Famine and Ethiopia: colonial legacies and global power structures

July 8, 2021

Reflecting on events in Ethiopia, Fisseha Fantahun Tefera argues that to understand famines we must go beyond a narrow, localized and simplistic understanding to look at how global structures foster conflicts that lead to famines. Tefera explains that colonial legacies and contemporary global power shape famine response operations, both by the states themselves and by the international aid industry.

By Fisseha Fantahun Tefera

The past two consecutive years Nobel peace prizes went to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia and the World Food Programme for settling a peace deal with neighbouring Eritrea and for fighting global hunger respectively. Now the two Nobel peace prize winners are confronted with a humanitarian crisis in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, that could potentially be the worst man-made famine in recent history. As the political crisis unfolds and the humanitarian disaster ensues, with a risk of imminent famine, history shows us that we have failed to learn the most important lessons about famines.

Failure to establish accountability

Famine casualties and mass starvation crimes going unprosecuted is a common thing. In fact, they have almost never been brought to trial anywhere, and even then, they assume a marginal space. This is usually attributed to a lack of explicit provisions in legal frameworks coupled with the complexity of factors causing famine. As many point fingers at the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments for what is happening currently in Tigray, there are lessons we can learn from Ethiopia’s own experiences in dealing with famines. Following the 1974 Wollo famine in northern Ethiopia during the Imperial period, a commission was set up to investigate the case. Even though the Emperor was deposed by the Dergue the same year, the commission was able to finalize its investigation that identified responsible governors, ministers, prime ministers, and other officials for the famine both individually and as a collective. These officials were later on, together with others, executed by the Dergue regime before they were brought to justice.

A decade later, the widely televised catastrophic 1984-85 famine killed close to one million people. Beyond claims that the Dergue regime is responsible for the famine, no one has yet been held accountable. The Special Prosecutor Office, set up after the 1991 transition, despite initial plans to investigate the famine, never brought any famine related case to court. With no significant political resistance from the totally collapsed former regime and with sufficient legal provisions available, this was a rare opportunity unused by the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front/Ethiopia Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (TPLF/EPRDF) led government. One explanation for this could be the relative ease of prosecuting the direct forms of violence like the Red Terror and war crimes, whereas, an investigation into the famine would raise unwanted attention (and culpability) to the role of other actors like TPLF, the US, and the UK that have used the famine and the aid operations for their own political, military and ideological interests. Both attempts at investigating crimes of mass starvation fall short of delivering justice to those who died and suffered due to man-made catastrophes.

Complexities

Contrary to the simplistic, localized, and unethical framing and representation, famines are complex events and part of the local-regional-global political dynamics and structure. Even though droughts, socio-economic conditions, policy failures, armed conflicts etc create the conditions for famines, catastrophes of famines are actualized when there is a failure in response. As armed conflicts have become the leading vectors of famines especially since the 20^th century, the local-regional-global political dynamics of these conflicts become an integral part of the causes, responses, and consequences of the famines.

The ongoing political crisis in Ethiopia that turned into an all-out open armed conflict between the federal government and Tigray’s TPLF since November last year is only a part of a broader political process that has been evolving during the past decade in particular and more broadly since the assumption of state power by the TPLF/EPRDF three decades ago. The conflict is also an integral part of the sub-regional Horn of Africa politics as countries advance their own interests including border conflicts, hydro politics, and more broadly with regard to the region’s strategic geopolitical position. The political crisis, the consequent humanitarian crisis and the imminent danger of famine need to be understood in light of these long durée of political processes in the country and the region, the various actors, and their complex constellation rather than a simplistic localized narrative.

Beyond the national level, historical and contemporary global political dynamics and structures shape the complex processes that result in famine casualties; both the conditions leading to famines and also the famine response. This is not unique to Ethiopia. Critically studying famines throughout Africa tells us a more revealing story. As armed conflicts become the leading factors that set the condition of famines, the much overseen yet still detrimental legacy of colonialism, among other things, in intra- and inter-state armed conflicts, is unavoidable. In addition, the various armed conflicts across the continent are shaped by the postcolonial global power structure that kept the continent in a subordinate position throughout the Cold War period, the War on Terrorism, the various development programmes etc. As well as shaping armed conflicts that create the conditions for famines, colonial legacies and contemporary global power structures have shaped famine response operations, both by the states themselves and by the international aid industry. The infamous World Bank and IMF led structural adjustment programmes of the post-Cold War period are worth mentioning here. Agricultural liberalization under these programmes led to the selling of strategic grain reserves that left many African states (for example Malawi in the early 2000s) incapacitated to respond to famine situations.

The international aid industry plays a key role in famine response, the failure of which usually leads to catastrophic consequences. We have seen how the global power structure plays into this process in many cases, a very good example being the Ethiopia 1984-85 famine of which two aspects are particularly relevant here. The first is how the Cold War period shaped the civil war in Ethiopia between a USSR-friendly central government and rebel groups supported by Western countries attempting to topple the central government. While this armed conflict created the conditions for famine, the famine response operation is even more crucial. For instance, the then US-friendly Sudanese government received more food aid than Ethiopia to an extent that it affected the agriculture sector of the country. In Ethiopia, despite media coverage and public outrage, ‘donor countries made efforts to restrict aid to unambiguously humanitarian needs and, insofar as possible, to keep it out of the hands of the central government’. More directly, as now declassified documents have also shown, the policies of the US and UK governments were ‘…to use food shipments to starving Ethiopians as cover to ship arms and supplies to rebels…’ and to ‘…make life harder for the Ethiopian regime…’ in their bid to overthrow the socialist Dergue regime.

Much more recently, we have also seen how the US war on terrorism in Somalia and the EU’s role contributed to the 2011 famine as aid was cut and withheld from agencies operating in Al-Shabab controlled southern Somalia. Given the strategic geopolitical location of Ethiopia and the Horn region broadly, great powers rivalry, which has seen increased competition recently, is an integral part of armed conflicts. Global powers(particularly US-China) military competition in the region coupled with Middle East countries (like Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE) competition to intervene in various political processes in the region were highly visible recently. The hydro politics tension between Ethiopia-Sudan-Egypt over a dam project in Ethiopia is also another piece of the puzzle in the political instability we have seen in the region recently. The push for accountability for famines must go beyond a narrow, localized and simplistic understanding to look at how other actors and global structures foster and respond to conflicts that lead to famines.

Ethics

Reminiscent to the 1980s, pictures of emasculated, wounded, and dead bodies are once again circulating. In the social media age when it is easy and convenient to access and distribute images and stories of humanitarian catastrophes, ethical concerns become paramount. Among others, aid agencies, media outlets, political groups, and activists, including in the diaspora, rely on and use stories and images of those suffering and dying to mobilize resources and support. Yet as we have seen from the past, those who suffer are portrayed unethically, a representation that becomes fixed, and helps to construct and reinforce stereotypes. The 1984-85 famine of Ethiopia and the subsequent Band Aid that ushered in ‘celebrity humanitarianism’ are classic examples of the un/ethics of images, stories and representations of victims of famines in Africa. Through these processes, already existing stereotypes that are fundamentally ‘simplistic, reductionist, colonial and even racist’, are reinforced and reproduced. That in turn also lends to the simplistic and localized framing and definition of accountability and responsibility to famine casualties.

Ethical concerns are not only discursive, they translate to practical consequences. As elsewhere in Africa, the Ethiopian political crisis has attracted international ‘experts.’ Some of these international experts and journalists continue to be the subject of social media controversy. Their continued analysis and reporting of the political crisis have been used by different actors as an ‘expertise’, ‘unbiased’, ‘neutral’ validation of their side, and invalidation of the other. Unfortunately, the existing global order also affords these ‘experts’, particularly those from the West the position of being heard by and to influence international organizations, Western countries, and the media. This often amounts to ‘experts’ actually shaping and influencing the politics of a country they are not a part of and the consequences of which they are immune from. In Ethiopia, for example, it is particularly alarming given the highly sensitive and complex ethnic identity politics (where at least advocates of the three politically dominant ethnic groups are currently accusing each other of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’). Western ‘experts’ analysis, reporting, and social media engagement, is frequently oblivious to the nuances and complexities of these factors.

Over time, we have seen a growing understanding of famines as man-made political, criminal acts that are legally prosecutable. The UN resolution 2417 of 2018 ‘condemning the starving of civilians as a method of warfare’ is one major milestone. This growing understanding carries with it the challenging task of identifying responsibility and establishing accountability. Given the complexity of the political crisis, with multiple actors from local to global level, it might take time before we know the full extent of responsibility of actors for the current catastrophe happening in Ethiopia. Another very important lesson we can learn from past famines and related political violence in Ethiopia is the need to be aware of and the real, practical dangers of unethical representation, analysis, and reporting. Sadly, it is not only in terms of legal accountability that we need to learn from the past. While we have museums, monuments, associations, and other forms of memorialization for victims of spectacular forms of political violence like wars and the Red Terror period, the victims of the 1984-85 famine and other historical famines are left ‘forgotten’.

Fisseha Fantahun Tefera is a PhD candidate in Peace and Development at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. He is currently working within the research project ‘Famines as Mass Atrocities: Reconsidering Violence, Memory and Justice in Relation to Hunger’. His research interests include politics of development, transitional justice, and memory politics in Africa through a critical, Africanist approach. He has a background in Development Studies (MSc) from Lund University and in Political Science and International Relations (BA) from Addis Ababa University.

Featured Photograph: Bob Geldof as the white saviour during the Ethiopian famine in 1984-5.

Kwame Nkrumah and imperialist finance in Africa today

ROAPE

July 6, 2021

More than half a century after Kwame Nkrumah first articulated his magisterial critique of neocolonialism, Scott Timcke argues his critique remains just as relevant in the analysis of present-day developments of capitalism in Africa.

By Scott Timcke

The present convergence of finance and wireless technology has generated considerable enthusiasm in development circles about the promise of connectivity and FinTech to improve quality of life and create wealth on the African continent. The prototypical example that proponents point to is M-Pesa, a service run in Kenya by Safaricom. Launched in 2007, M-Pesa is a form of mobile banking which uses cellphone accounts as a financial service, permitting transfers and credit extension facilities. Initially funded by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID), the service was commercialized through a joint venture by Vodafone and Safaricom. By 2018 there were 30 million customers and 6 billion yearly transactions. By most assessments, the service is a success. This blogpost revisits that conclusion by asking how these kinds of FinTech technologies, in their current configuration, perpetuate neocolonial relations. Replacing direct military rule, neocolonial relations can be understood as the coordinated exploitation of developing countries by advanced capitalist ones through their clout in international political economy. If such a claim at first appears like a stretch because it appears conspiratorial, it is worth recalling how European imperial and colonial practices were naturalized and normalized for most of modernity.

While ‘the methods of neo-colonialists are subtle and varied’ let us begin with the obvious. Desires to ‘bring Africa online’ in the 2000s had to confront stark realities born from both (i) the legacies of colonial infrastructure planned primarily to support resource extraction or settler communities, and (ii) the IMF imposed structural adjustment policies that slashed state maintenance budgets and social, economic, and political infrastructure. So, when digital neo-modernization advocates maintained that without access to the internet people in the Global South would face a digital divide which would exacerbate poverty that stemmed from the already asymmetrical relations in the global system, they overlooked the very history that gave rise to those inequalities and deficiencies in the first place. But this rhetoric of digital inclusion tended to overlook the historical materialist method at the heart of discussions about digital inequalities. Indeed the ‘connectivity paradigm’ currently promoted by the World Economic Forum and Facebook focuses on building infrastructure to create markets and customers, which will bridge the digital divide. However, this conceptualization ignores the insights of the scholarship around uneven and combined development or the research on the spatial fix required by capitalism to stall social problems in metropoles. In other words, for all the discussion about connectivity when digital neo-modernizers deny the connections of history; they deny how some polities are rich because others are poor.

Take the case of rising household over-indebtedness mediated by micro-lending platforms like M-Pesa. Sociological studies of the working-class in Kenya, like that by Kevin Donovan and Emma Park, demonstrate how these digitally mediated financial markets create debt traps for this class. In effect their earnings are used to pay off debts and more loans are taken against future earnings to service existing debts. This digitally mediated indebtedness of the working class is facilitated by the combination of the increase in the volume of rents extracted in the modern financial economy as well as, crucially, analysis of user generated data to assess their creditworthiness. In short, social reproduction is articulated through the logic of this financial system in turn causing severe maldistribution. Through this employment of FinTech ‘poverty is understood as a new frontier for profit-making and accumulation.’ These are the kinds of processes that Dan Kotliar and Abeba Birhane have in mind when they write about data orientalism and the algorithmic colonization of Africa respectively.

