunt lived in Kitty. So, it was quite a long distance to get to school. But I went to school there and managed to get a scholarship to go to Bishop’s High, which was the elite girl’s school. The two elite schools were Bishop’s High for girls and Queen’s College for boys, and I went to Bishop’s High. In the early days, it would only have been white folks and light folks who went there and the children of diplomats and the planter class who would have gone. I started at Bishop’s High in 1963. It was a delayed start because in 1962 we had that a big explosion of racial violence that was very disruptive today.[1] Like COVID-19 is now, it was very disruptive for schooling, there was a general strike they were major disruptions, and the start of the new school year was just one of them. But I started school in 1963, Guyana got independence in 1966, and I left school in 1969.
After leaving school I worked for a couple of years in Guyana, I work at a sugar estate called Wales Sugar Estate, which has been closed down now. But at the time, it was a functioning sugar estate. I worked there for a while, which meant leaving home very early in the mornings because I had to get two to three forms of transport and then a ferry to get there at seven o’clock. I subsequently got a job in Georgetown, which was much more attractive because it was much easier to get to. The job was with another state institution, which was the Guyana rice board. It was called the Rice Marketing Board at the time. It was an admin job, bookkeeping and mainly accounting.
I realised afterwards that I got both jobs because of my privilege, even though I didn’t know it at the time, I had two forms of privilege going for me, one, I was a Bishop’s high school girl. The second one, I was black African. By that time, the government that was in power was the People’s National Congress (PNC) of Forbes Burnham, which was backed mainly by African Guyanese. And the PNC had changed the senior staff in most of these state-organised workplaces because Indian Guyanese or supporters of the rival People’s Progressive Party (PPP) had usually staffed these workplaces.[2] So there was an active attempt to get African people in. It was not until much later that I realised why I got hired. I got hired really easily as I didn’t have to ask anyone. Usually in Guyana, the way things work is that you have to know somebody and ask somebody to help you. I simply wrote applications or turned up. I don’t think I even told anybody about it, I just applied for jobs and got them. Because they were my first jobs, I didn’t realise how lucky I was and how privilege was playing to my advantage.
Shortly before I left Guyana, privilege also played to my advantage when I got hired at the CARIFESTA in Guyana, which was the first Caribbean Festival of Creative Arts. I was then working at the Rice Board and I was told that I received a secondment to work for the festival for six months – I was working with the CARIFESTA secretariat. The crazy thing was that I actually got my salary from the rice board but also got paid as if I was doing a separate job at the festival secretariat. I got tickets to everything going, so was really popular with my mates. By that time, I bought a car and life was wonderful.
When did you end up going to the UK then?
I wanted to leave Guyana partly because of the racial violence that had happened in 1962. And, in general, it was considered anybody in Guyana who was going to be someone had to go away to do something, usually study. I got a letter from a cousin of mine who lived in London inviting me to come in 1972 …and that was the choice that I made.
Life for me in Guyana was apart from working with just having fun. That was the mindset that I arrived in London with. Within a couple of days of me being in London, another cousin of mine said she was going to take me to a party. I’ve literally been here just for a matter of days. And I think it was at the International Students House around the Bloomsbury area, where I met quite a few other Guyanese. The party was in somebody’s room in the hall of residence. That same cousin took me to another party at a student centre where there was a bigger space and a much larger crowd. And I met a whole lot of other people … one of whom was a sibling of Walter Rodney. And he eventually introduced me to Walter. He also introduced me to Jessica and Eric Huntley and that’s how I kind have started being aware of things and being politicised. Jessica Huntley and I became really good friends and I’d help out at the Bogle-L’Ouverture bookshop in Ealing on free evenings and weekends.
When exactly did you meet Walter Rodney, what did you like about him as and his work?
The first time I met Walter Rodney was in a house in the early 1970s. He didn’t live in London anymore – he lived in Tanzania. But he always travelled a lot and was always travelling back and forth. His relative would tell me when he’s coming to London and we would go and see him. We turned up to the house at which the Rodney’s were staying, that’s how I met Walter, his wife Patricia and their young kids.
He just seemed a regular nice guy actually, both him and his wife, they just seem like regular nice people, and they were Guyanese. I knew that he had written a couple of books. But I had no real idea of the importance until I started getting reactions from other Guyanese, when I mentioned that I met Walter Rodney, they would say, “you mean, you met Walter Rodney!?” I realised then that he did history. He was a historian. I’d heard people say Walter was bright. But in my colonised mind, if you were bright you’d become a doctor or a lawyer. Only somebody who wasn’t bright enough would do something like history. And I really did not have a concept of how you made a career of being a historian apart from being a teacher, and you became a teacher if you couldn’t do better. So, him being special and bright was not at the forefront of my mind. He just seemed to be a regular nice guy.
I think one of Rodney’s greatest strength was that he could understand and talk to people at every level with clarity, but without condescension or without using complicated language. By every level, I mean, from people who had no formal education – people who literally could not read and write – to people who were very sophisticated academics and professors and who considered themselves the intellectual elite. He could relate to everyone in a clear and respectful way without patronising them. That is why even as a student in Jamaica, he had attracted the attention of the security services. But because of his clarity and an ideological and political stance at the time, elements within the university at the time, did their damnedest to make sure that he didn’t stay there.[3] I guess they would have seen him as a loose cannon as he wanted to go, listen and talk to the Rastafari community.
I’m guessing that from your interest in Guyanese politics you came to support Rodney’s political organisation the WPA from the UK. When did the WPA Support Group start?
Mid-1970s was when things were becoming politically and economically difficult for working people in Guyana. Reports of repression there were rife. But there were also other things happening. Companies were being nationalised and the government was inviting Guyanese who were leaving in droves to come back home, and calling itself radical, socialist and supporting liberation struggles and so on. I was beginning to become curious about what was really happening at home. That was really the origin of my interest. I realised that one or two people I’d gone to school with, were saying things that seemed very strange to me, including identifying Indians in Guyana as the enemy. I found that really upsetting in a way because it reminded of what had happened in 1962. I felt this is the time that I’ve got to decide: am I going to support this or am I not? That was when I started thinking actively about politics. I wasn’t interested in Britain – I was primarily interested in understanding Guyana and what was happening there.
The WPA Support Group started in 1979, the same year the WPA became a political party. But before the formation of the WPA Support Group in London, I worked with an organisation called CARIG, Committee Against repression in Guyana, which both Leland De Cambra – another WPA SG UK founding member – and I were part of. That group of mostly African Caribbean activists, with a Guyanese core started agitating against political developments in Guyana.
