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African Unity from Below: a view from South Africa

By
ROAPE
-

On Africa Day – the annual commemoration of the foundation of the Organisation of African Unity on 25 May 1963 – Sanya Osha celebrates a real unity of African people and communities living in South Africa. Osha argues that South Africa bears miracles within that it doesn’t even know it possesses. A pan-Africanism is evolving that is practical and realistic and unhampered by rigid presuppositions of state politics and ideology.

By Sanya Osha

Undoubtedly, it is a contradiction in terms to even imagine that a cosmopolitan ethos and praxis are possible in a South Africa renowned for frequent outbreaks of xenophobic violence. I want to illustrate that it is possible to flip the script by demonstrating that regardless of South Africa’s renown insularity and so-called exceptionalism, we can in fact identify and celebrate a country defined by a cosmopolitan character in spite of widespread anti-foreigner sentiments and endemic violence.

Sunnyside, in South Africa’s capital Pretoria, is a hub of informal activities, relatively expensive tenement blocks, small businesses and high-tech commerce. Exorbitant rents, repeated renovation and migration have seen the city constantly transformed. People come and go. Nothing stays the same. A few bars and clubs have managed to thrive for a few more years longer than usual. Clubs like Europa have become a local mainstay even though it has changed its premises at least once.

The Sunnyside Mall is a central meeting place. Filled with boutiques, banks, a gymnasium, IT businesses, it is also like all malls, littered with eateries and nightclubs for the young and the eternally young at heart. The mall is a leveler of sorts. It isn’t always easy to read an individual’s economic status by mere appearance. Almost everyone looks young, sexy and alluring, attributes that are highly priced even if you happen to be out of pocket.

Youth is a powerful currency in today’s world and the mall attracts them in huge numbers. Outside, there is taxi rank as old as any in Pretoria which, until recently, used to be dominated by grandfathers who had been working there since the apartheid era boycotts. Being grandfathers, they were immune to the giddy sexiness of youth. These were hardened and experienced geezers who took great pride in their jobs until their work was decimated by companies like Uber and Bolt. Many of them have sons who have taken up the trade.

On Robert Sobukwe Street (formerly Esselen Street), a route that never sleeps, the parade of youth continues especially at the height of summer where every physical feature can be exposed. The street is not merely a street but a community perfectly suitable for constant and random meet and greets, “you look drop dead gorgeous! Are you prepared for a drink with me?”

“Oh sure, can I bring along my friends too?”

You can never avoid the cacophonous sounds; blaring car horns, infernally loud motorbikes mounted by various riders kitted out in all kinds of leather, shining, battered and worn – a swirling universe of human sounds that rise above the din of commerce, feverish activity and sheer longing.

Indeed, Sunnyside is a haven of dreams most of which are smashed to pieces and left like broken glass on some disused pavement. Most of all, you hear and see the struggling dreams of Africa born by Ethiopians, Somalis, Nigerians, Cameroonians, Ghanaians, Congolese, Chinese, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Tanzanians, Mozambicans, Burundians, Angolans, Zimbabweans, Angolans etc. Everywhere there is life on the continent and beyond you find it in Sunnyside. Each person bearing a fragment of a dream to be borne by toil, sweat and blood to the next shore of promises or else to a desolate bone yard where all dead dreams are buried noiselessly. An abundant flow of tears keeps the burial ground moist.

Yet the experiences of these paperless ‘aliens’ from the across the world are often brutal. With each pounding beat of the heart and each surreal thud of frightened feet, the words pierce through the inner ear and singe the soul: “go home or die”.

As Africans why do we forget so easily our shared horrific past? Why do we deny the umbilical cord we all buried together in secret in order to remind ourselves that never again would we allow our collective tears and shame to be stolen from us in times of revelry?

Yet South Africa bears a promise many South Africans themselves chose not to see: a dream that gleams in the faces of each toiling Ghanaian, Tanzanian, Zimbabwean, Eritrean, Sudanese, Ethiopian, Nigerian.

On 24 February 2017 when aggrieved South Africans largely from the township of Mamelodi on the outskirts of Pretoria attempted to invade Sunnyside in a fit of xenophobic anger, they were stopped by numbers larger than themselves. These South Africans were made to see colours they hardly ever noticed, sounds, voices and languages they hardly ever heeded and finally, they were made to feel the yearning and connectedness by which they could link up with the larger world. South African residents of Mamelodi had sworn to expel all foreigners residing in Sunnyside or at least assault them physically. But they found a community of foreigners ready and waiting for them. Sunnyside residents stopped them in their tracks.

Since 2008, during the presidential era of Thabo Mbeki, an apparent pan-Africanist of note, South Africa has been plagued by ongoing spates of xenophobic violence or what others have termed Afrophobia, where South Africans target and assault other Africans from elsewhere. This phenomenon pits internal versus external, regional versus national, local versus global, insider against outsider, citizen versus alien and refugee and finally, it seeks to articulate a politics of belonging that essentialises what is irreducible and expansive. A disturbing parochialism has emerged that undercuts a reality, both present and future, that South Africa can no longer deny.  South Africa is increasingly – whether accepted it or not – being significantly changed by externally fueled subcultures.

Languages ricochet from walls to sidewalks in fragments of siSwati, seTswana, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Yoruba, Igbo, Lingala, Ndebele, Swahili,  Shona, seSotho, isiVenda, Sepedi, Twi, Akan, Amharic Tsotsitaal, Pitori, Central and West African pidgin, Luba, French, Portuguese, Afrikaans, Arabic, Mandarin, Pentecostal jive, speedball verbal psychosis and aural ribbons created by birdsong etc. Sunnyside thus becomes a slightly frayed garden of languages and dialects set amid a decaying city of concrete where people come to find and lose their souls.

When a few anxious South Africans hurriedly rush through mini-Kinshasa, mini-Accra, mini-Addis, mini-Lagos, mini-Mumbai, Chinatown, mini-Harare and mini-Maputo they miss the treasures of those boisterous and colourful worlds. Secrets others have to seek outside the lands of their birth, traversing vast distances and enduring unbearable hardships in order to discover.

In reality ubuntu – a principle of humanism, reciprocity and human connection – is also a belief in different colours, sounds and dreams; it is, in other words, a striving to grasp something beyond the self; the annihilation of fear and all that is implies. This is, arguably, the most enduring promise of ubuntu which is alive and thriving on the streets of Sunnyside where the multi-various sounds of Africa illumine the skies.

At the poorly kept Jubilee Park on lazy afternoons, a drug addict or two sleep engulfed by the sun’s warmth. Kissed by the confident sunlight, his suffering is somewhat muted by the momentary innocence granted by the light. Various visitors sit on benches glued to their cell phones. Others just watch time and life drift by, savouring the peace contained in each minute. Cars speed past seemingly indifferent to the surrounding scenes of bliss. The high-rise apartments which have constantly changing tenants bear imprints, echoes and fragmented mementoes from all corners of Africa and beyond.

Many South Africans know it is self-nullifying not to acknowledge the intoxicating aroma of Ethiopian injera emanating from the other end of the street. There are thriving fufu spots fronted by diehard regulars who trade gossip, dreams and nightmares in equal measure. Exile and migration are definitely not for the faint-hearted.

Still the adventurous at heart, lost souls, dare-devils, day-dreamers and entrepreneurs of all stripes embark on the uncertain journey for new lives, new opportunities and the decisive meeting with destiny in order to re-make themselves. Yet on the journey there are those who have taken their own lives rather than return humiliated and destitute to the countries of their birth.

While each expectant soul waits patiently at the door of destiny, life goes on, wives are taken, children are born and families are made even as the grounds beneath the feet shifts constantly, refugee statuses remain unconfirmed, and as daily bread and wages remain uncertain. Life goes on as men assume the façade of being men and women continue to face life’s hardships with grace, indignation and grit.

South Africa bears miracles within it that it doesn’t even know it possesses. The unity Somalis crave back at homeland is hatched in South Africa. The same applies to people from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Sudan and everywhere else in Africa.

A pan-Africanism is evolving that is practical and realistic and unhampered by rigid presuppositions of parochial politics and ideology. Indeed, there is a pan-Africanism at work which politicians and policymakers are unable to heed.

Whilst the South African political firmament gets splintered by the all-too-familiar ills of factionalism, greed, corruption and incompetence another kind of miracle is occurring in which brothers and sisters from other parts of Africa have converged in the country to make and pursue life in inimitable ways. These people have managed unobtrusively, against immense odds, to extend and re-fashion the South African national miracle of 1994 to include all of Africa and the rest of the world.

The real South African miracle has also become a veritable African miracle made from below by the mass peopling of the country.. The miracle, undoubtedly, is an ongoing work-in-progress, a practical laboratory of human experimentation, as well as the next phase of evolution in the project and ethos of global Africanism.

The colours, hairstyles, sartorial designs, cuisines and spices, languages, sounds and music from other parts of Africa are currently re-defining the face and character of South Africa. South Africa seriously needs this connection to the larger world in order to remain true to itself and so as not to neglect crucial lessons of its own history.

In the neighbourhoods of Hillbrow and Yeoville in Johannesburg and the beachfronts of Durban populated by immigrants from all over the world, and amid chronic urban precarity, new threads of communality and belonging are being woven. To a fresh immigrant or former rural dweller, any city is always a forbidding proposition and the need to draw on the strengths and support of the collective is essential. Just as traditional South African townships of apartheid spatial design forged bases of identity and community, immigrants in South African inner cities are finding inventive ways to nourish, re-make and sustain themselves by drawing on their own resources.

South Africans who embrace these vibrant and colourful environments discover new meanings for the idea of freedom. They also discover that the realm of the imagination has no limits and more importantly, that the ties that bind us outnumber our differences.

Sunnyside is beauty in full profile, hopeful artists, craftsmen and women, seasoned denizens of assorted linguistic and cultural Meccas, professional pickpockets, armies of drug addicted car guards, internet fraudsters, streetwise hairstylists, con-artists, part-time hookers, students, hard-bitten families and those who are simply passing through. Even with a grumbling stomach it is always possible to offer high-fives and click knuckles in greeting or share a palm full of crisps. More importantly, smiles and laughter are free. The street level camaraderie tells you true life lies in people.

The late South African writer, Phaswane Mpe explored some of these worlds in his 2001 novel, Welcome to our Hillbrow. Such novelistic possibilities attest to propulsive Afropolitanisms, vernacular cosmopolitanisms and Afrofuturisms which hold the possibility of displacing and dissolving divisions at bewildering velocities.

Urban communities such as Sunnyside attract much of the world without trying. AbdouMaliq Simone’s 2018 book Improvised Lives: Rhythms  of Endurance in an Urbanised South is a concise and impassioned attempt to project a sense of the densities, ruptures and continuities, velocities and forms of conviviality which almost miraculously multiply life forms where ordinarily there ought to be none. The local and global collide ceaselessly in ways that do not necessarily submerge local identities. In many respects, the encroachments of the global are used by the state and politicians to accentuate the fears and anxieties of the local which flare up in random bouts of xenophobic violence.

Communities such as Sunnyside, Pretoria attest to the possibilities of realising a unity from below that is governed by a diverse yet inclusive vision of Pan-Africanism and an ethos of communalism that is as broad and propulsive as the African continent itself.

Sanya Osha is the author of several books including Postethnophilosophy (2011) and Dust, Spittle and Wind (2011), An Underground Colony of Summer Bees (2012), On a Weather-beaten Couch (2015) and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow (expanded edition, 2021) amongst other publications. He currently works at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Featured Photograph: Yeoville in Johannesburg in recent times – Yeoville African Market (25 October 2018).

On Gladiatory Scholarship

By
ROAPE
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In the sands of the arena, gladiators embodying colonial and decolonial modes of thought are locked in academic combat, exchanging blows of disciplinary conquest, identity and self-styled objectivity versus self-awareness and epistemic revolution. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, describing such a combat, reignites important questions and sets out to open our eyes to the battle lines, and the weapons that are available to defeat gladiatorial scholarship – the moment to learn to unlearn is upon us, he writes.

By Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni

The arena

Blood on the floor of the seminar room was avoided – thanks to the power of decolonial love! The gladiators once more prepared to clash … swords drawn … but not yet crossed. The antagonist was on the offensive, standing on a high pedestal that consisted of fidelity to objectivity and positivism. But, across the arena, the protagonist exuded decolonial love, which had been his weapon of choice from the beginning. This is how blood on the floor was avoided. ‘All human beings are born into valid and legitimate knowledge systems’, the protagonist posited; ‘we must avoid a “God complex” in our scholarship’, he continued; ‘as scholars, we are social and political beings, we are always situated’, he added. Warming to the combat, the protagonist continued: ‘it seems like our dominant knowledge systems are becoming exhausted, so they are not enabling us to rise speedily and adequately to numerous modern problems including the current Covid-19 pandemic’. Gladiatory and egoistic scholarship became desperate. For the antagonist, resorting to personal attack did not work … resorting to naturalism and essences did not hold … dragging modernist concepts back to before Modernity sounded ridiculous. Thanks to the soft power of decolonial love, combined adeptly with erudition. Because knowledge can be exchanged without blood on the floor – the secret is to listen to one another. The moment to learn to unlearn is upon us; it is a window to relearning. No to all fundamentalisms. Like Mao, one can just say: the situation is excellent.

What counts as knowledge?

The theme under discussion was decolonization. This resurgent and insurgent theme in the world of knowledge is indeed haunting the republic of letters. It has taken academics and intellectuals back to the drawing boards of knowledge. Old questions have returned, demanding new answers from us:

  • What is knowledge?
  • What is the place of identity in knowledge?
  • Who is a knower?
  • Where do we think from?
  • How do we know what we know?
  • Does geography matter in knowledge?
  • Does knowledge have a biography?
  • Does ideology play any role in knowledge?
  • Is knowledge political?

The presenter was an African scholar. Should I use the name ‘protagonist’ because there was a pre-arranged ‘antagonist’? The protagonist was a black African from Africa researching and writing about Africa and African people. Not to be confused with Africanists – those who research Africa from somewhere else. The protagonist was very passionate about the issues of colonialism/coloniality and decolonization/decoloniality. The ‘afterlives of colonialism’, the continuation of colonialism beyond the dismantlement of direct administrative colonialism, was underscored. It was compared to the concept of the ‘afterlives of racial slavery’ which survived liberal notions of abolition and emancipation.

Beyond protagonists and antagonists: towards decolonial love

The ‘antagonist’ was well chosen. From the questions he posed, they seem to have been prepared a day before the ‘protagonist’ could even deliver his presentation. This is where the cat came out of the sack. Even though most of the questions had been addressed in the protagonist’s presentation, the antagonist just could not abandon his prepared notes and asked them all the same. One wondered whether the antagonist was listening at all to what the protagonist was saying! All this is part of resilient gladiatory scholarship characterised by ego-politics more than by exchange of ideas. Listening is in short supply within gladiatory scholarship. Reflexivity is very difficult. The ‘God complex’ disables these.

The antagonist was trying to turn a seminar into a theatre of war, an arena of gladiatorial combat. Much effort was expended, aimed at belittling and caricaturing what was said by the protagonist. Killing softly was attempted. Thank God, the protagonist saw through all these politics of ‘gaslighting’ and stuck to the substance of what was under discussion. In the midst of this emotionally charged seminar, the protagonist introduced the concept of ‘decolonial love’, and explained that it informed his terms of scholarly engagement.  Armed with this shield of decolonial love, the protagonist deflected personal attacks and responded to the antagonist most respectfully, but still succeeding in demolishing the very premise of the questions, and indeed unmasking Eurocentrism and coloniality in the questions themselves. In this way, blood on the floor of the seminar room was avoided.

