The insurgency in northern Mozambique is threatening a multi-billion investment in natural gas production. Sara Stevano and Helena Pérez Niño explain how the violence in northern Cabo Delgado is part of a longer script of capitalist penetration into periphery regions.
By Sara Stevano and Helena Pérez Niño
Late in 2017 an insurgent movement emerged in northern Mozambique led by a group locally referred to as ‘Al-Shabaab’. At the beginning the group attacked police stations and government buildings, but thereafter the group targeted civilians and managed to occupy larger towns. At the time of writing it is estimated that some 2,800 have been killed and 700,000 have been forcibly displaced. The attacks have escalated and by March 2021, the insurgency marched on Palma, where a large project for the extraction of gas is being developed.
Cabo Delgado, the northernmost province of Mozambique, previously unknown to most outside the region, is now attracting international attention due to the escalating insurgency that is threatening the multi-billion investment in natural gas production. In this crisis, as in many others, media coverage and the international community’s need to make sense of the violence has led to accounts that are superficial and often incomplete: inordinately focused on the plight of expatriates, the nationality of the combatants and the implications for foreign investment while comparatively clumsy in attempts to report on the impact on the local society and economy, as most starkly demonstrated in reports on the most recent attack on the town of Palma (see, for example, this article in the Guardian and this article in the Financial Times).
As researchers of Mozambique but not researchers of the conflict, we argue that, if we are to understand this conflict, the analysis needs reframing.[1] Approaching the mega-projects and the insurgency using only the rubrics of extractivism and humanitarian crisis sheds light on the visible tip of the iceberg but conceals their impacts on vast networks of production and reproduction that sustain the whole region. A view of this complexity illuminates’ aspects of the marginalisation, fragility and humanity that are key to capture the broader implications of dramatic change in the region.
Historical, spatial and political divides
The northern districts of Cabo Delgado have only recently come to the attention of wider publics with the discovery of the gas deposits and the abrupt transition from remote borderland to frenzied epicenter of investment and speculation. The transition has been disorienting for all parties involved. The most recent crisis is a manifestation of stark historical divides that recent analysis and coverage gloss over or completely disregard.
International headlines refer to violence in Cabo Delgado, but this falls short of levels of precision required to account for a province that is roughly the size of Austria. A better account of the conflict calls for a more precise distinction between the northern and coastal districts most directly affected (Muidumbe, Mocimboa da Praia, Macomia, Nangade, Quissanga, Palma); neighbouring districts like Mueda, Meluco and Ancuabe, where the violence has been less frequent but has nonetheless disrupted everyday lives and livelihoods; and the southern districts including Pemba, the provincial capital.[2] The distinction is significant: it makes visible a long standing North-South divide in the province, note in the way the military response has been partially about insulating Pemba, which is compounded by another divide between southern, central and northern Mozambique. By virtue of the remote location of northern Cabo Delgado in relation to Maputo – the southernmost site of power – northern Cabo Delgado’s connections to the rest of Mozambique have been sporadic in terms of migration patterns, trading routes and political ascendancy.
Paradoxically the region’s remote location made the northern districts of Cabo Delgado, home to the Maconde people, an ideal launching pad for the liberation struggle against Portuguese colonial rule from the 1960s and a refuge for Frelimo insurgents. The participation of the Maconde people in the struggle elevated Cabo Delgado to a symbolic position in the national imaginary and the province remains a Frelimo stronghold (see West, 2000; Israel, 2006). Cabo Delgado’s symbolic centrality in the narratives of liberation is at odds with its actual political and economic marginalization (see also Bonate, 2013).This marginalisation was suddenly confronted with the gas developments and is part and parcel of the present crisis. The explosion of extractive interests took place in Cabo Delgado, the province with the highest levels of chronic malnutrition, very high levels of income poverty and among the lowest levels of private investment in the country.
Most of the media coverage is prominently missing these divides, when not unwittingly contributing to reproducing them: there is a politics of who is a subject of military protection (foreigners, employees of the gas projects) that runs parallel to the politics of media concern; there is a politics of what is to be protected (infrastructure and investment) that belies an inability by the state, the military and the media to account for, report about and to respond to the demands for protection of local populations and local economies.
Capitalist penetration of the extreme periphery
At the core of the recent socio-economic change in Cabo Delgado is the juxtaposition of two wildly different political economies: on the one hand, large groups of Mozambicans living at the margins of capital accumulation and, on the other hand, one of the largest extractive projects in development in the continent. Such a dissonant encounter is most strident in the areas under development around Palma where local livelihoods are precarious and largely bypassed by the promise of new riches. It is the meeting of an extreme periphery with extractivism incarnate.
Coverage of the conflict in Cabo Delgado would have us believe that LNG investments take place in no man’s land, but in fact the advent of Oil and Gas majors and an array of other investors happens side-by-side with a local economy shaped by long-term processes and everyday forms of production, reproduction and exchange. The political economy of Cabo Delgado is based on an array of different livelihoods. A large group of socially differentiated agricultural producers engaging in small-scale farming for consumption and sale, whose insertion in local markets is a legacy of changes triggered by the colonial introduction of forced cotton farming, and chibalo (forced labour) (see Isaacman, 1982) Cashew production remains another important source of household income in the northern districts and depending on the location, people may have access to income from growing sesame, artisanal fisheries or service jobs associated with the high-end tourism sector on the Quirimbas archipelago. Extraction of timber, gemstones and minerals involves mostly foreign investors but generates few jobs for locals. In synthesis, economic activity in Cabo Delgado revolves around pockets of export agriculture, tourism enterprises and extractive mega projects amidst vast informal and localised labour markets.
Class differentiation in northern Cabo Delgado is largely determined by occupation and whether or not people have access to regular earnings. These dynamics are compounded by the relative ability to tap on relations of mutuality and kinship. Access to regular incomes is uncommon and mostly associated with being employed in the public sector. Less than 5% of the population has this kind of steady income even in the larger towns in northern districts.[3] On the contrary there are more people receiving veteran pensions due to the direct participation of the Maconde people in the liberation struggle (see Feijó, 2020; Stevano, 2021).[4] The pension scheme works as a form of social protection used by the state to maintain its influence and legitimacy among the Maconde. However, it also contributes to social differentiation, as veterans and traders, i.e. those with more regular income, tend to be hirers of casual and seasonal (agricultural) wage workers. Most households in northern Cabo Delgado engage in casual piece-rate wage work (kibarua). The divide between labour hirers and labour sellers marks the main class difference in contemporary Cabo Delgado. Given this occupational multiplicity and class differentiation the idea of mega investment projects occurring in lands occupied by a homogenous peasantry could not be further from reality. Attempts to understand the challenges of development in Cabo Delgado need to acknowledge this complexity.
Most people in Cabo Delgado make a living by combining forms of work, petty trade, limited commodity production and all forms of reproductive work. This complexity is not captured in official statistics and escapes many observers. The relentless fragmentation of subsistence has forced many to engage in various, often survivalist occupations, including petty smuggling in some cases. And although having access to land is not in itself sufficient to make a living, it remains a necessary condition for virtually everyone in the province. For one thing, a condition for the existence of these livelihoods is the ability of people to move around cobbling together different sources of income, often within the province, but also beyond: combining highland and lowland farming in Mueda; trading across the border or supplying long distance commercial linkages in Nangade and Mocimboa.[5] Maintaining key social relations also requires freedom of movement to care for ailing or old family members or to help out during peak labour periods. These networks of protection are critical in the context of minimal public provisioning. In this context, the internal displacement of at least 700,000 people as a consequence of the violence raises critical questions in humanitarian terms but also in relation to the disruption of production and social reproduction in the province.
Enclave extractivism
Accounts of the crisis that are oblivious to these productive and reproductive dynamics are missing how the violence in northern Cabo Delgado is part of the longer script of capitalist penetration into periphery regions. This is a centuries-old process in Southern Africa, taking at times the form of the slow commodification of subsistence and other times the flash flood development of speculative and extractive projects. The commodification of labour, with its violent roots in chibalo, advanced slow commodification through the 19th and 20th century. But as capital has acquired the ability to penetrate the countryside (as opposed to simply extracting forced and mobile labour power) Mozambique’s post conflict decades have been characterised by developments of the second type, massive investment initiatives, ‘Os Megaprojectos’, that unleash financial speculation; changes in the use of land; at times forced evictions, but never before these levels of conflict. The recent history of Mozambique charts the ebbs and flows of Mozal (Aluminium smelter), Moatize (Coal) and many others, against the background of the political economy of 21st century Mozambique and the inability and unwillingness of the groups in power to make such developments conditional on the creation of any meaningful linkage to the domestic economy via employment, fiscal revenue, local content or effects on domestic demand (Castel-Branco, 2002 and 2014).
If most of these projects can be characterized as enclave economies, in the case of the LNG developments in northern Cabo Delgado these dynamics are amplified: the gas deposits are off-shore, and extraction proper will not force investors into rounds of negotiation with local communities. Elsewhere, these conflicts have created some pressure for a national reckoning and some debates about Mozambique’s long-term strategy. But here, the on-shore infrastructure under construction in the Afungi peninsula, just south of Palma, has been cordoned-off. There is a tenuous link between the local economy and the multibillion LNG project: a novelty that is patently there but out of everybody’s reach. If the recent history of extractive developments in the region is a guide to go by, there will likely be no jobs or local benefits beyond the façade of Cooperate Social Responsibility (CSR) interventions that are a mockery of any serious expectation of development; and there is no indication that the revenue generated by the extraction of gas will be used to transform the structure of the Mozambican economy and there is good cause to distrust the prospects of a strategy based on fossil fuel, a technology that should be on its way out. This is probably as evident to local dwellers as it is to distant observers.
The impacts of the ongoing conflict cannot only be accounted for in terms of death and displacement but should also encompass the lost livelihoods and disrupted economies. Only a solid explanation of this violence, one rooted in an awareness of this history, spatiality and political economy can hope to turn the tides of what is already shaping to be one of Africa’s largest extractive failures, with all resources exported and no transformation on the ground.
Sara Stevano is a Lecturer in Economics at SOAS University of London. Her research focuses on the political economy of production and reproduction and she has conducted research on food, work and gender in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique.
Helena Pérez Niño is a Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Cambridge. She works on dynamics of agrarian change and structural transformation and has conducted research on contract farming in Tete, Mozambique.
Featured Photograph: Bridge over Rio Lúrio, between Nampula and Cabo Delgado provinces, Mozambique (F Mira, 4 August 2009).
Notes
[1] For research on the conflict see work by Liazzat Bonate, Sérgio Chichava, João Feijó, Salvador Forquilha, Eric Morier-Genoud and João Pereira, among others.
[2] See Cabo Ligado data and OCHA Mozambique Access Snapshot (February 2021).
[3] See Ministério da Administração Estatal, República de Moçambique. (2005). Perfil do Distrito de Mocimboa da Praia/Perfil do Distrito de Nangade. Ministério da Administração Estatal, República de Moçambique. (2014). Perfil do Distrito de Mocimboa da Praia/Perfil do Distrito de Palma.
[4] In 1994, President Chissano introduced a pension scheme to recognise the veterans’ contributions to Mozambican independence.
[5] See: Ministério da Administração Estatal, República de Moçambique. (2005). Perfil do Distrito de Mocimboa da Praia/Perfil do Distrito de Nangade. Ministério da Administração Estatal, República de Moçambique. (2014). Perfil do Distrito de Mocimboa da Praia/Perfil do Distrito de Palma.
ROAPE’s Janet Bujra reviews a major new book on climate change. Jonathan Neale’s book, Fight the Fire: Green New Deal and Climate Jobs, goes beyond the symptoms of climate change and focusses on the causes. These are to be found in the scientific facts, but equally relevant, the social relations of globalizing capitalism. Neale calls for a global mass movement that can confront the forces that are destroying the planet.
By Janet Bujra
It is easy to succumb to a sense of defeatism and despair when faced by a rising tide of unbearable news about the impending climate crisis. Many of us shut down, believing it will not affect us personally, or become cynical at the unlikely prospects of the powerful ever acting decisively to confront it. I counted myself amongst the defeatists and the cynics, even whilst dutifully attending protests where we waved banners and collectively feigned death in Centenary Square in Bradford to bring home the message.
Written by a committed socialist and climate activist, with a powerful analysis framed by radical political economy, Jonathan Neale both informs and inspires, with a realistic assessment of the problem of global warming and of potential solutions. He argues powerfully that committed and organized collective action is the urgent answer, where democratic forces confront the vast power of vested interests in the status quo.
In Africa we have already seen the insidious effects of climate change, with substantial future impacts anticipated. Increasing desertification and aridity is threatening food supplies and leading to major conflicts over the control of water from depleted rivers. Conversely, major floods and cyclones have killed and displaced thousands, whilst unreliable weather patterns and heat waves threaten human existence and create habitat changes that favour disease-bearing or crop-devastating insects such as mosquitoes and locusts. Although the African continent has contributed the least to causing climate change it is likely to be amongst the worst hit.
A recent report in Le Monde Diplomatique (April 2021) detailed the threat to over 70% of African National Parks from ‘greedy’ multinational oil companies seeking and gaining concessions to explore, drill and frack. It warned of the disastrous impact this will have – on local people forcibly displaced, on wildlife and habitats destroyed and on water polluted. Despite resistance from NGOs and environmentalists, African states are facilitating oil exploration in a bid to top up their depleted reserves and join the ranks of the oil producing countries, even as we know that the profits of oil production feed global corporate accumulation more than local development, and reduce African producers to the status of suppliers of raw materials.
The major issue here, however, is not even mentioned – oil is a fossil fuel feeding the climate crisis. When burnt to produce energy it creates toxic carbon emissions. Neale makes crystal clear that if we are to avoid a cataclysmic future of global warming, we need to ban the use of fossil fuels altogether – oil, gas and coal – and replace them with renewable forms of energy such as wind and solar, as he writes, “The key to stopping climate change will be stopping emissions”. His book demonstrates how this is possible.
This is a book addressed to a general audience, so the style is almost conversational, avoiding jargon and undefined technical vocabulary, whilst also displaying an encyclopaedic grasp of information through an extensive set of appendixed references (no index though!). It engages through a step by step unfolding of a set of meticulously logical arguments and evidence, always taking care to address and deal with objections. A major contribution of the book is its construction of a comprehensive global analysis, showing how all parts of the problem everywhere and their solutions are interconnected. Most importantly Neale goes beyond the symptoms of climate change and focusses on the causes. These are to be found in the scientific facts, but equally relevant, the social relations of globalizing capitalism. Saving the planet will take more than piecemeal responses, like extracting the methane from sewage for biofuels or setting up a charging system for electric cars. It must address the concentration of economic and political power which stands in the way of a result.
Neale differentiates the two major sources of emissions – carbon (CO2) and methane – and shows how they are generated and how they affect climatic conditions. Secondly, he calculates by how much they could realistically be reduced, using current technology (no hostages to fortune here). He estimates that it would be possible to reduce current emissions by around 70% which would allow us to stay within the 1.5 degree internationally agreed objective for global warming.
