A People’s Historian: an interview with Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja

April 20, 2021

ROAPE’s Ben Radley interviews the Congolese historian and scholar-activist Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja. He explains that the overriding motivation of his work is solidarity with the oppressed and an uncompromising quest for the truth to elucidate the political history of the Congo and Africa generally from the colonial period to the present.

Ben Radley: Can you please describe to us your memories and experiences growing up as a child in the Congo under Belgian colonial rule and coming of age during the national liberation struggle, and how these experiences shaped your early politics and student activism?

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja: Growing up on the American Presbyterian Congo Mission (APCM) station of Kasha, some 10 km from the state post of Luputa and a major railway station on the BCK network between Lower Congo and Katanga, the first experience I remember from my childhood was the consciousness of skin colour. As Frantz Fanon has described all colonial settlements, this mission station was built as a Manichean city, with whites on the one side with modern houses and electricity, and black people on the other side in thatched roof houses lit with kerosene lamps on unlit streets. A large cordon sanitaire or a huge open space comprising the church, the medical centre, school buildings and the football field and other sports facilities separated the city of light from the city of darkness, which rejoiced only under moonlight.

Since our parents worked for the mission in various capacities as teachers, nurses, maintenance workers and domestic servants for the American missionaries from Dixie, we as their children could play with the few white kids present. By the time we all attained puberty, these children’s games ceased, and it was not unusual to hear the white kids calling us by the N word. Racial consciousness evolved on both sides, and this was reinforced for the Congolese each time we went to Luputa to catch a train or to shop at the stores owned by the Greek, Italian and Portuguese merchants. While in Luputa, we also witnessed whipping of prisoners by the police under the stern watch of the Belgian administrator at 6:00 a.m. or 12:00 noon near the flagpole with the red, yellow, and black Belgian standard. At the train station, black people stood in a long queue under the sun to buy tickets, but a white person could simply walk straight to the ticket box and walk away with his or her ticket in a minute.

You briefly held a number of academic positions in the Congo in the early 1970s, shortly after Mobutu came to power, and before beginning your long period of exile from the country. What impact has having spent such a long time away from the Congo had on you personally?

I had spent eight years and a half in the United States completing one year of secondary school, four years of undergraduate studies and three years of postgraduate studies, from July 1962 to February 1971. During this period, I had the opportunity of spending two months and a half in the Congo during the summer vacation of 1965, which allowed me to visit my very large family, and to even visit newly independent Zambia for a week. It was therefore very difficult to spend 17 years and a half, between December 1973 and August 1991 without seeing members of my family. Both parents and one sibling had passed away during that period. But those years of exile strengthened my commitment to the struggle for political change and genuine democracy in the Congo. I participated in numerous meetings and spoke on the Congo in the United States and Canada, Europe, and several African countries.

This self-imposed exile from Mobutu’s Zaïre was due to the harassment and threats I had experienced from the regime during my two years of work at the Lubumbashi campus of the National University of Zaïre, including a four-hour interrogation by the security police in November 1973. The harassment was renewed in Washington, DC in the 1980s when I became actively involved in supporting the mass democratic movement led by the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS). In 1989, my passport was confiscated by the Congolese ambassador to the U.S., Mushobekwa Kalimba wa Katana, following my request for a renewal. After several months of inaction, I received a letter dated 26 December 1989 from the ambassador stating that he took away my passport on the grounds of my opposition to the regime. Although I did get the passport back after the liberalization of the system on 24 April 1990, I still introduced a plaint against Mr. Mushobekwa for violations of my rights as a citizen through the Foreign Affairs Subcommission of the Political Affairs Commission at the Sovereign National Conference on 29 June 1992. He appeared before the subcommission and admitted that he had indeed violated my civil rights but added that he had acted on orders from the secret police in Kinshasa. It was, for him, a question of a choice between renewing my passport or losing his job. The subcommission cleared him.

You were heavily involved in the Sovereign National Conference in 1992, which represented the culminating moment of around a decade of resistance to Mobutu’s dictatorship in the struggle for multiparty democracy. Can you describe the atmosphere in the Congo at that time, and the meaning and significance of that historical moment, both for yourself but also politically for the country and for the Congolese?

It is almost 29 years now since I joined the Conférence Nationale Souveraine (CNS) in April 1992 as one of seven “scholars of international renown” co-opted by the Conference to make their contribution to this nationwide palaver. Following my general policy statement on the 14 May 1992, my name became a household word in the Congo. My declaration was one of the most popular speeches at the CNS, judging by the number of applauses. Cassette recordings were made and sold in the Congolese diaspora in Belgium, and in a country where the post office was no longer functioning very well, over 500 letters were sent to me by young people from all over the country. On a trip to Goma from New York in April 2007, an immigration official looked at my passport and said to me: “Aren’t you the Professor Nzongola of CNS fame?” When I said yes, he started chastising me for having abandoned the struggle by returning abroad. Even today, people over 50 in Kinshasa would recognize me because of the CNS.

I have given a comprehensive assessment of the CNS in my book The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History (2002). Most of its 23 commissions and over 100 sub-commissions produced excellent reports on what had gone wrong in the past and proposals on charting a new path for freedom, peace, and well-being in the country. As a member of the Political Affairs Commission, I had expressed interest in chairing the sub-commission on external affairs. But the people who had advanced the foreign agenda in the Congo like Justin Bomboko and Victor Nendaka did their best to exclude me from that sub-commission. As a consolation, they allowed me to chair two sub-commissions, on current affairs and political files, the latter being basically the rewriting of Congolese history by revisiting all the major political events in the country since Independence on what happened, why it happened, and what we should do to prevent such events in the future. When the late Professor Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba joined us, I managed to pull him from the Scientific Research Commission to make him the rapporteur for Political Files. He wrote an outstanding report on our deliberations.

The CNS succeeded as an educational forum and a political mobilizer. For all plenary meetings were carried on national radio and television. In most places of work, people did what they could do between 7:00 AM and 12:00 PM and went to sit by their radio or television to follow the deliberations at the Chinese built People’s Palace, home of our Parliament.

However, the CNS failed to achieve its immediate objective, which was to remove the dictator Mobutu from power and put the country on the path of multiparty democracy, economic recovery, and the improvement of the living conditions of ordinary people. The main reasons for that failure were the reluctance of Mobutu and his clique to leave power and its attendant privileges; the weakness and immaturity of the opposition; and the lack of support from the major Western powers for radical change in the resource-rich centre of the African continent.

I illustrate the latter factor with the way the international community refused to accept the democratic decision of 4 August 1992 by 2,842 delegates at the CNS representing all strata of the Congolese population to abandon “Zaïre” and to go back to the majestic name of “Congo.” This was a confirmation of a decision by another popular assembly, the Constitutional Convention of 1964 at Luluabourg (now Kananga), to make the official name of the country “The Democratic Republic of the Congo” (DRC). In May 1997, the same international community had no problem accepting the actions of Laurent-Désiré Kabila who, by the stroke of a pen, changed the country’s name to DRC and proclaimed himself the new president of the country. The major powers, beginning with the United States, accepted this unilateral decision, like Mobutu’s earlier decision imposing the name “Zaïre” in October 1971.

Today, the CNS remains a major historical reference for political and social change in the DRC. None of the numerous conferences, dialogues and consultations that have been held since then have brought anything new in terms of democratizing the political system, cleansing the state of its deadwood and corrupt oligarchs, and empowering the people to ensure that they are not only the primary sovereign, but also the beneficiaries of state action. In accordance with Etienne Tshisekedi’s credo, the business of government is “le peuple d’abord” or the people first. This is the popular and progressive legacy of the CNS, and the alpha and omega of democratic and developmental governance in the DRC.

**UNDP participant at a meeting of African ministers of public administration, AU, Addis Ababa 2006.**

We have recently marked the 60^th anniversary of Patrice Lumumba’s murder, and to commemorate the occasion ROAPE published an extract of a keynote speech you gave in 2018, in which you discuss Lumumba’s rise and influence as both a nationalist and pan-Africanist leader. Before discussing Lumumba, I’d like to briefly touch on the late Etienne Tshisekedi, the main opposition leader to Mobutu in the 1980s and 1990s, and father of the current President Felix Tshisekedi. You served at one point as a diplomatic advisor to Etienne Tshisekedi, who himself was an advisor to Lumumba’s Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) in the late 1950s. How do you position Etienne Tshisekedi in relation to Lumumba and the broader emancipatory struggle of which they were both a part?

Yes. As a law student at Lovanium University, Etienne Tshisekedi wa Mulumba served as an advisor to the newly created MNC for one year, 1958-59. Thus, I do assume that they did get to know each other, given the fact that only 7 years separated them in age, as Lumumba was born on 2 July 1925 and Tshisekedi on 14 December 1932. In September 1959, the MNC split into two separate wings, the radical and unitarist Lumumba wing, known as MNC/L, and a more moderate wing led by federalists under Albert Kalonji, known as MNC/K. Following his service on Mobutu’s College of general commissioners from 14 September 1960 to 9 February 1961 as deputy commissioner for justice, Tshisekedi went to work for Albert Kalonji in secessionist South Kasai, where he served as minister of justice.

Tshisekedi’s stoicism in the face of unending persecution and humiliations by Mobutu, Laurent and Joseph Kabila, was exemplary in his steadfast fight for democracy, the rule of law and the instauration of a government that works for the people. His courage and persistence recalled those of Patrice Lumumba. This made him very popular among the people, who reverently called him “Moses,” in the Biblical sense or, more affectionately, as “Ya Tshitshi” or “Big Brother Tshitshi.” By his courage, stoicism, and intransigence on key principles of democracy, justice, equality and service to the people, he was the Congolese political leader closest to the character of Patrice Lumumba. As for the son, he is nicknamed “Tshitshi Béton,” or someone as hard as concrete and capable of facing any challenge, including getting rid of the Joseph Kabila dictatorship.

Moving onto Lumumba, then, how strong an influence do you think his political legacy continues to hold in the popular Congolese imagination today, and across Africa more broadly?

Given the lack of regular polling on the knowledge and attachment that people do have about Patrice Lumumba and his martyrdom, it is difficult to assess the strength of his political legacy in the Congolese political imagination today. People do frequently hear his name on national radio and television, which remind them of his eminent status as our national hero and the 17 January, the day of his assassination along with Sports and Youth Minister Maurice Mpolo and Senate Vice President Joseph Okito, is a national holiday.

In Africa, boulevards, major avenues, squares, and streets are named after him. In most of the countries I have visited, the place I like the best is the African Heroes Square in downtown Bamako, Mali’s capital, which has a very impressive statue of Lumumba. When he was killed, many parents across the continent gave his name to newly born sons. Two of them were serving as members of the Nigerian Parliament when I lived in Abuja in 2000-2002. Kenya has a distinguished professor of law who goes by the name of Patrick Lumumba. Finally, many literary and nonfiction books were written in honour of Lumumba following his death.

Lumumba’s Independence Day speech remains a major treasure for African freedom fighters, even among the lost sheep. In the 1980s, during my days as a professor at Howard University in Washington, I had a visit to my office one day from Roberto Holden, then exiled leader of the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA). I asked him if it was true that he had always been a paid collaborator of the CIA. To refute this accusation, which was nonetheless well-established, he and his assistant stood up and recited Lumumba’s famous speech in its entirety, in French. I was so moved by this gesture that I momentarily forgot about his crimes in Angola.

Sixty years after Lumumba’s demise, the people who really know about his leadership and his trials and tribulations, in the Congo or elsewhere in Africa, are generally past the age of 75. The two generations who came after 1961 may have heard tales about him, read books and articles on him or seen films and videos about him. But they have very little knowledge of Lumumba because they live in countries that, in most cases, are ruled by political leaders who have no interest in progressive and visionary leaders determined to put people’s needs above their own selfish class interests. Patrice Lumumba was such a leader, and most of his peers in this category, including Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Mehdi Ben Barka of Morocco, Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Machel of Mozambique, Amilcar Cabral of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, and Ruth First and Chris Hani of South Africa, were destroyed by imperialism and their cronies in Africa through military coups d’état and/or assassination.

Lumumba’s name was also associated, positively or negatively, with the popular insurrections of 1963-68 for a “second independence.” This was a movement based on the grievances of peasants, workers, secondary school students and lower civil servants, including teachers and nurses, whose organic intellectuals had clearly shown that the flag independence of 1960 was a sham. Politicians had promised everything under the sun during the electoral campaign of May1960 but delivered nothing in terms of expanding freedom and improving the living conditions of the population. Since they were no different from their Belgian predecessors, the Congolese rulers constituting the new privileged oligarchy were in the eyes of the people “the new whites” because they were just as brutal in their repression as the former colonialists, on whom they continued to rely for military support, and ‘liars” because they excelled at making false promises.

The popular movement for a “second independence” was led by the former lieutenants of Patrice Lumumba. It had two distinct wings and fields of armed struggle, the Kwilu revolution, led by Pierre Mulele, Lumumba’s former minister of education and a Marxist-Leninist, and the Eastern or Simba Rebellions, led by Christophe Gbenye, Lumumba’s former minister of internal affairs and successor as head of the MNC/L. This is the wing that also included Laurent-Désiré Kabila, Thomas Kanza and Gaston Soumialot. Of the two wings, Mulele’s was the most politically successful by its revolutionary engagement and commitment to ordinary people’s interests, while the Gbenye wing was more militarily successful but betrayed Lumumbism by its brutal and unprincipled goal of regaining the power Lumumba’s lieutenants had lost in Kinshasa at any price.

Once they conquered a city, the first thing they did was occupy the residence of the provincial governor or district commissioner to find the loot, which included gold, money, and fine alcohol. They paid no consideration to people’s needs and interests, while pretending to be fighting for ordinary people. Rhetoric aside, they were no different from the new oligarchy led by army general Mobutu, intelligence chief Victor Nendaka and perennial foreign minister Justin Bomboko. Later, Gbenye would remain head of one of a dozen MNC/L factions and joined Mobutu’s and Joseph Kabila’s political coalitions; Thomas Kanza would become Mobutu’s candidate for prime minister at the CNS in 1992 and a minister in Laurent Kabila’s government; Gaston Soumialot became a very successful farmer with Mobutu’s support; and Laurent Kabila overthrew Mobutu with military support from Rwanda and Uganda in 1997. The multiple errors of the “second independence” movement and the co-optation of most of its leaders by the MPR, Mobutu’s ruling party, weakened Lumumbism as a political force, but the hold of Lumumba’s legacy in the Congolese imagination has remained strong thanks to Congolese popular music and popular urban art.

In June 2021, the return from Belgium of what is left of Lumumba’s remains, namely a tooth that one of the Belgian police officers who cut up the bodies of the three martyrs of 17 January 1961 took as a souvenir before dissolving them in sulfuric acid, will be observed with national honours in Kinshasa. In a continent in which funerals occupy a very important place in our culture, President Félix Tshisekedi is doing everything possible to lay Lumumba to rest in a manner befitting a great chief and warrior. This is another event that should have great impact in strengthening the hold of Lumumba’s legacy in popular Congolese imagination today.

For those readers interested in my views on Lumumba’s leadership, his legacy for Africa, and the role of the CIA in his assassination along with the Belgians, the British M16 and corrupt Congolese leaders, a good place to start is my blogpost published by ROAPE on 15 January 2021.

**On a mission for the AAPS (African Association of Political Science) in Nairobi in November 1994.**

I’d like to move on to discuss now your scholarly work. What has been the motivation for your historical enquiry over the years, and what do you regard as your most important work and contribution?

I am not a historian by training since none of my university degrees are in history. I have a B.A. in philosophy (Davidson College, 1967), an M.A. in diplomacy and international commerce (University of Kentucky, 1968) and a Ph.D. in political science (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1975). Despite my training as a political scientist, only six years of my academic teaching since 1971 have been in a department of political science: one year at the Congo Free University in Kisangani (DRC), two years at the National University of Zaire, Lubumbashi Campus, two years at Atlanta University (now Clark-Atlanta University) in Atlanta (USA) and one year at the University of Maiduguri in Nigeria. My longest two jobs as a teacher have been at Howard University (1978-97) and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, since 2007.

I taught in the Department of African Studies at Howard, a unit of the Faculty of Social Sciences, offering M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in African studies with a focus on public policy and development. At Carolina I am teaching in the Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies, which offers undergraduate degrees in African studies and African American and Diaspora studies. Moreover, I have held the presidency of both an interdisciplinary professional organisation, the African Studies Association (ASA) of the United States, the largest scholarly organisation of Africa-area scholars in the world, in 1987-88, and a disciplinary one, the African Association of Political Science (AAPS), 1995-97. With 33 years spent teaching in interdisciplinary departments, I see myself as an interdisciplinary scholar, and I am above all a scholar-activist.

