The Review of African Political Economy is looking for two affiliates to join the journal’s Editorial Working Group (EWG) for a year starting from January 2021.
We are particularly interested in applications from activists in the African diaspora who have a passion and a focus on Africa’s politics, history, and economics.
We would also consider African nationals currently studying for a PhD in the social sciences or humanities with an interest in the journal’s academic and activist work. Preference will be given to applicants who will have finished their fieldwork by January 2021.
Obviously these two elements are not mutually exclusive.
The remit of the journal is as follows: ‘Since 1974, RoAPE has provided radical analysis of trends, issues and social processes in Africa, adopting a broadly materialist interpretation of change. It pays particular attention to the political economy of inequality, exploitation and oppression, and to struggles against them, whether driven by global forces or local ones (such as class, race, ethnicity and gender). It sustains a critical analysis of the nature of power and the state in Africa in the context of capitalist globalisation.’
The EWG is eager for the journal to engage with the new wave of global activism that has risen to meet the crises of the current moment and to find ways to connect struggles in Africa with those of the African diaspora. We hope that our new affiliates will take a leading role in helping us to connect with these important developments and bridge the gap between our academic analysis and the crucial work of activists on the ground.
The person appointed would get some first-hand knowledge of editing a journal and contributing to some of the tasks involved as part of the ROAPE collective. This will include writing, commissioning and editing contributions for our website, roape.net, which includes blogs, debates, conference reports and interviews among its content (we would be particularly enthusiastic to welcome an affiliate who is experienced with social media). Additional experience might also include contributing to other aspects of the journal’s work, for example, through book reviews, refereeing of articles, support for conferences and workshops, IT, social media and communications.
The journal hopes to gain a broader input, particularly from young people who are actively engaged in radical research and activism. They will have to commit to attending as many EWG meetings as possible and to taking on responsibilities. We also encourage affiliates to submit at least one substantial piece of work to the journal or website whilst they are in office (with support).
If you are interested in knowing more or in putting forward your name, please submit the following:
1) A statement on your reasons for wanting to become an affiliate (500 words max).
2) A CV, which should include:
your name and contact details
name and email address of your supervisor (if relevant)
your country of origin
area or topic of research
an account of any activist experience
any publications to date
experience in relevant fields (event organising, IT etc.)
The deadline for applications is the end of Friday 13 November 2020. If you have any questions, please contact the Chair of the Editorial Working Group, Hannah Cross. Applications should be returned to Hannah via email at h.cross@westminster.ac.uk.
Featured Photograph: The prominent Scottish slave-owner Robert Milligan outside the Museum of London Docklands – the statute was removed on 9 June (Chris McKenna, 9 June 2020).
Brahim Rouabah challenges what is referred to as ‘the post-colonial’ era, instead he proposes a decolonial approach that refers to the ‘colonial counter-revolution’. In a detailed analysis of Algeria, Rouabah demonstrates the horizons such an approach unlocks and the new perspectives it allows to emerge.
By Brahim Rouabah
The 20th century was a century of revolutions. The process of decolonization, despite its imperfections, was undoubtedly one of the most significant turning points in recent history. The tide of peoples across the globe rising up to sweep away the structures of domination and subjugation to which they had been subjected for centuries constituted an unquestionably world altering force. This dynamic unlocked a wide range of new horizons and unleashed a plethora of emancipatory energies and liberatory political projects. Ranging from Pan-Africanism to Afro-Asianism, from Third Worldism to Muslim Internationalism, from Pan-Arabism to Tricontinentalism; peoples in the Global South rediscovered their voices and their power and were not afraid to use them.
A widespread conception of this history regards decolonization more as a point in time rather than a process. This misconception of historical time imagines categories such as colonial and postcolonial, colonized and independent, subjugated and sovereign as clear cut categories, and mistakes their analytical function for their actual empirical distinctiveness. An a priori commitment to thinking about history and historical time in terms of brakes, ruptures and discontinuities may do more to distort than to clarify. Approaching institutions, systems and structures of power that have been developed over centuries as phenomena that have lives as well as afterlives may help us to demystify the seeming incomprehensibility of the contemporary human condition.
It would be naive to think that the sovereignty of postcolonial states became absolute on the official day of their independence. It would be equally naive to believe that former colonial powers simply dragged their tails of defeat back to Europe and forever closed the colonial chapter of their history and opened a new page in which their former colonial subjects are now both perceived and treated as equals and deserving of equal rights.
The ‘Second World War’ and the process of decolonization blew the final whistle on the old colonial world in which the British and French empires reigned supreme. The United States was ushered in as the heir and torchbearer for this now centuries old racial capitalist colonial project. In the context of the Cold War and the strong ideological and material competition presented by the Soviet Union, the survival of the colonial project depended upon the maintenance, and where possible, the restoration and improvement of the colonial infrastructures that had been erected and nurtured over, at least, the preceding four and a half centuries by Western European colonial powers.
The passing of this old colonial portfolio under new management and its integration into a neo-colonial and neo-imperialist conglomerate under US leadership – with the purpose of maintaining, and where possible, enhancing the supremacy of a transnational White European Christian aristocracy (Whiteness) over the world. As a process, this is what I refer to here as the ‘Colonial Counter-Revolution.’
The Colonial Counter-Revolution
Every revolution, as Sadri Khiari has observed, ‘is accompanied by a counter-revolution. It is almost a historical law.’ [1] The counter revolutionary calculus is almost always three-fold: 1) Counter-revolutionary forces, during times of political upheaval, ideally seek to enhance, deepen, and expand their control and advantages. This is considered the best-case outcome. 2) In the absence of the possibility for the former, the maintenance of status quo ante acquires the utmost importance and urgency. 3) Damage limitation is the counter revolutionary force’s last resort and least preferred outcome.
More often than not the first and third options tend to be the most likely outcomes. In the first case, not only does the counter-revolution seek to re-establish the status quo ante, but also to eradicate the capacity for revolutionary action. The opposite scenario is true in the third case. That is to say, revolutionary forces always seek to eliminate the conditions that lead to revolution in the first place.
The hostile takeover of old colonial architectures coupled with the newly created ones (e.g. the Zionist project) required a neo-colonial division of labor, in which the older European empires were to perform the functions of subsidiaries in their traditional spheres of influence (e.g. British Commonwealth, Françafrique, etc), while the US focused its energies on getting its ‘backyard’ (South and Latin America) in order. After relative success over a few decades, the colonial counter-revolution entered its second phase in the 1990s, triumphantly celebrating the fall of the Soviet Union whose rivalry had until then created the space for non-aligned politics.
The first half of the colonial counter revolution had a militaro-financial character. Stuck between the rock of odious debt traps and the hard-place of military/palace coups, the ‘formerly’ colonized world was to be governed through the carrot of ‘financial assistance’ and the stick of imperialist interventions and coups d’états. It would perhaps not be an exaggeration to assert that there have been more coups since the mid-twentieth century than in any other era of recorded human history.
On the ideological level, in addition to countering Soviet Communism, the colonial counter-revolution sought and continues to seek to crush, or at least discredit, any emancipatory political project and ideology, even when expressed in Westphalian term. The underpinning values common to all these global south projects – Tricontinentalism, Afro-Asianism, Pan-Africanism, Muslim Internationalism – included an awareness of a shared condition and common destiny, a sovereigntist/anti-colonial/anti-imperialist commitment to peoples’ self-determination, and a civilizational outlook anchored in an ethos of peaceand justice rather than power as the only way to resist global imperial arrogance and exploitation and to create a better, more humane world.
The struggle to end settler-colonial rule in Palestine formed the basis of a strong ‘postcolonial’ consensus, and hence became the single most important target of the colonial counter-revolution. Normalization of the Zionist settler-colonial, racial capitalist project in some ways became the litmus test for assessing the progress of the colonial counter-revolution.
Algeria and the Colonial Counter-Revolution
The colonial transfer of power, in ‘post-colonial’ states, to minority groups or illegitimate royal dynasties and/or military juntas is hardly a point that needs to be demonstrated. Algeria’s anti-colonial revolution, despite its specificities, was no major exception to the general rule. Realizing it was swimming against the tide, the fifth republic in France opted for the strategy of infiltration as the most effective way to destroy the Algerian revolution from the inside.
