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Struggles Over Value: Suppression of locally-led capital accumulation in the Congo

Based on their article in ROAPE, Ben Radley and Sara Geenen argue that a coalition of transnational capital and the Congolese state has marginalised and held back locally led processes of capital accumulation and mining mechanisation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The full article can be accessed for free until the end of March (see link in blogpost).

By Ben Radley and Sara Geenen

Over the last few decades, African governments have liberalised and privatised their mining industries, attracting significant foreign direct investment. Transnational corporations (TNCs) have become the dominant forces. Their en masse arrival across the continent has been accompanied by the displacement and marginalisation of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). This has been a political process not just to create value, but to transfer value to foreign firms. In this same process, particular production modes are devalued. According to Jennifer Bair and Marion Werner (2011), this is a deliberate process linked to ‘everyday practices and struggles over value’, whereby certain forms and logics of value creation are prioritised and asserted over others.

Yet a consideration or even acknowledgement of these everyday practices and struggles is generally absent from the Global Value Chain (GVC) analysis which dominates the African mining literature (especially the more influential policy papers and flagship development agency reports). This literature is mainly preoccupied with how African firms can integrate into and ‘upgrade’ within TNC-led industrial mining GVCs. It remains largely blind to a consideration of how and from whom value is transferred when recently established TNC-led mines interact with pre-existing and more locally-anchored ASM economies.

Locally driven mechanisation and capital accumulation in the Congo (Sara Geenen).

In our recently published research in ROAPE’s journal looking at the case of South Kivu Province in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), we redress this imbalance by documenting precisely these ‘everyday practices and struggles over value’. We demonstrate how a coalition between foreign corporate capital and the Congolese state has marginalised and held back locally-led processes of technological assimilation, capital formation and mechanisation in ASM. By so doing, we direct attention towards the developmental potential of domestically embedded networks of African mining production, and how these networks are disrupted by incoming TNCs.

Capital Formation and Mechanisation in Congolese ASM

From at least as early as the 1950s, ASM miners in this region started to operate alongside industrial mining companies – sometimes literally in the same tunnels. They linked up with master traders based in neighbouring Burundi and Uganda. The Belgian-owned company mining gold and tin in the region (MGL, followed by SOMINKI) initially reacted with fierce repression. But it soon had to ease off as it began to suffer problems of its own, created by the tin price crash of 1985, eventually leading to SOMINKI’s liquidation in 1997. With the withdrawal of foreign-led industrial mining and the retreat of the Congolese state during the Congo Wars (1996 to 2002), ASM began to operate with more autonomy.

Today, ASM is the most important livelihood activity, after agriculture. Hundreds of thousands of South Kivutians work in the sector, mostly in gold. According to G. Kamundala, S. Marysse and F.M. Iragi  (2015), the province produces an estimated 4,800 kilograms of ASM gold annually. In 2020, this equated to a market value of around US$265 million. But almost all of it is produced informally and smuggled out of the country.

Of this end value, Congolese workers, managers and traders capture around ninety to ninety-five per cent (so, around US$240 to US$250 million based on last year’s annual value). From this high level of domestic value capture, successful shaft managers and traders can generate relatively significant profits, up to a few thousand dollars per month for managers and several thousand dollars per month for traders. Both we and other researchers (see Ambroise Bulambo, 2002) have observed investments from these profits in agriculture, livestock, real estate, commerce and transport, as well as to bring consumer goods, construction material and food produce into the country.

A significant share of profits is also reinvested in production, which in turn has stimulated a locally-led process of increasing sectoral productivity via technological assimilation, capital formation and mechanisation. Around 2010, shaft managers noticed a decrease in the quality of the extracted ore in the large gold mining town of Kamituga. In response, they introduced ball mills, cement mixer-sized machinery to grind large rocks into fine powder. Initially imported from Tanzania and eventually manufactured in local workshops, the mills allowed mine sites that had previously been exhausted by artisanal techniques to once again became productive. By the end of 2012, around 70 ball mills were in use. Shaft managers also started constructing their own pylons to connect sites to the local electricity grid, operated by a nearby hydroelectric power station.

Through the increased use of machinery, then, Congolese managers and traders in Kamituga were driving a domestically-managed process of capital accumulation towards a semi-mechanised mode of production, with origins in extractive techniques previously adopted by Congolese at other sites in South Kivu and the wider region. Their major problem, however, was that they were doing so in a site of strategic importance to the recently arrived Canadian mining corporation, Banro.

Corporate-State Suppression

Since the 2000s, Banro had held 12 exploitation permits covering nearly 3,000 square kilometres across South Kivu, including one at Kamituga. This rendered any ASM extraction inside this or any of the other permits illegal. Banro had, nonetheless, initially tolerated the presence of ASM on its Kamituga concession, while it focused first on moving towards commercial production in other areas. Yet by depleting the value of the corporation’s Kamituga deposit far more rapidly than had been the case under purely artisanal techniques, ASM mechanisation posed a greater threat. As the Public Relations Manager of Banro’s Congolese subsidiary Kamituga Mining succinctly noted: ‘We continue to tolerate the presence of [artisanal] miners up to now, but under the condition that they remain in artisanal mining only’ (cited in Janvier Buraye, Nik Stoop and Marijke Verpoorten 2017).

In January 2012, the state mining administration attempted to formally ban the use of ball mills due to their illegal encroachment onto Banro’s concession. This had little effect, so in early 2013 Banro opened legal proceedings against the mill owners. In September 2013, after the mill owners had refused to move the mills, around 30 of them were appropriated by state agents with the support of local military and police. According to one of the local police involved in the operation, ‘police officers and soldiers were instructed to clear all the mills at Mobale. This was difficult for us, but we had to follow orders.’

Locally driven mechanisation and capital accumulation in the Congo (Sara Geenen).

By 2017, while mills were no longer present at the main Mobale deposit, they continued to operate at Calvaire, a site of less strategic value to Banro. Yet no judgement had been passed on the court case opened by Banro against the mill owners. The president of a miners’ association in Kamituga reflected that ‘Since 2012, artisanal miners have been leading a life of uncertainty. They continue in their work, not knowing what day their enemy will surprise them, inciting local authorities, police and military to appropriate their machinery’. This testimony proved somewhat prescient, as in April 2018 the General Prosecutor informed the state mining police in Kamituga that the case against mill owners at Calvaire was still open, and that a visit would soon be undertaken ‘to proceed to the suspension of all related [ball mill] activity’.

However, this foreseen court visit has yet to take place, possibly as both Banro and the Congolese state have been distracted in recent years by their own problems. In 2019, one year after Banro emerged from Canadian government creditor protection, the corporation split its assets with the Chinese investment fund Baiyin International Investment and its CEO wrote to the Congolese Ministry of Labour requesting the suspension of all worker contracts for reasons of force majeure (circumstances beyond the control of the company). Meanwhile, that same year, Félix Tshisekedi was appointed as the new President of the DRC, and Theo Ngwabidje Kasi was appointed as the new Governor of South Kivu.

Banro’s ongoing difficulties and the new political climate open some space for a shift in the balance of power away from foreign corporations and towards more domestically anchored ASM operators in the region. Yet this space will not be granted without struggle, as our research demonstrates the historical continuity of corporate-state ASM suppression in South Kivu across different political regimes, from the 1970s through to the 2010s.

Conclusion

The World Bank remains wedded to promoting the potential benefits of TNC-led industrial mining across Africa. Yet African governments are beginning to depart from this prescription, taking a more confrontational stance in their dealings with foreign mining corporations. Based on the findings presented in our ROAPE article, it is to be hoped that this shift might represent an ideological break with the past, and that future GVC-inspired scholarship on African mining and other industries expands its analytical framework to consider forms of value and accumulation that lie in networks outside of the currently dominant but all too often disarticulated and disruptive TNC-led incarnations.

Ben Radley and Sara Geenen’s full ROAPE article can be accessed for free until the end of March here.

Ben Radley is a political economist and lecturer in International Development for the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath. His research centres on the role, influence and developmental impact of Northern transnational corporations operating in the extractive and renewable energy industries, with a regional focus on Central Africa.

Sara Geenen is assistant professor at the Institute of Development Policy (IOB), University of Antwerp, Belgium. She is project leader of the Centre d’Expertise en Gestion Minière (CEGEMI) at the Université Catholique de Bukavu, DRC. Her research interests lie in the global and local development dimensions of extractivist projects, addressing questions about more socially responsible and inclusive forms of globalization.

References

Bair, J., and M. Werner. 2011. “Commodity Chains and the Uneven Geographies of Global Capitalism: A Disarticulations Perspective.” Environment and Planning 43: 988-997.

Bulambo, A. 2002. Capitalisme minier et droits de l’homme en RD Congo: la croisade des Nindja contre la Société Minière et Industrielle du Kivu. Huy: Les éditions du trottoir.

Buraye, J. K., N. Stoop., and M. Verpoorten. 2017. “Defusing the Social Minefield of Gold Sites in Kamituga, South Kivu: From Legal Pluralism to the Re-making of Institutions?” Resources Policy 53: 356-368.

Kamundala, G., S. Marysse., and F. M. Iragi. 2015. “Viabilité économique de l’exploitation artisanale de l’or au Sud-Kivu face à la compétition des entreprises minières internationales.” In Conjonctures Congolaises 2014. Politiques, territoires et ressources naturelles : changements et continuités, edited by S. Marysse and J. O. Tshonda, 167-195. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Borders and corporate domination over land, resources and labour: an interview with Hannah Cross

In an interview with ROAPE’s Hannah Cross, we ask about her work, research and her new book Migration Beyond Capitalism. A book that asks what kinds of political alliances, programmes, policies and arguments do – and do not – work in the interests of global worker solidarity.

Hannah, could you introduce yourself to roape.net readers?

I’m the chair of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group and a senior lecturer at the University of Westminster.

Can you talk a little about your research and activism?

I’ve been researching migration for more than 15 years. I was fortunate to be a postgraduate at the University of Leeds and gain a new way of seeing the world from socialists like Ray Bush  and Hugo Radice, and to get PhD funding after a time working as a medical secretary.

At this time, in the 2005 election campaign, the Conservatives put up chilling billboards in working class areas about limiting immigration. There was a televised debate, ‘Immigration on trial’, for which I’m glad to say immigration was found not guilty, but it was absurd and harmful to my mind, the idea that people can choose whether or not to have immigration and decide whether it’s ‘good’ or ‘bad’. There was no attention to why people are really migrating and who they are. That the Conservatives lost that election was hardly a win for humanity: the Home Office under Blair’s Labour government was criminalising asylum seekers, even those displaced by the Iraq War, and creating a hostile environment that tried to match the Conservatives’ national chauvinism.

I often thought about how my maternal great grandparents and grandma’s family, fleeing the pogroms and the Holocaust, would have fared under this regime, the bureaucratic indignities they would go through and if they would have been able to build such a life and legacy in the UK, not that it was ever easy. I was also seeing how shocking and frightening deportations could be for people who had long established themselves in the country.

A friend from East Africa, who had been in England with her family since childhood, completed the wrong visa form after finishing her studies and then the criteria changed. This meant she was not earning enough for the visa renewal. She had no real connections in her home country and had to work underground in London with a relative to get some income, then try to leave the country undetected to avoid a ban on returning. The thought of someone having their whole life pulled away from them like this was incomprehensible and I hoped that one day this atrocious order would end and be seen for what it is – not as an issue on the edges of the Western liberal democratic system but something that defines it.

I had a growing interest in Africa after such an inspired period at Leeds, which transformed my ideas of the continent, and went on to do ethnographic research in Senegal, Mauritania and Spain. This incorporated life history research among migrants, those who remained and their families with a Marxist political economy understanding, ultimately identifying a regime of ‘unfree labour mobility’ in the not-so-contradictory agendas of borders and deregulated labour markets. There was a strong element of chance in where people may end up in the ‘stepwise’ migrations towards the Maghreb and Europe that I was looking at. In the Senegalese communities I went to, the state’s fishing agreements with the EU were destroying artisanal fishing and other opportunities were closed down by the long-term effects of structural adjustment and continuing neoliberalism – factory closures, no safety net, rising food prices etc. A local women’s collective, led by bereaved mothers after young people were lost at sea heading to the Canary Islands, managed to obtain visas for people to work in Spain and gained support from President Wade, but with or without visas, people ended up in precarious labour. The EU system contributes to ‘surplus labour’ and controls migration movements with visas, border regimes, amnesties, deportations and managed labour markets, and this aggravates inequalities with Africa, as the great Marxist scholar and activist Samir Amin identified.

In terms of activism, I joined various protests over time – the Iraq War, defence of refugees, anti-racism etc. but didn’t have much of a political home beyond ROAPE. I joined the Labour Party and Momentum when Jeremy Corbyn was elected as leader and had local officer positions in both for a time. I also joined Jewish Voice for Labour and found the group courageous. A Jewish socialist, non-zionist tradition was being cast out by the party, and Jewishness essentialised and used against Corbyn and left critics of Israel, to the loss of anti-imperial struggle, the fight against Islamophobia and fascism, and socialist politics. I was not particularly active though – I felt conflicted as someone who was called to action by the cynical instrumentalisation of my heritage by the party’s right, but for whom Judaism has not really been an active part of my life since childhood. Through this debacle, it was clear how the state machinery produces class antagonisms in the most detestable ways and prevents unity between the labouring classes, and how wider consciousness of these methods and strength against them will be essential to any transformative programme. I am also a UCU rep [University and College Union – the main academic teaching union].

Your new book, Migration Beyond Capitalism, continues work you have done on global remittances, migration and labour mobility in West Africa. What were your objectives with the book?

I wanted to intervene in the conversations about migration on the left in the UK and elsewhere because I felt they were at an impasse. A ‘revolutionary theory’, as Amílcar Cabral put it, might bring some clarity. While there were new ideas and possibilities for radical change in Corbyn’s Labour, there was little to tackle the imperial division of the world and its consequences for labour on an international scale. This need also seemed to resonate with the left in Germany, the US and Canada. The overall research question was to analyse what kinds of political alliances, programmes, policies and arguments do – and do not – work in the interests of global worker solidarity and progression out of cheap labour as a mainstay of wealthy economies.

As Marx argued, and then Stephen Castles and Godula Kosack in their 1973 book on Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe, humanitarian appeals against antimigrant sentiment will not convince the workers being forced into competition while the state and capital actively divide them. And being ‘pro-migration’ as opposed to ‘anti-migration’ could sustain divisions between migrants and native-born workers as well as the class divide. The divisions between workers do not only allow cheap labour to continue but are also the secret of capitalism’s success – and left-liberalism can also be divisive.

Further, it does not help to have largely middle-class people, who benefit from the growth of the economy, arguing for the economic benefits of migration. It is alienating to those who have been directly affected by the deregulation of labour and these native-born workers are often workers of colour. It was important to separate migrants from the regime – i.e. to recognise that it is not progressive to defend the regime and this does not dignify migrant workers.

Jeremy Corbyn, when he talked about cheap labour and undercutting, faced disapproval from his underlying movement and there seemed to be a fear that talking about these things will stir up anti-immigrant sentiment and nativism. There is truth in that because of the way immigration debates have played out and been polarised to the benefit of capital, but if the labour movement cannot deal with the concrete problems of cheap labour in its international dimensions, what is it for? I thought my approach may be similarly misunderstood and not win me many friends, so the support of ROAPE comrades and others has meant a lot.

It has been proven in numerous workplaces around the world that working people are perfectly capable of separating the groups they are pitted against from the regime that forces them into competition. Racism and antimigrant sentiment is largely a top-down phenomenon of the capitalist, imperial state and exists in the middle classes at least as much as the working classes, while there are also ‘the traditions which haunt human minds’ as Walter Rodney put it. At a time of empowerment for the left that I hadn’t seen in my lifetime, I felt that we needed to stop worrying about what the right thinks or does, or what the media will say, develop our own concrete analysis and go forward with it.