I was really hungry to learn and to understand what was going on in Guyana. Unlike others there who were politically active before, I had no ideological background. All I knew about ideologies was what the propaganda had got into my head in my early days in Guyana, which was the PPP was communist and they were bad and had to be gotten rid of. And the PNC was the party for me. That was probably the extent of my ideological awareness. Until I began to read things, write and talk to people and meet other activists involved in liberation struggles and other struggles, it was then that I decided with others to form a WPA support group. In short, I think CARIG had ideological issues with the WPA becoming a political party in Guyana. WPA supporters were therefore pushed out of CARIG, although CARIG continued agitating against Guyana’s escalating political repression.
The WPA message that resonated the most with me was the genuine wielding of power in the interest of working people, and in particular about ethnic division not being the way to go. And so I was able to support them and over time come to learn a little bit more about what was happening and to understand why they were opposing the PNC government. When there was talk about WPA needing support groups I said, “Yes, I want to be part of it!”
How many people were involved in the WPA Support Group and who?
Initially, I would say maybe a dozen members, rising to cores at its height. We organised the first meeting at my then home at 80 Sistova Road, Balham. By that time, I had become so convinced by what the WPA was saying that I thought it would make sense to most of my friends, and most of the people I knew. I remember rushing home early from work that first evening; myself, Leland De Cambra, Makini Campbell, Horace Campbell, and a few other people waiting around to start. But then the phone started to ring with apologies and excuses like “sorry I have to work late” or “I can’t come”. That was my first really tough lesson: I thought we were not going to have enough room for people to sit, but that certainly was not a problem at that first meeting. I was disappointed, but it was the start of a steep organising learning curve.
Can you give me a few examples of the various activities that the WPA support group did in the UK?
Okay, um, apart from having planning meetings, we would have public meetings exposing the PNC dictatorship and its neocolonial nature, organise fundraisers, cultural events, dances, film screenings. and connecting with radical groups from around the world. We also maintained close contact with the WPA in Guyana, hosting and organising public platforms for visiting members and supporters like Josh Ramsammy, Clive Thomas, Moses Bhagwan, Eusi Kwiana. Rupert Roopnarine and Andaiye who resided in the UK for two years in the early 80s as an WPA international secretary. We also distributed WPA literature and its newsletter, Dayclean. Meetings in those days was hiring a school, community or church halls, Ritzy Cinema and Abeng Centre Brixton, getting invited by students, trade unions or other radical groups and disseminating information about what was happening in Guyana and showing solidarity with other campaigns. Those were the priorities at the time. Burnham’s PNC government was showing itself up as dictatorial. They had been shamelessly rigging elections, and were duplicitous with Guyana’s working people, doing really progressive and popular things like supporting African liberation struggles while at the same time being a despot at home.
Did the WPA support group organise these meeting with African or Indian community organisations? Or even left-wing and student groupings?
I think it was very much a case of whatever and wherever the support group could do, and with whomever. We collaborated with Caribbean, African, and many other student activists all over London, the Midlands, Sussex; with Labour and Liberal party activists, NGOs like CAFOD, Friends of The Earth, Amnesty International, interested in the erosion of Guyana’s political, civil and human rights. These contacts assisted with disseminating reliable information on Guyana and the WPA, organising legal and election observers and briefing journalists, MPs and other activists.
What we were doing all the time is trying to say to people what’s going on in Guyana and why. That certainly was my focus. We would say, “we formed this group and be happy to come and talk to you about it.” So, some students somewhere would invite us to come and speak at something that was already going on, or we would just organise meetings and do flyers and put them out. I remember events at the old Africa Centre in Covent Garden on King Street. That was like the second most important central venue for African and African Caribbean activists after the Earl’s Court Student Centre. Those were the two venues if you wanted to meet black activists, progressive kinds of people. The Earl’s Court centre was predominantly Caribbean people while the Africa Centre was predominantly Africans.
That leads me to another question because Burnham in Guyana in the late 70s supported this so-called “cooperative socialism” and made a reputation for himself abroad as a progressive leader, especially in various black radical circles across the world. Did that fact make it difficult for the WPA support group to gain respect in the UK among elements of the black community?
It was not so difficult to get respect, because at that time people were very receptive. However, when non-Guyaneserealised we were criticising the Burnham government, they became confused. Guyanese people understood it, because then they knew either directly or from family and friends in Guyana, what was going on. But for other Caribbean and African and progressive people, anywhere, really, one had to do a lot of explaining, to explain how somebody who is seen as progressive in the non-aligned movement was anti-democratic and rotten at the core. In the 1980s, I remember going to the Houses of Parliament here in London with a WPA leader, Clive Thomas, to meet MP Bernie Grant. Clive Thomas was attempting to garner support for the WPA and Bernie grant at first was supportive, but then said, “…the thing is, man, I can’t criticise Burnham as a black leader.” That was the biggest struggle that one would have with black activists in the UK, trying to explain to them “Yes, Burnham is a black leader, but….” Rodney’s explanations helped me understand those contradictions and the WPA in Guyana had a well thought out position to counter the PNC’s carefully cultivated progressive, radical pan-African image.
The primary focus of the PNC, in all their rebrands [now APNU], has always been about usurping state power to develop a base to enrich themselves and dispense patronage, mainly to an African-Guyanese elite. Classic manifestations were the nationalisation of Guyana’s sugar and bauxite industries; their notorious, well documented election rigging during the 1960s to 1990s to keep out the PPP [then deemed communist by the Americans] with CIA collusion [documentation now released], and their astonishingly foolhardy attempt – in full public glare – to steal the March 2020 election which they lost, citing historical economic deprivation of African Guyanese. Their reckless desperation to retain control of Guyana’s nascent oil and gas industry, precipitated today’s sad pictures of PNC old men [mostly ex-military in sharp suits] embarrassing themselves.
Did a lot of members in the WPA Support Group write and publish any pamphlets or maybe news briefs on the situation in Guyana?
We did a lot of that but virtually all of them came from Guyana, because we were gathering Information, and accurate and reliable information was always an issue. We would get by various means information from Guyana, it could be sent to us by post, or it could be people travelling and bringing stuff and we would reproduce them here and there. There were quite a lot of documents that we would reproduce; Dayclean, which was the WPA’s regular publication, and other particular speeches and publications like Sign of the Times, People’s Power, No Dictator, [4] and other pamphlets and booklets. It was the sort of material that they would have circulated in Guyana because reading material was always at a premium and newsprint was banned. Part of the repressive nature of the Burnham regime meant that you were starved of newsprint. So, reading material was always in premium demand.