On the eve of Algeria’s independence, De Gaulle, along with Nasser and Hassan II, propped up elements of the Algerian Liberation Army stationed in Tunisia and Morocco (the Frontier Army) with armaments and a group of highly trained Algerian ‘deserters’ from the French colonial army (DAF Officers), enabling them to be in the best position to take over the nascent Algerian state. At the helm of the frontier army, Col. Houari Boumediene who lacked in political capital and the revolutionary credentials and legitimacy that other historic figures held in the eyes of the struggle inside Algeria. The Colonel allied himself with Ben Bella and the DAF officers to make up for these short comings.[2]
The first post-independence act of this bloc was to crush a mostly unsuspecting interior army and to topple the then civilian provisional government of the Algerian Republic. This outside-backed coup, in the summer of 1962, was the foundational act of the ‘post-colonial’ Algerian state. The exiling of historic revolutionary figures such as Hussein Ait-Ahmed, Mohamed Boudiaf, Mohamed Khider and Krim Belkacem, to mention just a few, and the eventual assassination of the latter three provide a clear picture of the orientation of Boumediene’s regime. The execution of Col. Chaabani for opposing Boumediene’s favoring of DAF officers in the ‘The People’s National Army,’ the new appellation given to the ‘Liberation Army’, and his toppling of Ben Bella less than three years later, are also instances that demonstrate how Boumediene’s personal ambitions blinded him to the ways in which he played into De Gaulle’s hands and served, perhaps unintentionally, the colonial counter-revolution.
From the late 1980s onwards, a few years after Boumediene’s mysterious death, the top brass of the Algerian army mostly consisted of ex ‘deserters’ from the French colonial army, including those who fought tooth and nail for Algeria to remain a French settler-colony. For example, Gen. Khaled Nezzar, who joined the French colonial army two years after the start of the 1954 war of liberation, was made Army Chief of staff in 1988 in return for his leading role in the killing of over 500 Algerians in the massacre of 5 October 1988.[3] A post he would occupy for two years before being promoted to defense minister until July 1993.
Similarly, Gen. Mohamed Lamari who joined the liberation army in late 1961/early 1962 became Army Chief of Staff in 1994 and was to hold on to the post for an entire decade. Lamari admitted in an interview to the French Newspaper, Le Point, in 2003 that he participated in the Battle of Algiers. That is to say on the French side, fighting for Algeria to remain French.[4]
This sociology of elites is indispensable in understanding Algerian postcolonial history in general, and the last four decades in particular. It is all the more necessary when one takes into account the fact that seven out of the eight army generals responsible for the 11 January 1992 coup in Algeria were former officers in the French colonial army who had mostly joined the Algerian Liberation Army only in the eleventh hour.
The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end of the Cold War annihilated the condition sine qua non for non-alignment politics. This ‘End of History’ moment and shift to global unipolarity also marked the beginning of the second phase of the colonial counter-revolution.
Within this context and with the ascendance to power of this officer class in Algeria, the 1992 coup against popular will marked a turning point for the Algerian state and army, as well as for their relationship to the Algerian people. The outward looking, anti-colonial and liberatory doctrine of the Algerian army was transformed into an inward-looking, sub-colonial, and repressive doctrine. The liberation army whose raison d’être was the defense of sovereignty and self-determination of the people was turned into an army whose function was to repress the people. The ‘enemy’ was no longer northern imperialist powers, but Algerians themselves.
Schooled in the French School of counter-insurgency, this officer class massacred a people it considered insurgent enemies, plundered and ransacked the country, mortgaged its natural resources, placed the noose of indebtedness around its neck and handed the other end of the rope to global colonial counter revolutionary forces in exchange for their support. In some ways a class of neo-colons came into being during this period. Having internalized a racialized hierarchy of humanity, these neo-colons have come to despise Algerians for constantly reminding them of who they are. In some ways, one can see both Malek Bennabi’s colonial co-efficient at work here, and the deep psychological scars, identified by Frantz Fanon, that colonialism has carved into the colonized soul.[5]
Buying into a Hegelian master-slave dialectic and failing to realize that the game is rigged, this comprador class becomes unable to see the fact that, as house-slaves, their master’s recognition is a chimera and his reciprocity will forever outrun them. [6] The more a slave self-negates to please their master, the more disdain they solicit from them. As conveyor belts for northbound wealth and resource transfers, postcolonial comprador elites are stuck in a limbo between the popular hostility and lack of legitimacy they feel at ‘home’ and the insatiable appetite of their masters on whose political support and continued goodwill (jurisdiction over ill-gotten fortunes) they depend. As such they are condemned to an existence not dissimilar from that of laboratory mice running on wheels.
This state of alienation which comprador elites experience activates within them the defense mechanism of projection. The sensations of shame, self-hatred, nauseating revulsion that these elites feel lead them to violently project these pathologies onto the native nay-sayer. The constant accusations and defamation of revolutionary movements, opposition figures, and independent civil society actors as agents of foreign powers (la main étrangere) is a case in point.
Just like there is nothing juicier for a corrupt cop than evidence of an organized crime boss’ guilt, there is nothing more appealing to a global policeman than an illegitimate and corrupt comprador elite with blood on its hands, to blackmail. Except for its barefacedness, Donald Trump’s mob-like treatment of gulf monarchies is hardly a novelty. In fact, blackmail has been a key technology of global governance and a privileged weapon in the colonial counter-revolution’s arsenal all along.
Caption reads: The constitutional referendum is a trick to transform the Algeria of Martyrs into an Algeria of collaborators.
Holding the crimes committed by this officer class, and its acolytes in Algeria, in the 1990s over their heads, foreign powers twisted their arms and coerced them into making unprecedented compromises that, in some cases, can only be spoken of in a language of high treason.
Algeria Post-9/11
Since 2001, there has been the pledge of full intelligence sharing, guaranteed energy supply, opening up of the Algerian market for foreign capital,[7] cooperation with NATO, backing of the global ‘war on terror’, and allowing foreign intelligence agencies to operate in Algeria and rape Algerian women literally with impunity.[8] In addition, we have seen ever more concrete moves towards normalization with Zionism, resuscitating the French economy following the 2008 financial crisis, opening the air space for French neo-colonial wars in Africa and U.S. intelligence aerial gathering, providing logistical support for the French and American militaries in the Sahel. Yet even these measures have not been enough to satisfy the voraciousness of the colonial counter-revolution.[9]
Dozens of accords, agreements and protocols of understanding have been signed with the US and France covering just about every sector, essentially rendering Algeria a neo-colony. Key to the military accords is the move beyond the already contested information sharing and exchange to actual joint operational arrangements. The Algerian military is being prepared to fight under the leadership of the French and American militaries in wars in which the military oligarchy, let alone the Algerian people, has no say over the determination of the designated ‘enemy’.
Under the banner of the ‘global war on terror’ and the US quest for ‘full-spectrum dominance’ as part of the ‘New American Century’ project, the colonial counter-revolution has intensified.[10] It features a new Middle East and a new Scramble for Africa. For its current strategy, the US draw upon on a long tradition of colonial empires using native armies and regiments such as the East India Company’s Presidency Armies and the Algerian/Senegalese Tirailleurs, in the British and French empires respectively. Whether expressed in military language such as interoperability and multinational ops, the political rhetoric of ‘leading from behind’, or even the business lingo such as ‘outsourcing/subcontracting’, the reality remains the same. The colonial counter-revolution seeks to globally dominate and dispossess the natives by the natives.
A key target of the counter-revolution has been the dismantling of the liberatory political projects expressed from the mid twentieth century onwards. One of these core values is expressed in the doctrine of peoples’ self-determination and mutualnon-intervention among Global South states. If, in the first decade of the twenty first century, the counter-revolution’s military engagement was accompanied with legislative interventions to ensure the introduction of counter-terror legislation in most Global South states, the second decade has been characterized by constitutional interventions, seeking to institutionally enshrine subservience to neo-colonial and imperialist designs. In Sudan, Egypt, and elsewhere constitutional amendments were introduced to allow their militaries to be deployed beyond their borders. Today, these militaries are used as cannon fodder in places as far apart as Mali and Yemen.
A new constitution
In Algeria, the currently proposed constitution does not deviate from this trend. Aside from the further concentration of powers to the executive[11] and the consecration of total impunity for state officials,[12] the most dangerous and widely contested provisions relate to the constitutionalization of the military’s supremacy over political life,[13] undermining the most central demand of the Hirak movement – for a civilian, not military state – and the placing of the Algerian military at the service of neocolonial powers.[14] Amending the constitution to allow the Algerian army to engage in ‘peace keeping’ missions beyond its borders, is the price required by the US and France for their continued support of the military oligarchy against its own people in revolt for over eighteen months. In the words of Mohamed Larbi Zitout, co-founder of the Rachad Movement, the junta’s new deal with its foreign backers can be summarized as follows: ‘Your army in exchange for international legitimacy.’