As a youngster whose political awakening coincided with the struggle for independence in the Belgian Congo, and whose dream of becoming a medical doctor was derailed by my own choice to participate in civil rights demonstrations against racial injustice and discrimination in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1963-65, political activism has been an integral part of who I am since I was expelled from the United Secondary School (Presbyterian-Methodist) of Katubue in April 1960 for participation in protests in favour of Congolese independence. Consequently, my scholarly work has been focused on the political history of the Congo and Africa, with the aim of understanding colonialism, African resistance to foreign rule, the independence struggle, and the betrayal of the people’s expectations of independence by the new African oligarchy, which is more concerned with enriching itself and clinging to power to protect itself from political and economic crimes. My first major scholarly article dealt with the role of different African social classes in the struggle for independence, and it was published as the lead article in the December 1970 issue of The Journal of Modern African Studies, while the French translation appeared three months earlier in the Cahiers Economiques et Sociaux, the social science journal of Lovanium University in Kinshasa.

This article, along with my very first article published in the December 1969 issue of Mawazo, a Makerere University journal, on the massacre of university students in Kinshasa on 4 June 1969, set the tone for all my subsequent publications. The most important work in these publications is The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History (2002). This book, which I finished writing while working for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Nigeria, won the Best Book Award from the African Politics Conference Group (APCG), an affiliate organization of the African Studies Association and other professional groups. It is an organisation made up mostly of American political scientists studying Africa. To make it available to Congolese and other Francophone readers, I published an updated French version of it as Faillite de la gouvernance et crise de la construction nationale au Congo-Kinshasa: Une analyse des luttes pour la démocratie et la souveraineté nationale (ICREDES 2015), which is translated in English as “Governance failure and the crisis of nation building in Congo-Kinshasa: An analysis of struggles for democracy and national sovereignty.”

This is the main thread running through my work and comes out clearly in my major books and articles, such as my presidential addresses at the African Studies Association in 1988 and the African Association of Political Science in 1997 entitled “The African Crisis: The Way Out,” and “The Role of Intellectuals in the Struggle for Democracy, Peace and Reconstruction in Africa,” respectively. The first address seeks to answer a question that many African scholars have raised but which is best articulated by Claude Ake in the London magazine West Africa of 17 June 1985 with a simple interrogation: “Why Africa is not developing.”

The American sociologist Barrington Moore has provided the correct way of approaching such a question. Generally, he argues, intellectuals analyse society either from the standpoint of the dominant groups, which have a vested interest in mystifying the way society works, or from the perspective of ordinary people, who have nothing to lose from truthful analyses of their predicament. For him, it is this latter class perspective that comes closer to objective scientific analysis. He writes: “For all students of human society, sympathy with the victims of historical processes and skepticism about the victors’ claims provide essential safeguards against being taken in by the dominant mythology. A scholar who tries to be objective needs these feelings as part of his ordinary working equipment”.

At the same time, sympathy with the popular classes does not mean creating other mythologies that have nothing to do with reality. Here I take advice from the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the social responsibility of intellectuals, which includes thinkers like Socrates, Karl Marx, and Cheik Anta Diop. According to this tradition, intellectuals are to be philosophers and, as such, critics of the status quo. For to philosophize, Merleau-Ponty maintains in his book Éloge de la philosophie (In Praise of Philosophy) – his brilliant inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1953 – implies that there are things to see and to say. And what a philosopher sees and says may not agree with society’s conventional wisdom and dominant interests. This is a position that is in perfect agreement with the Socratic view of philosophical practice as an uncompromising quest for the truth. A quest, it must be added, that involves a critical appraisal of all ideas, values, and conventions. According to this view, the philosopher is one who investigates and announces the results of this investigation regardless of the price to be paid for her/his commitment to the truth, the ultimate price being, as in the case of Socrates himself, giving up one’s life.

These are the two basic principles of my scholarly practice and contribution to knowledge: sympathy with the oppressed and uncompromising quest for the truth. I have attempted to rely on them to elucidate the political history of the Congo and Africa generally from the colonial period to the present.

**UNDP technical assistant at a meeting of ICGLR (International Conference on the Great Lakes Region) MPs at the People’s Palace in Kinshasa, March 2007.**

Which political figure from Congolese history do you think has been the most misunderstood or overlooked, and is deserving of greater attention today?

In terms of political history and social analysis, the one intellectual who fits this category the best is Mabika Kalanda. A philosopher and a political activist formerly known as Auguste Mabika Kalanda, he received an excellent education in the classical Greek and Latin curriculum of Belgian schools at the famous Catholic secondary school of Kamponde in the Kasai province of the Belgian Congo. In 1954, he was one of the first Congolese to enrol in a full-fledged university at Lovanium in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa). He graduated in 1958 with two undergraduate degrees in psychology and education and political science. After one year of professional training as an assistant in the Ministry of Interior and the provincial government of Brabant in Belgium, he returned to the Congo as the sole Congolese member of the European-only corps of territorial administration officials.

Four years later, he would become the second person to hold the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs, from 14 April 1963 to 8 July 1964. When Pierre Mulele returned to Kinshasa on 3 July 1963 disguised as a West African following his training in guerrilla warfare in China, he apparently received support from Minister Mabika Kalanda, who gave him a new Congolese passport and helped facilitate his return to the Kwilu bush on 27 July. The popular insurrection for a “second independence” was about to start. A Lumumbist and a strong advocate of Lumumba’s vision for the Congo, Mabika Kalanda was head of one of the MNC/L factions at the CNS in 1991-92.

Mabika Kalanda wrote several books on different topics, ranging from the intra-ethnic conflict between the Lulua and Luba-Kasai to mythology, but his most important book with respect to postcolonial Africa is La Remise en Question: Base d’une Décolonisation Mentale (1967), in which the author calls for mental decolonisation in Africa by the calling into question of ideas, values and behaviour inherited from colonialism. The manuscript was sent to the publisher in 1965, but the book did not appear until two years later. By the time Mabika Kalanda began writing it in 1964, he had already dropped using his “Christian” or “European” name of Auguste, nearly eight years before Mobutu launched his “recourse to authenticity” drive in February 1972, which ordered his compatriots to use African names only and to promote African culture. Before that, in 1963, Mabika Kalanda had written a book in Tshiluba, one of the four national languages in the DRC, entitled Tabalayi, or open your eyes, for the Lulua and Luba-Kasai who are not fluent in French, but who share the same mother tongue, to resist the manipulations of ambitious politicians who were stoking the fires of division and war for their own interests.

Today, when you go into academic forums in the United States and in Anglophone Africa, you hear scholars heap praise on the distinguished Kenyan writer and academic Ngugi wa Thiong’o, formerly James Ngugi, as the person who first came up with the concept of mental decolonisation in his book Decolonizing the Mind (1986), although Ngugi himself gives a lot of credit to Frantz Fanon for this idea. Unfortunately, both Anglophone and Francophone scholars in Africa know little or nothing about Mabika Kalanda and his work. One can understand why Anglophone scholars could not have heard of him in the absence of translations. In the case of Francophone scholars, on the other hand, the main issue is the fact that we seem to notice great African intellectuals only after they have been discovered by Europeans or Americans.

When reading your work, and especially your most seminal contributions, the spirits of Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral are ever present. Could you talk a little about their influence on your intellectual development and writing?

I discovered Frantz Fanon in 1964 at Davidson College and Amilcar Cabral in 1968 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. One day, while walking past his office in the main building of the college, Dr Richard Gift, then a professor of economics at Davidson, called me in to show me the 1963 Grove Press edition of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon’s masterpiece. He asked me whether I knew this revolutionary thinker of African descent. He was surprised by my ignorance and told me that every Third World student must study Fanon. I took his advice seriously and went to the college library, where I found the original of Fanon’s book in French (Les damnés de la terre, 1961), other books by him, and several of his articles as well as critiques of his work in French scholarly journals.

Since then, Fanon’s writings have influenced my intellectual outlook and my analysis of African politics. I was greatly inspired by his central message to African intellectuals, that they should follow the path of revolution by going to the school of the people rather than be captured by the bookish knowledge of the Ivory Tower, to transform the inherited structures of the economy and the state to serve the interests of the wretched of the earth instead of those of the imperialist bourgeoisie and its lackeys in Africa. This message rang so true in my mind not only because it reinforced similar messages from other great intellectuals such as Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Barrington Moore, but also and more importantly because it reminded me of the martyrdom of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo.

With reference to Amilcar Cabral, I came across his brilliant address on “Presuppositions and objectives of national liberation in relation to social structure,” which is best known as “The Weapon of Theory,” in 1968. This is the speech he had delivered on behalf of the peoples and nationalist organisations of the Portuguese colonies to the First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America held in Havana on 3-12 January 1966. This and subsequent readings of Cabral’s other speeches and writings confirmed his affinity with Fanon’s central message. As a trained agronomist, his writings were fact-based and he combined a high level of empirical analysis with a very clear theoretical compass for understanding social realities, in addition to being a great strategist in the armed struggle against Portuguese fascism and colonialism. His writings on imperialism and national liberation were so superb that they were cited as an inspiration by the young Portuguese military officers who carried out the democratic coup d’état of April 1974, which is better known in Portugal as the Carnation Revolution.

The Amilcar Cabral Foundation learned of my appreciation of Cabral’s scholarly work at the 25^th anniversary meeting of the African Studies Association, which was held in November 1982 in Washington under my leadership as the Program Director and chief organizer, that they invited me to the First Amilcar Cabral International Symposium held on 17-20 January 1983 in Praia, Cape Verde. These dates were chosen to coincide with the assassinations of Lumumba and Cabral himself, the first in 1961 and the second in 1973. I have had the privilege of participating in the 2^nd symposium in September 2004 and the third in January 2013, all of which were held in Praia.

Lastly, it seems we are living through a period of some hope in the Congo, where in the first instance the courage, activism and sacrifices of Congolese people taking to the streets and in some cases laying down their lives made it politically unfeasible for Kabila to fulfil his desire to change the constitution and continue for a third term (and beyond), and more recently, the current President Felix Tshisekedi (Etienne’s son) has pulled off a succession of significant strategic moves to weaken Kabila’s political coalition and grip over the country, and replace it with what he is calling a Union sacrée de la nation (Sacred Union of the Nation). This is all very much ongoing as we speak, but what is your initial reading of the current political moment, and do you share the view that this is indeed a period of hope?

Africans tend to be eternal optimists, and I am one of them. In April 2019, on his first official visit to the United States, President Tshisekedi told a Congolese audience that his sees his job as that of ousting or taking down (déboulonner in French) the dictatorial and corrupt system that he found in power. Lots of people laughed at this statement, but he was dead serious about it. He started the process by unleashing the judiciary to let them do their job without being dictated to by Kabila and his cronies, and the prosecutors went after the President’s own chief of staff. Next came changes in the military high command and the Constitutional Court. The Kabilists overreacted with insults and acts of insubordination, particularly by the Justice minister and the Prime Minister, and fell into their own trap. The President stopped collaborating with them and cancelled the weekly cabinet meetings. Meanwhile, he appealed to patriotism and organized consultations with all strata of the population for a full month to gauge the spirit of the nation. The result was overwhelming support for breaking the coalition with Kabila’s political group and the desertion of hundreds of MPs from Kabila’s camp to the Union Sacrée de la Nation, the new parliamentary majority.

There is no doubt that some of the MPs who have changed political camps have done so in the hope of getting ministerial and parastatal posts. While fragile, the new majority made up of the pre-2019 opposition and the deserters from the Kabila camp will help the President in the short term in reorienting the country towards the rule of law and fiscal discipline likely to improve revenue collection to allow the state to pay civil servants and to provide to the population basic services such as water, electricity, health care and free education in primary and secondary schools. This will create a new departure for DRC citizens, who are tired of living in a banana republic, but one with an enormous wealth in the natural resources necessary to ensure decent livelihood. Popular support is one of the main reasons for the success of Tshisekedi’s political gamble, and the majority of the population stands behind the son of Etienne Tshisekedi. It is also the main reason for hope. Our politicians are aware of this reality. Being human, they do not want to see the people’s anger directed at them.

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja is Professor of African and Global Studies in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA). He is also a member of the African Academy of Sciences (AAS), former president of the African Studies Association (ASA) of the United States and the author of many books, including The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History and Patrice Lumumba.

Featured Photograph: Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja as a lecturer at the Lubumbashi campus of the National University of Zaire in December 1973.

Democracy as divide and rule

ROAPE

April 16, 2021

In a far-reaching long-read for ROAPE, writer and commentator Yusuf Serunkuma argues that ‘democracy’ in Africa is not just a language of (colonial) exploitation, it is the practice of exploitation itself. Our challenge today, is to understand the colonial nature of this democracy – divide and rule, shameless free markets, foreign aid, and loans & media bombardment – and the myriad, so-called good-intentioned crusaders who promote it.

By Yusuf Serunkuma

If Marx had lived during our time, he would edit his timeless phrase about religion. He would write, as religion is the opium of the masses, democracy is the crack cocaine of the elite. Especially the African elite, we are high on it. As it quietly destroys our internal organs, we strive for more and of better quality. The vendors are merchandisers all the most aggressive and most persuasive. Their adverts have refused to add the cautionary label, “democracy smoking will kill you.” These vendors are not only ‘creaming away’ all the profits from their product, but also eating the carcasses of their victims. By the time the African intelligentsia overcome their addiction, they would understand that the enemy to their governance-development question has never been themselves, their bad education or bad leadership but rather the stuff they have been smoking as medication – democracy itself, its crusaders and merchandisers. Democracy is not just a language of [colonial] exploitation, it is the practice of exploitation itself. Problematically mixed with civil liberties, democracy has inextricably, irretrievably tied the African elite to exploitative capitalism, while at the same time, exciting, distracting and completely blinding them from real concerns, or even revolution.

Just the same way colonial exploitation thrived on divide and conquer, democracy does the same, but more tactfully, more elusively. Democracy thrives on a double-layered divide and conquer (a) it disconnects the elite from ordinary folks with the elite not only developing new tastes and cultures —not simply consumptive ones, but lifestyles and practices—but they also become obsessed with their own preservation. On the other hand, the lifestyles, struggles and pains of rural folks are exorcised as slight inconveniences, painful sores and humanitarian— not structural—challenges needing benevolent intervention. (b) the elite are then split into often terribly polarized “political parties” and other smaller camps, where sustaining or grabbing power becomes the single most important preoccupation. The task of the African intellectual therefore is to understand the colonial exploitative nature of democracy (divide and rule, shameless vulgarity of free markets, disruptive endless ‘human rights’ quibbles, foreign aid, and loans, media bombardment); and the myriad lofty seemingly good-intentioned crusaders.

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Let’s start with some basic seemingly obsolete questions: Do former colonial masters still want to exploit the resources of formerly colonised places – specifically Africa? By exploit I mean, to steal or benefit at the expense of the Natives of those countries. Stated differently, are Africans convinced that their former colonisers are happy to see them thrive, and the endless streams of aid and loans, and the gospel of democracy are all meant for their betterment? How about new powers such as America and China? Are they benevolent friends helping in times of need or honest business partners? Has this urge, ambition and plotting to pillage ended? Again, this is not about countries in West Africa where the colonial powers, specifically, France actually didn’t leave after independence but rather retained its grip on their former colonies through especially banking. I am concerned about countries where colonial masters actually “left” upon independence.

The response to these questions is an easy YES; all the world’s new and old powers are interested in stealing from weaker countries especially in Africa. A sombre cry by novelist Ama Ato Aidoo on 500 years of European exploitation captures the painful state of affairs, and a recent meticulous study by Angus Elsby on coffee and cotton captures this ongoing pillage. But the question is this: if Africans know that there are thieves all around them plotting, scheming, and conniving to steal their resources, why are they not resisting the way their predecessors resisted colonialism? Why do Africans feel and behave so weak, incapable, and conditioned to playball as their countries are looted by the same powers their anti-colonial mothers and fathers resisted? Why don’t we have a second wave of anti-exploitation struggle on the continent resisting the new manifestation of colonial-like exploitation?