While the excellent critical literature on FinTech in Africa is growing, too often this work is lost in the analytical (and political) noise of neo-modernization. As the connectivity paradigm illustrates, this ideology has a naïve comprehension of technology as a social form. By contrast, when approached from a critical perspective, FinTech is not confined to reconfiguring or extending new services. Rather it involves creating new markets, introducing new machinery to reduce labor costs and more generally aiding inter-sector competition. But most importantly, FinTech is concerned with enclosing and capturing the value in existing informal lending practices the African working class has already built themselves. For example, South African informal saving networks are estimated to hold US$3 billion. To put it another way, the purpose of FinTech is to readjust the balance of power between capital and labor. This means that the central issue is not about the outcomes this technology produces, nor is it even a matter of access. The fundamental question is about how control rights of this technology reside with a minority of shareholders and how their interests are adjacent to the interests of their firms’ customers. And through indebtedness, FinTech is effectively creating a ‘digital-creditor-debtor-divide’ in Africa.

There is considerable value in revisiting Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism to understand the neocolonial components of algorithmic capitalism (informational or cybernetic capitalism). Published in 1965 and written in the wake of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s 1960s Wind of Change speech in the Parliament of South Africa in which the Conservative British government signaled that is would no longer actively oppose independence movements, neocolonialism as Nkrumah described it, was a technique of indirect rule kept in place through a combination of economic arrangements and treaties, innovations in communication technology, and with the assistance of local sympathetic agents. In short, Nkrumah argued that European politicians like Macmillan and Charles de Gaulle offered disingenuous statements about the formal end of colonial rule, in part because newer mechanisms of colonial exploitation were possible to implement.

As a quick illustration of the durability of neocolonialism as a form of imperial rule, consider how, sixty years after formal political independence, the CFA franc has kept former French colonies under the influence of France monetary policy and structuring the economic relationship between France and these former colonies. Fanny Pigeaud and Ndongo Samba Sylla’s recently published Africa’s Last Colonial Currency concretely shows how 162 million people in 15 states have France mediate their monetary policy. When paired with the frequent military interventions that still take place, as Nkrumah accounted for, African populations continue to be subjects of scientific and financial experimentation by global powers.

Even reviewing Nkrumah’s sequence of chapters gives an early indication of the larger argumentation and stakes of his thesis. “Exercised through economic or monetary means” and “by a consortium of financial interests” imperialist finance and its currencies enable capitalists to establish corporations dedicated to extracting raw materials from concessions. By pressing labor—whose wages are artificially depressed through monopoly in economic sectors and the monopsony of labor (a market situation in which there is only one buyer) like in many African extractive economies—the profits of which are repatriated to metropoles through monetary zones and foreign banks. Indeed, at the time the book even caught the eye of the CIA in November of 1965. Nkrumah’s government would not last even four more months. It was deposed in February 1966 by a military coup. While it is difficult to adequately discuss Ghanaian politics in the 1960s in this venue (and more generally we must resist mono-causal explanations) it is nevertheless telling that Nkrumah’s removal set in motion a ‘diplomatic realignment’ that benefited the West.

Indeed, it is this kind of protracted material struggle between oppressor and oppressed that gave rise to the neocolonial critique. In the 1989 edition of The Black Jacobins, CLR James included an appendix ‘From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro’ in which he writes that about the intellectual encounter between the West Indians like Marcus Garvey and George Padmore and Africans like Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah. Calling this “one of the strangest stories in any period of history”, James described how encounters between sets of migrants in European cities led to the formation of groups like the International African Service Bureau, as Theo Williams has previously discussed on roape.net. Being in metropoles these Pan-Africanists had front row seats to witness the transition from ‘the old colonial system’ that had stood since the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference to ‘neocolonialism’ that emerged after World War Two. Through their ‘criticism of the weapon’—to employ a line from Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right—the Pan-Africans made their theory ‘a material force.’

While there are several tendencies in African studies, neocolonialism and neo-modernization represent two divergent conceptualizations of actions occurring on the continent. Despite protestations otherwise, neo-modernization is institutionally, philanthropically, and academically entrenched. It provides the initial frame of reference for design of empirical studies. And it is precisely “because they have already established a near monopoly of what is written on the subject” to enroll some of Walter Rodney’s remarks, that space is made for the neocolonial critique. This critique can, for example, show how local intermediaries facilitate neocolonial rule. Walter Rodney called these local agents’ allegiance to, or cynical cooperation with neocolonial powers, part of the ‘elementary conditions’ of neocolonial rule. For example, as it applies to algorithmic capitalism, the Kenyan government owns 35% of Safaricom. This means that the state gains revenues from the indebtedness of its citizens and the commodification of their data that Donovan and Park describe. But here arises a contradiction, because these revenues may be offset by costs spent to address the social consequences of indebtedness like homeless and mental illness. Indeed, depending upon their mandate, parts of the Kenyan bureaucracy are likely working at cross purposes from one another. This adds conflicting interests to any intra-governmental discussions on how (or if) to regulate lending apps like M-Pesa.

To recap, aside from the skews and parameters that arise from internal properties, it is true that there is nothing intrinsically exploitative about digital technology. That said, due to the global supremacy of the private property regime, the meaning and operation of these digital infrastructures is overdetermined by capitalist values. Accordingly, using neocolonialism in studies of digital sociology can help us focus less on the mechanisms of this or that platform, and more on how platforms are part of the basic forms of a society that shape social relations. In this vein, neocolonialism provides a different methodology—a counter-narrative that foregrounds the experience of the oppressed—that comes to vastly different conclusions to the neo-modernization perpetuated in the elite ‘fintech-philanthropy-development complex’.

This complex promotes platforms to advance economic liberalization and skirting existing regulations believing that such policy courses can nominally improve material conditions for Africans. However, in practice due to platform mediated financialization setting up conditions of perpetual insolvency, the lived-experience of the African working class is delimited by the interests of metropolitan capital, an arrangement that is reminiscent of the same kinds of subordination that Nkrumah described in the latter half of the 20^th century. Much like in the 20^th century this most recent iteration of neocolonialism will have long reverberations.

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

Featured Photograph: British prime minister Harold Wilson talking to president Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana in the garden of Marlborough House, London (Adam Sonin, ‘Heritage: Kwame Nkrumah, the visionary who took Ghana to independence’ 14 October 2020).

The New Intellectuals of Empire

ROAPE

July 1, 2021

In a powerful polemic against the new intellectuals of empire, Yusuf Serunkuma addresses an African audience. Serunkuma warns his audience of a new breed of missionary-scholars who speak to the visible wrongs in our midst, but they hardly ever offer any context, longue durée, causation, and abstraction, to the point that they have even conscripted disciples from among us. This new breed, he argues, is more tactical, more sophisticated, but as dangerous as their colonial predecessors.

By Yusuf Serunkuma

It has become increasingly common for scholars, activists and politicians who see Africa from African vantage points to be outraged by neo-orientalist portrayals of Africa by activist-scholars and media from the west. By ‘African vantage points’, I mean that they tend to explain and offer context to the well-publicised crimes of Africa’s leaders as opposed to calling them out and campaigning for sanctions and intervention from the benevolent west. I mean, whilst they would be critical of Muammar Gaddafi or Robert Mugabe, they are unwilling to support coalitions of the so-called ’vanguards of justice and human rights’ to flush these bad leaders out, even if flushing them out comes by way of sanctions. These scholars and activists are my main audience in this essay – because I claim to be one of them.

It is my contention that we need to be kinder to the West’s celebrity-missionary intellectuals and media. They commit no crime when they ’misrepresent’ the continent. In fact, misrepresentation as a term does not even apply to them as, indeed, they are not mispresenting anything but simply doing their job – which is mainly writing for and informing their home audiences on how to see Africa, which remains an abundant wild reserve for game and exploitation. It would be liberating for the African activist and scholar to beware that over 95 per cent of academics, mainstream media outlets such as the BBC and CNN, and the myriad commentors including bloggers, columnists, and overly sanctimonious tweeps on Africa from the West will — oftentimes involuntarily, instinctively or by association — follow the foreign policy positions of their countries.

So, Michela Wrong, Nic Cheeseman, Robert Guest and many others remain intellectuals of empire. But with a sophistication; they are not crude like their predecessors (such as the colonial anthropologists and explorers who were, among other things, openly racist and abusive). This new breed of missionary-scholar speaks to the visible wrongs and actual abuses by African leaders, but they hardly ever offer any context, longue durée, causation, and abstraction. They treated their subjects as exotic and geographically contained with neither global-local connections, nor power games with the new colonial powers etcetera. Indeed, these outright half-analyses have been used quite successfully to even conscript disciples from amongst us. You will constantly hear African university graduates chanting tired buzz words about democracy, free market economies, the need to attract foreign investments, praising IMF and World Bank data, and congratulating themself after more aid is released. They’ll then focus on small and obsolete campaigns such as decolonisation, demand reparations to appear cool and sophisticated. All this is the work of the new breed of the intellectuals of empire, which is more tactical, more sophisticated, but as dangerous as their predecessors.

Reflecting on Wrong’s recent book, Do Not Disturb, Jörg Wiegratz and Leo Zeilig have reminded us about the timeless trope of monsters in Western media and academia in reference to African ‘autocratic‘ presidents. It is worth stressing that presidents that are labelled ’monsters’ are not necessarily innocent individuals; they are and have actually committed crimes to fit the label. But while their badness ought not to be denied, it has to be understood as a timeless fact of all politicians: their monstrosity ought to be understood as a function of power – so the truism that ‘power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely’ – and this is not limited to Africa.

In truth though, those characterised as monsters across formerly colonised places have been men [and women] unwilling to allow modern imperial plunder disguised as free trade and often packaged in the slick language of human rights. Please note that monsters do not begin as monsters in both their political character, and the ways in which the world sees and writes about them. Frequently, they simply undergo a key turn, which often happens at that sobering moment of encounter with the imperial capitalist machine. Slovenian theorist, Slavoj Zizek has described this moment, as a ‘key dilemma’ for any president seeking to champion the lives of the wretched of the earth under a corrosive capitalist modernity.

Ugandan president Idi Amin started out as a darling of the West. But he became a monster as soon as he chose to get the natives out of the backwaters of the economy, which actually meant taking the economy away from the Indian-Asians, the ‘deputies of colonialists’ as historian Lwanga-Lunyiigo called them.[1] After Amin radically pulled the rag from under their feet — as Kenya and Tanzania had done using their legal systems — Uganda’s former colonisers who had actually shipped Indians into the region and deliberately privileged them over the natives, were the first to demonise Amin labelling him an autocrat, a monster. Once politically ‘bad’, Amin also became bad in the scholarship and media coverage. Most famously, he became a ’white pumpkin’ in popular media circles.

Queen Elizabeth II bestowed a knighthood on President Mugabe, which was clearly a subtle bribe to get him to ignore land reforms, a burning issue at independence in 1980. For 20 years, Mugabe remained a darling of the West, never antagonising white farmers and instead, becoming ensnared in endless negotiations with them and the UK government to find a less radical or less painful way to allow them to keep their colonial loot. Even when the British government gave Mugabe money to buy land for redistribution, the white landowners refused to sell. Caving into pressure in the late 1990s from inside his own party and from former combatants, Mugabe then took a hard stance on land. Shamelessly, Zimbabwe’s former colonisers took back their bribe, and the media and academia competed in badmouthing Mugabe. On the heels of UK government sanctions, were tons of monsterizing scholarship and media coverage.

In nearby South Africa, the gift for his political-economic naivety was the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Nelson Mandela which was working wonders. Mandela admitted in his memoir, Long Walk to Freedom, that he had blatantly defied the ANC’s resolutions in his ignorant and childlike pursuit of political independence. In effect, he left South Africa’s entire economy in the hands of white South Africans. As Zizek puts it, if Mandela had really won, he would never have become a darling of the West — and of the world. Similarly, before Kagame started taking a hard stance towards the West, he had been their darling for years. He is now their monster.

Ever wondered why with all Museveni’s crimes, he is yet to become a monster? Well, Museveni is in Somalia, Central African Republic, South Sudan, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo – doing mercenary work for the western democracy merchandising imperialists. He is providing the calm under which foreign mining companies enjoy Congolese resources, and also providing the environment under which European pirates enjoy Somalia’s marine resources. Thus, despite his well-documented crimes on Ugandans, he is yet to make the label, a monster.

The point I am making here is that a huge percentage of scholarship and media in the West reflects the foreign policies of their states. This is true not just in the so-called “formerly colonised” places, but it is also true of Europe’s and America’s relations across the world where their exploitative tentacles are being resisted. Mainstream scholarship, and media, which is largely ‘a bunch of frauds’ as Noam Chomsky puts it, will often find the ‘ethical imperative’ to blast leaderships in Russia, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, China, and even helpless Palestine — as long as their multinationals face stiff opposition attempting to monopolise the economies of these countries.