Having changed the Algerian military doctrine in 1992, the counter-revolution is pushing to change its fighting doctrine once again to perceive other Africans as the enemy. A hard feat to pull off considering that, over the last several centuries, objective threats have almost exclusively come from the North. The deluge of official visits, in recent weeks, by French and American officials (Secretary of Defense and head of AFRICOM) suggest that the results of the so-called referendum are a foregone conclusion and the deployment of Algerian troops, to start with, to places like Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso is only a matter of time.
French President Macron carrying Abdelmadjid Tebboune – currently serving as the President of Algeria – followed by the Algerian Army into Mali.
The intended humiliation baked into the symbolism of the choice of 1 November, the 66th anniversary of the start of the Algerian anti-colonial revolution, as the date for a ‘referendum’ on Algeria’s status as a neo-colony has not been lost on the collective consciousness of the people’s movement. The counter-revolution seeks to desacralize the foundational myth of the Algerian nation and destroy the symbolic value it has held in the eyes of the oppressed in the Global South.
Yet success of the colonial counter-revolution is not a foregone conclusion. The Algerian people are determined not to allow their army, which contributed to the liberation of the African continent more than half a century ago, to be used as a stick in the hands of neocolonial powers seeking to subjugate humanity all over again.
Algerians are aware of the burden and responsibility they carry. They are conscious of the fact that their ancestors, who brought an arrogant empire to its knees, were the authors of one of the glorious chapters in humanity’s struggle for freedom and justice. Algerians are cognizant that they were never forgiven for that and are confident that if their ancestors defeated global hubris at its peak, this generation, if needs be, is capable of doing the same against a fascism-ridden provincial state nostalgic for past glory and an empire in its twilight.
What the people’s movement has instilled in the Algerian collective psyche over the last 18 months is a self-determining attitude towards their future and destiny. This renewed sense of ownership over their country, expressed through such slogans as ‘this is our country and our will shall reign supreme,’ carries a message of reassurance to the people’s ancestors: should the deluge strike again, the overwhelming majority of Algerians will reach for buckets and not life jackets. The military oligarchy and its foreign backers can be toppled once more by the mass movement.
Brahim Rouabah is an Algerian activist, co-founder and former head of the UK Algeria Solidarity campaign. He teaches politics at Brooklyn College (CUNY) in New York.
Featured Photograph: Image of Abdelkader ibn Muhieddine being held up during the streets days of Hirak. Abdelkader fought against the French invasion and occupation of Algeria in the 19th century (22 March 2019).
[5] See Bennabi, Malek, and Asma Rashid. “The Conditions of Renaissance.” Islamic Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2001, pp. 305–314; Fanon, Frantz. “Black Skins, White Masks”, 1952, and “The Wretched of the Earth”, 1961.
[6] Hegel, G.W.F. “The Phenomenology of Spirit,” Cambridge University Press, 2018.
[7] Rouabah, Brahim. « De-dramatizing Algerian Politics, » Jadaliyya, October 5th, 2015, , Last accessed on 10/27/2020 @ 4:20am.
The mass protests in Nigeria have brought out tens of thousands of people in several cities across all the geo-political regions of the country, defying the guns, risking their freedom and life, and declaring they are ready to die for freedom. Femi Aborisade and Salvador Ousmane look at the background to the protests and celebrate a movement that challenges Nigeria’s ruling class.
#EndSARS Protestors in Nigeria Need Our Solidarity
By Salvador Ousmane
Over the last few weeks a mass movement has broken out in Nigeria against the widespread harassment, violence and intimidation faced by, especially the youth, for years from the security forces, especially the police. With the background of the successes of the Black Lives Matter movement, predominantly in the US, the youth in Nigeria have organised mass protests in all the major cities across the country.
What started as the demand to #EndSARS, to dismantle the notorious police Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), has widened into opposition to all forms of intimidation by the security forces and even calls for President Buhari to resign. These protests have gained global attention with the killing of at least a dozen unarmed protesters in the largest city, Lagos on Tuesday, 20 October, by a joint operation of the police and the army. Fifty or more protestors have been killed by the security forces and these killings continue.
Despite this massacre, the protests have continued. Similarly, the announcement of the dismantling of SARS on 11October (or its renaming as SWAT) only gave more confidence to the protesters and the demonstrations continued to grow.
Nigeria is an oil rich country, but the majority of the population are extremely poor. Earlier this year the National Bureau of Statistics published their survey that showed that 40% of households existed on a monthly income of less than £25. The minimum wage was increased last year to £60 a month, but this has yet to be implemented in many states. Nigeria is one of the most unequal countries in the world with the richest person being richer than anyone else in Africa or Britain. As a result, corruption is rampant, including regular payment of bribes at police roadblocks.
Earlier this year price increases were announced for fuel and electricity, despite the huge economic impact of lockdowns associated with Covid-19. The main trade union centres, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress (TUC) announced a general strike from 28 September, but this was called off at the last minute after talks with the government and an agreement with some minor sweeteners for the trade union leaders. ASUU, the university lecturer’s union, have been on strike for the last six months with all the public universities closed. The health workers organised a two-week national ‘warning’ strike earlier in September with many more local strikes.
In this context, the Alliance on Surviving Covid-19 and Beyond (ASCAB) has launched an appeal for trade union support for the protests. ASCAB was established in April to argue for the trade unions to pressurise the government of Nigeria to provide support to enable the poor majority to survive Covid-19. ASCAB would also like international support from organisations who are prepared to endorse this statement:
We the under-listed organisations and representatives of the organised working people give our unequivocal support to the #EndSARS protestors and mass protest movement and call on our members to join the continuing protests. We call for a conscious intervention of the working people and their organisations, and in a manner that can open the way to a structured and robust conversation within the movement and among the oppressed and resisting peoples on the way forward. We are horrified by the Lekki Toll Gate Massacre and other killings by the security forces, as well as by organised criminal groups taking advantage of the situation, and state sponsored thugs. We call for the popular peaceful protests to continue until the articulated demands of the broad movement have been addressed, state sponsored violence stops, and the government acts against those that are responsible.
The Government and the ruling elite are now very weak and divided. It does not know what to do. So now is the time to push forward our trade union demands. The health workers need to re-start their strikes. The teachers should organise for action around the promises made to them by Buhari. The NLC and TUC should be planning action over the fuel and electricity price increases and over full implementation of the minimum wage in all states, as well as over the brutal clamp down on the popular protests by government.
Please show your solidarity by sharing the above statement widely. Send your endorsements and solidarity to: ascab2020@gmail.com
Salvador Ousmane is a Senior Lecturer and writer.
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Nigeria’s movement against brutality and poverty
By Femi Aborisade
The #endsars protest represents an unprecedented point in the history of popular struggles in Nigeria. I am happy to be alive to witness this period. I had thought Nigeria was incapable of producing such an inspiring, massive resistance. We have never seen anything like this before in the history of Nigeria. No other struggle had brought out tens of thousands of people in several cities across all the geo-political regions of the country, defying the guns, risking their freedom and life, declaring they are ready to die for freedom and for future generations. Young people had been written off as preoccupied with the primitive accumulation of wealth. Yet with the outbreak of the #endsars movement divisions along ethnicity and religion have largely disappeared. The protests have taken a national character, involving the youths, employed and the large army of the unemployed, in virtually all states of the federation. The movement has fulfilled the long held understanding that the outbreak of social movements and revolts cannot be mathematically calculated. If anyone had predicted that Nigeria would move at such a scale ten years ago, such a person would have been ignored as indulging in illusory thinking.
What started as a protest against police brutality evolved quickly into protests to end all forms of impunity and deprivation. Placards held by the protesters included #end unemployment, #end commercialization of education, #end hunger, #end lack of free medical care, #end bad roads, #end hunger, #end fuel price increase, #end increase in electricity tariff, and so on. Above all, the movement began to acquire a political character as the battle cry of the protesters included #Buhari (the head of the central government) must go!
In the past, anti-military dictatorship struggles had involved mass protests, but in terms of the number of people mobilized on the streets, those struggles now pale into insignificance. The struggles against military dictatorship tested the will and conviction of relatively few protesters. Aided by the influence of social media, the spread and numbers of protesters involved in the #endsars movement have announced a new and glorious phase in mass struggles in Nigeria.
The nature of the struggle is perhaps responsible for the determination of both the federal and state governments to crush the movement. The initial measures employed by the state was to infiltrate the protesters through agent provocateurs who joined the protesters in demonstrations only to attack those on the street with dangerous weapons, burning the vehicles being used for the campaigns and inflicting fatal injuries on protesters. Vehicles belonging to security agencies were sighted in video clips either dropping off heavily armed thugs or picking them up after protesters had been attacked.