Let me make one caveat here: this has nothing to do with the so-called legacy of colonialism – see Mahmood Mamdani and co. – because that would mean seeking to bring an end to a way of doing things, or simple removal of the structures that were left behind after independence. Mine is not a quest to decolonise but rather to see foreign exploitation in all its new forms. Perhaps my first proposition is that seeing and discussing western exploitation of the African continent through the language of colonialism, and its blighted offshoots, neo-colonialism, decolonisation, etc is not necessarily obsolete, but is actually distractive. It denies us the chance to appreciate the performatively non-colonial ways in which the continent is being looted. My core proposition is that we need to see democracy as the new absolute manifestation of exploitation. There is urgent need to go behind it, expose its traps, and confront its beastly smiley face. Africa will need to proudly pursue a de-democratisation struggle—which is certainly much more difficult than the anti-colonial struggle.

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Let’s return to my central question: why are Africans not resisting this new form of exploitation – democracy? My answer to this question is threefold: (a) the new exploiters, couched in the slick but highly deceptive, confusingly omnibus understanding of democracy (to include free markets, free and fair elections, freedoms and human rights, free speech, choice, people, representation, equality, justice) have deftly disguised the manifest exploitation of democracy. The face of democracy appears attractive and sophisticated as it displays and performs ironically non-existent Mzungu practices on governance in Europe and North America. As Ali Mazrui, 1997 succinctly demonstrated, the humanitarian values (freedom of speech, women emancipation and empowerment, freedom of choice, religion, etc.) believed to the guaranteed as so terribly inexistent even in the so-called democracies of the west. The denial of these values, Mazrui noted, only takes a different more subtle form. One doesn’t have to look too far to see how “democratic” America or the United Kingdom treats its black folks, workers, women, drops bombs on other nations for sport, continue to openly loot abroad, etcetera.. The beautiful decorated façade of regular elections, freedom of speech and religion mask a rather dangerous strain of thuggery and exploitation.

(b) there is an army of pleasant looking, beautiful, ever-smiling, sweet-talking and cash-dangling handlers and brokers pushing democracy with high-sounding and seemingly beautiful arguments about justice, rights, the people… etcetera claiming these are provided and guaranteed by democracy. Who could be against that…? They subtly ask. These handlers – these new colonial administrators – do not call themselves Governors and Colonial Lords, but rather “regional coordinators,” “country directors,” “programme managers” and academics. They operate without the brutality, overt racism and insults that defined earlier exploiters. They are constantly “seeking partnerships,” not dominions. They claim to “respect” national sovereignty and independence and will seek to execute their duties in the confines of international law. They will never tell you the history of so-called international law, which explicitly does not recognise Africans as sovereigns but rather just as Africans (see Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui, 1996). In doing all this, they never lose sight on the estate. These new exploiter emissaries include charming fellows in the European Union, American and British embassies, the United Nations offices, World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) and several experts of democracy based at British and American universities—studying Africa! They run tantalisingly named units such as the Democracy Governance Facility (DGF) where they narcotize thousands of local elites into inertia, spending endless hours in offices writing proposals and forging accountabilities (see Makau Mutua, eds. 2009).

These strategies have quietly, methodically captured all local media houses, schools, and all other spaces of active learning to push the democracy agenda into curriculums. In the end, they produce democracy thinking clones – literally, producing democracy’s Uncle Toms. Ever wondered why war-torn countries such as Somalia, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Libya, etcetera have intellectuals and politicians on podiums chanting democracy amidst ruins and dead bodies—entering contracts for oil and other mineral resource explorations, signing off loans and debts? Yes, it is the good work of these handlers.

Oftentimes, these democracy “merchandisers” operate under the language of development assistance. They flood the NGO sector, and civil society. This is in spite of the copious amounts of scholarship that vividly demonstrate that aid does not work (see Andrew Rugasira, 2007; Juluis Gatune, 2010; Dambisa Moyo, 2010). African countries surely do not need aid to stave off famine or prosper – no country ever did – but the givers will not listen. Even when asked to leave, they go away sour-graping like they loved the recipient country more than its leaders. But these new exploiters, wearing their false smiles have, through a series of lengthy and underhand methods—including manufacturing narratives of poverty, predictions of disease, fake annual indices on this and that—they actually force, squeeze, cajole, and harass an African country into receiving aid, but will never mention better terms of trade (see Slavoj Zizek, 2009). If they fail to push this through more technicalized forgeries and liberal concoctions, they’ll resort to outright violence. Examples abound of both covert and overt uses of violence: Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, etcetera under the cover of civil liberties. In truth, these are fortune hunters – like their colonial predecessors who rode on the deceptive language of civilising the Natives, these are simply sophisticated thieves who have managed to manufacture a common sense around their practice of theft as the best form of governance (elsewhere, see Pepe Escobar, 2009).

And finally, against such an environment of deftly disguised exploitation and aggressive brokers (c) the current breed of leaders – in the academia, media, and mainstream politics – have been extremely softened by urban life, and the perverse spread of bodily pleasures from Europe and North America. Softeners range from their beautiful wives (and, occasionally, husbands) and long streams of concubines, comfortable beds, to sweet foods, which they have not earned and are haunted by the fact that they do not deserve. Incredible amounts of money circulate among these fellows over and above the rent for their labour. It is a cartel. These comprador leaders and elites surviving off the crumbs of elite capital are condemned to perpetual praise and gratitude to their present oppressors – for enabling them access to these crumbs in the theft of their compatriots. Intellectually inferior, and without the backing of a traditional modernities upon which their predecessors —the anti-colonial intelligentsia—were bedecked, our new leaders are barebones, thrown into modernities where they have no histories and are simply drowning. When Partha Chatterjee writes about ‘tradition’ presenting the anti-colonial intellectuals with ‘a liberal rationalist dilemma’, that is, in the words of Lidwien Kapteijns, the challenge to be modern and traditional at the same time, he actually recognises the base upon which the anti-colonial intelligentsia constantly made reference as they negotiated their entry into a colonial modernity in a postcolonial moment. Our new would-be liberationists have neither and are simply swimming with the tide.

Spending endless hours watching European football on SuperSport, and admiring lofty English on BBC and CNN, googling stuff, and busying themselves on the myriad social media platforms, they cannot imagine abandoning these pleasures for thoroughbred struggle, which could benefit the collective. It is simply enough and too much. With the majority of this elite imprisoned at their small desks in parliament, NGOs and Civil Society, they are seemingly content with the status quo since they can ably afford the bodily pleasures mentioned above (you’ll find them endlessly chanting: ‘Compatriots! Do not risk throwing the existing order up in air – who knows where we will land !’). They are obsessed with their pleasures and freedoms guaranteed by democracy as the actual wealth of the country is quietly scooped up by their NGOs and Civil Society funders.

Democracy as divide and Rule: Lessons from Uganda

Ugandans are now familiar with constant images of mostly white folks from the European Union, and other western embassies driving to homes of leading opposition candidate after every election. Their agenda remains the most enigmatic. When it was Col. Kiiza Besigye, amidst the tension of a stolen election in 2016 —the Uganda confirmed gross irregularities on two occasions but refused to nullify the election— EU folks would drive to his home in Kasangati for some conversations. We will never know exactly what they discussed but it wouldn’t matter anyway. But they often had such a grand entry and exit from the dusty Kasangati road turning into Besigye’s home. From Kiiza Besigye’s home, they would then go and meet the incumbent, Yoweri Museveni. This Museveni meeting was never as prominently publicised. Most recently, with Bobi Wine becoming the lead opposition candidate in the country, they have been driving to his home in Magere, and quite often to his party offices in Kamwokya. Again, they often make quite an entry. From meeting Bobi Wine, they then travelled a few kilometres to meet Museveni where he assured them that Uganda was not “their enemy” [sic] before posing for pictures.

A delegation from the European Union (EU) Mission in Uganda and the US Embassy Kampala meet the Uganda opposition leader Kizza Besigye (26 February 2016).

There is no better manifestation, or blatant display of divide and conquer than seeing these democracy merchandisers strutting from one corner of Kampala to the other just like colonial lords patronising the lead politicians on either side of the rather superficial aisle. Their obvious but deftly disguised intention are threefold: (a) ensure that while these two groups remain diametrically opposed to each other, they do not disturb the peace creating a mess for business. Preach peace— there should be no disruptions to our looting! Because if they did, you will never know where it ends. (b) should either side emerge victorious, no alliances are lost, as all of them will consider you a friend. But more significantly, (c) once the cameras are gone, the EU uses opposition leaders as bargaining chips against which they force Museveni into tougher concessions. They constantly remind Museveni of their potential to support his adversary if he does not play ball. Indeed, if this were the 1970s, these fellows would actually sell guns to both sides, and then bring relief food supplies to war-displaced natives.

If colonialism thrived on the principle of divide and conquer, democracy thrived on a likeable but sadly, equally dangerous arrangement, ‘multi-party governance.’ As a principle, a multi-party order divides the elite into polarized camps, political parties, with one forming the government and the other, the opposition. After the country’s intelligentsia are divided, the democracy brokers and merchandisers proceed to conquer them. Deeply divided, and sometimes at the point of violence against each other, Natives never get the opportunity to stop and see their real enemy. The contest over retaining office becomes the major concern for the ruling party at the expense of developing the country. Instead of actually uniting to consolidate their position and use their combined brain power (as their anti-colonial intelligentsia did), the sitting government both imprisons and murders its critics—key human resources—leaving it empty of brain power, and terribly exposed. By the time the democracy thieves strike, the sitting president has sycophants and praise singers to consult with.

In the Ugandan example, we will never know (a) how much money Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni invests in keeping the office of president, since he has some of the most sumptuous classified budget votes—such as state house (spending USH550m daily – US$152,000) with a budget allocation above tourism, the lead foreign exchange earner). It is certainly in billions. Since he has life presidency ambitions, Museveni spends a great deal of time and money procuring members of the opposition. To divide them further. Museveni is also endlessly facilitating and privileging the security forces, which in 2020, took 10% of the entire national budget above health and agriculture. [There is no war in Uganda, and the budget has been as high as this for the last 15 years]. The guardian ministries of the man (state house and security) also get sumptuous supplementary budgets for classified expenditure! But the larger goal is to keep the president in power, since he sees a constant threat in the opposing side.

Parliament, which Museveni obviously does not need if there were no democracy merchandisers pushing him, is terribly bloated with over 530 legislators currently making it the biggest in Africa—bigger than South Africa and Nigeria. Annually, the Ugandan parliament burns USH1.3 trillion (approximately US$360m) of Ugandan taxpayer just for the theatrics of it. Just for the theatrics of it. Yet, everything of consequence in Uganda is pre-decided by Museveni before it is dramatized on the floor of Parliament. Additionally, Museveni employs hundreds of advisors, ministers, Residential District Commissioners (RDCs) with equally senior deputies, simply as part of his great retinue of patronage. The amount of money and energy Museveni spends on playing other centres of power especially the Catholic church, Muslims and the Buganda kingdom elite is equally immense. These are not simple cash-staffed brown envelopes—which are far too common—these are big sums ranging from billions to churches to four-wheel Land-cruisers. Just to buy off opposition in the name of democracy. But democracy merchandisers hold these items in his face, which forces him into concessions with specifically the foreign exploiters. Let’s now consider the related part of this argument.

Living in simple fear—not the principle—of the opposition (b) we would never know the amount of concessions, Museveni has had to make with the new democracy-wagging exploiters, the self-appointed vanguards of democracy to allow them to continue their pillage of Uganda, and him to continue governing. If he is not sending mercenary forces to Somalia, he is sending them to South Sudan, and DRC. The details of these concessions remain top secrets to the Ugandan public. The Ugandan parliament predicts that the country will need 94 years to clear this debt, which continues to surge every passing day. Business deals where Uganda is left with minority shareholding over its own resources such as oil are simply baffling.

Incidentally, all this rides on the wreck left behind by vanguards of democracy into African economies in the late 1980s when they coerced country after country into dismantling cooperatives that had enabled societies and the people to survive. The dismantling of cooperatives led to a rise in rural poverty after tilling the land had been made unprofitable. If this was no colonialism—an outright plot to exploit and break the toiling masses of Africa —then we’ll never appreciate the depth of its damage to the continent. Because after local economies were ruined, including the closure of all local banks – many of them closed without explanation – the vacuum left behind was filled by European and Asian banks. The Ugandan banking market is now dominated by foreign banks, with business-suffocating interest rates, making banks in Africa the most profitable in the world, yet the most inefficient—according to The Economist. It is extremely difficult, if not outright terrifying, for farmers and small scale businesspersons to access credit. Surprisingly, this so-called Washington Consensus is still enforced 20 years on – even when the damage is visible everywhere – and the WB has acknowledged its mistakes. What the fuck is this?

Yet farmers across Europe and North America are not on their own. They are heavily funded by their states. Take the example of Mali that Slavoj Zizek (2009) writes about, despite producing high quality cotton and beef, the two pillars of its economy, the country could not compete with the US and EU, where the same industries are heavily subsidised:

…the problem is that the financial support the US government gives to its own cotton farmers amounts to more than the entire state budget of Mali… the EU subsidizes every single cow with around 500 Euros per year—more than the per capita GDP in Mali.

These double standards are visible to every single soul from South Africa to Mali and Uganda (see also, Jörg Wiegratz 2019). The promotion of free markets remains a central idea to a so-called democratic government. But in truth, it is outright exploitation through the international dictates of structural adjustment and open markets which are pushed down the throats of Africans as a core parts of ‘democracy.’ Only in Africa!

To return to the question why is there no concentrated movement against this new form of exploitation dubbed democracy (its free market economics, loans, and grants, and foreign aid) and enforced onto only small countries? This is because of democracy’s disguised logic of divide and conquer. The language of democracy ensures the best brains of the country are split into conflicting camps with one obsessed with the holding onto the presidency as much of the intelligentsia remains blind but also conscripted to the networks and channels of exploitation.

The west’s no-change regimes, and PR presidents

One of the most powerful jokes of the 21st Century is the highly cited notion that “power belongs to the people.” It never does, has never, and will never. That in the exercise of democracy—specifically voting—ordinary folks wield their power to determine the ways in which they are governed, remains one of the biggest lies of our time. The lie continues that by this single act of voting, they have power to restore civility, end dangerous policies of previous governments such as removing American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, which since the start was based on fake intelligence, closing the very embarrassing Guantanamo Prison, or ensuring a minimum wage for workers etcetera. It is all high sounding nonsense. Ordinary folks have no power—except through violent revolution—but would be constantly manipulated into the belief in their electoral power.

The Slovenian theorist, Slavoj Zizek, was right when he claimed that while humanity was okay, 99 percent of people are boring gullible idiots. They have been deluded into belief of possessing electoral civil power. In truth, the world is run on self-interested authorities or autocracy. These take two forms, institutionalised and individualised. While in Europe and North America, authority or autocracy is institutionalised, it has tended to take individualised forms in Africa. The west has extremely autocratic institutions, which constantly change their public relations officers—often problematically called Presidents or Prime Ministers. The holders of these titles and offices actually have no power besides speech and celebrity. See for example, be it Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden, America’s domestic policy on immigration, the police force, black folks, guns, women, the minimum wage will remain the same. There will be minute adjustments that the very noisy American press will blow out of proportion discussing it endlessly. But by and large, stuff remains the same. American foreign policy towards the Middle East, Israel, Palestine, Iran and Africa will not change. Change only comes by way of violent revolution, marches, strikes, community organising, media activism, etcetera—not through the facades of elections.

As an African watching America from the outside, I agree with Syria’s Bashar-al-Assad’s conclusion that President Donald Trump’s crime was transparency about the intentions of America’s imperial interests. While Obama and Clinton smiled and joked through their crimes in the Middle East and at home, Trump was boisterous and embarrassingly candid. With more gusto, Trump simply continued Obama’s policies at home and abroad. Surely, Joe Biden is already doing the same — with just a little sophistication and disguise. American and European presidents are like shirts and dresses, while some make the wearer turn out smart, others could simply mess-up their appearances. But the bodies behind these fabrics remain the same. The truth is, heavily invested, albeit invisible Hitlers, Mussolinis, Stalins, Lenins, and Napoleons control American and European institutions. True to their power, these invisible Hitlers and Mussolinis blatantly took away the megaphone from Donald Trump for constantly embarrassing them with terrible PR. They went ahead and killed those smaller units that sought to challenge their power? [Please note, Facebook and Twitter are simply a manifestation, not the wielders of actual power].

The cycle of deception continues. Americans will always unite in stealing and killing from the rest of the world. Then back home, lobbyists, bankers and the super rich will squeeze life out of workers and African Americans will constantly be jailed and murdered, as women march for equal work equal pay like democracy never existed. It is all a deception.