The crime of the leaderships of these countries is trying to extract maximum benefit from their mineral resources — especially oil, gold, lithium and platinum — and fighting for their land. As these leaders are derided by EU and American politicians, western scholars and journalists endlessly chant their badness. These same scholars and media also sweat blood and tears to ensure that the crimes of empire are not exposed. Ali Mazrui told us as much in 1997 when the BBC censored him for reporting factually about Muammar Gaddafi. More recently, The Conversation killed a well-researched piece by Matthew Alford on how ’western media rationalises and amplifies state-sanctioned violence and wars as millions die.’

Please note that these fellows in the Western-based media and academia hate being associated with their countries’ foreign policies. They will vehemently deny this accusation. They strut themselves around as independent objective academics and analysts building their craft purely on fieldwork and theory. This is rightly undeniable but to a degree. There are two glaring handicaps with their claim: first, you’ll never hear them speak out against the crimes of their own countries the way they do about those of other countries or their leaders. You do not see them calling out Israel’s colonisation of Palestine. You do not see them joining Black Lives Matter, nor see them call out the wars in Yemen, Iraq, and the entire Middle East that were started on absolute deception. And this isn’t a case of disciplinary focus or areas studies. That would be a clumsy excuse. A true activist-scholar has to start by calling out the crimes of own countries. Sadly, you have heard them downplay the double standards of structural adjustment, or simply remain silent. They are happy to harp on about democracy and human rights as if there is no connection between livelihood and governance. It is as if they do not see the continued ruins of structural adjustment as local African populations remain disempowered and emasculated – and the double standards with which Europe and North America still enforce the Washington Consensus onto Africa as they themselves do the exact opposite at home.

Second, and this is an important point I intend to make: working or simply following the foreign policy positions of their countries cannot be seen as a crime on the part of these activist-scholars and media. They really have no choice. Even those most aware of their positionality in this game – by far the fewest – end up with very limited choices. To appropriate David Scott, they did not choose to do this job, they were simply conscripted. They did not choose to work for their countries as earlier intellectuals of empire did. To survive as scholars, they have to stay true to the mission of the master who not only introduced them to these parts of the world, but who also enables their intellectual and financial power to undertake scholarship in these parts of the world.

That the majority are unaware of or simply deny their conscription to the imperial machine is how it is meant to be. This is because the conscription is more discreet and takes many subtle forms including their training, funding, legitimation by their schools, historical connections, etc. This is an existential dilemma. Just one telling example, there are exponentially more scholars from the UK than from France or Germany working in the former British colonies, in the same way that there are more scholars from France than from the UK in the former French colonies. And although this form of conscription runs deep, it remains not just largely invisible but unconsciously suppressed. Should it be strange that there are almost zero scholars from the colonies doing fieldwork in Europe and North America. To this day, it is still viewed as almost comical that an African university started a centre for the study of the Americas.[2]

The bigger point I wish to make is this: scholarship is closely linked to the economy—and to politics. Until Africans develop their economies to fund their own scholarship, these men and women from the west will continue to say whatever they want – and there will always be good evidence to back up any arguments they choose to make, which actually makes their scholarship appear sound and objective. But as Foucault has told us, to focus on a particular argument or focus on a particular subject is often a political position and not an intellectual one. It is not intellectual persuasion or a case of overwhelming evidence. It is power and politics.

My intention is not to make the conscription of Western media and scholars at the service of their countries’ foreign policies a crime (though perhaps if they acknowledged this fact, they would be humbler and less sanctimonious). It is to remind African intellectuals and activists that there is a need to spend more time fighting at home to better their politics and economies. This, in turn, will give them the intellectual and political power to also push our side of the story – which will also be, as Nigerian historian Yusufu Bala Usman would put it, a political position.

Yusuf Serunkuma is a columnist in Uganda’s newspapers, scholar and a playwright. In 2014, Fountain Publishers published his first play, The Snake Farmers and it was received with critical acclaim in Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda.

Featured Photograph: Eric Dutton (right), Palmer Kerrison, and Governor Robert Coryndon at Government House in Nairobi, 1924. Dutton was an academic geographer and a major force behind early urban-planning programs in East and Central Africa and author of four books. Permanently disabled by war wounds, he was also permanently infatuated with the moral rightness of British imperial culture (Garth Myers, 1998).

Notes

[1] Since they were neither settlers nor natives at independence, the only category left in this push and pull for belonging and identity was deputies to the colonialists. Quite inexplicably, the Indian-Asians stayed on in the East African colonies even after the end of colonialism. Had they become natives or settlers?

[2] In 2018 South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand started the African Centre for the Study of the United States (ACSUS).

Sudan: prisons, jockeys and contraband cars

ROAPE

June 30, 2021

Magdi el Gizouli argues that the new prison complexes in Sudan’s major towns are part of the legal scaffolding of the privatisation and austerity assault which continues to punish insolvency with imprisonment. Gizouli sees the massive rates of imprisonment as manifestations of social conflict, the hunger, the hustling, the jockeying, the wheeling and dealing of Sudan today.

By Magdi el Gizouli

Sudan’s Minister of Interior, Izz al-Din al-Sheikh, inaugurated on 17 June a new prison in Soba, a sprawling suburb south of the capital Khartoum. The new prison has the capacity of hosting 3600 inmates and is designed to accommodate minors of both sexes. The new prison complex is the third in recent years. Two similar prisons were opened in Gedaref and the White Nile in 2020. A police officer boasted that the new prisons would even allow wives to enjoy an intimate hour with their inmate husbands. As a side note the officer declared that the new prisons are equipped with ‘massive workshops’. Sudan’s prison population is estimated at around 36 000 inmates, including the former president Omar al-Bashir and many senior members of his defunct political party, the National Congress Party (NCP).

Excluding the newly built prisons, Sudan’s inmates are crammed into some 125 establishments with an occupancy level of 255%. The country’ prison population has been increasing steadily over the past three decades, from some 7000 inmates in 1990 to around 20000 in 2011 at the time of the breakaway of South Sudan. Like most available statistics in the country, the accuracy of these figures is not guaranteed but the trend is clear. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 the Sudanese authorities decided to release all prisoners held in relation to public prosecution offences, mostly people incarcerated for burglary, robbery, drugs crimes and prominently bounced cheques. Over 4000 inmates were released from one prison in March 2020. The inmates left behind mutinied, and one was shot dead by the police in the chaos. Copycat mutinies followed in the Port Sudan and Nyala prisons.

The Sudanese penal code introduced in 1991 as part of the legal scaffolding of the privatisation and austerity assault of former president Bashir’s government, punishes insolvency with a fine or a maximum of 5 years imprisonment. Repeated offenders could be jailed for up to 7 years. The practice of the courts often meant that default on loans resulted in a situation of perpetual imprisonment, in the parlance of court verdicts ‘imprisonment until payment’. Sudan’s minister of justice in 2016 said there were around 4000 debtors behind bars in al-Huda prison alone, a major prison complex north of Omdurman. At the time the percentage of non-performing loans from gross loans in Sudanese banks was estimated at 5.2% after an all-time high of 26% in 2007. Imprisonment for insolvency was already a feature of Sudan’s debt ridden mid-1980s in the twilight years of Jaafar Nimayri’s rule when an article of Sudan’s civil procedures code was used to justify the pretrial detention of debtors.

Non-performing bank loans are however only a fraction of the debt crisis that lands people behind bars in Sudan. Cheques function as promissory notes in cycles of trade to the detriment of new market entrants, often those trying to escape the crushing regime of agricultural labour through attempts at enterprise after liquidation of meagre assets, a stretch of farmland or a few animals. These start-up retailers, novices in a cut-throat market economy, acquire merchandise from wholesalers on debt and at often stunning interest rates but are unable to survive in a perpetually stagflating market. The peculiar situation often arises in which the naïve novice is forced to sell the merchandise at a ‘fraction’ of the price – meaning far below market price – to remain out of jail, at times to the same cheque-weaponised dealer or associates.

Eventually a market in debts emerged involving the transaction of defaulted cheques between a new class of traders, known as ‘jockeys’. A jockey buys debts in the form of draft cheques at a lower price than their nominal value from their cash-keen holders and uses the drafts to buy tradeable commodities, greater debts or ideally urban land or real estate in cycles of speculation. The neatest example is probably the car market. Cars acquired through bank loans with the security of real estate or draft cheques are sold at a ‘fraction’ of the price in return for hard cash and resold for draft cheques with a high profit. The jockey is the risk-ready middleman. Sudan’s auditor general estimated the volume of circulating debts in the form of bounced cheques in 2019 to be some 44.7 billion (approximately US$100m) Sudanese pounds including some 3.6 billion (US$8m) Sudanese pounds in draft cheques submitted to the tax authorities.

The power of jockeys should not be underestimated. Back in 2010 trade in ‘fractions’ and debts became a security crisis in al-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. In May 2010 the open market in fractions imploded and the local government was faced with some 3700 angered claimants who had traded actual cash and real property for toxic debts. Protests ensued and the police resorted to gunfire. Four people were killed, and fifty others injured in the process. The clean-up proved a political nightmare for the central government. Two prominent jockeys were allies of the long-time governor of North Darfur Osman Mohamed Yusif Kibir and were elected to the regional parliament on the ruling party’s ticket. The crisis cost the governor his position. He was fired from the job in 2014 in a major reshuffle but remained too influential to ignore and was eventually parked in the presidential palace as a deputy to Bashir in September 2018, a few months before the collapse of the regime.

The market in debts did not disappear with the demise of Bashir’s regime in 2019 and fused into the market in cash forcing the authorities to effectively surrender. In May 2020 the Bank of Sudan suspended an article of a memo issued back in 1997 instructing banks to shut-down the accounts of clients who dishonour three cheque payments or more in a period of six months.

Jockeys and dealers of sorts were instrumental in inflating the ballooning market in smuggled cars through toxic debts from around 2015. Thousands upon thousands of used cars were smuggled through Sudan’s turbulent western frontier, mostly from post-Gaddafi Libya and Chad bypassing the country’s porous customs regime and fuelling a bonanza of speculative debts trading. The initial signal was a government decision that offered Sudanese expatriates returning from war-torn Libya customs advantages in the import of cars. The famed loose cars acquired the name ‘Boko Haram’ in reference to their origin outside the bounds of law and order. In February 2021, the authorities estimated the number of Boko Haram cars in Khartoum alone to be some 300 000 vehicles.

The government’s interventions oscillated between attempts to capture some of the value of the cars through post-hoc customs arrangements and licensing with perpetually shifting deadlines and hollow threats of confiscation at gun-point. The latest immediate confiscation order in this salvo of official edicts was issued by the governor of North Kordofan on 14 April 2021 after another deadline had passed on 1 March. Similar orders were issued back in 2017 by Sudan’s former vice president, Hassabo Mohamed Abd al-Rahman. At the time he told the regional parliament in North Darfur that the government had decided to confiscate all Boko Haram cars without compensation with immediate effect.

World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) experts, international NGO cadres, ambassadors of great powers and government officials prefer to perceive Sudan’s chronic economic malaise through statistical summaries that are supposed to reflect economic performance: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, current account balance, external debts, foreign direct investments, purchasing parity, poverty lines, poverty head counts and so on and so forth.

These and other notions constitute a powerful vocabulary of economy, finance and social management on a global scale but shed eloquence and utility when juxtaposed against the conundrums facing a Darfurian farmer who trades his meagre crop at a ‘fraction’ of its value to a jockey in al-Fasher to address a health crisis in the family. The language of international finance is not particularly illuminating when attempting to comprehend the fate of the thousands of insolvent petty traders and inept drug dealers in Sudan’s prisons. Its syntax does not accommodate the moral economy that underwrites the ties and relationships which flow with savings in the form of ‘Boko Haram’ cars through international borders.

Prisons, contraband markets and isolated customs checkpoints might not appear at first glance to be the most suitable places to understand an economy. The social contradictions and conflicts that play out in these locations are easily lumped together under the designation ‘corruption’ as some sort of pathological feature external to the workings of the ‘real’ economy.

The contention is which realities count? IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) findings from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and other partners show that an estimated 7.3 million people in Sudan (around 16% of the population) are going hungry and are forced to sell limited livelihood assets as a result, a goat may be or the odd piece of furniture. Of these 1.8 million are already in the clutches of malnutrition and are dying excessively as a consequence. These figures are expected to increase to 9.7 million people (21% of the population analysed) in the lean season (June to September), the period between planting and harvesting when work is hard to come by and incomes drop.

The new prison complexes in Sudan’s major towns are a securitised response to the manifestations of the social conflict, the hunger, the hustling, the jockeying, the wheeling and dealing, that offers no avenue to address them.