The peak of the vicious attacks on the protesters was the Lekki Massacre of 20 October when soldiers, under the cover of darkness, opened fire on the peaceful protesters. Protesters had been gathering at Lekki Toll gate on a daily basis without a break since 8 October 2020. The number of persons killed and injured is still undetermined, but media reports have it that not less than twelve peaceful protesters killed in cold blood.
What has now become known as the ‘Lekki Massacre’ enraged the public. Virtually anything that represents the authority of government has been targeted by angry protesters. Shops, banks, houses and buildings representing the business face of leaders of the ruling party, the All Progressive Congress (APC) and the head of the Lagos State Government, were equally attacked and set on fire. Prisoners were set free in many prisons across the country. Party headquarters of the ruling party were attacked. Traditional rulers known to be close to the Lagos State Government were not spared by the protesters.
In a palace of a traditional ruler of Lagos, demonstrators raided the palace and left with bags of rice, which were allegedly meant for distribution to ordinary people as part of the Covid-19 palliatives (a term used in Nigeria to describe the ‘relief’ and ‘support’ provided by the state). The poverty across Nigeria also saw soldiers who had been sent to restore order allegedly also helping themselves to bags of rice from the palace of the traditional ruler. Poverty thus united the soldiers and the unemployed and poor. However, prior to the Lekki Massacre, the protestors rejected food and water sent to them by a notorious political figure in Lagos who is perceived to be an agent of the state government.
The rage of the people following the Lekki Massacre was such that the protesters in some states of the federation defied the curfew declared by state governments. The protests continued unabated.
The Lekki Massacre, as well as the killings of protesters in other states, poses the question whether ordinary people who were protesting are slaves without rights or citizens who have the right to protest. The anger of poor people has been fuelled by the refusal of President Mohammadu Buhari to address the nation on the killings. When he made a Presidential Speech on 22 October, he expressed no regret for the Lekki Massacre and the killings in other states. The Presidential Speech is widely perceived as insensitive. It has added to the fury among the masses. Despite social media and video footage on the attack in Lekki, the official position of government is that there were no killings.
The federal government has explanations to make. Under Section 217 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the military has no role to play in the civil disobedience that was being carried out by peaceful protesters. The only role of the military is to defend the territorial integrity of Nigeria against external aggressors. Peaceful protesters are not external aggressors. The sacredness of life guaranteed under section 33 of the constitution has also been violated. Currently, it is estimated that about 60 people were killed during almost three weeks of peaceful protests whilst many more have suffered fatal injuries. In one city alone in Oyo State, in Ogbomoso, South Western Nigeria, four peaceful protesters were killed by security agents on 11 October – it is important to name them, Jimoh Isiaq, 20 years old; Ganiyu Moshood, 22 years old; Taiwo Adeoye, 25 years old and Pelumi Olatunji, 15 years old.
Despite the largescale killings, the #endsars movement has not been defeated. It may have suffered a setback. It may resurrect in the same name or under other names or demands. Poverty is pervasive in the country and the masses will be forced to fight, again and again. The unity of the oppressed, in the North and South of Nigeria, lies in the development of such movements. We know that failure of these movements may herald social conflagration along ethnic and religious lines which would represent untold hardship, bloodshed and ultimately a breakup of the country. The challenge is to prevent such a future by building mass movements to unite the masses in collective struggles from below to change society in their own interest.
Femi Aborisade is a socialist, writer and lawyer based in Lagos. He was interviewed on roape.net and the interview can be accessed here. Femi is an editor of ROAPE.
Featured Photograph: Protesters at the #endSARS protest in Lagos, Nigeria (13 October 2020).
Join scholars, activists and researchers for an online conference on the insights into Walter Rodney’s phenomenal political and intellectual legacy that still propels today’s pan-African struggles.
(Re)Igniting Walter Rodney’s Legacy for Today’s Black Lives Matter Movement
Walter Rodney’s transformational impact on people’s thinking with the ground-breaking How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, skewered the dominant narratives on African and European development. The book challenged and disrupted centuries of historical lies on Africa, enslavement, empire, (neo)colonialism and reparations. The conference will also explore how that legacy can inform and inspire today’s Black Lives Matter movement. It will:
Interrogate the depth, range and impact of Rodney’s scholarship as an exemplar change-making African historian.
Feature Rodney’s legacy here and now, alive in the struggles of today’s workers, scholars and activists the world over.
About the Speakers:
Richard Drayton was born in Guyana and grew up in Barbados. He has lived in Britain since 2001 where he has taught at Cambridge and King’s College London. He is a board member of The Walter Rodney Programme@PET
Ama Biney is a Pan-Africanist scholar-activist, with over 25 years teaching experience. She has taught courses in African and Caribbean history; the History of Black People in Britain and international relations in the UK and in Ghana. She is currently an independent scholar and in the Bikoist tradition writing what she likes. She is also a member of The Walter Rodney Programme@PET’s advisory board.
David Johnson transferred from social anthropology to a history major at the University of Sussex after reading How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and attending a grounding session with Walter Rodney, in a black community bookshop in North London. He went on to complete a doctorate in African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and taught for three decades at the University of Calabar, Georgetown University and the City University of New York. He was a founder member of the UK Support Group of the Working People’s Alliance, a platform through which Walter Rodney, as well as other creative and courageous comrades, dared to imagine and pursue another world.
Natasha Issa Shivji is the Director of the Institute for Research in Intellectual Histories of Africa in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. She has previously taught in the History departments at the University of Dar es Salaam and the University of Dodoma on courses focusing on African political economy, the agrarian question in Africa and Indian Ocean World History on the East African Littoral. Walter Rodney’s work remained a central influence for her in both her teaching and in her own research as work that withstood the test of time and remained formidable in shaping the discourse of how we write our history understanding the material realities of underdevelopment and imperialism and yet within a framework that is emancipatory and audacious.
About the Moderators:
Mohammed Elnaiem is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Cambridge. A socialist activist, he has been involved in the cause for black liberation for years. He is inspired by Walter Rodney’s legacy as a scholar-activist and is passionate about the cause for black liberation from a working-class perspective.
Robert Cuffy is a well-known revolutionary socialist in NYC, and an effective organizer for Black Liberation. He is a member of the DSA Afrosocialist Caucus, a leader of the NYC Fight for Our Lives Coalition (which is part of People’s Strike, a National coalition organized by Cooperation Jackson), and a founder of the Socialist Workers Alliance of Guyana. He is also a leader of the DSA Labor Branch.
Zara Brown is a recent Politics and Quantitative Methods University of Warwick graduate. Her academic and activist interests in Caribbean and pan-African history exposed her to Walter Rodney’s ideas, revolutionised her thinking, and inspired her to found Warwick’s Caribbean Culture Society, among other things. She currently works as a social researcher and continues to engage with youth activism. She is also a member of The Walter Rodney Programme@PET’s advisory board.
Programme
Keynote (i) The Meaning of Walter Rodney
Richard Drayton outlines the range, depth, breadth and contemporary importance of Rodney’s contribution to scholarship and activism.
Respondent: Dr Ama Biney
Keynote (ii) Reclaiming the African Past and Present with Walter Rodney
David Johnson shows why the ideas of this audacious youth left a legacy that still sends shock-waves inside and outside the academy.
Respondent: Natasha Issa Shivji
Q&A
Break 5 mins
Groundings: Rodney’s Profound Impact Here & Now
Scholars and grass-roots activists share how Rodney’s profound influence on their historical consciousness and personal development inspires their current work.
Panel: This panel brings together The United Families & Friends Campaign [UFFC], Migrant Media [MM], Young Historians Project [YHP], Young African Leaders Forum (YALF). All working for a better world.
Q&A
Next Steps: The Way Forward: Speakers’ closing remarks.
You are welcome to email advance conference questions to wrpatpet@gmail.com.
The conference is happening with support from the Walter Rodney Foundation and the Sociology Department at the University of Cambridge.
Karl Marx Highgate Cemetary, North London, England (circa 1979).
In this blogpost, Biko Agozino argues that Karl Marx was among the few European theorists of his time who did not try to conceal his ‘debt’ to Africa but celebrated such knowledge as foundational. Agozino shows how people of African descent were central to the theory, practice and writings of Marx. Marxism is not a Eurocentric ideology.