The deceptive entanglement that democracy is more than elections, but all other civil liberties and humane treatment is terribly ahistorical. African history is replete with civil regimes that have no connection with our present perceptions of so-called democracy. In truth, the proposition that their democracy guarantees and is synonymous with humaneness and civil liberties is not just problematically ahistorical, but a dreadful deceptive. It is the trick. It is behind this claim that Africans have been duped, as their resources are being stolen under their noses.

Towards regimes of authority

After Tanzanian President John Pombe Magufuli had died, and the deafening elite noise boomed from every corner of the region, sloganeering about how Magufuli stifled dissent and free press, a friend of mine asked me to name the major opposition political party in China, and how many MPs they had in their parliament. I didn’t know. He then asked me to name the main opposition party in Russia, and how democracy—as dramatized in western Europe and North America—played out there. I did not know it either. He moved on to the much admired Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. He mixed it up with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Argentina, North Korea, Iran asking me to name their opposition political parties. It was such as mixed bag, and I did not know how to respond. He then asked me about the quality of life in those countries compared to say the “more democratic” Great Britain, Kenya, Uganda or even South Africa.

Humbled, I then recalled Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya which the UN constantly ranked highest in Africa on its Development Index. Focused on items including literacy rates, women empowerment, living conditions, and healthcare, Libya, for years ranked above more democratic spaces such as South Africa and Nigeria. On their part, Russia, China and Turkey have a higher quality of life for their populations in addition to being major economic powers. Why, if they aren’t democratic? Why don’t they have open markets? Didn’t structural adjustment reach these places? Before asking about the civil liberties in these countries, my friend raised the story of Julian Assange and the asked whether I had read a Mazrui 1997 essay discussing how similar the so-called democratic spaces in the west aren’t any different from so-called authoritarian spaces in the Islamic world.

The exploitative dangerousness of democracy is captured in Slavoj Zizek’s eulogy to Nelson Mandela that appeared in The Guardian upon his death. Concluding that Mandela was a failure—as regards the uplift the victims of apartheid from the backwaters of the economy, land redistribution . Zizek speaks to a difficult capitalist-democracy dilemma, and how leaders get derided and fought as authoritarians and sometimes even killed. Zizek writes,

A leader or party is elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a “new world”– but, then, sooner or later, they stumble upon the key dilemma: does one dare to touch the capitalist mechanisms, or does one decide to “play the game”? If one disturbs these mechanisms, one is very swiftly “punished” by market perturbations, economic chaos and the rest.

Although Zizek speaks to open confrontation from capitalists, we need to appreciate that exploitative nature of capitalism has thrived with ‘democracy’ as its utmost enabler, its methodology, which most importantly, makes resistance to exploitation divided and distracted.

Across Africa, this dilemma of whether to or not to touch the capitalist machine is as old as independence. Those leaders who played the game were either favourably profiled in international presses, given lucrative deals in mining and other resource exploitation projects. In other cases, they were knighted, and sometimes awarded with Nobel prizes. If they touched or simply threatened to dismantle this exploitative structure, they were punished, either with sanctions leading to removal from office, assassinated or exiled. They would be labelled dictators.

It is noteworthy that those few African leaders in history who actually managed to destabilise the machinery of new exploitation—euphemised as ‘free markets democracy’—had to craft something entirely different. But they were fiercely resisted. Even if they had actually been elected, as soon as they touched the machinery of exploitation, they were challenged. Especially on land and resources exploitation reforms, Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, John Pombe Magufuli are noteworthy. The core reason for dispensing with their democracy is that it has tended to bind government into contracts (globalisation, and free market), sensibilities (such as certain political freedoms, international human rights regimes etc), which are often selfishly and racially applied onto weaker countries and then exploited. International exploitative capitalism would be dead if it were not offered democracy as its handmaiden.

Nelson Mandela’s Nobel Prize winning genius was in deftly deflecting ANC land reform and economic redistribution movement leaving the economy in the hands of white South Africans. And because Steve Biko, Chris Hani, Winnie Mandela presented a persistent threat to white capital, they were purged. It should be interesting to note that the land reform in Zimbabwe was for a while actually working despite the country continuing under sanctions and misinformation in the major media houses (see Grasian Mkodzongi and Peter Lawrence, 2019). Six years of John Pombe Magufuli would be characterised by immense international name-calling because he actually refused to cow-tow to the dictates of the democracy merchandisers.

Closely appreciating these exploitative dynamics of a mode of government—a more sophisticated mode of pillage and control just like colonialism—continues to be stifled by the democracy machine and lobby. Africans will have to take a stand. And standing up will be costly in terms of life and resources. Sanctions, death, wars will be created so as to reproduce democratic exploitation. But for the African who is convinced that democratic Uganda under Museveni or democratic Kenya under the Mwai Kibaki, Uhuru Kenyatta, or Raila Odinga rather than Libya under Gaddafi or Cuba under Fidel Castro has actually joined the thieves en-route to rob their father’s estate. Of course, there are empty comprador autocracies, which are as bad as democracy. We’ll discuss these another day. Of course, Libya’s Gaddafi would be more humane, and the example of what it has become is extreme. But democratic Libya would never return to Gaddafi’s Libya, unless all Africans stood up. Nor will democratic South Africa ever reach Gaddafi’s Libya. The values often confused with democracy were more often preserved under the Ottomans. The scholarship on the Islamic tradition is deep and explicit on humaneness, rights of women, the poor, social security, equality between races, workers, independent scholarship, and thus freedom of speech, but the language is never “democracy.” In truth, democracy is divide and rule. It is thuggery.

Yusuf Serunkuma Kajura 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: US Secretary of State John Kerry hosts a working lunch for Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari (July 21, 2015).

Truth in a world of lies: the life of Nawal El-Saadawi

ROAPE

April 14, 2021

On 21 March 2021, Nawal El-Saadawi, Egyptian-born Marxist and long-time activist for women’s rights, died at the age of 89. Described as a feminist, author, activist, physician and psychiatrist, she was also known as Egypt’s most radical feminist. David Seddon celebrates her life.

By David Seddon

As a doctor, a political activist and a writer, Nawal El-Saadawi was a beacon of hope to women across the Arab world and beyond who struggled against the many faces and practices of patriarchy. She beat the drum for a radical and secular approach to women’s liberation. It was the patriarchal capitalist system and not ‘Islam’ specifically that kept women in chains.

The second eldest of nine children, El-Saadawi was born in 1931 in the small village of Kafr Tahla in the Nile Delta. Her father was a government official in the Egyptian Ministry of Education, who had campaigned against the rule of the British occupation of Egypt and Sudan during the Egyptian Revolution of 1919. He was relatively progressive and taught his daughter self-respect and to speak her mind. He also encouraged her to study the Arabic language and supported her education beyond school. Even so, El-Saadawi was subject to female genital mutilation at the age of six, and, when she was only 10 years old, her family tried to make her marry. Her mother supported her in resisting this.

El-Saadawi did well at school and eventually went to medical school. She graduated from Cairo University as a doctor in 1955 and married Ahmed Helmi, whom she met as a fellow student in medical school. They had a daughter, Mona. The marriage ended after two years. While working as a doctor in her birthplace of Kafr Tahla, she observed at first hand the hardships and inequalities faced by rural women. Her second husband was a colleague, Rashad Bey. Through her medical practice, she observed women’s physical and psychological problems and came to connect them not just with oppressive cultural practices, but with patriarchal, class and imperialist oppression.

She eventually became the Director of the Ministry of Public Health and met her third husband, Sherif Hatata, while sharing an office in the Ministry of Health. Hatata, also a medical doctor and writer, had been a political prisoner for 13 years. They married in 1964 and had a son. She was, throughout her life, far more than a distinguished medical professional, even if her experiences in this field provided her with a crucial foundation for her writing and her persistent lobbying against all forms of female oppression.

In 1969, for example, she published Women and Sex, confronting and contextualising the systematic aggression perpetrated against women’s bodies, including female circumcision. As a consequence of the book and her political activities, El-Saadawi was dismissed from her position at the Ministry of Health. She also lost her positions as chief editor of a health journal, and as Assistant General Secretary in the Medical Association of Egypt.

From 1973 to 1976, El-Saadawi carried out research on women and neurosis in the Faculty of Medicine at Ain Shams University. From 1979 to 1980, she was the UN Advisor for the Women’s Programme in Africa and the Middle East. In 1977, she published The Hidden Face of Eve, which spared no details of ‘the cuttings’ she had seen as a doctor in the villages.

I was introduced during this period to her life and works by Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan feminist sociologist and writer, whose own first book, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society, was published in 1975.

In 1981, El-Saadawi helped publish a feminist magazine called Confrontation. She was jailed in Qanater Women’s Prison in September that year by the government of President Anwar Sadat. El-Saadawi stated once in an interview, “I was arrested because I believed Sadat. He said ‘there is democracy and we have a multi-party system and you can criticize’. So, I started criticizing his policy and I landed in jail”. While in prison, she formed the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, the first legal and independent feminist group in Egypt.

In prison, she was denied pen and paper, however, that did not stop her from continuing to write. She used a ‘stubby black eyebrow pencil’ and ‘a small roll of old and tattered toilet paper’ to record her thoughts. Her incarceration formed the basis for her memoir, Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, and the experiences of another prisoner at Qanater, nine years before she was imprisoned there, served as inspiration for an earlier work, a novel titled Woman at Point Zero, in which her main protagonist, Firdaus, was awaiting execution for killing just one of the men who had abused her.

She was released later in 1981, one month after President Sadat’s assassination. Of her experience she wrote: ‘Danger has been a part of my life ever since I picked up a pen and wrote. Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies’.

After her release from prison, and throughout her 50s, she continued her crusade, arguing that nothing would change until the whole system was changed. This meant not just the overthrow of patriarchy – and the establishment of full gender equality – but of the whole class system and the religious ideology, that sustained it in Egypt and throughout ‘the Muslim world’, and of the imperialist world order that helped maintain repressive capitalist states and oppressive regimes.

In the 1990s, death threats, particularly from Islamists, led to her going abroad. Now in her 60s, she was fêted in the West, particularly in leftist circles, and her exile from Egypt was spent teaching at Duke University in North Carolina as well as at the University of Washington. But she was critical of the Western feminist movement and spoke openly of her dream of a pan-Arab women’s movement. Eventually, in 1996, she felt able to return to Egypt, but was not prepared to moderate her views or her expression of these views.

She maintained a high profile, taking part regularly in TV debates in which she was very outspoken. She was aware from an early age of the interplay and mutual reinforcement of class, colour and gender and always described herself proudly as ‘a dark-skinned Egyptian woman’.

In 2005, when she was 73 years old, President Hosni Mubarak banned her from media appearances. When, in 2007, her publisher burned a play of hers, in which God was out argued and gave up, she declared that if she said all she wanted to say she would be burned at the stake, like Joan of Arc.

In 2008, in part as a result of her persistent lobbying, a law was passed in Egypt banning female genital mutilation; but it had limited impact on what was, after all, a deeply ingrained cultural practice. El-Saadawi did not give up, however, and continued to maintain a high profile. All this activism came at a cost. In 2010, after 43 years of marriage, she and her third husband were divorced.

She was awarded honorary degrees and prizes around the world, and at various times held positions at a number of prestigious colleges and universities, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Georgetown, Florida State University and the University of California, Berkeley in the US and at the Sorbonne in Paris. But at home in Egypt, she continued to be a thorn in the flesh of the establishment.

When, in 2011, popular protest broke out across the Arab world, she joined the crowds in Tahrir Square and called for the end to the Mubarak regime; but she also denounced the Muslim Brotherhood and the new President Morsi as ‘capitalist patriarchs tied to Islam and abetted by the West’. Now in her 80s, she continued throughout the second decade of the 21^st century to make her views felt, in Egypt and elsewhere.

At the Göteborg Book Fair at the end of September 2018, El-Saadawi attended a seminar on development in Egypt and the Middle East after the Arab Spring and during her talk at the event stated that ‘colonial, capitalist, imperialist, racist’ global powers, led by the United States, had collaborated with the Egyptian government to end the 2011 Egyptian revolution.

She died, unrepentant and still defiant, at the age of 89. Her written legacy includes short stories, poetry, lectures, plays and novels, as well as her enormously influential early non-fiction books. Described as an Egyptian feminist, author, activist, physician and psychiatrist, she was also known as Egypt’s most radical feminist woman.

Nawal El-Saadawi (27 October 1931 to 21 March 2021).

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.

Featured Image: Portrait by David Horst (6 April 2021).

Taking on Adam Habib: an interview with Sandy Nicoll

ROAPE

April 12, 2021

ROAPE speaks to the socialist and trade unionist, Sandy Nicoll, the Secretary of the trade union, UNISON, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) about Professor Adam Habib, the new head of SOAS.

In a webinar with students from SOAS in March, Habib used the ‘n-word’ and then tried to justify himself. Nicoll’s union branch had an emergency meeting and carried a motion of ‘no confidence’ in Habib. 98% of those who attended voted for the motion and the other 2% abstained. The students and the union demand that Habib must go.

There are many reasons why people at SOAS think he should not be the Director. Firstly, it was unacceptable to use the ‘n-word’ in any context, with the possible exception of African Americans who have suffered the hurt associated with its use, and this alone, many argue, is enough for him to be sacked. He aggressively justified himself, attempting to cover his tracks by saying: ‘I come from a part of the world where we actually do use the word,’ which was taken as an excuse for using the word. Yet, as many commentators in South Africa have noted, this claim is simply inaccurate.

Habib never apologized for using the ‘n-word’ but merely for causing offense and discomfort. In addition, many claim, he was blatantly dishonest, arguing, for instance: ‘I did not say we use the word in South Africa,’ when it is very clear he was claiming exactly this. Others have criticised his astonishing arrogance, defending his statement, among numerous other examples, by saying some students ‘deliberately misrepresented [the] conversation.’

In this blogpost we post the original footage from the meeting, and – trigger-warning – the moment when Habib uses the ‘n-word’ in the meeting, and the immediate reaction from the students. We also include the full interview with Sandy Nicoll and his commentary on the meeting, racism at the university, the crisis at SOAS, and the efforts to push back against further restructuring and cuts.

Extraction-driven devastation: an interview with Nnimmo Bassey

ROAPE

March 30, 2021

In early 2021, anti-extractivist struggles won two major legal victories against Shell Oil’s operations in Nigeria. These wins represent decades of community organizing on the part of Niger Delta activists and residents. ROAPE’s Lee Wengraf interviews the environmental activist, Nnimmo Bassey, about oil, activism and Shell.

***

In a January ruling, a Dutch appeals court found on behalf of four fishermen that Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary, Shell Petroleum Development Corporation of Nigeria (SPDC), was directly responsible for oil spills in the Goi, Ikot Ada Udo and Oruma communities, ordering compensation and immediate clean-up. The second was the February, Okpabi decision by the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court that the multinational parent company, Royal Dutch Shell, could be held liable for the actions of the SPDC subsidiary. In that case, over 50,000 members of the Ogale and Bille communities sued for environmental destruction caused by oil spills dating as far back as 1989. Both court decisions represent important wins and the culmination of decades of community organizing on the part of Niger Delta activists and residents, the oil-producing region of Nigeria subjected to over a half-century of extraction-driven pollution and environmental devastation. These cases are merely a glimpse into continent-wide devastation unfolding, as one grassroots organization has stated, “with the knowledge of Western and powerful countries that profess to champion human rights, accountability and justice.”

These legal developments raise important questions for community activists and the left. One, how can we understand these victories in the context of a shift by fossil fuel corporations towards declared goals of carbon emission reduction and expanding renewables? Multinationals have embraced what some have characterized as deceptive “green-washing” efforts while positioning themselves to seize the advantage in the profit-driven, “green gold rush” of the renewables market. Have these shifts provided a favorable context for communities to take on multinationals in the courts and wrest some form of compensation and justice? Finally, in a globalized, neoliberal economy with capital sometimes characterized as immune from regulation, what are the implications of these decisions and the role of the state in the Global South?

Nnimmo Bassey is the director of the Benin City-based ecological think tank Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) and a member of the steering committee of Oilwatch International. He was chair of Friends of the Earth International (2008-2012) and Executive Director of Nigeria’s Environmental Rights Action (1993-2013). He was a co-recipient of the 2010 Right Livelihood Award also known as the “Alternative Noble Prize.” In 2019, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of York, United Kingdom. Nnimmo has written extensively on extractivism and environmental crisis in Africa, including the books We Thought it Was Oil, But It was Blood – Poetry (Kraft Books, 2002), I will Not Dance to Your Beat – Poetry (Kraft Books, 2011), To Cook a Continent – Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa (Pambazuka Press, 2012) and Oil Politics: Echoes of Ecological Wars (Daraja Press, 2016).