One of the things if you were Guyanese and you were travelling is that you tried to tell as few people as possible that you were going back, because otherwise everyone would ask you to take a letter, and the letter would turn out to be a big carrier bag full of something. That has to do with the fact that there was always a lot of shortages in Guyana, of basic foodstuffs, also other basic things so that somebody was always desperate, almost anything that you take for granted now would have been either scarce or unavailable in Guyana.
In one sense it was easier to get WPA pamphlets reproduced in the UK. We just had to go to a printer’s and get it paid for, or some of us will use facilities where we worked. I worked at one time at a place where I was allowed to use a Gestetner machine (an old duplicating machine). Where I could print a flyer and type it up on a stencil, and then run it off on the Gestetner machine. I think that was the only way we duplicated pamphlets because photocopying was far too expensive. And the WPA Support Group never paid for the Gestetner because we received collections from meetings and fundraised for everything we did. Or we’d ask people to do it at work or try to get reduced prices somewhere. It was our hustle.
This is the first of a two-part interview, the second part will be posted in a couple of weeks.
Anne Braithwaite is the co-chair and treasurer of the Walter Rodney Programme under the auspices of the Pluto Educational Trust (PET) in London.
The Walter Rodney Foundation is hosting: ‘ASSASSINATION is no ACCIDENT’ to call for justice for Walter Rodney which is 41 years overdue. Hear from the Rodney Family (including Donald Rodney), Horace Campbell, Dev Springer and others. 13 June, 6 – 9pm (UK). Resister here.
Notes
[1] Anne is referring to one the racial conflicts that occurred during the People Progressive Party’s (PPP) term in office from 1961-1964. In February 1962, strikes and riots erupted against the PPP governments’ Budget bill. As the protest spread, they often took the form of violent clashes between members of the Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese communities.
[2] The People Peoples Progressive Party (PPP) was the party that led the anti-colonial movement in the 1950s. It was founded and led by the Marxist Indo-Guyanese dentist, Cheddi Jagan, and the African Guyanese Lawyer, Forbes Burnham. However, the two leaders split in 1957. Forbes Burnham created the People National Congress (PNC), which relied on support from the African community, while Jagan’s PPP relied on support from the Indian community. Burnham’s PNC defeated the PPP in the General Elections of 1964, rising to power before Guyanese independence from Britain in 1966.
[3] Anne here is referring to when Walter Rodney went to teach in Jamaica in 1968. The Jamaican Government banned Rodney from the island because of his Black Power agitation among students, Rastafarians and unemployed youths.
[4] Anne is naming some of the speeches Walter Rodney made in Guyana in 1979-1980.
David Seddon reviews Washington Bullets: a History of the CIA, Coups and Assassinations, by Vijay Prashad. This is a book about how political leaders and other activists considered to pose a threat to US and more broadly Western interests have been assassinated, removed in coups and eliminated.
By David Seddon
This short book by Vijay Prashad – who is Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, chief correspondent at Globetrotter and chief editor at LeftWord Books – is unusual, both in its structure and in its subject matter. Short and to the point, Prashad makes it clear how he was strongly supported in the production of this text by his team at Tricontinental and encouraged ‘to write it as quickly as possible’. Although he does not make explicit reference to Mao Zedong, he makes it clear, in the main title of the book that, in his view, US imperialism relies ultimately on the fact that ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’.
After a Preface by Evo Morales Ayma, former President of Bolivia, the first section is a two page section on Files, in which the reader is told that the text relies on the extensive perusal and ‘a vast amount of reading’ of official files and documents, both published and unpublished – and ‘a lifetime of activity and reading’ – and that ‘nothing has been as useful to me as the conversations I have had with ex-CIA agents’. The book dispenses with the usual apparatus of detailed references to documents and texts, and has no index, although there is a brief section at the end on Sources, in which the author remarks that ‘listing all the books and articles would surely make this book double its current size’.
Prashad comments that this ‘is a book about the shadows, but it relies upon the literature of the light’. ‘The shadows’ refers mainly to the murky, underground aspects of US imperialism, with special reference to conspiracy and the CIA and its role in removing – by coups and by assassinations – those political leaders and other activists considered to pose a threat to specifically US and more broadly ‘Western’ interests across the world. This is what is meant by ‘Washington Bullets’.
The book is divided into sections, the logic of which largely escapes me. The first, very brief section is called ‘Bring Down More US Aircraft’ – a phrase attributed to Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War. It sets out a kind of thesis, starting with ‘bullets’ and ending with ‘hope’: ‘Washington bullets are sleek and dangerous. They intimidate and they create loyalties out of fear. Their antidote is hope’– hope of another future. This section ends with a poem.
Then comes Part 1, divided under a series of headings, which seem to encapsulate different ideological justifications for the exercise of ‘preponderant power’. These are: Divine Right, Preponderant Power, Trusteeship, ‘international law has to treat natives as uncivilized’, ‘savage tribes do not conform to the codes of civilized warfare’, Natives and the Universal, UN Charter, ‘I am for America’, Solidarity with the United States against Communism, ‘No Communists in Gov. or Else’, ‘Nothing Can Be Allowed’, Third World Project, Expose the US ‘Unnecessarily’.
In Part 2, which seems to be more focused on the pragmatic side of intervention, the first main header is: Manual for Regime Change, which is divided into nine sub-sections – Lobby ‘public’ opinion, Appoint the right man on the ground, Make sure the Generals are ready, Make the economy scream, Diplomatic isolation, Organize mass protests, Green light, A Study of Assassination, and Deny. The second header is Production of Amnesia, which is followed by ‘Be a Patriot, Kill a Priest’, The Answer to Communism Lay in the Hope of Muslim Revival, ‘I Strongly Urge You to Make This a Turning Point’, ‘The Sheet is Too Short’, The Debt of Blood, All the Cameras Have Left for the Next War (which is a poem).
Part 3, which deals essentially with the period from 1989 to 2019, starts with ‘Our Strategy must now Refocus’, ‘Rising Powers Create Instability in the International State System’, ‘Pave the Whole Country’, Banks Not Tanks, First Among Equals, Only One Member of the Permanent Security Council – The United States, Republic of NGOs, Maximum Pressure, Accelerate the Chaos, Sanctions are a Crime, Law as a Weapon of War, Dynamite in the Streets – which discusses the coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia – and We Believe in People and Life.