Of sceptics and generations of scholars

This was before the outbreak of Covid-19. Physical presence was still the mode of conferencing. By the time the protagonist entered the door, the small seminar room was already packed. Those who packed it are called ‘participants’. The ‘participants’ are always of various opinions and persuasions. There were ‘sceptics’ of course among them. While scepticism is necessary for critical thought/scholarship, it has to be informed by facts, not ego. Eurocentric sceptics often dismiss scholarship informed by decolonization/decoloniality as nothing but identity politics. In France, they have upped their game: they dismiss critical race theory, postcolonial theory, decolonial thought, and feminist intersectionality thought as importations from the US. These critical interventions are said to exist to undermine French universalist thought and civic republicanism. In France, the conservatives have become desperate and extreme in their crusade against critical liberation thought emerging from battlefields of history and born of struggles against racism, enslavement, genocides, colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. This extremism sees critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and decolonial thought as ‘Islamo-leftism’ – whatever that means. Efforts are made to causally link terrorism and critical thought. This is how desperate the situation is!

There are also African sceptics. Some believe that the question of decolonization is archaic: the continent has passed through this phase!  Decolonial thought is often dismissed as ‘Latin American’, not relevant for Africa … as though thought on liberation must be ignored if it’s from Latin America! One can easily sense a generational element in some forms of African scepticism. Most of the African sceptics belong to what Thandika Mkandawire would categorise as the ‘first’ and ‘second’ generations of African scholars. They often say their generation dealt with this question of colonialism and decolonization long ago: it is now settled – what else can one tell them about it? The reality is that colonialism was never an event. It has always been a power structure with far-reaching consequences. The ‘episodic school’ underestimated this character of colonialism. At least Kwame Nkrumah noticed ‘neo-colonialism’. So, arrogance and an end-of-history mentality of claiming to have settled the debates on colonialism and decolonization are nothing other than part of the stuff of gladiatory scholarship and its ego-politics of even dismissing that which is haunting the ‘postcolonial world’. May the beautiful soul of Thandika rest in peace. He was never a gladiator! His generosity of spirit and humility remains salutary.

But, born inside the belly of the beast of colonialism and educated in Europe and North America, the ‘first generation’ had limited options besides imbibing Eurocentric thought.  This was the only game in town. This was delivered as the only thought. To be fair to the first generation, against all odds and colonial seductions, it developed anti-colonial and anti-imperialist consciousness inside the belly of the beast of colonialism.  The first generation’ actively participated in the very creation of African nationalism. Therefore, the first and second generations participated in or witnessed decolonization at close range. But epistemically, the first generation had been subjected to radical assimilation of Eurocentric standards, notions of excellence, and all protocols of what rigorous scholarship looked like.

While most of the ‘second generation’ they did their undergraduate education in Africa, they tended to go for postgraduate studies in Europe and North America. Inevitably, like the first generation, this cohort is very proud of its access and reception of what is considered to be rigorous ‘international’ scholarship. A latent scepticism of the scholarship of those who studied locally (inside Africa) is noticeable, and feeds into gladiatory scholarship. This is why the ‘third generation’ is judged in terms of lack of the so-called ‘international’ exposure.  This is used to lower its standing in scholarship.

Of course, facile generalization about the ‘first’ and ‘second’ generations must be avoided. Because these generations are made up of giants on whose shoulders the present generation stands. Think of Kwame Nkrumah, Claude Ake, Dani W. Nabudere, Ruth First, Julius Nyerere, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Chinua Achebe, Cheikh Anta Diop, Theophilus Obenga, Valentin Y. Mudimbe, Mahmood Mamdani, Samir Amin, Patricia McFadden, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Thandika Mkandawire, Issa G. Shivji, Walter Rodney, Adebayo Olukoshi, Archie Mafeje, Ibbo Mandaza, Shadrack Gutto, Bernard Magubane, Ifi Amadiume, Rudo Gaidzanwa, Ngwabi Bhebe, Es’kia Mphahlele, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinweizu Ibekwe, Sam Moyo,  Helmi Sharawi,  Toyin Falola, Peter Ekeh, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Alfred Babatunde ‘Tunde’ Zack-Williams, Ali A. Mazrui,  Bethwel Ogot, and the list is not complete. These and others not mentioned constitute the finest crop of academic and intellectuals who laid a very strong foundation for current decolonial thought, decolonial theory, and decolonial scholarship. But the purveyors of gladiatory scholarship are mainly those whose scholarship needs support of ego as well pulling of rank and age to survive.

Gladiatory scholarship and its features

Gladiatory scholarship is characteristically Eurocentric and egoistic. It is born of colonial logics of the paradigm of war, the will to gain power, and the paradigm of ‘discovery’. Consequently, in gladiatory scholarship, the academy is turned into a site of warfare, a circus of war. Disciplines exist as colonies; professors are disciplinary conquerors – one has to create boundaries around a chosen field of research. Next is to cultivate that field and defend it from others who try to trespass on it. To ring-fence and create a border around the field of research, there is the issue of developing an ‘academic tribe’ (a particular language). It may be termed sociology, anthropology, or something else. Lack of familiarity with the language is a basis for exclusion.

In gladiatory scholarship, winning arguments is an end in itself – not a means to an end. Wrestling characterises gladiatory scholarship. Poking holes in another scholar’s work is privileged over seeking to understand what other scholars are providing. Reviewing another scholar’s work often degenerates into writing oneself into another’s work. The aim is to dismiss the work under review and affirm one’s own ideas.  Writing one’s book into another’s book rather than reviewing what one is given to review is a common disease of gladiatory scholarship: its intention is to destroy rather than to engage with another scholar’s ideas. In gladiatory scholarship, there is very low appreciation of other ways of knowing. What the intellectual and academic gladiator does not know is always deemed to be wrong, shallow or unscholarly.

Sustaining gladiatory scholarship are colonial ways of knowing, and at the centre of this arena is resilient civilizing mission mentality. The gladiator is always the teacher; all others are pupils. Inevitably, there is always fundamentalism in gladiatory scholarship. There is epistemic deafness. This is an inability to hear other scholars. There is also epistemic racism and epistemic xenophobia. This takes the form of dismissing all other knowledges from the rest of the world except that from Europe. Behind the scenes there is ceaseless looting of others’ ideas, only to present them as the gladiator’s original thinking.

In gladiatory scholarship, there is always very strong paternalism. This takes the form of listening to those who belong to my generation and think like me. My generation is always the best. All others are engaged in pseudo-scholarship and pseudo-science. All other generations which come before mine and did not go the schools and universities that I attended and where I studied must be looked at suspiciously. They were not there where I was, hence they can’t know as much as me.  There is a lot of effort spent on infantilizing other generations’ scholarship. There is patriarchy and sexism in gladiatory scholarship. Works of women scholars are generally ignored. There is uneven citational politics in gladiatory scholarship. African scholarship is often ignored and never cited. If scholarship informed by critical race theory, postcolonial theory, decolonial thought, and intersectionality is not outrightly dismissed as subjective … it is just ignored. Pretend it does not exist. Let’s write as though it does not exist. Invisibilize it. Don’t give it attention. Push it to the margins. Don’t include it in curriculum. Exclude it.

The consequences of gladiatory scholarship reveal themselves in their most detestable forms in assessments and examinations. Some universities still see no problem in inviting a scholar to be an ‘opponent’ in the public ‘defence’ of doctoral theses. These two words ‘opponent’ and ‘defence’ reveal the paradigm of the war tradition informing gladiatory scholarship. The other consequences are negative assessment of the student’s work, whereby the examiner just looks for what is wrong with the student’s work and ignores all that is correct, using the former to make a judgement and to give a mark. Gladiatory scholarship instils fear in its victims. It is intimidatory scholarship. But there is now turmoil in the kingdom of gladiatory scholarship and the situation is excellent for epistemic freedom. Claims of objectivity are always the refuge of gladiatory scholarship.

Beyond objective scholarship and towards a decolonization of knowledge

Thought from nowhere! Knowledge from nowhere! Theory from nowhere! I am, therefore, a scholar. My scholarship is: neutral, objective, unsituated, truthful, universal, and scientific.  In this scholarship, there is no room for the personal, emotion, ideology, and politics. There is no room for geopolitics and body-politics. In this scholarship, I totally hide myself and indeed you can’t see me. Why hide yourself and pretend to be a god who cannot be seen? What is the logic behind concealment of self in knowledge generation and dissemination?  This hiding and concealment is belied by a simple fact that we all write our names on the book covers we write. Our journal articles and book chapters always carry our names. Perhaps those who use pseudonyms have tried even harder. But a pseudo-name is a form of identity all the same. So, there is identity in knowledge generation. There is the wish to be known as the authors of our works. We always wish to own our work, hence we affix our names to it. This means there is always us in our work. We can’t hide and conceal ourselves successfully.

The veteran educationist and intellectual Paulo Freire urged us to reveal ourselves. Decolonial thought urges us to reveal ourselves. Feminist and womanist scholars urge us to reveal ourselves. What is there to hide anyway? We are human beings. We are social and political beings. We are spiritual beings. We are many things at once. Can we successfully hide from these identities as we generate knowledge? Can we suspend ourselves, banish ourselves from ourselves for the sake of producing objective, truthful, universal, neutral, and unsituated knowledge relevant across time and space? There are no ways to do this, it is impossible.

We research and write as ourselves. Our race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, spirituality and other vectors of our identity constructed as they may be, we cannot escape from them as we generate knowledge. They are in us and are us. Those who pretend to be able to escape these identities are simply more capable than others of hiding them and then denying their existence. By revealing ourselves we come nearer to the truth and reality of being human in the first instance. This nearness to truth and reality is delivered more forcefully by decolonial thought: it is an epistemic perspective which is unmasking us and revealing us so that we stop lying to ourselves and avoid myths of objectivity and neutrality. Our gift from decolonial scholarship includes coming to terms with such realities as: ego-politics of knowledge, body-politics of knowledge, and locus of enunciation of knowledge. An epistemic revolution is on offer, where a new agenda that is beyond exhausting one another over disciplinary knowledge is unfolding, and where a new focus on troublesome existential problems is the focal point of knowledge generation.

Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni is Professor and Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. He is a leading decolonial theorist in the fields of African history, African politics, African development and decolonial theory.

In Fanon’s Shadow: the new Algerian revolution and Black Lives Matter

By
ROAPE
-
Justice for All March - Dec. 13, 2014

In the second part of his long-read on Frantz Fanon and the Algerian revolution, Hamza Hamouchene looks at recent events in Algeria. He argues that we need to revive the ambitious projects of the 1960s that sought emancipation from imperialism and capitalism. Building on this revolutionary heritage, being inspired by its insurgent hope and its internationalist perspective is vital to Algeria, to the Black Lives Matter movement and to other emancipatory struggles all over the world.

By Hamza Hamouchene

As with any revolution, counter-revolutionary forces have mobilized to block change in Algeria. The counter-revolutionary campaign currently underway in Algeria draws support from abroad. Regionally, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are using their money and influence to halt potentially contagious waves of revolt in the region. At the global level, France, the US, UK, Canada, Russia and China, along with their major corporations, seeing a potential threat to their economic and geostrategic interests, are all supportive of the Algerian regime.

Revolutions and uprisings can also be times of entrenching unpopular economic policies and extending more concessions to foreign investors. The budget law of 2020 and the new multinational-friendly Hydrocarbon Law are powerful examples. We cannot therefore fully appreciate the political situation in Algeria without scrutinizing foreign influences and interferences and apprehending the economic question from the angle of natural resource grabs, energy (neo)colonialism and extractivism.

When it comes to the political level, the counter-revolution has been embodied by the military hierarchy. The army has not fired any bullets so far, but it has continued to justify various repressive measures. Since independence in 1962, Algeria has been ruled by a military regime, directly or indirectly. The militarization of society has created a culture of fear and distrust. The brutal repression of past uprisings and the cruelty of the war in the 1990s explain the popular movement’s reluctance to directly confront the army.

The military bourgeoisie still proclaims, as Fanon wrote in 1961, that the ‘vocation of their people is to obey, to go on obeying and to be obedient till the end of time’ and as he explained it is  an army that ‘pins the people down, immobilizing and terrorizing them’. However, despite the Military High Command’s rejection of every roadmap and appeal for genuine dialogue proposed by the movement, people remain determined to peacefully demilitarize their republic. They have been chanting: ‘A republic not a military barrack’. After Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s overthrow, demonstrations continued in opposition to the military, which has maintained de facto authority over the country.

In these poor, under-developed countries, where the rule is that the greatest wealth is surrounded by the greatest poverty, the army and the police constitute the pillars of the regime; an army and a police force which are advised by foreign experts. The strength of the police and the power of the army are proportionate to the stagnation in which the rest of the nation is sunk. By dint of yearly loans, concessions are snatched up by foreigners; scandals are numerous, ministers grow rich, their wives doll themselves up, the members of parliament feather their nests and there is not a soul down to the simple policeman or the customs officer who does not join in the great procession of corruption.

This intense passage from The Wretched is a fairly accurate portrayal of the situation in Algeria where repression and suppression of freedoms are the rule – helped of course by foreign expertise – and where elites institutionalise corruption and serve foreign interests. One of the emblematic slogans of the current uprising has been very eloquent in this regard: ‘You devoured the country…Oh you thieves!’

Algerians know what the military are capable of and despite the trauma of the civil war of the 1990s, they are bravely still insisting: ‘A civilian state not a military one!’ In this way, the Algerian system is exposed for what it is: a military dictatorship hiding behind a ‘democratic’ façade.

Class struggle, organising and political education

Despite the odds stacked against it, and the state’s efforts to divide, co-opt, and exhaust it, the Hirak (Arabic for “movement”) has maintained an exemplary unity and peacefulness. This was demonstrated in various slogans such as: ‘Algerians are brothers and sisters, the people are united, you traitors.’

The movement is youth-led and relatively loosely organised. There are no clearly identifiable leaders or organised structures propelling it. It is a popular uprising mobilising mass forces from the middle classes and from the marginalised classes in urban and rural areas. Unlike Sudan, where the Sudanese Professional Association played a leading and organising role, in Algeria organising is done horizontally and mainly through social media. The general strike in the first few weeks of the uprising, which was instrumental in forcing Bouteflika to abdicate in 2019 was organised spontaneously after anonymous calls on social media. Such amorphous, non-structured and leaderless dynamics and movements are extremely vulnerable. While they can generate large inter-class mobilisations and are not an easy target for repression, or for co-option of leaders, they nevertheless manifest fatal weaknesses in the long run.

But what can Fanon teach us when it comes to the class struggle and organising?

Class struggle is central to Fanon’s analysis. The Lebanese Marxist, Mahdi Amel, pointing to Fanon’s insights on how the revolutionary praxis differentiates and changes its meaning and direction after independence, wrote: ‘While … [the revolution] before independence, [was] essentially a national struggle, after independence it becomes a real class struggle’ through which the masses discover their true enemy: the national bourgeoisie. So from a strictly national level, the fight moves to a socio-economic level of class struggle. Fanon urges us to move from a national consciousness towards a social and political consciousness when he says, ‘If nationalism is not made explicit, if it is not enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words into humanism, it leads up a blind alley’.

However, Fanon invites us to ‘stretch Marxism’ as a way of understanding the particularities of capitalism in the colonial and postcolonial world. To borrow Immanuel Wallerstein’s words, Fanon ‘had rebelled, forcefully, against the ossified Marxism of the communist movements of his era’, asserting a revised version of the class struggle breaking with the dogma that the urban, industrial proletariat is the only revolutionary class against the bourgeoisie. Fanon thought of the peasantry and the urbanized lumpenproletariat as the strongest candidate for the role of historical revolutionary subject in colonial Algeria. And here, Fanon meets Che Guevara when both point out that in colonised countries, revolution begins in rural areas and moves to the urban towns. It is launched by the peasantry, which embraces the proletariat rather than the other way around as in the case of European capitalist, and even socialist, countries.

In a nutshell, class struggle requires that we clearly identify the struggling classes. In this spirit, it is crucial to determine the revolutionary classes (and their alliances) in the current uprising. We need to go beyond ‘workerism’ and embrace a much broader conception of the proletariat in its contemporary expressions, namely the unemployed youth, urban and rural working people, informal workers, peasants, etc. It is these classes that have nothing to lose but their chains, which gives them potential revolutionary agency.