Magdi el Gizouli is a scholar and a fellow of the Rift Valley Institute. He writes on Sudanese affairs here and regularly contributes to roape.net.

A Handbook of Marxism

ROAPE

June 24, 2021

ROAPE’s Bettina Engels reviews a new Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism which, she argues, presents a variety of important Marxist thinkers and successfully demonstrates the wide range of theoretical approaches of those who have engaged with Marxism.

By Bettina Engels

The number of publications under the label of Post-Marxism, Post-Foundationalism, Post-Capitalism and Post-Politics has considerably increased during the last decade, including several edited volumes. What clearly distinguishes this handbook from most of these other publications is that it refers to Marxism and Post-Marxism and presents classical Marxist writers such as Marx and Engels themselves, Luxemburg, Kautsky and others, in one compilation with contemporary prominent Marxist scholars such as Samir Amin, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and David Harvey. By doing so, it eventually made me understand what ‘Post-Marxism’ as a label means. Post-Marxisms, as the editors define it, is a “theoretical and political framework that simultaneously is itself influenced by Marxisms but seeks to go decisively beyond it” (p. 1).

Yet, the prefix ‘Post’, seems somehow confusing, as it suggests some kind of chronology, that Marxism was ‘over’ or completed and now we were in the Post-Marxist era. Of course, neither the editors nor authors who consider themselves Post-Marxists in general affirm this, but the term still suggests it. So maybe ‘Marxism +’ would be a more appropriate label.

Post-Marxism as a ‘self-adopted label’ came up in the 1980s “to characterize a particular means of escape from the widely proclaimed ‘crisis of Marxism’ that followed the decline of the 1960s radical movements” (p. 1). Still, it remains somehow vague to me what exactly characterises ‘Post-Marxism’ — for example, would we label Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak and David Harvey as ‘Marxists’ or ‘Post-Marxists’? Nor is self-identification the only criterion – at least to be included in the handbook. According to Terrell Carver, the author of the chapter on Judith Butler, Butler herself “does not identify as a Marxist or Post-Marxist” (p. 435).

The volume is structure in nine parts, most of them starting with a longer general chapter followed by shorter pieces on individual thinkers (45, altogether) and three on specific topics (on ‘African Settler Societies’, ‘Ecological Marxism’, and ‘Covid-19’). The editors outline that they are aware of the problem of selecting some names and excluding many others. With that said, it might have been an alternative to focus less on individual figures and ‘big names’ and more on debates, controversies, and topics, which would have possibly shifted the focus from thinkers and writers slightly more towards Marxist political practices and class struggles.

Notwithstanding, many chapters – brilliant pieces by ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig on Frantz Fanon and by Marcel van der Linden on Immanuel Wallerstein, for example – succeed to present the life of the respective thinker and at the same time core concepts and debates in Marxism, such as class consciousness and class struggle (Wallerstein), the role of the peasantry in revolutionary struggles (Fanon), and the relationship of capitalism and imperialism (in the chapter on Samir Amin by Yousuf Al-Bulushi).

The order of the volume is more or less chronological. Unsurprisingly, it starts with a chapter each on Marx and Engels. Part 2 is dedicated to the era of the Second International, the ‘Age of Imperialism’, presenting chapters on Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky. This is followed by a section on the era of the Russian Revolution, with contributions on Trotsky, Gramsci, and Benjamin, among others. After these chronological parts, part 4 of the handbook, under the heading ‘Tricontinental’, pools ‘Marxism outside Europe’ (the title of the conceptual chapter by Vijay Prashad that introduces the section): Vladimir I. Lenin, James Connolly, José Carlos Mariátegui, Mao Zedong, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, and a chapter by Allison Drew on ‘Marxist Theory in African Settler Societies’.

This might, at a first glance, suggest a dichotomy of ‘Europe and beyond’, or ‘The West and the rest’ (as Stuart Hall has put it). However, the following sections of the handbook also include chapters on authors from various parts of the world and with various identities, though still the clear majority are men from Europe and North America.

In view of how much have already been written on Sartre, Gramsci, and Poulantzas, for example, and of course on Marx and Engels themselves, Trotsky and Lenin, many readers might have benefited more from chapters on Steve Biko, Amílcar Cabral, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Claudia Jones, Thomas Sankara, Walter Rodney or others. Moreover, these were all thinkers, writers, and political activists at the same time, they also have lots to say about political practice, about modern class struggles and national (liberation) politics. The historical experiences and theoretical thinking of these activists cannot be substituted from reading contemporary writers from Europe and North America, whether or not they identify as Marxists or Post-Marxists. I am unable to provide examples of Marxist writers and activists from Latin America, Asia, and the ‘Arab world’, as I am myself unfamiliar with Marxist debates and activities in these world regions. So, I would have enthusiastically read such chapters (rather than one on Habermas, for example).

Part 5, ‘Renewal and Dispersal’, deals with the 1960s and 1970s, namely with Sartre, Althusser, Hobsbawm, Poulantzas, Wallerstein, Amin, and others. Parts 6 (‘Beyond Marxism?’), 7 (‘Unexplored Territories’) and 8 (‘Hidden Abode’) present a variety of important contemporary Marxist thinkers and successfully demonstrates the wide range of theoretical approaches and the analytical focus of those engaging with Marxism: from Laclau and Mouffe, Negri and Badiou (all in the section titled ‘Beyond Marxism?’) and radical economists such as Henryk Grossmann and Kozo Uno (‘Hidden Abode’) to Marxist political ecology and feminism.

I am not sure whether I find it felicitous to subsume postcolonial (Stuart Hall), ecological and feminist thinkers (Butler, Mohanty) under ‘Unexplored Territories’. These may be indeed fields of thinking and analysis that are somehow at the margins of Marxism, however, they are far from being ‘unexplored’, and I would be more cautious to use territorial notions referring to postcolonial and feminist theory, given the ambivalence of the term and the debates on it in both theoretical fields. Part 9, ‘Marxism in an Age of Catastrophe’, contains a single chapter by John Bellamy Foster and Intan Suwandi on Covid-19.

The book presents an invaluable resource particularly for teaching, in Political Economy and in Critical Political Theory in general. Already the introductory chapter provides an excellent, encompassing and thorough overview and genealogy of Marxist theoretical debates. The editors have accomplished an impressive work in compiling a comprehensive collection of chapters by inspiring young contributors alongside some of the most experienced Marxist authors, who could have equally deserved being the subject instead of the authors of chapters!

With so many profound and nuanced contributions, the compilation succeeds in presenting the variety and range of classic and contemporary Marxist thinkers, but at the same time maintaining a clear focus and not randomly offering any critical perspective as ‘Marxist’. It is left to readers now to decide whether or not ‘Post-Marxism’ presents an appropriate label, academically or politically. In any case, the volume provides a promising starting point for this discussion.

Alex Callinicos, Stathis Kouvelakis and Lucia Pradella (editors) Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism, London, Routledge, 2021.

Bettina Engels teaches at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, Freie Universität Berlin, in Berlin. Bettina is an editor of ROAPE.

Featured Photograph: Diego Rivera, ‘Mexico Today and Tomorrow,’ featuring Karl Marx, History of Mexico murals, 1935, fresco, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.

Germany’s Namibia Genocide Apology: the limits of decolonizing the past

ROAPE

June 22, 2021

Heike Becker writes about the recent agreement between the German and Namibian governments for special “reconciliation and reconstruction” projects to benefit the Ovaherero and Nama communities that were directly affected by colonial genocide. Becker asks what are the possible international ramifications of the Namibian-German agreement? Will the deal possibly turn the tide more broadly for reparation claims from ex-colonies of the empires of European colonialism?

By Heike Becker

“Words cannot be found to relate what happened; it was too terrible.” This is how Jan Kubas, an eyewitness of the events that followed the battle of Ohamakari in what was then called German South West Africa, now Namibia, in 1904, articulated his struggle to express his memories of the German pursuit of the Ovaherero into the parched Omaheke desert. Kubas was a member of the racially-mixed Griqua people who lived at Grootfontein near the area where following the extermination order by German general Lothar von Trotha, thousands were driven into the barren Omaheke.

In 1904 and 1905 the Ovaherero and Nama people of central and southern Namibia rose up against colonial rule and dispossession. The revolt was brutally crushed. By 1908, 80% of the Ovaherero and 50% of the Nama had succumbed to starvation and thirst, overwork and exposure to harsh climates. Thousands perished in the desert; many more died in the German concentration camps in places such as Windhoek, Swakopmund, and Shark Island.

A century after Jan Kubas struggled to articulate the horrors he witnessed in 1904, the German government has, at long last, officially acknowledged the colonial genocide. An agreement between the German and Namibian governments was recently concluded. According to the agreement, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will soon travel to Windhoek and offer a formal apology for the first genocide of the 20^th century; the deal also stipulates additional German development aid for Namibia. These funds, to the amount of 1.3 Billion Euro, will be paid over the next thirty years. They will be earmarked for special “reconciliation and reconstruction” projects to benefit the Ovaherero and Nama communities that were directly affected by the genocide.

There are many open questions, however: What are possible international ramifications of the Namibian-German agreement? Will the deal possibly turn the tide more broadly for reparation claims from ex-colonies of the empires of European colonialism?

Penetrating questions need to be asked also about the extent to which Germany is committed to “working through” its violent colonial past. Has it, following decades of avoidance, truly committed to addressing its painful colonial past? Can the restitution of looted cultural objects and human remains from the postcolonial metropole’s museums and academic collections be considered a serious and sufficient effort at decolonization? What are the limitations of recent challenges to the historical staging of former colonial empires in the public space, such as monuments, and the renaming of streets, which were named after colonial despots?

And in national as well as transnational perspectives: What could be the next steps in going beyond dealing with the colonial past in purely symbolic terms? What kind of new solidarities are being forged in moves towards decolonization, racial justice and re-distribution?

Reactions

When the announcement that after almost six years of bi-lateral negotiations an agreement had been initialled by the Namibian envoy, Zedekia Ngavirue, and his German counterpart, Ruprecht Polenz, the German government and mainstream media celebrated this as a political and moral triumph: “Germany recognises Genocide” broadcast the main news bulletin of the state television ARD on 28 May 2021. The deal was quickly dubbed the “reconciliation agreement” in German discourse. The leader of the German delegation, Polenz remarked confidently that with the promise of special aid Germany would ensure that the acknowledgment and apology did not remain lip service.

The Namibian government’s announcement was much more subdued. President Hage Geingob’s spokesperson cautiously expressed that the agreement was a “first step in the right direction”. However, associations of the affected communities, the Ovaherero and Nama, whose ancestors had been victims of the genocide, were a whole lot more critical. They criticized the agreement on substantial as well as procedural grounds: For one, the German government had succeeded to enforce its stated principle not to pay reparations for the crimes committed during German colonial rule. And, as they had done for years, descendants of the victims protested that they had not been properly involved in the process. Ovaherero traditional leader Vekuii Rukoro, who sadly succumbed on the 18 June to the terrible Covid surge currently haunting Namibia, called the agreement “an insult“; a statement, which made front page headline news on the The Namibian newspaper.

Members of the victim associations took to the streets of Windhoek. Even those representatives of the affected communities, who had in the past been more amenable to the negotiation process, expressed their concerns in growing numbers. They particularly questioned the amount of the payment package, which was far lower than what had been expected by the Namibian government, who had rejected, in 2020, the earlier German offer of 10 million Euro compensation. While the amount offered now is an improvement on last year’s, it still falls short of Namibian expectations, as even Namibian Vice-President Nangolo Mbumba admitted although he officially accepted the German offer on behalf of his government.

For Namibians, and the descendants of the genocide victims in particular, it is not all about the amount of money though. Activist and politician Esther Muinjangue, the former Chairperson of the Ovaherero Genocide Foundation, now an opposition MP, and also Namibia’s Deputy Minister of Health and Social Services, cut to the chase when she unequivocally stated that “development aid can never replace reparations”.

The Namibian government’s official response on 4 June 2021 clearly attempted some damage control and referred to the agreed “reconstruction and reconciliation” payments as a “reparations package”. This is in distinct contradiction to the official language of the agreement that these payments were decidedly not reparations but an additional set of development aid. Three weeks after the announcement of the agreement, and what the German government had obviously hoped would bring closure to a painful past, there’s only one phrase to describe the situation: it’s a total mess.

Reparations

When former German Foreign Minister Joseph ‘Joschka’ Fischer visited Windhoek in October 2003 he went on record to say that there would be no apology that might give grounds for reparations for the genocide, which was committed by German colonial troops in Namibia. Fischer’s rather undiplomatic words are indicative of the intense and heated, historical and present relations that are at stake.