Yet achieving this goal will require a complete change in the way that we live our lives. The key transformation here is electrification using renewable energy. Neale spells out the extent to which electrification can be applied – in transport particularly, in construction and manufacturing and in heating and cooling homes. The eventual objective would be a ‘super-grid’ allowing for the evening out of variations in electricity supply and with excess production becoming exportable across the globe. The cost of doing this is considerable and Neale insists that it cannot be done via the market. Markets are efficient in producing profits for private production, not in investing in public services. It demands public ownership and funding. He notes in passing that Africa has totally inadequate levels of electrification, distributed very unevenly towards urban areas and the more industrialised countries like South Africa and Nigeria.
African development efforts have typically been focused on industrialization, especially manufacturing, but the methods by which this is to be achieved usually depend on building core heavy industry – cement, steel and chemicals – using fossil fuels, some of which are only currently being discovered on the continent – especially natural gas and coal. To give up on this tried and tested path to growth will lead – at least in the short run, to negative economic growth, especially for the poorest parts of the world. Neale is adamant that the most disadvantaged must be offered the prospects of a better, rather than a worse life in this transition. Economic growth must continue, in order to satisfy the needs of the many rather than the few – in jobs, housing and health – but it must be achieved through the use of renewable energy creating a low-carbon world, if we are to avoid climate disaster.
The key, whether in Africa or elsewhere, is to build industries and economies using renewable energy which also create jobs. This is a key tenet of Neale’s argument. Reductions in emissions must go along with the simultaneous and planned generation of ‘climate jobs’ – to design, manufacture, install and operate the infrastructure required. This needs to be done strategically so that communities which were based on mining and processing of fossil fuels are not left stranded and in decline. We saw in the UK in the 1980s how the lack of such planning devastated coal mining communities and the worker solidarities that were built upon them. Such planning should also provide an incentive for those affected to join the struggle against environmental disaster.
It is not only emissions from fossil fuels which will have to be addressed. Forestry and farming account for one-third of total global emissions. And African economies rely more heavily on agriculture than on industry. Here deforestation (given that trees store carbon), rice cultivation and methane from livestock impact the most. Reductions are proposed by Neale which do not have the same potential for job creation as the development of renewables but can still cut emissions. This can be facilitated through changing methods of production. Large-scale industrial farming is less effective here than small-holder production. Cutting the use of fertilisers, encouraging the consumption of meat which does not produce as much methane (chicken and pork, for example), reducing livestock and letting grazing areas revert to natural forest are some of the suggestions. Neale calls it ‘conservation agriculture’ and insists again that it will win over communities to the cause, especially if backed by land reform.
The intellectual rationale for these dramatic changes is laid out impeccably by Neale, but he does not assume that rationality will produce its own effects. There have to be social forces which can carry the necessary transformations into effect. He has little confidence in current governments and international bodies purporting to bring change, noting that so far they have consistently avoided mandatory cuts in climate emissions. Nor does he have much truck with the plethora of NGOs which have emerged to address the crisis and now dominate the narrative, seeing them as too tied to the current power structures. Given patterns of research patronage, it is difficult even for scientists to remain independent of vested interests. But the main opposition to the radical transformation required to fight climate change are the vested interests of ‘carbon capitalism’ – those who make profits out of the exploitation of fossil fuels, together with the political class which fronts their toxic power. His response is clear: only a global mass movement can confront such a phalanx of power, and “we need to replace the current leaders and rulers of the world and we need to do so quickly”. Rebellion is justifiable where the future of humanity is at stake.
The over-riding debate here is about the cost of the dramatic changes necessary. Neale estimates that the global cost of a climate change programme would be $4trillion a year. He argues that the cost can be covered by a mixture of more progressive taxation, cutting tax evasion and quantitative easing – obviously anathema to the richest and threatening to the electoral prospects of those in power. However, history shows that governments can find money when they need to: after the Great Depression of the 1920s-30s, World War II, the global financial crash of 2008, and for pandemics like Covid. The climate jobs programme would also yield returns – the workers employed would receive wages and pay taxes, consumers would purchase the electricity, and because the programme would be delivered by public bodies (Neale suggests a national Climate Service in each country) the drain of profits would be eliminated.
Progressive climate change policies in one country will not prevent the climate crisis – there needs to be a global movement of change, given the interconnectedness of the world’s economy. All regions contribute to the problem though in different ways. The US and China are the heaviest contributors to global emissions – one a capitalist economy in decline which resists political regulation for the public good, the other an authoritarian communist state industrializing via traditional high carbon methods of production.
The same globalizing capitalist pressures to industrialise for economic growth and accumulation are raising emissions everywhere and generating the same catastrophic spectre of disaster. To address this will “require the mother of all political struggles and will not happen without solidarity between mass movements in the North and the South”. How can this be achieved?
For Neale it is those who will suffer the most from climate disaster who have the most to gain from fighting it – the most impoverished and exploited, the workers of the world (84% of them in the Global South, especially China and India) and especially those most organized to do so through trade unions. He is aware that trade unions have conflicting interests in this struggle and may on occasion take reactionary positions. Moreover, those who resist the power of carbon capital will face concerted suppression, enduring brutality, imprisonment, even death.
Neale’s optimism that it is possible to fight and win in the struggle against global warming is backed by his examples where the oppressed have resisted successfully. He names the campaign in South Africa for free HIV/AIDS drugs and the international solidarity that led it eventually to succeed: “millions upon millions of people were given life because those in grave danger had organized and fought”. And history shows that people do resist oppression: currently there are mass uprisings across the world, beginning with the Arab Spring and stretching from Hong Kong, to Belarus, Lebanon, Chile, India, Sudan and many others. Neale notes their impact in unsettling and even overthrowing regimes, but also the weakness of their organizational capacity to build alternative futures. More focused movements like Black Lives Matter or Me Too demonstrate the potential force of single issue campaigns – and here Extinction Rebellion is on target for the climate crisis. Neale celebrates the way in which women and youth have become noticeably more radical in recent years but notes that their radicalism does not embrace socialist alternatives. In this struggle the Left has also been guilty of defeatism and of “hopeless rage … that works against change”.
At this point Neale’s optimism seems like wishful thinking. Clearly there is not yet the solid base for a full-frontal international resistance movement against carbon capital. However, giving up is not an option: “it never makes sense to stop trying to limit the damage”. The key is to understand how the social stasis of inequality is transformed into resistance and active and organized opposition. Where climate change is concerned it will first be events – the devastating series of failed harvests, the rising numbers of children dying of pollution in the air of our big cities, even the primroses that flower at Christmas. But it will also be the inspiration of those who make sense of these events and build them into a bigger picture and act to link the angry voices into a movement. And here Neale is required reading.
Janet Bujra is a longstanding member of the Review of African Political Economy, a feminist, socialist and researcher.
Jonathan Neale’s Fight the fire: Green New Deal and Climate Jobsis published jointly by Resistance Books, London; The Ecologist, Devon; Alternative Information and Development Centre, Cape Town; International Institute for Research and Education, Amsterdam. The book is free to download, read and print here.
Featured Photograph: School students march during the Global Climate Strike in Cape Town, South Africa (20 September 2019).
Introducing a new book on African woman, Zainab Haruna argues the collection is the first attempt to chronicle the diverse perspectives and experiences of African women. Haruna asks what does liberation for the African woman look like?
By Zainab Haruna
In discussing feminist ideals, African Feminist thought, and theories occupy an important space to ensure that issues affecting African women, both within and outside the African continent, are adequately addressed and discussed. Too often, the lived experiences of African women are spoken about authoritatively by people other than themselves, thus relegating African women to the role of spectators in their own life stories. The question then becomes, “what does liberation for the African woman look like to the African woman?”
In an exciting new collection of woman’s voices, which delves into the varied and complex perspectives and interpretations of feminism and gender equality for African women, the In Her Words anthology (which can be downloaded for free) is a collection of 15 stories by African women from 7 countries which beautifully upholds the ideals of the African Feminist Charter, underscoring the importance of diversity, inclusion, plurality and individual interpretation of feminist ideologies by African women for African women. The anthology responds to the query of how young African women navigate the world today amidst the intersection of the different aspects of their identity – nationality, marriage, religion, age, wealth, ethnicity, profession, among others, intersect daily with gender to shape the actual lived experiences of millions of women across the African continent.
The stories and essays in the collection take on different perspectives from intellectual work on feminist theories, from lived experiences of gender-based violence, to the intersection of identity, faith, marriage, and the evolution of feminist ideals. They query the validity of age old, accepted customs and social norms, gendered barriers that limit access to education, healthcare and legal representation, and violence against women which continues to result in the deaths of thousands of women every year. Alongside the questions posed are also proposals for undoing oppressive systems and cultures, navigating the terrain, and building adequate structures that help African girls and women to achieve their full potential. The collection is a first attempt to chronicle the diverse perspectives and experiences of African women on the topics of gender equality and feminism.
Collectively, the voices chronicled in these essays are a potpourri for dismantling external gazes that do not centre the narrative of African women on African women themselves. It also looks at shades and nuances of the conversation on feminism and feminist practice on the continent. It speaks on the perspective of different women, those who continue to work to advance the goals of equality while rejecting the label of “feminist” in their practice and those who embrace the label as activists and storytellers in their work. It looks at lineages of women, espousing the strong connections that hold women together across generations and further entrenching the knowledge that feminism has always been African from Huda Sharaawi founding the first national feminist movement of Egypt in 1923 to Margaret Ekpo ensuring the assimilation of women into Nigeria’s political landscape in 1959 and further beyond.
The contributors speak strongly in their own words, contextualising definitions of representation, inclusion, access, freedoms, and dignity. In her essay titled “On Being Feminist but not Anti-Men”, Priscilla Sena Bretuo challenges the linearity of mainstream feminist thought and practice explaining that the modern ideals of feminism are rooted in western theorisations. She argues that the core of feminism should remain on individual agency and the elimination of inequalities and harmful social practices which subjugate both men and women to arrive at the ultimate goal of equality and justice.
Taking an opposing stance, Makalay Saidiatu Sonda argues in “Africans and Feminism: Beyond the Donor Funds”, that feminism remains fundamentally an African concept that identifies and recognises the strength, capacity, and potential of the African woman. In her words, Makalay emphasised that, ’Our ancestors, the women of time past, ventured out, took up challenges and conquered. They ruled kingdoms, protected their lands, and were many things in addition to being mothers, wives, and daughters. History teaches us that African women have always been capable and remarkable.’ Her essay is a call to Africans to take a stance and prioritise the freedoms of women on the continent as she does in her work of ensuring access to education for young girls in Sierra Leone.
Hauwa Shaffii’s essay, “When we talk of freedom”, explores the concept of freedom and what that could mean subjectively for all women in general and Muslim women in particular. Her unpacking of the non-Muslim gaze through which issues related to Islam and Muslim women are often viewed shines a light on a key interpretation bias that is encountered everyday not just on the streets of Nigeria, but across the world.
The denial of women’s fundamental rights in marriage, a blended outcome from a merger of cultural practices and a misinterpretation of Islamic stipulations which are then firmly positioned as Islamic injunctions on Muslim women, is a common practice in Northern Nigeria. This phenomenon is what Nana Sule’s essay “Walking this path” investigates as she delves into the intersection of religion, marriage and rights of women. Her essay draws on her personal experience to investigate the rights of a Muslim woman in marriage as supported by the provisions of Islam.
Gendered roles in culture and the ways in which these subjugate girls in Senegal is the core tenet of Sokhna Mbathio Thiaw’s “Equality in Senegal: a dream or an eternal quest” essay. Like other poor West African countries, girl child education in Senegal suffers as girls continue to drop out of school to help parents with domestic chores or forced into early marriage. Sokhna uses her essay as a lens to explore the trajectory of the lives of many Senegalese women as they are forced to remain in poverty due to lack of education and skills. How does an illiterate, poor girl, forced into an early marriage and unpaid domestic labour break the cycle of poverty for herself and her children?
However, as Ojonwa Miachi submits in her essay, societal expectations on gendered roles do not just have a negative effect on women; there are consequences for men too. The expectation that men should be sole providers has a documented negative impact on the health of men, as evidenced by key indicators on men’s health and wellbeing.
The devolution of power within the family unit, and the creative ways it robs girls of any decision-making authority is the subject of Linda Tusiime’s interrogation in her story titled, “And so it goes”. The automatic assumption of male sons as the heir when daughters are equally capable is vested deeply in cultural norms that have not been adequately addressed in modern African societies. The notion that a woman would belong to her husband after marriage which makes her an unsuitable candidate for the position of heir does not hold true for men. This archaic notion is evidently flawed, as the same women are somehow expected to support the family in situations when the family business, which they were ruled out of leading, collapses. These, and other focal points, can be found in Tusiime’s essay, reflecting limitations placed on the ambitions and expressions of young girls in Uganda.
Borso Tall comes from a family of enlightened matriarchs and her life has been influenced by these strong matrilineal forces. Her essay delves into this history following the migration of members of her family and how the knowledge of equality was handed down from mother to daughter almost like an inheritance or a rite of passage and a protest against wildly patriarchal societies. Essentially, it emphasised the power of protest in storytelling and the body of knowledge enfolded and distributed informally through this practice.
The stories from the different essays in the anthology hold convergent and divergent lines for women across the continent. For instance, some of the experiences and realities of Senegalese women might echo the realities of women living in rural Ghana while some of them might be alien experiences. It underscores the importance of understanding the complexity in the experiences of women and the need to avoid broad brush strokes in the telling of African women’s stories. The importance of querying accepted normative frameworks as Victoria Malowa focuses on in her essay cannot be over-emphasised. There is an urgent need to conceptualise, while refraining from generalising the individual and exceptionalising the general.
As the world seems to lurch through multiple and related crises, it becomes increasingly pertinent that platforms and spaces be created or expanded for marginalised voices and people. There is a need to identify and understand our gaps in knowledge. It is difficult to engage appropriately with issues that we have no experience about or limited knowledge on African feminism. The ultimate default which is often erroneous is to assume that the challenges of women are identical and to pose linear solutions to address them. What better way to understand the realities, triumphs, and challenges of African women and their liberation than to listen to them tell it, in their own words.
Zainab Haruna has worked in different capacities to address a variety of challenges including poverty, education, job creation, corruption and service delivery issues in Nigeria. Haruna is one of the coordinators of the collection of essays, In her words: African women’s perspectives on gender equality – compiled by, Tawakalit Kareem, Zainab Haruna, Joy Sani, Isatou Jallow and Omolayo Nkem Ojo.
Featured photograph: The woman in the image has written “Just Fall “ on her arm, during the revolution that removed president Al Bashir in Sudan at the time of the Khartoum sit-in (Ola A. Alsheikh, 8 April 2019).
Paul O’Connell celebrates Issa Shivji’s pathbreaking 1989 book The Concept of Human Rights in Africa. He praises a book that see the dominant human rights discourse as one of the main elements in the ideological armoury of imperialism. Shivji, he argues, articulated a revolutionary conception of human rights which we must return to.
By Paul O’Connell
Human rights language is ubiquitous today. Starting with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, we have since seen the proliferation of international and regional treaties and monitoring bodies. This gained pace, in particular, with the end of the Cold War and Francis Fukuyama’s putative end of history – with human rights emerging as the ‘post-ideological’ common sense of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Precisely because of the very hegemony of human rights talk in the contemporary world, critiques of human rights abound; ranging from the friendly critiques which seek to perfect an otherwise laudable idea and system, to more radical dismissals of human rights as the avatars of neoliberal capitalism and inequality.