You tackle the abstract and utopian thinking of liberals and leftists on the question of migration, these thinkers and commentators you argue downplay patterns of displacement and can divide working people. Can you give us some idea of these arguments and why they are important?

Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas of ‘empty utopias’, and of measuring the strength and aspiration for these utopias by speculative reason, resonated when I saw arguments being made for open borders or free movement that are contradictory and unable to address the underlying causes of border repression. Such utopianism, which Luxemburg saw in anarchic revolutionary movements, can risk contorting reality and making alliances with opportunistic and harmful forces.

On one hand, the human rights of migrants are rightly being defended; on the other, it is being argued that they are ‘good for the economy’ and this is supposed to deter the nativist arguments. It is contradictory because people become such useful workers, in massively undervalued and degrading jobs, as a consequence of displacements that should worry humanitarians, whether by conflict or in capital’s struggle against the natural economy.

The migration of labour is not comparable to the international travel opportunities enjoyed by the middle classes, even if there are times of success, mobility and agency for migrant workers within this apartheid-type regime. They are being treated as a resource, not people, by bourgeois economics that look at migration from a national perspective and do not adequately capture precarious and outsourced work. There is the maxim that migrant workers do the work native-born workers don’t want to do and therefore should be celebrated – but this plays into divisions. Why is it acceptable for racialised ‘others’ to do undesirable jobs, and why would it be acceptable that useful work, often known as ‘unskilled’ work, should have such a low value and become so undesirable in areas like agriculture, food production, care, cleaning etc.? All of this work could be more rewarding or at least less burdensome on individuals in an economy oriented to the needs of society.

Luxemburg also showed that capitalist imperialism can demolish borders, as well as create them, for the interests of capital. There was a fixation by liberals and leftists on free movement in the EU, as though defending this at the time of Brexit may naturally lead to more free movement globally. But the EU framework is racist and exclusionary, and free movement within the EU came at the expense of immigration from outside it, historically shutting down established migration channels from Africa at a time when its economies were struggling with debt and structural adjustment. The deadly EU borders and those around other wealthy countries follow a militarist logic today and this militarism is a product of capitalism for Luxemburg just as imperialism was for Lenin; thus any strategy to prevent border repression and support the rights of migrants needs to deal with the social relations of production on an international level.

What does your use of a Marxist framework bring to our understanding of migration and alternatives?

Particularly the points made in Marx’s 1870 letter on the ‘Irish Question’ underpin the book’s structure, argument and strategy and offer quite a rounded picture of the political economy of migration. He argued here that the only way to wrest power from the English ruling class was through the emancipation of Ireland, and that this required a social revolution in England that sided with Ireland. Migration was at the centre of this strategy because colonial land evictions in Ireland forced people to migrate to England. This movement of labour lowered the position of the English working class and created antagonisms between English and Irish workers. The ruling class aggravated these antagonisms using all means possible, including through the media and entertainment, allowing it to gain even more from cheap labour than from the imported meat and wool produced on expropriated Irish land. This division of people was the secret of ruling class power in England as well as in Ireland and agitated international working-class cooperation too. By this logic, the defence of migrants’ rights and of workers’ rights more generally requires an internationalism shared by all workers in oppressing and oppressed countries, against the domination of the ruling class in countries that both send and receive migrants.

On this basis, the book analyses the relationship between migration and imperialism today, found in capital’s destruction of the natural economy and the creation of racialised patterns of labour mobility. It then examines, in turn, the relationship between borders, militarism and inequality, the nature of today’s bitter labour conflicts, the ways that class antagonisms have been produced through racial ideologies and other social oppressions, the existing modes of internationalism and labour struggle, and finally ideas for a socialist approach to migration.

Your final chapter imagines an emancipatory or emancipated future and the programmes and approaches the world needs to promote global worker solidarity. It seems that today, with multiple crises of capitalism, we need to exercise our creative capacities – what could the future look like, and how is this a universal project applicable to the Global South?

There is so much to learn from the thinking of Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and other revolutionaries about class analysis, methodology, visions for the future and strategies to get there. Based on the theories and praxis in the book, the chapter sketches out a future without cheap labour – where peasant uprisings and labour insurgencies in the global South as well as grassroots antiracism, working class solidarity and democratisation of the media in the global North can inform progressive politics. Work is revalued and countries have a simple and fully egalitarian entry process. The logic of borders is destroyed by the decline of corporate domination over land, resources and labour, autonomous development and the end of imposed competition between workers. My thinking was that such a sketch of states and the international system could suggest where energies might be focused and could also illuminate how brutal and senseless the current order is for the vast majority of people. It draws particularly on the work of Samir Amin and Ben Selwyn for imagining a different future.

As it stands, many Northern progressive/ social-democratic strategies, even those that call themselves socialist or radical, continue to mystify how national wealth and the food, devices and other goods that are available to people appear, how they are extracted and produced and the social relations they embody. Global South countries are seen either as competitors- ‘emerging powers’, or continuing paternalism is presumed. This perspective has emptied these ‘luxury communist’, ‘post-capitalist’, ‘post-work’ etc. visions of meaning and ambition and leaves no hope for eradicating racism either. The logic of the Irish Question remains – upending the ruling class, and a real change in social relations, requires anti-imperial struggle or the labouring classes in oppressing and oppressed countries will continue to suffer.

Please join Review of African Political Economy and the University of Westminster for the launch of Hannah Cross’ new book, Migration Beyond Capitalism (Polity 2021) with discussant Femi Aborisade – labour and rights activist, lawyer and contributing editor to the ROAPE. The event will be chaired by Peter Dwyer (University of Warwick/ROAPE). Wednesday, 24 March, 17:00 – 19:00 GMT. Please register here.

Hannah Cross is author of Migrants, Borders and Global Capitalism: West African labour mobility and EU borders, Routledge 2013 and the new book Migration Beyond Capitalism. She is a senior lecturer in International Relations at the University of Westminster, and the Chair of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group.

Featured Photograph: Anti-racist demonstration on 9 June 2018 in London (Steve Eason).

Insurgent Decolonisation: Ndlovu-Gatsheni on the sins of colonialism

Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni writes how war, violence and extractivism defined the legacy of the empire in Africa, and why recent attempts to explore the ‘ethical’ contributions of colonialism is rewriting history.

By Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni

In 2017, a professor at Oxford University in the United Kingdom proposed a research project. The key thesis: that the empire as a historical phenomenon – distinct from an ideological construct – has made ethical contributions and that its legacy cannot be reduced to that of genocides, exploitations, domination and repression.

Predictably, such a project raised a lot of controversies to the extent that other scholars at Oxford penned an open letter dissociating themselves from such intended revisionism and whitewashing of the crimes of the empire. One leading member of the project resigned from it, citing personal reasons.

This month marks 136 years since the end of the Berlin Conference in 1885, where western powers met to set the rules for how they would divide up Africa. Historically, theoretically and empirically, it should be clear that the empire was a “death project” rather than an ethical force outside Europe; that war, violence and extractivism rather than any ethics defined the legacy of the empire in Africa.

But it is the continuation of revisionist thinking that beckons a revisiting of the question of colonialism and its impact on the continent from a decolonial perspective, challenging the colonial and liberal desire to rearticulate the empire as an ethical phenomenon.

The ‘ethics’ of empire?

In the Oxford research project, entitled Ethics and Empire (2017-22), Nigel Biggar, the university’s regius professor of moral and pastoral theology and director of the MacDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life, sought to do two important interventions: to measure apologias and critiques of the empire against historical data from antiquity to modernity across the world; and to challenge the idea that empire is imperialist, imperialism is wicked, and empire is therefore unethical.

In support of its thesis, the description of the research project lists “examples” of the ethics of the empire: the British empire’s suppression of the “Atlantic and African slave trades” after 1807; granting Black Africans the vote at the Cape Colony 17 years before the United States granted it to African Americans; and offering “the only armed centre of armed resistance to European fascism between May 1940 and June 1941”.

But the selective use of such examples does not paint an accurate picture. Any attempt to credit the British empire for the abolition of slavery, for instance, ignores the ongoing resistance of enslaved Africans from the moment of capture right up to the plantations in the Americas. The Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 still stands as a symbol of this resistance: enslaved African people rose against racism, slavery and colonialism – demonstrating beyond doubt that the European institution of slavery was not sustainable.

The very fact that, in the Oxford research project, the chosen description is “the Atlantic and African slave trades” reveals an attempt to distance itself from the crime of slavery, to attribute it to the “ocean” (the Atlantic), and to the “Africans” as though they enslaved themselves. Where is the British empire in this description of the heinous kidnapping and commodification of the lives of Africans?

The second example, which highlights the very skewed granting of the franchise to a small number of so-called “civilised” Africans at the Cape Colony in South Africa as a gift of the empire, further demonstrates a misunderstanding of how colonialism dismembered and dehumanised African people. The fact is that African struggles were  fought for decolonisation and rehumanisation.

The third example, that the British empire became the nerve centre of armed resistance to fascism during the second world war (1939-45), may be accurate. But it also ignores the fact that fascism became so repugnant to the British mainly because Adolf Hitler practised and applied the racism that was meant for “those people” in the colonies and brought it to the centre of Europe.

Projects like Briggar’s, and others with similar thought trajectories, risk endangering the truth about the crimes of the empire in Africa.

Afro-pessimism: Seeing disorder as the norm

What, fundamentally, is colonialism? Aimé Césaire, the Mantiniquean intellectual and poet, posed this deep and necessary question in his classical treatise Discourse on Colonialism, published in 1955. In it, he argues that the colonial project was never benevolent and always motivated by self-interest and economic exploitation of the colonised.

But without a real comprehension of the true meaning of colonialism, there are all sorts of dangers of developing a complacent if not ahistorical and apologetic view of it, including the one that argues it was a moral evil with economic benefits to its victims. This view of colonialism is re-emerging within a context where some conservative metropolitan-based scholars of the empire are calling for a “balance sheet of the empire”, which weighs up the costs and benefits of colonialism. Meanwhile, some beneficiaries of the empire based in Africa are also adopting a revisionist approach, such as Helen Zille, the white former leader of South Africa’s opposition Democratic Alliance party, who caused a storm when she said that apartheid colonialism was beneficial – by building the infrastructure and governance systems that Black Africans now use.

Both conservative and liberal revisionism in the studies of the empire and the impact of colonialism reflect shared pessimistic views about African development. The economic failures, and indeed elusive development, in Africa get blamed on the victims. The disorder is said to be the norm in Africa. Eating, that is, filling the “belly” is said to be the characteristic of African politics. African leadership is roundly blamed for the mismanagement of economies in Africa.

While it is true that African leaders contribute to economic and development challenges through things like corruption, the key problems on the continent are structural, systemic and institutional. That is why even leaders like Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, who were not corrupt, did not succeed in changing the character of inherited colonial economies so as to benefit the majority of African peoples.

Today, what exacerbates these ahistorical, apologetic and patronising views of the impact of colonialism on Africa is the return of crude right-wing politics – the kind embodied by former US President Donald Trump. It is the strong belief in inherent white supremacy and in the inherent inferiority of the rest.

But right-wing politics is also locking horns with resurgent and insurgent decolonisation of the 21st century, symbolised by global movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall. However, to mount a credible critique to apologias for the empire, the starting point is to clearly define colonialism.

On colonisation, colonialism, coloniality

Three terms – colonisation, colonialism and coloniality – if correctly clarified, help in gaining a deeper understanding of the empire and the damage colonialism has had on African economies and indeed on African lives.

Colonisation names the event of conquest and administration of the conquered. It can be dated in the case of South Africa from 1652 to 1994; in the case of Zimbabwe from 1890 to 1980; and in the case of Western and Eastern Africa from 1884 to 1960. Those who confused colonisation and colonialism conceptually, ended up pushing forward a very complacent view of colonialism which define it as a mere “episode in African history” (a short interlude: 1884-1960). While this intervention from the Ibadan African Nationalist School of History was informed by the noble desire to dethrone imperialist/colonialist historiography which denied the existence of African history prior to the continent’s encounter with Europeans, it ended up minimising the epochal impact of colonialism on Africa.

It was Peter Ekeh of the University of Ibadan, in his Professorial Inaugural Lecture: Colonialism and Social Structure of 1980, who directly challenged the notion that colonialism was an episode in African history. He posited that colonialism was epochal in its impact as it was and is a system of power that is multifaceted in character. It is a power structure that subverts, destroys, reinvents, appropriates, and replaces anything it deems an obstacle to the agenda of colonial domination and exploitation.

Eke’s definition of colonialism resonated with that of Frantz Fanon who explained, in The Wretched of the Earth, that colonialism was never satisfied with the conquest of the colonised, it also worked to steal the colonised people’s history and to epistemically intervene in their psyche.

Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe is also correct in positing that the fundamental question in colonialism was a planetary one: to whom does the earth belong? Thus, as a planetary phenomenon, its storm troopers, the European colonialists, were driven by the imperial idea of the earth as belonging to them. This is why at the centre of colonialism is the “coloniality of being”, that is, the colonisation of the very idea and meaning of being human.

This was achieved through two processes: first, the social classification of the human population; and second, the racial hierarchisation of the classified human population. This was a necessary colonial process to distinguish those who had to be subjected to enslavement, genocide and colonisation.

The third important concept is that of coloniality. It was developed by Latin American decolonial theorists, particularly Anibal Quijano. Coloniality names the transhistoric expansion of colonial domination and its replication in contemporary times. It links very well with the African epic school of colonialism articulated by Ekeh and dovetails well with Kwame Nkrumah’s concept of neo-colonialism. All this speaks to the epochal impact of colonialism. One therefore wonders how Africa could develop economically under this structure of power and how could colonialism be of benefit to Africa. To understand the negative economic impact of colonialism on Africa, there is a need to appreciate the four journeys of capital and its implications for Africa.

Four journeys of colonial capital and entrapment

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, in his Secure the Base: Making Africa Visible in the Globe, distilled the four journeys of capital from its mercantile period to its current financial form and in each of the journeys, he plotted the fate of Africa.

The first is the epoch of enslavement of Africans and their shipment as cargo out of the continent. This drained Africa of its most robust labour needed for its economic development. The second was the exploitation of African labour in the plantations and mines in the Americas without any payment so as to enable the very project of Euro-modernity and its coloniality. The third is the colonial moment where Africa was scrambled for and partitioned among seven European colonial powers (Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal) and its resources (both natural and human) were exploited for the benefit of Europe. The fourth moment is the current one characterised by “debt slavery” whereby a poor continent finances the developed countries of the world. Overseeing this debt slavery is the global financial republic constituted by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other financial institutions. All these exploitative journeys of capital were enabled by colonialism and coloniality.

Empirically and concretely, colonialism radically ordered Africa into economic zones of exploitation. This reality is well expressed by Samir Amin who identified three main colonial zones. The first is the “cash crops zone” covering Western and Eastern Africa, where colonialism inaugurated “peasant trade colonies” whereby Africans were forced to abandon cultivation of food crops and instead produce cash crops for an industrialising Europe.

The second zone was that of extractive colonial plantations symbolised by the Congo Free State which was owned by King Leopold II of Belgium; Africans were forced to produce rubber, and extreme violence including the removal of limbs was used to enforce this colonial system.

The third zone was that of “labour reserves” inaugurated by settler colonialism. The Southern Africa region was the central space of settler colonies, where Africans were physically removed from their lands and the lands taken over by the white settlers. Those African who survived the wars of conquest were pushed into crowded reserves where they existed as a source of cheap labour for mines, farms, plantations, factories, and even domestic work.