Nnimmo spoke with Lee Wengraf on these questions and the legacy of “a nation split by oil,” whose civil war (1967-1970) birthed a federal system anchored in extraction, foreign investment and a deregulated industry.

Lee Wengraf: In recent weeks, we’ve seen two significant legal defeats for Shell Oil. Both clearly represent victories for the farmers and fisherfolk living for decades amidst ecological destruction in the Niger Delta. In both, the question of whether a foreign-owned multinational can be held responsible for its actions in a country, where it’s extracting resources, is important. Could you speak about the importance of these cases and what these victories represent for Niger Delta communities and the struggle against extraction?

Nnimmo Bassey: The victories are extremely significant, especially because they almost reinforce one another. After so many years, Shell has been in denial and refused to accept responsibility for pollution that was clearly not caused by a third party [i.e., sabotage]. So, it was such a big relief that the appeals court in the Netherlands found that Shell had to compensate for traumas impacted by pollution that have been caused since 2004 and 2005. And then the Supreme Court ruling in the UK is extremely significant because that clearly stated that there’s no way to hide for transnational corporations like Shell. When they pollute in Nigeria, they can be held to account in the courts in their own backyard.

So that’s a victory for victims in Nigeria and elsewhere because often corporations behave like they can do anything, they are extremely “colonial” in their approach to extractive activities. So, this one brings justice to the people. It’s like a breath of fresh air for the people who have been choking on fossil fuel fumes over the years. And it should also be an incentive for oil companies to behave better.

As you say, in the Dutch case, the spills go back as far as 2004. There’s also been cases where the pollution stretches back decades. What has been the impact on Delta communities concretely?

The impact of the pollution across the Delta, apart from the [Nigerian civil] war, these are permanent scars on the environment. Take, for example, the spill and the destructive impact on the Ogoni communities, which is where Chief [Eric] Barizaa comes from, one of the plaintiffs in the case against Shell. That community does not really have any oil infrastructure: there’s no pipeline there, no oil wells. But because of the entire nature of the creek around there, oil pollution came from somewhere else and because it caught fire, and the entire community burned down. That community, the Goi community, is still largely uninhabited. There’s one location that I personally visit whenever I go to Ogoniland, and I just sit there for a few minutes and remind myself that this injustice simply cannot be swept under the carpet. I see children swimming in oil-coated water, fishermen fishing in this oil-contaminated water, hoping to catch something. Sometimes they do come out with one or two tilapia. The last time I was there I asked a fisherman to open the fish up and we found crude oil right in the belly. The fish they catch there are totally unfit for human consumption.

The case of Orumo is also very interesting. It was a leakage in the pipeline which may have been caused by corrosion, certainly it wasn’t caused by third-party interference: it was buried in the ground, about six feet below the surface, and the leakage was on the underside of the pipe. So, the arguments have always been about ways of avoiding responsibility and having the judges in the Netherlands say that Shell has a duty of care, I believe it’s a very clear signal, it’s saying that environmental misbehaviour cannot be ignored, they cannot always blame sabotage where there has been no sabotage.

And the Dutch case, with Friends of the Earth, it began when you were there. How did that first come about, the idea of bringing this to the courts?

Friends of the Earth International is a network of like-minded, grassroots environmental justice groups that work together on certain topics. Just before this case was instituted, this network was documenting as much as possible instances of pollution across the Niger Delta, in close collaboration with Friends of the Earth Netherlands / Milieudefensie. They visited the Niger Delta a number of times, visiting communities, documenting and generally providing support, because Shell is from their backyard. Then at a climate justice meeting in South Africa, in the early 2000s, where the idea of bringing this kind of litigation came up, discussions were followed up with Friends of the Earth Netherlands and Nigeria, and then it happened.

What are your thoughts on communities using the courts as part of an activist, anti-extractivist strategy? Of course, this is not a new development, but do you see this strategy gaining traction, especially as anti-extraction movements strengthen?

I do expect that more cases should be coming up. There are several cases in the Nigerian courts with corporations having this attitude of ignoring whatever the courts say here in Nigeria. So, finding that the courts in Europe and the Global North will be willing to listen to the victims from the Niger Delta should be very encouraging to people who have been ignored, who have borne the brutality of industry. I believe they are going to utilize this new opening to press for justice after so many years of being ignored as victims, as if their lives don’t matter.

And the case in Britain, for example, builds on a legal victory on the part of 2,500 Zambian villagers against Konkola Copper Mine plc and its UK-based parent company Vedanta from 2019.

You cannot believe the level of desperation in these communities, where they are just ignored and they are left with the wrong end of the stick continuously. Now the case in Zambia, if you read the history of that company who went in there with nothing, and then [pushed] their way into millions of dollars…. These are all very encouraging signs that activism by ordinary people – they are not professional activists, these are ordinary people who are taking their destinies in their hands and finding opportunities in the courts, because where else are you going to find justice?

When you hear of companies like BP and Shell who have made pledges to rid themselves of fossil fuels, what is your response to these plans?

They just make me laugh. You know, you can fool some of the people some of the time, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. They will never fool me because, for example, the strategy that Shell has dusted off, which they have brought up before, they’ve said that by 2050, they going to achieve net zero. Now, we all know that net zero is not zero. What we want is zero emissions, not net zero, so you cannot keep on extracting, looking for new fields, moving into deeper waters and getting more fossil fuels, and you’re telling me that you’re working towards net zero. No, no, no, this is sophistry. I think we cannot accept that kind of arithmetic. We have to ask for zero emissions, not net zero, and be forced to watch over carbon stocks in forests and in trees while companies like Shell keep on polluting and assuming that the trees are absorbing the equivalence of their pollution. There are so many funny things, like investing in capture and storage instead of leaving it in the ground in the first place. So, I’m not impressed at all by this kind of announcement that they’re making. They’re just trying to buy time, to lure people and yield social capital to themselves so they can avoid the questions of how they are harming people who are living now and in future generations.

How would you characterize the role of the Nigerian government and its relationship with Shell more broadly? There seems to be an attempt by Shell to deflect some of the responsibility onto the lack of state regulation, which goes along with the sabotage issue. What do you make of the role of the Nigerian state in all of this?

I think the Nigerian Government is totally complicit in both cases because they are partners in the pollution. They’re running a joint venture with Shell so when the company pollutes, the government is polluting also. Whatever shame comes on Shell, if I may use that term, when Shell is held accountable, our own judicial system should be worried that Nigerians have to go abroad to seek justice, when we have a government that should protect them, and we have a judicial system that should be respected in the country. So, the government is totally complicit. Here is a colonial arrangement with transnational corporations, but that doesn’t excuse the Nigerian government. But the corporations are the operators, and they have a duty of care to ensure that the pollution doesn’t occur in the way that it has in the Niger Delta.

There’s an argument that’s been made, for example in the Zambian case, that African governments involved don’t have the ability to regulate these companies. What do you make of that?

I don’t think that is correct. What is correct is that the legal system does not make it possible to regulate industry. African governments have to change the mechanisms for justice, have to change the legal frameworks. The Nigerian legal framework for most of what happens in the oil sector was drawn up during the Nigerian civil war [when the oil producing region] territory was a combat zone. That is why these I characterize these laws as “war laws” and these laws are patently unjust when it comes to the people and the environment. The same mentality at the center of these laws is still complicating the processes for change in the area.

So, it’s not the innate inability of African governments, it’s the colonial nature of the regulatory frameworks. The legislative framework is also a media coup, a public relations coup, of the companies who are always able to deflect the blame on victims in many ways and investing a lot in polishing their images, so people don’t always think that these guys are responsible.

And finally, let me just say that, saying that African governments are unable to regulate oil companies is almost like saying that they are unable to regulate global bodies like the IMF and the World Bank. These are all agencies that are rigged against the African continent, and the same is true with transnational fossil fuel companies coming from outside the continent.

Nnimmo Bassey is a Nigerian environmentalist activist, author and poet, who chaired Friends of the Earth International from 2008 through 2012 and was Executive Director of Environmental Rights Action for two decades. He is director of the ecological think-tank, Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), based in Nigeria.

Global capitalism and Africa after Covid-19

ROAPE

March 25, 2021

ROAPE’s Peter Lawrence writes how Covid-19 has hit capitalism when it was already confronting systemic problems. The pandemic has helped to connect the dots between environmental degradation and the development of global capitalism. Lawrence argues that only with organised pressure from below can a way through be found.

By Peter Lawrence

The impact of Covid-19 and the subsequent lockdowns has been unequal, lower-income groups, living in overcrowded housing and with limited or no access to running water to wash their hands regularly, have suffered the most in terms of contracting the virus and dying from it. The impact of Covid-19 is indeed a class issue, and not just in terms of health. Although there has been some decline in manufacturing employment, it is the service sector that has taken the biggest hit in countries where lockdowns have resulted in the closure of hospitality services, of entertainment and cultural venues, and other service provision, typically employing people on low wages with poor job security and leaving them in even more precarious positions.

Covid-19 hit capitalism when it was already confronting systemic problems. The neoliberal post-financial crisis austerity policies of the global North have increased the proportions of their working populations living on low incomes with reduced levels of social support. There has been a significant increase in inequality and a concentration of wealth into fewer hands. The top 1% in the world have 45% of the world’s wealth (Credit Suisse 2019), five men own almost as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population (Buchheit 2017). In the global South, inequality has been increasing. In China, the top 1% owned 30% of the country’s wealth in 2019, compared with just over 20% in 2000. The top 1% in emerging markets had 32% of wealth in 2000 and 39% in 2019 (Credit Suisse 2019). Wage growth in the global North has been lower than economic growth and has led to further inequality in incomes and wealth. This has dampened demand and depressed consumer goods manufacturing, resulting in a move to the global South where labour is cheaper, and markets are growing.

Advances in information technology in almost all areas of life have reduced employment opportunities in manufacturing and some service industries, while not increasing them by as much in the new industries. The existence of an increasing number of free goods, such as some computer software, or goods sold at ever lower prices, undermines profits and capital accumulation. The potential abundance of low-priced or free goods requires a very different principle of distribution from that based on supply, demand and price. In Marxist terminology, the development of the productive forces is in conflict with the social relations of production. Covid-19 has made matters a lot worse, forcing lower levels of economic activity around the world, with a fall in global GDP of around 5% in 2020, and for advanced economies a fall of 8% (IMF 2020). The second wave has led to an even larger fall.

The climate emergency threatens the supply of oxygen and water for the next generations’ chances of mere survival. Covid-19 has helped to connect the dots between environmental degradation and the development of global capitalism. Deforestation has brought to markets wild animals with new viruses to which humans are not resistant. Global capitalism has increased human traffic such that an outbreak of a virus in a distant Chinese market can very quickly infect others in far-flung regions of the world. So, questions have been asked not only of the effects of capitalist globalisation but of the future of capitalism itself.

Government measures to deal with the pandemic and its economic effects have challenged the idea of the neoliberal minimal state. Those countries that have shrunk state capacity have found themselves less able to deal with the virus. Where countries such as China and South Korea have developed or maintained strong state capacities to organise and direct, outbreaks and deaths from Covid-19 have been significantly lower. Among African countries, Ethiopia for example, with a strong state capacity and considerable experience of driving the economy, has been able to support conversions of industrial units hit by the economic downturn, especially in exports, into manufacturing much needed protective equipment and keep official Covid-related deaths to date very low (Oqubay 2020; WHO 2020).

One of the characteristics of neoliberalism has been the importance given to the state’s role in the maintenance of law and order and the protection of property rights. The more authoritarian right has further emphasised this role, not least in the US and, as we have seen, most notably in the shooting of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, police killings have reflected the racist characteristics of this authoritarianism. In Africa, police brutality during the pandemic has resulted in many deaths, as security forces enforce lockdown rules or use lockdown rules to pursue other agendas.

In South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria there were well-publicised police killings of people allegedly acting against the lockdowns. The consequence has been public protests against African states that have used lockdowns as a form of repression, but also expressions of solidarity by social and political movements, especially with health workers (see ‘Out of the Ruins and the Rubble’ on roape.net). We have come to know some of these movements through the participation of their representatives in the ROAPE workshops and in the webinar held last year (see ‘Africa and the pandemic’ on roape.net).

The economic consequences of Covid-19 for some African economies have already been devastating. South Africa, for example, which has had the highest number of cases by far of any country in Africa, has suffered a fall of up to 7% of GDP in 2020. The predictions for Africa as a whole are not as bleak. Given Africa’s economies are still heavily dependent on the export of primary commodities, a significant world economic downturn will severely impact on Africa’s foreign exchange earnings, adversely affecting government revenues. We have seen a sharp decline in the oil price and with the exception of gold, whose price increased sharply and continued to increase, non-oil primary commodity prices also slumped between the first and second quarters of 2020. However, by the middle of the third quarter most had recovered, reflecting uncertainty of supply. Predictions of export revenue declines are widespread, but because of the uncertainty of the effect of the virus on supply, revenues could stabilise or even rise if prices increase. The main exception is expected to be oil, unless producers restrict supply, more difficult because of the competing interests within the producer group of countries.

As in the global North, African government revenues have been hit by reduced economic activity during lockdowns and by increased health and other expenditures related to the virus and its effects. Budget deficits went from middle-single to high-double figures in many countries, and already the IMF has agreed emergency funding for over 30 African countries for debt servicing and budget support, although there has been reported resistance to taking up these funds because of the increased debt burden and the effect on countries’ credit ratings (see ‘The World Bank and Covid-19’ on roape.net). Nevertheless, UN forecasts suggest that Africa will need a US$200-billion support package to sustain services and stimulate economies to prevent a further 50 million people falling into severe poverty. It will also need a debt standstill and a facility which allows it to repay commercial debt.

In recent years, some African governments have begun to take the issue of structural transformation and the role of the state in that process much more seriously after the failures of neoliberalism. In various parts of Africa, there is evidence of industrial strategies being developed to effect structural transformation, with the state playing a key role in directing and supporting new industrial economic activity, broadly defined, although this may enable an accumulation of capital by a corrupted political class rather than accumulation of surplus for investment in development for the whole population. The consequences of Covid-19 will require a much greater involvement of the state in managing the economy in the near future.

The problem for progressive forces in African countries seeking initially to move the state towards a more interventionist and directive economic strategy is whether the decades of running down the capacity to do this makes such state involvement possible. Even if there is sufficient capacity, what will push them into taking a more interventionist role that is to the benefit of the whole population, and especially those in extreme poverty? For it is only with organised pressure from below that governments will move in such a direction. The serious abuses of power by the forces of the state during the pandemic, referred to above, do not augur well for the possibilities of such organisation being tolerated. Meanwhile, those of us in the global North, and this journal in particular, will continue to express our solidarity with movements in Africa that seek to affect a development strategy to change people’s lives for the better so they no longer struggle for mere survival.

A longer version of this blogpost appeared in Peter Lawrence’s editorial to ROAPE Volume 47/ Issue 165.

Peter Lawrence is an editor on ROAPE. He is also an Emeritus Professor of Development Economics at the Business School at Keele University and has taught in Tanzania, Uganda, and Canada and spent periods of research in Tanzania, Hungary, Spain and India. Lawrence is a founding member of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group.

Featured Photograph: Zoo Lake, Parkview, Johannesburg, South Africa (Hennie Stander, 26 May 2020).

Class, race and whiteness

ROAPE

March 23, 2021

Nicola Ginsburgh explores the class experiences of white workers in Southern Rhodesia, based on her recent book (reviewed in ROAPE by Alex Callinicos – see blogpost for full review). She builds on whiteness literature and synthesizes theories of race, class and gender within a Marxist framework. Ginsburgh sees race and class as mutually constitutive and inseparable from the historical development of capitalism.

By Nicola Ginsburgh

Many settlers arrived in Rhodesia with hopes that they would transcend into a white classless utopia. Particularly in the last decades of white rule, the image of a pleasant middle-class existence consisting of sundowners, swimming pools and deferential servants gave the impression that in Rhodesia, divisions of class had been successfully displaced by those of race.