There is much value in some of these recent critiques of human rights. It is noteworthy, however, that in a short book written in the late 1980s, the Tanzanian author and academic, Issa Shivji, articulated a critique of human rights that both anticipated many of these more recent critiques and, crucially, remains more incisive and politically relevant than most of them. Although in certain respects it is a work of its time, Shivji’s The Concept of Human Rights in Africa is a critique of human rights that remains relevant for both a research agenda on human rights and radical politics in the 21st century. This review sets out the key elements of Shivji’s account of rights, and the continuing relevance of his work and this book for today.
Shivji begins the book by stating clearly that human rights, or at least what he terms the dominant/liberal conception of human rights, ‘constitutes one of the main elements in the ideological armoury of imperialism’. As such, Shivji sets out to engage ‘the subject of human rights so as to avoid the pitfalls of a liberal perspective’.In contrast to the claimed neutrality of the dominant discourse, Shivji’s explicit ‘point of departure and reference are the interests of the broad masses of the African people’, – thus from the outset, Shivji’s account of human rights is both critical and partisan.
Importantly, unlike ‘petty bourgeois radical’ accounts of human rights, which are just another variation on the liberal tradition in the way in which they ‘absolutise the human rights question’, it is not Shivji’s aim or intention to ‘throw away … human rights talk’, but instead to ‘reconstruct … human rights ideology to legitimise and mobilise people’s struggles’. In this latter endeavour we find one of Shivji’s most distinctive contributions: the attempt to articulate what he calls a revolutionary conception of human rights.
The Dominant Account
Shivji’s work then sets out an account of the dominant discourse of human rights in Africa, so that he can then critique it and from that critique begin to articulate an alternate account of human rights. Shivji notes that, in real terms, one ‘can hardly talk of the African philosophy of human rights’, instead the ‘dominant argument … propounded by most of the African and Africanist lawyers and jurists, has proceeded on the basis of an uncritical acceptance of Western liberal conceptions of human rights.
As such, notwithstanding some variations, these dominant accounts suffer from five key deficiencies: (i) they abstract from social history and concrete material conditions; (ii) they divorce the history of human rights from the history of the class struggles that were crucial in shaping them (with natural rights as the sword advancing the class interests of the rising European bourgeois and positively enacted rights as their shield once in power); (iii) they elide the ‘ideologically and politically charged’ nature of debates over the priority of rights (civil and political v social and economic etc.); (iv) ‘the prevailing human rights discourse on Africa has been singularly ‘deficient’ in contextualising the human rights ideology within the imperialist domination of Africa’; and (v) the individualist and ahistorical approach to human rights allows for a focus on discrete episodes or human rights violations, while remaining blind to the structural causes of human rights abuse and denial.
Taken together, the effect of all of these characteristics and deficiencies of the dominant discourse contributes to ‘the production and reproduction of a human rights ideology which objectively buttresses the imperialist oppression of Africa on the one hand, and the authoritarian/military domination of its people on the other’. As such, Shivji argues that human rights and human rights discourse, in their dominant rendering, are a barrier to the democratic revolution necessary for the fundamental transformation of Africa.
Human Rights and Struggle
Shivji, however, does not stop with critique – cognisant of the important role human rights (in their natural rights rendering) played in mobilising the earlier bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the ideological cachet of human rights in the present, Shivji insists that ‘there is a need to build a new perspective of human rights in Africa’. At this point, Shivji shows an acute awareness of the need to connect theory with practice, noting that ‘this reconceptualisation is obviously a process involving constant interaction between the struggles of the African people and activists’.
So, while it is not possible to articulate a full blown reconceptualisation of human rights ‘at a stroke’, the preceding critique of the dominant discourse ‘provides some elements or building blocks for beginning to erect a new perspective’. Central to Shivji’s critique of the dominant human rights discourse is that it divorces human rights from concrete history, the role of imperialism and from the masses of African people as active subjects in their own life and history.
The central elements for Shivji’s rethinking of human rights flow directly from this – as such he identifies three key elements that must inform a revolutionary reconceptualisation of human rights in Africa. The first is that any account or theory must be ‘historically situated’ and grounded in a concrete analysis of the conjuncture, in the context of Africa this must emphasise that ‘imperialist domination of Africa, from colonial to neocolonial forms, constitutes the main point of departure for understanding the conditions of the African masses’. A new theory of human rights must ‘be thoroughly anti-imperialist, thoroughly democratic and unreservedly in the interest of the ‘people’ (understood here as the mass of workers and peasants).
The second key element of such a theory is that it must stress the centrality of class struggle in shaping and conceptualising human rights, as Shivji puts it:
the human rights ideology has to be appropriated in the interest of the people to play a mobilising role in their struggle against imperialism and compradorial classes and their state. Therefore, the new perspective must distance itself openly from imperialist ideology of human rights at the international level and cultural-chauvinist/developmentalist ideology of the compradorial classes, at the national level. This is the second element or building block in the new perspective.
This latter point is crucial to Shivji’s account, as he understands that the contradictory role that human rights and human rights talk has played in the past (both subverting and legitimating the status quo) is the product not of unresolved intellectual abstraction, but the concrete product of class struggles.
The third element of Shivji’s reconceptualisation of human rights is an insistence that ‘new conceptualisation must clearly break from both the metaphysics of natural law as well as the logical formalism and legalism of positive law. It must be rooted in the perspective of class struggle’. This implies that rights, rooted in struggle and a revolutionary perspective, would not be primarily conceived as individual rights, but as collective rights of peoples; rights are not primarily conceived as legal entitlements, but ‘as a means of struggle, ‘right’ is therefore not a standard granted as charity from above but a standard-bearer around which people rally for struggle from below’; all of this, in turn, transforms the vocabulary of human rights so that:
one does not simply sympathise with the ‘victims’ of human rights violations and beg the ‘violators’ to mend their ways in numerous catalogued episodes of violations; rather one joins the oppressed/exploited/dominated or ruled against the oppressors/exploiters/dominant and ruling to expose and resist, with a view ultimately to overcome, the situation which generates human rights violations.
In line with Marx’s view of the role of critique being to find the kernel of the new in the old Shivji’s reconceptualisation of human rights does not ‘begin from a clean slate’, but instead begins to sketch the elements of the new from his critique of the old.
Another Way
Importantly, Shivji also illustrates that this theoretical difference is present in concrete terms in the contrast between the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights, which for Shivji suffers from all of the maladies of the dominant account, with its ‘neo-colonialist statist disposition’, developmentalism and obeisance to a fictive international cooperation. In stark contrast, Shivji invokes the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples (or Algiers Declaration) of 1976, a document which is avowedly anti-imperialist and centred on the collective rights of oppressed peoples.
The Preamble to the Algiers Declaration, which Shivji quotes approvingly, recognises from the outset the ‘new forms of imperialism’ that have evolved to oppress and subjugate the peoples of the world, thus fundamentally undermining human rights. It sets itself against imperialism in all its forms, and provides support for ‘all those who, throughout the world, are fighting the great battle, at times through armed struggle, for the freedom of all peoples’, with the hope that people will ‘find in this Declaration the assurance of the legitimacy of their struggle’.
Whereas the African Charter provides firm protection to private property, and in this way undercuts many of the other rights proclaimed in it as well as legitimating imperial relations of exploitation, the Algiers Declaration provides no such protection. This is crucially important, as Shivji notes, because a ‘careful reading of its provisions shows that it is clearly aware that private property, in this case particularly imperialist property, lies behind the system of underdevelopment and domination in the Third World’.
In its explicit anti-imperialism, its rejection of the centrality of private property (the fundamental right par excellence of the bourgeoisie) and its foregrounding of the rights of collectives in struggle, the Algiers Declaration provides a concrete illustration of Shivji’s revolutionary and struggle centred reconceptualisation of human rights. As Shivji notes, the subsequent neglect of the Declaration speaks to the persistent ideological biases of human rights discourse rooted in the hegemony of imperialist ideology. In the more than thirty years since Shivji produced this book the Algiers Declaration has remained a more or less forgotten moment in the history of anti-imperialist and radical critiques of imperialism and human rights, whereas the African Charter system has consolidated itself.
Shivji’s Critique Today
As noted at the outset, critiques of human rights are commonplace today. Few, however, have the incisiveness or political relevance of the critique Shivji outlined in 1989. With a very few exceptions, the most notable being Radha D’Souza’s excellent recent book, few critiques of human rights seriously understand or attempt to engage with imperialism in any meaningful sense. Others are wrapped up in the critique of human rights as an idea, traversing the interesting terrain of intellectual history, but ending in political immobilisation and quietism.
In contrast, Shivji’s account foregrounds class antagonisms and class struggle in both how we understand the development and place of human rights in the world today, and how we might engage with human rights in movements for fundamental change. Imperialism remains the defining feature of our world system, so when thinking about human rights it is crucial to avoid the pitfalls of abstraction, in its various forms, and foreground the role of contemporary imperialism in both reproducing human rights ideology, and structurally undermining the possibility of human rights protection – Shivji’s work provides an important lodestar and entry point in this regard.Much like the Algiers Declaration, Shivji’s work has not received the attention that it merits. This is no doubt in part due to the very relationships of imperial and neo-colonial hierarchy that Shivji himself identified, but it is also because Shivji’s critique of human rights and attempt to reconceptualise human rights in the service of revolutionary struggles, is far less palatable than the petty bourgeois and pseudo radical critiques that leave the essence of imperialism and class struggle untouched.
His critique of human rights remains incisive and relevant, both in the context of the continued imperial plundering of Africa and in light of the various social movements, such as Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa, that are engaging with human rights in subversive and imaginative ways. But its relevance goes far beyond Africa, and in an era of persistent capitalist crises and imperialist barbarism, Shivji’s work provides us with a starting point for thinking about and engaging with human rights without ‘mindlessly reproducing imperialist and neo-colonial ideological domination’. A way of critiquing and engaging with human rights as if they really matter.
A version of this blogpost was originally published as ‘Critiquing Human Rights Like It Matters: Issa Shivji’s The Concept of Human Rights in Africa’ on the new website Liberated Texts. Liberated Texts is an independent book review website which features works of ongoing relevance that have been forgotten, underappreciated, suppressed or misinterpreted in the cultural mainstream since their release. They are primarily interested in texts with anti-colonial, anti-imperialist themes and those related to the history of Marxism, communism and revolution globally. You can submit reviews and contact the editors of the site here.
Featured Photograph: Unemployed and the poor protest in front of the Cape Town High Court for the wealthy to be taxed in order to generate funds to create housing for the poor (Pierre F. Lombard, 19 September 2012).
ROAPE’s Ben Radley interviews the Congolese historian and scholar-activist Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja. He explains that the overriding motivation of his work is solidarity with the oppressed and an uncompromising quest for the truth to elucidate the political history of the Congo and Africa generally from the colonial period to the present.
Ben Radley: Can you please describe to us your memories and experiences growing up as a child in the Congo under Belgian colonial rule and coming of age during the national liberation struggle, and how these experiences shaped your early politics and student activism?
Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja: Growing up on the American Presbyterian Congo Mission (APCM) station of Kasha, some 10 km from the state post of Luputa and a major railway station on the BCK network between Lower Congo and Katanga, the first experience I remember from my childhood was the consciousness of skin colour. As Frantz Fanon has described all colonial settlements, this mission station was built as a Manichean city, with whites on the one side with modern houses and electricity, and black people on the other side in thatched roof houses lit with kerosene lamps on unlit streets. A large cordon sanitaire or a huge open space comprising the church, the medical centre, school buildings and the football field and other sports facilities separated the city of light from the city of darkness, which rejoiced only under moonlight.
Since our parents worked for the mission in various capacities as teachers, nurses, maintenance workers and domestic servants for the American missionaries from Dixie, we as their children could play with the few white kids present. By the time we all attained puberty, these children’s games ceased, and it was not unusual to hear the white kids calling us by the N word. Racial consciousness evolved on both sides, and this was reinforced for the Congolese each time we went to Luputa to catch a train or to shop at the stores owned by the Greek, Italian and Portuguese merchants. While in Luputa, we also witnessed whipping of prisoners by the police under the stern watch of the Belgian administrator at 6:00 a.m. or 12:00 noon near the flagpole with the red, yellow, and black Belgian standard. At the train station, black people stood in a long queue under the sun to buy tickets, but a white person could simply walk straight to the ticket box and walk away with his or her ticket in a minute.
You briefly held a number of academic positions in the Congo in the early 1970s, shortly after Mobutu came to power, and before beginning your long period of exile from the country. What impact has having spent such a long time away from the Congo had on you personally?
I had spent eight years and a half in the United States completing one year of secondary school, four years of undergraduate studies and three years of postgraduate studies, from July 1962 to February 1971. During this period, I had the opportunity of spending two months and a half in the Congo during the summer vacation of 1965, which allowed me to visit my very large family, and to even visit newly independent Zambia for a week. It was therefore very difficult to spend 17 years and a half, between December 1973 and August 1991 without seeing members of my family. Both parents and one sibling had passed away during that period. But those years of exile strengthened my commitment to the struggle for political change and genuine democracy in the Congo. I participated in numerous meetings and spoke on the Congo in the United States and Canada, Europe, and several African countries.
This self-imposed exile from Mobutu’s Zaïre was due to the harassment and threats I had experienced from the regime during my two years of work at the Lubumbashi campus of the National University of Zaïre, including a four-hour interrogation by the security police in November 1973. The harassment was renewed in Washington, DC in the 1980s when I became actively involved in supporting the mass democratic movement led by the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS). In 1989, my passport was confiscated by the Congolese ambassador to the U.S., Mushobekwa Kalimba wa Katana, following my request for a renewal. After several months of inaction, I received a letter dated 26 December 1989 from the ambassador stating that he took away my passport on the grounds of my opposition to the regime. Although I did get the passport back after the liberalization of the system on 24 April 1990, I still introduced a plaint against Mr. Mushobekwa for violations of my rights as a citizen through the Foreign Affairs Subcommission of the Political Affairs Commission at the Sovereign National Conference on 29 June 1992. He appeared before the subcommission and admitted that he had indeed violated my civil rights but added that he had acted on orders from the secret police in Kinshasa. It was, for him, a question of a choice between renewing my passport or losing his job. The subcommission cleared him.
You were heavily involved in the Sovereign National Conference in 1992, which represented the culminating moment of around a decade of resistance to Mobutu’s dictatorship in the struggle for multiparty democracy. Can you describe the atmosphere in the Congo at that time, and the meaning and significance of that historical moment, both for yourself but also politically for the country and for the Congolese?
It is almost 29 years now since I joined the Conférence Nationale Souveraine (CNS) in April 1992 as one of seven “scholars of international renown” co-opted by the Conference to make their contribution to this nationwide palaver. Following my general policy statement on the 14 May 1992, my name became a household word in the Congo. My declaration was one of the most popular speeches at the CNS, judging by the number of applauses. Cassette recordings were made and sold in the Congolese diaspora in Belgium, and in a country where the post office was no longer functioning very well, over 500 letters were sent to me by young people from all over the country. On a trip to Goma from New York in April 2007, an immigration official looked at my passport and said to me: “Aren’t you the Professor Nzongola of CNS fame?” When I said yes, he started chastising me for having abandoned the struggle by returning abroad. Even today, people over 50 in Kinshasa would recognize me because of the CNS.