By Biko Agozino
Described by one editor as ‘nothing short of pathbreaking’, I am pleased to have been invited by roape.net to summarize in a blogpost the arguments in my paper ‘The Africana Paradigm in Capital: The Debts of Karl Marx to People of African Descent’ (published in the journal in 2014 and free to access until the end of November). The original claim in the paper that Marx borrowed from the knowledge and experiences of people of African descent has also been described as ‘surprising’ by Micco Sarno who nevertheless concluded his detailed intertextual review by stating that the paper has deepened the understanding of Capital as a truly global critique of capitalism by a European author who was not Eurocentric. Adam Mayer wrote that the article ‘demolished the myth that Marxism was a Eurocentric ideology incompatible with African pride.’ In this summary of the paper, I highlight the key points and clarify some issues raised by some authors.
Contrary to claims by many that Marx was Eurocentric just like other European intellectuals of his time, my article argued that people of African descent were central to the discourse of Marx. I suggested that the earlier work of Marx, such as The Manifesto of the Communist Party, may have misled some readers into assuming that his writings about class struggles dealt with only the European working class. This may be so because the history of slavery outlined in the Manifesto referred mostly to ancient slavery in Europe, but my article also shows that some of the references in the manifesto concerned modern slavery in the New World. I delved into his mature work, Capital, to reveal that it was centered on people of African descent as the paradigm for explaining the struggle for liberation from oppression with emphasis on race-class-gender articulation contrary to crude economists, feminists, and Afrocentric scholars alike who assume that Marx was concerned only with male European working class struggles.
I concluded that article by suggesting that the epistemology and methodology of Marx as a scholar-activist who went beyond explaining the world and got involved in trying to change it for the better was a mirror image of the critical, creative, and centered paradigm that is privileged in Africana Studies and other critical disciplines today.[1] Therefore, the work of Marx should remain among the required readings for scholar-activists today instead of being subjected to rejectionist ideologies out of fear of marginalization by dominant powers or fear of the loss of originality if Marx is uncritically accepted as being relevant to all current struggles globally.
The rejectionist readings of Marx in relation to people of African descent can be illustrated in Cedric Robinson’s influential text, Black Marxism, which dismissed Marxism as ‘a Western construction’ with a philosophy, methodology, sociology and historical perspective that is ‘decidedly Western’. People of African descent were challenged by Robinson to develop their own original theory and methods instead of relying on Marx. The charge of Eurocentrism against Marx can also be found in the work of Reiland Rabaka who lumped Marx together with Max Weber and Émile Durkheim in his work, Against Epistemic Apartheid, where he held up the work of W.E. B Du Bois but did not add that Du Bois himself rightly found Marx to be an ally of the Africana struggle for social justice. In the work of Molefi Kete Asante, rejectionism appears to be a strategy for originality lest Eurocentric scholars claim that Afrocentricity has nothing new to offer in An Afrocentric Manifesto. Some feminist writers have also rejected Marxism under the mistaken assumption that it neglected the oppression of women under the mode of reproduction.
While I support the call for more originality by scholars of African descent, I demonstrated that some of the most original thinkers in the Africana tradition are decidedly Marxist without apology precisely because Marxism allows room for internal criticism in the concrete analysis of concrete situations, Marx borrowed from Africana traditions of intellectual and moral leadership, and the Marxist perspective has a track record of sticking up for struggles against racism-sexism-imperialism.
Since Africana scholars are not completely against citing the work of some European scholars with approval, the tendency among some of them to insist on rejecting the work of Marx is a curious case of the choice of allies especially when those who reject Marx rarely cite specific texts by him. There is absolutely no reason for the online journal, Socialism and Democracy, to fantasize about a ‘science fiction gun fight’ between Marxists and Kawaida philosophers (a synthesis of nationalist, pan-Africanist, and socialist ideas) since Kawaida and Marxism are not mutually exclusive or at war with each other.
On the other hand, Eurocommunists may be responsible for the rejectionism from Africana scholars because they have tended to present Marxism as an exclusive heritage of European thought that should not be borrowed by people of African descent without obtaining permissions from the rightful owners. The Africa-born Eric Hobsbawn, in How to Change the World, mistakenly asserted that the historical knowledge of Marx and Engels was ‘nonexistent on Africa’. Far from it, there are hundreds of references to Africans and to people of African descent in Capital. I agree with the Africa-born Jacques Derrida that we all owe it to ourselves to return to an activist reading of The Specters of Marx instead of shying away from the task to avoid being seen as trespassing on the exclusive private intellectual property rights of Marx and Sons of Europe.
Stuart Hall built partly on the teachings on C.L.R James to offer an Africana interpretation of Marx in Cultural Studies 1983. In his view, Eurocommunism made the error of reading Marx simply from the perspective of what the Africa-born Louis Althusser called crude economic determinism that is not attributable to Marx who saw other struggles articulated with the economic class struggle. On the contrary, the work of Marx is also simultaneously against racism-sexism-imperialism as systems of oppressive power to be fought against through party building, alliances and coalitions.
Similarly, Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Amilcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, and Angela Davis, among others, saw the struggle against apartheid not only as class struggles but also primarily as a struggle against racism-sexism-imperialism in articulation or intersectionality. To suggest that the class struggle was the only important struggle in apartheid South Africa as Archie Mafaje implied was ‘mechanical’ and strategically misleading as Ruth First stated in her response to Mafaje in a debate in ROAPE in 1978. Nathaniel Norment was right in listing Marxism as a major current in African American Studies and the Black Lives Matter movement is justified in organizing against racism-imperialism-patriarchy globally.
My article filled a gap in knowledge by going beyond what Marx could contribute to Africana Studies and focusing on what Marx borrowed from Africana Studies. Relying on the ease with which modern technology enables us to conduct a discourse analysis of soft copies of texts, I used the PDF versions of Capital and other works by Marx to see the frequency with which he referred to the struggles of people of African descent against slavery, racism, and imperialism and the struggle of women against sexism as part of his core concerns in opposition to racism-sexism-imperialism. The difficulty of reading his hefty tomes in hard copies may be responsible for the fact that this gap in knowledge existed for so long before the research I conducted for the 2014 study. However, my discourse analysis should not be mistaken for a quantitative analysis just because I noted the frequency or number of times that Marx referred to Africa and Africans.
The notion that Europeans borrowed from Africa should not be surprising because Cheikh Anta Diop already warned that Africans should not be too quick to reject European ideas because when you scratch their surface, you will find that some of the most profound European ideas were borrowed or stolen from Africa. Karl Marx was among the few European scholars of his time who did not try to conceal his ‘borrowings’ from Africa but celebrated such knowledge as foundational. Although his references to Africa in volume one of Capital are few, numbering about six, a discourse analysis rather than quantitative number crunching will show that the references to Africa are substantively higher because Marx indicated over and over again that the references to Africa were paradigmatic for understanding the capitalist system of production as a system of ‘wage slavery’. The only error that Marx made was to use the term common in his time and since then by referring to the human trafficking of kidnapped Africans as a ‘slave trade’. Du Bois also called it a ‘trade’ in his doctoral dissertation at Harvard University even though he proved that it was suppressed by law. The Marxist theory of primitive accumulation rightly identified it as robbery, plunder, and violence and as a consequence Marxists should support the demand for reparative justice.
On the ‘Negro’, the number of references increase to 14 in volume one of Capital, five times in volume three and six times in Grundrisse, the methodological work in preparation for Capital. But these were not passing references or frequencies to be counted for quantitative analysis, they were foundational for Marxist theory. For example, Marx stated as follows:
A negro is a negro. In certain circumstances he becomes a slave. A mule is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain circumstances does it become capital. Outside these circumstances, it is no more capital than gold is intrinsically money, or sugar is the price of sugar … Capital is a social relation of production. It is a historical relation of production. (Marx 1867, Vol. I, footnote 4, 541)
Here, Marx was giving a definitive role to people of African descent in the formation of the capitalist mode of production. The word slave was referenced 150 times in volume one and 72 times in volume three of Capital. In volume one, Marx critiqued Aristotle on the commodity fetishism of equal values because Aristotle failed to acknowledge that Greece was a slave society, what he was comparing were labors of equal value and not commodities. Africana Studies would not refer to people as slaves and Marxists would agree that they should be called enslaved people.
In his preface to the first English edition of volume one of Capital, Engels observed that after the abolition of slavery, the next struggle was to revolutionize the relationship between capital and land and he concluded (perhaps in acknowledgement of the Africana philosophy of nonviolence) that England held the promise of nonviolent revolution provided that the capitalists did not launch a pro-slavery rebellion. Although the references to slavery in volume three were to ancient slavery in Europe due to the influence of Engels who competed the volume posthumously, Engels still added an appendix on the fascinating defeat of the British army by the Zulu who were armed with only sticks and stones. Marx had set up the First International Workingmen’s Association precisely to oppose the British plans to join the American civil war on the side of the pro-slavery confederacy.