This last one-page sub-section accuses those responsible for the coups, the assassinations, and the massacres of wishing ‘to steal the soul of the people so as to reduce people to zombies who must bow their heads down and work, putting their precious labour towards the accumulation of capital for the tyrants of the economy’. The Washington Bullets are a means to an end: domination and exploitation – imperialism. The counter is ‘hope’ and ‘the people’. As the Guatemalan poet, Otto René Castillo, said: ‘we believed in people and life, and life and the people never let us down’.
The book is a rapid survey of conspiracies, of the activities of the CIA, of coups and of assassinations in numerous countries across the world from the 1950s onwards. It is scattered with the names of well-known and lesser-known political figures who were/have been killed by ‘Washington bullets’; but significant as were these ‘tall leaders of the Third World’, it is the thousands of activists (including trade unionists, peasant and other local leaders, as well as intellectuals, journalists, writers and poets) and the millions of ordinary people adversely affected by these US ‘interventions’ who are celebrated here, and to whom in effect the book is dedicated.
See a conversation with Vijay Prashad on his new book here.
David Seddon is a researcher and political activist who has written on social movements, class struggles and political transitions across the developing world. David is a regular contributor to roape.net and a former member of the Editorial Working Group of ROAPE.
Vijay Prashad’s Washington Bullets: a History of the CIA, Coups and Assassinations, is published by Monthly Review Press.
ROAPE’s Peter Dwyer introduces two new members of the Editorial Working Group. Mabrouka M’Barek is a Tunisian activist who was deeply involved in the country’s uprising in 2011. Boaventura Monjane grew-up during Mozambique’s civil war and was inspired by the survival and resistance of the working people around him.
Mabrouka M’Barek, who has recently joined ROAPE, was active during the uprising in Tunisia in 2011. M’Barek was subsequently elected to the country’s constituent assembly. As a socialist and internationalist, she struggled with building a movement and politics as the uprising was taking place. As she writes, ‘We didn’t have the possibility to create and mature a political formation during the dictatorship, so we had to do everything simultaneously.’
It became clear to her that the politics and resistance she was trying to build needed organisational coherence and political theory. Writing powerfully in her blog below, she explains, ‘My comrades and I have learned from experience that we can’t have a revolutionary movement without emancipatory theory. This is why after my term in office, I joined academia.’ M’Barek is now a researcher in political economy, race, class and social theory at the University of Massachusetts in the United States.
Boaventura Monjane was born in 1983 in the middle Mozambique’s civil war. His family survived by the small scale farming and cultivation of his mother, undertaken at great risk, and the salary of his father, who worked for a trade union. He was, as he writes, the product of a ‘peasant-worker’ alliance – ‘My awareness (and later consciousness) regarding social issues, which blossomed very early in my childhood, was a result of that alliance’. Profoundly marked by Portuguese colonialism, his father had been sentenced to forced labour on plantations on the Atlantic islands of São Tomé and Principe, then the colonial possessions of Portugal.
Currently researching agrarian movements, rural politics and food sovereignty at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, Boaventura’s overriding commitment, which he hopes to extend in ROAPE, is illuminating emancipatory politics in rural and urban spaces in Mozambique and Africa. He explains his influences, ‘Even during great uncertainties, the “working people” of the world have been able to resist, inspire and influence scholar-activists like myself.’
ROAPE sees its future in the hands of a new generation of scholar-activists. Mabrouka M’Barek and Boaventura Monjane are among these radical activists and researcher who will take our work and projects forward.
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No revolutionary movement without emancipatory theory – Mabrouka M’Barek
I come from the southern steppe region in Tunisia, a rural community of once semi-nomads who have led an anti-colonial war against French colonizers. People were killed, social relations were enclosed, movements were constrained, commons in sovereign tribal territories were expropriated, divided, and registered. Little by little, nomads and semi-nomads were proletarianized. Many were forced to migrate to urban centres; later on, after the independence, people went abroad to support their community. Today, we still bear the marks of the devastation caused by colonialism. Cheap labour has been exploited at home or brought legally or illegally by Europe since the sixties.
My community is ravaged by migration as we count one of the highest numbers of youth crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Sixty years ago, my father migrated to work in a GM subsidiary factory in France. Europe’s economy relies on African labour, and we often forget the triple burden of women from the Global South who reproduce the labour exploited by the global north. Europe’s impressive border security apparatus isn’t there to prevent migrants from entering but to intimidate them and crush any sense of collective bargaining power. It is very similar in North America, where black, brown, and indigenous are policed, incarcerated, and routinely killed. In many ways, I find resonance with the black labour movement, particularly in Detroit.
This context forged my activism. After the 2011 revolution, I joined a political party and was subsequently elected to the constituent assembly. We didn’t have the possibility to create and mature a political formation during the dictatorship, so we had to do everything simultaneously. We were fighting inside the party to impose a radical anti-capitalist and anti-colonial program and purge the neo-liberals while at the same time fighting outside the party against the counter-revolution, the comprador class, and imperialist aggression.
Some of us ended up carrying out campaigns to audit Tunisia’s debt and nationalize our natural resources. Still, we were all scrambling against the IMF and World Bank without fully grasping how Tunisia had become a class society in the first place. Among our party cadres, we counted a couple of long-time leftists. One colleague grew up in a Maoist household and provided much-needed insights. But cadres had divergent priorities. The Tunisian left was somewhat coordinating inside the constituent assembly, but parties’ cadres remained too divided. My comrades and I have learned from experience that we can’t have a revolutionary movement without emancipatory theory. This is why after my term in office, I joined academia.
The predominant analysis of what happened during the 2010-2011 uprisings remains deeply problematic. In Tunisia and elsewhere in the Arab World, popular movements are perceived to be sui generis and lacking any relationship to other anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist mobilizations around the globe; thus, the “Arab Spring” has been quickly quarantined under the rubric of regional politics.
With a focus on land, labour, and migration, my research investigates the material foundations of historical struggles connecting them to the global political economy. My work has been informed and inspired by ROAPE, which has always been among my top go-to publications for radical analysis. Radical knowledge emerges from movements and should be brought into dialogue with the people. This is exactly what ROAPE does, Over the last couple of years, the Review has grounded radical thinking in and from activism, and I hope to see this engagement continues. I am honoured to join ROAPE as a contributing editor and I look forward to being involved with their Black Lives Matter group to connect and strengthen solidarity beyond the African continent.
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The working people of the world – Boaventura Monjane
I used to joke that I am the result of a ‘peasant-worker’ alliance. That is however true. My awareness (and later consciousness) regarding social issues, which blossomed very early in my childhood, was a result of that alliance too. By listening to my parents’ conversations sharing with each other their workdays – my mother as a peasant farmer and my father a staff member of a trade union – I gradually became aware of what it was like to be a peasant and a worker in the context of a country (in my case, Mozambique) in conflict.