In his chapter ‘Spontaneity: its strengths and weaknesses’ in The Wretched, Fanon expressed concerns that if the lumpen-proletariat is left on its own, without organisational structure, it will burn out. In order to avoid this and to bar the route to the parasitic bourgeoisie, Fanon wrote: ‘The bourgeoisie should not be allowed to find the conditions necessary for its existence and its growth. In other words, the combined effort of the masses led by a party and of intellectuals who are highly conscious and armed with revolutionary principles ought to bar the way to this useless and harmful middle class’.

Fanon made an important observation on African revolutions, which is that their unifying character side-lined a socio-political ideology on how to radically transform society. This is a great weakness that we are witnessing yet again with the new Algerian revolution. ‘Nationalism is not a political doctrine, nor a programme’, wrote Fanon. He insists on the necessity of a revolutionary political party (or perhaps an organised social movement) that can take the demands of the masses forward, a party-structure that will educate the people politically, that will be ‘a tool in the hands of the people’ and that will be the energetic spokesperson and the ‘incorruptible defender of the masses.’ For Fanon, reaching such a conception of a party necessitates first of all ridding ourselves of the bourgeois notion of elitism and ‘the contemptuous attitude that the masses are incapable of governing themselves’.

Fanon abhorred the elitist discourse on the immaturity of the masses and asserted that in the struggle, they (the masses) are equal to the problems which confront them. Nigel Gibson eloquently articulated this view in these words: ‘for Fanon, the “we” was always a creative “we”, a “we” of political action and praxis, thinking and reasoning’. For him, the nation does not exist except in a socio-political and economic program ‘worked out by revolutionary leaders and taken up with full understanding and enthusiasm by the masses’.

Unfortunately, what we see today in Africa is the antithesis of what Fanon strongly argued for. We see the stupidity of the anti-democratic bourgeoisies embodied in their tribal and family dictatorships, banning the people, often with crude force, from participating in their country’s development, and fostering a climate of immense hostility between the rulers and the ruled. Fanon, in his conclusion of The Wretched, argues that we have to work out new concepts through ongoing political education, enriched through mass struggle. Political education for him is not merely about political speeches but rather about ‘opening the minds’ of the people, ‘awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence’. ‘If building a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who work on it’, then according to Fanon, it ‘ought not to be built and the citizens can go on swimming across the river or going by boat’.

This is perhaps one of the greatest legacies of Fanon. His radical and generous vision is so refreshing and rooted in the people’s daily struggles, which open up spaces for new ideas and imaginings. For him, everything depends on the masses, hence his idea of radical intellectuals engaged in and with people’s movements and capable of coming up with new concepts in non-technical and non-professional language. Just as, for Fanon, culture has to become a fighting culture, so too must education become about total liberation.

This is what we need to bear in mind when we talk about education in schools and universities. Decolonial education in the Fanonian sense is an education that helps create a social and political consciousness. The militant or the intellectual, therefore, must not take shortcuts in the name of getting things done, as this is inhuman and sterile. It is all about coming and thinking together, which is the foundation of the liberated society.

Black Lives Matter and the Algerian revolution

In 2020, a global revolt against white supremacy started in the streets of Minneapolis in the United States following the murder of George Floyd, a 46 year-old Black man by a policeman who knelt on his neck. Like Eric Garner before him, George Floyd uttered these last words before he died: ‘I can’t breathe’. The ensuing global rebellion and show of solidarity echo the words of Fanon when he discussed the Vietnamese anti-colonial struggle: ‘It is not because the Indo-Chinese has discovered a culture of his own that he is in revolt. It is because “quite simply” it was, in more than one way, becoming impossible for him to breathe’.

We can no longer breathe in a system that dehumanises people, a system that enshrines super-exploitation, a system that dominates nature and humanity, a system that generates massive inequality and untold poverty. Fortunately, revolts that are fundamentally anti-systemic are taking place on all continents and regions. But for these episodic and largely geographically-confined acts of resistance to succeed, they need to go beyond the local to the global; they need to create enduring alliances in face of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy.

Can these various contemporary struggles, from the Arab uprisings to Black Lives Matter, converge and build strong alliances that overcome their own contradictions and blind spots? Can they usher in a new moment where we question the colonial foundations of our current predicaments and continue on the path of decolonising our politics, economies, cultures and epistemologies? This is not only possible but necessary as we must envisage such transnational solidarities and alliances because they are crucial in the global struggle of emancipation of the wretched of the earth. Perhaps, we can take inspiration from the past, by looking at the decolonisation period, Bandung and Third Worldism era, the Tri-Continental and other internationalist experiences. I would argue that Fanon (or more accurately his intellectual legacy) could be once again the linkage of these struggles, as his work was in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the first two decades of its independence, Algeria became, as Samir Meghelli described it in 2009, ‘a critical node in the constellation of transnational solidarities’ being forged among revolutionary movements around the world. In the heydays of the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, Meghelli shows that ‘just as Algeria looked to Black America as part of the Third World located in the heart of the beast so, too, did much of Black America look to Algeria as “the country that fought the enslaver and won”, as Ted Joans wrote in 1970.

Algeria became a powerful symbol of revolutionary struggle and served as a model for several liberation movements across the globe. Given its audacious foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s, the Algerian capital was to become a Mecca for all revolutionaries. As Amilcar Cabral, the revolutionary leader from Guinea-Bissau announced at a press conference at the margins of the first Pan-African festival in 1969 in Algiers: ‘Pick a pen and take note: the Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Christians to the Vatican and the national liberation movements to Algiers!’

Thanks to the popular film The Battle of Algiers as well as Frantz Fanon’s writings, Algeria came to hold an important place in the ‘iconography, rhetoric, and ideology of key branches of the African American freedom movement’, as Meghelli explained in 2009, which came to view their struggle for civil rights as connected to the struggles of African nations for independence. Francee Covington in 1970, a student in political science at Harlem University in the late 1960s made this point even clearer: ‘In the past few years the works of Frantz Fanon have become widely read and quoted by those involved in the “Revolution” that has begun to take place in the communities of Black America. If The Wretched of the Earth is the “handbook for the Black Revolution,” then The Battle of Algiers is its movie counterpart’.

The writings of Fanon and his analysis of the Algerian war revealed so many parallels between the experience of colonial domination in Algeria and the racial oppression Blacks had suffered for centuries in America. His book The Wretched had become a ‘Black bible’ to use the words of Eldridge Cleaver. By the end of the 1970s, it had sold some 750,000 copies in the United States.

In his visit to New York on October 1962, Ahmed Ben Bella, one of the FLN leaders and the first Algerian president, met with Dr Martin Luther King Jr. and made it clear that there is a close relationship between colonialism and segregation. This view advocating for a global perspective on oppression (be it colonial or racist) was expressed a few years later by Malcolm X. After visiting Algeria in 1964 and the Casbah – the site of the battle of Algiers against French militaries in 1957 – and after responding to the allegations that there existed some sort of “hate-gang” called the “Blood Brothers” based in Harlem and calculatedly committing crimes against whites, he declared at the militant Labour Forum: ‘The same conditions that prevailed in Algeria that forced the people, the noble people of Algeria, to resort eventually to the terrorist-type tactics that were necessary to get the monkey off their backs, those same conditions prevail today in America in every Black community’.

It is this global perspective on our struggles that we need to emphasise in order to break away from the many constraints and limitations imposed on our movements in order to embrace a radical internationalism that will actively promote solidarity. Therefore, it becomes essential to rediscover the revolutionary heritage of the Maghreb, Africa, West Asia and the Global South, developed by great minds like Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Thomas Sankara, Walter Rodney and Samir Amin to mention just a few. We need to revive the ambitious projects of the 1960s that sought emancipation from the imperialist-capitalist system. Building on this revolutionary heritage, being inspired by its insurgent hope and applying its internationalist perspective to the current context is of utmost importance to Algeria, to the Black Lives Matter movement and to other emancipatory struggles all over the world.

Conclusion

The progressive forces in Algeria and beyond have a huge task confronting them: the task of putting the socio-economic issue at the centre of the debate around alternatives and injecting a class analysis into the broad movement. It is incumbent upon them, and more specifically upon the radical and revolutionary left, to elaborate new visions that go beyond resistance to the current predatory offensive of capitalism to question the models of capitalist development itself.

Fanon urged us to invent and make new discoveries and not blindly imitate Europe. The struggle of decolonisation, Fanon tells us, must challenge the dominance of European culture and its claims of universalism. It is these two alienations that colonised people must overcome in their cultural struggle. Decolonising the mind also means deconstructing Western notions of ‘development’, ‘civilisation’, ‘progress’, ‘universalism’ and ‘modernity’.

Such concepts represent what is called a coloniality of power and knowledge, which means that ideas of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’ were conceived in Europe and North America and then implanted in our continents (Africa, Asia and Latin America) in a context of coloniality, as Mignolo wrote in 2012. These Eurocentric ideas and culture have reinforced the colonial heritage of land confiscations, resource plunder, as well as domination of ‘other’ peoples in order to ‘civilise’ them.

These notions (of ‘progress’, ‘development’, ‘modernity’) are imposed notions and are based on a linear conception of the evolution of history that divides the world between ‘developed’ and ‘under-developed’; ‘advanced’ and ‘less advanced’; ‘modern’ (read Western) and ‘backward’ (read non-Western). They are concepts that pretend to be universal and issue injunctions to the excluded and dispossessed to follow a pre-determined path in order to enter an imperial globalisation, led by the ‘advanced’ countries, legitimising their subordination. Being Eurocentric, these concepts assert their self-claimed superiority by excluding and delegitimizing other forms of knowledge, other ways of life and other civilisations’ contributions.

Fanon did not offer us a clear prescription for making the transition after decolonisation to a new liberated political order. Perhaps, there is no such thing as a detailed plan or solution. Rather, he viewed it as a protracted process that will be informed by praxis and, above all, by confidence in the masses and in their revolutionary potential to figure out the liberating alternative.

In the conclusion of The Wretched, Fanon wrote:

Come, then, comrades; it would be as well to decide at once to change our ways. We must shake off the heavy darkness in which we were plunged and leave it behind. The new day, which is already at hand must find us firm, prudent and resolute…. Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe… Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe…For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.

In this vein, it is vital to continue the tasks of decolonisation and delinking from the imperialist-capitalist worldn order to restore our denied humanity. Through resistance to colonial and capitalist logics of appropriation and extraction, new imaginaries and counter-hegemonic alternatives will be born.

This is the second of a two-part long read on Fanon and the new Algerian revolution. Many of the ideas in the blogpost come from a chapter in a forthcoming book Fanon Today: The Revolt and Reason of the Wretched of the Earth (edited by Nigel Gibson, Daraja Press 2021).

Hamza Hamouchene is an Algerian researcher-activist and commentator, he works as the North Africa Programme Coordinator for the Transnational Institute (TNI).

Featured Photograph: Justice for All March (13 December, 2014).

References

Covington, F. (1970) ‘Are the Revolutionary Techniques Employed in The Battle of Algiers Applicable to Harlem?’ In T.C, Bambara (ed). The Black Woman: An Anthology. New York: Penguin.

Fanon, F. (1965) A Dying Colonialism. New York : Grove Press.

Fanon, F. (1967) The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin Books.

Fanon, F. (1967) Toward the African Revolution. New York: Grove Press.

Fanon, F. (1986) Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press.

Eduardo Gudynas, E. (2013) ‘Debates on development and its alternatives in Latin America. A brief heterodox guide’. In M. Lang & D. Mokrani. (eds). Beyond Development: Alternative Visions from Latin America. Quito & Amsterdam: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation & Transnational Institute.

Hamouchene, H. and Rouabah, B. (2016) ‘The political economy of regime survival: Algeria in the context of the African and Arab uprisings’. Review of African Political Economy. Volume 43 – Issue 150, 668-680.

Joans, T. (1970). ‘The Pan African Pow Wow.’ Journal of Black Poetry. 1 (13): 4–5.

Khalfa, J. and Young, R.J.C. (2018) Frantz Fanon: Alienation and Freedom. London: Bloomsbury.

Meghelli, S. (2009) From Harlem to Algiers: Transnational Solidarities between the African American Freedom Movement and Algeria, 1962-1978. In, M, Marable and H, Aidi. Eds., Black Routes to Islam. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 99-119.

Walter Mignolo, W. (2012) Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Neal, L. (1966) ‘The Black Writer’s Role,’ Liberator 6, no. 6 : 8.

Said, E. (1994) Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage.

Wallerstein, I. (2009) ‘Reading Fanon in the 21st Century’, New Left Review. 57, pp. 117-125.

 

Decolonising a neo-colony: an interview with Guy Marius Sagna

By
ROAPE
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In March, Senegal experienced unprecedented popular protests. Recently released from prison, activist Guy Marius Sagna, founding member of the Front for an Anti-Imperialist Popular and Pan-African Revolution (Frapp–France Dégage), argues in this interview with Florian Bobin and Maky Madiba Sylla that anti-imperialism is gaining ground in the country. While welcoming this upsurge in popular mobilization, he warns African progressives against the “manoeuvres of imperialism and its local henchmen” and contends that a sovereign Senegal can only be achieved “within a united and sovereign Africa.”

Florian Bobin and Maky Madiba Sylla: Guy Marius Sagna, you have been fighting for years for a sovereign Senegal: facing the neo-colonial status quo prevailing since independence, you call for blocking the road to foreign interference through “pan-African anti-imperialism.” Where does this political awareness come from?

Guy Marius Sagna: I was lucky enough to have an uncle, Ludovic Alihonou, who was a member of a left-wing organization, [African Workers Rally – Senegal], organized within the framework of a newspaper called Ferñent (“The Spark” in Wolof), in reference to Iskra, [official organ of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party]. So, it was these left-wing activists – Birane Gaye, Assane Samb, Fodé Roland Diagne – who took charge of my education from the age of 11-12. Later, militants like Alla Kane, Moctar Fofana Niang, Madièye Mbodj, Jo Diop, Malick Sy, Ousseynou Ndiaye, etc., were added to the group. We are the heirs of our glorious predecessors: from Lamine Ibrahima Arfang Senghor, Seydou Cissokho, Birane Gaye, the elders Alla Kane, Dialo Diop to Cheikh Anta Diop. We can go further back in history, with Aline Sitoé Diatta, [Biram] Yacine Boubou, and even our religious resistants Mame [Cheikh Amadou] Bamba, Maba Diakhou Bâ. Studying and reading people like Omar Blondin Diop will only give us the tools to better analyse history and especially the present and better guide us out of poverty and underdevelopment.

When you are raised by the left, your understanding of life is that the misfortune of the majority is made by the happiness of an overpowering minority. To understand why there is so much homelessness and poverty in France – the same France that claims to be helping us while letting its own people freeze to death – it is because there is a system called capitalism, which can only function through the oppression of the majority in the capitalist centres and the oppression of the majority in the peripheries, to speak like Samir Amin. This is the vision of life that I have inherited, a political vision that it is the people who make history and that it must be taught that no one else will come to save them.

This is why, for decades, we have been standing alongside unpaid workers, like public kindergarten teachers. My first imprisonment in 2012-2013 was part of this struggle: five days in prison in Tambacounda [in the southeast of Senegal] alongside nine teachers. We had blocked the national road to Tambacounda following months of unfruitful struggle. And since 2012, nearly a thousand kindergarten teachers have been trained and paid thanks to these struggles. So yes, freedom comes only through struggle. We have also stood by other fighting actors, like arbitrarily dismissed contractual Senelec (National Electricity Company of Senegal) workers, who were able to be recruited again. We stood by workers like those at the PCCI call centre (PCCI  is a multinational outsourcing company), who went 14 months without pay. And that battle was won. In this struggle, we have been beaten, detained several times, inhaled tear gas.