There is an underlying conjecture of the German-Namibian negotiations: what are the potential international ramifications of accepting legal, political and moral responsibility of reparations for colonial violence and genocide. Colonial Germany may have committed genocide, according to the UN definition, “with intent to destroy, …, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” only in Namibia; but it certainly carried out atrocities and mass killings also in other colonial territories. Esther Muinjangue nailed it when she said: “We know that the German Government is guilty equally when it comes to the people of Tanzania or when it comes to the people of Cameroon. So, they want to safeguard themselves.” The German government fears more claims from ex-colonies; it also fears claims from European countries such as Greece, which have never received compensation for World War Two war crimes.

Then there are the shared postcolonial anxieties among the former colonial empires. Would Germany’s acceptance of its colonial past open the floodgates to a surge of claims by formerly colonized nations, in Africa as elsewhere, against their erstwhile colonizers? Muinjangue thinks this a likelihood: “all countries that were present at the Berlin Conference of 1884 and divided up the African continent are guilty: France, Britain, Belgium, and many others. They all have blood on their hands – and they all fear that one day they will have to pay reparations for their crimes.” The fears of former empires, such as Britain, France and Belgium, have been the proverbial elephant in the room.

Not without us…

If any agreement between a former colonizing power and the formerly colonized should stand a chance of bringing about justice and reconciliation, the descendants of those affected must be closely listened to. This means that they should be appropriately included in the negotiations. This has been the vocal persistent demand of genocide victim groups for an inclusive process under the slogan “not without us” ever since the negotiations between Namibia and Germany began in 2015. In January 2017 representatives of Ovaherero and Nama traditional authorities filed a lawsuit in New York, which although ultimately unsuccessful, sent a strong message to Germany and the Namibian government that negotiations “without us” remained unacceptable for those whose ancestors were killed in the genocide.

A common grievance, often expressed in Namibia, questions Germany’s pronounced difference of responding to different victims of genocide. Ever since 1990, descendants of those who suffered under the colonial genocide have often asked me, why did Germany pay generous and easily negotiated reparations to Israel after the reparations programme, which was created when Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany and Israel signed the Luxembourg Agreement in 1952, but has been so recalcitrant regarding Namibians? Why did the German government readily include the Jewish Claims Conference as representatives of Jewish non-governmental organisations but insisted on government-to-government only talks with Namibia? Is it “because we are Africans”, with these words Namibians regularly express suspected racism.

Restitutions: Symbolic reparations, not quite…

Symbolic commemorations of Germany’s African genocide have taken place over the past few years. If not without controversy, human remains of genocide victims were repatriated from Germany to Namibia in 2011, 2014 and 2018. These had been shipped to academic and medical institutions in Germany, and had remained there until recently.

In 2019 some significant items of cultural memory, which had been stolen during colonial conquest, were returned to Namibia from the Linden Museum in Stuttgart. These included the slain Nama leader Hendrik Witbooi’s Bible and his riding whip.

Other former German colonies have also begun to claim restitution. In 2018 Tanzania’s ambassador to Berlin requested the repatriation of human remains, which are being stored in German museums and academic institutions. In Berlin alone the remains of 250 individuals were identified, and more are suspected to be in Bremen, Leipzig, Dresden, Freiburg, and Göttingen. Provenance research on the human remains from former German East Africa also include about 900 remains of colonized people from Rwanda, which together with today’s Tanzania and Burundi formed colonial German East Africa. Also, in 2018, the President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation promised funding for future provenance research in transnational collaborations on collections of human remains with the perspective of repatriation to Cameroon, Togo and Papua New Guinea.

Yet, the debacle of the Namibian-German “reconciliation” agreement points out that the attempts at addressing the German colonial past, including, but not restricted to the shared-divided history of Germany and Namibia, have thus far been at best half-hearted.

Bronzes, a boat & street names

At the same moment that the “reconciliation agreement” was presented in Germany with some fanfare, controversy erupted once again around the Humboldt-Forum. Berlin’s ambitious new museum is housed in the royal Prussian palace in central Berlin; the reconstructed Baroque structure that was built over the past decade at a cost of over 680 Million Euro. In this space in the historical centre of imperial Germany, controversially, ethnographic collections will be exhibited. The Humboldt-Forum has been at the centre of highly critical responses from anti-colonial and black community civil society organisations, cultural workers, as well as historians and anthropologists. Its claim to decolonization has been highly contradictory.

Just before news broke about the Namibian-German agreement, high-profile German politicians loudly congratulated each other for their decision to return some of the hundreds of Benin bronzes kept in German museum collections to Nigeria. Until recently Benin bronzes were meant to occupy pride of place in the new museum in central Berlin, where Germany wants to demonstrates its cosmopolitanism; now German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas celebrated the “turning point in our way of dealing with [our] colonial history”. Quite ironically, just a week later the next prominent scandal of colonial loot hit the news. A new book by the historian Götz Aly revealed the dark history of an artistically stunning vessel looted from former German-New Guinea in 1903.

Berlin’s leading museum officials displayed an astonishing level of ignorance. Even more astounding was the suggestion to continue exhibiting the beautifully decorated 16 metres long boat, that was built by residents of Luf Island in the Western part of the Hermit Group, and who fell victim to German colonial atrocities in the new museum by declaring it “a memorial to the horrors of the German colonial past”. This arrogance is indeed astounding since there is still no memorial in Berlin to honour the victims of German colonialism and genocide in the central Berlin space, near the Reichstag, where Germany honours the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and belatedly, now also the victims of the Porajmos (genocide of the Roma and Sinti), and the Nazis’ persecution of homosexuals.

A tongue-in-cheek suggestion came from a leading historian of German colonialism and genocide. In a column in die tageszeitung Jürgen Zimmerer, Professor of Global History at Hamburg University, asked why not turn the reconstructed Prussian Palace itself into a fitting memorial. His proposition: fill-up its centre courtyard with sand from the Omaheke desert, or break up the castle’s fake Baroque façade with barbed wire in remembrance of the concentration camps in colonial Namibia.

Then there is street renaming, the most noticeable form of postcolonial activism in the German public space. A well-known dispute over street names comes from Berlin’s Afrikanisches Viertel (‘African Quarter’), where from 2004 civil society activist groups have been calling for the renaming of streets, which are currently named after German colonial despots. The members of the long-standing activist group Berlin Postkolonial and other initiatives, now active in cities and towns across Germany, have employed decolonial guided walking tours as a main tool of intervention. Recently, one of Berlin’s oldest campaigns gained success when the former Wissmannstrasse in the borough of Neukölln was renamed Lucy-Lameck-Strasse. The infamous German colonial officer and administrator was thus supplanted with the Tanzanian liberation fighter and politician, who after her country’s independence campaigned for gender justice.

Entangled memory: from violent pasts to new solidarities

The question remains, how much real change can come from the symbolic engagement with the colonial past. A future-oriented trajectory will point out that, beyond symbolic action, Germany’s culture of remembrance has to face challenges for the country to understand its own history within European colonialism.

Public debates in Germany have frequently posited colonialism and Holocaust memory against each other; it is alleged that an expansion of “working through the past” to include the colonial era, would ‘relativize’ the Holocaust. In contrast to this supposed competition of memory, Michael Rothberg’s concept of Multidirectional Memory has recently garnered some interesting, though at times controversial attention in public debate. Rothberg’s intervention, translated into German only twelve years after the original publication of the book in 2009, has become a catalyst for productive dialogues. In a nutshell, Rothberg suggests that memory works productively through negotiation and cross-referencing with the result of more, not less memory.

**Berlin-based Ovaherero activist Israel Kaunatjike**

An interesting case to explore new ways of thinking about colonial memory, social change and solidarities relates to the historical legacies of racial science and eugenics, which were developed by the anthropologist Eugen Fischer on the basis of research in Namibia in 1908. Fischer’s research was mainly used in the European colonial empires. From 1927 it was further developed under his leadership at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWI-A) in Berlin-Dahlem. From 1933 it became the basis of the Nazi race laws that targeted Jews and other racially and socially ‘undesirables’. Today the colonial roots of racism and inequality, as well as the systematization of racial studies and eugenics in Nazi Germany, continue to raise questions about the politics of remembrance and decolonization.

During excavations on the grounds of the Free University, which now occupies the site of the former KWI-A, hastily buried human remains were discovered. In 2015 and 2016 the University commissioned archaeological expertise on these finds. The KWI-A entertained close connections to the Auschwitz camp. Thus the initial suspicion was that the excavated bones may have belonged to people murdered during the Nazi era. However, when the archaeological report was presented during a well-attended online meeting in February 2021, it turned out that the situation was more complex. Some of the remains seem to have originated indeed in crimes against humanity that were perpetrated during the Nazi terror. Others, however, are more likely to originate in anthropological collections from the colonial era. It appeared impossible to ascertain the regional origins of the remains of the about 250 individuals. This gave rise to new solidarities that originated in entangled forms of remembering the atrocities of the colonial and Nazi eras. Representatives of Jewish, Black, and Sinti and Roma communities now work together to ensure that these human remains are treated with dignity.

Such new forms of solidarity are already practiced in civil society and transnationally in the global anti-racist movement. When the global Black Lives Matter movement formed a year ago, young activists got involved in Germany as well as in Namibia. In Windhoek, the movement was directed primarily against the statue of the German colonial officer and alleged city founder Curt von François. Not only the Nama and Ovaherero communities, but also young Namibians from all sections of the population are confronting colonial legacies. Over the past year the young Namibian activists who campaigned against the offensive monument and who support the claims of the descendants of the genocide survivors, have clinched a number of social justice issues as part of their decolonizing activism, and have been calling for an end to sexism, patriarchy, and racism.

In Germany too, civil society activists have played a big role and the “reconciliation agreement” is owed, more than anything else, to their post-colonial remembrance work. Campaigning started around 2004, i.e., the time of the centenary of the genocide. In October 2016, for instance, an international civil society congress, “Restorative Justice after Genocide”, brought together over 50 Herero and Nama delegates and German solidarity activists in Berlin. The participants staged public protests and Ovaherero and Nama delegates held a press conference in the German Bundestag. And now that the, unsatisfactory, agreement is on the table, activists in Germany are again campaigning vibrantly in solidarity with the affected Namibian communities and have taken to the streets of Berlin. The current Namibia solidarity alliance brings together civil society outlets of long-standing, and young groups, who have come together during the past year’s surge of radical anti-racist activism.

The agreement that has been concluded falls short of expectations in many ways. However, it can be an impetus for the former colonial rulers and the formerly colonized to finally begin a meaningful conversation about the difficult divided history. The question arises as to whether the civil society decolonization movements in both Germany and Namibia can influence the future politics of remembrance in both their countries in a way that makes a solidarity-based post-colonial policy of reconciliation and justice possible.

Heike Becker focuses on the politics of memory, popular culture, digital media and social movements of resistance in southern Africa (South Africa and Namibia). She also works on decolonize memory activism and anti-racist politics in Germany and the UK. Heike is a regular contributor to roape.net.

Photographs: The photographs were taken during a rally that was organised in Berlin on 28 May 2021 – it was held during the afternoon of the day when the agreement was officially announced by the German government. The space where the rally was held is on the grounds of where the infamous Berlin-Kongo conference was held in 1884/85 (all photographs were taken by Heike Becker).

Celebrating Maina wa Kinyatti’s Kenya: A Prison Notebook

ROAPE

June 17, 2021

Written 25 years ago, Kenya: A Prison Notebook inspired generations and proved a great resource and a handbook in political education in Kenya and beyond. It chronicles Maina wa Kinyatti’s arrest and detention by the Moi regime, and powerfully captures Kenya’s history. From a new collection on the book, Sungu Oyoo introduces a celebration of Kinyatti’s work by young activists and Gacheke Gachihi writes how his life was transformed by meeting Maina wa Kinyatti – the full text of the collection is available at the end of the blogpost.

Maina wa Kinyatti was a university professor and foremost researcher on the Mau Mau (Kenya Land and freedom Army), the liberation movement that engaged the British colonialists in armed struggle for land and freedom. In 1982, he was arrested by state agents for ‘possession of seditious material’ and detained by the Moi regime. Maina wrote Kenya: A Prison Notebook over the course of the next six and half years he spent in detention – mostly in solitary confinement.

Maina’s work and writing remains a constant and painful reminder that the objectives of the freedom struggle the Mau Mau engaged in are yet to be achieved. Kenya is a neo-colonial state. Her economy is in the hands of global capital and imperialism, while constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms are everyday blatantly disregarded with impunity.

Maina’s generation continued with the struggle for a better society and showed great courage by confronting a regime that was prepared to go to any lengths to suppress dissenting voices. Today, another generation is continuing with that struggle in fulfillment of its historical responsibility.

Through this collection of reflections on Kenya: A Prison Notebook, young comrades from various movements and organizations interrogate the lived reality and material conditions of their generation whilst relating them to past struggles and experiences. They reflect on a range of themes; including the purpose of education as a tool for liberation or bondage; the unfinished task of national liberation; intergenerational inheritance of social struggles in Kenya; not forgetting the pain, courage, patriotism and organizing reflected in the book.