When I was born, in October of 1983, Mozambique was in the midst of a war that showed no signs of ending. The war had been going on for seven years and continued for almost a decade. The year of my birth was probably the peak of the civil war, which compromised both food production and food imports. It became known in history as the ‘year of famine’ and was recorded as the year with the greatest food shortages in the history of independent Mozambique.
Although agricultural production as a whole was highly compromised, it was undoubtedly peasant agriculture, conducted with sacrifice and high risk (as the guerrilla war was being fought in the countryside), that enabled the Mozambican population to avoid absolute crisis with regards to child mortality.
My memories are still intact. My mother would leave home very early in the morning to the farm (‘machamba’), in Mulotane, Matola (today a highly urbanized area near the Mozambique capital, Maputo). In Mozambique, machamba is farmland cultivated by peasant farmers, usually small in size. Most women in my neighbourhood would walk up to 10-15 kilometres from our then semi-rural neighbourhood to their respective machambas. Like all other women, my mother would leave home with uncertainties about whether she would be able to return home safely. Very frequently, women and children were captured while working the land and taken away by members of the guerrilla movement, RENAMO (Resistencia Nacional de Moçambique – National Resistance of Mozambique). Most of them were never seen again. Matola is close to the capital city of Maputo, and RENAMO was already attacking Matola in the late 1980s.
My late father, although more exposed to urban-based activities was also from a peasant background. In his young adulthood, he was sentenced to forced labour on the cocoa plantations on the islands of São Tomé and Principe as punishment for committing an act then considered immoral and forbidden by the colonial regime. This was my father’s most significant experience in agrarian labour.
I am grateful to my mother and father, and to all peasant farmers and urban workers of the world. Even during great uncertainties, the ‘working people’ of the world have been able to resist, inspire and influence scholar-activists like myself.
I hold a PhD on Postcolonialisms and Global Citizenship (Sociology), from the Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra. I am now pursuing a post-doc at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa) as part of a fellowship of the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. I do my research on agrarian movements, rural politics, food sovereignty, and climate justice. I have also been involved in agrarian social movements, both locally and internationally, working with the National Peasants’ Union of Mozambique (UNAC) and the International Secretariat of La Via Campesina.
My commitment as a scholar-activist is to generate knowledge, not only to further understand the processes of accumulation, exploitation, oppression and exclusion of the ‘working people’ by capital and by the bourgeois and ruling classes, but also to possibly influence and illuminate possibilities for emancipatory politics and processes in rural and urban spaces in Mozambique and Africa. I am hoping that my involvement with ROAPE will contribute a great deal towards achieving that aspiration.
Peter Dwyer is a member of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group and works in the department of Global Sustainable Development at the School for Cross-Faculty Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.
Featured Photograph: Demonstration at the Place du Gouvernement in Tunis during the ‘Caravane de la libération’ (Liberation Caravan) following the Tunisian revolution (23 January 2011).
In an interview with ROAPE, the Tunisian sociologist, Frej Stambouli, remembers his teacher Frantz Fanon. Stambouli describes Fanon’s lectures at the university in Tunis in 1959, and his unique conception of psychiatry and promotion of open psychiatry as a “pathology of freedom”. Stambouli considers Fanon’s legacy and his anger, reason and kindness, recalling, ‘I will never forget the generosity of Fanon’.
You were in Tunisia the late 1950s; can you explain how you came to be there and what you were doing?
I am Tunisian, born in December 1935 in a prestigious small city called Monastir, which lies on the Mediterranean coast. I am married to a Finnish woman, Anja Toivola-Stambouli, whose career was in the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. We are now both retired and have lived in Helsinki since 2008, with frequent visits to Monastir, Tunisia.
At at an early age, in 1942, I was hiding with my parents in a small tunnel dug by my maternal grandfather in his field. This was during the Second World War when the Germans were attacking the French in Tunisia. I had just started my primary school, run by a French headmaster. For me, it was rather hazy what was going on. My parents were illiterate. They just told me that it was a battle between Europeans.
While I went to school and learned French, my sister, who was younger than me, remained illiterate. That was the mood of the time: girls do not go to school. Also, my two older brothers did not finish primary school. My father owned one hundred olive trees and was a merchant of olives. In addition, he rented three houses to officers of the French army in Monastir.
In Tunisia, where a nationalist movement was on the rise, the struggle against French domination intensified until the nation gained its independence in 1956. Just after, in 1957, I finished secondary school in the city of Sousse and left for Tunis for my first year of university. In the late 1950s, the university offered only two years of education, for this reason I went to Paris in 1960 and obtained a master’s degree in sociology. I then finished my Doctorate in College de France under the well-known orientalist Jacques Berque in 1964.
While in Paris, I discovered the influence of Fanon there, having been his student in Tunis in 1959. Unhappy about the timidity of the French political left concerning the Algerian revolution, Fanon met with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and convinced them to act. I could now personally witness Fanon’s influence. I saw Sartre in the Latin Quarter of Paris distributing leaflets in favour of Algerian independence and spoke with him. I also invited him to talk to the Tunisian students about the Algerian revolution. Later I asked Simone de Beauvoir to talk about the condition of women in Algeria. With Gisèle Halimi, the talented lawyer of Tunisian origin, she was defending the Algerian woman fighter Jamila Bouhired.
From 1964 to 2000, I taught sociology at Tunis University, where Michel Foucault was in 1967 my colleague and friend. During that time, I did field research in Tunisia on regional development, urbanization, and slums in the periphery of Tunis. I wrote several articles that were published in journals and edited books on these topics.
As you know, Frantz Fanon and his wife Josie and son, were in exile in Tunis. Fanon worked as a psychiatrist in the capital, but he also taught. You were one of his students. Please tell us a little of your experiences with Fanon, how you first met him, your personal impressions and your direct contact with him?
Fanon arrived in Algeria for the first time in 1953. A year later, the Algerian revolution started while Fanon was working at Blida Hospital. The French colonial administration feared his influence on the events, leading Fanon to resign from his post two years later (see his letter to the French colonial minister in Algeria, Robert Lacoste, in his posthumous collection). Pierre Bourdieu arrived in Algiers in 1955 and was teaching and doing research there until 1960. He was critical of Fanon, whom he never met.