I have given a comprehensive assessment of the CNS in my book The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History (2002). Most of its 23 commissions and over 100 sub-commissions produced excellent reports on what had gone wrong in the past and proposals on charting a new path for freedom, peace, and well-being in the country. As a member of the Political Affairs Commission, I had expressed interest in chairing the sub-commission on external affairs. But the people who had advanced the foreign agenda in the Congo like Justin Bomboko and Victor Nendaka did their best to exclude me from that sub-commission. As a consolation, they allowed me to chair two sub-commissions, on current affairs and political files, the latter being basically the rewriting of Congolese history by revisiting all the major political events in the country since Independence on what happened, why it happened, and what we should do to prevent such events in the future. When the late Professor Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba joined us, I managed to pull him from the Scientific Research Commission to make him the rapporteur for Political Files. He wrote an outstanding report on our deliberations.
The CNS succeeded as an educational forum and a political mobilizer. For all plenary meetings were carried on national radio and television. In most places of work, people did what they could do between 7:00 AM and 12:00 PM and went to sit by their radio or television to follow the deliberations at the Chinese built People’s Palace, home of our Parliament.
However, the CNS failed to achieve its immediate objective, which was to remove the dictator Mobutu from power and put the country on the path of multiparty democracy, economic recovery, and the improvement of the living conditions of ordinary people. The main reasons for that failure were the reluctance of Mobutu and his clique to leave power and its attendant privileges; the weakness and immaturity of the opposition; and the lack of support from the major Western powers for radical change in the resource-rich centre of the African continent.
I illustrate the latter factor with the way the international community refused to accept the democratic decision of 4 August 1992 by 2,842 delegates at the CNS representing all strata of the Congolese population to abandon “Zaïre” and to go back to the majestic name of “Congo.” This was a confirmation of a decision by another popular assembly, the Constitutional Convention of 1964 at Luluabourg (now Kananga), to make the official name of the country “The Democratic Republic of the Congo” (DRC). In May 1997, the same international community had no problem accepting the actions of Laurent-Désiré Kabila who, by the stroke of a pen, changed the country’s name to DRC and proclaimed himself the new president of the country. The major powers, beginning with the United States, accepted this unilateral decision, like Mobutu’s earlier decision imposing the name “Zaïre” in October 1971.
Today, the CNS remains a major historical reference for political and social change in the DRC. None of the numerous conferences, dialogues and consultations that have been held since then have brought anything new in terms of democratizing the political system, cleansing the state of its deadwood and corrupt oligarchs, and empowering the people to ensure that they are not only the primary sovereign, but also the beneficiaries of state action. In accordance with Etienne Tshisekedi’s credo, the business of government is “le peuple d’abord” or the people first. This is the popular and progressive legacy of the CNS, and the alpha and omega of democratic and developmental governance in the DRC.
UNDP participant at a meeting of African ministers of public administration, AU, Addis Ababa 2006.
We have recently marked the 60th anniversary of Patrice Lumumba’s murder, and to commemorate the occasion ROAPE published an extract of a keynote speech you gave in 2018, in which you discuss Lumumba’s rise and influence as both a nationalist and pan-Africanist leader. Before discussing Lumumba, I’d like to briefly touch on the late Etienne Tshisekedi, the main opposition leader to Mobutu in the 1980s and 1990s, and father of the current President Felix Tshisekedi. You served at one point as a diplomatic advisor to Etienne Tshisekedi, who himself was an advisor to Lumumba’s Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) in the late 1950s. How do you position Etienne Tshisekedi in relation to Lumumba and the broader emancipatory struggle of which they were both a part?
Yes. As a law student at Lovanium University, Etienne Tshisekedi wa Mulumba served as an advisor to the newly created MNC for one year, 1958-59. Thus, I do assume that they did get to know each other, given the fact that only 7 years separated them in age, as Lumumba was born on 2 July 1925 and Tshisekedi on 14 December 1932. In September 1959, the MNC split into two separate wings, the radical and unitarist Lumumba wing, known as MNC/L, and a more moderate wing led by federalists under Albert Kalonji, known as MNC/K. Following his service on Mobutu’s College of general commissioners from 14 September 1960 to 9 February 1961 as deputy commissioner for justice, Tshisekedi went to work for Albert Kalonji in secessionist South Kasai, where he served as minister of justice.
Tshisekedi’s stoicism in the face of unending persecution and humiliations by Mobutu, Laurent and Joseph Kabila, was exemplary in his steadfast fight for democracy, the rule of law and the instauration of a government that works for the people. His courage and persistence recalled those of Patrice Lumumba. This made him very popular among the people, who reverently called him “Moses,” in the Biblical sense or, more affectionately, as “Ya Tshitshi” or “Big Brother Tshitshi.” By his courage, stoicism, and intransigence on key principles of democracy, justice, equality and service to the people, he was the Congolese political leader closest to the character of Patrice Lumumba. As for the son, he is nicknamed “Tshitshi Béton,” or someone as hard as concrete and capable of facing any challenge, including getting rid of the Joseph Kabila dictatorship.
Moving onto Lumumba, then, how strong an influence do you think his political legacy continues to hold in the popular Congolese imagination today, and across Africa more broadly?
Given the lack of regular polling on the knowledge and attachment that people do have about Patrice Lumumba and his martyrdom, it is difficult to assess the strength of his political legacy in the Congolese political imagination today. People do frequently hear his name on national radio and television, which remind them of his eminent status as our national hero and the 17 January, the day of his assassination along with Sports and Youth Minister Maurice Mpolo and Senate Vice President Joseph Okito, is a national holiday.
In Africa, boulevards, major avenues, squares, and streets are named after him. In most of the countries I have visited, the place I like the best is the African Heroes Square in downtown Bamako, Mali’s capital, which has a very impressive statue of Lumumba. When he was killed, many parents across the continent gave his name to newly born sons. Two of them were serving as members of the Nigerian Parliament when I lived in Abuja in 2000-2002. Kenya has a distinguished professor of law who goes by the name of Patrick Lumumba. Finally, many literary and nonfiction books were written in honour of Lumumba following his death.
Lumumba’s Independence Day speech remains a major treasure for African freedom fighters, even among the lost sheep. In the 1980s, during my days as a professor at Howard University in Washington, I had a visit to my office one day from Roberto Holden, then exiled leader of the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA). I asked him if it was true that he had always been a paid collaborator of the CIA. To refute this accusation, which was nonetheless well-established, he and his assistant stood up and recited Lumumba’s famous speech in its entirety, in French. I was so moved by this gesture that I momentarily forgot about his crimes in Angola.
Sixty years after Lumumba’s demise, the people who really know about his leadership and his trials and tribulations, in the Congo or elsewhere in Africa, are generally past the age of 75. The two generations who came after 1961 may have heard tales about him, read books and articles on him or seen films and videos about him. But they have very little knowledge of Lumumba because they live in countries that, in most cases, are ruled by political leaders who have no interest in progressive and visionary leaders determined to put people’s needs above their own selfish class interests. Patrice Lumumba was such a leader, and most of his peers in this category, including Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Mehdi Ben Barka of Morocco, Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Machel of Mozambique, Amilcar Cabral of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, and Ruth First and Chris Hani of South Africa, were destroyed by imperialism and their cronies in Africa through military coups d’état and/or assassination.
Lumumba’s name was also associated, positively or negatively, with the popular insurrections of 1963-68 for a “second independence.” This was a movement based on the grievances of peasants, workers, secondary school students and lower civil servants, including teachers and nurses, whose organic intellectuals had clearly shown that the flag independence of 1960 was a sham. Politicians had promised everything under the sun during the electoral campaign of May1960 but delivered nothing in terms of expanding freedom and improving the living conditions of the population. Since they were no different from their Belgian predecessors, the Congolese rulers constituting the new privileged oligarchy were in the eyes of the people “the new whites” because they were just as brutal in their repression as the former colonialists, on whom they continued to rely for military support, and ‘liars” because they excelled at making false promises.
The popular movement for a “second independence” was led by the former lieutenants of Patrice Lumumba. It had two distinct wings and fields of armed struggle, the Kwilu revolution, led by Pierre Mulele, Lumumba’s former minister of education and a Marxist-Leninist, and the Eastern or Simba Rebellions, led by Christophe Gbenye, Lumumba’s former minister of internal affairs and successor as head of the MNC/L. This is the wing that also included Laurent-Désiré Kabila, Thomas Kanza and Gaston Soumialot. Of the two wings, Mulele’s was the most politically successful by its revolutionary engagement and commitment to ordinary people’s interests, while the Gbenye wing was more militarily successful but betrayed Lumumbism by its brutal and unprincipled goal of regaining the power Lumumba’s lieutenants had lost in Kinshasa at any price.
Once they conquered a city, the first thing they did was occupy the residence of the provincial governor or district commissioner to find the loot, which included gold, money, and fine alcohol. They paid no consideration to people’s needs and interests, while pretending to be fighting for ordinary people. Rhetoric aside, they were no different from the new oligarchy led by army general Mobutu, intelligence chief Victor Nendaka and perennial foreign minister Justin Bomboko. Later, Gbenye would remain head of one of a dozen MNC/L factions and joined Mobutu’s and Joseph Kabila’s political coalitions; Thomas Kanza would become Mobutu’s candidate for prime minister at the CNS in 1992 and a minister in Laurent Kabila’s government; Gaston Soumialot became a very successful farmer with Mobutu’s support; and Laurent Kabila overthrew Mobutu with military support from Rwanda and Uganda in 1997. The multiple errors of the “second independence” movement and the co-optation of most of its leaders by the MPR, Mobutu’s ruling party, weakened Lumumbism as a political force, but the hold of Lumumba’s legacy in the Congolese imagination has remained strong thanks to Congolese popular music and popular urban art.
In June 2021, the return from Belgium of what is left of Lumumba’s remains, namely a tooth that one of the Belgian police officers who cut up the bodies of the three martyrs of 17 January 1961 took as a souvenir before dissolving them in sulfuric acid, will be observed with national honours in Kinshasa. In a continent in which funerals occupy a very important place in our culture, President Félix Tshisekedi is doing everything possible to lay Lumumba to rest in a manner befitting a great chief and warrior. This is another event that should have great impact in strengthening the hold of Lumumba’s legacy in popular Congolese imagination today.
For those readers interested in my views on Lumumba’s leadership, his legacy for Africa, and the role of the CIA in his assassination along with the Belgians, the British M16 and corrupt Congolese leaders, a good place to start is my blogpost published by ROAPE on 15 January 2021.
On a mission for the AAPS (African Association of Political Science) in Nairobi in November 1994.
I’d like to move on to discuss now your scholarly work. What has been the motivation for your historical enquiry over the years, and what do you regard as your most important work and contribution?
I am not a historian by training since none of my university degrees are in history. I have a B.A. in philosophy (Davidson College, 1967), an M.A. in diplomacy and international commerce (University of Kentucky, 1968) and a Ph.D. in political science (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1975). Despite my training as a political scientist, only six years of my academic teaching since 1971 have been in a department of political science: one year at the Congo Free University in Kisangani (DRC), two years at the National University of Zaire, Lubumbashi Campus, two years at Atlanta University (now Clark-Atlanta University) in Atlanta (USA) and one year at the University of Maiduguri in Nigeria. My longest two jobs as a teacher have been at Howard University (1978-97) and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, since 2007.
I taught in the Department of African Studies at Howard, a unit of the Faculty of Social Sciences, offering M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in African studies with a focus on public policy and development. At Carolina I am teaching in the Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies, which offers undergraduate degrees in African studies and African American and Diaspora studies. Moreover, I have held the presidency of both an interdisciplinary professional organisation, the African Studies Association (ASA) of the United States, the largest scholarly organisation of Africa-area scholars in the world, in 1987-88, and a disciplinary one, the African Association of Political Science (AAPS), 1995-97. With 33 years spent teaching in interdisciplinary departments, I see myself as an interdisciplinary scholar, and I am above all a scholar-activist.
As a youngster whose political awakening coincided with the struggle for independence in the Belgian Congo, and whose dream of becoming a medical doctor was derailed by my own choice to participate in civil rights demonstrations against racial injustice and discrimination in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1963-65, political activism has been an integral part of who I am since I was expelled from the United Secondary School (Presbyterian-Methodist) of Katubue in April 1960 for participation in protests in favour of Congolese independence. Consequently, my scholarly work has been focused on the political history of the Congo and Africa, with the aim of understanding colonialism, African resistance to foreign rule, the independence struggle, and the betrayal of the people’s expectations of independence by the new African oligarchy, which is more concerned with enriching itself and clinging to power to protect itself from political and economic crimes. My first major scholarly article dealt with the role of different African social classes in the struggle for independence, and it was published as the lead article in the December 1970 issue of The Journal of Modern African Studies, while the French translation appeared three months earlier in the Cahiers Economiques et Sociaux, the social science journal of Lovanium University in Kinshasa.
This article, along with my very first article published in the December 1969 issue of Mawazo, a Makerere University journal, on the massacre of university students in Kinshasa on 4 June 1969, set the tone for all my subsequent publications. The most important work in these publications is The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History (2002). This book, which I finished writing while working for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Nigeria, won the Best Book Award from the African Politics Conference Group (APCG), an affiliate organization of the African Studies Association and other professional groups. It is an organisation made up mostly of American political scientists studying Africa. To make it available to Congolese and other Francophone readers, I published an updated French version of it as Faillite de la gouvernance et crise de la construction nationale au Congo-Kinshasa: Une analyse des luttes pour la démocratie et la souveraineté nationale (ICREDES 2015), which is translated in English as “Governance failure and the crisis of nation building in Congo-Kinshasa: An analysis of struggles for democracy and national sovereignty.”
This is the main thread running through my work and comes out clearly in my major books and articles, such as my presidential addresses at the African Studies Association in 1988 and the African Association of Political Science in 1997 entitled “The African Crisis: The Way Out,” and “The Role of Intellectuals in the Struggle for Democracy, Peace and Reconstruction in Africa,” respectively. The first address seeks to answer a question that many African scholars have raised but which is best articulated by Claude Ake in the London magazine West Africa of 17 June 1985 with a simple interrogation: “Why Africa is not developing.”
The American sociologist Barrington Moore has provided the correct way of approaching such a question. Generally, he argues, intellectuals analyse society either from the standpoint of the dominant groups, which have a vested interest in mystifying the way society works, or from the perspective of ordinary people, who have nothing to lose from truthful analyses of their predicament. For him, it is this latter class perspective that comes closer to objective scientific analysis. He writes: “For all students of human society, sympathy with the victims of historical processes and skepticism about the victors’ claims provide essential safeguards against being taken in by the dominant mythology. A scholar who tries to be objective needs these feelings as part of his ordinary working equipment”.
At the same time, sympathy with the popular classes does not mean creating other mythologies that have nothing to do with reality. Here I take advice from the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the social responsibility of intellectuals, which includes thinkers like Socrates, Karl Marx, and Cheik Anta Diop. According to this tradition, intellectuals are to be philosophers and, as such, critics of the status quo. For to philosophize, Merleau-Ponty maintains in his book Éloge de la philosophie (In Praise of Philosophy) – his brilliant inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1953 – implies that there are things to see and to say. And what a philosopher sees and says may not agree with society’s conventional wisdom and dominant interests. This is a position that is in perfect agreement with the Socratic view of philosophical practice as an uncompromising quest for the truth. A quest, it must be added, that involves a critical appraisal of all ideas, values, and conventions. According to this view, the philosopher is one who investigates and announces the results of this investigation regardless of the price to be paid for her/his commitment to the truth, the ultimate price being, as in the case of Socrates himself, giving up one’s life.