When big businesses like Auchan and Carrefour were setting up in Senegal, there existed no regulation for supermarkets. We had to fight and say “Auchan dégage” (Auchan get out), with, of course, content to it: we asked the state to suspend their contract and make an impact assessment of what would be the consequences. “Auchan dégage” was also to hold a conference on domestic trade, to see what went wrong and why Senegalese markets are the way they are: what is the share of responsibility of citizens, municipalities, retailers, the state and how to have Senegalese markets that meet the needs of its people. Because it is neither Lidl, nor Walmart, nor Leclerc, nor Auchan, nor Carrefour that will transform Senegal: they are going to come, skim off the profits and take them back abroad. Of course, many of our people will follow these benefits out of a bled-dry Africa: that is the tragedy of immigration.

Facts have only reinforced my worldview. Facts may contradict theory, but in my personal experience, this theory, this political vision of life, inherited from my worthy predecessors, has only been reinforced, refined by the tragic reality of the Senegalese people. We fight while being Gramscians, that is to say having the pessimism of analysis: we give blows to the neo-colonial system, but this neo-colonial system will not remain inert to our blows. It will not accept that it can be struck like that. While having the pessimism of analysis that neo-colonialism is going to do everything, imperialism will be more and more ferocious–we maintain an optimism of the will. The optimism of the will is to know that whatever imperialism does, whatever the alliance between imperialism and Africans who accept to be its servants do, the peoples can be strong enough to transcend this, and ultimately win.

The popular uprising from March 2021, expressive of a generalized resentment toward the country’s ruling political class, is an illustration of this power balance you describe. Throughout February and early March, dozens of Pastef-Les Patriotes opposition party activists, members of the Frapp movement – yourself included – and various citizens were arrested and imprisoned for their political activities [Fraapp is Front for an Anti-Imperialist Popular and Pan-African Revolution]. What is your take on the situation in Senegal?

I think that what happened recently is an uprising, a revolt, not a revolution. Now, many uprisings, many revolts can lead to revolution. And an organization like Frapp is trying to contribute to the advent of this revolution. What happened recently is at least two things. First, it is expressive that neo-colonialism, imperialism, is afraid because there is an unprecedented situation in Senegal. Never in Senegal, since 1960, has a candidate been campaigning against the CFA franc, against the EPAs (Economic Partnership Agreements), against foreign military presences – let’s say against the neo-colonial system. This is the first time in Africa, in a country formerly colonized by France, at least in West Africa, that a candidate has 16 percent of the vote while campaigning openly against imperialism. And I think that President Macky Sall knows that if nothing is done fundamentally, the fifth President will be called Ousmane Sonko, [which means] the victory of an anti-imperialist political family. They understand the danger; they know that those fighting still have a lot of room to manoeuvre and that the political parties that imperialism relies on are much more discredited. And this discredit will grow increasingly worse. [Sonko is a leader of the Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics and Fraternity (PASTEF) party and an MP; his arrest on 3 March triggered a wave of youth protest that Guy Marius Sagna is referring to].

The second thing to decipher is that the awareness-raising campaign against imperialism has made great strides in Senegal. This way of going out in the street, of mobilizing, is unprecedented in Senegal. And it is the result of  work to which several organizations have contributed: so-called nationalist, patriotic, pan-African, anti-imperialist organizations. When we created Frapp, we said: “We want to contribute to putting questions of sovereignty – economic and monetary sovereignty, but also popular and democratic sovereignty – at the heart of the political, economic and social debate.” We must radically transform the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world; Africa must stop being the rest of the world’s wallet. But we must also transform the relationship between the people, the citizens and the elites who come to power. We have states held hostage by elected officials who are not servants [of the people] because of the political system.

I believe that democracy is for the people to choose: either in the ballot box or in the street. For me, when the people of Burkina Faso ousted [Blaise] Compaoré [in October 2014], that is democracy. But for me also, if a people oust Macky Sall and elects a pan-African through the ballot box, it would prevent deaths. But everyone knows that a class as a class never abdicates. The member of a class can commit revolutionary suicide, to speak like Amílcar Cabral. But a class as a class never commits suicide. The parasitic Senegalese bureaucratic bourgeoisie, subservient to imperialism in general, will never willingly accept that Senegal enters the camp of pan-Africanism, of anti-imperialism. Imperial France will never accept that its former colonies leave its private preserve. Senegal is Françafrique’s “democratic showcase”; Ivory Coast is Françafrique’s “economic showcase.” We are the pillars of Françafrique. If only one of these two countries leave, Françafrique collapses, the CFA Franc collapses. That is what is at stake. So, organizations like Pastef or the Frapp are a danger.

France, imperialism in general, sees that this private preserve is slipping away. And throughout these past years, we have heard France and its supporters in the media say: “there is an anti-French sentiment.” In reality, it is not an anti-French sentiment; it is an anti-imperialist sentiment. What country does not wish to be free? Yes, we have a deep desire for freedom. Not, like France or the United States, to oppress other peoples… An anti-imperialist, a consequential pan-Africanist, wants to be free and be sovereign but not oppress others. On the contrary, to work so that they be free.

Malcolm X explained that when Black people start becoming conscious, the first step is to hate White people. When populations also begin to be anti-imperialist, they hate its external aspects, hence the ransacking of Auchan, Total, of French symbols. It’s the same process. It’s not bad, but you have to quickly raise your consciousness and understand that there are Whites who are as oppressed as Blacks, that it’s the same system. You have to refuse division and manipulation of racial, religious, ethnic or national sentiments aimed at weakening and dividing workers and peoples in struggle. When the ordinary, conventional voices are no longer able to hold down workers and peoples, to make them accept their oppression, the oppressors – if you study history of humanity – have always resorted to using division through manipulating ethnic religious and racial sentiments. So that today, they prevent people from looking to neo-colonialism, and that Peuls come and say: “you, the Wolof, are the cause of my situation”; that Sereers use Joolas as scapegoats. That’s why someone like Karl Marx said to the White workers: “the White worker will never be emancipated as long as the Black worker is oppressed.”

Imperialism and its local henchmen – the bureaucratic bourgeoisie led by President Macky Sall – will manoeuvre. I think that, in some ways, the religious leaders saved Macky Sall. If it was not for them, he might not have spent an [extra] night in Senegal. But with the March uprising, it’s the first time in a very long time that an African people from one of the countries formerly colonized by France has blocked the ruling bureaucratic bourgeoisie against an opponent. Look at what happened in Ivory Coast or Guinea. The voices of the revolution, liberation or emancipation are unfathomable. Perhaps this was the preview to a much more significant struggle to come. For me, what happened recently is a step in the very long struggle of the Senegalese people… This is the umpteenth stage. And there is reason to be hopeful with the people and the youth.

In response to the protests that rocked Senegal in March, the government used live fire and marauding militias to crush the movement, recalling the single-party state’s violent methods 50 years ago. In addition to the hundreds injured, fourteen people died in less than a week. Many accounts have also painted a chilling picture of prison conditions. What can you tell us about political repression in Senegal today?

First, I often hear people say that [Leopold Sedar] Senghor left us a state, [but he] left us a neo-colonial state. And for there to be a neo-colonial state with solid foundations, it was necessary to go through this repression and “reduce resistance to its simplest expression.” This is what President Senghor tirelessly did. I believe he had the best profile to continue to make Senegal a “little Paris”; to perpetuate the cooperation agreements; to make our Constitution the twin of the French Constitution; to leave the CFA franc untouched; to make our official language French and to continue, from the cradle, to dominate the Senegalese in their minds. France needed to leave to stay better. When we see what we are living, it gives you the impression – even if today there is social media and all that – that almost nothing has changed. We are almost in the same positions, the same contexts as in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1950s, some said “yes to independence” and others “no to independence” or that we should remain in the French sphere. Today, there are still those who say, “France get out,” “Auchan get out,” that we must get out of the CFA Franc and those who say that the CFA Franc is a good currency.

Yes, because of our actions, our activities and our struggles, we face acts of repression that remind us of what our predecessors experienced decades ago. First, it is often very difficult to get permits to demonstrate …We have been invited by people in certain localities in Senegal, and I was surprised to hear the locality’s sub-prefect say that they had to ask him for authorization to invite me and that he gave it before I could come. It is no longer participating in a banned demonstration that gets you into police custody or prison, but the simple fact of taking a letter and going to police headquarters to inform the prefect, who then takes the liberty of banning or not.

In police stations, you are also a victim of many other things. I remember being slapped hard by prison officers there. I arrived at court, the guard who was doing the search told me: “Guy Marius, you are back again. You really are an asshole.” And when I told him that he “was much more of an asshole than I was,” I received a slap in the face. In one of the central police station’s cells, we are sometimes dumped there and, to urinate, we are forced to use the same water bottles we drink out from. But we understand that one of the functions of defence and security forces in a neo-colony like Senegal is frightening the population. And so, subjecting demonstrators and protestors to such treatment that they no longer feel like resisting; that they surrender, that they become afraid, that their parents and their families become terrified. You regularly hear that comrades are tortured. The latest is one of the protesters arrested on February 8 and 9, 2021: they took him out of his cell at the central police station and brought him upstairs. There, they kicked him in the testicles. And then the Senegalese police threatens … those who would accuse them of torture.

This is why even ordinary citizens who are not fighters, or are arrested in a context other than resistance, are victims of the fact that our defence and security forces are neo-colonial, the heirs of colonial France. This is how we must understand that a citizen like Pape Sarr, simply accused of stealing a sheep, was tortured in the Thiaroye police station, diluent poured on him and electrocuted, before catching fire and dying like a mummy in his bandages at the hospital [in July 2018]; Seck Ndiaye found [dead] in his room, beaten by five police officers [in June 2018]; Abdoulaye Timera hit by a police car on the Allées du Centenaire [in April 2018]. And so far, for all these cases and others, no justice, no truth…

I worked at the regional hospital in Sédhiou, one of the two or three poorest regions in Senegal, and discovered the system and mechanism through which its different directors embezzled money. Since 2014, when I spoke publicly about it, I have been pushed to the sideline by the Ministry of Health. So, since 2014, I have had no office, no place to work. The Senegalese State prefers to have me in the street rather than in work, so I don’t see things to denounce and they can keep me in a precarious situation, preventing me from thinking and acting optimally for the anti-imperialist and pan-Africanist struggle. But our worthy predecessors were victims of the same methods. These are the same practices inherited from the colonial past, which are, in fact, not a past but more than ever a feature of contemporary reality.

You just mentioned anti-imperialism and pan-Africanism. In line with the long history of theorizing and implementing the pan-African ideal, the “United States of Africa,” as Cheikh Anta Diop spoke of it, what is your vision of it in the early 2020s? 

I think that today, necessarily for all African states, Senegal included, there will be no way out of underdevelopment and poverty without sovereignty. In other words, sovereignty is today a sine qua non condition, a necessary condition, so that we can get out of the situation where 64% of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) collapse in Senegal before their third years. How can you solve the problem of unemployment when Senegalese SMBs have such a high mortality rate? Being sovereign will also allow us to solve scandals such as four women dying every day from pregnancy or sixty children under five dying every day from minor illnesses such as acute respiratory infections, i.e. coughs, colds, diarrhoea, malaria. That’s more than 25,000 children [per year]. Elsewhere, we would have spoken of genocide. Yes, the imperialist system is genocidal.

So, we need to be sovereign in Senegal, in Gambia, in Mauritania, in Mali, in Burkina Faso, etc. We need to escape imperialism and have states that guarantee and ensure monetary sovereignty, commercial sovereignty, military sovereignty—all sovereignties. Even this language that we use, French, we have to escape from it. Our children – whether Wolof, Jaxanke, Bassari, Koñagi, Puular, Joola, Sereer – must be able to learn in their languages. Because a language is first and foremost a vision of life. By educating our children with a different vision of life, we make them little French people. And so, instead of wearing Ngaay shoes [leather sandals], like the ones I’m wearing, we prefer wearing Italian or French. Instead of eating fondé [millet porridge], using our millet, sorghum, corn, we will prefer eating camembert. We must therefore wrest this sovereignty.

In order to be viable and sustainable, the project of a sovereign Senegal will only be done within a united and sovereign Africa. How will sixteen million Senegalese citizens be able to face three hundred million Americans, a state with a billion Chinese or some three hundred million of the European Union? Our micro-states cannot guarantee it in the long term. Personally, I wouldn’t mind if Senegal, Gambia and Mauritania, or Senegal and Guinea, decided today to have a federal state. If it is on the scale of ECOWAS or of West Africa, it could work. We should not underestimate anything. The problem is that progressives are not at the head of these different states, and we don’t know when they will be. So, we can’t say, “We need fifty-four states to be united.” That’s why everyone has to fight, and if everyone wins in their state, we will win everywhere.

We need a sovereign Africa, disconnected from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, from the World Trade Organization, from fisheries agreements and other EPAs with the European Union, from foreign military presences – whether French or American. An African unity that can have a common policy in terms of employment, agriculture, education. A currency that serves the fight against unemployment and allows us to put enough credit in the hands of our farmers and employers—people cannot claim that “since the others have not yet left the CFA franc, we cannot leave.” A policy that allows us to give markets, when possible, to Africans and not export our jobs by giving our markets to foreign companies. And even where we do not yet have the capacity, signing agreements so that, very quickly, there is a transfer of technology. But Senegal’s sixteen million inhabitants, Gambia’s two or three million inhabitants, what weight can they have against these mastodons to impose a rapid transfer of technology?

But we must be careful with institutions like ECOWAS. I am one to think that even French Equatorial Africa and French West Africa [the French colonial division of Africa] were also a type of African unity. But African unity serving imperialism. It is not this African unity that we seek – an African Union whose headquarters are financed and whose microphones are listened to by China, whose budget, like that of ECOWAS, comes more from the European Union and the United States.

To be pan-African for me today is necessarily to be anti-imperialist. Their vision of uniting Africa is to serve imperialism, but also African bourgeoisies. For me, Afro-liberalism, with agreements like the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), is not pan-Africanism. Free trade is a law that allows big fish to eat small fish. It is an open boulevard to Western capitalist companies and multinational corporations in a context where we talk about companies under Senegalese law… yet its capital and owners are not even African.

Whoever may implement free trade, it will be destructive, dramatic and tragic for the majority. Tragic as our youth dying in the Sahara desert, the Atlantic Ocean or the Mediterranean Sea; like the fact that 54% of the Senegalese population can neither read nor write; like the fact that we import 64 billion [CFA Francs] of dairy products every year and export our jobs through them, maintaining our farmers, their children and their families in poverty…

To get out of this tragedy that is neo-colonialism, it is urgent today to be sovereign: a sovereign Senegal in a sovereign and united Africa.

Translated from French by Florian Bobin (read a portrait of Guy Marius Sagna here and an interview in French here).

Florian Bobin is a researcher in African history studying post-colonial liberation struggles and state violence from the 1960s and 1970s in Senegal.

Maky Madiba Sylla is a Senegalese artist and filmmaker, co-director of the documentary El Maestro Laba Sosseh (Linkering Productions, 2021).

Featured Photograph: Guy Marius Sagna during a press conference in Dakar on March 25, 2021, the day after his release from prison, courtesy of Seyllou Seyllou (AFP)

Colonial frameworks: networks of political and economic order

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ROAPE
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Christoph Vogel writes that the university is a site where colonial frames survive – whether in financial, linguistic, architectural, political or mental spheres. These frameworks are cross-cutting and create, shape and legitimise knowledge. He argues that Western raised and educated academics are trapped in self-made intellectual snares, complicating attempts to make sense of politics in most parts of the world.