This colonial ordering of economies in Africa has remained intact even after more than 60 years of decolonisation. This is because achieving political independence did not include attaining economic decolonisation. At the moment of political decolonisation, Europe actively worked to develop strategies such as Eurafrica, Françafrique, Lomé Conventions, the Commonwealth and others to maintain its economic domination over Africa.

Roadblocks to development

Like all human beings, Africans were born into valid and legitimate knowledge systems which enabled them to survive as a people, to benefit from their environment, to invent tools, and to organise themselves socially on their own terms.

The success story of the people of Egypt to utilise the resources of the Nile River to build the Egyptian civilisation, which is older than the birth of modern Europe, is a testimony of how the people and the continent were self-developing and self-improving on their own terms.

The invention of stone tools and the revolutionary shift to the iron tools prior to colonialism is another indication of African people making their own history. The domestication of plants and animals is another evidence of African revolutions. This is what colonialism destroyed as it created a colonial order and economy that had no African interests at its centre.

Flourishing pre-colonial African economies and societies of the Kingdom of Kongo, Songhai, Mali, Ancient Ghana, Dahomey were first of all exposed to the devastating impact of the slave trade and later subjected to violent colonialism. What this birthed were economies in Africa rather than African economies – economies that were outside-looking-in in orientation – to sustain the development of Europe.

Fundamentally, the economies in Africa became extractive in nature. By the time direct colonialism was rolled back after 1945, African leaders inherited colonial economies where Africans participated as providers of cheap labour rather than owners of the economies. These externally oriented economies could not survive as anything else but providers of cheap raw materials. They were and are entrapped in well-crafted colonial matrices of power with a well-planned division of labour.

Today, the economies in Africa remain artificial and fragile to the extent that any attempt to reorient them to serve the majority of African people, sees them flounder and collapse. This is because their scaffold and pivot are colonial relations of exploitation, not decolonial relations of empowerment and equitable distribution of resources.

For real future development and a successful move from economies in Africa towards true African economies, there is a need to revolutionise the asymmetrical colonial power structures that still govern the fate of the continent.

A version of this blogpost was first published as ‘Moral evil, economic good’: Whitewashing the sins of colonialism by Al Jazeera English.

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.

Featured Photograph: Cartoon of Belgian King Leopold II in the middle, German Emperor William I on the right, and a crowned beer (representing the Russian Empire on the left), cutting up a pumpkin (representing the Congo) at the Berlin Conference of 1884 (Le Frondeur, Belgium, 20 December 1884).

Manufacturing Madness: Omar Blondin Diop against French educational elitism

In Senegal, the “Diary Sow case” has reopened the debate on the elitist French grandes écoles system. Over fifty years ago, Senegalese revolutionary Omar Blondin Diop had made a strong case against them in a film synopsis. Today, his family has decided to make this previously unpublished text public. Florian Bobin writes about what is going on.  

By Florian Bobin

The yellowish letter paper is still warm. Its edges, dented, victim to humidity, betraying time spent in storage. The title reads “L’attrape-nigauds” (“The Sucker Bait”). Some words are bolded with several layers of thick purple ink, others are crossed out. The author’s name is nowhere to be seen, but the style reveals his identity—Omar Blondin Diop.

Red keffiyeh around the neck, Cheikh Hamallah Diop’s gaze is fixed on his older brother’s text. Since the late 1960s, the family has carefully preserved these four pages. “It’s a film synopsis that remained an idea,” he reveals. One that never saw the light of day because Blondin Diop’s fate was quickly shattered.

In Senegal, his tragic death at Gorée prison in May 1973, disguised as suicide by President Leopold Sedar Senghor’s regime, remains a symbol for much of the younger generation. Despite himself, he posthumously became an icon of state violence, modus operandi of neo-colonial rule.

At the core, Blondin Diop is an unclassifiable figure of the Global 1960s, who, from Paris to Dakar via Algiers and Bamako, participated in his epoch’s political and artistic fervour. Exhibitions, films, academic research: his life and work, still unknown to many, has aroused real interest in recent years. More fundamentally, a foundational period of history—anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist revolts worldwide, post-colonial African disillusionment, and political Senghorism—is resurfacing today.

In the summer of 1968, Omar Blondin Diop attended several film shootings in London, introduced to British counterculture cinema by his director friend Simon Hartog. The duo was used to taking notes of their respective projects. The synopsis of “The Sucker Bait” most likely came to life in this context—a film meant to depict the decadence of a young man obsessed with “the elite’s ideology,” making “the grandes écoles world the only one he admits as a reference.”

Blondin Diop, himself a student of philosophy in Paris at the prestigious École normale supérieure (ENS), had spent the spring of 1968 between the crowded lecture halls of Nanterre University and student demonstrations in the Latin Quarter. Upon his return from the British capital, he dropped out of the school.

Why leave the institution before even obtaining his degree, he whose career seemed all mapped out, as a former student of Lycée Louis-le-Grand, like a certain ‘poet-president’ compatriot, and the first Senegalese to be admitted to ENS? Precisely for all these reasons. For, he writes, “after two years or more of this regime, the student, if he has not become mentally ill, constitutes a little monster of bookish knowledge and grotesque pretentiousness.”

The questioning of the elitist French grandes écoles system remains topical. In January, the disappearance of Diary Sow, a student in her second year of preparatory classes at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, dubbed Senegal’s “best pupil” in 2018 and 2019 for her academic results, raised numerous questions. “When the case first came up, many things were said,” Cheikh Hamallah Diop asserts, “but there was no criticism of the system which, in my opinion, is an aberration: schools of excellence.”

This prompted Omar Blondin Diop’s family to make “The Sucker Bait” public—a sort of farewell letter to the grandes écoles. Despite being over half a century old, the text has barely aged a day.

Together with roape.net we published the first translation of the text in English:

“The Sucker Bait” by Omar Blondin Diop

LLG – ULM – CVB / Language
Chicks

A student who was in his time and in high school a serious and early gifted student advances, not without hurdles, towards mental illness.

His case is of no interest, except to read through the subject’s personal history that of a minority of young people duped by the elite’s ideology and then shattered by the destruction of this mirage.

The École Normale Supérieure is a sucker bait.[1] Everyone knows that. How can healthy young people be brought to such a dead end?

You have to have seen the LLG high school to understand this…[2] A chaplain – Very old teachers – Very old monitors – Very old invigilators – A censor – A principal – Grey buildings – Dark rooms – An aquarium with a bailiff in it – A monumental entrance.

At LLG everything is done to make you understand that you are in an important high school. It is a favour to attend an LLG professor’s class since he himself explains to you that across the street (that can mean at the Sorbonne or in the bars surrounding it) everything is going wrong – (Understand: French University in its entirety is in chaos while LLG is a haven of peace and dignity where teaching consequently reaches vertiginous levels).

When a teenage brain is immersed in this jar for a while, it no longer asks questions about its future. The high school, if it keeps quiet, will guide it serenely out of the difficult years.

Once one has assimilated and accepted the jar’s aristocratic ideology, one must draw all the consequences if one wants to succeed: the extreme consequence is total intellectual subservience, which notably manifests itself in artificial, stupid, or even ludicrous exercises.

Example: The Lagarde et Michard text explanation in hand.[3]

Dissertations on the great century in which students must compete in erudition.
Compilation of textbooks.
The art of playing with words.
The art of taking notes without understanding a thing.
The art of talking about authors with little scraps of ideas.

After two or more years of this regime, the student, if he has not become mentally ill, constitutes a little monster of bookish knowledge and grotesque pretentiousness.

He is ripe to take the Ulm entrance exam. He usually fails the first time around. That is a good thing because if he passes the exam on the first try, it would be a right and not a favour. But let’s make it clear that it is not a matter of training solid and intellectually well-armed men; it’s a matter of training superior, chosen men.

The Elite is not about Having; it is about Being. The second time around, the candidate usually comes out of the kennel. LLG has performed its duty – The teenager’s life is all mapped out. At Ulm, coercion will not even be needed anymore. This is when the breakup occurs for those whose view of reality has not been completely clogged.  

Ulm is a world of delusion that hesitates between the Executive School and the clinic for difficult adolescents.

There is aesthetic delusion.
There is epistemological delusion.
There is arriviste delusion.
There is erotic delusion.
There is political delusion.

The case we are trying to grasp is that of a boy who lives on the margins of this marginal world.

First symptom: the world of the grandes écoles is the only one he admits as a reference. It is a ghost that haunts him for the simple reason that he could not keep up with the LLG-Ulm path (he had his first acute crisis at the Lycée Louis Le Grand: after attacking the school principal, whom he insulted and beat up, he was expelled and spent some time in a clinic) – It had already become impossible for him to write a dissertation.

The following year, he re-enrolled in preparatory class at the Lycée Henri IV.

After a failed attempt at going back to work, it seems that a new element appears in his life. He becomes attached to a young girl who is in preparatory class herself. She seems to have been fascinated by his mastery of language (it is well known that in France, the ability to speak is one of the essential weapons of academic success).

There, the subject probably found a substitute that allowed him to get out of the conflicts that were shaking him up.

Second symptom: Establishment of very complex relations between the subject and the young preparatory pupil.

  • Teacher-student relations.
  • Relations between him as a potential genius and her as the muse or, better still, the midwife of this genius.
  • Platonic relations between him as an intellectual whose beauty can only be grasped in a Socratic way and her as the social beauty of consumer societies. (There will thus be an unspoken desire on the subject’s side and fascination with the refusal of physical commitment on the girl’s side).

The result of these relationships is a perpetual tension that leads to the subject’s attempt to destroy the young girl, who refuses to coincide precisely with the representation he makes of her. The breakup with the girl is carried out for the benefit of political engagement in the CVB.

For the subject, the CVB are a means to return towards Rue d’Ulm while escaping from himself.

The Grass-root Vietnam Committees are an anti-imperialist mass organization led by the UJCML; a Maoist organization formed from the Rue d’Ulm UEC circle.[4]

There is thus, on the one hand, the intellectual aspect of the matter: the CVB’s literature is a certain way of interpreting Louis Althusser’s teaching [5] and that of the Cahiers d’Epistémologie.[6]

On the other hand, there is the organizational aspect: young people deciding for themselves the direction they want to give to their lives and equipping themselves of structures that will allow them to do so.

Finally, there is the political fact, which is the only real fact in the film: we will show it in this kind of evidence that surrounds the exercise of violence.

Violence is appropriately the only sphere that allows aspects of aristocratic teaching to manifest its existence.

Translated from French by Florian Bobin (read Omar Blondin Diop’s text in French here).

Florian Bobin’s research focuses on post-colonial liberation struggles and state violence from the 1960s and 1970s in Senegal. He is the author of Omar Blondin Diop: Seeking Revolution in Senegal and Poetic Injustice: The Senghor Myth and Senegal’s Independence published on roape.net, as well as Law and disorder published on africasacountry.com.

Featured Photograph: Cheikh Hamallah Diop reading his older brother’s previously unpublished film synopsis “L’attrape-nigauds” (“The Sucker Bait”), February 2021 © Florian Bobin.

Notes

[1] The Ecole normale supérieure (ENS), founded in the late 18th century during the French Revolution, is one of the most selective post-secondary schools in France, whose main branch is located rue d’Ulm in Paris’ Latin Quarter. Specializing in literature and science, its curriculum notably prepares the student for teaching, applied research, and the civil service.

[2] The Lycée Louis-le-Grand (LLG), founded as a Jesuit college in the mid-17th century, renamed a century later in honour of King Louis XIV (whose regime set up the first French trading post in Africa, on the island of Ndar in Senegal), is one of the country’s most elitist public high schools. Located not far from ENS and the Lycée Henri-IV in the Latin Quarter, LLG is known for its demanding Grandes Écoles Preparatory Classes (CPGE); part of the “LLG-Ulm path” Blondin Diop describes.

[3] Lagarde et Michard is a French literature textbook published by Bordas Editions from 1948 to 1962 by literature teachers André Lagarde (from the Lycée Louis-le-Grand) and Laurent Michard (from the Lycée Henri-IV). Composed of author biographies, text commentaries and questions addressed to students, Lagarde et Michard remained, until the early 1990s in France, the reference textbook for teaching French in secondary schools.

[4] The Union of Communist Students (UEC) is a French student political organization founded in 1939, close to the French Communist Party (PCF). During the 1960s, ideological divergences within its ranks gave birth, in 1966, to the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Youth (JCR) and the Maoist Union of Marxist-Leninist Communist Youth (UJCML), primarily composed of “Ulmards” (students from ENS rue d’Ulm). Opposed to the American war in Vietnam, the JCR and UJCML respectively founded the National Vietnam Committees (CVN) and the Grass-root Vietnam Committees (CVB). Sympathizers to both movements played an essential role in the “May ’68” mobilization.

[5] Louis Althusser (1918-1990) was a French Marxist philosopher, professor at ENS from 1948 to 1980, whose teachings influenced many students who partook and led the “May ’68” demonstrations, in particular the UEC’s “Ulm circle,” embryo of the UJCML. The philosopher did not, however, openly give them his support.

[6] The Cahiers pour l’Analyse, referred to as the Cahiers d’Épistémologie by Blondin Diop, is a journal of philosophy published from 1966 to 1969 by ENS’ Cercle d’Épistémologie (Circle of Epistemology), a group of Louis Althusser’s students.

Popular Democracy, Youth and Activism: an interview with Tunde Zack-Williams

ROAPE’s Peter Dwyer interviews the scholar-activist Tunde Zack-Williams. In 2020, Zack-Williams became the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom’s Distinguished Africanist. For decades, his research and writing on economic and political reform across Africa has focused on alternatives to western prescriptions, which has influenced his work as an editor of ROAPE.

Comrade, can you please tell us about your early politicisation? Your childhood background in Sierra Leone and your experience growing up?

I was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone and as far as I can recall, there was no politician in the family, though politics was always discussed. It was mainly local politics, but also international and pan-African. As a child growing up in Sierra Leone, the conflict that caught my attention was the situation in Southern Africa. I just could not understand how and why the white minority imposed their brutal hegemony on the people of southern Africa. I had a deeply felt sympathy for the people of Zambia not just for the punishment they suffered from the apartheid regime in South Africa, but also how sanctions were damaging their economy. I did not have access to books on other African countries, at least, not until the Peace Corps volunteers arrived from the states as teachers and they would lend us their books. At a very young age I would take myself to the library to read, not just for peace and tranquillity, but to avoid unending domestic tasks. Our generation had hoped for a radical transformation of economy and society, which has no similarity to the kleptocracies that now constitute the Sierra Leone state.

What were the experiences of coming to the UK, and then trying to establish yourself as a scholar?

Coming to Liverpool was a totally new experience, not least because everything seems larger than similar items in Freetown. I came to join my mother, who was already in Liverpool, working as a nurse. She was a loving, but no nonsense mother, who expected me to work hard to enable me to look after myself with a good job. On arrival in Liverpool, I registered for A Levels in Economics, British Economic History and Government and my tutor was a labour and co-operative supporter, Robert (Bob) Wareing, a fascinating guy, a staunch socialist and an excellent teacher. He was very active in the Labour movement and later became a member of parliament for the Liverpool West Derby constituency. I thoroughly enjoyed his classes: he encouraged debates and always had time to answer our questions.

I think I can describe myself as a studious individual and I spent most of my spare time in libraries, which were easily reached in Liverpool, prior to Tory austerity. Indeed, apart from my house, I have probably spent more time in libraries than anywhere else. I went on to study and research for a PhD. On completion of my PhD, I moved to Nigeria.

You moved to Nigeria in the late 1970s to lecture. What were your experiences of this period, and your years in Nigeria? Can you tell us something about the atmosphere at the time, and also the work you were doing?