Numerous references to the concept of race can be found in Capital with a defiant usage that rejected white supremacy by consistently talking about the ‘human race’ and by questioning the concept of civilization when those who presumed themselves to be civilized were guilty of barbarous acts against indigenous people, women, and Africans. On the few instances when he used offensive words like the N-word or Kaffir, he was mocking the white supremacists who used such terms to signify white privilege. A collection of his work on colonialism also highlighted hundreds of refences against racism, slavery, and colonialism. This short blogpost does not have the space to highlight and analyze each reference of relevance to people of African descent and to women but hopefully, a book will emerge from this project to detail the evidence more comprehensively.
W.E.B. Du Bois used terms like the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to corroborate Marxist theory in Black Reconstruction in America. C.L.R. James concurred in The Black Jacobins where he stated that the enslaved Africans on the sugar plantations represented the most industrialized workers of their time and he went on to write a series of essays on The Negro Question as foundational in Marxist theory and revolutionary practice. However, George Padmore concluded that Pan-Africanism was a better strategy for Africans than communism due to the exclusionary practices of Eurocommunism. Eric Williams completed the Africana trilogy on Capitalism & Slavery a few years after The Black Jacobins by James in his DPhil thesis at Oxford University.
Claudia Jones and later, Angela Davis, also underscored the relevance of Marxism to the scholar-activism against racism-sexism-imperialism as articulated or intersectional systems of oppression to be opposed simultaneously. Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, Cabral in Unity and Struggles, and Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, reached similar conclusions. There are still Marxist political parties and activists in Africa and they should be encouraged to unite to demonstrate the relevance of Marxism to Africana struggles against imperialism-racism-sexism globally worldwide and towards the social democratic building of the Peoples Republic of Africa or the United Republic of African States.
You do not need to be a Marxist to agree that the methodology of historical materialism is relevant to struggles on the ground in Africa and globally, not only to the European working-class. Since Africans continue to read the work of bourgeois European thinkers with approval despite their silence on Africa, there is no reason why we should continue to reject Marxism as foreign without attempting to read the powerful body of work that was partly based on Africana knowledge and struggles. European Marxists have no excuse to continue ignoring original work by scholar-activists of African descent given that Marx would have paid close attention to such work.
[1] A largely US based approach, Africana Studies is a multidisciplinary engagement to the research, experience and understanding of African people and African-descended people throughout the world.
In the text of his presentation from the Tunis workshop, Max Ajl spoke about Tunisian radical agronomist Slaheddine el-Amami. Ajl celebrates an approach which emphasized the specifically ecological aspects of uneven development and the specifically ecological aspects of resistance to uneven development.
By Max Ajl
Some of you have heard or read me present on the Tunisian radical agronomist Slaheddine el-Amami, who in my view is probably the most important holistic thinker of the specifically technical-ecological aspects of rural, national, and popular development in North Africa during the 1970s and 1980s.[1]
There are many facets of Amami’s work to consider: the technology critic, the agronomic-regional state planner, the scientific experimenter, the intellectual historian. I would like to consider all of them, but to use them as a bridge to connect questions of epistemology and political economy as posed by the framework of this workshop.
One of the central intellectual and political problems in the development of Marxism has been a tendency for practice and theory to sidestep and therefore make invisible a central facet of accumulation on a world scale: the core-periphery, or North-South, or First World-Third World division. At the epistemological level, it relates to how interests determine knowledge and theory. On the one hand, this explains why the core-periphery distinction frequently disappears. On the other, it clarifies what kinds of knowledges and procedures for gathering knowledge are necessary in order to challenge the core-periphery relationship.
Theorizing from the South
This brings us to a question which dominated discussion earlier in the workshop: what does it mean to produce knowledge, and theorize from, or in relation to, or on behalf of, or with, or in solidarity with, the Global South?
Theories which come from the core, including Marxist theories, have often upheld the colonial division of humanity. Theories from the periphery have often challenged it. To theorize from the South, then, is not reducible to a human being theorizing from a southern country, nor a genetic or cultural identity. It is a form of knowledge production, sense-making, and abstraction which challenges international periphery-core flows of value alongside intra-national class epistemological architectures which support uneven accumulation and environmentally unequal exchange.[2]
To theorize from the South is to theorize from a national-class position, and to theorize towards a communist horizon within which southern workers and northern workers are not at odds but unite.[3] But a true unity, which accounts for – in order to erase – the uneven incorporation of nations into the world system.
Slaheddine el-Amami’s Knowledge Production
This brings us to Amami. From the 1970s onwards, he carried out a program of basic research and a critique of Tunisia’s second ‘decade of development’, which interwove questions of whom was considered a trustworthy producer of agronomic knowledge, with how to develop Tunisia in a national-popular-sustainable style. He was, then, well ahead of his time in emphasizing the specifically ecological aspects of uneven development and the specifically ecological aspects of resistance to uneven development. In this way, he raised the question, in the economist Azzam Mahjoub’s phrase, of how to carry out a ‘peripheral convivial research’ program.
Amami’s Local Libraries of Knowledge
Amami saw clearly that a system of technology born of an imperialist epistemology produced a neo-colonial theory of development, which ensured uneven accumulation. Directly inspired by Maoism, Amami carried out several radical breaks from prevailing theories of development.
First, he rejected the universalizing and flattening tendencies of industrial and especially northern theories of development. He connected the kinds of thinking encouraged in the national schooling system and the ways foreign corporations could turn Tunisia into an arena for profit. What he saw was that neo-colonial capitalism’s conversion of Tunisia into a dependent arena of profit rested on the local production of neo-colonial ideology. If this was a bane, it was also a boon, because insofar as neo-colonialism rested on specific local structures of thought, it could accordingly be challenged by an attack on those structures and the institutions which reproduced them.
He analyzed the engineering schools’ contempt for the ‘traditional,’ and the technologies to which the slur referred. In disdaining over a millennium of precolonial polytechnics, such contempt became ‘in reality a colonial ideology favoring the supremacy of imported technology and wanting to disown any specificity to the colonized country.’[4]
Colonialism and neo-colonialism dissolved and disarticulated the national agricultural system. As it became oriented further and further away from feeding the population, the agricultural system could no longer protect the ecology. The bequest from the past, Amami contended, had been slowly shrunk: ‘Just some pockets and enclaves have been preserved from colonial destruction and constitute the true national libraries of Maghrebi agricultural technology.’[5]
Disarticulation and re-articulation also meant an ideological attack on these older forms of knowledge production. The new system, through schooling, ‘dangled the mirage of an urban life getting rid of centuries of prejudice and downgrading in which the rural world bathed. To ‘modernize’ is to erase and surpass all of the traditional systems of managing natural resources…The choice of techniques is almost never inspired by the local patrimony.’[6]
By tradition, specificity, or the local Amami did not mean nativism. He meant that places are different from one another: they have different levels of precipitation and different hours of sunlight and different temperatures and different wind patterns and soil profiles. Traditional systems meant the repertoire of technologies for managing that ecology – maintaining the ability to reproduce it while extracting what was needed for human well-being. Implicitly, Amami saw that specific ecologies had to be the rational basis for long-run sustainable planning.
Amami saw that northern – or imperialist-capitalist – ways of knowing, such as the presumption that ‘of course’ it was wise to shift to excessively mechanized and input-intensive agriculture, had to be countered, with southern, anti-colonial, and national-popular ways of knowing. In this way, they would distinguish and break from capitalist accumulation of value from above with a southern accumulation of ecologically embedded use values from below.
The transformation he envisioned had two elements. One was institutional – a shift in how people learned in the engineering schools. The other was epistemological – rooted in a popular-mass and implicitly ‘peasantist’ and Maoist conception of technological advance and diffusion, based on valuing rather than dismissing peasant knowledge. In the first place, this meant embedding research nationally:
In order to advantageously and effectively use the research infrastructure, every decision and technical choice of the research organisms…must be condoned by the research organisms. The orientations and the technical choices will then be taken on rational bases and as a function of norms and trials elaborated in Tunisia and not artificially transferred.[7]
However, this also, potentially, and more in spirit than in letter, had a class element: social liberation alongside national liberation. In the most general terms, this meant a populist project:
The Arab countries must encourage the promotion of a socio-economic ecology which analyzes the ‘rationality’ of local populations with a view towards injecting technological improvements corresponding to the aspirations and mutations of these populations and not to the sophisticated and very expensive technology giving the illusion of ‘miracle’ solutions.[8]
Here was a way of bridging the methodology of the laboratory with the methodology of the ethnographer, which rested on elaborating an epistemology which did not eliminate from discussion but elevated to the dais the capacity to think of local peasants and pastoralists. He called for an interplay of knowledges in which such practices were understood to have their own rationality and were even considered libraries.