Research on settlers in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe has often replicated the image of a relatively homogeneous, wealthy and largely rural population. However, the character of Rhodesian settlement was overwhelmingly urban; its white population more closely reflected descriptions of Rhodesia as a ‘Working Man’s Colony’ than of a community of middle-class farmers.[1]

Class divisions were not erased in Rhodesia. Rather, precisely because racial ideologies demanded that settlers possess uniform characteristics befitting of a “master race”, class divisions took on urgent dimensions. In my book, Class, Work and Whiteness, I argue that not only were class and the worlds of work central to the ways in which ascriptive identities were constructed, contested and remade, but that white workers’ struggles against Africans, employers and the state had important implications for the development and demise of Rhodesian settler colonialism.

Analyses of settler colonialism have increasingly utilised notions of ‘elimination’ and ‘territoriality’. These formulations suggest that whilst colonialism is predicated on exploitation, settler colonialism is defined by the elimination or erasure of indigenous presence (and indigenous claims to land) whether through physical displacement, cultural assimilation or genocide.[2] Yet indigenous labour was central to numerous settler colonial formations.[3] Rhodesian settler colonialism was premised on interrelated processes of expropriation and exploitation. Settler struggles to remove Africans from the land, from towns, train carriages and pavements, were combined with an acute reliance on cheap black labour.

In the first decades of colonisation the Rhodesian economy formed around mining and agricultural industries which favoured migrant labour systems and were reliant on the hyper-exploitation of African Chibaro labour. Higher paid semi-skilled and skilled positions were dominated by white male migrants from Britain and South Africa who fought to exclude Africans, women and non-British whites from their ranks.

In these early years, transnational flows of labour shaped white worker’s trade union militancy and political ideologies which reflected an uneasy combination of socialism and white supremacy. The white working class was a heterogeneous formation, fractured along the lines of ethnicity, nationality, gender, skill and occupation. Yet despite these internal fissures, lower class whites could unite in opposition to Africans. An array of economic, political and social policies ensured they received higher wages, better housing, healthcare and education than the majority black population.

Whiteness studies has been an increasingly popular framework to analyse workers who were both exploited by capital but privileged through race. By drawing on whiteness studies and Marxist theories of language and class, my book attempts to contribute to the rich body of scholarship which has destabilised whiteness as a natural category and explored the complex processes of racial and class formation.

Analysing the intersections of race and class in the US, David Roediger has argued that white workers had their experiences of exploitation softened by the ‘status and privileges conferred by race’.^[4] Yet, as Deborah Posel has argued with regards to apartheid South Africa, the wages of whiteness were ‘double-edged’. Many whites in the civil service were looked down upon as gaining employment as a result of their skin colour, rather than their skill or intelligence. As such, the privileges attached to race could elicit indignity and shame.[5]

Racial ideologies often provoked psychological distress for white workers who struggled to reconcile their supposed racial superiority with their class status. Lower class whites were variously feared and repulsed by elite whites; seen as a rowdy mob capable of infecting Africans with ideas of trade unionism; susceptible to racial degeneration and more likely to act in inappropriate ways which threatened the stability of racial hierarchies. Employers and middle-class whites repeatedly attempted to humiliate white workers: they criticised their high wages and bemoaned them as inept, inadequate and entitled. As the century progressed, Africans likewise increasingly highlighted white mediocrity and challenged white workers claims to productivity and respectability.

In turn, white trade unions mobilised around pride, shame and anger in order to police white worker behaviours and regulate anxieties. They sought to transform the shame of poverty through notions of pride in work, in trade unionism and by loudly trumpeting their own status as the productive force behind empire. Yet these strategies did not eradicate pervasive fears that they would be undercut and displaced by cheaper black labour; that without protections from the state they would degenerate, become poor whites and be unable to perform their racial difference from Africans. This structural insecurity shaped the idiosyncratic ways in which white workers imagined the erasure of the indigenous population as they fiercely struggled over the boundaries of ‘white’ and ‘black’ work, fantasised about entirely white workplaces and forcefully asserted the delusional belief that African labour was unproductive and unimportant.

At different times British dominated trade unions variously incorporated or rallied against ‘undesirable’ whites including Afrikaners, Greeks, Italians and the Portuguese. The highest paid jobs were often reserved for those of British stock and trade unionists repeatedly engaged in inconclusive debates over how racial hierarchies should be replicated in the workplace with regards to non-British whites and mixed raced persons. They also proved reluctant to determine the racial purity of many of their members. Their debates show that even for the most zealous settler ideologues, racial boundaries were not always obvious.

Settlers did not possess uniform ‘white behaviours’ or attitudes. Ideas about race, gender and nationality varied across different social groups, changed over time and were deeply shaped by class. White workers constructed their racial and gendered identities through work – and these identities were highly dynamic. Just as the continual flow of new migrants shaped and disrupted trade union structures, racial ideologies and class identities, the capitalist mode of production both reproduced and destabilised ascriptive categories.

As particular industries variously emerged and declined, the boundaries of white male work were continually redrawn. From the Second World War, the expansion of secondary industry made white worker’s monopoly of semi-skilled and skilled work increasingly untenable. White women’s idealised roles as doting housewives and mothers of the race conflicted with labour shortages and settler commitment to the colour bar. White women took on a variety of paid work and engaged in struggles against employers and racial others; their entrance into wage labour reshaped dominant notions of white femininity and masculinity and stirred anxieties over gendered and racial hierarchies.

The 1940s also marked a period of growing African urbanisation, the rise of an African middle class, African militancy, and trade union organisation. I explore these interrelated processes which destabilised and emasculated white male workers. Just as white men felt workplace hierarchies shift beneath them, they attempted to reinstate their gendered and racial power: throughout the 1940s their trade union journals printed allusions to African violence and invocations to a Black Peril, which stereotyped black men as inherently lecherous and unstable predators and white women as vulnerable and weak.

Class continued to shape Rhodesian settler colonialism, even when traditional markers of class consciousness declined. In 1962, white workers rallied around the Rhodesian Front. Yet, despite promises to protect white workers from African competition and ‘maintain standards’, the combination of chronic labour shortages and an increasingly violent war meant that the Rhodesian Front could not protect white jobs.

Lower class whites proved less likely to evade conscription and their regular absence from industry made black Africans increasingly attractive to employers. Just as white men felt threatened by black advancement into skilled trades, white female participation in wage labour also increased. As white women became more independent, divorce rates soared. Many white men positioned themselves as victims and accused employers of ‘reverse racism’. With notable frequency, in bars, magazines, memoirs and novels, Rhodesian men expressed their fears through descriptions of white castration. Unlike previous Black Peril panics, which had revolved around white male attempts to control white women and racial others, this generalised castration anxiety underscored a more explicit pessimism over white male power. Certainly, as Rhodesia failed to repel Zimbabwean liberation movements, whites emigrated in their droves.

In recent years discourses of white victimhood and reverse racism have been utilised to strengthen nationalism and white supremacy whilst the far-right has constructed itself as the champion of the white working class. Yet invocations of ‘reverse racism’ and appeals to nationalism rely on active distortion of histories of race and class and obscures the role of capitalist social relations in creating and reproducing this differentiation. By understanding race and class as mutually constitutive and inseparable from the historical development of capitalism, I hope my work provides a modest contribution to our understanding of how class has been historically racialised to justify inequality and the intertwined processes of exploitation and oppression.

Read Alex Callinicos’ full review of Nicola Ginsburgh’s book, Class, work and whiteness: Race and settler colonialism in Southern Rhodesia, 1919–79 in ROAPE here.

Nicola Ginsburgh is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Ginsburgh is a socialist and activist.

Featured Photograph: Jameson Avenue in Salisbury in Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). Renamed Samora Michel Avenue in the early 1980s (26 March 2012).

References

[1] Cyril Dunn, Central African Witness, London, 1959, p.204.

[2] Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8:4 (2006), pp.387-409; Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, Basingstoke, 2010.

[3] See Sai Englert, ‘Settlers, Workers, and the Logic of Accumulation by Dispossession’, Antipode, 52:6 (2020), pp.1647-1666.

^[4] David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, London, 2007.

[5] Deborah Posel, ‘Whiteness and Power in the South African Civil Service: Paradoxes of the Apartheid State’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 25:1 (1999), pp. 99-119.

Samir Amin – a Marxist with blood in his veins

ROAPE

March 18, 2021

Following the publication of the special issue on Samir Amin, we post short interviews by the authors on the influence of Amin on their lives and research. The articles by Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Francisco Pérez, Ndongo Sylla, Francesco Macheda, Roberto Nadalini, Fathimath Musthaq and Max Ajl are available to read until the end of the month.

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My encounter with Samir Amin

By Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni

How did you first come across Amin´s writing and become interested in his work?

I encountered the name of Samir Amin during my undergraduate studies at the University of Zimbabwe especially in relation to the economic history of Africa and understanding of what was then called Third World economies. My attention turned to his contributions to the dependency school as well as the concepts of underdevelopment and modes of production. These were indeed my first encounters with the writings of Samir Amin.

During that time, as a young undergraduate student I was attracted more to the nationalist school of history which in many ways also tapped into Marxist thought. But I must hasten to say that in the Department of History at the University of Zimbabwe the dominant approach was empiricist in orientation. Theory and ideology were not prominent at all, hence Amin’s work was not prominent. It was in the Department of Economic History that I learnt a lot about the dependency school and Third World economies, where I encountered Amin’s work.

I must also say that the work which attracted me most to Samir Amin’s writing was his Delinking: Towards A Polycentric World and my interest emerged long after I graduated even from my DPhil. So, I must say I encountered most of Amin’s work when I became a researcher myself and I was developing my interest in decolonization and decoloniality.

In 2012, I remember writing an email to Samir Amin requesting him to have a look at a manuscript I was preparing for publication by CODESRIA. I remember that he asked me to send him by post the whole manuscript which eventually was published as Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization (CODESRIA 2013). I sent him the whole manuscript to an address in France, which he had given me. Within two weeks he sent me positive feedback which encouraged me a great deal.

I was increasingly becoming more interested in his work and I used his Delinking book to frame my other book entitled Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity (Berghahn Books 2013). To me, his works resonated with ideas emerging from the decoloniality school and I became attracted to his other work entitled Eurocentrism, a book that addressed one of the major problems that the decoloniality scholarship was concerned with.

When he published Global History: A View from the South in 2011, I was now a regular reader of Amin’s work and I considered him an intellectual giant on whose shoulders one could stand in pursuit of the resurgent and insurgent epistemic decolonization. To me Marxism and decolonization were complementary visions of liberation which converged in many ways.

In my latest book entitled Decolonization, Development and Knowledge in Africa: Turning Over a New Leaf (Routledge 2020), I dedicated a whole chapter to the subject of ‘‘African Political Economy’’ drawing from Amin’s rich archive on development and critique of conventional economics.

What Aminian concepts have been most relevant for you in your own research?

A number of concepts became very relevant to my own research predicated on decolonization/decoloniality—epistemological decolonization and the search for epistemic freedom. I am attracted to such concepts such as ‘extraversion,’ ‘maldevelopment,’ ’unequal development,’ and ‘delinking,’’ a concept which has also attracted the attention of Walter D. Mignolo, a leading Latin American decolonial theorist who expanded it from its economic meaning to epistemic ‘delinking.’ I found myself using the concept of ‘extraversion’ as expanded by Paulin Hountondji to reflect on intellectual and academic ‘extraversion’ in my book Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization (Routledge 2018). I also found Amin’s concept of ‘five monopolies’ resonating with the decolonial concept of ‘colonial matrices of power,’ hence I depicted Samir Amin as an ‘African Marxist decolonial thinker’ in my latest book. Indeed, the work of Amin has influenced me to explore the connections between Marxism and decolonization in my forthcoming edited book entitled Marxism and Decolonization in the 21^st Century: Living Theories and True Ideas (Routledge, July 2021).

What inspires you most from Amin´s academic and activist work?

What inspires me most about Amin’s academic and activist work is his consistent dedication to the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist struggles. In Amin’s work one finds the finest science of understanding capitalism and imperialism across different epochs. I am also impressed with Amin’s active role in institution-building especially his immense contribution to the establishment of CODESRIA, the premier Africa-based and Africa-focused research institute. I am inspired by the fact that the fall of the Soviet Union and the implosion of the Eastern Bloc did not deter Amin’s commitment to the struggles for socialism. What even inspires me more is that in Amin one finds a very prolific and rigorous scholar-activist who left us with an incredibly rich archive that is anti-colonial, anti-imperial and anti-capitalist. His rich archive is instructive at many levels for social movements that are raged against imperialism, colonialism and capitalism.

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

Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s article in the special issue can be read here.

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Amin’s academic and activist work

By Francisco Pérez

How did you first come across Amin´s writing and become interested in his work?

My parents are low-income migrants from the Dominican Republic to New York City, so I have always wanted to know why a few countries are rich while so many are poor. Conventional theories struck me as overly flattering to rich countries, claiming they have the right cultures, policies, or institutions, and blaming the victims of our global economy entirely for their poverty. I knew that that wealth and poverty are two sides of the same coin, and that any explanation for global poverty and inequality had to recognize the importance of the history of racism and imperialism, of exploitation and coercion.

I first came across Amin’s ideas when I attended the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2005. I then found his writing in the Monthly Review. When I moved to Senegal, I became even more interested in his work since I was looking for ways to explain the poverty I saw around me from an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist perspective. One that spoke from the point of view of the Global South, took class struggle seriously, and did not simply parrot Eurocentric notions of development and progress.

What Aminian concepts have been most relevant for you in your own research?

There are so many! First his method, his insistence on historical materialism and rejection of economism, and the impossibility of separating theory from history, and politics from economics. Secondly, the center-periphery divide and the distinction between auto-centric and peripheral economies. Peripherality explains the headwinds to development in the South—whether with capitalist or socialist aims. It addresses why it is so difficult for poor countries to catch up to rich ones. Third, the concept of delinking. Delinking points to what must change structurally for peripheral economies to become auto-centric ones. While it shares many prescriptions with the industrial policy or developmental state literature, delinking takes into account the interaction of domestic and international class struggles. Development is not simply a matter of having an effective, mission-driven bureaucracy but also of world market conditions and geopolitical alliances. Amin also highlights the ambivalence of the capitalist classes in the periphery who vacillate between challenging foreign capital and becoming its junior partners. Fourth, his thoughts on Eurocentrism, the tributary mode of production and why capitalism emerged in Western Eurasia and not elsewhere, have shaped my thinking on the “Great Divergence” between Europe and the rest of the world.

What inspires you most from Amin´s academic and activist work?

What inspires me most was his commitment to praxis. Unlike many of his academic critics on the left and the right, Amin was not an ivory tower intellectual. He served in both the Egyptian government under Nasser and the Malian government under Keita. His criticism of Third World ‘national-popular’ regimes and African socialism came from someone who participated actively in these experiments. Amin was also a lifelong organizer, key to the creation and/or leadership of several organizations: the Institute for Development Education and Planning (IDEP), the Third World Forum, the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), and the World Forum for Alternatives, World Social Forum, etc. These organizations all had the aim of creating critical and non-sectarian spaces for intellectuals from the Global South to not simply discuss issues facing the South, but the world as seen from Global South. He also met with hundreds of left-wing activists, party officials, artists, and intellectuals from all over the world for decades. Consequently, his theories and analyses responded to the shifting challenges of real-world politics, which made his a Marxism “with blood in its veins” and not an esoteric, academic pursuit.

I also admire his commitment to participatory democracy. While he sought to understand the constraints these parties were operating under, he consistently rebuked the leadership of single-party states in the USSR and throughout Africa—Guinea-Conakry, Ghana, Mali, Tanzania, Benin, Ethiopia, etc—for suppressing grassroots participation. He argued that this fundamental lack of democracy contributed to many of these governments’ undoing.

Francisco Pérez researches the history and political economy of currency unions. He has published on the crisis in the eurozone and is currently examining the debates on how to reform the CFA franc.

Pérez’ article in the special issue can be read here.

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Permanently involved in the main struggles of the day

By Ndongo Samba Sylla

How did you first come across Amin´s writing and become interested in his work?

In Senegal, it is difficult to miss the name Samir Amin as it evokes a major intellectual figure of the Third World. Although I came across his ideas in the early 2000s, when I was doing a Master’s degree in development economics, I did not start reading his work systematically until I joined the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in 2012. In March 2013, as a guest speaker, Samir Amin inaugurated the ‘Economics Saturdays’, a monthly forum held in Dakar on economic issues initiated by Demba Moussa Dembélé and myself, with the support of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Just before his inaugural conference, I offered Amin my recently published book on fair trade and told him that any input from him would be welcome. It was a Saturday morning. Two days later, he phoned me and said: ‘Ndongo, you did a remarkable job. I will publish a review of your book very soon.’ And so he did. This gesture demonstrates to me the humility of this great man and his thirst for knowledge. I think that 99% of intellectuals of his caliber would never have paid the slightest attention to the writings of an unproven, unknown author.