In 1979, I went to Nigeria, where I worked initially at Bayero University in Kano, and later at the University of Jos with one of the greatest sociologists (human beings for that matter) that I have ever met, and his name was Omafume Friday Onoge. We all called him ‘Prof’, not that he wanted it that way, rather because it exemplified the high regard we held him. Prof had the biggest head that I ever saw on a human being and as a Sierra Leonean I was convinced ‘his head was full of books’. He was well read and well published, and despite his great achievements, he was a modest, generous and fair-minded person. He had published extensively in various sub-disciplines in sociology: literature, theory, development, deviance etc. Prof saw me as an important member of a strong staff team he was building of young radical, research oriented, excellent teachers and researchers. He spoke to me about the future shape and direction of the department and he made it clear to me that I was at the core of his plans. I knew he respected my work and wanted me to stop thinking of returning to Britain. He wanted the University of Jos Sociology Department to be the best in the country. It was full of young dynamic scholars (men and women) from all over Nigeria and Ghana, Sierra Leone, Britain, Uganda, India, USA, and Eastern Europe.

Though I was not a senior staff member at the time, Prof gave me major portfolios: as Examination Officer, Admissions Officer and Departmental Seminar Organizer. These were important offices, if not well-managed can damage the image and reputation of the Department. As examination officer, I would invite colleagues to submit examination papers to me, ensure they were ready without errors and leakages and to get the same papers typed and ready for each examination. The main issues were the integrity of the papers in order to avoid leaks and other malpractices. These issues never arose.

Whilst I was in Kano, I had developed an interest in gender study, and by the time I got to Jos, I had written two papers on women in Africa: ‘Female Labour and Exploitation Within African Social Formation’ and ‘Female Urban Employment (1985). The first article came out of my reading of Marx and Louis Althusser and the other was an empirical study of women working in construction sites in the Jos metropolitan area.

Women in Nigeria (WIN) soon emerged as an important pressure group of women, though virtually all its members were middle class, often university-based, as well as a few university-based men who gave support to the activities of the movement. WIN became a rallying point for many middleclass women, supported by socialist inclined men. However, it was not long before WIN became a bête noire to many conservative husbands and boyfriends, who saw it as a source of radicalisation and domestic discontent as women, particularly northern Nigerian women were now asking awkward questions around gender equality. Nonetheless, much of the activities of WIN continued to be based in the universities and most of the participants were university people, including expatriate women from Europe and North America largely from Amadu Bello University, University of Jos, University of Ibadan and University of Port Harcourt. WIN was a major tour de force for gender consciousness in Nigeria during the 1980s.

When the history of radical politics in Nigeria is written, the period of the late 1970-1985 will be seen as a period of serious political engagements and challenges. For example, the value of the Naira, the country’s currency was quite strong, stronger than the pound sterling, as a result, the universities were better resourced and academic campuses were vibrant and free from oppression.

Omafume Onoge was a real intellectual giant, a friendly and trustworthy individual. He was a Harvard graduate, but unlike the ‘been to’ (blabbers) that one encountered from time to time, I had been working with Prof (Onoge) for almost three years before I knew he got his PhD from Harvard. It came as a consequence of a death threat I received from a student, who wrote an anonymous letter threatening me that I had come to Nigeria ‘to frustrate Nigerian students’, otherwise, how can I justify the mark I gave him. This individual warned that since I had come to frustrate Nigerian students, ‘it is my corpse that will return to England’. This note was slipped under my office door and I was aware that weak, lumpen students used this strategy to threaten young and foreign lecturers. Unfortunately, for the culprit, I trusted my integrity and my sense of justice and fair play. I took the letter straight to Onoge, and I told him that I had a suspect, who was lurking around my office as I came from a lecture. Onoge’s face dropped and he started perspiring and apologised to me profusely for this act of a student. Next Onoge summoned the entire class and invited me to come to the meeting. Prof turned to the assembled class and said to them: ‘I want you to know how disappointed and ashamed I feel today to hear a Nigerian student referred to Dr Zack-Williams coming from Sierra Leone as a foreigner, who has come to destroy Nigerian students’. It was at this point Prof Onoge told them: ‘You people do not realise how lucky you are to have Zack-Williams teaching you. I studied in Harvard under Talcott Parsons, but I never learnt any sociology’. He told them that all he got from Harvard was bourgeois sociology. Finally, he told the class that he was disgusted with the fact that someone from Sierra Leone could be called a foreigner in Nigeria.

There was also the case of another student, who came up to me and said he wanted to see me. At the time, I was in a hotel when he turned up, I thought this person wanted to borrow a book or to discuss some academic issue. He turned up to my hotel and in the presence of a friend of mine he made his intentions clear: He had Second Class Lower in his second year, he said, and he needed at least a Second Class Upper for the job he was interested in pursuing and he expected me to co-operate with him. It turned out that he wanted me to change his overall average that he had the previous year, after which I told him to leave and that I was going to report him to the head of department. What is clear is that rogues like these two characters were not typical of the vast majority of industrious, pleasant and courteous young Nigerian men and women that I taught.

You are well known for your work on Sierra Leone and you are regarded as an authority – cutting your way through much of the academic nonsense that has been written about Africa. You have helped analyse the state in Sierra Leone, and the historical circumstances that have contributed to conflict and underdevelopment and examined the ways in which the complex political emergencies in West Africa can be grasped within a radical political economic framework. Can you explain what you were trying to do and how you kicked back against prevailing intellectual fashions?

The truth is that Sierra Leone was a development tragedy waiting to happen. Throughout history, one can hardly speak of a consensus as to how the country was to be governed as a nation – both between the colonial power and the local governing classes. From its inception, the various groups and nationalities that came together in the new formation that became Sierra Leone after 1787 did not have the ability or opportunity to impose hegemony over the rest of society, due to slave raiding and internecine wars, as well as the weakness of each section. For example, in Ghana the Asante managed to impose hegemony over less powerful groups or the Fulani in Northern Nigeria.

The Peninsula, consisting of Freetown and its environs was chosen as the home for the Liberated Africans whose status differed from that of the indigenous people in the country, who unlike the freed slaves were not accorded British subject status, but were deemed as British protected people. Throughout the colonial period, the settlers now referred to as Creoles or Krios were governed by British laws and both government and mission schools were available to them from as early as 1845. It was not until 1906 that the first provincial school was opened to boys who were sons of Chiefs. This political dualism, came to haunt both rulers and ‘subjects’ as certain privileges (education and land) were available to one group and denied to the other.

This history had a direct impact on subsequent decolonisation, and independence. Siaka Stevens and his All Peoples Congress (APC) wasted no time in declaring a one-party under his leadership in 1978, thus laying the foundation for economic and political chaos that led to the country’s civil war. The one-party state led to curtailment of freedom of expression as opposition leaders and critics of the emerging kleptocracy were harassed, thrown in jail or forced into exile. Coincidentally, the rise of the one-party state was characterised by the collapse of the economy and frequent visits to the International Financial Institutions for aid, which simply exacerbated the situation.

Structural adjustment programmes and later neo-liberalism brought misery and chaos to the people of Sierra Leone, whilst the political elite survived through widespread corruption by mortgaging the country’s resources and by strengthening the authoritarian state. Steven’s administration tried to suppress opposition from young people who bore the brunt of the economic irresponsibility of the state, but in 1991, war broke out when a group of rebels entered from the southeast of the country near the Liberian border to challenge the APC government for state hegemony. The rebels were able to capture important posts in the country, including parts of the rich diamond mines in the Kono District, near the Liberian border, which they continued to mine. The success of the rebels on the diamond field posed a major threat to the ability of the APC to raise resources to prosecute the war. As the war was being prosecuted by the already discredited APC regime, a coup was unleashed by a section of the army.

Charles Taylor the Liberian warlord, decided to teach Sierra Leone a lesson by arming a local warlord, Foday Sankoh, whom Taylor had met in Libya when both were undergoing military training in Benghazi during the regime of Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi. Inevitably, given the close proximity between the two countries and the cultural ties between them, the fighting in Sierra Leone spilled over to Liberia, when Economic Community of West African States (ECOMOG) forces struck Taylor’s position in Liberia as his troops were about to capture the Liberian capital. Consequently, Taylor swore revenge on Sierra Leone for allowing its airport to be used to strike at his units. It took the intervention of Nigerian-led ECOWAS troops and British troops, including the Ghurkhas to put an end to fighting. Taylor was subsequently charged with11 crimes including terrorism, rape, murder and the use of child soldiers by rebel groups in Sierra Leone during the civil war of 1991-2002.

Unfortunately, for the toiling masses, the DNA of the governing class is fuelled by corruption and indiscipline. These ‘natural causes’ are simply pointing to the precarity which defines life for the ordinary citizens of this unfortunate land. Progress will not come to Sierra Leone until the governing classes realise that their raison d’être is not self-serving, but to work for and with the people for the transformation of society in order to raise the standard of living of the masses. Only popular democracy based on the will of the people will bring progress and sustainable peace to this unfortunate land. The role of the young people is crucial, if progress is to be consolidated.

You were a young scholar when Walter Rodney wrote his pioneering 1972 book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. You shared much – in terms of approach and politics – with Rodney. He was also – like you – a man deeply connected to the struggles of Black people in North America and Caribbean. Can you describe how his work and life influenced you and your research- activism?

Throughout my undergraduate life, there were a number of books and writers that I found intriguing and which left indelible impressions in my mind. These authors include: Amilcar Cabral’s, Revolution in Guinea: An African People’s Struggle, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth; Black Skins White Masks, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Turay) & Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America and of course Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. I also read Rodney’s The Groundings with My Brothers. Here Rodney was able to discuss with the Rastafarians in a relaxed manner, whilst drawing attention to the injustices of slavery, which left slaves and their dependents empty handed and in a state of destitution, whilst compensating people like Edward Colston, who had already made a fortune out of the misery of millions of Africans- now you can appreciate the reason behind the ecstatic celebrations of the young people (black and white) who liberated the people of Bristol from the presence of such an unsavoury character. This was the young Rodney post-PhD, full of energy, not afraid to engage the brothers in discussion on such issues as: Black Power, Black Consciousness, above all, about the brutality and humiliation early capitalism imposed on the African people on the continent and it’s Diaspora.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was a path-breaking project, which called it out as he saw it. Rodney was able to reassure the reader that development was not an alien phenomenon to Africans. The format of the book, the style of writing, the language all points to the fact that it was not necessarily produced for an academic consumption, but to raise consciousness among the toiling masses and their allies.

In Nigeria, I encountered students who were eager to read the text, listen to discussions and learn about the ‘counter discourses’ that writers like Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral produced. At this time Nigerian universities were reasonably well resourced with relatively good library facilities, regular, well organised conferences and seminars, which brought together students’ and staff participation. I was surprised to learn in the universities that I taught, that prior to my arrival, they had never heard about these great black radical thinkers. By the time I left these authors and books were in the curriculum and books on these topics were available in the library and campus bookshops.

Your research and writing on economic and political reform in Africa has been important, but you have also developed alternatives to western prescriptions for decades, which has helped keep alive a tradition of thought that was marginalised in the 1980s and 1990s. How have you managed to do this, what has helped sustain you politically and intellectually? I am aware of your years on ROAPE as an editor, and member of the Editorial Working Group. Has this been important to you?

It is imperative that those of us who witnessed the destructive effect of structural adjustment and neo-liberalism must stand up to be counted. These two ‘Western constructs’ derailed African progress and far from aiding democracy, it strengthened the authoritarian state and anarchy in Africa. Leaders became disconnected from their citizens as they slashed vital budgets on health, education and food imports in order to settle crippling and mounting debts owed to donors. Democracy did not survive under these conditions, as challenges to the state lead to economic uncertainty, political upheaval and a series of military coups, which in turn impacts on economic progress. What is clear to me is this: one cannot study Africa and remain neutral to the problems African people face.

My objection to what I saw as the imposition of western paradigms or solutions to African states is based on one simple observation: these policies do not benefit the toiling masses of the continent. Far from aiding their struggles, they are designed to tie Africa and its governing class even deeper onto the neo-colonial umbilical cord of Western domination and to make the continent perpetually subservient to Western dictate. Indeed, this has been the fate of much of Africa, and Sierra Leone in particular: policies are dictated from Washington, London or Paris, policies which are in the interests of those who developed them, such as the Bretton Woods Institutions or the International Financial Institutions, and the World Bank.

In short, after years of destructive structural adjustment programmes (SAP) and neo-liberal economic policies, African leaders should have ended this economic suicide imposed by the IMF and the World Bank. One simply has to look at how these two policies: structural adjustment programme and neo-liberalism have destroyed African infant industries. For example, prior to the imposition of structural adjustment, many African countries had nascent (infant) industries which were destroyed by these programmes forcing African countries with infant industries to compete with ‘mature’ industries in the capitalist economies, a battle that they were incapable of winning.

For me it has not been easy given the fact that my work environment could not be described as Africanist, which meant that some of the concessions or benefits of working on Africa were not available to me. Indeed, I was recruited as a Lecturer in Social Policy, initially teaching social policy and I am sure this has influenced my perspective when it comes to issues of poverty and social inequalities. However, there were other colleagues in the university who were working on Africa, such as Giles Mohan (a geographer) and Bob Milward (an economist). Indeed, Mohan and I collaborated with Milward, and Ed Brown, a geographer from Loughborough University, in producing a much acclaimed critique of structural adjustment, Structural Adjustment: Theory, Practice and Impacts, published by Routledge, 2000.

I also worked with other colleagues, whilst taking the lead in producing,  Africa in Crisis: New Challenges and Possibilities with (Diane Frost and Alex Thompson); When the State Fails: Studies on Intervention in the Sierra Leone Civil War with a group of Sierra Leonean academics in Sierra Leone and the USA. I also edited another text in 2008  on Sierra Leone: The Quest for Sustainable Development and Peace. In both cases, Cyril Obi was very helpful. I want to take this opportunity to thank him for all his support. He is fine comrade. One other work that I want to mention is that which I put together with Professor Ola Uduku of Manchester Metropolitan University, our book: Africa Beyond the Post Colonial: Political and Socio-Cultural Identities. For sure, I have been able to work with people committed to change in Africa.

In addition, as you have pointed out this period coincided with the decades when Thatcherism and the New Right took centre stage in British politics, a period when the nation was told that, ‘there is nothing like society, only individuals’. It was also a period when thousands of miners struck to protect their jobs, families and communities. I must pay tribute to comrades in ROAPE, a journal that I consider my intellectual home and one that has helped me and others to reflect on seemingly puzzling issues, and where I have met comrades who have helped me to further develop my ideas. Though I have been mainly involved with editorial work, nonetheless, I have also been involved in outreach work, including the invaluable writing workshops in Britain and in Africa working with young academics who are interested in publishing articles in journals on topics of their choice, which is then critiqued by moderators from the ROAPE collective. I have found this exercise quite rewarding in that it helps to improve and consolidate writing skills for many young academics in Britain and in Africa and in this way, ROAPE is making a difference.

What does an alternative vision for the continent look like today? How do we draw in radical social movements and protests closer towards this kind of vision?

Well, there was a time a few years ago when I would have sought comfort in a few countries such as South Africa, Nigeria, or Ethiopia. Right now, these countries are all troubled with conflicts. In the case of South Africa, the jury is still out on the new regime with its millionaire leader, Cyril Ramaphosa. Nigeria, despite its enormous wealth, has still not assumed its leadership role in African governance or development. To many Nigerians, President Buhari’s second coming is already a disappointment, as he has not been able to deal with pressing economic, social and security problems, including widespread corruption among the unruly elite.  Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country also occupies a highly sensitive geographical position on the continent, and its economic performance that many feels deserves attention but is now engrossed in a new war with one of its associated province.

