Class, race and whiteness

March 23, 2021

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

By Nicola Ginsburgh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

Samir Amin – a Marxist with blood in his veins

ROAPE

March 18, 2021

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

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My encounter with Samir Amin

By Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Amin’s academic and activist work

By Francisco Pérez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Permanently involved in the main struggles of the day

By Ndongo Samba Sylla

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The contemporary relevance of uneven development

By Francesco Macheda and Roberto Nadalini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Making sense of an exploitative global system

By Fathimath Musthaq

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A heart and head always looking below and to the left

By Max Ajl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enduring Relevance: Samir Amin’s radical political economy

ROAPE

March 16, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

What is Samir Amin’s approach to Political Economy?

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

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

Thinking structurally

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

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

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

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

Thinking temporally

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

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

Thinking politically

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

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

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

Thinking creatively

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

Beyond Samir Amin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

Senegal Uprising: End impunity for Macky Sall’s regime

ROAPE

March 11, 2021

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

By Boubacar Boris Diop and Moussa Sene Absa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A climate of terror

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

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

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

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

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

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

International impunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signatories (100):

Boubacar Boris Diop, author and journalist;

Moussa Sene Absa, filmmaker;

Rachel Ndeye Khan, actress and jurist;

Maky Madiba Sylla, musician and filmmaker;

Florian Bobin, researcher in history;

Khadim Ndiaye, historian;

Dip Doundou Guiss, artist;

Jaly Badiane, activist;

Fou Malade, artist;

Wasis Diop, musician;

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

Thiat Kër Gui, artist;

Demba Moussa Dembélé, economist;

Ndeye Fatou Fall, lawyer;

Kilifa Kër Gui, artist;

Abdarahmane Ngaïde, historian;

Marie Parsine-Diop, merchant;

Oumar Dia, researcher in philosophy (UCAD);

Xuman, artist;

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

Khalil Diallo, Senegalese writer;

Beatrix Daumas-Diatta, social worker;

Ramatoulaye Ndiaye, nurse;

Saratou Moussa Sam, lawyer;

Mad Zoo, artist (RBS Crew);

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

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

Simon, artist;

Aissatou Ba, social worker;

Amadou Bator Dieng, journalist, founder of Kirinapost;

Banouna Sam, consultant and pan-Africanist activist;

Hamidou Dia, researcher (IRD);

Rokhaya Loum, artist;

Babacar Faye, English teacher;

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

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

Sun Sooley, artist;

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

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

Bathie Samba Diagne, historian;

Dieynaba Madina Diallo, teacher;

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

Seika (Awa Mbengue), artist;

Fatou Fall, jurist in defense, security and peace;

Nitt Doff, rap artist;

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

Fatou Niang Sow, telecommunications manager;

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

Djimby Ka, communication executive;

Mike Sylla, stylist;

Sokhna Aïcha Mbodji, chef;

Adam Sene, artist;

Tamsir Ousmane Diagne, financial expert;

Socrates (Mamadou Diop), filmmaker and writer;

Diane Regisford, academic;

Ngoné Sylla Diop, city councillor;

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

Fatou Bintou Sall, web journalist;

Dread Wone, artist;

Bigué Marcelle, project manager (Legs Africa);

Papa Dieye, land development engineer and environmentalist;

Big D, artist;

Jeanne Dior Corréa, administrative technician;

Khady Tamba, lecturer in English linguistics (UCAD);

Ass Malick, artist;

Adja Coumba Gueye, social media manager;

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

Ndeye Yama Diouf, dancing artist;

Malick Diagne, professor of philosophy (UCAD);

Obee (Fatima Ndiaye), artivist and entrepreneur;

Alune Wade, musician;

Fabienne-Joseph Mérélix, artist;

Pope Ibrahima Ndiaye, dancer;

Aminata Diouf, entrepreneur;

Ombrezion, artist;

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

Ndeye Awa Fall, stylist;

Tchiko, artist;

Kouro Wane, high school teacher;

Mamadou Coulibaly, physics teacher (UCAD);

Sokhna Diariatou Ba, higher technician in architecture;

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

Moh Dediouf, artist;

Marie Mendy, administration secretary;

Djibril Keïta, sociologist;

Boc’s Amandla, artist;

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

Dread Maxim, artist;

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

Bamba Diop, filmmaker;

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

Souleymane Ndiaye Sall, head of department in logistics;

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

Binou Ndoye, financial analyst;

Stefane Kabou, artist;

Arame Fall, auditor;

Max Barry, artist;

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

Abel Proença, artist;

Amilcar Barsely, author.

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

ROAPE

March 9, 2021

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

By Ben Radley and Sara Geenen

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

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

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

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

Capital Formation and Mechanisation in Congolese ASM

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

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

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

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

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

Corporate-State Suppression

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

ROAPE

March 4, 2021

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

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

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

Can you talk a little about your research and activism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insurgent Decolonisation: Ndlovu-Gatsheni on the sins of colonialism

ROAPE

March 2, 2021

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

By Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni

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

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

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

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

The ‘ethics’ of empire?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afro-pessimism: Seeing disorder as the norm

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

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

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

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

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

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

On colonisation, colonialism, coloniality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four journeys of colonial capital and entrapment

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roadblocks to development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Manufacturing Madness: Omar Blondin Diop against French educational elitism

ROAPE

February 25, 2021

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

By Florian Bobin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Sucker Bait” by Omar Blondin Diop

LLG – ULM – CVB / Language
Chicks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROAPE

February 23, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can Africa speak?

ROAPE

February 19, 2021

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

By William Shoki

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ROAPEJournal

ROAPEJournal

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Samir Amin – a Marxist with blood in his veins

My encounter with Samir Amin

Amin’s academic and activist work

Permanently involved in the main struggles of the day

The contemporary relevance of uneven development

Making sense of an exploitative global system

A heart and head always looking below and to the left

Senegal Uprising: End impunity for Macky Sall’s regime

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

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Insurgent Decolonisation: Ndlovu-Gatsheni on the sins of colonialism

Manufacturing Madness: Omar Blondin Diop against French educational elitism

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

Can Africa speak?

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The Day Rhodes Fell: Ten Years After

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