What Aminian concepts have been most relevant for you in your own research?

Amin has introduced or contributed to many concepts: ‘tributary mode of production’, ‘eurocentrism’, ‘unequal exchange’, ‘law of worldwide value’, ‘low intensity democracies’, etc. But the two key concepts I find most central are: ‘imperialism’ and ‘delinking’.

Amin conceives of imperialism not as a “stage” of capitalism but as being inscribed in the DNA of capitalism. Talking about capitalism without imperialism is like talking about Hamlet without ever mentioning the prince of Denmark. Imperialism, while being a constitutive reality of capitalism, has taken on different forms. According to Amin, the phase of imperialisms in plural – competing imperialist powers – described by Lenin and the first generation of Marxists, was followed by a phase of collective imperialism (USA, Japan, Western Europe) under US leadership.

In order to ensure a minimum of well-being for their peoples, the governments of peripheral countries must ‘delink’ from the world system. For Amin, delinking is not a luxury. It is a necessity given the impossibility of ‘economic catch-up’ for Third World masses in the inherently polarising global/imperialist economic system. ‘Delinking’ does not imply autarky but rather a determined effort of emancipation from the global logic of capitalism/imperialism.

What inspires you most from Amin´s academic and activist work?

The intellectual and activist work inspires me with great respect and admiration. One wonders how he was able to have such a prolific academic body of work, and so broad in the themes covered, knowing that he was not the type of intellectual to lurk in his ivory tower. He was permanently involved in the main progressive struggles of the day, whether it was related to the Third World or to the mobilisation for a socialist International. The critical pessimism of the work of the radical intellectual always found its counterweight in the creativity of the institution-builder and the lucid optimism of the activist eager to learn from past failures.

Before his death, Amin donated his personal library (including his own works) to the Dakar-based ENDA Tiers Monde, an institution he helped build in 1972. On 3 March 2018, he inaugurated himself the newly named Bibliothèque Populaire de Développement which hosts a room bearing his name.

Throughout his career, Amin was a living embodiment of both the ideals of liberation carried by the Bandung conference and the imperative of international solidarity between progressive forces at the periphery and those at the centre.

Ndongo Samba Sylla is Research and Programme Manager for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. He is the editor and author of a number of books including The Fair Trade Scandal.

Sylla’s article in the special issue can be read here.

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The contemporary relevance of uneven development

By Francesco Macheda and Roberto Nadalini

How did you first come across Amin´s writing and become interested in his work?

Our interest in Samir Amin’s work springs from the desire to identify the structural roots of the class compromise between labor and capital that supports the reproduction of capitalism in the imperialist countries. As Marxists born and raised in the advanced economies, we soon realized that the Eurocentric dogma that socialist revolution is on the agenda only in advanced capitalist countries would make it impossible for a credible socialist perspective to emerge. For this reason, we turned our attention to Samir Amin (and other economists close to the dependency approach such as Hosea Jaffe, Arghiri Emmanuel, and Christian Palloix), who implicitly or explicitly argued that the transfer of value from the periphery to the center through international trade effectively contributes to counter the tendency of the profit rate to fall and uphold real wages in the already developed countries – thereby aligning social democracy with imperialism almost from the beginning of the setting up of the modern Western left.

What Aminian concepts have been most relevant for you in your own research?

We believe that the concept of uneven development maintains its theoretical validity and that the analysis of the global economy according to the ‘center-periphery’ dichotomy can help explain some rather significant phenomena that have occurred in recent decades. In particular, the peripheral character of China’s integration into the world market helps explain the enormous transfer of value to the center of capitalism – first and foremost the US – that we have witnessed during the last twenty-five years. At the same time, the Aminian idea that the maintenance of external balance constitutes a binding constraint on the backward countries’ attempt to overcome their peripheral condition seems to be confirmed by historical facts: consider for example the structural impediments to progressively overcome the middle-income trap by many Latin American countries in the post-war period. In all these countries, the maintenance of external balance required a contraction in investment in order to recreate an excess of labor and bring wages back to the level necessary to recover external competitiveness. This is very much in line with the development of underdevelopment thesis put forward by Samir Amin in the late sixties.

What inspires you most from Amin´s academic and activist work?

What inspires us from Amin’s work is one simple but powerful idea: that a major obstacle that prevents peripheral countries from closing the wage gap with respect to the advanced economies ultimately results from the distortion of their productive structure towards low value-added branches of activity. If one accepts the idea that the center–periphery divide stems from an unequal international division of labor, then it follows logically that the “best” and perhaps the “only” development path that might enable peripheral countries to lift themselves out of their peripheral status within the world economy requires a progressive change in their productive specialization towards technologically-innovative sectors. As Amin suggested, this would provide peripheral producers with the opportunity to capture a slice of the technological rent hitherto reserved to the capitalist center. The entrance of peripheral producers in the most technologically intensive sectors, of course, would lead to two contradictory results: on the one hand, it promotes and develops the welfare of the working-class of the periphery. On the other, the erosion of monopolistic position would force advanced countries to accept a substantial reduction of their income. Aware of the fundamental economic relations between the center and periphery, Samir Amin has coherently supported the struggle for emancipation by the people of the Global South for more than a half a century. For us, this is the greatest political and scientific legacy of Samir Amin that must be preserved and expanded.

Francesco Macheda is an associate professor in political economy at Bifröst University, Iceland. His main research interests include Marxist political economy, the interaction between economic theory and ideology, and economic growth and development.

Roberto Nadalini received his MA in political sciences from the University of Bologna, Italy. He currently works at a non-profit organisation promoting the integration of immigrants and people at disadvantage in Modena.

Macheda and Nadalini’s article in the special issue can be read here.

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Making sense of an exploitative global system

By Fathimath Musthaq

How did you first come across Amin’s writing and become interested in his work?

I came across Amin’s work in college, when I first learned about dependency theory. The moral clarity with which he engaged with the reproduction of colonialism in the periphery and the practical experience that informed his work made reading Amin an exciting and thought-provoking experience.

What Aminian concepts have been most relevant for you in your own research?

Amin engaged with the financial aspects of dependency. He described how the banking system in developing economies were primarily externally oriented in that they financed short-term investments or government expenditure over long term growth. In my work, I draw on Amin’s insights about financial dependency and the concept of “imperialist rent.” Amin used imperialist rent to refer to the surplus extracted from the periphery through the super-exploitation of labour. In my work, I re-interpret the term to refer to the costs that peripheral countries bear to take part in the global financial system.

What inspires you most from Amin’s academic and activist work?

One of the most inspiring aspects of Amin’s life was his constant engagement with the struggles of the times. His work on monopoly capitalism, delinking, and political Islam spoke of a mind continuously engaged in making sense of phenomena that appeared as distinct but were intertwined and constitutive of a broader exploitative global system. Amin’s life’s work was dedicated to the cause of human emancipation and serves as a template for any scholar aspiring to make a difference.

Fathimath Musthaq is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research and teaching interests are in the politics of central banking, financialisation, asset management, international development and global capitalism.

Musthaq’s article in the special issue can be read here.

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A heart and head always looking below and to the left

By Max Ajl

How did you first come across Amin´s writing and become interested in his work?

I had two encounters with Amin. At first, I read him regularly in Monthly Review, before I had any real grasp of value theory or underdevelopment or Marxism. This journal has historically been the main place Anglophone readers could encounter Amin. His essays on, for example, ‘The Battlefields Chosen by Contemporary Imperialism: Conditions for an Effective Response from the South’ were still helpful for me in terms of political orientation. Similarly, his The World We Wish to See was inspiring for its sweeping ambition about a better world. I only began to understand his work properly as I started to think about development paths in the South from an agrarian perspective. This research naturally led me to Amin’s foundational work on the importance of Maoism and the centrality of the Chinese development path for subsequent world-historical events and how China could possibly offer important lessons for subsequent attempts to break from the periphery. I became more and more interested as I saw Amin’s theories weaving in and out of my own research into Tunisian intellectual history and heterodox theories of development and how he has been a touchstone for the Tunisian dependency school.

What Aminian concepts have been most relevant for you in your own research?

I have found the most use for Amin’s concepts of delinking and auto-centered development. Amin’s problematic of how underdevelopment and polarization are central and structuring components of accumulation on a world scale – and of course, that accumulation is always occurring on a world scale – have been critical as background concepts for interpreting just about everything. But I have more recently been trying to understand what paths exist to actually escape from underdevelopment, the limits of projects which did not empower the small peasantry, and how to fuse my academic/activist background in agroecology and food sovereignty with, on the one hand, political economy-centered work, and on the other, Third World sovereign development.

Auto-centered development was very useful in thinking through the internal articulations of different sectors and the breaking from the capitalist law of value. Delinking has likewise been helpful in trying to understand how that law of value warps and shatters Third World attempts at popular development. Furthermore, Amin’s abstraction from the Chinese experience helped me focus on endogenous technological mastery as absolutely central to Third World development, historically and going forward – which ties neatly to agro-ecology’s interest in building on existing rural knowledge bases.

What inspires you most from Amin´s academic and activist work?

Contemporary academia either urges a surrender to capitalism or social democracy under the guise of ‘realism’ or only maintains any kind of aspiration or even conceptualization of a really equal world – say, Communism – provided it rejects the people and places which have tried to build socialism. Amin did neither. He defended popular attempts to build a better world, especially those attempts which were beaten back or were and are still breathing in the Third World, and always kept his heart and his head looking below and to the left. Throughout his life and to his last breath he was always engaged with popular struggles for emancipation. But, beyond that, his resistance to economism, his attention to the primacy of politics, and his defense of national sovereignty and national liberation amidst the intellectual assault on those ideas and horizons have been very important in terms of helping me orient my own thinking and practice.

Max Ajl is a postdoctoral Talent fellow at Wageningen University and Research. He writes on Arab agrarian issues. His book A People’s Green New Deal is forthcoming with Pluto in 2021.

Ajl’s article in the special issue can be read here.

Enduring Relevance: Samir Amin’s radical political economy

ROAPE

March 16, 2021

Introducing ROAPE’s special issue on Samir Amin (available to access for free until 31/03 – see links in blogpost), the editors, Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, Maria Dyveke Styve, Ushehwedu Kufakurinani and Ray Bush, argue Amin’s legacy provides a lighthouse for those who not only want to understand the world, but fundamentally change it, by combining rigorous scholarship with political commitment and action.

By Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, Maria Dyveke Styve, Ushehwedu Kufakurinani, Ray Bush

In moments of great uncertainty there is refuge to be found in the work of intellectual titans like Samir Amin. After the sad news of his passing in August 2018 in Paris, aged 86, we began thinking about how best to explore the enduring relevance of his analysis and concepts to make sense of contemporary crises.

The pertinence and analytical heft of Amin’s work is particularly important in the contemporary period marked by the interconnected crises related to COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, the climate emergency, and looming debt crises across the periphery. In the years ahead, confronting these multiple and intertwined crises will require the kind of commitment to combining research with political engagement that Amin demonstrated.

Amin’s ability to weave together thorough analysis of the polarising effects of capitalism with concrete political projects for an international radical left makes his work particularly relevant in our quest to understand capitalism, its particularities across the world, and oppositions to it. There is a younger generation of scholars, of which we are a part, that is particularly hungry for Amin’s perspectives, one that came of age in a time where the universities have been thoroughly marketised and moulded by neoliberal processes, and where intellectual production and debates are not necessarily embedded within social struggles.

What is Samir Amin’s approach to Political Economy?

Amin pushes us to think creatively in structural, temporal, and political ways that often defy disciplinary boundaries. The combination of truly global perspectives with analysis that is finely contextualised within particular geographical locations, and mindful of the complex nature of political conflicts and different class interests, makes his contributions to dependency theory especially rich.

While Amin developed many concrete concepts and shed light on many concrete issues, it is his approach to political economy that is the most inspiring for us and that we believe holds the most promise for driving radical political economy in his spirit forward. His approach entails thinking structurally, thinking temporally, thinking politically, and thinking creatively. All the contributions to the Special Issue draw on these concepts in various ways (read our full editorial to the ROAPE Special Issue on Samir Amin here).

Thinking structurally

At a time when much of social science has come to be centred around either methodological individualism or methodological nationalism – the notions that individuals and nation states, respectfully, are the most relevant units of analysis – Amin’s attention to global structures, that underpin an international system of exploitation, is a much needed contrast. In Amin’s work, both the structure of the global economy and the structural prejudice of eurocentrism, are key.

Taking the structure of the global economy as a starting point led Amin to explore concepts such as core-periphery relations, imperialism and unequal exchange. He recognised that the global capitalist system is polarising and that the polarisation between the centre and the periphery was a key part of this.^[1] Note that Amin went beyond thinking only in core-periphery terms – which dependency theorists are often critiqued for – as he identified a range of classes of importance across both the core and periphery (see Jayati Ghosh’s article in the Special Issue). It is also worth noting that thinking structurally does not mean thinking deterministically. While Amin was ‘capable of a very high level of abstraction’, as Ghosh has written, and some could see his characterisations as sweeping, he was always ready to adapt his categories and understandings as the world changed, and his understanding of how outcomes were shaped was first and foremost dialectical – which led him to critique World Systems Theory for being static and for prioritising global relations over domestic.^[2]

In this issue, Fathima Musthaq’s and Ndongo Samba Sylla’s articles apply a structural way of thinking about financial and monetary dependencies. Mushtaq explores how Amin’s work on imperialist rent can be extended to understand financial dependencies and hierarchies in a financialised global economy, while Sylla explores Amin’s approach to the monetary mechanisms and functioning of the banking sectors in peripheral countries which contribute to keeping them underdeveloped, with a specific focus on the CFA Zone. Similarly, Macheda and Nadalini’s investigation into how China was able to integrate itself into the global economy without abandoning its strategy of delinking from imperialism opens up space for further research and theorising about how different strategies for national development can be anti-imperialist.

What’s more, identifying eurocentrism as a structural prejudice allowed Amin to show how social theories disguise the imperialist and racist foundations of the capitalist system.^[3] This allows us to see that the Enlightenment values and promise of rationality and universality are actually heavily biased and founded on a colonial and racist project. This is key for understanding why societies cannot develop by imitating the West. Generally, eurocentrism has been taken as an important starting point for scholars who build further on Amin as well as critics. Ndlovu-Gatsheni in the Special Issue, for example, revisits Marxism and decolonisation via the legacy of Amin to re-evaluate Amin’s critical Marxist political economy in the context of epistemology, to unmask racism and the trans-historic expansion of colonial domination.

Thinking temporally

Thinking temporally was key for Samir Amin’s understanding of the world, and more specifically, thinking in longue durée terms. This is an important entry point for exploring contemporary problems, because it opens the door for analysing how imperialist relations have historically and contemporarily shaped the possibilities for development in the Global South. In this issue, Jayati Ghosh lays out how Amin’s approach to imperialism remains relevant across key axes such as technology, finance, and the search for and effort to control new markets, despite changing global configurations such as the ‘rise’ of the BRICS.

Francisco Pérez’s and Ndongo Samba Sylla’s articles are also particularly good illustrations of how a historical perspective is important for understanding contemporary problems. For example, Pérez’s explanation of the East Asian ‘miracle’ starts from how those countries developed historically and geopolitically. Pérez also demonstrates how China’s contemporary delinking must be understood by starting from their attempt at socialist delinking in 1949, and the complex battle between statist, capitalist, and socialist forces that played out since then. Similarly, Sylla’s article shows how the colonial origins of the CFA is key for understanding how it operates today. Tracing the history of the CFA also makes it painfully clear why defending the monetary status quo for Amin amounts to defending the perpetuation of the old colonial order.

Thinking politically

In line with Marx’s famous phrase, interpreting the world is important, but ‘the point, however, is to change it,’ Amin never shied away from admitting that his work was driven by political ambitions to change the world. Indeed, Amin was a socialist from an early age and was concerned with responding to and building emancipatory social movements throughout his life.^[4] This was reflected in his life-long organising efforts and activism, across a wide range of platforms and organisations, including the establishment of the Third World Forum in Dakar, where he helped set practical and intellectual agendas for socialist transformation on the continent, the establishment of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), which became an important vehicle of radical social science research and analysis in Africa, and his active engagement in the World Social Forum.

We find such explicit acknowledgement of political commitment especially inspiring and necessary at a time when the economics field in particular likes to cloak itself in deceitfully ‘objective’ language, even though knowledge production in the social sciences is necessarily ideological.