These are the two basic principles of my scholarly practice and contribution to knowledge: sympathy with the oppressed and uncompromising quest for the truth. I have attempted to rely on them to elucidate the political history of the Congo and Africa generally from the colonial period to the present.
UNDP technical assistant at a meeting of ICGLR (International Conference on the Great Lakes Region) MPs at the People’s Palace in Kinshasa, March 2007.
Which political figure from Congolese history do you think has been the most misunderstood or overlooked, and is deserving of greater attention today?
In terms of political history and social analysis, the one intellectual who fits this category the best is Mabika Kalanda. A philosopher and a political activist formerly known as Auguste Mabika Kalanda, he received an excellent education in the classical Greek and Latin curriculum of Belgian schools at the famous Catholic secondary school of Kamponde in the Kasai province of the Belgian Congo. In 1954, he was one of the first Congolese to enrol in a full-fledged university at Lovanium in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa). He graduated in 1958 with two undergraduate degrees in psychology and education and political science. After one year of professional training as an assistant in the Ministry of Interior and the provincial government of Brabant in Belgium, he returned to the Congo as the sole Congolese member of the European-only corps of territorial administration officials.
Four years later, he would become the second person to hold the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs, from 14 April 1963 to 8 July 1964. When Pierre Mulele returned to Kinshasa on 3 July 1963 disguised as a West African following his training in guerrilla warfare in China, he apparently received support from Minister Mabika Kalanda, who gave him a new Congolese passport and helped facilitate his return to the Kwilu bush on 27 July. The popular insurrection for a “second independence” was about to start. A Lumumbist and a strong advocate of Lumumba’s vision for the Congo, Mabika Kalanda was head of one of the MNC/L factions at the CNS in 1991-92.
Mabika Kalanda wrote several books on different topics, ranging from the intra-ethnic conflict between the Lulua and Luba-Kasai to mythology, but his most important book with respect to postcolonial Africa is La Remise en Question: Base d’une Décolonisation Mentale (1967), in which the author calls for mental decolonisation in Africa by the calling into question of ideas, values and behaviour inherited from colonialism. The manuscript was sent to the publisher in 1965, but the book did not appear until two years later. By the time Mabika Kalanda began writing it in 1964, he had already dropped using his “Christian” or “European” name of Auguste, nearly eight years before Mobutu launched his “recourse to authenticity” drive in February 1972, which ordered his compatriots to use African names only and to promote African culture. Before that, in 1963, Mabika Kalanda had written a book in Tshiluba, one of the four national languages in the DRC, entitled Tabalayi, or open your eyes, for the Lulua and Luba-Kasai who are not fluent in French, but who share the same mother tongue, to resist the manipulations of ambitious politicians who were stoking the fires of division and war for their own interests.
Today, when you go into academic forums in the United States and in Anglophone Africa, you hear scholars heap praise on the distinguished Kenyan writer and academic Ngugi wa Thiong’o, formerly James Ngugi, as the person who first came up with the concept of mental decolonisation in his book Decolonizing the Mind (1986), although Ngugi himself gives a lot of credit to Frantz Fanon for this idea. Unfortunately, both Anglophone and Francophone scholars in Africa know little or nothing about Mabika Kalanda and his work. One can understand why Anglophone scholars could not have heard of him in the absence of translations. In the case of Francophone scholars, on the other hand, the main issue is the fact that we seem to notice great African intellectuals only after they have been discovered by Europeans or Americans.
When reading your work, and especially your most seminal contributions, the spirits of Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral are ever present. Could you talk a little about their influence on your intellectual development and writing?
I discovered Frantz Fanon in 1964 at Davidson College and Amilcar Cabral in 1968 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. One day, while walking past his office in the main building of the college, Dr Richard Gift, then a professor of economics at Davidson, called me in to show me the 1963 Grove Press edition of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon’s masterpiece. He asked me whether I knew this revolutionary thinker of African descent. He was surprised by my ignorance and told me that every Third World student must study Fanon. I took his advice seriously and went to the college library, where I found the original of Fanon’s book in French (Les damnés de la terre, 1961), other books by him, and several of his articles as well as critiques of his work in French scholarly journals.
Since then, Fanon’s writings have influenced my intellectual outlook and my analysis of African politics. I was greatly inspired by his central message to African intellectuals, that they should follow the path of revolution by going to the school of the people rather than be captured by the bookish knowledge of the Ivory Tower, to transform the inherited structures of the economy and the state to serve the interests of the wretched of the earth instead of those of the imperialist bourgeoisie and its lackeys in Africa. This message rang so true in my mind not only because it reinforced similar messages from other great intellectuals such as Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Barrington Moore, but also and more importantly because it reminded me of the martyrdom of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo.
With reference to Amilcar Cabral, I came across his brilliant address on “Presuppositions and objectives of national liberation in relation to social structure,” which is best known as “The Weapon of Theory,” in 1968. This is the speech he had delivered on behalf of the peoples and nationalist organisations of the Portuguese colonies to the First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America held in Havana on 3-12 January 1966. This and subsequent readings of Cabral’s other speeches and writings confirmed his affinity with Fanon’s central message. As a trained agronomist, his writings were fact-based and he combined a high level of empirical analysis with a very clear theoretical compass for understanding social realities, in addition to being a great strategist in the armed struggle against Portuguese fascism and colonialism. His writings on imperialism and national liberation were so superb that they were cited as an inspiration by the young Portuguese military officers who carried out the democratic coup d’état of April 1974, which is better known in Portugal as the Carnation Revolution.
The Amilcar Cabral Foundation learned of my appreciation of Cabral’s scholarly work at the 25th anniversary meeting of the African Studies Association, which was held in November 1982 in Washington under my leadership as the Program Director and chief organizer, that they invited me to the First Amilcar Cabral International Symposium held on 17-20 January 1983 in Praia, Cape Verde. These dates were chosen to coincide with the assassinations of Lumumba and Cabral himself, the first in 1961 and the second in 1973. I have had the privilege of participating in the 2nd symposium in September 2004 and the third in January 2013, all of which were held in Praia.
Lastly, it seems we are living through a period of some hope in the Congo, where in the first instance the courage, activism and sacrifices of Congolese people taking to the streets and in some cases laying down their lives made it politically unfeasible for Kabila to fulfil his desire to change the constitution and continue for a third term (and beyond), and more recently, the current President Felix Tshisekedi (Etienne’s son) has pulled off a succession of significant strategic moves to weaken Kabila’s political coalition and grip over the country, and replace it with what he is calling a Union sacrée de la nation (Sacred Union of the Nation). This is all very much ongoing as we speak, but what is your initial reading of the current political moment, and do you share the view that this is indeed a period of hope?
Africans tend to be eternal optimists, and I am one of them. In April 2019, on his first official visit to the United States, President Tshisekedi told a Congolese audience that his sees his job as that of ousting or taking down (déboulonner in French) the dictatorial and corrupt system that he found in power. Lots of people laughed at this statement, but he was dead serious about it. He started the process by unleashing the judiciary to let them do their job without being dictated to by Kabila and his cronies, and the prosecutors went after the President’s own chief of staff. Next came changes in the military high command and the Constitutional Court. The Kabilists overreacted with insults and acts of insubordination, particularly by the Justice minister and the Prime Minister, and fell into their own trap. The President stopped collaborating with them and cancelled the weekly cabinet meetings. Meanwhile, he appealed to patriotism and organized consultations with all strata of the population for a full month to gauge the spirit of the nation. The result was overwhelming support for breaking the coalition with Kabila’s political group and the desertion of hundreds of MPs from Kabila’s camp to the Union Sacrée de la Nation, the new parliamentary majority.
There is no doubt that some of the MPs who have changed political camps have done so in the hope of getting ministerial and parastatal posts. While fragile, the new majority made up of the pre-2019 opposition and the deserters from the Kabila camp will help the President in the short term in reorienting the country towards the rule of law and fiscal discipline likely to improve revenue collection to allow the state to pay civil servants and to provide to the population basic services such as water, electricity, health care and free education in primary and secondary schools. This will create a new departure for DRC citizens, who are tired of living in a banana republic, but one with an enormous wealth in the natural resources necessary to ensure decent livelihood. Popular support is one of the main reasons for the success of Tshisekedi’s political gamble, and the majority of the population stands behind the son of Etienne Tshisekedi. It is also the main reason for hope. Our politicians are aware of this reality. Being human, they do not want to see the people’s anger directed at them.
Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja is Professor of African and Global Studies in the Department of African, African American, and Diaspora Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA). He is also a member of the African Academy of Sciences (AAS), former president of the African Studies Association (ASA) of the United States and the author of many books, including The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People’s History and Patrice Lumumba.
Featured Photograph: Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja as a lecturer at the Lubumbashi campus of the National University of Zaire in December 1973.
In a far-reaching long-read for ROAPE, writer and commentator Yusuf Serunkuma argues that ‘democracy’ in Africa is not just a language of (colonial) exploitation, it is the practice of exploitation itself. Our challenge today, is to understand the colonial nature of this democracy – divide and rule, shameless free markets, foreign aid, and loans & media bombardment – and the myriad, so-called good-intentioned crusaders who promote it.
By Yusuf Serunkuma
If Marx had lived during our time, he would edit his timeless phrase about religion. He would write, as religion is the opium of the masses, democracy is the crack cocaine of the elite. Especially the African elite, we are high on it. As it quietly destroys our internal organs, we strive for more and of better quality. The vendors are merchandisers all the most aggressive and most persuasive. Their adverts have refused to add the cautionary label, “democracy smoking will kill you.” These vendors are not only ‘creaming away’ all the profits from their product, but also eating the carcasses of their victims. By the time the African intelligentsia overcome their addiction, they would understand that the enemy to their governance-development question has never been themselves, their bad education or bad leadership but rather the stuff they have been smoking as medication – democracy itself, its crusaders and merchandisers. Democracy is not just a language of [colonial] exploitation, it is the practice of exploitation itself. Problematically mixed with civil liberties, democracy has inextricably, irretrievably tied the African elite to exploitative capitalism, while at the same time, exciting, distracting and completely blinding them from real concerns, or even revolution.
Just the same way colonial exploitation thrived on divide and conquer, democracy does the same, but more tactfully, more elusively. Democracy thrives on a double-layered divide and conquer (a) it disconnects the elite from ordinary folks with the elite not only developing new tastes and cultures —not simply consumptive ones, but lifestyles and practices—but they also become obsessed with their own preservation. On the other hand, the lifestyles, struggles and pains of rural folks are exorcised as slight inconveniences, painful sores and humanitarian— not structural—challenges needing benevolent intervention. (b) the elite are then split into often terribly polarized “political parties” and other smaller camps, where sustaining or grabbing power becomes the single most important preoccupation. The task of the African intellectual therefore is to understand the colonial exploitative nature of democracy (divide and rule, shameless vulgarity of free markets, disruptive endless ‘human rights’ quibbles, foreign aid, and loans, media bombardment); and the myriad lofty seemingly good-intentioned crusaders.
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Let’s start with some basic seemingly obsolete questions: Do former colonial masters still want to exploit the resources of formerly colonised places – specifically Africa? By exploit I mean, to steal or benefit at the expense of the Natives of those countries. Stated differently, are Africans convinced that their former colonisers are happy to see them thrive, and the endless streams of aid and loans, and the gospel of democracy are all meant for their betterment? How about new powers such as America and China? Are they benevolent friends helping in times of need or honest business partners? Has this urge, ambition and plotting to pillage ended? Again, this is not about countries in West Africa where the colonial powers, specifically, France actually didn’t leave after independence but rather retained its grip on their former colonies through especially banking. I am concerned about countries where colonial masters actually “left” upon independence.
The response to these questions is an easy YES; all the world’s new and old powers are interested in stealing from weaker countries especially in Africa. A sombre cry by novelist Ama Ato Aidoo on 500 years of European exploitation captures the painful state of affairs, and a recent meticulous study by Angus Elsby on coffee and cotton captures this ongoing pillage. But the question is this: if Africans know that there are thieves all around them plotting, scheming, and conniving to steal their resources, why are they not resisting the way their predecessors resisted colonialism? Why do Africans feel and behave so weak, incapable, and conditioned to playball as their countries are looted by the same powers their anti-colonial mothers and fathers resisted? Why don’t we have a second wave of anti-exploitation struggle on the continent resisting the new manifestation of colonial-like exploitation?
Let me make one caveat here: this has nothing to do with the so-called legacy of colonialism – see Mahmood Mamdani and co. – because that would mean seeking to bring an end to a way of doing things, or simple removal of the structures that were left behind after independence. Mine is not a quest to decolonise but rather to see foreign exploitation in all its new forms. Perhaps my first proposition is that seeing and discussing western exploitation of the African continent through the language of colonialism, and its blighted offshoots, neo-colonialism, decolonisation, etc is not necessarily obsolete, but is actually distractive. It denies us the chance to appreciate the performatively non-colonial ways in which the continent is being looted. My core proposition is that we need to see democracy as the new absolute manifestation of exploitation. There is urgent need to go behind it, expose its traps, and confront its beastly smiley face. Africa will need to proudly pursue a de-democratisation struggle—which is certainly much more difficult than the anti-colonial struggle.
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Let’s return to my central question: why are Africans not resisting this new form of exploitation – democracy? My answer to this question is threefold: (a) the new exploiters, couched in the slick but highly deceptive, confusingly omnibus understanding of democracy (to include free markets, free and fair elections, freedoms and human rights, free speech, choice, people, representation, equality, justice) have deftly disguised the manifest exploitation of democracy. The face of democracy appears attractive and sophisticated as it displays and performs ironically non-existent Mzungu practices on governance in Europe and North America. As Ali Mazrui, 1997 succinctly demonstrated, the humanitarian values (freedom of speech, women emancipation and empowerment, freedom of choice, religion, etc.) believed to the guaranteed as so terribly inexistent even in the so-called democracies of the west. The denial of these values, Mazrui noted, only takes a different more subtle form. One doesn’t have to look too far to see how “democratic” America or the United Kingdom treats its black folks, workers, women, drops bombs on other nations for sport, continue to openly loot abroad, etcetera.. The beautiful decorated façade of regular elections, freedom of speech and religion mask a rather dangerous strain of thuggery and exploitation.
(b) there is an army of pleasant looking, beautiful, ever-smiling, sweet-talking and cash-dangling handlers and brokers pushing democracy with high-sounding and seemingly beautiful arguments about justice, rights, the people… etcetera claiming these are provided and guaranteed by democracy. Who could be against that…? They subtly ask. These handlers – these new colonial administrators – do not call themselves Governors and Colonial Lords, but rather “regional coordinators,” “country directors,” “programme managers” and academics. They operate without the brutality, overt racism and insults that defined earlier exploiters. They are constantly “seeking partnerships,” not dominions. They claim to “respect” national sovereignty and independence and will seek to execute their duties in the confines of international law. They will never tell you the history of so-called international law, which explicitly does not recognise Africans as sovereigns but rather just as Africans (see Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui, 1996). In doing all this, they never lose sight on the estate. These new exploiter emissaries include charming fellows in the European Union, American and British embassies, the United Nations offices, World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) and several experts of democracy based at British and American universities—studying Africa! They run tantalisingly named units such as the Democracy Governance Facility (DGF) where they narcotize thousands of local elites into inertia, spending endless hours in offices writing proposals and forging accountabilities (see Makau Mutua, eds. 2009).