By Christoph Vogel

If we keep seeing incessant calls for decolonizing knowledge, research and teaching, that’s owed to stubborn imperfections in the political architecture of the Ivory Tower. The university is a site where colonial frames survive in the material and immaterial features of academia – whether in financial, linguistic, architectural, political or mental spheres. While these frames are cross-cutting, as the writings of Edward Said, Angela Davis, bell hooks or Aimé Césaire and others taught us, this essay focuses on epistemics, that is – in a nutshell – the ways in which we create, shape and legitimise knowledge. Inspired by Spivak and others, the starting point here is the observation that colonial imaginations keep questioning whether the subaltern can speak, leading – in academia and beyond – to longstanding trajectories of epistemic violence, marginalisation and exclusion.

Colonial frames are constructed to systemically preserve political, moral and economic authority of the people and nations that gained from exploiting others, or, for the very least, from imposing their worldviews. Some of it, however, is rooted in the pre-determined shaping of our thinking, the ways in which Western mindsets and mental frames are conditioned by a reproduction of in-group thought and truism in socialisation and education. This follows established colonial trajectories, but – going back to the opening line – it most virulently plays out where scientific capital is most powerful. This place is the Western university, flanked by an oligopoly of academic publishers and – crumbling but still unparalleled – funding schemes for research. Scores of writers, theorists and commentators regularly remind us of these issues. They point out how, despite the momentum to mobilise decolonial struggle, in academia and beyond, progress is slow. Like a turtle, colonial structures and institutions prove enormously resilient in defending an exclusive ‘permission to narrate.’

But what if Western thought itself is a victim of its own (neo-)colonial attitude? Admittedly, we’re entering a semantic minefield here, since nothing justifies colonialism by any acceptable notion of values, let alone reverse victimhood. But, for the sake of an experiment, this piece will discuss how colonial frames also harm the quality of individual and collective scholarship on the side of the privileged. Colonial socialisation and education do that by cutting to size our epistemologies as if we would be looking in the mirror when theorizing out of the window. As academics, Western-raised, Western-educated or both, we are trapped in our very own, self-made intellectual snares, complicating attempts to make sense of politics in most parts of the world. The writing process of a piece I recently wrote for ROAPE was good initial antidote, although I remain puzzled if it addressed only symptoms or actual root causes of my own incomplete mental decolonization process.

Dominant social theory is based on thought, conceptualisation and definitions developed by mostly Western scholars in their own lifeworlds. Hence, even if so-called fieldwork is done, analysis is usually done back home. It is therefore, knowledge situated out of context, with all its limitations. Human thought is dependent on language as a technique for both framing and transmission. Yet, concepts come into being through passive and active speaker competence, so it is rather difficult for someone who does not speak Yoruba, Arabic or Bengali to express the meaning of something in its context. Of course, we can translate, and sometimes chance helps making things fit, but more often, it results in erasure as specific type of epistemic violence. Forming precise equivalents of complex, situated social reality and abstraction into concepts faces problems of what Feyerabend  and Kuhn called incommensurability – the lack of shared language across scientific concepts and those discussing them – or Derrida’s idea of ‘untranslatability,’ the lack of exact equivalent across languages. Epistemic decolonisation hence requires linguistic emancipation on all sides of the table. We all use definitions, most of which are based on wording we are familiar with. Hence, even the most engaged and immersed ethnographers face multiple risks of imprecision, such as taking correlation for causation, as fans of econometric analysis do. For several reasons, hence, such as the refusal to engage in collaborative research, intellectual laziness, linguistic diversity, academic conventions, and forms of structural violence – just to name a few – we as social scientists are thus collectively racing into our very own epistemic surrender.

These shortcomings are particularly visible is the study of conflict dynamics and contentious politics in most parts of the world. To employ one of the few truisms I’d subscribe to, there surely is a correlation between the degree to which social phenomena are complex and contested and to which we need detailed context and information to avoid shortcuts, errors and misinterpretations. This exponentially peaks whenever translation issues come on top. But social theory is clever. Generations of scientists and researchers have been working on frames to both boil down complexity and to transfer social reality from where it plays out into spheres from where we target understanding and explanation. That’s legit to some extent because otherwise both case study research and generalisations would be worthless and obsolete. Yet, it is also not legit to posit such as generally and genuinely infallible or true. Dynamics of conflict, violence and politics tend to be mired by competing narratives anywhere in the world. Before and even into the era of alternative facts and fake news, this leads us to point at Otherness, to use diverging discursive construction to describe things that perhaps are not that different.

What we call ‘corruption’ in Africa is often referred to as ‘nepotism’ when we talk about Europe. What we subsume under ‘terrorism’ in the Middle East are the ‘individual cases’ of white people killing scores of people with assault rifles in the US, owing to ‘mental health issues.’ What we call mindless and savage violence in the Congo, are joint efforts in migration policy by the European Union. Intriguingly, the concomitant result is humans killed and public money embezzled in all cases. Of course, and luckily, lots of good social research is far beyond such crude Manichean clichés and tropes, but down the ladder of gravity we find similarly constructed problems.

As means of illustration, I will sketch two examples of epistemic challenges I have been facing. One is the ROAPE essay and another related one refers to an article Josaphat Musamba and I have been writing. In both, we have tried to investigate the “real governance” of conflict-affected mineral markets in the eastern Congo, a place where myths and stereotypes all too often clash with facts and analysis. In the course of the Congo wars around the millennium, the notion of conflict minerals arose to conceptualise the role of natural resources in a broader context of insecurity. Akin to existing – and problematic – assumptions on the economics of and in civil wars, this paradigm not only led to significant transnational policy but also framed an image of mineral trade and livelihoods as profoundly characterised by greed and violence. In consequence, a language of illegality and fraud came to dominate analyses on the matter. This however, shrouded our collective understanding of what mineral markets in eastern Congo actually look like, and why they work in the ways they work.

Instead, the conceptual arsenal of Western-dominated social science offered a number of theorizations ranging from neopatrimonialism, racketeering and greed to describe and analyse the personae of traders, business heavyweights and other participants of eastern Congo’s mineral markets. This is where we got stuck.

In our piece on the intermediary traders that oil cogwheels of domestic business – that is, before mineral goods are exported – we therefore had to look for solutions to name our protagonists. In French, the Congo’s colonially-inherited official language, these people are known as négociants – ‘negotiators.’ Now, negotiating is universal human activity and as such there is little chance of distorting the meaning of what these people do. Yet, it is insufficient to paint a fuller conceptual picture of their action and role. In this case, we did not find any further ‘emic’ (that means, arising from its very own, situated context) conceptualisation that would provide enough clarity. We thus began defining them as brokers of crisis. We did so because in the Congo, the notion of la crise is a ubiquitous reference and in literatures unsuspicious of too much colonial penchant, crisis is defined as “permanent or conditional category” or “ordinary and banal phenomenon.” Moreover, the notion of a broker, compared to that of a smuggler, is a functional term not a value judgment. In its broadest sense, it simply describes human connection for the sake to social, economic or political transactions.

The ROAPE article was a similar challenge, as it focused on another pivotal category of stakeholders in Congo’s political economy for which I borrowed the term incontournables. These are the people neopatrimonialism theory would call patrons, and Paul Collier would call them greedy. The incontournables are those, as the term suggests, that are hard or impossible to avoid due to their position and clout in a given context. Another emic solution, this term is French but while it comes out of a colonial language, it is used abundantly by Congolese. However, and most importantly, it is used in France itself with a positive connotation. There, for instance, extraordinary wines or outstanding literary works are incontournable. This is important, because while engaged scholarship is eminently political, we ought not to be blind as to the consequences of our epistemic choices. Hence, there is no issue with calling a corrupt person ‘corrupt’, but it is imprecise and prone to error to call entire groups ‘corrupt.’ Worse even, if we either use certain flattering (Western) language for ourselves, and pejorative (also Western) terms for the Other. Or if we simply decline to seek for emic, embedded meaning and explanation as we try to understand a context. All of that is amplified by a strong unidirectionality of scientific conceptualisation from the Global North to the South.

If these short examples are illustrative of the epistemic problems complicating social theory, they are not end points but mere entry doors into broader reflection. While decolonial scholars upped the game with works of enormous relevance – Kimberlé Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, Walter Mignolo and Boaventura de Sousa Santos to name a few – this debate also addresses our own issues, Western epistemic surrender. This means two things – the problem itself and a potential solution. The problem is that Western social theory has since long committed epistemic surrender, surrender as in abandoning this epistemic struggle. However, this surrender – as a conscious objective – can also mean to actively work towards surrendering our frames of thought and more actively embracing and applying epistemics not inherently ours, on the African continent and elsewhere so that, as Achille Mbembe suggested, ‘we will no longer have a university. We will have a pluriversity.’

Christoph Vogel’s ROAPE article ‘The politics of incontournables: entrenching patronage networks in eastern Congo’s mineral markets’ is available to read for free until the end of the month. Vogel’s article will be in the forthcoming June issue of ROAPE (Vol 48: Issue 168).

Christoph Vogel is the Research Director of the Insecure Livelihoods project at Conflict Research Group, Ghent University, and a Senior Fellow at Congo Research Group, New York University. 

Frantz Fanon and the Algerian revolution today

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ROAPE
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Sixty years after the death of the revolutionary Frantz Fanon and the publication of his masterpiece, The Wretched of the Earth, Algeria is undergoing another revolution. In the first of a two-part blogpost, Hamza Hamouchene provides a brief historical account of Fanon’s anti-colonial thought, his critique of the postcolonial ruling elites and the new popular movement (Hirak) engulfing Algeria.

By Hamza Hamouchene

During the upheavals that the North African and West Asian region witnessed a decade ago – what has been dubbed the ‘Arab Spring’- Fanon’s thought proved to be as relevant as ever. Not only relevant, but insightful in helping to grasp the violence of the world we live in, and the necessity of a sustained rebellion against it.

Fanon’s wrote during in a period of decolonisation in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South. Born in Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean, though Algerian by choice, he wrote from the vantage point of the Algerian revolution against French colonialism and of his political experiences on the African continent. Today, we might ask: can his analyses transcend the limitations of time? Can we learn from him as a committed intellectual and revolutionary thinker? Or should we just reduce him to another anti-colonial figure, largely irrelevant for our post-colonial times?

For me, as an Algerian activist, Fanon’s dynamic and revolutionary thinking, always about creation, movement and becoming, remains prophetic, vivid and committed to emancipation from all forms of oppression. He strongly and compellingly argued for a path to a future where humanity ‘advances a step further’ and breaks away from the world of colonialism and European universalism. Fanon represented the maturing of anti-colonial consciousness and he was a decolonial thinker par excellence.

Despite his short life (he died at the age of 36 from leukaemia in 1961), Fanon’s thought is rich and his work, in books, papers and speeches, prolific. He wrote his first book Black Skin, White Masks in 1952, two years before Điện Biên Phủ (the defeat of the French in a crucial battle in Vietnam) and his last book, The Wretched of the Earth in 1961. His 1961 classic became a treatise on the anti-colonialist and Third-Worldist struggle, one year before Algerian independence, at a moment when sub-Saharan African countries were gaining their independence – an experience in which Fanon was deeply and practically involved.

In Fanon’s intellectual journey, we can see the interactions between Black America and Africa, between the intellectual and the militant, between theory and practice, idealism and pragmatism, individual analysis and collective action, the psychological life (he trained as a psychiatrist) and physical struggle, nationalism and Pan-Africanism and finally between questions of colonialism and those of neo-colonialism.

Fanon did not live to see his adoptive country become free from French colonial domination, something he believed had become inevitable. Yet his experiences and analysis were the prism through which many revolutionaries abroad understood Algeria and helped to turn the country into the mecca of Third World revolution.

Six decades after the publication of his masterpiece The Wretched, Algeria is witnessing another revolution, this time against the national bourgeoisie that Fanon railed against in his ferocious chapter ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness.’

Fanon and colonial Algeria

The Algerian independence struggle against the French was one of the most inspiring anti-imperialist revolutions of the 20th century. It was part of a wave of decolonisation that had started after the Second World War in India, China, Cuba, Vietnam and many countries in Africa. The wave of decolonisation inscribed itself in the spirit of the Bandung Conference and the era of the ‘awakening of the South’, the Third world as  it was then known, which has been subjected to decades of colonial and capitalist domination under several forms, from protectorates to settler colonies.

Frantz Fanon methodically unpicked the mechanisms of violence put in place by colonialism. He wrote: ‘Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state.’ According to him, the colonial world is a Manichean world (to see things as having only two sides), which goes to its logical conclusion and ‘dehumanises the native, or to speak plainly it turns him into an animal.’

What followed the insurrection on November 1, 1954, launched by nationalist forces against the French, was one of the longest and bloodiest wars of decolonisation, which saw the widespread involvement of the rural poor and urban popular classes. Huge numbers of Algerians were killed in the eight-year war against the French that ended in 1962, a war that has become the foundation of modern Algerian politics.

Arriving at Blida psychiatric hospital in 1953 in French controlled Algeria, Fanon realised quickly that colonisation, in its essence, produced madness. For him, colonisation was a systematic negation of the other and a refusal to attribute humanity to them. In contrast to other forms of domination, the violence here was total, diffuse, and permanent.

Treating both French torturers and liberation fighter, Fanon could not escape this total violence. This led him to resign in 1956 and to join the Front de libération nationale (FLN). He wrote: ‘The Arab, alienated permanently in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalisation.’ He added that the Algerian war was ‘a logical consequence of an abortive attempt to decerebralise a people’.

Fanon saw colonial ideology being underpinned by the affirmation of white supremacy and its ‘civilising mission.’ The result was the development in the ‘indigènes évolués’ (literally the more  evolved natives) of a desire to be white, a desire which is nothing more than an existential aberration. However, this desire stumbles upon the unequal character of the colonial system which assigns places according to colour.

Throughout his professional work and militant writings, Fanon challenged the dominant culturalist and racist approaches on the ‘native’: Arabs are lazy, liars, deceivers, thieves, etc. He advanced a materialist explanation, situating symptoms, behaviours, self-hatred and inferiority complexes in a life of oppression and the reality of unequal colonial relations.

Fanon believed in revolutionary Algeria. His illuminating book A Dying Colonialism (published in 1959) or as it is known in French L’An Cinq de la Révolution Algérienne, shows how liberation does not come as a gift. It is seized by the popular classes with their own hands and by seizing it they are themselves transformed. He strongly argued the most elevated form of culture – that is to say, of progress – is to resist colonial domination. For Fanon, revolution was a transformative process that created ‘new souls.’ For this reason, Fanon closes his 1959 book with the words: ‘The revolution …changes man and renews society, has reached an advanced stage. This oxygen which creates and shapes a new humanity – this, too, is the Algerian revolution.’

Bankruptcy of the post-colonial ruling elites

Unfortunately, the Algerian revolution and its attempt to break from the imperialist-capitalist system was defeated, both by counter-revolutionary forces and by its own contradictions. The revolution harboured the seeds of its own failure from the start: it was a top-down, authoritarian, and highly bureaucratic project (albeit with some redistributive aspects that improved people’s lives in the reforms carried out in the first years of independence).

However, the creative experiences of workers’ initiatives and self-management of the 1960s and 1970s were undermined by a paralyzing state bureaucracy that failed to genuinely involve workers in the control of the processes of production. This lack of democracy was connected with the ascendancy of a comprador bourgeoisie that was hostile to socialism, workers control and staunchly opposed to genuine land reform.

By the 1980s, the global neoliberal counter-revolution was the nail in the coffin and ushered in an age of deindustrialization and pro-market policies in Algeria, at the expense of the popular classes. The dignitaries of the new neoliberal orthodoxy declared that everything was for sale and opened the way for mass privatization.

Fanon’s work still bears a prophetic power as an accurate description of what happened in Algeria and elsewhere in the Global South. Fanon foretold the bankruptcy and sterility of national bourgeoisies in Africa and the Middle East today. A ‘profiteering caste’, he wrote, that tended to replace the colonial ruling class with a new class-based system replicating the old structures of exploitation and oppression.