The alternative vision for Africa in my view should be premised on a desire to put an end to gerontocracy, and a greater involvement in national and local politics of young people, in particular, women. The politics of gerontocracy is the precursor to totalitarianism; its outmoded nature renders it antithetical to progress and modernity. Not only is it impervious to alternatives, but it is hostile to new ideas, seeing them as undermining its core belief: age is superior to brain. How can any progressive state justify the constitutional position that people must be at least 40 years to stand as a candidate to lead his country; especially a state like Sierra Leone where the life expectancy was only 53 in 2017? Young people can work closely and quickly for the liberation of African women from genital mutilation and freedom from gender oppression, which has meant that society has not seen the best of the African woman.

Women would make the case for, and fight to end ‘the school shift system’, as girls would be the major beneficiaries of such policies, which currently means that half of the children in Sierra Leone, for example, go to school after the morning shift has ended and those who go to the afternoon shift are already overwhelmed with domestic chores as well as petty commodity activities, thus arriving in school already tired, and finish school when it is dark and there is little time for ‘studying’ or to complete ‘home work’. A youthful parliament will help to end silent gender oppression and girls and women could realise their full potential.

Much of your work – again for decades – has been developing young Black scholars, within, of course, your specific frameworks and perspectives. You have also been active in Lancashire and Liverpool arguing for black and ethnic minority interests. Can you talk about these combined activities?

In my view, the welfare and progress of students are important, if only because the future is theirs and progressives must utilise their position to aid students so that they can get the best out of them.  This is true of students, who come from working class back grounds, particularly those who are the first in the family to enter higher education, who find what Nigerians call ‘acada’ (university life), not just strange, but also stressful and daunting. In order to aid student’s welfare, it is important to build alliances with like-minded colleagues, in other words, people committed to transform the atmosphere under which students work.

One mechanism I utilised, with colleagues, was to set up a weekly ‘Wednesday Afternoon Workshop’ opened to all students who gained entry via the ‘access programme,’ (those coming late to university, without many study skills) to which other students could join, if they so wished. The whole point of this exercise was to demystify the academy and take the fear out of the students by finding what they found difficult to understand and to deal with it in a place that is less pressed for time than formal lectures and tutorial settings. As the programme proceeded, we noticed that students’ confidence grew, questions asked were becoming more sophisticated and these were reflected in better results. We were also  able to attract a few young Black scholars to our graduate programmes and some are now working in Africa and others are now teaching in Britain and we are still in touch. At least one is a regular reviewer for ROAPE and head of department in his university.

As you pointed out, I have also been active in Liverpool and Lancashire arguing for black and ethnic minority interests. These activities have taken several forms. Firstly, following the publication of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and the Macpherson Report, I was invited by the then Chief Constable of Lancashire Constabulary, to become one of their Independent Advisers by the Chief Constable Sir Paul Stephenson. Prior to that appointment, I had been appointed Independent Member of Merseyside Police Authority. Indeed, by the time I left I had become the longest serving Independent Member of any Police Authority in the country. The inspiration for my involvement in this venture was the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and the Macpherson Report, which gave the impression that Tony Blair’s Labour Government was serious about standing up to racists and bullies. My main interests included: the force’s policies, programmes on race, gender, young people and gay and lesbian people.

For over a decade, I also chaired The Granby Mental Health Community Group (GMHCG). This group was set up by a group of women, who were concerned with the poor state of mental health provisions in the city of Liverpool, in particular the fact that there was no centre dealing with the specificity of black mental health. The GMHCG was set up to address some of the problems of Black mental health in our community and the Mary Seacole Centre was where it was situated. The centre on Upper Parliament Street is at the heart of the black community, and to locate it in any other region would have alienated our members. Though most of our members were Black, we also had members from different ethnic groups and different faiths. My involvement with Mary Seacole House deepened my interest in black mental health, to the point where I co-authored a book on black mental health with a group of social workers for the Central Council of Social Work Education.

I was also involved with a dance theatre for young people on Merseyside, via Merseyside Dance Initiative as a committee member for over twelve years. Finally, I have been involved as Governors for three schools in Liverpool: Mosspits Infants and Juniors School, Calderstones School, and Kingsley Junior School. Both Mosspits and Calderstones draw their children from predominantly white catchment areas, whilst Kingsley School has children from predominantly Muslim immigrants including Arabs, Somali, Pakistan, and a few East Europeans. My involvement in schools and community groups is really to bridge that gap between what community needs are and what ruling authorities understand and are offering.

What are we without activism, and action? Idle pontificators, at best, so, yes, involvement and engagement has always been at the centre of my life.

Tunde Zack-Williams is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Central Lancashire. He won the Distinguished Africanist award of the UK African Studies Association in 2020. Zack is a long-standing member of the Review of African Political Economy, editor, mentor and comrade.

Can Africa speak?

Africa Is a Country’s William Shoki presents a newly established interview series, AIAC Talk. The weekly show, co-hosted by Shoki and Sean Jacobs, seeks to take advantage of the migration of life online to reach captive audiences and occupy an important space to talk about the world from an African perspective.

By William Shoki

It is often mentioned everywhere that the global left is experiencing something of a renewal. Though this hasn’t shaped up in the way everyone had hoped, especially considering the prominent defeats of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain’s most recent parliamentary election and Bernie Sanders prematurely dropping out of the US presidential race, the left no longer occupies the marginal position it once did. Since the 2008 financial crisis which triggered the collapse of the neoliberal consensus which governed the world since the end of the Cold War, a flurry of mobilisations – from #OccupyWallSt to #BlackLivesMatterInternational – has made the call for social and economic justice penetrate mainstream politics in a way that can’t be ignored.

Capitalising on the malaise of the moment, the left has seized the opportunity to widely disseminate its ideas – numerous media platforms have sprung up introducing left-wing political thought to new audiences, doing so in ways that expand beyond the typical magazine format to include podcasts, YouTube channels, and recently, even clips on TikTok. The global left has responded to the demand for information, albeit to a very different audience than the one it’s used to – today’s audiences have shorter attention spans, and a taste for crisp and professional production. But exactly how global is this new left-wing media?

This is precisely the question that Africa Is A Country asked when it established its new interview series, Africa Is A Country Talk or AIAC Talk for short. Beginning during the first wave of COVID-19 transmission in 2020 which saw lockdowns imposed and citizens around the world compelled to remain indoors, it sought to take advantage of the migration of life online to reach captive audiences. It was shortly after when BlackLivesMatter swept the United States and conversations about, and protests against, racial injustice spread internationally, that the project developed a sense of urgency. It wasn’t like Africa had never experienced its own, horrific incidents of police brutality, which only increased during lockdown – and yet, the frameworks and terms of discussions on this continent felt profoundly American.

AIAC Talk then, aims to intervene in the discourse so as to “occupy an important space to talk about the world from an African perspective.” That is at least how one of our recent guests, António Tomás, eloquently put it. Antonio appeared on an episode with Ricci Shryock to discuss the life, thought and legacy of Amílcar Cabral. While there are tons of books and papers on Cabral’s life, one must honestly ask: who’s read them? Who has the time, and importantly, the resources to access and read them? Rather than being anti-intellectual by promoting a culture of ‘consuming content’ instead of patient learning, AIAC Talk seeks the opposite: it aims to be an entryway to the rich body of African perspectives out there which, as result of the legacies of colonialism and capitalist inequality, are either side-lined or out of reach.

And not only that but to show that Africa has a lot to say about the world it is within. That it has opinions and agency, taking us beyond a portrayal of Africa, relied on by both right and left, where things happen to it and it is powerless to do or say anything about it. Yes, Israel is making a renewed effort to lure African countries into its arms – but African countries have their own interests in strengthening ties with the apartheid-state, as Yotam Gidron and Matshidiso Motsoeneng recently discussed. Yes, a vaccine apartheid has emerged where rich countries horde vaccine supply for their own citizens– but as Achal Prabhala and Indira Govender also noted, poorer countries aren’t just accepting it.

Ultimately, in a way that keeps up with the quick pace of developments happening in the world today, AIAC Talk is not only interested in showing that Africa can speak– it also wants to show that Africans have something to say.

William Shoki is staff writer at Africa Is a Country and cohost of Africa Is a Country Talk (which can be watched here).

Capitalism did not die: rethinking a failed liberation struggle

ROAPE’s John Saul writes about who won and who lost in the apparently seismic transition to a liberated South Africa in the early 1990s. He sees a parallel recolonization of South Africa both by global capital and by the self-interested actions of local political elites.

By John Saul

In one of the best of recent books assessing the outcome of the South Africa freedom struggle, Are South Africans Really Free? a volume written by South African author Lawrence Hamilton in 2014 he proceeds forcefully to argue that the answer is a resounding NO! This may, of course, be a startling answer for many both in Africa and around the world who supported the South African liberation struggle and celebrated its “victory” in 1994 but Hamilton argues his case convincingly. The book bears careful reading and cannot easily be reduced to some quotable quote. Arguing that “although South Africans are freer than they were under apartheid they are a lot less free than they might otherwise have been had they instantiated institutions that enabled freedom as power” across a much wider range of fronts.

Note in particular, Hamilton writes, such realities as the fact that “the existing skewed forms [of] economic and political representation reproduce the power and interests of elites rather than generate economic opportunity for all” or that South Africa’s “existing macroeconomic policy [has failed] to address the dire conditions of poverty, inequality, unemployment, inadequate education and thus [ensure] the provision of freedom as power for all South African.” True, he continues, the changes necessary would demand “courageous leadership, active citizenship, new forms of representation and a macroeconomic policy that offers radical redistribution of actual and potential wealth.”

But the fact that all too little along such lines has occurred in South Africa leads Hamilton to conclude his book several hundred pages later by again underscoring the fact “that the failure to overcome South Africa’s long legacy of racial oppression and devastatingly high levels of inequality, unemployment and poverty have been the most serious indictment of the African National Congress (ANC) in government.” Here, in short, is post-apartheid South Africa seen as a businessman’s society – at best a “free market” society – rather than as some very “free,” “liberated” or “democratic” society in any more expansive and people-centred sense.

Setting the Agenda: Steve Biko Projects a Range of Possible Futures

The truth is Steve Biko had much earlier worried that the very denouement to the struggle might indeed be his country’s fate and he very clearly said as much. Biko was of course a brilliant Black Consciousness militant, at his most prominent in the 1960s and in the 1970s when, in fact, he was assassinated (in 1977) while being held in custody by the apartheid police state. As a principled adherent to and leader of the Black Consciousness Movement and as holder of a firmly black-centred perspective on the world, Biko saw the racist mind-set that characterized white South Africa as being virtually unshakable, with the dominant European minority frozen, by privilege, prejudice and apartheid, into one unbudging social mould as befitted their sense of themselves as a self-consciously “dominant white race.” As for the majority African population Biko felt it could, under these grim circumstances, most effectively and lastingly mobilize itself to fight back along primarily racially conscious, rather than along merely class,  or nationally conscious, lines: this was the politics that Biko principally advocated.

True, this was not the sole vector of Biko’s insight (albeit the one at the core of his reading of South Africa’s past and present). For he was also a close student of, among others, Frantz Fanon, with Fanon’s work, in particular, pushing him to consider the possible weight of other attendant social realities. And this in turn led him, in a valuable 1972 interview, to make to Gail Gerhart some particularly striking statements about the complex interplay between race and class in his native South Africa.

Asked by Gerhart to reflect on the situation in South Africa and to identify “what trends or factors in it…you feel are working towards the fulfilment of the long term ends of blacks,” he suggested that the regime’s deep commitment to a racial hierarchy had actually acted as “a great leveler” of class formation amongst the black population and dictated “a sort of similarity in the community”, such that the “constant jarring effect of the [apartheid] system” produced a “common identification” on the part of the people. Indeed, as Biko saw it, the racial structure of the South African system was what was central, and, for him, it was the emergence of a new confidence and anti-racist/racial consciousness – Black Consciousness – on the part of the mass of the country’s oppressed blacks (African, Coloured and Indian) population that could most readily open the revolutionary door to a new South Africa.

This, as we know, was precisely the politics of Black self-assertion that he himself would follow in the few remaining years of his life then granted him by the apartheid regime. Nor can there be any doubt as to broad resonance of such a “Black Consciousness” emphasis – one evident in the events of Soweto (1976) and beyond – that combined with other currents of resistance to fuel, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a mass movement for dramatic change in South Africa.

However, Biko was astute enough – he was, as suggested, a careful reader of Fanon – to also recognize the theoretical possibility of other, less savory, outcomes. For, as he also told Gerhart, he saw that in the more liberal system envisaged by South Africa’s Progressive Party of the time “you would get stratification creeping in, with your masses remaining where they are or getting poorer, and the cream of your leadership, which is invariably derived from the so-called educated people, beginning to enter bourgeois ranks, admitted into town, able to vote, developing new attitudes and new friends…a completely different tone.”

This is, of course, precisely what would soon transpire in South Africa’s transition to a post-apartheid future although for Biko it had been precisely because the whites were so “terribly afraid of this” that apartheid South Africa would continue instead to represent, for Biko, “the best economic system for revolution.” For “the evils of [the apartheid system] are so pointed and so clear [that they] therefore make the teaching of alternative methods, more meaningful methods, more indigenous methods even, much easier under the present sort of setup.” But how would he have reacted if he had lived to see global capitalism and a black middle class actually reshaping the meaning of the liberation struggle for which he was prepared to give his own life?

Anglo Plays to Win: Co-opting the ANC as its Partner in Crime

This is also where the Progressive Party alluded to by Biko also fits into the picture. True, this party – the “White” party was most drawn, in the 1970s, to an understanding of what genuine capitalist-led reform might hope to accomplish – was nowhere near taking political power at that point. Nor were capitalists in general nearly so reform-minded in the 1970s as Biko apparently felt the most enlightened of Progressive Party supporters (including, significantly, Harry Oppenheimer himself) already to be.

For, as we know, the entire history of twentieth century South Africa had been one that was much more defined by an alliance between racists and capitalists to ensure both racial and class advantage than one defined by any deep contradiction between the two camps. As suggested above, the dawning awareness of the political dangers that the very baldest form of “racial capitalism” now evoked came pretty unevenly to those within the capitalist class even if some fractions of capital did feel themselves to be more economically constrained by apartheid than others. Moreover, as a more complex capitalism also emerged, the various racial discriminations within the job market – even though the apartheid system was often rather more flexible about them in practice than in theory – could also be felt as a constraint upon the capitalists’ effective deployment of all labour, regardless of its pigment.

Enter, then, the aforementioned Oppenheimer who, as chairman of the Anglo-American Corporation, South Africa’s largest single business enterprise, was to be an especially key player. Moreover, Oppenheimer was also a leading supporter and financial backer of the still small Progressive Federal Party. He was thus well placed to put the key points clearly in the 1970s, this in the first instance with respect to the issue of labour supplies but having also much wider implications. It was a position towards which many more capitalists would gravitate throughout the following several decades.

By the 1970s and then into the 1980s, Oppenheimer and his cronies had begun to feel that apartheid was becoming too crude and politically dangerous a system of exploitation upon which to gamble capitalism’s future. As he told journalists (in 1981), P. W. Botha(the last Prime Minister from 1978 to 1984) and the National Party had “squandered too much time,” so much so that “time is running out and unless substantive changes are made by the mid-1980s, South Africa could face a violent revolution.”