On the other hand, Amami did not reject technology: he called for technological improvements.[9] And he did not reject the knowledge procedures of science, but insisted that local practices, and the norms and dreams of those populations, should serve as guidelines shaping engineering decisions concerning where and when to inject improvements.
Thus, the place of specialists is as boosters, refiners, and complements the creative national-popular productive practice of poor rural people. As Amami elsewhere wrote alongside his collaborator J.P. Gachet, this would entail a
Regional agricultural plan, decentralized and depending primarily on the mobilization of the creative will of peasants capable of ‘moving mountains’ and of defeating difficulties of all genres and of living with droughts in order to limit the havoc [that] could in this manner constitute a real tool of development in the rural world.[10]
Here was an argument resting on the poorest of the poor, especially southern peasants and pastoralists from ‘useless’ Tunisia, adding a muted regional-class element to the program for national development towards auto-centred accumulation. It was also based on an epistemological revolution, breaking sharply with the notion of the peasantry as empty vessels for Western knowledge which had been the calling card of Western neo-colonialism in Tunisia and its native collaborators.
Conclusion
What Amami presented, in sum, was a way of theorizing from the South which identified the North-South divide as not merely marked by value flows from the latter to the former, but a system of ideological and epistemological disciplining which sought to lock the periphery in an iron anti-developmental cage. His southern theory was meant to break the bars of the cage by making its prisoners the agents of their own liberation, an intellectual ‘return to the peasantry’ which is a possible basis not just for the liberatory development plans of yesterday, but also of tomorrow.
Max Ajl has a PhD from Cornell University and researches national liberation and post-colonial development theories in Tunisia. He is a regular contributor to ROAPE and roape.net.
Notes
[1] Samir Amin and many other Egyptian, Tunisian, and other Maghrebi social scientists excelled in other aspects of theorizing accumulation and development. Paul Pascon did exceptional work, like Amami, on Moroccan indigenous hydraulics. Amami himself was writing alongside a vibrant Tunisian conversation concerning appropriate development strategies for the Third World, including figures like Azzam Mahjoub, Abdeljelil Bedoui, Tahar Gallali, and others.
[2] Cf. Jean and John Comaroff, “Theory from the South: A Rejoinder,” Cultural Anthropology Online, 2012.
[3] Enrique Dussel, “Marx’s Economic Manuscripts of 1861-63 and the ‘Concept’ of Dependency,” Latin American Perspectives 17, no. 2 (1990): 62–101.
[4] Slaheddine El-Amami, “Pour Une Recherche Agronomique Au Service d’une Technologie Nationale Intégrée,” in Tunisie: Quelles Technologies ? Quel Développement ? (GREDET, 1982), 15. Polytechnics was a term which the historian of technology Lewis Mumford developed to refer to life-centered technologies which were decentralized and devoted to human flourishing.
[5] Slaheddine El-Amami, “Technologie et Emploi Dans l’Agriculture,” in Tunisie, Quelles Technologies ? Quel Developpement, GREDET (Tunis, 1983), 21.
[7] El-Amami, “Pour Une Recherche Agronomique Au Service d’une Technologie Nationale Intégrée,” 19.
[8] Slaheddine El-Amami, “Projets de Coopération Régionale En Matière de Recherche Scientifique et Technologiques,” in Les Cahiers Du CRGR, vol. No, 21 (Conférence des Ministères des Etats Arabes Charges de l’Application de la Science et de la Technologie au Développement, UNESCO, Rabat, 1976), 6.
[9] It is noteworthy that in the same paper, he called for development of an Arab metallurgical industry.
[10] J.-P. Gachet and Slaheddine El-Amami, “La Sècheresse En Tunisie, Réalité Permanent Ou Phénomène Accidentel?” (Ministère de l’Agriculture, D.E.R.F.C.: C.R.G.R., February 1978), 13.
In this blogpost, Annamaria Artner examines how Samir Amin was read, studied, and understood in pre-1989 Eastern Europe. She argues that Amin understood that the transition of the world system from capitalism to socialism, what he referred to as a long transition, would make use of the historical experiment of the USSR-led Eastern Europe.
By Annamaria Artner
After the Second World War, the young Amin visited Eastern Europe several times, but he was somewhat disappointed due to his experiences in Yugoslavia and Hungary in 1948-49, and in the following decades he returned there only rarely. Despite this, his intellectual works became part of the curriculum in universities in the region relatively early in his academic life. A young assistant professor, Tamás Szentes, at the Karl Marx University of Economic Science, in the Hungarian capital, Budapest, was invited to teach at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1967. There he happened to meet the most prominent intellectuals of the time, who dealt with the problems of development and underdevelopment. Among others, Szentes became friends with Samir Amin. Returning home to Hungary at the beginning of the 1970s, Szentes began to teach his newly acquired knowledge.
The other part of this story began in 1973, when an economic historian, Iván Tibor Berend , was nominated to be the rector of the same university. Due to his field of study, he read Wallerstein’s book The Modern World System (New York, 1974), and began to teach world systems to his students, as did Szentes. As a result, the world system theory, elaborated by the ‘Gang of Four’, as Amin called it (Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein), began to awaken the interests of many students.
It was from here that the third element of the story comes into play. Two of the professors’ students, Ferenc Miszlivetz and László Béládi were both highly talented and thirsty for knowledge, so Szentes began to work with them intensively. From this collaboration the idea of publishing new, supplementary teaching material for student, which would contain the texts of the relevant authors, was born. This ‘semi samizdat’ series of readings entitled ‘Development Studies’ (Fejlődéstanulmányok) that was initially based on the voluntary work (translation, editing) of these two students, helped by others, saw these ‘readings’ grow to ten volumes by 1989. These volumes contained several pieces of international literature, from authors such as Arrighi, Gunder Frank and Wallerstein and included six texts from Amin. The latter were extracts from his books such as Accumulation on a World scale, Unequal Development, Class and Nation,Historically and in the Current Crisis, and one of his articles about the ‘New International Economic Order.’
This text-book series was unique in Eastern Europe and would not have been compiled without ‘the exceptionally good intellectual atmosphere in Dar,’ which so inspired Szentes and provided him with knowledge and contacts. In this way, students came in contact with the thoughts of Samir Amin – although for the most part, they did not apply them in their subsequent careers as economists.
After the Eastern European transitions in 1989, Amin was ‘re-discovered’ by the radical movements of Eastern Europe (e.g. the Russian alter-globalist network called Alternatives, and the Social Forum organizations in several countries of the region). Among the languages of the region, Amin’s books have been most frequently translated into Russian. This fact, of course, is not unrelated to his deep interest in the history of the country. As Aleksandr Buzgalin explained, Amin ‘truly loved Russia and the Soviet Union. … For him, the main event in history was undoubtedly the October Revolution, and the departure of the USSR from the historical arena was the greatest tragedy of our time’.
His shorter works have been translated occasionally into other languages in the region, mostly Hungarian, thanks to the above-mentioned Development Studies course and, after the changes in 1989, in the Marxist journal Eszmélet (Consciousness). Amin’s theories are also taught sporadically at universities and doctoral schools at the discretion of some critically thinking teachers.
Discovering Amin’s influence
I interviewed a few of the researchers and university professors who are known for their radically critical stance towards capitalism, to find out how Amin’s thoughts had affected them and what they thought of his influence in Eastern Europe. Below I will shortly outline their opinions and juxtapose that with Amin’s own words.
To this end, I spoke to Attila Melegh, a Hungarian historian and sociologist and director of the Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies, who mentioned Amin’s book Eurocentrism (first published in 1988) that he appreciated the most. ‘This was an important Marxist analysis amongst the nonsense’ written by others, he said. Amin’s definition of Eurocentrism as the ‘ideological framework of capitalism’ forms one of the main theoretical pillars of Melegh’s book about the ‘East-West slope’. In this book Melegh applied the post-colonial analytical framework presented by Amin to Eastern European developments to explain how and why Eastern Europe has been destined to play an inferior role vis-á-vis Western Europe after the systemic change in 1989. He also argued, referring to Amin, that ‘one of the most important functions of the East–West slope is the recreation and maintenance of racism and other forms of exclusion inherent in hierarchical Eurocentric constructions’ (Melegh, 2006: 195-196).