By the 1980s, the Algerian national bourgeoisie had dispensed with popular legitimacy, turned its back on the realities of poverty and underdevelopment. In Fanon’s terms, this parasitic and unproductive bourgeoisie (both civilian and military) was the greatest threat to the sovereignty of the nation. In Algeria, this class was closely connected to the ruling party, the FLN, and renounced the autonomous development initiated in the 1960s and offered one concession after another for privatizations and projects that would undermine the country’s sovereignty and endanger its population and environment — the exploitation of shale gas and offshore resources being just one example.

Today, Algeria – but also Tunisia, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, Gabon, Angola and South Africa, among others – follows the dictates of the new instruments of imperialism such as the IMF, the World Bank and negotiate entry into the World Trade Organisation. Some African countries continue to use the CFA franc (renamed Eco in December 2019), a currency inherited from colonialism and still under the control of the French Treasury.

Fanon predicted this behaviour of the national bourgeoisie when he noted that its mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation but rather consists of ‘being the transmission line between the nation and capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the masque of neo-colonialism.’ Fanon’s analysis of the class basis of independence speaks to the contemporary postcolonial reality, a reality shaped by a national bourgeoisie ‘unabashedly…anti-national,’ opting he added, for the path of a conventional bourgeoisie, ‘a bourgeoisie which is stupidly, contemptibly and cynically bourgeois.’

Fanon also noted in 1961 the international division of labour, where we Africans ‘still export raw materials and continue being Europe’s small farmers who specialise in unfinished products.’ Algeria remains in a extractivist model of development where profits are accumulated in the hands of a foreign-backed minority at the expense of dispossession of the majority.

The Hirak and the new Algerian revolution

Fanon alerted us sixty years ago that the enrichment of this ‘profiteering caste’ will be accompanied by ‘a decisive awakening on the part of the people and a growing awareness that promised stormy days to come.’ In 2019 Algerians shattered the wall of fear and broke from a process that had infantilised and dazed them for decades. They erupted onto the political scene, discovered their political will and began again to make history.

Since 22 February 2019, millions of people, young and old, men and women from different social classes rose in a momentous rebellion. Historic Friday marches, followed by protests in professional sectors, united people in their rejection of the ruling system and their demands of radical democratic change. ‘They must all go!’ (Yetnahaw ga’), ‘The country is ours and we’ll do what we wish’ (Lablad abladna oundirou rayna), became two emblematic slogans of the uprising, symbolising the radical evolution of a popular movement (Al Hirak Acha’bi). The uprising was triggered by the incumbent president Bouteflika’s announcement that he would run for a fifth term despite suffering from aphasia and being absent from public life.

The movement (Hirak) is unique in its scale, peaceful character, national spread – including the marginalised south, and participation of women and young people, who constitute the majority of Algeria’s population. The extent of popular mobilisation has not been seen since 1962, when Algerians went to the streets to celebrate their hard-won independence from France.

The popular classes have affirmed their role as agents in their own destiny. We can use Fanon’s exact words to describe this phenomenon: ‘The thesis that men change at the same time that they change the world has never been as manifest as it is now in Algeria. This trial of strength not only remodels the consciousness that man has of himself, and of his former dominators or of the world, at last within his reach. The struggle at different levels renews the symbols, the myths, the beliefs, the emotional responsiveness of the people. We witness in Algeria man’s reassertion of his capacity to progress.’

The Hirak succeeded in unravelling the webs of deceit that were deployed by the ruling class and its propaganda machine. Moreover, the evolution of its slogans, chants, and forms of resistance, is demonstrative of processes of politicisation and popular education. The re-appropriation of public spaces created a kind of an agora where people discuss, debate, exchange views, talk strategy and perspectives, criticize each other or simply express themselves in many ways including through art and music. This has opened new horizons for resisting and building together.

Cultural production also took on another meaning because it was associated with liberation and seen as a form of political action and solidarity. Far from the folkloric and sterile productions under the suffocating patronage of authoritarian elites, we have seen instead a culture that speaks to the people and advances their resistance and struggles through poetry, music, theatre, cartoons, and street-art. Again, we see Fanon’s insights in his theorisation of culture as a form of political action: ‘A national culture is not a folklore, nor an abstract populism that believes it can discover the people’s true nature. It is not made up of the inert dregs of gratuitous actions, that is to say actions which are less and less attached to the ever-present reality of the people.’

The struggle of decolonisation continues

Leaving aside largely semantic arguments around whether it is a movement, uprising, revolt or a revolution, one can say for certain that what is taking place in Algeria today is a transformative process, pregnant with emancipatory potential. The evolution of the movement and its demands specifically around ‘independence’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘an end to the pillage of the country’s resources’ are fertile ground for anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and even ecological ideas.

Algerians are making a direct link between their current struggle and the anti-French colonial resistance in the 1950s, seeing their efforts as the continuation of decolonisation. When chanting ‘Generals to the dustbin and Algeria will be independent’, they are laying bare the vacuous official narrative around the glorious revolution and revealing that it has been shamelessly used to pursue personal enrichment. We see a second Fanonian moment where people expose the neo-colonial situation and emphasise one unique characteristic of their uprising: its rootedness in the anti-colonial struggle against the French.

Slogans and chants have captured this desire and made references to anti-colonial war veterans such as Ali La Pointe, Amirouche, Ben Mhidi and Abane: ‘Oh Ali [la pointe] your descendants will never stop until they wrench their freedom!’ and ‘We are the descendants of Amirouche and we will never go back!’

The struggle of decolonisation is being given a new lease of life as Algerians lay claim to the popular and economic sovereignty that was denied to them when formal independence was achieved in 1962. In Fanon’s prophetic words: ‘The people who at the beginning of the struggle had adopted the primitive Manichaeism of the settler – Blacks and Whites, Arabs and Christians – realise as they go along that it sometimes happens that you get Blacks who are whiter than the whites and the hope of an independent nation does not always tempt certain strata of the populations to give up their interests or privileges.’

This two-part long read is an extract from a chapter in a forthcoming book Fanon Today: The Revolt and Reason of the Wretched of the Earth (edited by Nigel Gibson, Daraja Press 2021).

Hamza Hamouchene is an Algerian researcher-activist and commentator, he works as the North Africa Programme Coordinator for the Transnational Institute (TNI).

Featured Photograph: Frantz Fanon speaking at the All African People’s Conference (AAPC), which was held in Accra, Ghana, between 5 and 13 December 1958.

Insurgency in Cabo Delgado: capitalist penetration in the periphery of the periphery

By
ROAPE
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The insurgency in northern Mozambique is threatening a multi-billion investment in natural gas production. Sara Stevano and Helena Pérez Niño explain how the violence in northern Cabo Delgado is part of a longer script of capitalist penetration into periphery regions.

By Sara Stevano and Helena Pérez Niño

Late in 2017 an insurgent movement emerged in northern Mozambique led by a group locally referred to as ‘Al-Shabaab’. At the beginning the group attacked police stations and government buildings, but thereafter the group targeted civilians and managed to occupy larger towns. At the time of writing it is estimated that some 2,800 have been killed and 700,000 have been forcibly displaced. The attacks have escalated and by March 2021, the insurgency marched on Palma, where a large project for the extraction of gas is being developed.

Cabo Delgado, the northernmost province of Mozambique, previously unknown to most outside the region, is now attracting international attention due to the escalating insurgency that is threatening the multi-billion investment in natural gas production. In this crisis, as in many others, media coverage and the international community’s need to make sense of the violence has led to accounts that are superficial and often incomplete: inordinately focused on the plight of expatriates, the nationality of the combatants and the implications for foreign investment while comparatively clumsy in attempts to report on the impact on the local society and economy, as most starkly demonstrated in reports on the most recent attack on the town of Palma (see, for example, this article in the Guardian and this article in the Financial Times).

As researchers of Mozambique but not researchers of the conflict, we argue that, if we are to understand this conflict, the analysis needs reframing.[1] Approaching the mega-projects and the insurgency using only the rubrics of extractivism and humanitarian crisis sheds light on the visible tip of the iceberg but conceals their impacts on vast networks of production and reproduction that sustain the whole region. A view of this complexity illuminates’ aspects of the marginalisation, fragility and humanity that are key to capture the broader implications of dramatic change in the region.

Historical, spatial and political divides

The northern districts of Cabo Delgado have only recently come to the attention of wider publics with the discovery of the gas deposits and the abrupt transition from remote borderland to frenzied epicenter of investment and speculation. The transition has been disorienting for all parties involved. The most recent crisis is a manifestation of stark historical divides that recent analysis and coverage gloss over or completely disregard.

International headlines refer to violence in Cabo Delgado, but this falls short of levels of precision required to account for a province that is roughly the size of Austria. A better account of the conflict calls for a more precise distinction between the northern and coastal districts most directly affected (Muidumbe, Mocimboa da Praia, Macomia, Nangade, Quissanga, Palma); neighbouring districts like Mueda, Meluco and Ancuabe, where the violence has been less frequent but has nonetheless disrupted everyday lives and livelihoods; and the southern districts including Pemba, the provincial capital.[2] The distinction is significant: it makes visible a long standing North-South divide in the province, note in the way the military response has been partially about insulating Pemba, which is compounded by another divide between southern, central and northern Mozambique. By virtue of the remote location of northern Cabo Delgado in relation to Maputo – the southernmost site of power – northern Cabo Delgado’s connections to the rest of Mozambique have been sporadic in terms of migration patterns, trading routes and political ascendancy.

Paradoxically the region’s remote location made the northern districts of Cabo Delgado, home to the Maconde people, an ideal launching pad for the liberation struggle against Portuguese colonial rule from the 1960s and a refuge for Frelimo insurgents. The participation of the Maconde people in the struggle elevated Cabo Delgado to a symbolic position in the national imaginary and the province remains a Frelimo stronghold (see West, 2000; Israel, 2006). Cabo Delgado’s symbolic centrality in the narratives of liberation is at odds with its actual political and economic marginalization (see also Bonate, 2013).This marginalisation was suddenly confronted with the gas developments and is part and parcel of the present crisis. The explosion of extractive interests took place in Cabo Delgado, the province with the highest levels of chronic malnutrition, very high levels of income poverty and among the lowest levels of private investment in the country.

Most of the media coverage is prominently missing these divides, when not unwittingly contributing to reproducing them: there is a politics of who is a subject of military protection (foreigners, employees of the gas projects) that runs parallel to the politics of media concern; there is a politics of what is to be protected (infrastructure and investment) that belies an inability by the state, the military and the media to account for, report about and to respond to the demands for protection of local populations and local economies.

Capitalist penetration of the extreme periphery

At the core of the recent socio-economic change in Cabo Delgado is the juxtaposition of two wildly different political economies: on the one hand, large groups of Mozambicans living at the margins of capital accumulation and, on the other hand, one of the largest extractive projects in development in the continent. Such a dissonant encounter is most strident in the areas under development around Palma where local livelihoods are precarious and largely bypassed by the promise of new riches. It is the meeting of an extreme periphery with extractivism incarnate.

Coverage of the conflict in Cabo Delgado would have us believe that LNG investments take place in no man’s land, but in fact the advent of Oil and Gas majors and an array of other investors happens side-by-side with a local economy shaped by long-term processes and everyday forms of production, reproduction and exchange. The political economy of Cabo Delgado is based on an array of different livelihoods. A large group of socially differentiated agricultural producers engaging in small-scale farming for consumption and sale, whose insertion in local markets is a legacy of changes triggered by the colonial introduction of forced cotton farming, and chibalo (forced labour) (see Isaacman, 1982) Cashew production remains another important source of household income in the northern districts and depending on the location, people may have access to income from growing sesame, artisanal fisheries or service jobs associated with the high-end tourism sector on the Quirimbas archipelago. Extraction of timber, gemstones and minerals involves mostly foreign investors but generates few jobs for locals. In synthesis, economic activity in Cabo Delgado revolves around pockets of export agriculture, tourism enterprises and extractive mega projects amidst vast informal and localised labour markets.

Class differentiation in northern Cabo Delgado is largely determined by occupation and whether or not people have access to regular earnings. These dynamics are compounded by the relative ability to tap on relations of mutuality and kinship. Access to regular incomes is uncommon and mostly associated with being employed in the public sector. Less than  5% of the population has this kind of steady income even in the larger towns in northern districts.[3] On the contrary there are more people receiving veteran pensions due to the direct participation of the Maconde people in the liberation struggle (see Feijó, 2020; Stevano, 2021).[4] The pension scheme works as a form of social protection used by the state to maintain its influence and legitimacy among the Maconde. However, it also contributes to social differentiation, as veterans and traders, i.e. those with more regular income, tend to be hirers of casual and seasonal (agricultural) wage workers. Most households in northern Cabo Delgado engage in casual piece-rate wage work (kibarua). The divide between labour hirers and labour sellers marks the main class difference in contemporary Cabo Delgado. Given this occupational multiplicity and class differentiation the idea of mega investment projects occurring in lands occupied by a homogenous peasantry could not be further from reality. Attempts to understand the challenges of development in Cabo Delgado need to acknowledge this complexity.

Most people in Cabo Delgado make a living by combining forms of work, petty trade, limited commodity production and all forms of reproductive work. This complexity is not captured in official statistics and escapes many observers. The relentless fragmentation of subsistence has forced many to engage in various, often survivalist occupations, including petty smuggling in some cases. And although having access to land is not in itself sufficient to make a living, it remains a necessary condition for virtually everyone in the province. For one thing, a condition for the  existence of these livelihoods is the ability of people to move around cobbling together different sources of income, often within the province, but also beyond: combining highland and lowland farming in Mueda; trading across the border or supplying long distance commercial linkages in Nangade and Mocimboa.[5] Maintaining key social relations also requires freedom of movement to care for ailing or old family members or to help out during peak labour periods. These networks of protection are critical in the context of minimal public provisioning. In this context, the internal displacement of at least 700,000 people as a consequence of the violence raises critical questions in humanitarian terms but also in relation to the disruption of production and social reproduction in the province.

Enclave extractivism

Accounts of the crisis that are oblivious to these productive and reproductive dynamics are missing how the violence in northern Cabo Delgado is part of the longer script of capitalist penetration into periphery regions. This is a centuries-old process in Southern Africa, taking at times the form of the slow commodification of subsistence and other times the flash flood development of speculative and extractive projects. The commodification of labour, with its violent roots in chibalo, advanced slow commodification through the 19th and 20th century. But as capital has acquired the ability to penetrate the countryside (as opposed to simply extracting forced and mobile labour power) Mozambique’s post conflict decades have been characterised by developments of the second type, massive investment initiatives, ‘Os Megaprojectos’, that unleash financial speculation; changes in the use of land; at times forced evictions, but never before these levels of conflict. The recent history of Mozambique charts the ebbs and flows of Mozal (Aluminium smelter), Moatize (Coal) and many others, against the background of the political economy of 21st century Mozambique and the inability and unwillingness of the groups in power to make such developments conditional on the creation of any meaningful linkage to the domestic economy via employment, fiscal revenue, local content or effects on domestic demand (Castel-Branco, 2002 and 2014).

If most of these projects can be characterized as enclave economies, in the case of the LNG developments in northern Cabo Delgado these dynamics are amplified: the gas deposits are off-shore, and extraction proper will not force investors into rounds of negotiation with local communities. Elsewhere, these conflicts have created some pressure for a national reckoning and some debates about Mozambique’s long-term strategy. But here, the on-shore infrastructure under construction in the Afungi peninsula, just south of Palma, has been cordoned-off. There is a tenuous link between the local economy and the multibillion LNG project: a novelty that is patently there but out of everybody’s reach. If the recent history of extractive developments in the region is a guide to go by, there will likely be no jobs or local benefits beyond the façade of Cooperate Social Responsibility (CSR) interventions that are a mockery of any serious expectation of development; and there is no indication that the revenue generated by the extraction of gas will be used to transform the structure of the Mozambican economy and there is good cause to distrust the prospects of a strategy based on fossil fuel, a technology that should be on its way out. This is probably as evident to local dwellers as it is to distant observers.