As seen, this was increasingly considered to be a plausible reading of things because the rising temperature of internal resistance so markedly evident in the Durban strikes and in the Soweto uprising had, quite simply, continued to rise in the 1980s. Nor was this “revolutionary threat” tightly linked to work of the country’s ostensible liberation movement, the African National Congress and the ANC. But in some important ways the movement’s exile-status had also opened up opportunities for the South Africa’s largely black population to find additional and often more imaginative sites and styles of struggle than had hitherto been available to it.

Baruch Hirson in 1979 and others were giving strong accounts of the diverse currents that gave rise to dramatic levels of “township unrest” in Soweto and beyond in the 1970s and the 1980s. For Hirson too notes the extent to which the fresh struggles of students in schools and college that began to erupt in “periodic boycotts, strikes and arson” took place in a context in which “it was not even possible to find any traces of formal black students’ organization in the schools before the late 1960s …despite the conflict situations that [had] developed year after year.”

Here were clear signs that the epoch of “undisputed white rule” was really coming to an end. Soweto demonstrated, Hirson adds, “the ability of the black population [really] to challenge the control of the ruling class,” while it also served as a spring-board for the mass unrest that became so much more widely tangible by the 1980s. Small wonder that other capitalists – including even Afrikaner ones – began slowly but surely to share Oppenheimer’s insight that South Africa’s “racial capitalism” was now nurturing, for the 1980s, the threat of a genuine popular revolution! True, the apartheid state would remain a source of on-going and overt repression, but Anglo-American spokespersons and others were set ever more forcefully a different tone – and even Afrikaner capitalists were also prepared to listen.

Small wonder that at about the same time an even more central Anglo player, Gavin Relly – successor to Oppenheimer from the early-1980s until 1990 as the corporation’s chairman – took on a more prominent role in helping to shape a Fanon-style “false decolonization,” one that envisaged and would eventually achieve the putting into place in post-apartheid South Africa of the kind of hegemonic capitalist socio-economic system that had, we have seen, been one of Biko’s worst nightmare. Thus, in 1985 and just before a fateful meeting in Lusaka between leading capitalists and senior ANC leadership, Relly would affirm to the Mail and Guardian that

there is a coherent sense for businessmen to want to find out if there is common ground…that a free enterprise society is demonstrably better at creating wealth than some type of Marxist socialism. I would have thought it was self-evident… that nobody wants to play a role in a country where the economy…was destroyed either by a sort of Marxist approach to wealth creation or by a revolution.

Then, after the Lusaka meeting, Relly felt he could affirm to the South African Broadcasting Corporation that “he had the impression that the ANC was not “too keen” to be seen as “Marxist” and that he felt they had a good understanding “of the need for free enterprise.”

From “magic elixir” to Marikana

The ANC had gone into exile after the Sharpeville massacre and based in Tanzania and Zambia in the sixties, had difficulty in that decade in gaining momentum for the liberation struggle in South Africa. True, it had begun, with assistance from the Eastern Bloc, to develop a military force, Umkhonto We Sizwe but, with “Portuguese Africa” and “white-settler dominated” Rhodesia still firmly in place, the main force of the movement remained some distance away from what was meant to be the chief site of struggle: South Africa itself. Moreover, the ANC/SACP also did retain some underground presence inside the country but the fact remains that, by the 1970s, a whole new surge of revolutionary energy had begun to emerge inside South Africa, driven by activists very conscious of the ANC’s historic role to be sure but often also skeptical about it.

It was in exile, however, that the seeds were being sewn for the fateful alliance between global and local capital on the one hand and the ANC on the other, this constituting a united front that would become crucial to the fate of freed South Africa. Thus, wielding the mantle of Nelson Mandela and the partially mythic liberatory past of the ANC as potent symbols, the ANC/SACP (African National Congress/South African Communist Party) contrived to draw the trade union movement (as represented by Congress of South African Trade Unions) into a partnership – albeit a junior partnership – within the newly-conceived Tripartite Alliance. And the ANC/SACP also succeeded (by both fair means and, some have argued, foul) in convincing the popularly driven United Democratic Front (UDF) to disband itself, leaving in its place only a very weak South African National Civic Organization (SANC0).

For the grim fact was that, like the doyens of capital, prominent ANC leaders were rethinking their strategic options and also switching sides. Never a terribly left-wing force in any case this leadership now had begun to drift towards the embrace an ever more distinctly pro-capitalist tilt of its own. Even Mandela – for all the extraordinary heroism he demonstrated during his 27 years of incarceration by the apartheid state – manifested such a shift. It is true that, on his release from Pollsmoor prison in 1990, he proclaimed to a massive Cape Town crowd that: “There must be an end to white monopoly on political power and a fundamental restructuring of our political and economic systems to ensure that the inequalities of apartheid are addressed, and our society thoroughly democratized.” Yet only four years later (in 1994) he could be found suggesting, as an invited speaker at a special meeting of the American Congress, his openness to the idea that:

[t]he success of your [American] entrepreneurs, and with it the capacity of your society to give work to your citizens, rests on the fact of the elevation of every person, anywhere in the world, to the position of a free actor in the marketplace.

There was actually little room for debate on this issue in the leadership team that Mandela forged once in power – with Thabo Mbeki as Vice-President, Trevor Manuel as head of the ANC’s Department of Economic Planning in the transitional period and ultimately the country’s powerful Minister of Finance, Tito Mboweni as Governor of the South African Reserve Bank. It was such men who now acted as a self-conscious cutting-edge for the deepening of the new regime’s commitment to a fully capitalist future for South Africa.

What also bears underscoring here is the extent to which the ANC (and SACP!) had actively plotted, in making such a deal with ‘reform capitalism”. Thus, in exile, Mbeki – soon to be Mandela’s successor as president – was (with others) a key participant in various meetings with South African power-wielders. After all, Mbeki himself had already made his position quite clear earlier in the 1980s when he affirmed that, in his view, “the ANC is not a socialist party. It has never pretended to be one, it has never said it was, and it is not trying to be. It will not become one by decree or for the purpose of pleasing its ‘left’ critics.”

Left Turns: The critical perspectives of Ben Turok, Ronnie Kasrils and Neville Alexander   

There were veterans of the struggle who were intolerant of the continuing rightward creep of the movement once it was in power. Ben Turok – a veteran ANC/SACP hand, a then sitting ANC member of parliament, and, as it happens, a personal friend of mine from our shared Dar es Salaam days in the 1960s – was prepared to strike a critical note in 2008, one that did not come easily to so fiercely loyal a long-time ANC activist as he remained. Thus, in what was one of his more recent writings, he would confess to having some difficulty in maintaining quite the same loyalty to the ANC incumbents as he once did. For, as he put it, he had reached “the irresistible conclusion … that the ANC government has lost a great deal of its earlier focus on the fundamental transformation of the inherited social system.” Moreover, he asserted, “much depends on whether enough momentum can be built to overcome the caution that has marked the ANC government since 1994. This in turn depends on whether the determination to achieve an equitable society can be revived.”

Even more startling has been the line taken by Ronnie Kasrils in recent years, Kasrils even admitting in 2014 that he could not comfortably urge others to vote for the ANC anymore – this from a man who had been a long-time Central Committee Member of the SACP, a member of the Executive Committee of the ANC, a one-time head of military intelligence for Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC’s armed wing, and an MP and senior minister in the post-apartheid ANC government. The key for Kasrils was what he chose to call the ANC’s “Faustian moment,” a moment when, in his words, “the battle for the ANC’s soul got under way and was eventually lost to corporate power; we were entrapped by the neoliberal economy – or, as some today cry, we ‘sold our people down the river.’”

And finally, there was the rather less surprising political posture taken up by the late and much-lamented left warrior Neville Alexander – once a Robben Island prisoner himself and an exemplary lifer as a progressive South African activist albeit one always operating well outside the ANC fold. Writing some years into the transition to a “new South Africa” and the country’s new “right turn,” he published a book in 2002 entitled, somberly, An Ordinary Country. This is, in truth, a book absolutely crucial for understanding where South Africa is now in the 21st century, one that states clearly that “[t]he post-apartheid state is a capitalist state.” As he continues:

The most unexpected phenomenon has been the breath-taking ease with which the ANC has accepted the most unpalatable of compromises and retreats. Almost everything that had formerly been propagated as sacred cows has proved to be expendable. Most notable among these was the policy of nationalization of the mines and of monopoly companies. This is no longer even mentioned in the ANC; instead, rearguard actions have to be fought inside and outside the Congress Alliance against the ANC leadership’s willingness to undertake wholesale privatization of state property (euphemistically called the “restructuring of state assets”).

More generally, Alexander observed that “the real situation is that hardly any change has taken place in the relations of economic power and control.” True, a growing number of black people have entered the ranks of the economic privileged but as Alexander notes:

Today the movement of history is becoming increasingly discernible. There is a clear shift in power in various sectors from exclusive white ownership and control to increasingly black – token and real – managerial control. This is indicative of the fact that the black middle class, which had been kept in confinement artificially through the policy of apartheid has liberated itself. As indicated above, there is no doubt that this rapidly growing class of people are the real beneficiaries of the compromise reached in 1993…the promotion of the capitalist ethos and practices …as well as the accumulation of capital assets by black middle-class individuals.

It is also true that this quasi-capitalist class is still the main social base of the ANC leadership itself – with its extreme misbehaviour having been most dramatically embodied by the scandalous actions in power of now-deposed President Jacob Zuma.

Capitalism did not die

There have, of course, been efforts in recent years to promote new options beyond those offered by the ANC and the “exhausted nationalism” it embodies. True, the grim, corrupt and divisive presidency of Jacob Zuma that cut short and then displaced Mbeki’s presidential regime was a strong sign of further rot in the ANC’s rule. Cyril Ramaphosa’s similar replacement of Zuma as President (also before the end of the latter’s own full term) was an additional signal of distemper, even if Ramaphosa, a corporate giant in his own right, could at least offer South Africans a rather more rational and less blatantly corrupt – albeit still frankly and aggressively pro-capitalist – governing model. After all, when still in the private sector, Ramaphosa had been one of the principal architects of the gruesome Marikana Massacre that signaled so clearly the brutality of South Africa’s now hegemonic black-and-white capitalist class.

But there has also been on-going resistance from below, with South Africa consistently being in the top-3 of the world’s leading hot-spots for the manifestation of popular demonstrations and violent defiance at the local level and there have also been more organized expressions of alternative left-political assertions: Julius Malema’s otherwise rather unconvincing Economic Freedom Fighters (EEF) has had some fledgling electoral success for example, although other momentarily promising initiatives like the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa-driven “United Front and Movement for Socialism” have tended to founder on the rocks of too bald a brand of vanguardism or other failures of political imagination and craft.

Though it is important to also see the writings of a range of scholar activists that focus on the bold assertions of the Anti-Privatization Forum and other promising fronts for engagement (see, for example, Marcelle Dawson and Luke Sinwell’s 2014 book) – including, more recently, new flare-ups that have also given hope of on-going struggle, (the dramatic “Rhodes Must Fall/Fees Must Fall” student initiatives of recent years, for example, requiring further study in this respect).

To conclude, I’ll cite another good source, this time a book by the estimable Australian-born leftist commentator John Pilger. His appropriately titled, Freedom Next Time contains a strong extended chapter on South Africa entitled “Apartheid Did Not Die.” The chapter documents the fact that White Power did not completely die when Mandela and the ANC took power in 1994. Nonetheless, an equally accurate title for this chapter might have been “Capitalism Did Not Die,” this because what Pilger confirms is that South Africa has witnessed a class – both white and black in its constitution – of privileged South Africans that has together actually reaped the prizes of struggle at least for the moment. Thus, Pilger writes,

In the 1970s, the ANC declared: “It is a fundamental feature of our strategy that victory must embrace more than formal political democracy. To allow the existing economic forces to retain their interests intact…does not represent even a shadow of liberation.” In 2001, however, George Soros told the Davos World Economic Forum that “South Africa is in the hands of international capital.” [For the fact is that] the most basic freedom – to survive and to survive decently – has been withheld from the majority of South Africans, who are aware that had the ANC invested in them and in the “informal economy” by which most barely survive, it could have actually transformed the lives of millions…[Instead, under capitalism, South Africans will have to] suffer many more years of “tears and blood” in a struggle for freedom not yet won.

The task for ROAPE is to take this truth as a starting point and then explore just how a meaningful resistance – one that advances a successful “struggle for freedom not yet won” – can still be realized by the vast majority of South Africans (and Africans). In short, this essay has tracked a course from Hamilton’s ‘Are South Africans Really Free?’ to Pilger’s new title, ‘Capitalism did not die’. Our struggle is set against global capital and against a new South African elite (both black and white), and is now more pressing than ever.

John S. Saul, a founding editor of ROAPE, is Professor Emeritus, York University, Canada and has also taught at the University of Dar es Salaam, the Universidade de Eduardo Mondlane, and the University of the Witwatersrand. A long-time solidarity activist, Saul has published more than twenty books on southern Africa, including, later this year for Cambridge University Press, Race, class and the thirty years war for southern African liberation, 1960–1994: a history.

Featured Photograph: Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk during the transition to the 1994 political transition in South Africa.

References

Alexander, P., 2010. “Rebellion of the poor: South Africa’s service delivery protests – a preliminary analysis.” Review of African Political Economy, v. 37, 123.

Alexander, P., Legowa, T., Mmope, B., Sinwell, L., Kezwi, B. (eds), 2012. Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer. Aukland Park, S. A.: Jacana Media.

Alexander, N., 2002. An Ordinary Country: Issues in the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy in South Africa. Pietermaritzburg, SA: University of Natal Press.

Basson, A. and du Toit, P, 2017. Enemy of the People: How Jacob Zuma stole South Africa and how the people fought back. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball.

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Biko, S. and Gerhart, G., 1972. Interview with Steve Biko as carried out by Gail Gerhart. Available here.

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Bernstein. R, 2007. “From the ‘best days’ of the struggle to ‘present-day political circumstances’”: a letter from Rusty Bernstein to John S. Saul.” Transformation 64.

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Dawson, M. 2010. “’Phansi Privatisation, Phansi!’: The Anti-Privatisation Form and Ideology in social movements” in William Beinart and Marcelle Dawson (eds), Popular Politics and Resistance Movements in South Africa Johannesburg: Wits Press.

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Fraser, M., “No More Talk. Time to Act,” 1986. The Times (London). 30 June 1986.

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Hirson, Baruch, 1979 Year of Fire. Year of Ash – The Soweto Revolt: Roots of a Revolution. London: Zed Books.

Kasrils, R., 2013. ‘How the ANC’s Faustian pact sold out South African’s poorest: In the early 1990s we in the leadership of the ANC made a serious error. Our people are still paying the price’, The Guardian, 24 June.

Kasrils, R., 2014. “Ronnie Kasrils: I can’t say ‘vote ANC’ anymore.” Mail and Guardian, 13 May.

Kings, S., 1996. “South Africa shaped by Thatcherism.” Mail and Guardian, 12 Apr 2013.

Macqueen, Ian, 2009. “Black Consciousness in Dialogue: Steve Biko, Richard Turner and the ‘Durban moment’ in South Africa, 1970-1974.” A paper in the present author’s possession and given at the Southern African Seminar, SOAS (London), December 4, 2009.

Mandela, N., 1990. Rally Address (11 Feb. 1990) Following Release From Pollsmoor Prison, available here.

Mandela, N., 1994. Address Before a Joint Meeting of the United State States Congress, October 6.

Mbeki, T., 1984. “The Fatton Thesis: A Rejoinder.” Canadian Journal of African Studies, 18, 3 (1984), 609-612.

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Msimang, Sisonke, 2017. Always Another Country. London: World Editions.

Ndabe, B., Owen, T., Panyane, M., Serumala, R. and Smith, J.(authors and editors), 2019. The Black Consciousness Reader (especially ch. 1, “Steve Biko and the Rise of Black Consciousness”). New York and London: OR Books.