These strategies have quietly, methodically captured all local media houses, schools, and all other spaces of active learning to push the democracy agenda into curriculums. In the end, they produce democracy thinking clones – literally, producing democracy’s Uncle Toms. Ever wondered why war-torn countries such as Somalia, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Libya, etcetera have intellectuals and politicians on podiums chanting democracy amidst ruins and dead bodies—entering contracts for oil and other mineral resource explorations, signing off loans and debts? Yes, it is the good work of these handlers.
Oftentimes, these democracy “merchandisers” operate under the language of development assistance. They flood the NGO sector, and civil society. This is in spite of the copious amounts of scholarship that vividly demonstrate that aid does not work (see Andrew Rugasira, 2007; Juluis Gatune, 2010; Dambisa Moyo, 2010). African countries surely do not need aid to stave off famine or prosper – no country ever did – but the givers will not listen. Even when asked to leave, they go away sour-graping like they loved the recipient country more than its leaders. But these new exploiters, wearing their false smiles have, through a series of lengthy and underhand methods—including manufacturing narratives of poverty, predictions of disease, fake annual indices on this and that—they actually force, squeeze, cajole, and harass an African country into receiving aid, but will never mention better terms of trade (see Slavoj Zizek, 2009). If they fail to push this through more technicalized forgeries and liberal concoctions, they’ll resort to outright violence. Examples abound of both covert and overt uses of violence: Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, etcetera under the cover of civil liberties. In truth, these are fortune hunters – like their colonial predecessors who rode on the deceptive language of civilising the Natives, these are simply sophisticated thieves who have managed to manufacture a common sense around their practice of theft as the best form of governance (elsewhere, see Pepe Escobar, 2009).
And finally, against such an environment of deftly disguised exploitation and aggressive brokers (c) the current breed of leaders – in the academia, media, and mainstream politics – have been extremely softened by urban life, and the perverse spread of bodily pleasures from Europe and North America. Softeners range from their beautiful wives (and, occasionally, husbands) and long streams of concubines, comfortable beds, to sweet foods, which they have not earned and are haunted by the fact that they do not deserve. Incredible amounts of money circulate among these fellows over and above the rent for their labour. It is a cartel. These comprador leaders and elites surviving off the crumbs of elite capital are condemned to perpetual praise and gratitude to their present oppressors – for enabling them access to these crumbs in the theft of their compatriots. Intellectually inferior, and without the backing of a traditional modernities upon which their predecessors —the anti-colonial intelligentsia—were bedecked, our new leaders are barebones, thrown into modernities where they have no histories and are simply drowning. When Partha Chatterjee writes about ‘tradition’ presenting the anti-colonial intellectuals with ‘a liberal rationalist dilemma’, that is, in the words of Lidwien Kapteijns, the challenge to be modern and traditional at the same time, he actually recognises the base upon which the anti-colonial intelligentsia constantly made reference as they negotiated their entry into a colonial modernity in a postcolonial moment. Our new would-be liberationists have neither and are simply swimming with the tide.
Spending endless hours watching European football on SuperSport, and admiring lofty English on BBC and CNN, googling stuff, and busying themselves on the myriad social media platforms, they cannot imagine abandoning these pleasures for thoroughbred struggle, which could benefit the collective. It is simply enough and too much. With the majority of this elite imprisoned at their small desks in parliament, NGOs and Civil Society, they are seemingly content with the status quo since they can ably afford the bodily pleasures mentioned above (you’ll find them endlessly chanting: ‘Compatriots! Do not risk throwing the existing order up in air – who knows where we will land !’). They are obsessed with their pleasures and freedoms guaranteed by democracy as the actual wealth of the country is quietly scooped up by their NGOs and Civil Society funders.
Democracy as divide and Rule: Lessons from Uganda
Ugandans are now familiar with constant images of mostly white folks from the European Union, and other western embassies driving to homes of leading opposition candidate after every election. Their agenda remains the most enigmatic. When it was Col. Kiiza Besigye, amidst the tension of a stolen election in 2016 —the Uganda confirmed gross irregularities on two occasions but refused to nullify the election— EU folks would drive to his home in Kasangati for some conversations. We will never know exactly what they discussed but it wouldn’t matter anyway. But they often had such a grand entry and exit from the dusty Kasangati road turning into Besigye’s home. From Kiiza Besigye’s home, they would then go and meet the incumbent, Yoweri Museveni. This Museveni meeting was never as prominently publicised. Most recently, with Bobi Wine becoming the lead opposition candidate in the country, they have been driving to his home in Magere, and quite often to his party offices in Kamwokya. Again, they often make quite an entry. From meeting Bobi Wine, they then travelled a few kilometres to meet Museveni where he assured them that Uganda was not “their enemy” [sic] before posing for pictures.
A delegation from the European Union (EU) Mission in Uganda and the US Embassy Kampala meet the Uganda opposition leader Kizza Besigye (26 February 2016).
There is no better manifestation, or blatant display of divide and conquer than seeing these democracy merchandisers strutting from one corner of Kampala to the other just like colonial lords patronising the lead politicians on either side of the rather superficial aisle. Their obvious but deftly disguised intention are threefold: (a) ensure that while these two groups remain diametrically opposed to each other, they do not disturb the peace creating a mess for business. Preach peace— there should be no disruptions to our looting! Because if they did, you will never know where it ends. (b) should either side emerge victorious, no alliances are lost, as all of them will consider you a friend. But more significantly, (c) once the cameras are gone, the EU uses opposition leaders as bargaining chips against which they force Museveni into tougher concessions. They constantly remind Museveni of their potential to support his adversary if he does not play ball. Indeed, if this were the 1970s, these fellows would actually sell guns to both sides, and then bring relief food supplies to war-displaced natives.
If colonialism thrived on the principle of divide and conquer, democracy thrived on a likeable but sadly, equally dangerous arrangement, ‘multi-party governance.’ As a principle, a multi-party order divides the elite into polarized camps, political parties, with one forming the government and the other, the opposition. After the country’s intelligentsia are divided, the democracy brokers and merchandisers proceed to conquer them. Deeply divided, and sometimes at the point of violence against each other, Natives never get the opportunity to stop and see their real enemy. The contest over retaining office becomes the major concern for the ruling party at the expense of developing the country. Instead of actually uniting to consolidate their position and use their combined brain power (as their anti-colonial intelligentsia did), the sitting government both imprisons and murders its critics—key human resources—leaving it empty of brain power, and terribly exposed. By the time the democracy thieves strike, the sitting president has sycophants and praise singers to consult with.
In the Ugandan example, we will never know (a) how much money Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni invests in keeping the office of president, since he has some of the most sumptuous classified budget votes—such as state house (spending USH550m daily – US$152,000) with a budget allocation above tourism, the lead foreign exchange earner). It is certainly in billions. Since he has life presidency ambitions, Museveni spends a great deal of time and money procuring members of the opposition. To divide them further. Museveni is also endlessly facilitating and privileging the security forces, which in 2020, took 10% of the entire national budget above health and agriculture. [There is no war in Uganda, and the budget has been as high as this for the last 15 years]. The guardian ministries of the man (state house and security) also get sumptuous supplementary budgets for classified expenditure! But the larger goal is to keep the president in power, since he sees a constant threat in the opposing side.
Parliament, which Museveni obviously does not need if there were no democracy merchandisers pushing him, is terribly bloated with over 530 legislators currently making it the biggest in Africa—bigger than South Africa and Nigeria. Annually, the Ugandan parliament burns USH1.3 trillion (approximately US$360m) of Ugandan taxpayer just for the theatrics of it. Just for the theatrics of it. Yet, everything of consequence in Uganda is pre-decided by Museveni before it is dramatized on the floor of Parliament. Additionally, Museveni employs hundreds of advisors, ministers, Residential District Commissioners (RDCs) with equally senior deputies, simply as part of his great retinue of patronage. The amount of money and energy Museveni spends on playing other centres of power especially the Catholic church, Muslims and the Buganda kingdom elite is equally immense. These are not simple cash-staffed brown envelopes—which are far too common—these are big sums ranging from billions to churches to four-wheel Land-cruisers. Just to buy off opposition in the name of democracy. But democracy merchandisers hold these items in his face, which forces him into concessions with specifically the foreign exploiters. Let’s now consider the related part of this argument.
Living in simple fear—not the principle—of the opposition (b) we would never know the amount of concessions, Museveni has had to make with the new democracy-wagging exploiters, the self-appointed vanguards of democracy to allow them to continue their pillage of Uganda, and him to continue governing. If he is not sending mercenary forces to Somalia, he is sending them to South Sudan, and DRC. The details of these concessions remain top secrets to the Ugandan public. The Ugandan parliament predicts that the country will need 94 years to clear this debt, which continues to surge every passing day. Business deals where Uganda is left with minority shareholding over its own resources such as oil are simply baffling.
Incidentally, all this rides on the wreck left behind by vanguards of democracy into African economies in the late 1980s when they coerced country after country into dismantling cooperatives that had enabled societies and the people to survive. The dismantling of cooperatives led to a rise in rural poverty after tilling the land had been made unprofitable. If this was no colonialism—an outright plot to exploit and break the toiling masses of Africa —then we’ll never appreciate the depth of its damage to the continent. Because after local economies were ruined, including the closure of all local banks – many of them closed without explanation – the vacuum left behind was filled by European and Asian banks. The Ugandan banking market is now dominated by foreign banks, with business-suffocating interest rates, making banks in Africa the most profitable in the world, yet the most inefficient—according to The Economist. It is extremely difficult, if not outright terrifying, for farmers and small scale businesspersons to access credit. Surprisingly, this so-called Washington Consensus is still enforced 20 years on – even when the damage is visible everywhere – and the WB has acknowledged its mistakes. What the fuck is this?
Yet farmers across Europe and North America are not on their own. They are heavily funded by their states. Take the example of Mali that Slavoj Zizek (2009) writes about, despite producing high quality cotton and beef, the two pillars of its economy, the country could not compete with the US and EU, where the same industries are heavily subsidised:
…the problem is that the financial support the US government gives to its own cotton farmers amounts to more than the entire state budget of Mali… the EU subsidizes every single cow with around 500 Euros per year—more than the per capita GDP in Mali.
These double standards are visible to every single soul from South Africa to Mali and Uganda (see also, Jörg Wiegratz 2019). The promotion of free markets remains a central idea to a so-called democratic government. But in truth, it is outright exploitation through the international dictates of structural adjustment and open markets which are pushed down the throats of Africans as a core parts of ‘democracy.’ Only in Africa!
To return to the question why is there no concentrated movement against this new form of exploitation dubbed democracy (its free market economics, loans, and grants, and foreign aid) and enforced onto only small countries? This is because of democracy’s disguised logic of divide and conquer. The language of democracy ensures the best brains of the country are split into conflicting camps with one obsessed with the holding onto the presidency as much of the intelligentsia remains blind but also conscripted to the networks and channels of exploitation.
The west’s no-change regimes, and PR presidents
One of the most powerful jokes of the 21st Century is the highly cited notion that “power belongs to the people.” It never does, has never, and will never. That in the exercise of democracy—specifically voting—ordinary folks wield their power to determine the ways in which they are governed, remains one of the biggest lies of our time. The lie continues that by this single act of voting, they have power to restore civility, end dangerous policies of previous governments such as removing American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, which since the start was based on fake intelligence, closing the very embarrassing Guantanamo Prison, or ensuring a minimum wage for workers etcetera. It is all high sounding nonsense. Ordinary folks have no power—except through violent revolution—but would be constantly manipulated into the belief in their electoral power.
The Slovenian theorist, Slavoj Zizek, was right when he claimed that while humanity was okay, 99 percent of people are boring gullible idiots. They have been deluded into belief of possessing electoral civil power. In truth, the world is run on self-interested authorities or autocracy. These take two forms, institutionalised and individualised. While in Europe and North America, authority or autocracy is institutionalised, it has tended to take individualised forms in Africa. The west has extremely autocratic institutions, which constantly change their public relations officers—often problematically called Presidents or Prime Ministers. The holders of these titles and offices actually have no power besides speech and celebrity. See for example, be it Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden, America’s domestic policy on immigration, the police force, black folks, guns, women, the minimum wage will remain the same. There will be minute adjustments that the very noisy American press will blow out of proportion discussing it endlessly. But by and large, stuff remains the same. American foreign policy towards the Middle East, Israel, Palestine, Iran and Africa will not change. Change only comes by way of violent revolution, marches, strikes, community organising, media activism, etcetera—not through the facades of elections.
As an African watching America from the outside, I agree with Syria’s Bashar-al-Assad’s conclusion that President Donald Trump’s crime was transparency about the intentions of America’s imperial interests. While Obama and Clinton smiled and joked through their crimes in the Middle East and at home, Trump was boisterous and embarrassingly candid. With more gusto, Trump simply continued Obama’s policies at home and abroad. Surely, Joe Biden is already doing the same — with just a little sophistication and disguise. American and European presidents are like shirts and dresses, while some make the wearer turn out smart, others could simply mess-up their appearances. But the bodies behind these fabrics remain the same. The truth is, heavily invested, albeit invisible Hitlers, Mussolinis, Stalins, Lenins, and Napoleons control American and European institutions. True to their power, these invisible Hitlers and Mussolinis blatantly took away the megaphone from Donald Trump for constantly embarrassing them with terrible PR. They went ahead and killed those smaller units that sought to challenge their power? [Please note, Facebook and Twitter are simply a manifestation, not the wielders of actual power].
The cycle of deception continues. Americans will always unite in stealing and killing from the rest of the world. Then back home, lobbyists, bankers and the super rich will squeeze life out of workers and African Americans will constantly be jailed and murdered, as women march for equal work equal pay like democracy never existed. It is all a deception.
The deceptive entanglement that democracy is more than elections, but all other civil liberties and humane treatment is terribly ahistorical. African history is replete with civil regimes that have no connection with our present perceptions of so-called democracy. In truth, the proposition that their democracy guarantees and is synonymous with humaneness and civil liberties is not just problematically ahistorical, but a dreadful deceptive. It is the trick. It is behind this claim that Africans have been duped, as their resources are being stolen under their noses.
Towards regimes of authority
After Tanzanian President John Pombe Magufuli had died, and the deafening elite noise boomed from every corner of the region, sloganeering about how Magufuli stifled dissent and free press, a friend of mine asked me to name the major opposition political party in China, and how many MPs they had in their parliament. I didn’t know. He then asked me to name the main opposition party in Russia, and how democracy—as dramatized in western Europe and North America—played out there. I did not know it either. He moved on to the much admired Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. He mixed it up with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Argentina, North Korea, Iran asking me to name their opposition political parties. It was such as mixed bag, and I did not know how to respond. He then asked me about the quality of life in those countries compared to say the “more democratic” Great Britain, Kenya, Uganda or even South Africa.