It is in Tunisia during the years 1956-1961 that Fanon came to fully develop his political engagement for the liberation of the Algerian people. This was precisely when I became a student of Fanon, attending his lectures at Tunis university in 1959. I followed a course of social psychopathology. Fanon was critical of the somatic conception of psychiatry and promoted open psychiatry as a “pathology of freedom.” He also spoke about his time at the Blida hospital in Algeria and his fights with his orthodox colleagues there.
I rarely came across a fascinating personality like Fanon. An intelligent and sharp man, passionate and fully mastering his discourse. Fanon spoke with elegance, conviction, and a superb art of persuasion. In particular, he made you realize the ferocity of the colonial system and the necessity to fight against barbarity, violence, and injustice. As first-year students of sociology, it was for us an unsurpassable introduction to our future specialization.
We were surprised that Fanon’s lectures were attended by a non-student public, such as medical doctors, academics, Algerian militants, and politicians, creating an unusual atmosphere that fascinated us as students. After his lectures, Fanon would invite us to be present at some of his consultations in the psychiatric hospital. We were enormously impressed by his ability to listen to his patients and his art of making them talk without fear. It was often about trauma while fighting in the Algerian mountains during the revolution.
The patients were invited to verbalize their symptoms freely, explain their problems, and learn to make again contact with reality. As for Fanon, “social therapy helps free the patient from his fantasms and confront reality.” I will never forget the generosity of Fanon with his patients and his ability to free them from anxiety and guilt.
Can you talk us through the years you were in Tunisia, and your contact, experience of the Algerian exiles, and FLN members at the time?
In 1956 Tunisia had just won its political independence under the leadership of Habib Bourguiba, having fought for it since the birth of the Nationalist Party in 1934. Bourguiba was a great leader, very popular, realistic, and pragmatic. He was born in Monastir and came from the educated petty bourgeoisie. This was the time when Tunisia became the safe haven for the Algerian political leadership and a great number of political activists. An intensive beehive!
In 1957 Fanon, using Dr. Fares as his pseudonym, arrived in Tunis, which became the main harbour of the FLN (Front de libération nationale) in exile. Ferhat Abbas, a moderate Algerian nationalist leader, founded in 1958 in Tunis the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) in exile. He also used to meet with President Bourguiba for deliberations. Later on, in 1961, he joined the most revolutionary wing of the FLN led by Ben Bella and Boumediene. Great figures of the Algerian political spectrum were based in Tunis, such as Reda Malek, Ahmed Boumendjel, M’hamed Yazid, Mohamed Harbi, Abane Ramdane, Pierre Chaulet, and others.
From time to time, I interacted with some of them. Reda Malek, who later on would have several ministerial positions, was a fine man. Bitter about the timidity of the French left and especially the betrayal of the communist party, he was rather happy to be in Tunisia, praising the active solidarity of the Tunisians with the Algerian people. Dr. Pierre Chaulet, expelled from Algeria in 1957 along with his wife Claudine, used to visit us at the university, where I met them in 1959 (Pierre had introduced Fanon to the FLN). Claudine sometimes joined lectures on sociology in the department where I was studying. Both were passionate about the Algerian revolution. Pierre Chaulet was also writing for El Moudjahid, a daily newspaper of the Algerian revolution since 1956, available in Tunisia but, of course, banned in Algeria. He even conducted secret operations under the strong leader Abane Ramdane.
Fanon became a fierce political speaker of the Algerian FLN. He was a brilliant polemist and active journalist for El Moudjahid. There were papers of Fanon published in El Moudjahid, which are available in a book called Pour la Revolution Algerienne, (published in English as Towards the African Revolution in 1967) edited by Maspero, Paris, in 1964. In some of them, one can feel the strong attacks of Fanon against the timidity of the French political left. Fanon’s style is a unique synthesis of passion rooted in rigorous national analysis. Several journalists who approached Fanon described their impressions. The famous Giovanni Pirelli from Rome speaks of his “burning eyes which cut my defences.”
One can conclude from his articles how much Fanon represented the left of the Algerian FLN, contrary to the first Algerian President Ben Bella. Fanon’s dream was a future Algeria leading the way to a revolutionary Africa, secular and modern. Here, Fanon underestimated the Islamic dimension of Arab-Algerian society, which he did not master. During the terrible decade of the Algerian civil war in the 1990s, I met some of the modernist Algerian intelligentsia who had fled Algeria. For example, Ali El Kenz joined my sociology department of Tunis university in 1993-94, and Faysal Yachir, a leftist. The three of us joined Samir Amin as members of CODESRIA (African Council of Social Sciences and Development) in Dakar.
The whole position of Fanon regarding religion is very peculiar. In particular, he was too quick and too optimistic when he wrote, “The old Algeria is dead, and a new society is born.” One should remember here two decisive sinister heritages from the colonial time in Algeria and elsewhere in the Maghreb: the extension of illiteracy and the marginalization of the Islamic patrimony, which started early in the process of colonization.
Until 1954 illiteracy rate in Algeria was about 86%. The country lost one hundred and fifty years compared to European societies. This is probably the most catastrophic heritage of colonialism, and the origin of what analysts will later on call “under-development.” Jacques Derrida, who was born in Algeria, denounced such scandalous trauma. Albert Memmi, born in Tunisia, characterized bilingualism in a colonial context as a “linguistic drama.” In order to identify the nature of present-day Algerian society, one should consider not only the colonial legacy but also its specific Arab-Islamic matrix, Islam being simultaneously a society, a state, and culture, the well-known: Din, Dawla, Dunja.
While in Tunisia, Fanon enjoyed meeting the famous radical scholar Jacques Berque and listening to his analysis of North Africa and the Arab world. Berque talked about Fanon, “sa colère, sa raison et sa bonté” (“his anger, his reason, and goodness”).
Can you explain what happened to you after 1961, and in the subsequent decades? How do you measure (or weigh) this early period in terms of your life and its trajectory?
Because I belong to an in-between historical period and generation, I can clearly see the advantages and the inconveniences of such a position.
My generation had better access to universal and global knowledge than the previous ones. I was trained in Paris, Sorbonne, in the sixties and later for one year in 1973 at LSE, London, under Ernest Gellner. I also had the chance to spend one year in 1987 as visiting professor at UCLA, Los Angeles, and a similar period at Ann Arbor, University of Michigan in 1991.
The shortcoming of such an itinerary is that my rootedness in my own culture and history remained insufficient. I realized it clearly when I started teaching at Tunis University in 1964. I was lecturing on the sociology of North African societies, which I had not sufficiently mastered. My knowledge of my own civilization – Islam and Arabism – was simply not sufficient.