Oppenheimer, H., 1981, Globe and Mail (Toronto), February 4.

Pilger, J., 2006. Freedom Next Time. London: Transworld Publishers, 2006.

Saul, J. and Bond P., 2014. South Africa – The Present as History: From Mrs Ples to Mandela and Marikana. Woodbridge, U.K. and Johannesburg: James Currey and Jacana Media.

Saul, J., 2014. “The New Terms of Resistance: Proletariat, Precariat and the Present African Prospect.” Being ch. 1, Entry point 5” Revolutionary Hope vs Free-Market Fantasies – Keeping the Southern Africa Liberation Struggle Alive: Theory, Practice, Context. Cantley, Canada: Daraja, 2021)

Saul, J. S., in press. Race, Class and The Thirty Years War for Southern African Liberation, 1960-1994 – A History. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.

Suttner, R., 2008. The ANC Underground in South Africa. Aukland Park: Jacana.

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Turok, B., 2008. From the Freedom Charter to Polokwane: The Evolution of ANC Economic Policy. Cape Town: New Agenda.

Van Driel. M., 2013. Documents of the Social Movements 2013: The Anti-Privatisation Forum. Johannesburg: Kanya College Publishing.

Webster, E, 2011. Oral communication to the present author and his paper “A Seamless Web or a Democratic Rupture: The Re-Emergence of Trade Unions and the African National Congress (ANC) in Durban 1973 and Beyond.” Paper presented at the conference “One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories and Democracy Today” conference,” held in Johannesburg, 20-24 September 2011.

Webster and Adler, G., 2001. “Exodus Without a Map: The Labour Movement in a Liberalizing South Africa.” In Bjorn Beckman and Lloyd Sachikonye (eds.) Labour Regimes and Liberalization: The Restructuring of State-Society Relations in Africa (Harare: University of Zimbabwe Press).

Wilson, L., 2011. Steve Biko. Auckland Park, S.A.: Jacana.

The Generational Populism of Bobi Wine

Discussing the recent elections, Luke Melchiorre argues that Uganda’s Bobi Wine is a symbol for a generation’s desire for political change. However, his power has often distracted attention from the underlying politics of his People Power project. Melchiorre explains that Wine did not disavow the country’s underlying neoliberal moorings, but instead fixated on the ruling party’s history of ‘poor governance’. 

By Luke Melchiorre

In many respects, Uganda’s recent presidential and parliamentary elections unfolded predictably. As in previous election years, the country’s incumbent president, Yoweri Museveni, was successfully able to utilize state violence and intimidation, amid allegations of widespread electoral fraud, to secure another term, his sixth, in office.

Yet, while Museveni’s victory was long considered a foregone conclusion, in other respects, the 2021 election was far from a historical repeat.  On the contrary, the formidable challenge posed to the incumbent by his upstart opponent, the 38-year-old popular musician-turned-parliamentarian, Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, aka Bobi Wine, would have been almost unthinkable just a few years ago.

As late as mid-2020, few experts predicted that Kyagulanyi, a man with no formal political experience prior to 2017, would displace Dr. Kizza Besigye, Museveni’s main challenger in the previous four elections, as the new face of the country’s opposition. Yet in spite of facing unprecedented state repression during the campaign, Kyagulanyi performed well, garnering just over 35% of the popular vote in a highly disputed election.  Perhaps even more impressively, his party, the National Unity Platform (NUP), the successor of his pressure group, People Power, won 61 seats in parliament, becoming the country’s official opposition.

Kyagulanyi’s rapid political rise and the international attention that it has garnered, particularly among Africa’s younger generation, has placed the content of his message and the methods of his political movement under intense scrutiny. In particular, in an era of international politics dominated by the supposed rise of populist politicians across the globe, Kyagulanyi’s repeated calls for the people of Uganda to rightfully reclaim control of the country’s democracy from the hands of its corrupt political elite, raises important questions about his own relationship to populism.

In my research, I argue that the 2021 election reveals both the possibilities and limits of Kyagulanyi’s unique brand of populism. While NUP’s electoral successes demonstrate how populist appeals in African democracies, like Uganda, are capable of building impressive political coalitions across ethno-regional lines, the emphasis placed on the power of Kyagulanyi as a political symbol, has often distracted from a deeper analysis of the limitations of his own underlying political economic agenda.

“A Populist Without an Agenda”?

In the run-up to the 2021 polls, Kyagulanyi’s political project has been referred to as populist both by domestic critics and international observers alike. Speaking less than a week before the election, for example, Museveni, who had already accused his main opponent of being backed by foreigners and “homosexuals”, dismissed Kyagulanyi as a populist without an agenda.

International observers have also described Kyagulanyi’s political appeals as populist, though in a far less derogatory manner. Writing in November in Time magazine prior to the election, for example, Aryn Baker suggested that Uganda’s “upcoming election is a test of the limits of populism when stacked against the entrenched powers of dictatorship.”

Such Western mainstream media descriptions of an avowed pro-democratic candidate like Kyagulanyi as a populist are notable, because they veer away from common depictions of populism in such spaces as an almost exclusively negative phenomenon, which is regularly said to pose an existential threat to democracies across the world.

While the term populist in the analysis of Kyagulanyi has been deployed with different meanings and intentions, it is important to note there is some truth to this label. There is no question that his use of populist discourse, for example, has effectively forged a new collective sense of identity among his mostly youthful supporters around the nodal point of “the people” and in antagonistic opposition to the country’s political elite.

Moreover, the Ugandan opposition leader does conform to some other conventional ideas of populist politicians.  When, for example, Kyagulanyi first ran in a parliamentary by-election in Kyadondo East in June 2017, he was a famous, but inexperienced political outsider. His candidacy was rejected by both of the then main opposition parties, the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) (the party of his political mentor, Besigye) and the Democratic Party (the party of his father).

In his rhetoric of this time, Kyagulanyi embraced his outsider status, rejecting the label ‘politician’ and instead describing himself as a “servant” and “leader” of ‘the people’.  He also positioned himself in opposition to the political establishment, brandishing both government and opposition MPs as ‘eaters’ for asking for salary increments, and promising “not to represent any political party or any particular politician but the views and aspirations of the people of Kyadondo East.”

Kyagulanyi’s commitment to what he called ‘politics unusual’, reflected in his embrace of a unique door-to-door campaigning strategy, represented an explicit rejection of Uganda’s political status quo.  It also clearly resonated with voters, who elected him as an independent candidate for the MP position in the Kyadondo East by-election in a landslide.

In other important ways, however, Kyagulanyi’s brand of populism is also novel. While his conception of ‘the people’ has always been heterogenous and inclusive, including market women, ghetto youth, journalists, teachers, and even those who are “struggling to run a business”, there is no denying that, for Kyagulanyi, ‘the people’ are largely defined in generational terms. Indeed, in his populist discourse, he calls for a generational transfer of power in Uganda, pitting the ‘Facebook generation’ of his supporters against Museveni’s ‘facelift generation’.

This is not surprising given the fact that Uganda has, with approximately 77% of its population below the age of 30, one of the world’s youngest populations. Still, it does distinguish his brand of populism from right-wing populist politicians in Europe and the United States, who have tended to define ‘the people’ in ethno-nationalist terms, or left-wing populists in Latin America, Southern Europe and the US, who often conceive of ‘the people’ in socioeconomic terms.

The ‘Umbrella wave’, as NUP’s electoral successes have been christened (referring to the party’s official symbol) has lent credence to the effectiveness of Kyagulanyi’s populist appeals. NUP was able to embarrass Ugandan opposition stalwarts, like the FDC and the DP, while winning decisive electoral victories in traditional strongholds of the ruling party, Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM), in Buganda (Kyagulanyi’s home region) and Busoga.

These impressive electoral results also offer evidence that Kyagulanyi’s brand of generational populism has the potential to build political coalitions across ethno-regional lines, incorporating previously excluded social groups (particularly young people) into the political process, while placing new emphasis within popular political discourses on common socioeconomic, political, and generational grievances. For this reason, NUP’s populist success could serve as a political model in African countries that share similar demographic characteristics and where opposition parties confront shared domestic political obstacles.

The Limits of Populism

For many youths in Uganda, Bobi Wine, dressed in a slim-fitting suit with a trademark red beret atop his head, has come to be a portent symbol of their own desire for generational political change.  The power of Kyagulanyi as a signifier, however, has often distracted attention away from discussions of the underlying politics of his People Power project.

Comparisons have been drawn between the 38-year-old Ugandan presidential candidate and radical African political figures of yesteryear, like Burkina Faso’s former president, Thomas Sankara, who appears on a mural on the wall of NUP’s political headquarters in Kamwokya.  While Kyagulanyi’s bravery, charisma, and popularity with youth across the continent certainly calls to mind Sankara, the former does not appear to subscribe to a similar brand of radical politics.

On the contrary, Kyagulanyi’s critiques of Museveni’s regime do not necessarily disavow its underlying neoliberal moorings, but instead fixate on the NRM’s recent history of ‘poor governance’.  This and Kyagulanyi’s repeated espousals of his commitment to the rule of law, service delivery, and a people-centred government operating within a liberal democratic institutional framework highlight the possible limits of his populist project. They suggest that while Kyangulanyi may be committed to creating a more pluralistic, democratic future for Uganda, where, how and if his promises of democratic reform will ultimately diverge from the neoliberal orthodoxy that has come to characterize Museveni’s Uganda, in the decades since the NRM came to power in 1986, remains uncertain.

Luke Melchiorre is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. His research engages in cutting edge debates that straddle Africanist political science and historiography.

Featured Photograph: At Jinja station, Uganda, 14 September 2010 (taken by John Hanson).

Democracy promoters and the Western Media in Uganda’s 2021 Elections

Moses Khisa argues that by making January’s election in Uganda about Bobi Wine, the Western media and democracy promoters handed the government a handy tool to smear and discredit Wine, as nothing more than an agent of foreign interests. Khisa states that the forces that can take down president Yoweri Museveni, in a manner that advances the cause of genuine democracy and freedom, must emerge from Ugandans.

By Moses Khisa

In the past few months, Western media and academia have placed unprecedented, and somewhat bewildering, focus on Uganda’s 2021 general elections. The exact source of the rather inordinate interest remains a little puzzling. The key issue at stake though is the military dictatorship of Yoweri Museveni, draped in civilian garb for 35 uninterrupted years. As a routine ritual, Museveni purports to seek legitimation every five years through elections, which are scarcely free, fair or credible. This has been the case since at least 2001 when Museveni first faced a serious challenge to his stay at the helm, a challenge from very close quarters – an in insider and heretofore member of the status quo, Kizza Besigye, dared step forward to take on Museveni and test his rhetorical belief in democracy.

In the 2021 elections, many among the community of ‘pro-democracy’ advocates and activists in Africa found reason to overtly and proactively support Museveni’s main challenger for the presidency, the popstar and Member of Parliament Robert Kyagulanyi, more popularly known as Bobi Wine. I want to argue here that the obsession with Bobi Wine is problematic as it fails to grasp the complex conditions around Museveni’s stay in power and the daunting dilemma of freeing the country from the firm grip of a ruler whose primary source of power is the bullet not the ballot.

Exposing Museveni’s democratic pretensions

Since he captured power as leader of the second successful postcolonial African guerrilla rebel group, after Hissen Habre in Chad, Museveni has repeatedly claimed he fought the 1981–1986 war to restore democratic governance and respect for human rights. In the initial years of his rule, at least up until the mid-1990s, he superintended modestly progressive reforms that gave voice to the citizenry through local level political participation and robust public accountability. Museveni projected himself as a ‘security president’ who had fundamentally transformed the role of the armed forces from being predatory to protective, from serving as a source of insecurity to guarantors of security of person and property.

In the main, Museveni’s democratic credentials appeared credible and compelling to Ugandans and foreigners precisely because he had not been tested yet. Western political and diplomatic actors saw him as representing the ‘new breed of African leadership’ and as a ‘beacon of hope’ for the continent.[1] All seemed rosy and reassuring until Museveni faced a real test of his democratic credentials as the country returned to the conduct of general elections in 1996, ten years after he came to power. At this first time of asking, he had a relatively easy ride as he still enjoyed broad goodwill and popular appeal in much of the country, except the war-afflicted northern Uganda. The tougher test lay ahead.

It was during the 2001 elections, and subsequent electoral cycles in 2006, 2011 and 2016, that Kizza Besigye fully exposed Museveni’s pretensions and hollow promises of a reformer and progressive incumbent who had earned plaudits from Western capitals. In earnest in 2001, Museveni resorted to state brutality and all manner of underhand machinations to beat back the surprising challenge from his former personal physician and senior cabinet member. From 2001 and on, state organised violence and blatant repression against opposition parties and politicians became the mainstay of Uganda’s electoral landscape.[2]

Having served him at a very close personal level, it appears that Besigye had formed an accurate conclusion of Museveni’s intentions and predispositions. True to Besigye’s prediction, Museveni engineered a dubious constitutional amendment process in 2005 that included removal of presidential term limits to hand him the latitude to rule for life. The only other remaining constitutional huddle, the 75-year age-limit, also got thrown out of the constitution in 2017 in a manner that included violent scenes on the floor of parliament when the military stormed the House to arrest opponents of the amendment.

Museveni’s steady slide

Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Western media and at least sections of the academia, either painted a positive image or at worst maintained a largely lukewarm interest in the deepening tenor of Museveni’s authoritarian rule. With the exception of a few media houses that traditionally report on Africa, and therefore have bureaux in African capitals, not many Western media outlets took any interest in Museveni’s vicious assaults on his opponents and the gross erosion of democratic institutions in his singular quest to rule for life.

On their part, Western academics often wrote about Museveni’s electoral victories as though they were proven to be credible and indisputable. For example, after the 2011 elections in which Museveni literally raided the national treasury to buy his way to remain in power, which led to the near collapse of Uganda’s economy under the weight of inflation, two American-based academics wrote a fanciful but hugely flawed paper, published in the well-respected Journal of Modern African Studies, arguing that money did not matter in the election![3] The post-election phenomenon in fact magnified just how money had mattered in securing Museveni’s continued stay in power. An election that had passed with little incident produced an explosive post-election atmosphere during which Museveni faced his first toughest challenge on the streets.

Excessive spending in the 2011 elections, a fact that may have embellished and sanitised Museveni’s electoral victory but wrecked the economy, triggered runaway inflation and deep economic hardships that fuelled street protests. Wary and jittery of a possible contagion and cascade from North Africa’s ‘Arab Spring’ where Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi had all been deposed in quick succession and humiliating circumstances, Museveni swiftly summoned the full force of the state’s coercive arsenal to beat back the ‘Walk-to-Work’ protest movement’.

The method and theme of the protest movement was simple yet innovative: it sought to assert the basic and fundamental right to walk to work since people could not afford transportation in the face of high fuel prices and dire financial conditions. Opposition leader Kizza Besigye was the defacto ‘chief walker’ and the primary target of state repression. In one encounter with the police and military, he was pepper-sprayed to the point of partial blindness as to need immediate medical evacuation to the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

From the Walk to Work protests in 2011, Uganda’s political landscape deteriorated quite rapidly with Museveni’s regime getting ever more repressive, and political engagement becoming patently confrontational and less constructive. Uganda’s ongoing political malaise is a consequence of the collapse of the minimum elite consensus forged in the early 1990s and laid down in the 1995 constitution. The collapse of this consensus stemmed in part from Museveni’s cavalier moves to chip away at some of the crucial provisions of the constitution, primarily the cap on presidential eligibility. His singular focus on ruling for life gradually spawned a hardened political confrontation, thereby making electoral contests binary fights about defending him versus defeating him. Every election is a referendum on his continued stay at the helm and not so much a contest over policy and programmes.