In Amin’s book on Delinking, he provides a tangible and critical assessment of ways to promote autonomous development in the periphery.^[5] Far from any call for autarky, delinking entails “the refusal to submit national-development strategy to the imperatives of ‘globalization’” and the promotion of popular and auto-centred development rather than unilaterally adjusting to the demands of the global economic system. Both Pérez’ and Macheda and Nadalini’s articles in this issue, which centre on delinking strategies, demonstrate how social science research is often used for political ends given how Chinese and East Asian delinking strategies are often misunderstood (or miscommunicated) in mainstream narratives about their ‘success’.

Thinking creatively

Finally, it is important to be creative in the way we apply Amin’s method to understand social phenomena. Amin called himself a ‘creative Marxist’, by which he meant he would start from, rather than to stop at Marx. We find this approach from Amin to be particularly relevant to understand contemporary problems and especially from a Global South perspective. Starting from Marx allows for an understanding of class struggle, exploitation, and the polarising tendencies of capitalism, while going deeper into structural inequalities associated with imperialism, sexism and racism. Amin started this work, but we believe it is relevant to go beyond Amin. Indeed, we find it relevant to start from Amin, not to stop at Amin.

Beyond Samir Amin

Several contributions to this special issue take Amin as a starting point for further exploration and theoretical development. Some also point in the direction of key critiques that have been levelled at Amin’s work, notwithstanding his powerful and incisive theoretical and analytical interventions on how developing economies relate with the North.

For example, although Amin himself did not include gender in his analysis – indeed, his analysis had glaring blind spots related to gender – his analysis can be enriched and extended to include gender hierarchies and a fuller recognition of gender’s place in the mode of production. Catherine Scott’s article is crucial for opening this door to understanding both the limitations to Amin and how gender can be approached from within his framework of analysis. She asks, for example, how gender may be included in analyses of delinking and the importance of discussions about relations in the households when considering how a revolution may occur.

Furthermore, in a historical moment where we cannot speak about autonomous industrialisation without considering ecological destruction, the need to explore how the two are interrelated and both shaped by imperialism is more important than ever. Max Ajl’s article starts from Amin’s theories of ecology to make broader analyses of the currents of ecological dependency that developed out of North African dependency analysis. He shows how Amin’s theoretical framework can be connected to that of Mohamed Dowidar, Fawzy Mansour and Slaheddine el-Amami and their advancement of the case for smallholder-centred national development. Given the urgent need to tackle climate change, its imperial characteristics, and the uneven geographical impacts of the destruction it causes, Amin’s framework serves as a useful starting point for thinking about ecological unequal exchange. As Ajl writes, ‘If Amin could not see the entirety of the necessary developmental path, he still illuminated its borders with a brilliant radiance…’.

What’s more, given the partial retreat and limited autonomy of the peripheral state in the context of the increasing power of international finance, Amin’s view of the state’s power to delink and stimulate auto-centric industrialisation must be scrutinised. We appreciate Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s contribution here, as he takes Amin as a point of departure while also somewhat diverging from Amin’s political orientation towards the nation state. He points to Amin’s commitment to a polycentric world as a departure point towards de-imperialisation, deracialisation, depatriarchisation, decorporatisation, detribalisation and democratisation, where the core is the internationalism of people, not of states. This is important in light of critiques of Amin’s conceptualisation of delinking as a process that holds the state as the locus of change.

Meanwhile, Fathima Mushtaq creatively adapts Amin’s categories to a financialised global economy, as she explores how imperialist rent is not limited to labour arbitrage but also includes financial arbitrage. Her article thus provides “an updated understanding of dependency in the context of financialisation,” as she centres financial factors to demonstrate how they contribute to reproducing global inequalities and the periphery’s subordinate position. This is of particular relevance given the important role that capital flows, interest rates, and exchange rates play in reproducing subordinate relations today.

What’s more, Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s work on decoloniality shows the need for decolonial knowledge production in order to break with eurocentric approaches, which is especially important given that Amin’s work on Eurocentrism has itself been criticised for demonstrating economic reductionism.^[6] This is yet another area where we believe Amin opens the door for important reflections and debates about how racism, eurocentrism, and capitalism are intertwined, but that we must move beyond his initial reflections to broaden the debates about how racism and imperialism shape society.

We hope this Special Issue will inspire more scholars and activists to engage with Amin’s ideas and also explore their relevance for emerging social and political problems. Amin’s methods of inquiry provide avenues towards doing research that transverses disciplinary boundaries and that aims to interrogate the social world as a whole. Notwithstanding important critiques of Amin’s work, the articles in this issue engage with his core concepts and demonstrate both their potency and how they can be creatively expanded and built upon. Amin’s legacy provides a lighthouse for those who not only want to understand the world, but fundamentally change it, by combining rigorous scholarship with political commitment and action.

The full Special Issue can be accessed for free until the end of March here.

Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven is a Lecturer in International Development at the University of York’s Department of Politics. Maria Dyveke Styve is a Research Fellow at the European University Institute in Italy and Ushehwedu Kufakurinani is an Economic Historian based at the University of Warwick. Ray Bush is a long-standing member of ROAPE and a Professor of African Studies and Development Politics at the University of Leeds.

Featured Photograph: Samir Amin, speaking at a Third World Forum symposium. (Third World Forum/Forum du Tiers-monde, Dakar, Senegal).

References

^[1] Amin, Samir.1974. Accumulation on a World Scale. Sussex: Harvester Press.

^[2] Kvangraven, Ingrid Harvold. 2017. “Samir Amin — A Dependency Pioneer.” In Dialogues on Development Volume 1 — On Dependency, edited by Ushehwedu Kufakurinani, Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, Frutuoso Santanta and Maria Dyveke Styve, 12–17. New York: Institute for New Economic Thinking.

^[3] Amin, Samir. 1988/2009. Eurocentrism (2nd Edition). New York: Monthly Review Press.

^[4] Kvangraven, Ingrid Harvold. 2020. “Samir Amin: A Pioneering Marxist and Third World Activist.” Development and Change 51(2): 631-649.

^[5] Amin, Samir. 1990. Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World. London: Zed Books.

^[6] See for example Mazama, Ama.1995. “Review of Eurocentrism.”Journal of Black Studies, 25 (6):760-764.

Senegal Uprising: End impunity for Macky Sall’s regime

ROAPE

March 11, 2021

As large protests have rocked Senegal, the government has used live fire and militias to crush the movement. A collective of Senegalese artists and academics calls for President Macky Sall to be held accountable for his crimes.

By Boubacar Boris Diop and Moussa Sene Absa

Since the arrest of leading opposition politician Ousmane Sonko on 3 March, Senegal has been gripped by unprecedented popular protests.

Rather than listen to the demands of the largely peaceful protest movement, the government has set out to crush it using all the means at its disposal: arbitrary arrests, the use of live ammunition, and the deployment of marauding militias.

In February, Sonko, president of the opposition PASTEF party (Patriots of Senegal for Work, Ethics, and Fraternity), was accused of rape and making death threats by an employee of a beauty parlour and has been subsequently stripped of his parliamentary immunity by an ad hoc commission dominated by pro-government MPs.

Hopes of a just resolution to the allegations were dashed when, en route to court, Sonko was arbitrarily arrested and placed in police custody for “disturbing public order”.

That was the last straw. Public anger erupted, setting the country ablaze.

The grievances that triggered countrywide demonstrations – from the capital Dakar to the Casamance region in the far south – go far beyond Sonko’s case. In the streets and on social media, cries of “Free Senegal” and “Macky out” have all but drowned out those of “Free Sonko”.

Rampant youth unemployment, growing inequality, corruption scandals, compounded by repressive measures amid the COVID-19 pandemic, are at the root of growing public anger. We are seeing a fed-up population taking to the streets to reject the country’s ruling political class.

A climate of terror

Since February, hardly a day has passed without the police raiding and arresting PASTEF activists, members of the Front for a Popular Anti-imperialist and Pan-African Revolution movement (FRAPP), and other political figures.

Numerous human rights organisations have sounded the alarm, with Amnesty International calling on Senegalese authorities to “stop arbitrary arrests of opponents and activists, respect freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression, and shed light on the presence of men armed with clubs alongside the security forces.”

Additionally, torture, a tool of colonial repression maintained by every regime since independence, has again reared its ugly head. Khadidiatou Ndiouck Faye, director of the notorious Cape Manuel prison, appeared to confirm as much, when she said on 4 March that uncooperative political prisoners were being held in punitive cells where “the rule is that the detainee commits suicide”.

In addition to restrictions of access to social media, confirmed by the cybersecurity monitor NetBlocks, the authorities have shut down several private television and radio stations. Numerous videos shared on social media show security forces pursuing unarmed protesters amid the sound of gunfire.

In some regions, the Senegalese state has called in the army. So far, at least 10 people have been killed and hundreds seriously injured.

Despite the mounting death toll, the government has decided to dig in its heels. On 5 March, after the third day of mobilisation, called by the Y’en a Marre (“fed up”) collective, which in 2011 mobilised the youth to overthrow former President Abdoulaye Wade, Interior Minister Antoine Félix Diome released a statement confirming President Macky Sall’s determination to stop at nothing. Mr Diome characterised the violence as “terrorist” and said demonstrators were manipulated by “occult forces”.

International impunity

Since its independence, Senegal has won powerful allies – foremost among them, France – which have supported successive regimes, turning a blind eye to authoritarianism and human rights violations.

The image of a “model democracy”, an island of stability in the restive Sahel region, fashioned by the country’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, himself the head of a single-party regime repressing the opposition, still resonates internationally.

The country opened up to a multi-party system in the 1980s and went through two transitions of power in 2000 and 2012. But President Abdoulaye Wade (2000-2012) and now Macky Sall (since 2012), once opponents, have both followed in their authoritarian predecessors’ footsteps.

Such concentration of power in the hands of the president goes back to the hyper-presidential system inherited from the 5th French Republic of 1958 and the Senegalese constitution of 1963, which repealed the prime minister’s position after the overthrow of the then-head of government, Mamadou Dia.

The ability of the president to run roughshod over the constitutional separation of powers was confirmed by Macky Sall himself, when in a televised New Year’s Eve speech last year, he said: “If the president knows that the arrest of [a] person [involved in a corruption scandal] will lead to the death of people, will he still arrest him? Maybe there is another way [to solve the problem].”

Indeed, Macky Sall has failed to investigate a corruption scandal revealed in 2019 by BBC in which British Petroleum allegedly agreed to pay $10bn for a suspicious Senegalese gas deal involving Macky Sall’s own brother.

Now that Senegal’s democratic charade has been finally exposed in front of the world’s cameras, impunity for Macky Sall’s regime in the court of international opinion must end. In 2018, the Economic Community of West African States’ Court of Justice condemned the state of Senegal for violating the rights of the former mayor of Dakar and main presidential contender Khalifa Sall who was found guilty of embezzlement and imprisoned in 2017.

In the wake of the scale of the regime’s repression, mere declarations are no longer enough. We demand full accountability and justice for the crimes committed before Senegalese and international courts.

Featured Photograph: Protestors in Dakar, March 3, 2021 (Leo Correa).

A version of this blogpost was first published as ‘Senegal: Impunity for Macky Sall’s regime must end’ by Al Jazeera English.

Boubacar Boris Diop is a Senegalese novelist and journalist, author of over a dozen novels and essays in French and Wolof, including Murambi, The Book of Bones (2006), Doomi Golo (2006), and The Knight and His Shadow (2015).

Moussa Sene Absa is a Senegalese filmmaker, director of over a dozen movies, including the award-winning Le prix du mensonge (1988), Ça twiste à Poponguine (1992), and Tableau Ferraille (1997).

Signatories (100):

Boubacar Boris Diop, author and journalist;

Moussa Sene Absa, filmmaker;

Rachel Ndeye Khan, actress and jurist;

Maky Madiba Sylla, musician and filmmaker;

Florian Bobin, researcher in history;

Khadim Ndiaye, historian;

Dip Doundou Guiss, artist;

Jaly Badiane, activist;

Fou Malade, artist;

Wasis Diop, musician;

Hady Ba, philosopher (Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, UCAD);

Thiat Kër Gui, artist;

Demba Moussa Dembélé, economist;

Ndeye Fatou Fall, lawyer;

Kilifa Kër Gui, artist;

Abdarahmane Ngaïde, historian;

Marie Parsine-Diop, merchant;

Oumar Dia, researcher in philosophy (UCAD);

Xuman, artist;

Gënji hip-hop, association of women artists, activists and feminists in hip-hop and urban cultures;

Khalil Diallo, Senegalese writer;

Beatrix Daumas-Diatta, social worker;

Ramatoulaye Ndiaye, nurse;

Saratou Moussa Sam, lawyer;

Mad Zoo, artist (RBS Crew);

El Hadj Samba Ndiaye, associate professor of law (UCAD);

Demba Gueye, specialist in digital communication and initiator of the hashtag #kebetu;

Simon, artist;

Aissatou Ba, social worker;

Amadou Bator Dieng, journalist, founder of Kirinapost;

Banouna Sam, consultant and pan-Africanist activist;

Hamidou Dia, researcher (IRD);

Rokhaya Loum, artist;

Babacar Faye, English teacher;

Ndèye Fatou Kane, researcher in gender studies (EHESS);

Aïda Dramé, political scientist specialized in conflict studies and editorialist;

Sun Sooley, artist;

Abdoul Aziz Diouf, associate professor of law (UCAD);

Ndeye Fatou Wosso Tounkara, instructor in artistic activism and cultural project manager;

Bathie Samba Diagne, historian;

Dieynaba Madina Diallo, teacher;

Ndiouga Benga, lecturer in modern and contemporary history (UCAD);

Seika (Awa Mbengue), artist;

Fatou Fall, jurist in defense, security and peace;

Nitt Doff, rap artist;

Sidy Alpha Ndiaye, associate professor of law (UCAD);

Fatou Niang Sow, telecommunications manager;

Idrissa Ba, associate professor of medieval history (UCAD);

Djimby Ka, communication executive;

Mike Sylla, stylist;

Sokhna Aïcha Mbodji, chef;

Adam Sene, artist;

Tamsir Ousmane Diagne, financial expert;

Socrates (Mamadou Diop), filmmaker and writer;

Diane Regisford, academic;

Ngoné Sylla Diop, city councillor;

Alpha Oumarou Ba, lecturer in oral literature (Assane Seck University of Ziguinchor);

Fatou Bintou Sall, web journalist;

Dread Wone, artist;

Bigué Marcelle, project manager (Legs Africa);

Papa Dieye, land development engineer and environmentalist;

Big D, artist;

Jeanne Dior Corréa, administrative technician;

Khady Tamba, lecturer in English linguistics (UCAD);

Ass Malick, artist;

Adja Coumba Gueye, social media manager;

El Hadj Abdoulaye Sall, lecturer in modern literature (UCAD);

Ndeye Yama Diouf, dancing artist;

Malick Diagne, professor of philosophy (UCAD);

Obee (Fatima Ndiaye), artivist and entrepreneur;

Alune Wade, musician;

Fabienne-Joseph Mérélix, artist;

Pope Ibrahima Ndiaye, dancer;

Aminata Diouf, entrepreneur;

Ombrezion, artist;

Alioune Gueye, inspector-auditor, political and administrative national secretary for the R3D party (Regards différents pour un développement durable);

Ndeye Awa Fall, stylist;

Tchiko, artist;

Kouro Wane, high school teacher;

Mamadou Coulibaly, physics teacher (UCAD);

Sokhna Diariatou Ba, higher technician in architecture;

Ludgero Amilcar Lima Silva, computer scientist, writer and social entrepreneur;

Moh Dediouf, artist;

Marie Mendy, administration secretary;

Djibril Keïta, sociologist;

Boc’s Amandla, artist;

Fatoumata Binetou Diallo, program coordinator (Toronto-based Shelter for women victims of violence and abuse);

Dread Maxim, artist;

El Hadji Malick Sy Camara, senior lecturer in sociology (UCAD) ;

Bamba Diop, filmmaker;

Ndickou Diaga Niang, child and family center advances and receipts director;

Souleymane Ndiaye Sall, head of department in logistics;

Fatima Diop, executive coach and founder of Ubuntu Executive Coaching;

Binou Ndoye, financial analyst;

Stefane Kabou, artist;

Arame Fall, auditor;

Max Barry, artist;

Alioune Ndiaye, former academy inspector, general secretary of the R3D party (Regards différents pour un développement durable);

Abel Proença, artist;

Amilcar Barsely, author.

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