I was not ready to understand, for example, the failure of the Arab armies in 1967 against Israel, nor the spectacular success of the Islamic turn of the Iranian revolution of 1979. The massive return of political Islam was an unforeseen surprise. I had to work hard to catch up and adjust to my own history. This is one lesson among others about the ravages of alienation and dispossession of our history from colonialism, which Fanon has scrutinized all his life. Despite all these shortcomings, I still feel privileged in contrast to the present-day challenges of our societies in nearly every domain, including education, health, employment, etc.
Albert Memmi, who wrote a book on Fanon, is intrigued by our societies’ present-day stagnation. “Why such failure?” he kept asking in a book called Decolonization and the Decolonizedin 2006. “In formerly colonized peoples, fifty years later, nothing really seems to have changed, except for the worse.” And he adds: “The gulf between the rich and the poor grows wider… a police state and tyranny maintain an oppressive system”.
Since decolonization, more than 60 years ago, the global political configuration of most Arab and African societies remained similar to what Fanon analysed: A micro-bourgeoisie controlling its wealth and power inherited from the direct colonialism era with the help of the army and a party regime.
Here and there, there are small changes, new variations, but the overall scenery remains unchanged. For example, the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 had been an uprising by the excluded, such as the peasantry of the interior regions, but also and especially the proletariat and semi-proletariat around the main cities, in rebellion for a share of wealth and for respect of their dignity and for justice. But the weakness of their organizations and their internal division did not allow them to win.
As we know, in all of Africa south of the Sahara, the historical heritage is as complicated as it is across the Arab world: manipulation of the frontiers by colonialism and hence arbitrary separation of communities and people. It is impressive how Fanon had dealt with these structural characteristics of Arab and African societies in the The Wretched of the Earth under the title “Pitfalls of the national consciousness“.
Fanon was fully aware of all the complexities of these societies. In his last book in 1961 he wrote: “One should get away from the ethnic and tribal dictatorships and promote a national policy in favour of the periphery and the masses.”
Therefore, the road to liberation of the oppressed is still long and tortuous. But Fanon has offered precious tools and hope. His contribution to the liberation of the oppressed (Mustathafin in Arabic) is infinite. And his optimism for the future of humankind is energizing. Fanon’s humanism is refreshing. It purifies history from segregation, racism, humiliation (Hogra in Arabic), and injustice and opens the door of freedom for every human being, regardless of race, culture, or religion. Recognition of the hominization of human beings (Hegel) leads to a revitalized universality. Time has come for an alternative civilization – this is what Fanon teaches us.
The most recent protest movement in the US, “Black Lives Matter,” shows how much Fanon’s struggle for the liberation of humankind is alive, and his ideal for justice and dignity will never be defeated!
Frej Stambouli is a scholar of urbanization, migration and the urban poor, and worked for years a professor of sociology at Tunis university. He currently lives in Finland.
ROAPE’s Peter Dwyer introduces new members of the journal’s editorial working group. He welcomes a new generation, Leona Vaughn, Chinedu Chukwudinma and Njuki Githethwa, who are activists from the African diaspora and those implanted in Africa. In a personal, political and scholarly sense, Dwyer argues, they will irrevocably change ROAPE.
We know that on reading these short biographies from the first of our six new editors to the Editorial Working Group (EWG) of the journal, you will immediately understand the excitement that they have generated by agreeing to join us.
Leona Vaughn writes of how her research and activism is grounded in her local region of Merseyside in the UK, yet she also works on global projects in which Africa features strongly. As a black woman from a city built on the profits from slavery she gives ROAPE a connection to research and campaigns in the Liverpool region and across Africa and so helps us develop the lived political connections between parts of the African diaspora in the UK and activists and scholar-activists in Africa.
Chinedu Chukwudinma centres his writings in his struggles as an activist against racism and imperialism. Drawing on his experiences of racism as a schoolboy in Switzerland, he talks of how his research and his commitment to ROAPE, is rooted in his Marxist politics in which words are weapons to be brandished as part of building anti-racist and anti-capitalist movements. Together with Leona he also brings new connections from the African diaspora in the UK (London) to help build on the foundations laid by longer-standing EWG colleagues such as Tunde Zack-Williams and Reg Cline-Cole.
Njuki Githethwa brings a deeply held belief and practice based on the intimate relationship between the cultural and the political in his struggles for revolutionary change across East Africa. His creativity and energy typifies the new Pan-African networks of activists and scholar-activists the journal has been building working relationships with over the last five years. Leona and Chin come to us from our activist connections in the UK and Njuki is one of the many new outstanding activists we met as part of our connections project.
It is fitting that they are the first of the new generation of colleagues introducing themselves as this is as much about uniting activists from the African diaspora with those implanted in Africa. In a personal, political and scholarly sense, they, and others, will irrevocably change the EWG and ROAPE.
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Speaking of disruption – Leona Vaughn
“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” Angela Davis
Professor Angela Davis is often quoted in these times, and not just by political activists. By those wanting to distinguish themselves as progressive anti-racists as opposed to ‘non-racist’. Those who have a desire and a hope for equity, justice and revolutionary change in our world. Because what Professor Davis is talking about here is the need for people to have a consistently radical vision and to behave in a way that reflects this constantly in all parts of our life. She is speaking of disruption. Of transformation of society. Of hope. All the time and everywhere. Even when doing so troubles our personal comfort, power and privilege.
I have worked in equality and social justice for over 25 years in the UK and internationally. From youth work, to social work, to work on racism and hate crime in Merseyside in the North West of England. From working on equalities issues within the criminal justice system nationally, to doing work to support addressing poverty and exclusion internationally. I have always tried to ‘act local think global’. There is no greater urgency to me than to live up to this age-old adage, especially in our calls for Black Lives to Matter. The transnational interconnectedness and interdependency of racism, colonialism and racial capitalism cannot be ignored if we academics and activists are to truly expose and dismantle structural racism in all its forms.
This is part of the reason why I am working to advance the principles of anti-colonial research praxis as the norm for academic research. Working with research teams in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Ghana and Dominican Republic to explore the impact of the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 on cocoa and garment workers in these countries and then with antislavery projects in East, West and Central Africa, really made me question how the notion of ‘risk’, within the way ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ and ‘modern slavery’ are conceptualised, is deeply racialised, western-centric and imagined in service of global capitalism. Now as a Derby Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool, working on the research theme ‘Slavery and Unfree Labour’, I am developing anti-colonial research methodologies which centre minoritised groups in knowledge production on risk, harm and racialisation within this field.