In this chequered political environment, particularly starting in the early 2000s through to 2019, the main opposition leader, Besigye, suffered enormous personal pain at the hands of the police, for long commanded by a highly partisan police chief, General Kale Kayihura, plucked from the military to lead Museveni’s stay in power using the coercive arsenal of the state. Besigye’s trial and tribulations, which spanned a whole two decades, rarely attracted the kind of Western media interest as we have seen over the past year or so. What is more, seldom did we see Western academics assiduously and aggressively speak out ‘in solidarity’ with those in the trenches against Museveni’s brutal rule as they have so forcefully claimed to be doing in the current phase in which Bobi Wine is the singular attraction and primary source of interest.

The West’s half-hearted and often approving stance towards Museveni’s rule derived from his favourable standing at the Pentagon as an invaluable ally in the war on terror, especially countering the spread of perceived Islamist threats under the tutelage of Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, and of course the situation in Somalia. He was also for long seen as an outstanding student of neoliberalism and the Washington consensus, who undertook thoroughgoing reforms making Uganda’s economy arguably the most liberalised and privatised in Africa.

The Wine fetish

By contrast, Bobi Wine became a fetish, valorised and sensationalised in ways that betrays an ahistorical understanding of Uganda’s political landscape, and somewhat counterproductive if antithetical to the struggle against Museveni’s nearly four decades rule. Suddenly, academics who always downplayed the severity of Museveni’s blunt authoritarianism now see the regime as nothing short of brutal, deserving unequivocal denunciation and being deposed one way or the other. Within Western academic circles, some who previously argued that Museveni was genuinely popular and had ‘won’ elections despite allegations of rigging have turned around to denounce this year’s election result in very strong terms. Yet, there is not much qualitative difference between Museveni’s conduct this time and previous election cycles.

Quite remarkably, a flurry of advocates and promoters of democracy in Africa have been hard at work on the streets of Twitter and Facebook, urging their respective home governments in Europe and North America to call out Museveni’s excesses, to issue tough statements and take a hard stance against him. Unwittingly, some academics and activists participated in spreading mis/disinformation originating from Bobi Wine’s fans, in one case retweeting a picture from the 2016 election to show how the vote was being stolen on 14 January 2021!

In a particularly instructive ‘show of solidarity,’ they challenged their governments and embassies in Kampala to, literally, order Museveni to lift the military/police siege on the house of Wine, who was effectively placed under house arrest on the night of the polls.  This proposed nostrum, of their governments issuing some kind of order to Museveni to behave and leave power, apparently draws from the justification that Museveni is a net beneficiary of Western foreign aid who should be reined in by his benefactors in the face of supposedly helpless Ugandans. This, of course, is grossly problematic on many fronts.

Museveni’s dependence on Western aid has declined over the years even as the repressive tenor of his rule has held steady or even accelerated. Since the early 1990s when his government overwhelmingly depended on donor funding, Museveni’s government bettered internal revenue collections but also diversified external aid dependence to include China and Japan and not just the traditional West. At any rate, why it is morally justified to use aid as the basis for pressuring Museveni today and not 10 years ago is an open question, but at a minimum it shows something not right with the current urgency to ‘save’ Ugandans from a ruler of long standing.

In the broader scheme of things, the aid argument sits on a decidedly shaky normative and empirical foundation. First, it is faulty to assume that aid by Western powers is a benevolent and selfless gesture, free of strategic and self-serving interests of the benefactors. Aid is not and has never been a purely charitable resource. It is true that there are nations and governments (such as the Scandinavian countries) that disburse aid resources with little clear and apparent national interests of their own, but even in this category we know that the aid industry has its own logics and self-reinforcing dynamics which have little to do with the officially stated aims. Ironic as it may sound, aid to Africa has grown into a business and a profession that operates with a powerful feedback loop driven by interests and ambitions that are external to the ostensible aid beneficiaries.

Second, the assumption that the aid leverage wielded by Western powers can be used to influence behaviour and actions of incumbent rulers runs against the unhealthy empirical picture from similar approaches in the recent past. As Jimi Adesina and co-authors argued on this website, the experience and lessons of Structural Adjustment conditionalities should disabuse us of faith in externally demanded political reforms because this approach either yields only superficial results or tends to fall flat. It is also a glaring assault on the sovereign existence of a people.

Resisting and defeating an entrenched authoritarian ruler like Museveni is no walk in the forest and is not reducible to the fiat of pressure from Western powers fuelled by media and democracy promoters. The forces and fuel that can prudently take down Museveni, in a manner that advances the cause of genuine democracy and freedom, must necessarily evolve and emerge from Uganda and among Ugandans. The oversized role of external agitators, quite hypocritical in many ways, in fact might work to hurt than help the struggle for liberation from a decayed, moribund and personalised system of rule now cruising to the fourth floor.

By making January’s election about Bobi Wine as a person, and not what is critically at stake for Uganda and Ugandans, the Western media and democracy activists handed Museveni a handy tool to smear and discredit Wine, portraying him as nothing more than an agent of foreign interests, a front for the same old imperial interests that seek to weaken Africa, Museveni repeatedly claimed. Wine himself tended to lend currency to Museveni’s charges by openly appealing to Western audiences and uncritically wallowing in the glamour of Western media sensationalism and splendour. On the eve of the January polls, for example, he bemoaned the refusal by the Ugandan government to accredit foreign journalists and election observers. It is difficult to see why he felt a free and fair election in Uganda depended on the presence of foreign media personnel and election observers. An election in a country like Uganda is not necessarily rigged on polling day!

Obviously, Museveni has zero credibility and moral authority to accuse his challengers of working with and benefiting from Western actors, as he in fact has been a leading agent of foreign interests not just in Uganda but on the continent. The point here though is that external agitation and pressure may sound like a benign and welcome ingredient to take down a brazen dictator; in practice, however, it can lend succour for nationalist mobilisation and jingoism precisely in the service of entrenching the dictatorship as happened in Zimbabwe when Robert Mugabe dug in deeper to hold on for so long.

Which way Uganda

For ‘friends’ of Africa keen to advance democracy and freedom, who want to ‘help’ the forces countering a runaway authoritarian ruler like Museveni, the starting point is to take in the lessons of history. Externally instigated regime change is a hard sale as it tends to not happen the way it is expected and often leads to perilous outcomes. After 35 years in power, Museveni has taken Uganda down a dangerous path. Bringing about meaningful change is not as simple as chasing out an autocrat and installing a new messianic figure with a populist appeal. It is also wrong to construe opposition figures as angels embodying democracy and deserving uncritical embrace. To see Museveni as a devilish dictator and his opponents as angelic democrats is a misleading dichotomy. Today’s ‘pro-democracy’ opposition figures can easily turn into tomorrow’s authoritarian rulers.

Uganda is a deeply socially complex society. The enormity of the country’s socioeconomic problems and crisis of its politics cannot be overemphasised. It may well be an easier job to overthrow Museveni in a popular process, but it is a herculean task forging a new Uganda of peace and prosperity. The issue is not merely one of saving Ugandans from a ruthless dictator, as Western democracy promoters appear bent on, it is also about understanding how a post-Museveni Uganda can be viably pursued and prudently implemented. Here, the Western journalist, the academic, the democracy advocate and activist, the diplomat and politician need to pause and appreciate that principled partnership with Ugandans might help, but old-type paternalism won’t. The agency of Ugandans is what can make a true and durable difference.

For foreign actors who are genuinely concerned and fired up for freedom and liberation of suffering Ugandans, I propose more humility and less hubris. Uganda is at grave political crossroads and the possibility of social disintegration is real. The country’s social fabric is fragile. The youth bulge presents a daunting task. Land conflicts easily portend the most important source of social disharmony and violence. The country’s democratic experiment requires a total rethink. To start tackling these and other endemic problems, the country urgently needs a candid and concerted conversation to turn the corner away from Museveni’s misrule, to reimagine a new Uganda.

The country wants to free itself from Museveni’s mess, but Museveni too needs to be liberated from his own trap of power. There is a delicate and difficult negotiation to be navigated here. It needs thoughtfulness and perceptiveness, not just fancy slogans and foreign pressure. The prospects for forging a post-Museveni Uganda anytime soon may very well be undercut by actions of overzealous and overbearing foreign actors. There is no magic wand of a popular figure that will easily sweep away Museveni without the efforts of coherent, coordinated and combined change-seeking forces inside the country.

A version of this article appeared as ‘Museveni’s Rhetorical Belief in Democracy and the 2021 Elections in Uganda’ in CODESRIA Bulletin Online, No.3, January 2021 and can be accessed here.

Moses Khisa teaches politics and political development in contemporary Africa. Moses is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies at North Carolina State University, in the United States.

Featured Photograph: Kampala, Uganda, 19 August 2014 (taken by Rob Waddington).

Notes

[1] It was President Bill Clinton who used the phrase ‘beacon of hope’ while his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, talked about a ‘new breed of African leadership.’ Both referred to Museveni and his peers Laurent Kabila in Congo, Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia, Isaias Afwerki in Eritrea and Jerry Rawlings in Ghana.

[2] Anders Sjögren, 2018, ‘Wielding the Stick Again: The Rise and Fall and Rise of State Violence During Presidential Elections in Uganda, In Violence in African Elections: Between Democracy and Big Man Politics, edited by Mimmi Söderberg Kovacs and Jesper Bjarnesen, London: Zed Books, pp.47–66.

[3] Jeffrey Conroy-Krutz and Carolyn Logan, 2012, ‘Museveni and the 2011 Ugandan Election: Did the Money Matter? The Journal of Modern African Studies, pp.625-655.

Commemorating our fallen comrades: Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Rosa Luxemburg and Titina Silla

Ezra Otieno reflects on a recent meeting in Nairobi celebrating the lives of important revolutionaries and activists. On 29 January at the Kenya National Theatre, the politics, theories and lessons of Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Rosa Luxemburg, and Titina Silla were remembered.

By Ezra Otieno

Commemorations of revolutionary moments in human history are rare and spread evenly throughout the year but the month of January is considered one of the most revolutionary months. With the commemoration of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, the Cuban revolution in 1959, the Zapatista uprising in Mexico in 1994, the month at the beginning of the calendar year signifies its importance to revolutionary struggles all over the world.

January also saw the demise of several revolutionary comrades like Lenin who died of natural causes, Patrice Lumumba, Rosa Luxemburg, Amilcar Cabral, and Titina Silla, who were murdered by their respective retrogressive regimes. It is for this reason that those of us in Kenya, more specifically in the Revolutionary Socialist League together with Ukombozi Library and All African People’s Revolutionary Party, saw fit to commemorate these four comrades. This gathering was also an opportunity for us to politically educate our new comrades and the public at large about the lives and politics of these revolutionaries.

The Event

The event was well attended, and the audience was eager, ready to listen and learn. All through the event, the audience engaged the speakers with questions and comments and at the end of the meeting they were satisfied and stimulated with the day. It began with a brief introduction and a background of why we were having this commemoration. It was then followed by presentations on each revolutionary. These were preceded by short documentaries about each of them.

Titina Silla (1943 –1973) was remembered as a brave heroine who joined the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) in her home of Guinea-Bissau. In the early 1960s at a very young age, she was already struggling alongside others for independence and socialism. Amongst others she was deployed by the PAIGC in northern Guinea Bissau for health awareness campaigns. She even visited the Soviet Union and trained as a nurse also gaining political experience, then quickly rose within the party to become one of the most influential members of the PAIGC. She was killed on 30 January by Portuguese soldiers while traveling to attend Amilcar Cabral’s funeral. To date, her legacy is celebrated not only in Guinea Bissau but all around the world. Her courage and determination show how women can break the shackles of patriarchy and lead the struggle.

Next was a presentation about Amilcar Cabral. The speaker emphasized the fact that Cabral during his lifetime (1924–1973) championed for a cultural revolution of the people. Cabral insisted on the ideological development of the masses for the permanence of the revolution to be ensured. He urged his people to change their mindset which according to him was the most powerful tool used by the Portuguese to colonize the people of Africa. The speaker hailed Cabral as one of the greatest revolutionaries of his time as he had analyzed Marxism and put it in the African context. He also had studied abroad in Portugal but chose to commit himself to the independence struggle in Guinea Bissau. Cabral used his knowledge to help the masses rather than exploit them. He was assassinated on 20 January 1973, just after he had begun to form peoples’ assembly in preparation for the independence of Guinea Bissau. His legacy lives on today and his works are used as a guide to revolutionaries all over the world. The speaker urged the audience to read Cabral’s writings, citing Return to the Source as an insightful read. We then watched a short documentary about Cabral to supplement the presentation.

Then there was a presentation on Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), who was murdered on 15 January, 1919, executed by the paramilitary, proto-fascist Freikorps together with her comrade Karl Liebknecht. A lot was said about how she championed ideological clarity in the movement. In her book, Reform or Revolution, she took on comrades within the party who opted for the path of so-called gradual reforms. She insisted that the only way to push for real change was through the hammer blows of revolution. She believed that the collapse of capitalism was not inevitable and meaningful change could only be secured through revolution – the alternative was, she argued, either socialism or barbarism. She was testimony that women must stand on the frontline in the struggle, as Titina did decades later. We also learned that crushing capitalism goes hand in hand with crushing patriarchy.

Finally, there was a presentation on Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961) brutally murdered on 17 January. He was the leader of Congolese independence, a Pan-Africanist revolutionary, who was killed by other Congolese nationalists in coordination with imperialist forces.  The people of the Congo and Africa were robbed of a visionary leader who would have likely fuelled widespread change all over the continent and perhaps even the ultimate defeat of the imperialists.

Reflections

The meeting emphasized the importance of learning and celebrating our true heroes and heroines especially in a system that thrives on ‘mis-education’ and the pacification of its people.  These four comrades – each murdered in the struggle against capitalist brutality – dedicated their lives to the oppressed and dreamt of a better society free of exploitation, poverty, and ignorance.  In their different ways, they each sought a world of critical thinkers, an educated and confident population, and a people who control the means of creating wealth and community for themselves.

From these comrades, I learned the spirit of internationalism. Rosa clashed with her compatriots because she believed in internationalism and revolution while they sought compromise. The key to a permanent revolution is internationalism. A socialist country in isolation is bound to fail.  All revolutionaries worldwide should look for like-minded partners to connect struggles across the globe.

More so, the importance of women in the struggle cannot be understated. There can be no true liberation without the liberation of women and Rosa Luxemburg and Titina Silla lived by this saying. Likewise, we realize that patriarchy is a creation of capitalism and for it to be crushed, classes too must be abolished completely.

We should also continue with the fight against imperialism since it remains as brutal as it was during Patrice Lumumba’s brief period as the leader of the Congo. Imperialists, with local supporters, businessmen and politicians, may kill progressive leader and replace them with dictatorships to facilitate their continued plunder. One of the most effective forms of propaganda has been to associate dictatorships with individual figureheads. This hides the fact that capitalism is not only the dictatorship of the rich but also a brutal and intricate system of small dictators who control our societies, often with a veneer of democracy.

Conclusion

We offer our tributes to these comrades as their lives, writings, struggles, and thoughts are as relevant today as they were during their lifetime. They continue to sharpen and inspire our revolutionary ideals as we struggle towards a socialist society. May we continue to honor them through our actions and live by their commitment. Let us not be deterred by the oppressors or even death for we have nothing to lose but our chains.

Long Live the Struggle!

Ezra Otieno is a member of the Revolutionary Socialist League Central Committee in Kenya.

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For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers pathbreaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive.
We use cookies to collect and analyse information on site performance and usage, and to enhance and customise content. By clicking into any content on this site, you agree to allow cookies to be placed. To find out more see our