Humbled, I then recalled Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya which the UN constantly ranked highest in Africa on its Development Index. Focused on items including literacy rates, women empowerment, living conditions, and healthcare, Libya, for years ranked above more democratic spaces such as South Africa and Nigeria. On their part, Russia, China and Turkey have a higher quality of life for their populations in addition to being major economic powers. Why, if they aren’t democratic? Why don’t they have open markets? Didn’t structural adjustment reach these places? Before asking about the civil liberties in these countries, my friend raised the story of Julian Assange and the asked whether I had read a Mazrui 1997 essay discussing how similar the so-called democratic spaces in the west aren’t any different from so-called authoritarian spaces in the Islamic world.
The exploitative dangerousness of democracy is captured in Slavoj Zizek’s eulogy to Nelson Mandela that appeared in The Guardian upon his death. Concluding that Mandela was a failure—as regards the uplift the victims of apartheid from the backwaters of the economy, land redistribution . Zizek speaks to a difficult capitalist-democracy dilemma, and how leaders get derided and fought as authoritarians and sometimes even killed. Zizek writes,
A leader or party is elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a “new world”– but, then, sooner or later, they stumble upon the key dilemma: does one dare to touch the capitalist mechanisms, or does one decide to “play the game”? If one disturbs these mechanisms, one is very swiftly “punished” by market perturbations, economic chaos and the rest.
Although Zizek speaks to open confrontation from capitalists, we need to appreciate that exploitative nature of capitalism has thrived with ‘democracy’ as its utmost enabler, its methodology, which most importantly, makes resistance to exploitation divided and distracted.
Across Africa, this dilemma of whether to or not to touch the capitalist machine is as old as independence. Those leaders who played the game were either favourably profiled in international presses, given lucrative deals in mining and other resource exploitation projects. In other cases, they were knighted, and sometimes awarded with Nobel prizes. If they touched or simply threatened to dismantle this exploitative structure, they were punished, either with sanctions leading to removal from office, assassinated or exiled. They would be labelled dictators.
It is noteworthy that those few African leaders in history who actually managed to destabilise the machinery of new exploitation—euphemised as ‘free markets democracy’—had to craft something entirely different. But they were fiercely resisted. Even if they had actually been elected, as soon as they touched the machinery of exploitation, they were challenged. Especially on land and resources exploitation reforms, Idi Amin, Robert Mugabe, John Pombe Magufuli are noteworthy. The core reason for dispensing with their democracy is that it has tended to bind government into contracts (globalisation, and free market), sensibilities (such as certain political freedoms, international human rights regimes etc), which are often selfishly and racially applied onto weaker countries and then exploited. International exploitative capitalism would be dead if it were not offered democracy as its handmaiden.
Nelson Mandela’s Nobel Prize winning genius was in deftly deflecting ANC land reform and economic redistribution movement leaving the economy in the hands of white South Africans. And because Steve Biko, Chris Hani, Winnie Mandela presented a persistent threat to white capital, they were purged. It should be interesting to note that the land reform in Zimbabwe was for a while actually working despite the country continuing under sanctions and misinformation in the major media houses (see Grasian Mkodzongi and Peter Lawrence, 2019). Six years of John Pombe Magufuli would be characterised by immense international name-calling because he actually refused to cow-tow to the dictates of the democracy merchandisers.
Closely appreciating these exploitative dynamics of a mode of government—a more sophisticated mode of pillage and control just like colonialism—continues to be stifled by the democracy machine and lobby. Africans will have to take a stand. And standing up will be costly in terms of life and resources. Sanctions, death, wars will be created so as to reproduce democratic exploitation. But for the African who is convinced that democratic Uganda under Museveni or democratic Kenya under the Mwai Kibaki, Uhuru Kenyatta, or Raila Odinga rather than Libya under Gaddafi or Cuba under Fidel Castro has actually joined the thieves en-route to rob their father’s estate. Of course, there are empty comprador autocracies, which are as bad as democracy. We’ll discuss these another day. Of course, Libya’s Gaddafi would be more humane, and the example of what it has become is extreme. But democratic Libya would never return to Gaddafi’s Libya, unless all Africans stood up. Nor will democratic South Africa ever reach Gaddafi’s Libya. The values often confused with democracy were more often preserved under the Ottomans. The scholarship on the Islamic tradition is deep and explicit on humaneness, rights of women, the poor, social security, equality between races, workers, independent scholarship, and thus freedom of speech, but the language is never “democracy.” In truth, democracy is divide and rule. It is thuggery.
Yusuf Serunkuma Kajura is a columnist in Uganda’s newspapers, scholar and a playwright. In 2014, Fountain Publishers published his first play, The Snake Farmers and it was received with critical acclaim in Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda.
Featured Photograph: US Secretary of State John Kerry hosts a working lunch for Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari (July 21, 2015).
On 21 March 2021, Nawal El-Saadawi, Egyptian-born Marxist and long-time activist for women’s rights, died at the age of 89. Described as a feminist, author, activist, physician and psychiatrist, she was also known as Egypt’s most radical feminist. David Seddon celebrates her life.
By David Seddon
As a doctor, a political activist and a writer, Nawal El-Saadawi was a beacon of hope to women across the Arab world and beyond who struggled against the many faces and practices of patriarchy. She beat the drum for a radical and secular approach to women’s liberation. It was the patriarchal capitalist system and not ‘Islam’ specifically that kept women in chains.
The second eldest of nine children, El-Saadawi was born in 1931 in the small village of Kafr Tahla in the Nile Delta. Her father was a government official in the Egyptian Ministry of Education, who had campaigned against the rule of the British occupation of Egypt and Sudan during the Egyptian Revolution of 1919. He was relatively progressive and taught his daughter self-respect and to speak her mind. He also encouraged her to study the Arabic language and supported her education beyond school. Even so, El-Saadawi was subject to female genital mutilation at the age of six, and, when she was only 10 years old, her family tried to make her marry. Her mother supported her in resisting this.
El-Saadawi did well at school and eventually went to medical school. She graduated from Cairo University as a doctor in 1955 and married Ahmed Helmi, whom she met as a fellow student in medical school. They had a daughter, Mona. The marriage ended after two years. While working as a doctor in her birthplace of Kafr Tahla, she observed at first hand the hardships and inequalities faced by rural women. Her second husband was a colleague, Rashad Bey. Through her medical practice, she observed women’s physical and psychological problems and came to connect them not just with oppressive cultural practices, but with patriarchal, class and imperialist oppression.
She eventually became the Director of the Ministry of Public Health and met her third husband, Sherif Hatata, while sharing an office in the Ministry of Health. Hatata, also a medical doctor and writer, had been a political prisoner for 13 years. They married in 1964 and had a son. She was, throughout her life, far more than a distinguished medical professional, even if her experiences in this field provided her with a crucial foundation for her writing and her persistent lobbying against all forms of female oppression.
In 1969, for example, she published Women and Sex, confronting and contextualising the systematic aggression perpetrated against women’s bodies, including female circumcision. As a consequence of the book and her political activities, El-Saadawi was dismissed from her position at the Ministry of Health. She also lost her positions as chief editor of a health journal, and as Assistant General Secretary in the Medical Association of Egypt.
From 1973 to 1976, El-Saadawi carried out research on women and neurosis in the Faculty of Medicine at Ain Shams University. From 1979 to 1980, she was the UN Advisor for the Women’s Programme in Africa and the Middle East. In 1977, she published The Hidden Face of Eve, which spared no details of ‘the cuttings’ she had seen as a doctor in the villages.
In 1981, El-Saadawi helped publish a feminist magazine called Confrontation. She was jailed in Qanater Women’s Prison in September that year by the government of President Anwar Sadat. El-Saadawi stated once in an interview, “I was arrested because I believed Sadat. He said ‘there is democracy and we have a multi-party system and you can criticize’. So, I started criticizing his policy and I landed in jail”. While in prison, she formed the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, the first legal and independent feminist group in Egypt.
In prison, she was denied pen and paper, however, that did not stop her from continuing to write. She used a ‘stubby black eyebrow pencil’ and ‘a small roll of old and tattered toilet paper’ to record her thoughts. Her incarceration formed the basis for her memoir, Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, and the experiences of another prisoner at Qanater, nine years before she was imprisoned there, served as inspiration for an earlier work, a novel titled Woman at Point Zero, in which her main protagonist, Firdaus, was awaiting execution for killing just one of the men who had abused her.
She was released later in 1981, one month after President Sadat’s assassination. Of her experience she wrote: ‘Danger has been a part of my life ever since I picked up a pen and wrote. Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies’.
After her release from prison, and throughout her 50s, she continued her crusade, arguing that nothing would change until the whole system was changed. This meant not just the overthrow of patriarchy – and the establishment of full gender equality – but of the whole class system and the religious ideology, that sustained it in Egypt and throughout ‘the Muslim world’, and of the imperialist world order that helped maintain repressive capitalist states and oppressive regimes.
In the 1990s, death threats, particularly from Islamists, led to her going abroad. Now in her 60s, she was fêted in the West, particularly in leftist circles, and her exile from Egypt was spent teaching at Duke University in North Carolina as well as at the University of Washington. But she was critical of the Western feminist movement and spoke openly of her dream of a pan-Arab women’s movement. Eventually, in 1996, she felt able to return to Egypt, but was not prepared to moderate her views or her expression of these views.
She maintained a high profile, taking part regularly in TV debates in which she was very outspoken. She was aware from an early age of the interplay and mutual reinforcement of class, colour and gender and always described herself proudly as ‘a dark-skinned Egyptian woman’.
In 2005, when she was 73 years old, President Hosni Mubarak banned her from media appearances. When, in 2007, her publisher burned a play of hers, in which God was out argued and gave up, she declared that if she said all she wanted to say she would be burned at the stake, like Joan of Arc.
In 2008, in part as a result of her persistent lobbying, a law was passed in Egypt banning female genital mutilation; but it had limited impact on what was, after all, a deeply ingrained cultural practice. El-Saadawi did not give up, however, and continued to maintain a high profile. All this activism came at a cost. In 2010, after 43 years of marriage, she and her third husband were divorced.
She was awarded honorary degrees and prizes around the world, and at various times held positions at a number of prestigious colleges and universities, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Georgetown, Florida State University and the University of California, Berkeley in the US and at the Sorbonne in Paris. But at home in Egypt, she continued to be a thorn in the flesh of the establishment.
When, in 2011, popular protest broke out across the Arab world, she joined the crowds in Tahrir Square and called for the end to the Mubarak regime; but she also denounced the Muslim Brotherhood and the new President Morsi as ‘capitalist patriarchs tied to Islam and abetted by the West’. Now in her 80s, she continued throughout the second decade of the 21st century to make her views felt, in Egypt and elsewhere.
At the Göteborg Book Fair at the end of September 2018, El-Saadawi attended a seminar on development in Egypt and the Middle East after the Arab Spring and during her talk at the event stated that ‘colonial, capitalist, imperialist, racist’ global powers, led by the United States, had collaborated with the Egyptian government to end the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
She died, unrepentant and still defiant, at the age of 89. Her written legacy includes short stories, poetry, lectures, plays and novels, as well as her enormously influential early non-fiction books. Described as an Egyptian feminist, author, activist, physician and psychiatrist, she was also known as Egypt’s most radical feminist woman.
Nawal El-Saadawi (27 October 1931 to 21 March 2021).
David Seddon is a researcher and political activist who has written on social movements, class struggles and political transitions across the developing world. David is a regular contributor to roape.net and a former member of the Editorial Working Group of ROAPE.
Featured Image: Portrait by David Horst (6 April 2021).
ROAPE speaks to the socialist and trade unionist, Sandy Nicoll, the Secretary of the trade union, UNISON, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) about Professor Adam Habib, the new head of SOAS.
In a webinar with students from SOAS in March, Habib used the ‘n-word’ and then tried to justify himself. Nicoll’s union branch had an emergency meeting and carried a motion of ‘no confidence’ in Habib. 98% of those who attended voted for the motion and the other 2% abstained. The students and the union demand that Habib must go.
There are many reasons why people at SOAS think he should not be the Director. Firstly, it was unacceptable to use the ‘n-word’ in any context, with the possible exception of African Americans who have suffered the hurt associated with its use, and this alone, many argue, is enough for him to be sacked. He aggressively justified himself, attempting to cover his tracks by saying: ‘I come from a part of the world where we actually do use the word,’ which was taken as an excuse for using the word. Yet, as many commentators in South Africa have noted, this claim is simply inaccurate.
Habib never apologized for using the ‘n-word’ but merely for causing offense and discomfort. In addition, many claim, he was blatantly dishonest, arguing, for instance: ‘I did not say we use the word in South Africa,’ when it is very clear he was claiming exactly this. Others have criticised his astonishing arrogance, defending his statement, among numerous other examples, by saying some students ‘deliberately misrepresented [the] conversation.’
In this blogpost we post the original footage from the meeting, and – trigger-warning – the moment when Habib uses the ‘n-word’ in the meeting, and the immediate reaction from the students. We also include the full interview with Sandy Nicoll and his commentary on the meeting, racism at the university, the crisis at SOAS, and the efforts to push back against further restructuring and cuts.
In early 2021, anti-extractivist struggles won two major legal victories against Shell Oil’s operations in Nigeria. These wins represent decades of community organizing on the part of Niger Delta activists and residents. ROAPE’s Lee Wengraf interviews the environmental activist, Nnimmo Bassey, about oil, activism and Shell.
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In a January ruling, a Dutch appeals court found on behalf of four fishermen that Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary, Shell Petroleum Development Corporation of Nigeria (SPDC), was directly responsible for oil spills in the Goi, Ikot Ada Udo and Oruma communities, ordering compensation and immediate clean-up. The second was the February, Okpabi decision by the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court that the multinational parent company, Royal Dutch Shell, could be held liable for the actions of the SPDC subsidiary. In that case, over 50,000 members of the Ogale and Bille communities sued for environmental destruction caused by oil spills dating as far back as 1989. Both court decisions represent important wins and the culmination of decades of community organizing on the part of Niger Delta activists and residents, the oil-producing region of Nigeria subjected to over a half-century of extraction-driven pollution and environmental devastation. These cases are merely a glimpse into continent-wide devastation unfolding, as one grassroots organization has stated, “with the knowledge of Western and powerful countries that profess to champion human rights, accountability and justice.”
These legal developments raise important questions for community activists and the left. One, how can we understand these victories in the context of a shift by fossil fuel corporations towards declared goals of carbon emission reduction and expanding renewables? Multinationals have embraced what some have characterized as deceptive “green-washing” efforts while positioning themselves to seize the advantage in the profit-driven, “green gold rush” of the renewables market. Have these shifts provided a favorable context for communities to take on multinationals in the courts and wrest some form of compensation and justice? Finally, in a globalized, neoliberal economy with capital sometimes characterized as immune from regulation, what are the implications of these decisions and the role of the state in the Global South?
Nnimmo Bassey is the director of the Benin City-based ecological think tank Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) and a member of the steering committee of Oilwatch International. He was chair of Friends of the Earth International (2008-2012) and Executive Director of Nigeria’s Environmental Rights Action (1993-2013). He was a co-recipient of the 2010 Right Livelihood Award also known as the “Alternative Noble Prize.” In 2019, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of York, United Kingdom. Nnimmo has written extensively on extractivism and environmental crisis in Africa, including the books We Thought it Was Oil, But It was Blood – Poetry (Kraft Books, 2002), I will Not Dance to Your Beat – Poetry (Kraft Books, 2011), To Cook a Continent – Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa (Pambazuka Press, 2012) andOil Politics: Echoes of Ecological Wars (Daraja Press, 2016).