The impacts of the ongoing conflict cannot only be accounted for in terms of death and displacement but should also encompass the lost livelihoods and disrupted economies. Only a solid explanation of this violence, one rooted in an awareness of this history, spatiality and political economy can hope to turn the tides of what is already shaping to be one of Africa’s largest extractive failures, with all resources exported and no transformation on the ground.

Sara Stevano is a Lecturer in Economics at SOAS University of London. Her research focuses on the political economy of production and reproduction and she has conducted research on food, work and gender in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique.

Helena Pérez Niño is a Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Cambridge. She works on dynamics of agrarian change and structural transformation and has conducted research on contract farming in Tete, Mozambique.

Featured Photograph: Bridge over Rio Lúrio, between Nampula and Cabo Delgado provinces, Mozambique (F Mira, 4 August 2009).

Notes

[1] For research on the conflict see work by Liazzat Bonate, Sérgio Chichava, João Feijó, Salvador Forquilha, Eric Morier-Genoud and João Pereira, among others.

[2] See Cabo Ligado data and OCHA Mozambique Access Snapshot (February 2021).

[3] See Ministério da Administração Estatal, República de Moçambique. (2005). Perfil do Distrito de Mocimboa da Praia/Perfil do Distrito de Nangade. Ministério da Administração Estatal, República de Moçambique. (2014). Perfil do Distrito de Mocimboa da Praia/Perfil do Distrito de Palma.

[4] In 1994, President Chissano introduced a pension scheme to recognise the veterans’ contributions to Mozambican independence.

[5] See: Ministério da Administração Estatal, República de Moçambique. (2005). Perfil do Distrito de Mocimboa da Praia/Perfil do Distrito de Nangade. Ministério da Administração Estatal, República de Moçambique. (2014). Perfil do Distrito de Mocimboa da Praia/Perfil do Distrito de Palma.

Fight the Fire

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ROAPE
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ROAPE’s Janet Bujra reviews a major new book on climate change. Jonathan Neale’s book, Fight the Fire: Green New Deal and Climate Jobs, goes beyond the symptoms of climate change and focusses on the causes. These are to be found in the scientific facts, but equally relevant, the social relations of globalizing capitalism. Neale calls for a global mass movement that can confront the forces that are destroying the planet.

By Janet Bujra

It is easy to succumb to a sense of defeatism and despair when faced by a rising tide of unbearable news about the impending climate crisis. Many of us shut down, believing it will not affect us personally, or become cynical at the unlikely prospects of the powerful ever acting decisively to confront it. I counted myself amongst the defeatists and the cynics, even whilst dutifully attending protests where we waved banners and collectively feigned death in Centenary Square in Bradford to bring home the message.

This book has transformed my thinking.

Written by a committed socialist and climate activist, with a powerful analysis framed by radical political economy, Jonathan Neale both informs and inspires, with a realistic assessment of the problem of global warming and of potential solutions.  He argues powerfully that committed and organized collective action is the urgent answer, where democratic forces confront the vast power of vested interests in the status quo.

In Africa we have already seen the insidious effects of climate change, with substantial future impacts anticipated. Increasing desertification and aridity is threatening food supplies and leading to major conflicts over the control of water from depleted rivers. Conversely, major floods and cyclones have killed and displaced thousands, whilst unreliable weather patterns and heat waves threaten human existence and create habitat changes that favour disease-bearing or crop-devastating insects such as mosquitoes and locusts. Although the African continent has contributed the least to causing climate change it is likely to be amongst the worst hit.

A recent report in Le Monde Diplomatique (April 2021) detailed the threat to over 70% of African National Parks from ‘greedy’ multinational oil companies seeking and gaining concessions to explore, drill and frack. It warned of the disastrous impact this will have – on local people forcibly displaced, on wildlife and habitats destroyed and on water polluted. Despite resistance from NGOs and environmentalists, African states are facilitating oil exploration in a bid to top up their depleted reserves and join the ranks of the oil producing countries, even as we know that the profits of oil production feed global corporate accumulation more than local development, and reduce African producers to the status of suppliers of raw materials.

The major issue here, however, is not even mentioned – oil is a fossil fuel feeding the climate crisis. When burnt to produce energy it creates toxic carbon emissions. Neale makes crystal clear that if we are to avoid a cataclysmic future of global warming, we need to ban the use of fossil fuels altogether – oil, gas and coal – and replace them with renewable forms of energy such as wind and solar, as he writes, “The key to stopping climate change will be stopping emissions”. His book demonstrates how this is possible.

This is a book addressed to a general audience, so the style is almost conversational, avoiding jargon and undefined technical vocabulary, whilst also displaying an encyclopaedic grasp of information through an extensive set of appendixed references (no index though!). It engages through a step by step unfolding of a set of meticulously logical arguments and evidence, always taking care to address and deal with objections. A major contribution of the book is its construction of a comprehensive global analysis, showing how all parts of the problem everywhere and their solutions are interconnected. Most importantly Neale goes beyond the symptoms of climate change and focusses on the causes. These are to be found in the scientific facts, but equally relevant, the social relations of globalizing capitalism.  Saving the planet will take more than piecemeal responses, like extracting the methane from sewage for biofuels or setting up a charging system for electric cars. It must address the concentration of economic and political power which stands in the way of a result.

Neale differentiates the two major sources of emissions – carbon (CO2) and methane – and shows how they are generated and how they affect climatic conditions. Secondly, he calculates by how much they could realistically be reduced, using current technology (no hostages to fortune here). He estimates that it would be possible to reduce current emissions by around 70% which would allow us to stay within the 1.5 degree internationally agreed objective for global warming.

Yet achieving this goal will require a complete change in the way that we live our lives. The key transformation here is electrification using renewable energy. Neale spells out the extent to which electrification can be applied – in transport particularly, in construction and manufacturing and in heating and cooling homes. The eventual objective would be a ‘super-grid’ allowing for the evening out of variations in electricity supply and with excess production becoming exportable across the globe. The cost of doing this is considerable and Neale insists that it cannot be done via the market. Markets are efficient in producing profits for private production, not in investing in public services.  It demands public ownership and funding. He notes in passing that Africa has totally inadequate levels of electrification, distributed very unevenly towards urban areas and the more industrialised countries like South Africa and Nigeria.

African development efforts have typically been focused on industrialization, especially manufacturing, but the methods by which this is to be achieved usually depend on building core heavy industry – cement, steel and chemicals – using fossil fuels, some of which are only currently being discovered on the continent – especially natural gas and coal. To give up on this tried and tested path to growth will lead – at least in the short run, to negative economic growth, especially for the poorest parts of the world. Neale is adamant that the most disadvantaged must be offered the prospects of a better, rather than a worse life in this transition. Economic growth must continue, in order to satisfy the needs of the many rather than the few – in jobs, housing and health – but it must be achieved through the use of renewable energy creating a low-carbon world, if we are to avoid climate disaster.

The key, whether in Africa or elsewhere, is to build industries and economies using renewable energy which also create jobs. This is a key tenet of Neale’s argument. Reductions in emissions must go along with the simultaneous and planned generation of ‘climate jobs’ – to design, manufacture, install and operate the infrastructure required. This needs to be done strategically so that communities which were based on mining and processing of fossil fuels are not left stranded and in decline. We saw in the UK in the 1980s how the lack of such planning devastated coal mining communities and the worker solidarities that were built upon them. Such planning should also provide an incentive for those affected to join the struggle against environmental disaster.

It is not only emissions from fossil fuels which will have to be addressed. Forestry and farming account for one-third of total global emissions. And African economies rely more heavily on agriculture than on industry. Here deforestation (given that trees store carbon), rice cultivation and methane from livestock impact the most. Reductions are proposed by Neale which do not have the same potential for job creation as the development of renewables but can still cut emissions. This can be facilitated through changing methods of production. Large-scale industrial farming is less effective here than small-holder production. Cutting the use of fertilisers, encouraging the consumption of meat which does not produce as much methane (chicken and pork, for example), reducing livestock and letting grazing areas revert to natural forest are some of the suggestions. Neale calls it ‘conservation agriculture’ and insists again that it will win over communities to the cause, especially if backed by land reform.

The intellectual rationale for these dramatic changes is laid out impeccably by Neale, but he does not assume that rationality will produce its own effects. There have to be social forces which can carry the necessary transformations into effect.  He has little confidence in current governments and international bodies purporting to bring change, noting that so far they have consistently avoided mandatory cuts in climate emissions. Nor does he have much truck with the plethora of NGOs which have emerged to address the crisis and now dominate the narrative, seeing them as too tied to the current power structures. Given patterns of research patronage, it is difficult even for scientists to remain independent of vested interests. But the main opposition to the radical transformation required to fight climate change are the vested interests of ‘carbon capitalism’ – those who make profits out of the exploitation of fossil fuels, together with the political class which fronts their toxic power. His response is clear: only a global mass movement can confront such a phalanx of power, and “we need to replace the current leaders and rulers of the world and we need to do so quickly”.  Rebellion is justifiable where the future of humanity is at stake.

The over-riding debate here is about the cost of the dramatic changes necessary.  Neale estimates that the global cost of a climate change programme would be $4trillion a year. He argues that the cost can be covered by a mixture of more progressive taxation, cutting tax evasion and quantitative easing – obviously anathema to the richest and threatening to the electoral prospects of those in power. However, history shows that governments can find money when they need to: after the Great Depression of the 1920s-30s, World War II, the global financial crash of 2008, and for pandemics like Covid. The climate jobs programme would also yield returns – the workers employed would receive wages and pay taxes, consumers would purchase the electricity, and because the programme would be delivered by public bodies (Neale suggests a national Climate Service in each country) the drain of profits would be eliminated.

Progressive climate change policies in one country will not prevent the climate crisis – there needs to be a global movement of change, given the interconnectedness of the world’s economy. All regions contribute to the problem though in different ways. The US and China are the heaviest contributors to global emissions – one a capitalist economy in decline which resists political regulation for the public good, the other an authoritarian communist state industrializing via traditional high carbon methods of production.

The same globalizing capitalist pressures to industrialise for economic growth and accumulation are raising emissions everywhere and generating the same catastrophic spectre of disaster. To address this will “require the mother of all political struggles and will not happen without solidarity between mass movements in the North and the South”.  How can this be achieved?

For Neale it is those who will suffer the most from climate disaster who have the most to gain from fighting it – the most impoverished and exploited, the workers of the world (84% of them in the Global South, especially China and India) and especially those most organized to do so through trade unions. He is aware that trade unions have conflicting interests in this struggle and may on occasion take reactionary positions. Moreover, those who resist the power of carbon capital will face concerted suppression, enduring brutality, imprisonment, even death.

Neale’s optimism that it is possible to fight and win in the struggle against global warming is backed by his examples where the oppressed have resisted successfully. He names the campaign in South Africa for free HIV/AIDS drugs and the international solidarity that led it eventually to succeed: “millions upon millions of people were given life because those in grave danger had organized and fought”.  And history shows that people do resist oppression: currently there are mass uprisings across the world, beginning with the Arab Spring and stretching from Hong Kong, to Belarus, Lebanon, Chile, India, Sudan and many others. Neale notes their impact in unsettling and even overthrowing regimes, but also the weakness of their organizational capacity to build alternative futures. More focused movements like Black Lives Matter or Me Too demonstrate the potential force of single issue campaigns – and here Extinction Rebellion is on target for the climate crisis. Neale celebrates the way in which women and youth have become noticeably more radical in recent years but notes that their radicalism does not embrace socialist alternatives. In this struggle the Left has also been guilty of defeatism and of “hopeless rage … that works against change”.

At this point Neale’s optimism seems like wishful thinking. Clearly there is not yet the solid base for a full-frontal international resistance movement against carbon capital. However, giving up is not an option: “it never makes sense to stop trying to limit the damage”. The key is to understand how the social stasis of inequality is transformed into resistance and active and organized opposition. Where climate change is concerned it will first be events – the devastating series of failed harvests, the rising numbers of children dying of pollution in the air of our big cities, even the primroses that flower at Christmas. But it will also be the inspiration of those who make sense of these events and build them into a bigger picture and act to link the angry voices into a movement. And here Neale is required reading.

Janet Bujra is a longstanding member of the Review of African Political Economy, a feminist, socialist and researcher.

Jonathan Neale’s Fight the fire: Green New Deal and Climate Jobs is published jointly by Resistance Books, London; The Ecologist, Devon; Alternative Information and Development Centre, Cape Town; International Institute for Research and Education, Amsterdam. The book is free to download, read and print here.

Featured Photograph: School students march during the Global Climate Strike in Cape Town, South Africa (20 September 2019).

In their own words: African women speak

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ROAPE
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Introducing a new book on African woman, Zainab Haruna argues the collection is the first attempt to chronicle the diverse perspectives and experiences of African women. Haruna asks what does liberation for the African woman look like?

By Zainab Haruna

In discussing feminist ideals, African Feminist thought, and theories occupy an important space to ensure that issues affecting African women, both within and outside the African continent, are adequately addressed and discussed. Too often, the lived experiences of African women are spoken about authoritatively by people other than themselves, thus relegating African women to the role of spectators in their own life stories. The question then becomes, “what does liberation for the African woman look like to the African woman?”

In an exciting new collection of woman’s voices, which delves into the varied and complex perspectives and interpretations of feminism and gender equality for African women, the In Her Words anthology (which can be downloaded for free) is a collection of 15 stories by African women from 7 countries which beautifully upholds the ideals of the African Feminist Charter, underscoring the importance of diversity, inclusion, plurality and individual interpretation of feminist ideologies by African women for African women. The anthology responds to the query of how young African women navigate the world today amidst the intersection of the different aspects of their identity – nationality, marriage, religion, age, wealth, ethnicity, profession, among others, intersect daily with gender to shape the actual lived experiences of millions of women across the African continent.

The stories and essays in the collection take on different perspectives from intellectual work on feminist theories, from lived experiences of gender-based violence, to the intersection of identity, faith, marriage, and the evolution of feminist ideals. They query the validity of age old, accepted customs and social norms, gendered barriers that limit access to education, healthcare and legal representation, and violence against women which continues to result in the deaths of thousands of women every year. Alongside the questions posed are also proposals for undoing oppressive systems and cultures, navigating the terrain, and building adequate structures that help African girls and women to achieve their full potential. The collection is a first attempt to chronicle the diverse perspectives and experiences of African women on the topics of gender equality and feminism.

Collectively, the voices chronicled in these essays are a potpourri for dismantling external gazes that do not centre the narrative of African women on African women themselves. It also looks at shades and nuances of the conversation on feminism and feminist practice on the continent. It speaks on the perspective of different women, those who continue to work to advance the goals of equality while rejecting the label of “feminist” in their practice and those who embrace the label as activists and storytellers in their work. It looks at lineages of women, espousing the strong connections that hold women together across generations and further entrenching the knowledge that feminism has always been African from Huda Sharaawi founding the first national feminist movement of Egypt in 1923 to Margaret Ekpo ensuring the assimilation of women into Nigeria’s political landscape in 1959 and further beyond.

The contributors speak strongly in their own words, contextualising definitions of representation, inclusion, access, freedoms, and dignity. In her essay titled “On Being Feminist but not Anti-Men”, Priscilla Sena Bretuo challenges the linearity of mainstream feminist thought and practice explaining that the modern ideals of feminism are rooted in western theorisations. She argues that the core of feminism should remain on individual agency and the elimination of inequalities and harmful social practices which subjugate both men and women to arrive at the ultimate goal of equality and justice.

Taking an opposing stance, Makalay Saidiatu Sonda argues in “Africans and Feminism: Beyond the Donor Funds”, that feminism remains fundamentally an African concept that identifies and recognises the strength, capacity, and potential of the African woman. In her words, Makalay emphasised that, ’Our ancestors, the women of time past, ventured out, took up challenges and conquered. They ruled kingdoms, protected their lands, and were many things in addition to being mothers, wives, and daughters. History teaches us that African women have always been capable and remarkable.’ Her essay is a call to Africans to take a stance and prioritise the freedoms of women on the continent as she does in her work of ensuring access to education for young girls in Sierra Leone.