I began my post in the pandemic, so my first research project, coproduced and delivered with African scholars and activists, was about the racialisation of risk narratives for COVID-19 prevention in Ghana, Kenya & South Africa. It specifically considered how the ‘Black immunity’ myth which emerged in China, the UK and USA, impacted risk prevention narratives in these African countries. One indication which came through this research so strongly, was that the mythical notion of biological race remains extremely powerful and influential at this time, as much in these Black majority countries as within those where Black people are minoritised.
I am grateful for the opportunity to work with colleagues and activists from around the world on the EWG. I am passionate on a personal, political and professional level about the African diaspora and believe that when we share our experiences, our activism and address our collective struggles together we will see radical, revolutionary change.
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As a revolutionary socialist – Chinedu Chukwudinma
Growing up in the Swiss school system, I was never taught about African history. I learnt about Europe’s industrial revolution but nothing about the horrors of colonisation, which Europe’s bourgeoisie shamelessly inflicted upon Africans. As someone of African heritage, I felt I did not belong in a schooling system that showed no interest in topics that concerned its black students. And the prejudices from my teachers made that feeling worse. My history teacher told me that colonialism bought civilisation to Africans. Meanwhile, the largest party in Switzerland reminded me of my inferiority in society when I walked past their campaign billboards, which displayed three white sheep standing on a Swiss flag kicking away a black one.
Because I was sickened by racism, I joined anti-racist movements and read the works of radical black thinkers, such as Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis. Today, I continue to fight racism in London, the birthplace of my parents, through my involvement with the national based Stand Up To Racism movement. I now understand that racism is not about prejudice, but it is systemic. It is a product of capitalism and a tool in the hands of the bourgeoisie to divide and rule the multiracial working class.
So, I define myself above all else as a revolutionary socialist in the tradition of Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky because I am committed to fighting the 1%. There’s no such thing as a lonesome socialist without organisation because nobody can change the world on their own. For my part, I’m a member of the Socialist Workers Party (UK) because it’s unapologetically committed to international socialism from below by organising in the streets and the workplaces where lays the real power of the working class.
My engagement with Marxist theory and practice has deepened my interest in the socio-economic and political issues that concern the African people on the continent and abroad. As a member to the Editorial Working Group, I will contribute to debates surrounding the legacy of my hero, the Guyanese Marxist historian Dr Walter Rodney. I hope to also honour Rodney’s legacy by applying historical materialism to analyse the struggles of the working class and the oppressed in Africa and the Americas and draw lessons in struggle from their defeats and victories. In doing so, I aim to support the attempts of the current and next generation of African revolutionaries and movements to overthrow imperialism and their ruling class.
As a member of the African diaspora, I will strive to get more black radical activists in Europe to write articles, opinion pieces and book reviews for the journal and website on areas as wide as Black Lives Matter, fighting border controls and police brutality. I believe the Review of African Political Economy is the perfect place for me to achieve such a goal because it is more than a progressive journal. At its core, ROAPE is an activist orientated publication that is determined to fight the reactionary ideas of the ruling class by including the most radical and creative left-wing thinkers and fighters in its ranks.
I am grateful for the honour of being appointed as an editor of ROAPE. I am a Kenyan writer and activist scholar. I am an activist who dabbles in scholarship, not the reverse. I am also the Managing Editor of Ukombozi Review, a publication based in Kenya that tries to connect people’s struggles in Kenya and elsewhere. I am also an adjunct lecturer at the Institute for Social Transformation at Tangaza University in Nairobi and a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Social Change, at the University of Johannesburg. As an activist, I am linked to organisations such as Kenya Left Forum, Ukombozi Library, Ujamaaa Collective, and Pan-African Movement.
I have been reading lots of insightful articles in ROAPE, especially its online version for many years, but my physical association with the journal began at the Connections workshop held by the journal in April 2018 at the University of Dar Es Salaam. My second meeting was in another Connections Workshop in November 2018 in Johannesburg.
Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, reportedly scolded the Chilean armed forces during a search in his house: “Look around – there’s only one thing of danger for you here – poetry.” This brings to mind the title of a book, Barrel of a Pen, by Ngugi wa Thiong’o. ROAPE is encased in words in pursuit of the African revolution. This is the where our interests converge. The pursuit of this revolution should not be viewed as either being cultural or state centric. It should be both. The cultural struggle is focused on capturing and influencing minds.
State-centric approaches to revolution concern themselves with ‘seizing’ or ‘smashing’ state power. This approach views revolution as only being attainable at the political level, not at economic, social or cultural fronts. On the other hand, cultural approaches to revolution argue that only when objective and subjective conditions are framed as unjust and changeable by means of cultural repertoires and discourses can the revolution be viewed by the masses as urgent and possible. Revolutions need to consider cultural repertoires for them to process the radical transformation of society in ways that are easily understood and attainable by the masses. The pursuit of revolution then becomes not only the attainment of state-centric struggles but the liberation of sites and spaces of people’s struggles through small steps and gains.
ROAPE will continue to collectively liberate minds, sites and spaces of people’s struggles towards an egalitarian and just social order and it is this project that inspires and prods me on as a member of ROAPE. This should be done by having more of popular and accessible writings alongside the heavy, didactic and academic writings, or as Chinua Achebe put it, “Let the kite perch and let the eagle perch too.” I am delighted to be involved in helping to drive ROAPE’s projects and revolutionary ambitions forward.
In the coming weeks, Peter Dwyer will be introducing other new members to our editorial collective. These members are part of our efforts to further radicalise the journal and our activism in the context of the multiple crises that face us globally.
Featured Photograph: Angela Davis addresses a crowd on 19 June – Juneteenth – rally at the Port of Oakland, which was shut down to mark the day (Beth LaBerge/KQED).
ROAPE stands in solidarity with Palestinian people as they struggle for freedom, justice and equality.
As a journal that is committed to liberation of colonised people and social justice, and with our historical analysis of apartheid in South Africa and continued levels of post-colonial oppression throughout Africa, we understand the tactics of terror and apartheid that the Israel state deploys to intimidate, maim, and kill Palestinians under occupation and within Israel itself. We recognise and deplore the complicity of the UK and other western governments in supporting and defending Israel, while remaining silent on the brutal occupation in West Bank and Gaza. As Nelson Mandela noted, ‘We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinian’.
For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers pathbreaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive.
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For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers pathbreaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive.
We use cookies to collect and analyse information on site performance and usage, and to enhance and customise content. By clicking into any content on this site, you agree to allow cookies to be placed. To find out more see our
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