Nnimmo spoke with Lee Wengraf on these questions and the legacy of “a nation split by oil,” whose civil war (1967-1970) birthed a federal system anchored in extraction, foreign investment and a deregulated industry.
Lee Wengraf: In recent weeks, we’ve seen two significant legal defeats for Shell Oil. Both clearly represent victories for the farmers and fisherfolk living for decades amidst ecological destruction in the Niger Delta. In both, the question of whether a foreign-owned multinational can be held responsible for its actions in a country, where it’s extracting resources, is important. Could you speak about the importance of these cases and what these victories represent for Niger Delta communities and the struggle against extraction?
Nnimmo Bassey: The victories are extremely significant, especially because they almost reinforce one another. After so many years, Shell has been in denial and refused to accept responsibility for pollution that was clearly not caused by a third party [i.e., sabotage]. So, it was such a big relief that the appeals court in the Netherlands found that Shell had to compensate for traumas impacted by pollution that have been caused since 2004 and 2005. And then the Supreme Court ruling in the UK is extremely significant because that clearly stated that there’s no way to hide for transnational corporations like Shell. When they pollute in Nigeria, they can be held to account in the courts in their own backyard.
So that’s a victory for victims in Nigeria and elsewhere because often corporations behave like they can do anything, they are extremely “colonial” in their approach to extractive activities. So, this one brings justice to the people. It’s like a breath of fresh air for the people who have been choking on fossil fuel fumes over the years. And it should also be an incentive for oil companies to behave better.
As you say, in the Dutch case, the spills go back as far as 2004. There’s also been cases where the pollution stretches back decades. What has been the impact on Delta communities concretely?
The impact of the pollution across the Delta, apart from the [Nigerian civil] war, these are permanent scars on the environment. Take, for example, the spill and the destructive impact on the Ogoni communities, which is where Chief [Eric] Barizaa comes from, one of the plaintiffs in the case against Shell. That community does not really have any oil infrastructure: there’s no pipeline there, no oil wells. But because of the entire nature of the creek around there, oil pollution came from somewhere else and because it caught fire, and the entire community burned down. That community, the Goi community, is still largely uninhabited. There’s one location that I personally visit whenever I go to Ogoniland, and I just sit there for a few minutes and remind myself that this injustice simply cannot be swept under the carpet. I see children swimming in oil-coated water, fishermen fishing in this oil-contaminated water, hoping to catch something. Sometimes they do come out with one or two tilapia. The last time I was there I asked a fisherman to open the fish up and we found crude oil right in the belly. The fish they catch there are totally unfit for human consumption.
The case of Orumo is also very interesting. It was a leakage in the pipeline which may have been caused by corrosion, certainly it wasn’t caused by third-party interference: it was buried in the ground, about six feet below the surface, and the leakage was on the underside of the pipe. So, the arguments have always been about ways of avoiding responsibility and having the judges in the Netherlands say that Shell has a duty of care, I believe it’s a very clear signal, it’s saying that environmental misbehaviour cannot be ignored, they cannot always blame sabotage where there has been no sabotage.
And the Dutch case, with Friends of the Earth, it began when you were there. How did that first come about, the idea of bringing this to the courts?
Friends of the Earth International is a network of like-minded, grassroots environmental justice groups that work together on certain topics. Just before this case was instituted, this network was documenting as much as possible instances of pollution across the Niger Delta, in close collaboration with Friends of the Earth Netherlands / Milieudefensie. They visited the Niger Delta a number of times, visiting communities, documenting and generally providing support, because Shell is from their backyard. Then at a climate justice meeting in South Africa, in the early 2000s, where the idea of bringing this kind of litigation came up, discussions were followed up with Friends of the Earth Netherlands and Nigeria, and then it happened.
What are your thoughts on communities using the courts as part of an activist, anti-extractivist strategy? Of course, this is not a new development, but do you see this strategy gaining traction, especially as anti-extraction movements strengthen?
I do expect that more cases should be coming up. There are several cases in the Nigerian courts with corporations having this attitude of ignoring whatever the courts say here in Nigeria. So, finding that the courts in Europe and the Global North will be willing to listen to the victims from the Niger Delta should be very encouraging to people who have been ignored, who have borne the brutality of industry. I believe they are going to utilize this new opening to press for justice after so many years of being ignored as victims, as if their lives don’t matter.
And the case in Britain, for example, builds on a legal victory on the part of 2,500 Zambian villagers against Konkola Copper Mine plc and its UK-based parent company Vedanta from 2019.
You cannot believe the level of desperation in these communities, where they are just ignored and they are left with the wrong end of the stick continuously. Now the case in Zambia, if you read the history of that company who went in there with nothing, and then [pushed] their way into millions of dollars…. These are all very encouraging signs that activism by ordinary people – they are not professional activists, these are ordinary people who are taking their destinies in their hands and finding opportunities in the courts, because where else are you going to find justice?
When you hear of companies like BP and Shell who have made pledges to rid themselves of fossil fuels, what is your response to these plans?
They just make me laugh. You know, you can fool some of the people some of the time, you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. They will never fool me because, for example, the strategy that Shell has dusted off, which they have brought up before, they’ve said that by 2050, they going to achieve net zero. Now, we all know that net zero is not zero. What we want is zero emissions, not net zero, so you cannot keep on extracting, looking for new fields, moving into deeper waters and getting more fossil fuels, and you’re telling me that you’re working towards net zero. No, no, no, this is sophistry. I think we cannot accept that kind of arithmetic. We have to ask for zero emissions, not net zero, and be forced to watch over carbon stocks in forests and in trees while companies like Shell keep on polluting and assuming that the trees are absorbing the equivalence of their pollution. There are so many funny things, like investing in capture and storage instead of leaving it in the ground in the first place. So, I’m not impressed at all by this kind of announcement that they’re making. They’re just trying to buy time, to lure people and yield social capital to themselves so they can avoid the questions of how they are harming people who are living now and in future generations.
How would you characterize the role of the Nigerian government and its relationship with Shell more broadly? There seems to be an attempt by Shell to deflect some of the responsibility onto the lack of state regulation, which goes along with the sabotage issue. What do you make of the role of the Nigerian state in all of this?
I think the Nigerian Government is totally complicit in both cases because they are partners in the pollution. They’re running a joint venture with Shell so when the company pollutes, the government is polluting also. Whatever shame comes on Shell, if I may use that term, when Shell is held accountable, our own judicial system should be worried that Nigerians have to go abroad to seek justice, when we have a government that should protect them, and we have a judicial system that should be respected in the country. So, the government is totally complicit. Here is a colonial arrangement with transnational corporations, but that doesn’t excuse the Nigerian government. But the corporations are the operators, and they have a duty of care to ensure that the pollution doesn’t occur in the way that it has in the Niger Delta.
There’s an argument that’s been made, for example in the Zambian case, that African governments involved don’t have the ability to regulate these companies. What do you make of that?
I don’t think that is correct. What is correct is that the legal system does not make it possible to regulate industry. African governments have to change the mechanisms for justice, have to change the legal frameworks. The Nigerian legal framework for most of what happens in the oil sector was drawn up during the Nigerian civil war [when the oil producing region] territory was a combat zone. That is why these I characterize these laws as “war laws” and these laws are patently unjust when it comes to the people and the environment. The same mentality at the center of these laws is still complicating the processes for change in the area.
So, it’s not the innate inability of African governments, it’s the colonial nature of the regulatory frameworks. The legislative framework is also a media coup, a public relations coup, of the companies who are always able to deflect the blame on victims in many ways and investing a lot in polishing their images, so people don’t always think that these guys are responsible.
And finally, let me just say that, saying that African governments are unable to regulate oil companies is almost like saying that they are unable to regulate global bodies like the IMF and the World Bank. These are all agencies that are rigged against the African continent, and the same is true with transnational fossil fuel companies coming from outside the continent.
Nnimmo Bassey is a Nigerian environmentalist activist, author and poet, who chaired Friends of the Earth International from 2008 through 2012 and was Executive Director of Environmental Rights Action for two decades. He is director of the ecological think-tank, Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), based in Nigeria.
ROAPE’s Peter Lawrence writes how Covid-19 has hit capitalism when it was already confronting systemic problems. The pandemic has helped to connect the dots between environmental degradation and the development of global capitalism. Lawrence argues that only with organised pressure from below can a way through be found.
By Peter Lawrence
The impact of Covid-19 and the subsequent lockdowns has been unequal, lower-income groups, living in overcrowded housing and with limited or no access to running water to wash their hands regularly, have suffered the most in terms of contracting the virus and dying from it. The impact of Covid-19 is indeed a class issue, and not just in terms of health. Although there has been some decline in manufacturing employment, it is the service sector that has taken the biggest hit in countries where lockdowns have resulted in the closure of hospitality services, of entertainment and cultural venues, and other service provision, typically employing people on low wages with poor job security and leaving them in even more precarious positions.
Covid-19 hit capitalism when it was already confronting systemic problems. The neoliberal post-financial crisis austerity policies of the global North have increased the proportions of their working populations living on low incomes with reduced levels of social support. There has been a significant increase in inequality and a concentration of wealth into fewer hands. The top 1% in the world have 45% of the world’s wealth (Credit Suisse 2019), five men own almost as much wealth as the bottom half of the world’s population (Buchheit 2017). In the global South, inequality has been increasing. In China, the top 1% owned 30% of the country’s wealth in 2019, compared with just over 20% in 2000. The top 1% in emerging markets had 32% of wealth in 2000 and 39% in 2019 (Credit Suisse 2019). Wage growth in the global North has been lower than economic growth and has led to further inequality in incomes and wealth. This has dampened demand and depressed consumer goods manufacturing, resulting in a move to the global South where labour is cheaper, and markets are growing.
Advances in information technology in almost all areas of life have reduced employment opportunities in manufacturing and some service industries, while not increasing them by as much in the new industries. The existence of an increasing number of free goods, such as some computer software, or goods sold at ever lower prices, undermines profits and capital accumulation. The potential abundance of low-priced or free goods requires a very different principle of distribution from that based on supply, demand and price. In Marxist terminology, the development of the productive forces is in conflict with the social relations of production. Covid-19 has made matters a lot worse, forcing lower levels of economic activity around the world, with a fall in global GDP of around 5% in 2020, and for advanced economies a fall of 8% (IMF 2020). The second wave has led to an even larger fall.
The climate emergency threatens the supply of oxygen and water for the next generations’ chances of mere survival. Covid-19 has helped to connect the dots between environmental degradation and the development of global capitalism. Deforestation has brought to markets wild animals with new viruses to which humans are not resistant. Global capitalism has increased human traffic such that an outbreak of a virus in a distant Chinese market can very quickly infect others in far-flung regions of the world. So, questions have been asked not only of the effects of capitalist globalisation but of the future of capitalism itself.
Government measures to deal with the pandemic and its economic effects have challenged the idea of the neoliberal minimal state. Those countries that have shrunk state capacity have found themselves less able to deal with the virus. Where countries such as China and South Korea have developed or maintained strong state capacities to organise and direct, outbreaks and deaths from Covid-19 have been significantly lower. Among African countries, Ethiopia for example, with a strong state capacity and considerable experience of driving the economy, has been able to support conversions of industrial units hit by the economic downturn, especially in exports, into manufacturing much needed protective equipment and keep official Covid-related deaths to date very low (Oqubay 2020; WHO 2020).
One of the characteristics of neoliberalism has been the importance given to the state’s role in the maintenance of law and order and the protection of property rights. The more authoritarian right has further emphasised this role, not least in the US and, as we have seen, most notably in the shooting of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, police killings have reflected the racist characteristics of this authoritarianism. In Africa, police brutality during the pandemic has resulted in many deaths, as security forces enforce lockdown rules or use lockdown rules to pursue other agendas.
In South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria there were well-publicised police killings of people allegedly acting against the lockdowns. The consequence has been public protests against African states that have used lockdowns as a form of repression, but also expressions of solidarity by social and political movements, especially with health workers (see ‘Out of the Ruins and the Rubble’ on roape.net). We have come to know some of these movements through the participation of their representatives in the ROAPE workshops and in the webinar held last year (see ‘Africa and the pandemic’ on roape.net).
The economic consequences of Covid-19 for some African economies have already been devastating. South Africa, for example, which has had the highest number of cases by far of any country in Africa, has suffered a fall of up to 7% of GDP in 2020. The predictions for Africa as a whole are not as bleak. Given Africa’s economies are still heavily dependent on the export of primary commodities, a significant world economic downturn will severely impact on Africa’s foreign exchange earnings, adversely affecting government revenues. We have seen a sharp decline in the oil price and with the exception of gold, whose price increased sharply and continued to increase, non-oil primary commodity prices also slumped between the first and second quarters of 2020. However, by the middle of the third quarter most had recovered, reflecting uncertainty of supply. Predictions of export revenue declines are widespread, but because of the uncertainty of the effect of the virus on supply, revenues could stabilise or even rise if prices increase. The main exception is expected to be oil, unless producers restrict supply, more difficult because of the competing interests within the producer group of countries.
As in the global North, African government revenues have been hit by reduced economic activity during lockdowns and by increased health and other expenditures related to the virus and its effects. Budget deficits went from middle-single to high-double figures in many countries, and already the IMF has agreed emergency funding for over 30 African countries for debt servicing and budget support, although there has been reported resistance to taking up these funds because of the increased debt burden and the effect on countries’ credit ratings (see ‘The World Bank and Covid-19’ on roape.net). Nevertheless, UN forecasts suggest that Africa will need a US$200-billion support package to sustain services and stimulate economies to prevent a further 50 million people falling into severe poverty. It will also need a debt standstill and a facility which allows it to repay commercial debt.
In recent years, some African governments have begun to take the issue of structural transformation and the role of the state in that process much more seriously after the failures of neoliberalism. In various parts of Africa, there is evidence of industrial strategies being developed to effect structural transformation, with the state playing a key role in directing and supporting new industrial economic activity, broadly defined, although this may enable an accumulation of capital by a corrupted political class rather than accumulation of surplus for investment in development for the whole population. The consequences of Covid-19 will require a much greater involvement of the state in managing the economy in the near future.
The problem for progressive forces in African countries seeking initially to move the state towards a more interventionist and directive economic strategy is whether the decades of running down the capacity to do this makes such state involvement possible. Even if there is sufficient capacity, what will push them into taking a more interventionist role that is to the benefit of the whole population, and especially those in extreme poverty? For it is only with organised pressure from below that governments will move in such a direction. The serious abuses of power by the forces of the state during the pandemic, referred to above, do not augur well for the possibilities of such organisation being tolerated. Meanwhile, those of us in the global North, and this journal in particular, will continue to express our solidarity with movements in Africa that seek to affect a development strategy to change people’s lives for the better so they no longer struggle for mere survival.
A longer version of this blogpost appeared in Peter Lawrence’s editorial to ROAPE Volume 47/ Issue 165.
Peter Lawrence is an editor on ROAPE. He is also an Emeritus Professor of Development Economics at the Business School at Keele University and has taught in Tanzania, Uganda, and Canada and spent periods of research in Tanzania, Hungary, Spain and India. Lawrence is a founding member of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group.
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