Hauwa Shaffii’s essay, “When we talk of freedom”, explores the concept of freedom and what that could mean subjectively for all women in general and Muslim women in particular. Her unpacking of the non-Muslim gaze through which issues related to Islam and Muslim women are often viewed shines a light on a key interpretation bias that is encountered everyday not just on the streets of Nigeria, but across the world.

The denial of women’s fundamental rights in marriage, a blended outcome from a merger of cultural practices and a misinterpretation of Islamic stipulations which are then firmly positioned as Islamic injunctions on Muslim women, is a common practice in Northern Nigeria. This phenomenon is what Nana Sule’s essay “Walking this path” investigates as she delves into the intersection of religion, marriage and rights of women. Her essay draws on her personal experience to investigate the rights of a Muslim woman in marriage as supported by the provisions of Islam.

Gendered roles in culture and the ways in which these subjugate girls in Senegal is the core tenet of Sokhna Mbathio Thiaw’s “Equality in Senegal: a dream or an eternal quest” essay. Like other poor West African countries, girl child education in Senegal suffers as girls continue to drop out of school to help parents with domestic chores or forced into early marriage. Sokhna uses her essay as a lens to explore the trajectory of the lives of many Senegalese women as they are forced to remain in poverty due to lack of education and skills. How does an illiterate, poor girl, forced into an early marriage and unpaid domestic labour break the cycle of poverty for herself and her children?

However, as Ojonwa Miachi submits in her essay, societal expectations on gendered roles do not just have a negative effect on women; there are consequences for men too. The expectation that men should be sole providers has a documented negative impact on the health of men, as evidenced by key indicators on men’s health and wellbeing.

The devolution of power within the family unit, and the creative ways it robs girls of any decision-making authority is the subject of Linda Tusiime’s interrogation in her story titled, “And so it goes”. The automatic assumption of male sons as the heir when daughters are equally capable is vested deeply in cultural norms that have not been adequately addressed in modern African societies. The notion that a woman would belong to her husband after marriage which makes her an unsuitable candidate for the position of heir does not hold true for men. This archaic notion is evidently flawed, as the same women are somehow expected to support the family in situations when the family business, which they were ruled out of leading, collapses. These, and other focal points, can be found in Tusiime’s essay, reflecting limitations placed on the ambitions and expressions of young girls in Uganda.

Borso Tall comes from a family of enlightened matriarchs and her life has been influenced by these strong matrilineal forces. Her essay delves into this history following the migration of members of her family and how the knowledge of equality was handed down from mother to daughter almost like an inheritance or a rite of passage and a protest against wildly patriarchal societies. Essentially, it emphasised the power of protest in storytelling and the body of knowledge enfolded and distributed informally through this practice.

The stories from the different essays in the anthology hold convergent and divergent lines for women across the continent. For instance, some of the experiences and realities of Senegalese women might echo the realities of women living in rural Ghana while some of them might be alien experiences. It underscores the importance of understanding the complexity in the experiences of women and the need to avoid broad brush strokes in the telling of African women’s stories. The importance of querying accepted normative frameworks as Victoria Malowa focuses on in her essay cannot be over-emphasised. There is an urgent need to conceptualise, while refraining from generalising the individual and exceptionalising the general.

As the world seems to lurch through multiple and related crises, it becomes increasingly pertinent that platforms and spaces be created or expanded for marginalised voices and people. There is a need to identify and understand our gaps in knowledge. It is difficult to engage appropriately with issues that we have no experience about or limited knowledge on African feminism. The ultimate default which is often erroneous is to assume that the challenges of women are identical and to pose linear solutions to address them. What better way to understand the realities, triumphs, and challenges of African women and their liberation than to listen to them tell it, in their own words.

Zainab Haruna has worked in different capacities to address a variety of challenges including poverty, education, job creation, corruption and service delivery issues in Nigeria. Haruna is one of the coordinators of the collection of essays, In her words: African women’s perspectives on gender equality –  compiled by, Tawakalit Kareem, Zainab Haruna, Joy Sani, Isatou Jallow and Omolayo Nkem Ojo.

Featured photograph: The woman in the image has written “Just Fall “ on her arm, during the revolution that removed president Al  Bashir in Sudan at the time of the Khartoum sit-in (Ola A. Alsheikh, 8 April 2019).

Issa Shivji’s revolutionary conception of human rights

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ROAPE
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Paul O’Connell celebrates Issa Shivji’s pathbreaking 1989 book The Concept of Human Rights in Africa. He praises a book that see the dominant human rights discourse as one of the main elements in the ideological armoury of imperialism. Shivji, he argues, articulated a revolutionary conception of human rights which we must return to.

By Paul O’Connell

Human rights language is ubiquitous today. Starting with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, we have since seen the proliferation of international and regional treaties and monitoring bodies. This gained pace, in particular, with the end of the Cold War and Francis Fukuyama’s putative end of history – with human rights emerging as the ‘post-ideological’ common sense of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.  Precisely because of the very hegemony of human rights talk in the contemporary world, critiques of human rights abound; ranging from the friendly critiques which seek to perfect an otherwise laudable idea and system, to more radical dismissals of human rights as the avatars of neoliberal capitalism and inequality.

There is much value in some of these recent critiques of human rights. It is noteworthy, however, that in a short book written in the late 1980s, the Tanzanian author and academic, Issa Shivji, articulated a critique of human rights that both anticipated many of these more recent critiques and, crucially, remains more incisive and politically relevant than most of them. Although in certain respects it is a work of its time, Shivji’s The Concept of Human Rights in Africa is a critique of human rights that remains relevant for both a research agenda on human rights and radical politics in the 21st century. This review sets out the key elements of Shivji’s account of rights, and the continuing relevance of his work and this book for today.

Shivji begins the book by stating clearly that human rights, or at least what he terms the dominant/liberal conception of human rights, ‘constitutes one of the main elements in the ideological armoury of imperialism’.  As such, Shivji sets out to engage ‘the subject of human rights so as to avoid the pitfalls of a liberal perspective’.In contrast to the claimed neutrality of the dominant discourse, Shivji’s explicit ‘point of departure and reference are the interests of the broad masses of the African people’,  – thus from the outset, Shivji’s account of human rights is both critical and partisan.

Importantly, unlike ‘petty bourgeois radical’ accounts of human rights, which are just another variation on the liberal tradition in the way in which they ‘absolutise the human rights question’, it is not Shivji’s aim or intention to ‘throw away … human rights talk’, but instead to ‘reconstruct … human rights ideology to legitimise and mobilise people’s struggles’. In this latter endeavour we find one of Shivji’s most distinctive contributions: the attempt to articulate what he calls a revolutionary conception of human rights.

The Dominant Account

Shivji’s work then sets out an account of the dominant discourse of human rights in Africa, so that he can then critique it and from that critique begin to articulate an alternate account of human rights. Shivji notes that, in real terms, one ‘can hardly talk of the African philosophy of human rights’, instead the ‘dominant argument … propounded by most of the African and Africanist lawyers and jurists, has proceeded on the basis of an uncritical acceptance of Western liberal conceptions of human rights.

As such, notwithstanding some variations, these dominant accounts suffer from five key deficiencies: (i) they abstract from social history and concrete material conditions; (ii) they divorce the history of human rights from the history of the class struggles that were crucial in shaping them (with natural rights as the sword advancing the class interests of the rising European bourgeois and positively enacted rights as their shield once in power); (iii) they elide the ‘ideologically and politically charged’ nature of debates over the priority of rights (civil and political v social and economic etc.); (iv) ‘the prevailing human rights discourse on Africa has been singularly ‘deficient’ in contextualising the human rights ideology within the imperialist domination of Africa’; and (v) the individualist and ahistorical approach to human rights allows for a focus on discrete episodes or human rights violations, while remaining blind to the structural causes of human rights abuse and denial.

Taken together, the effect of all of these characteristics and deficiencies of the dominant discourse contributes to ‘the production and reproduction of a human rights ideology which objectively buttresses the imperialist oppression of Africa on the one hand, and the authoritarian/military domination of its people on the other’. As such, Shivji argues that human rights and human rights discourse, in their dominant rendering, are a barrier to the democratic revolution necessary for the fundamental transformation of Africa.

Human Rights and Struggle

Shivji, however, does not stop with critique – cognisant of the important role human rights (in their natural rights rendering) played in mobilising the earlier bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the ideological cachet of human rights in the present, Shivji insists that ‘there is a need to build a new perspective of human rights in Africa’. At this point, Shivji shows an acute awareness of the need to connect theory with practice, noting that ‘this reconceptualisation is obviously a process involving constant interaction between the struggles of the African people and activists’.

So, while it is not possible to articulate a full blown reconceptualisation of human rights ‘at a stroke’, the preceding critique of the dominant discourse ‘provides some elements or building blocks for beginning to erect a new perspective’. Central to Shivji’s critique of the dominant human rights discourse is that it divorces human rights from concrete history, the role of imperialism and from the masses of African people as active subjects in their own life and history.

The central elements for Shivji’s rethinking of human rights flow directly from this – as such he identifies three key elements that must inform a revolutionary reconceptualisation of human rights in Africa. The first is that any account or theory must be ‘historically situated’ and grounded in a concrete analysis of the conjuncture, in the context of Africa this must emphasise that ‘imperialist domination of Africa, from colonial to neocolonial forms, constitutes the main point of departure for understanding the conditions of the African masses’. A new theory of human rights must ‘be thoroughly anti-imperialist, thoroughly democratic and unreservedly in the interest of the ‘people’ (understood here as the mass of workers and peasants).

The second key element of such a theory is that it must stress the centrality of class struggle in shaping and conceptualising human rights, as Shivji puts it:

the human rights ideology has to be appropriated in the interest of the people to play a mobilising role in their struggle against imperialism and compradorial classes and their state. Therefore, the new perspective must distance itself openly from imperialist ideology of human rights at the international level and cultural-chauvinist/developmentalist ideology of the compradorial classes, at the national level. This is the second element or building block in the new perspective.

This latter point is crucial to Shivji’s account, as he understands that the contradictory role that human rights and human rights talk has played in the past (both subverting and legitimating the status quo) is the product not of unresolved intellectual abstraction, but the concrete product of class struggles.

The third element of Shivji’s reconceptualisation of human rights is an insistence that ‘new conceptualisation must clearly break from both the metaphysics of natural law as well as the logical formalism and legalism of positive law. It must be rooted in the perspective of class struggle’. This implies that rights, rooted in struggle and a revolutionary perspective, would not be primarily conceived as individual rights, but as collective rights of peoples; rights are not primarily conceived as legal entitlements, but ‘as a means of struggle, ‘right’ is therefore not a standard granted as charity from above but a standard-bearer around which people rally for struggle from below’; all of this, in turn, transforms the vocabulary of human rights so that:

one does not simply sympathise with the ‘victims’ of human rights violations and beg the ‘violators’ to mend their ways in numerous catalogued episodes of violations; rather one joins the oppressed/exploited/dominated or ruled against the oppressors/exploiters/dominant and ruling to expose and resist, with a view ultimately to overcome, the situation which generates human rights violations.

In line with Marx’s view of the role of critique being to find the kernel of the new in the old Shivji’s reconceptualisation of human rights does not ‘begin from a clean slate’, but instead begins to sketch the elements of the new from his critique of the old.

Another Way

Importantly, Shivji also illustrates that this theoretical difference is present in concrete terms in the contrast between the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights, which for Shivji suffers from all of the maladies of the dominant account, with its ‘neo-colonialist statist disposition’, developmentalism and obeisance to a fictive international cooperation. In stark contrast, Shivji invokes the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples (or Algiers Declaration) of 1976, a document which is avowedly anti-imperialist and centred on the collective rights of oppressed peoples.

The Preamble to the Algiers Declaration, which Shivji quotes approvingly, recognises from the outset the ‘new forms of imperialism’ that have evolved to oppress and subjugate the peoples of the world, thus fundamentally undermining human rights. It sets itself against imperialism in all its forms, and provides support for ‘all those who, throughout the world, are fighting the great battle, at times through armed struggle, for the freedom of all peoples’, with the hope that people will ‘find in this Declaration the assurance of the legitimacy of their struggle’.

Whereas the African Charter provides firm protection to private property, and in this way undercuts many of the other rights proclaimed in it as well as legitimating imperial relations of exploitation, the Algiers Declaration provides no such protection. This is crucially important, as Shivji notes, because a ‘careful reading of its provisions shows that it is clearly aware that private property, in this case particularly imperialist property, lies behind the system of underdevelopment and domination in the Third World’.

In its explicit anti-imperialism, its rejection of the centrality of private property (the fundamental right par excellence of the bourgeoisie) and its foregrounding of the rights of collectives in struggle, the Algiers Declaration provides a concrete illustration of Shivji’s revolutionary and struggle centred reconceptualisation of human rights. As Shivji notes, the subsequent neglect of the Declaration speaks to the persistent ideological biases of human rights discourse rooted in the hegemony of imperialist ideology. In the more than thirty years since Shivji produced this book the Algiers Declaration has remained a more or less forgotten moment in the history of anti-imperialist and radical critiques of imperialism and human rights, whereas the African Charter system has consolidated itself.

Shivji’s Critique Today

As noted at the outset, critiques of human rights are commonplace today. Few, however, have the incisiveness or political relevance of the critique Shivji outlined in 1989. With a very few exceptions, the most notable being Radha D’Souza’s excellent recent book, few critiques of human rights seriously understand or attempt to engage with imperialism in any meaningful sense. Others are wrapped up in the critique of human rights as an idea, traversing the interesting terrain of intellectual history, but ending in political immobilisation and quietism.

In contrast, Shivji’s account foregrounds class antagonisms and class struggle in both how we understand the development and place of human rights in the world today, and how we might engage with human rights in movements for fundamental change. Imperialism remains the defining feature of our world system, so when thinking about human rights it is crucial to avoid the pitfalls of abstraction, in its various forms, and foreground the role of contemporary imperialism in both reproducing human rights ideology, and structurally undermining the possibility of human rights protection – Shivji’s work provides an important lodestar and entry point in this regard.Much like the Algiers Declaration, Shivji’s work has not received the attention that it merits. This is no doubt in part due to the very relationships of imperial and neo-colonial hierarchy that Shivji himself identified, but it is also because Shivji’s critique of human rights and attempt to reconceptualise human rights in the service of revolutionary struggles, is far less palatable than the petty bourgeois and pseudo radical critiques that leave the essence of imperialism and class struggle untouched.

His critique of human rights remains incisive and relevant, both in the context of the continued imperial plundering of Africa and in light of the various social movements, such as Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa, that are engaging with human rights in subversive and imaginative ways. But its relevance goes far beyond Africa, and in an era of persistent capitalist crises and imperialist barbarism, Shivji’s work provides us with a starting point for thinking about and engaging with human rights without ‘mindlessly reproducing imperialist and neo-colonial ideological domination’. A way of critiquing and engaging with human rights as if they really matter.

Paul O’Connell teaches law at SOAS, University of London and is a founding member of The Beehive in Manchester and the Political Education Project.

A version of this blogpost was originally published as ‘Critiquing Human Rights Like It Matters: Issa Shivji’s The Concept of Human Rights in Africa’ on the new website Liberated Texts. Liberated Texts is an independent book review website which features works of ongoing relevance that have been forgotten, underappreciated, suppressed or misinterpreted in the cultural mainstream since their release. They are primarily interested in texts with anti-colonial, anti-imperialist themes and those related to the history of Marxism, communism and revolution globally. You can submit reviews and contact the editors of the site here.

Featured Photograph: Unemployed and the poor protest in front of the Cape Town High Court for the wealthy to be taxed in order to generate funds to create housing for the poor (Pierre F. Lombard, 19 September 2012).

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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.
Subscribe
Donate
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
Privacy Policy