These reflections are a celebration of Maina wa Kinyatti and all those who engaged in struggles for a better Kenya and Afrika. They additionally are an urgent reminder of the need to organize more than ever given the lived reality and material conditions of our people – those living in deprivation, those whose rights are suppressed, and freedoms infringed. They are a reminder that struggle, like change, is a constant. These reflections were inspired by a conversation at Ukombozi Library between Gacheke Gachihi, Nicholas Mwangi and Brian Mathenge.

A luta continua!

Sungu Oyoo – Editor

**Reflections on Kenya: A Prison Notebook: Intergenerational inheritance of social struggles in Kenya – Gacheke Gachihi**

“9 June 1982: After refusing to sign a written confession statement, I was given back my clothes, blindfolded, handcuffed and taken to the CID headquarters where I was physically abused, photographed, fingerprinted and charged with possession of a seditious publications entitled Moi’s Divisive Tactics Exposed, a document the Police had planted in one of my research files” Prof. Maina wa Kinyatti.

25 Years ago, Professor Maina wa Kinyatti wrote Kenya: A Prison Notebook, borrowing from the narrative of the great revolutionary and organic intellectual Antonio Gramsci, a political prisoner during the fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini in Italy during a period when Europe was undergoing a capitalist-imperialist crisis of fascism.

Maina wa Kinyatti, a revolutionary and freedom fighter, spent 6 years in Prison primarily for writing Kenya’s correct history and for being a member of the Mwakenya December Twelve Movement (DTM) movement (an underground socialist movement in Kenya in the 1980s) that fought for democracy and social justice in Kenya during the Kenyatta–Moi dictatorships. In blood and tears, he wrote one of the most beautiful and glorious chapters of the history of our resistance as a people – a history of constant struggle in defense of democracy and our collective memory, dignity and social justice.

Published 25 years ago, Kenya: A Prison Notebook remains relevant and continues to inspire new generations of freedom fighters, students, peasants, and social justice activists. It has sparked a re-imagination of political education and provided the social justice movement with great insights into the true history of resistance in Kenya, including lessons learnt during the struggles of Kenya’s underground movement, popularly known as Mwakenya.

It was in 2003 when, through Tirop Kitur, I got a copy of Kenya: A Prison Notebook from the then Release Political Prisoners (RPP) offices along Nairobi’s historic Cabral Street. RPP was a political organization started by mothers of political prisoners and Kenyan exiled communities in London agitating for democracy and the release of all political prisoners in Kenya. Comrade Tirop had been one of the Mwakenya detainees and was a political activist alongside Karimi Nduthu – first RPP coordinator, a great revolutionary and urban guerrilla assassinated by the Moi regime in 1996. Karimi Nduthu was at the time of his assassination creating a political path for the mass movement anchored on the struggles and human rights work that RPP was engaged in. Indeed, the seeds for today’s grassroots social movements in Kenya emerged from the struggles of RPP and the Mwakenya movement – just as the seeds of RPP and Mwakenya had emerged from the struggles that preceded them.

The book opened my eyes to Kenya’s beautiful history of struggle, especially the resistance by ordinary people against the British imperialist backed Moi dictatorship. It sparked my anger and passion against injustices and human rights violations. It exposed me to the evils of the Moi regime, the blood that was shed and the price paid by many university intellectuals, workers and peasants during the struggle for democratic rights, including the freedom to organize and protest. It is through continuous organizing and protests such as the Saba Saba March in 1990 among other political activities that Moi’s 24-year-old dictatorship was removed from power in 2002.

The book became one of my best pieces of history and an authoritative reference on Kenyan struggle and resistance and has inspired me into buying copies for my comrades as part of political education.

True to its nature, the neocolonial state firmly opposed any political organizing and research on the Mau Mau Movement that Maina Wa Kinyatti was bringing to light to educate the Kenya masses on our true history. Maina Wa Kinyatti was one of the senior cadres of the DTM that was organized by progressive university intellectuals, political activists and workers. The movement showed great courage by organizing during the Moi regime, including in Kenyatta University where it conducted underground political study cells.

Due to fear of change and resistance the regime embarked on a mission to cleanse radicals and Marxist professors from Kenya Universities, destroying the culture of education and hitherto vibrant battle of ideas in university spaces. In the universities and other public spaces, the state removed progressive books by Karl Marx, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Steve Biko, Malcom X and any material that challenged the neo-colonial state and British imperialism in Kenya.

During Moi’s reign, marked by ethnic mobilization and backward politics, university education in Kenya took a nosedive, destroying the foundation of generational values and a culture of patriotism that liberation movements such as the Mau Mau had inspired. Moism took Kenya down the path of economic destruction and neocolonial poverty and entrenched divisive ethnic politics that is at the core of Kenya’s political mess today.

Maina wa Kinyatti was arrested and sentenced to six and a half years in prison for ‘possessing seditious material’. The Imprisonment of Maina Wakinyatii, Ewdard Oyugi, Kamonji Wachira, Katama Mkangi, Willy Mutunga, Ngugi wa Thiongo, and many others derailed the growth of an ideological political base in Kenya for progressive politics and the social justice movement.

***Maina Wa Kinyatti with Gaceke Gachihi***

I first met Maina wa Kinyatti in 2000 and much later, we began organizing political study sessions at the Polytechnic Institute in Nairobi as part of introducing us to class struggle and the history of resistance in Kenya. Subsequent study sessions forged our comradeship and led to an opportunity to launch one of his books, History of Resistance in Kenya in 2008. Maina Wa Kinyatti and his wife Mumbi Maina have since then become my teachers on love for our people and the struggle for liberation in Kenya and Africa.

As we mark 25 years of Kenya: A Prison Notebook we celebrate comrade Prof. Maina wa Kinyatti as a great freedom fighter, revolutionary intellectual and a mentor to our generation’s struggle for freedom and social justice.

As the Czech writer Milan Kundera once said, “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. Prison Notebook is an epoch of memory that we will never forget. An epoch of history that will continue sparking fire against injustice across many generations in Kenya. It’s a permanent spark of our fire of resistance, love of our country and a memory of the sacrifices of comrades of the Mwakenya-Decemeber Twelve Movement.

The book 25 Years of Kenya – A Prison Notebook: Reflections can be downloaded and read for free here.

Gacheke Gachihi is the coordinator of Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC) and a member of the Social Justice Centres Working Group Steering Committee in Nairobi, Kenya. He is also involved in regional social movements and politics. He researches and writes about police violence, criminalization of the poor, social justice, and social struggles, amongst other areas. His articles and video interviews are published by roape.net, Africa Is a Country (AIAC), Daraja Press, Verso Books and others.

Shifting the conversation on migration

ROAPE

June 15, 2021

Baindu Kallon reviews Hannah Cross’ new book Migration Beyond Capitalism. Kallon celebrates a book that brings a new left-wing response to the narrative around migration. Cross, Kallon argues, effectively demonstrates why an internationalist working-class response is the key to defeating neoliberal power and creating a new world.

By Baindu Kallon

Often the conversation on migration falls into familiar discourse. From the right, it’s the threat of the “foreigner” and the need to protect the nation, rhetoric steeped in racist language and actions. From Liberals and sections of the left, the argument often draws on the appeal of human rights, compounded with the argument that migration benefits the economy and promotes multiculturalism. Both sides of the argument tend to view migration as an issue solely of assimilation or the management of borders. In Migration Beyond Capitalism, author Hannah Cross aims to disrupt and bring a new left-wing response to the narrative around migration. Migration Beyond Capitalism centres migration within labour politics, demonstrating how current migration discourse “tends to ignore or take for granted the role of overexploited migrant labour in successive capitalist orders…” (Cross 9).. Throughout the book, Cross outlines how migration reflects and reinforces inequalities, such as income, gender and race, that are manifested through capitalism. By doing so, Cross presents a global and connected working-class of migrants and native workers that are the key to fighting against capitalism.

Cross grounds this analysis in Marxist theory by posing Karl Marx’s letter on the Irish Question, written in 1870, as a starting point (24). The migration of Irish workers created cheaper labour for the English ruling class. This, in turn, created divisions between the Irish and English working class in English towns and cities, which the ruling class exacerbated through politics, media and more. By dividing the working class, the ruling class ensured that they could control English workers by stopping them from uniting with their Irish co-workers in a struggle for higher wage and better working conditions. Thus two groups of workers with identical material interests were kept apart from one another. Marx argues that the struggle for freedom in Ireland against the English ruling class, and that of English workers, could only be achieved through a unified class struggle.

Migration Beyond Capitalism takes Marx’s writing on the Irish Question and applies it to the migration debate today. Cross examines how capitalism historically and continuously thrives on inequalities and the division of the working class. Cross draws from both the global North and South but places a specific focus on Western Europe and the United States. These divisions emerge through various mechanisms such as Fortress Europe, which is used to privilege movement from EU citizens while criminalising and excluding others. It also emerges through labour exploitation and businesses that demand “…access to specific forms of labour, influencing the laws and policies of the capitalist state” (101). Centring labour within the conversation on migration outlines the inherent inequalities within the capitalist system.

Cross also shows how tensions between workers can be eroded, leading to class solidarity. As evidenced in the 2009 Lindsey Oil Refinery Strikes in the UK, workers went on strike to demand better working conditions, rights and job security (124). Rather than demand that migrant workers be expelled or fired, the unofficial strike argued for migrant workers to be able to unionize and receive union assistance (125). The workers were united in fighting against the poor conditions that they all faced. For Cross, this solidarity is key and can be understood and advocated for by workers by analysing migration through the lens of the political economy of labour.

Understanding migration through labour politics

The relationship between inequality and migration comes through particularly well in the chapter on imperialism and migrant labour in the capitalist world. The common thread in the capitalist world is the focus on capital accumulation, the steady deterioration of labour and disregard of human needs. Cross expertly weaves these themes by analysing the historic, social and economic impact of slavery, colonialism and neoliberalism. Migration became a vehicle for capitalist ambition, by any means necessary – low to no wages, brutalised communities, horrific working conditions and more (53). This erosion of labour continues into the neoliberal era.

This chapter best demonstrates the strength of this book, a clear explanation of how the exploitation of labour, through migration, impacts workers in the global North and South. Development institutions such as the World Bank began “cutting welfare spending…and transformed monetary policy, causing enormous dislocation and harm to local production and livelihoods”, during the early neoliberal period. This coincided with trade unions in the global North becoming “depoliticized and deradicalized, operating in narrow institutional channels that blunt rather than destabilize neoliberalism” (93). Given these changes, workers in the Global South faced the growth of foreign direct investment to build factories built on low waged workers and resource extraction. This, in turn, provided transnational companies, specifically in the global North, with the opportunity to discourage unions from pushing for further demands (wage increases, better working conditions) under the threat of relocating to the Global South. The divide and rule tactic is key to the assault on workers globally. By outlining this tactic, Cross highlights the similar conditions that all workers face, making a well-evidenced case for international solidarity.

Class antagonism and migration

Through the lens of the political economy of labour, Cross demonstrates how the ruling classes use migration as a tool to create class divisions based on race, gender, religion, amongst others. Yet by centring migration, and further class antagonisms, through the politics of labour fails to give equal analysis to other forces that perpetuate and exacerbate class tensions.

For example, in the chapter on class antagonisms, Cross provides an analysis of racism and rightly argues that these divisions are manufactured through the state and media. Cross briefly touches on the fact that capitalism creates “… a false notion of privilege on the native-born white working class” (114). Yet Cross neglects to explore further how and why racist ideologies continue to be an effective tool in creating these seemingly “privileged sections” of workers (127). It is increasingly important to analyse the power of this rhetoric given that a growing response to the failures of late capitalism has been the rise of the Far Right and overall national chauvinism.

The need to divide workers, created and maintained by capitalist ambition, is also supported through the narrative of the nation-state. For many Western countries, those who belong to the nation or ‘imagined communities’ are centred as being white/Anglo, heterosexual, Christian and male. Those who traverse these boundaries are the ‘others’. On the one hand, this becomes a way in which the state racialises and scapegoats migrants during economic hardship. On the other hand, the narrative also deems migrants suitable for ‘low skilled’ jobs that native workers seemingly refuse to take, further strengthening racist hierarchies while creating class divisions and racist narratives to reinforce them.

The strength of the nation-state narrative comes through clearly in the example of Medhi Hasan challenging Paul Collier on his assertion that “indigenous British have become a minority in their own capital” (115). Hasan correctly asserts that the census shows that 63 per cent of London’s population is born in the UK and rather it’s the white British population that is a minority. Cross uses this example as a way in which to demonstrate how poor interpretation of data, or science, is used to reinforce racist ideology. While this is true, it also is quite apparent that Collier equates indigenous, or belonging to the British nation, to being white. This presented a missed opportunity to explore how ideas of belonging are reinforced by the demarcation of borders and citizenship rights. In the context of migration, this creates further tensions between migrant and native workers, often perpetuated by the spread of racist ideology. The fact that it’s reinforced by politicians, the media and leading Oxford professors, such as Collier, only strengthens the argument that racism is a system and ideology that benefits the ruling class. In the end, the mechanisms that support racism and class divisions are powerful and interconnected. Thus it deserves a further analysis of the whole system, from the economic to the political and social perspective, rather than within the boundaries of labour politics and migration.

An “open borders” approach?

Cross ends Migration Beyond Capitalism with an appeal for the left to distance itself from the rallying slogan for ‘open borders’. Instead Cross advocates for equality of movement, a radical transformation of migration politics which “highlights the inequalities between countries and people and can be at the centre of a progressive migration regime” (175). It’s important to note that Cross argues against an open borders rallying call because it “…can seek advancement by means of alliances with opportunistic and harmful forces, thus preventing systemic change and failing to persuade those beyond the activist grouping” (170).

The open borders slogan is co-opted by those who push for migration as a means to provide “low skilled” jobs that benefit the economy. As Cross correctly states, this fails to address the root causes and ignores the inequalities reflected through migration. However, the rhetoric of open borders should not be discounted, especially given that abolishing borders is a key socialist argument. Given this, it’s important to be explicit in this stance, rather than back away from it. The call for open borders and the equality of movement argument are not dichotomies, both fight for the same future – one that benefits the working class with the dismantling of militarized borders. As such, the issue is not so much the call for open borders but instead how the slogan is co-opted in global discourse. Thus, an open border argument must be made but distinguished in its meaning by centring it around labour politics. Not only would this highlight how borders are used to serve capital accumulation but also grounds working-class interests within the open borders argument. Doing so only strengthens the argument for the equality of movement that Cross advocates for so powerfully.

International solidarity and the working class

The fight for migrant rights cannot be articulated as a moral or human rights issue. Instead, it’s a question of survival for both migrant and native workers that have experienced the deterioration of wages, living conditions and more. Cross analyses migration with a labour centric approach – outlining the global attack on workers while more importantly, highlighting the connections and advocating for international solidarity. Cross’ approach provides a much-needed reorientation on the discussion around migration. By doing so, Cross effectively demonstrates why an internationalist working-class response is the key to defeating neoliberal power and creating a new world.

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

Building Solidarity: Walter Rodney & the Working People’s Alliance – an interview with Anne Braithwaite

ROAPE

June 10, 2021

When Guyanese Revolutionary Walter Rodney returned to Guyana in the mid-1970s, he joined a socialist organisation called the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) to fight against Fordes Burnham’s dictatorship. By 1979, the WPA’s advocacy for unity between Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese, bread and justice drew thousands of Guyanese working people into its ranks. The WPA also attracted support from members of the Guyanese and wider Caribbean community in England. One of them, Anne Braithwaite, spoke to ROAPE’s Chinedu Chukwudinma about her experience as a founding member of the WPA Support Group UK ahead of the 41^stanniversary of Walter Rodney’s assassination.

Tell me about your early years in Guyana and the UK, how did you become politically involved, where did it start?

In Guyana, I was not politically active at all. Guyana gained independence when I was in the middle of high school in 1966. Looking back, I’m amazed that I didn’t do more and that I wasn’t more engaged with independence. I think having fun really was my main thing at school and between school and coming to England. Not a lot of political engagement at all. My parents were sort of typical; you know, I guess working class with middle class ambitions. My mother was a nurse and was meant to be very good at school. She was one of those really bright girls. She was that kind of hard-working person, but not herself directly political. My father came from what would be considered aspiring middle class, but he himself never exerted himself too much about getting into the middle class. He was somebody who was into enjoying life and, you know, just doing what he liked. He was a security guard and was happy with that.

Going on to school, I spent formative years in primary school in a village in Guyana called Victoria. I realised later on that one of the teachers must have told my parents that they should put me in for the scholarship as it was called at the time. And so, they decided to send me to school in Georgetown where my aunt was a teacher, which was quite far from where we lived at the time. My parents lived in Lodge while my aunt lived in Kitty. So, it was quite a long distance to get to school. But I went to school there and managed to get a scholarship to go to Bishop’s High, which was the elite girl’s school. The two elite schools were Bishop’s High for girls and Queen’s College for boys, and I went to Bishop’s High. In the early days, it would only have been white folks and light folks who went there and the children of diplomats and the planter class who would have gone. I started at Bishop’s High in 1963. It was a delayed start because in 1962 we had that a big explosion of racial violence that was very disruptive today.[1] Like COVID-19 is now, it was very disruptive for schooling, there was a general strike they were major disruptions, and the start of the new school year was just one of them. But I started school in 1963, Guyana got independence in 1966, and I left school in 1969.

After leaving school I worked for a couple of years in Guyana, I work at a sugar estate called Wales Sugar Estate, which has been closed down now. But at the time, it was a functioning sugar estate. I worked there for a while, which meant leaving home very early in the mornings because I had to get two to three forms of transport and then a ferry to get there at seven o’clock. I subsequently got a job in Georgetown, which was much more attractive because it was much easier to get to. The job was with another state institution, which was the Guyana rice board. It was called the Rice Marketing Board at the time. It was an admin job, bookkeeping and mainly accounting.

I realised afterwards that I got both jobs because of my privilege, even though I didn’t know it at the time, I had two forms of privilege going for me, one, I was a Bishop’s high school girl. The second one, I was black African. By that time, the government that was in power was the People’s National Congress (PNC) of Forbes Burnham, which was backed mainly by African Guyanese. And the PNC had changed the senior staff in most of these state-organised workplaces because Indian Guyanese or supporters of the rival People’s Progressive Party (PPP) had usually staffed these workplaces.[2] So there was an active attempt to get African people in. It was not until much later that I realised why I got hired. I got hired really easily as I didn’t have to ask anyone. Usually in Guyana, the way things work is that you have to know somebody and ask somebody to help you. I simply wrote applications or turned up. I don’t think I even told anybody about it, I just applied for jobs and got them. Because they were my first jobs, I didn’t realise how lucky I was and how privilege was playing to my advantage.

Shortly before I left Guyana, privilege also played to my advantage when I got hired at the CARIFESTA in Guyana, which was the first Caribbean Festival of Creative Arts. I was then working at the Rice Board and I was told that I received a secondment to work for the festival for six months – I was working with the CARIFESTA secretariat. The crazy thing was that I actually got my salary from the rice board but also got paid as if I was doing a separate job at the festival secretariat. I got tickets to everything going, so was really popular with my mates. By that time, I bought a car and life was wonderful.

When did you end up going to the UK then?

I wanted to leave Guyana partly because of the racial violence that had happened in 1962. And, in general, it was considered anybody in Guyana who was going to be someone had to go away to do something, usually study. I got a letter from a cousin of mine who lived in London inviting me to come in 1972 …and that was the choice that I made.

Life for me in Guyana was apart from working with just having fun. That was the mindset that I arrived in London with. Within a couple of days of me being in London, another cousin of mine said she was going to take me to a party. I’ve literally been here just for a matter of days. And I think it was at the International Students House around the Bloomsbury area, where I met quite a few other Guyanese. The party was in somebody’s room in the hall of residence. That same cousin took me to another party at a student centre where there was a bigger space and a much larger crowd. And I met a whole lot of other people … one of whom was a sibling of Walter Rodney. And he eventually introduced me to Walter. He also introduced me to Jessica and Eric Huntley and that’s how I kind have started being aware of things and being politicised. Jessica Huntley and I became really good friends and I’d help out at the Bogle-L’Ouverture bookshop in Ealing on free evenings and weekends.

When exactly did you meet Walter Rodney, what did you like about him as and his work?

The first time I met Walter Rodney was in a house in the early 1970s. He didn’t live in London anymore – he lived in Tanzania. But he always travelled a lot and was always travelling back and forth. His relative would tell me when he’s coming to London and we would go and see him. We turned up to the house at which the Rodney’s were staying, that’s how I met Walter, his wife Patricia and their young kids.

He just seemed a regular nice guy actually, both him and his wife, they just seem like regular nice people, and they were Guyanese. I knew that he had written a couple of books. But I had no real idea of the importance until I started getting reactions from other Guyanese, when I mentioned that I met Walter Rodney, they would say, “you mean, you met Walter Rodney!?” I realised then that he did history. He was a historian. I’d heard people say Walter was bright. But in my colonised mind, if you were bright you’d become a doctor or a lawyer. Only somebody who wasn’t bright enough would do something like history. And I really did not have a concept of how you made a career of being a historian apart from being a teacher, and you became a teacher if you couldn’t do better. So, him being special and bright was not at the forefront of my mind. He just seemed to be a regular nice guy.

I think one of Rodney’s greatest strength was that he could understand and talk to people at every level with clarity, but without condescension or without using complicated language. By every level, I mean, from people who had no formal education – people who literally could not read and write – to people who were very sophisticated academics and professors and who considered themselves the intellectual elite. He could relate to everyone in a clear and respectful way without patronising them. That is why even as a student in Jamaica, he had attracted the attention of the security services. But because of his clarity and an ideological and political stance at the time, elements within the university at the time, did their damnedest to make sure that he didn’t stay there.[3] I guess they would have seen him as a loose cannon as he wanted to go, listen and talk to the Rastafari community.

I’m guessing that from your interest in Guyanese politics you came to support Rodney’s political organisation the WPA from the UK. When did the WPA Support Group start?

Mid-1970s was when things were becoming politically and economically difficult for working people in Guyana. Reports of repression there were rife. But there were also other things happening. Companies were being nationalised and the government was inviting Guyanese who were leaving in droves to come back home, and calling itself radical, socialist and supporting liberation struggles and so on. I was beginning to become curious about what was really happening at home. That was really the origin of my interest. I realised that one or two people I’d gone to school with, were saying things that seemed very strange to me, including identifying Indians in Guyana as the enemy. I found that really upsetting in a way because it reminded of what had happened in 1962. I felt this is the time that I’ve got to decide: am I going to support this or am I not? That was when I started thinking actively about politics. I wasn’t interested in Britain – I was primarily interested in understanding Guyana and what was happening there.

The WPA Support Group started in 1979, the same year the WPA became a political party. But before the formation of the WPA Support Group in London, I worked with an organisation called CARIG, Committee Against repression in Guyana, which both Leland De Cambra – another WPA SG UK founding member – and I were part of. That group of mostly African Caribbean activists, with a Guyanese core started agitating against political developments in Guyana.

I was really hungry to learn and to understand what was going on in Guyana. Unlike others there who were politically active before, I had no ideological background. All I knew about ideologies was what the propaganda had got into my head in my early days in Guyana, which was the PPP was communist and they were bad and had to be gotten rid of. And the PNC was the party for me. That was probably the extent of my ideological awareness. Until I began to read things, write and talk to people and meet other activists involved in liberation struggles and other struggles, it was then that I decided with others to form a WPA support group. In short, I think CARIG had ideological issues with the WPA becoming a political party in Guyana. WPA supporters were therefore pushed out of CARIG, although CARIG continued agitating against Guyana’s escalating political repression.

The WPA message that resonated the most with me was the genuine wielding of power in the interest of working people, and in particular about ethnic division not being the way to go. And so I was able to support them and over time come to learn a little bit more about what was happening and to understand why they were opposing the PNC government. When there was talk about WPA needing support groups I said, “Yes, I want to be part of it!”

How many people were involved in the WPA Support Group and who?

Initially, I would say maybe a dozen members, rising to cores at its height. We organised the first meeting at my then home at 80 Sistova Road, Balham. By that time, I had become so convinced by what the WPA was saying that I thought it would make sense to most of my friends, and most of the people I knew. I remember rushing home early from work that first evening; myself, Leland De Cambra, Makini Campbell, Horace Campbell, and a few other people waiting around to start. But then the phone started to ring with apologies and excuses like “sorry I have to work late” or “I can’t come”. That was my first really tough lesson: I thought we were not going to have enough room for people to sit, but that certainly was not a problem at that first meeting. I was disappointed, but it was the start of a steep organising learning curve.

Can you give me a few examples of the various activities that the WPA support group did in the UK?

Okay, um, apart from having planning meetings, we would have public meetings exposing the PNC dictatorship and its neocolonial nature, organise fundraisers, cultural events, dances, film screenings. and connecting with radical groups from around the world. We also maintained close contact with the WPA in Guyana, hosting and organising public platforms for visiting members and supporters like Josh Ramsammy, Clive Thomas, Moses Bhagwan, Eusi Kwiana. Rupert Roopnarine and Andaiye who resided in the UK for two years in the early 80s as an WPA international secretary. We also distributed WPA literature and its newsletter, Dayclean. Meetings in those days was hiring a school, community or church halls, Ritzy Cinema and Abeng Centre Brixton, getting invited by students, trade unions or other radical groups and disseminating information about what was happening in Guyana and showing solidarity with other campaigns. Those were the priorities at the time. Burnham’s PNC government was showing itself up as dictatorial. They had been shamelessly rigging elections, and were duplicitous with Guyana’s working people, doing really progressive and popular things like supporting African liberation struggles while at the same time being a despot at home.

Did the WPA support group organise these meeting with African or Indian community organisations? Or even left-wing and student groupings?

I think it was very much a case of whatever and wherever the support group could do, and with whomever. We collaborated with Caribbean, African, and many other student activists all over London, the Midlands, Sussex; with Labour and Liberal party activists, NGOs like CAFOD, Friends of The Earth, Amnesty International, interested in the erosion of Guyana’s political, civil and human rights. These contacts assisted with disseminating reliable information on Guyana and the WPA, organising legal and election observers and briefing journalists, MPs and other activists.

What we were doing all the time is trying to say to people what’s going on in Guyana and why. That certainly was my focus. We would say, “we formed this group and be happy to come and talk to you about it.” So, some students somewhere would invite us to come and speak at something that was already going on, or we would just organise meetings and do flyers and put them out. I remember events at the old Africa Centre in Covent Garden on King Street. That was like the second most important central venue for African and African Caribbean activists after the Earl’s Court Student Centre. Those were the two venues if you wanted to meet black activists, progressive kinds of people. The Earl’s Court centre was predominantly Caribbean people while the Africa Centre was predominantly Africans.

That leads me to another question because Burnham in Guyana in the late 70s supported this so-called “cooperative socialism” and made a reputation for himself abroad as a progressive leader, especially in various black radical circles across the world. Did that fact make it difficult for the WPA support group to gain respect in the UK among elements of the black community?

It was not so difficult to get respect, because at that time people were very receptive. However, when non-Guyaneserealised we were criticising the Burnham government, they became confused. Guyanese people understood it, because then they knew either directly or from family and friends in Guyana, what was going on. But for other Caribbean and African and progressive people, anywhere, really, one had to do a lot of explaining, to explain how somebody who is seen as progressive in the non-aligned movement was anti-democratic and rotten at the core. In the 1980s, I remember going to the Houses of Parliament here in London with a WPA leader, Clive Thomas, to meet MP Bernie Grant. Clive Thomas was attempting to garner support for the WPA and Bernie grant at first was supportive, but then said, “…the thing is, man, I can’t criticise Burnham as a black leader.” That was the biggest struggle that one would have with black activists in the UK, trying to explain to them “Yes, Burnham is a black leader, but….” Rodney’s explanations helped me understand those contradictions and the WPA in Guyana had a well thought out position to counter the PNC’s carefully cultivated progressive, radical pan-African image.

The primary focus of the PNC, in all their rebrands [now APNU], has always been about usurping state power to develop a base to enrich themselves and dispense patronage, mainly to an African-Guyanese elite. Classic manifestations were the nationalisation of Guyana’s sugar and bauxite industries; their notorious, well documented election rigging during the 1960s to 1990s to keep out the PPP [then deemed communist by the Americans] with CIA collusion [documentation now released], and their astonishingly foolhardy attempt – in full public glare – to steal the March 2020 election which they lost, citing historical economic deprivation of African Guyanese. Their reckless desperation to retain control of Guyana’s nascent oil and gas industry, precipitated today’s sad pictures of PNC old men [mostly ex-military in sharp suits] embarrassing themselves.

Did a lot of members in the WPA Support Group write and publish any pamphlets or maybe news briefs on the situation in Guyana?

We did a lot of that but virtually all of them came from Guyana, because we were gathering Information, and accurate and reliable information was always an issue. We would get by various means information from Guyana, it could be sent to us by post, or it could be people travelling and bringing stuff and we would reproduce them here and there. There were quite a lot of documents that we would reproduce; Dayclean, which was the WPA’s regular publication, and other particular speeches and publications like Sign of the Times, People’s Power, No Dictator, [4] and other pamphlets and booklets. It was the sort of material that they would have circulated in Guyana because reading material was always at a premium and newsprint was banned. Part of the repressive nature of the Burnham regime meant that you were starved of newsprint. So, reading material was always in premium demand.

One of the things if you were Guyanese and you were travelling is that you tried to tell as few people as possible that you were going back, because otherwise everyone would ask you to take a letter, and the letter would turn out to be a big carrier bag full of something. That has to do with the fact that there was always a lot of shortages in Guyana, of basic foodstuffs, also other basic things so that somebody was always desperate, almost anything that you take for granted now would have been either scarce or unavailable in Guyana.

In one sense it was easier to get WPA pamphlets reproduced in the UK. We just had to go to a printer’s and get it paid for, or some of us will use facilities where we worked. I worked at one time at a place where I was allowed to use a Gestetner machine (an old duplicating machine). Where I could print a flyer and type it up on a stencil, and then run it off on the Gestetner machine. I think that was the only way we duplicated pamphlets because photocopying was far too expensive. And the WPA Support Group never paid for the Gestetner because we received collections from meetings and fundraised for everything we did. Or we’d ask people to do it at work or try to get reduced prices somewhere. It was our hustle.

This is the first of a two-part interview, the second part will be posted in a couple of weeks.

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

The Walter Rodney Foundation is hosting: ‘ASSASSINATION is no ACCIDENT’ to call for justice for Walter Rodney which is 41 years overdue. Hear from the Rodney Family (including Donald Rodney), Horace Campbell, Dev Springer and others. 13 June, 6 – 9pm (UK). Resister here.

Notes

[1] Anne is referring to one the racial conflicts that occurred during the People Progressive Party’s (PPP) term in office from 1961-1964. In February 1962, strikes and riots erupted against the PPP governments’ Budget bill. As the protest spread, they often took the form of violent clashes between members of the Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese communities.

[2] The People Peoples Progressive Party (PPP) was the party that led the anti-colonial movement in the 1950s. It was founded and led by the Marxist Indo-Guyanese dentist, Cheddi Jagan, and the African Guyanese Lawyer, Forbes Burnham. However, the two leaders split in 1957. Forbes Burnham created the People National Congress (PNC), which relied on support from the African community, while Jagan’s PPP relied on support from the Indian community. Burnham’s PNC defeated the PPP in the General Elections of 1964, rising to power before Guyanese independence from Britain in 1966.

[3] Anne here is referring to when Walter Rodney went to teach in Jamaica in 1968. The Jamaican Government banned Rodney from the island because of his Black Power agitation among students, Rastafarians and unemployed youths.

[4] Anne is naming some of the speeches Walter Rodney made in Guyana in 1979-1980.

Washington Bullets

ROAPE

June 9, 2021

David Seddon reviews Washington Bullets: a History of the CIA, Coups and Assassinations, by Vijay Prashad. This is a book about how political leaders and other activists considered to pose a threat to US and more broadly Western interests have been assassinated, removed in coups and eliminated.

By David Seddon

This short book by Vijay Prashad – who is Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, chief correspondent at Globetrotter and chief editor at LeftWord Books – is unusual, both in its structure and in its subject matter. Short and to the point, Prashad makes it clear how he was strongly supported in the production of this text by his team at Tricontinental and encouraged ‘to write it as quickly as possible’. Although he does not make explicit reference to Mao Zedong, he makes it clear, in the main title of the book that, in his view, US imperialism relies ultimately on the fact that ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’.

After a Preface by Evo Morales Ayma, former President of Bolivia, the first section is a two page section on Files, in which the reader is told that the text relies on the extensive perusal and ‘a vast amount of reading’ of official files and documents, both published and unpublished – and ‘a lifetime of activity and reading’ – and that ‘nothing has been as useful to me as the conversations I have had with ex-CIA agents’. The book dispenses with the usual apparatus of detailed references to documents and texts, and has no index, although there is a brief section at the end on Sources, in which the author remarks that ‘listing all the books and articles would surely make this book double its current size’.

Prashad comments that this ‘is a book about the shadows, but it relies upon the literature of the light’. ‘The shadows’ refers mainly to the murky, underground aspects of US imperialism, with special reference to conspiracy and the CIA and its role in removing – by coups and by assassinations – those political leaders and other activists considered to pose a threat to specifically US and more broadly ‘Western’ interests across the world. This is what is meant by ‘Washington Bullets’.

The book is divided into sections, the logic of which largely escapes me. The first, very brief section is called ‘Bring Down More US Aircraft’ – a phrase attributed to Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War. It sets out a kind of thesis, starting with ‘bullets’ and ending with ‘hope’: ‘Washington bullets are sleek and dangerous. They intimidate and they create loyalties out of fear. Their antidote is hope’– hope of another future. This section ends with a poem.

Then comes Part 1, divided under a series of headings, which seem to encapsulate different ideological justifications for the exercise of ‘preponderant power’. These are: Divine Right, Preponderant Power, Trusteeship, ‘international law has to treat natives as uncivilized’, ‘savage tribes do not conform to the codes of civilized warfare’, Natives and the Universal, UN Charter, ‘I am for America’, Solidarity with the United States against Communism, ‘No Communists in Gov. or Else’, ‘Nothing Can Be Allowed’, Third World Project, Expose the US ‘Unnecessarily’.

In Part 2, which seems to be more focused on the pragmatic side of intervention, the first main header is: Manual for Regime Change, which is divided into nine sub-sections – Lobby ‘public’ opinion, Appoint the right man on the ground, Make sure the Generals are ready, Make the economy scream, Diplomatic isolation, Organize mass protests, Green light, A Study of Assassination, and Deny. The second header is Production of Amnesia, which is followed by ‘Be a Patriot, Kill a Priest’, The Answer to Communism Lay in the Hope of Muslim Revival, ‘I Strongly Urge You to Make This a Turning Point’, ‘The Sheet is Too Short’, The Debt of Blood, All the Cameras Have Left for the Next War (which is a poem).

Part 3, which deals essentially with the period from 1989 to 2019, starts with ‘Our Strategy must now Refocus’, ‘Rising Powers Create Instability in the International State System’, ‘Pave the Whole Country’, Banks Not Tanks, First Among Equals, Only One Member of the Permanent Security Council – The United States, Republic of NGOs, Maximum Pressure, Accelerate the Chaos, Sanctions are a Crime, Law as a Weapon of War, Dynamite in the Streets – which discusses the coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia – and We Believe in People and Life.

This last one-page sub-section accuses those responsible for the coups, the assassinations, and the massacres of wishing ‘to steal the soul of the people so as to reduce people to zombies who must bow their heads down and work, putting their precious labour towards the accumulation of capital for the tyrants of the economy’. The Washington Bullets are a means to an end: domination and exploitation – imperialism. The counter is ‘hope’ and ‘the people’. As the Guatemalan poet, Otto René Castillo, said: ‘we believed in people and life, and life and the people never let us down’.

The book is a rapid survey of conspiracies, of the activities of the CIA, of coups and of assassinations in numerous countries across the world from the 1950s onwards. It is scattered with the names of well-known and lesser-known political figures who were/have been killed by ‘Washington bullets’; but significant as were these ‘tall leaders of the Third World’, it is the thousands of activists (including trade unionists, peasant and other local leaders, as well as intellectuals, journalists, writers and poets) and the millions of ordinary people adversely affected by these US ‘interventions’ who are celebrated here, and to whom in effect the book is dedicated.

See a conversation with Vijay Prashad on his new book here.

David Seddon is a researcher and political activist who has written on social movements, class struggles and political transitions across the developing world. David is a regular contributor to roape.net and a former member of the Editorial Working Group of ROAPE.

Vijay Prashad’s Washington Bullets: a History of the CIA, Coups and Assassinations, is published by Monthly Review Press.

1...313233...101 Page 32 of 101

ROAPEJournal

ROAPEJournal

Famine and Ethiopia: colonial legacies and global power structures

Kwame Nkrumah and imperialist finance in Africa today

The New Intellectuals of Empire

Sudan: prisons, jockeys and contraband cars

A Handbook of Marxism

Celebrating Maina wa Kinyatti’s Kenya: A Prison Notebook

**Reflections on Kenya: A Prison Notebook: Intergenerational inheritance of social struggles in Kenya – Gacheke Gachihi**

Shifting the conversation on migration

Building Solidarity: Walter Rodney & the Working People’s Alliance – an interview with Anne Braithwaite

Washington Bullets

Decarbonization reproduces colonial inequalities

Oligarchy and the subversion of democracy – warnings from South Africa

The Day Rhodes Fell: Ten Years After

News

The Journal

Activities

Activities