The hungarian historian, Tamás Krausz, expert on Eastern European history and Leninism, and editor in chief of the journal Eszmélet, highlighted that Amin, through his works and personal contacts within the framework of the World Social Forum, was able to bring the Eastern European left into the global field of the revolutionary fight. On the other hand, he pointed out that Amin could learn from the critical analysis of ‘state socialism’. His criticism towards the pre-1989 Eastern European systems weakened over time. To illustrate this thesis, Krausz evoked his own experience from 2017, when, in a conference on the 1917 revolution held in Moscow, Amin’s task was to present and evaluate Stalin’s views and his role in the October Revolution. According to Krausz, Amin accomplished this ‘with a great strength of conviction’.
The Russian political economics professor, Buzgalin, who is also the coordinator of the above-mentioned alter-globalist network ‘Alternatives’, depicted this same event in his memorial article in 2020: ‘Amin presented Stalin as a person who simultaneously strives for socialism and commits crimes, as a symbol of victory in the Great Patriotic War (a victory that echoed the movement of the masses towards socialism throughout the world, including Africa, which was witnessed by young Amin himself), and the common name of the bureaucratic dictatorship’.
Péter Szigeti, a professor of law and philosophy, also underlined that Amin’s analysis had become more sophisticated over time. According to him, for a long period, Amin, like Trotsky, looked at the Eastern-European experiment as a bureaucratic, unliveable, and dictatorial formation, probably an appendix or even a subsystem of capitalism. Szigeti maintained that this was the case because the circles of the new left had become convinced – particularly in the 1980s, when there had already been many obvious problems in Eastern Europe – that there was only one single world order. Later, Amin’s critique became more refined and accepting of Eastern Europe and, particularly, the Chinese development from Mao to Deng. Amin always carried out important analyses of international production and exploitation and he became politically an increasingly sober analyst, while simultaneously illuminating the contradictions of the existing Eastern European transitory social systems. In the meetings of the World Social Forum he spoke in this spirit either at mass gatherings or in narrower circles, Szigeti recalls.
Indeed, Amin offered a self-criticism on how he had evaluated the Soviet system. He admitted that earlier he thought it was a ‘stable and advanced form of what the normal tendency of capital should engender elsewhere, by the very act of centralization of capital, leading from private monopoly to state monopoly’. However, later he realized that he was wrong, and the Soviet system could not be described as one form of capitalism where the party-bureaucracy is the ‘new ruling class’. The Soviet model was swept away by the worldwide attack of neoliberal capitalism. Amin concluded, ‘Never mind that the Soviet model was incapable of becoming a definite alternative to be gradually copied by others. Events have shown that it was not. This may reflect only its own weaknesses. It does not mean that in other parts of the developed world, once the recent wave of liberal utopia is over, evolution may not follow a path mapped out by the old USSR. An assessment is needed of the Soviet cycle now that it is completed. It is not positive overall, or negative. The USSR, and subsequently China and even the countries of Eastern Europe, built modern autocentric economies such as no country of peripheral capitalism has succeeded in doing’ (Amin 2017:18).
This implies that over time, Amin had begun to see Stalin in a more positive light, than before the historical failure of the socialist experiment. Although he abandoned his ‘perfectly Stalinist position’ (by his words) after 1956, he never become a true ‘anti-Stalinist’. He always criticized Stalin from the position of the left, like Mao, not from the right, like Khrushchev and the neoliberal narrative. ‘Collectivization as implemented by Stalin after 1930 broke the worker-peasant alliance of 1917 and, by reinforcing the state’s autocratic apparatus, opened the way to the formation of a “new class”: the Soviet state bourgeoisie’. Amin added that Lenin’s economism ‘had unwittingly prepared the groundwork for this fatal choice’ of Stalin (Amin 2017:15-16). It must be emphasised, however, that in the given historical circumstances neither Lenin’s, nor Stalin’s steps were ‘ungrounded’. First, without industrialization the peasantry could not have been lifted from its misery, and secondly, after 1930 fascism was on the rise in Europe, as well the possibility of a terrible war was growing. Amin himself admitted this, saying that Stalin’s choice of rapid industrialization and armament at the beginning of the 1930s ‘was not without some connection to the rise of fascism’ (Amin 2017:10).
Furthermore, Amin thoroughly discussed and defended Stalin’s economic policy and centralized Soviet planning, and criticized Trotsky’s activity in exile as well as ‘the so called “de-Stalinization”’ initiated by Khrushchev in 1956.’ He argued against ‘the primary anti-Stalinist blunders à la mode, which are tirelessly repeated by the Western media and which have unfortunately been accepted by the heirs of euro-communism’ (Amin 2017:31). Additionally, in an interview just before his death, Amin ranked the task of ‘building a modern, integrated industrial system that is centred on internal popular demand’ as first among the basic issues of an authentic, non-neoliberal development policy that aims to benefit all people.
Moral firmness and anti-imperialism
Not surprisingly, Amin’s theoretical and moral firmness and radical anti-imperialism have not been welcomed without reservation by everyone on the left in Eastern Europe. For example, one of the most internationally well-known left-wing Hungarian theoreticians, Gáspár Miklós Tamás, entirely rejects Amin’s attitude. Tamás writes about those who hold an ‘anti-western and anti-modern interpretation of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism, which is naturally accompanied by the opportunistic celebration of “left-wing” terror-regimes of the Third World – as in Samir Amin’s influential and extraordinarily harmful works’.
This rejection of Amin derives, partly, from the ‘integrated periphery’ position of Eastern Europe. Radicalism is usually fed by the feeling of intense material, legal or intellectual oppression, and only few Eastern Europeans have ever truly experienced these things. For historical and geographical reasons, ideological ‘twins’ have been controlling Eastern European movements and parties from the left-liberals to the anarchists. We find, on one hand, the Eurocentrism or the feeling of ‘Europeanness’ (Amin 1990) and, on the other hand, the uncritical acceptance of the superiority of so-called ‘human rights’ and liberal democracy irrespective of their highly apologetic content and limited application in capitalism. These two biases of thinking have prevented left-wing political movements and thinkers from accepting the difficulties and painful burdens of any real class struggle. The conviction that society is fine as long as it is handled in an idealized ‘European’ and ‘democratic’ way where nobody’s interests are compromised, has worked against the success of a transition from capitalism to socialism in the past and works against it even now.
As a consequence, a hard-leftist intellectual may prefer or even praise revolutions and revolutionaries in general, but rush to distance themselves from any flesh-and-blood revolutionaries in actual historic moment. The methodological foundation of this ‘arm-chair’ left-wing thinking is an abstract or even sterile approach towards history. It positions itself above history and evaluates and condemns the real-life revolutionaries who are far from the ‘radicals’ created in the minds of certain philosophers. This way of thinking was not unfamiliar to Samir Amin. He criticized it in connection with the Trotskyist ‘myth of the world revolution’, which would be led by the working class of capitalist countries: ‘This discourse could be convenient for certain academic Marxists who could afford the luxury of proclaiming their attachment to principles without worrying about being effective in transforming reality’ (Amin 2017: 29).
However, what did Amin see as a positive, possible way forward for socialism in Eastern Europe? Amin did not offer a concrete answer to this question, but, as mentioned above, he did not exclude the possibility that sometime and somewhere in the future social evolution may follow the path of the Soviet system. He understood that the change of the world system from capitalism to socialism could only be what he referred to as a long transition, of which the historical experiment of the USSR-led Eastern Europe formed a part.
Annamaria Artner is a Senior Research Fellow at the Eötvös Loránd Research Network, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Institute of World Economics, and professor at Milton Friedman University, Budapest, Hungary.
References
Amin, Samir 1990. Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure. London, Zed Books Ltd.
Amin, Samir 2017. October 1917 Revolution, a century later. Dataja Press.
Melegh, Attila 2006. On the East–West slope. Globalization, nationalism, racism and discourses on Eastern Europe. CEU Press, Budapest – New York.
In the third blogpost from a joint memoir that is being written by Selina Molteno and Robin Cohen about their period in Nigeria, September 1967–September 1969, they describe their work in the Department of Political Science and the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ibadan together with some remarkable academics, researchers and students.
By Selina Molteno and Robin Cohen
With his Commonwealth scholarship in hand, Robin was, he thought, all set up as a graduate student loosely affiliated to the department of political science at the University of Ibadan. However, as things turned out, he was required to fulfil a more central role in the department. Political science had started modestly in 1960 as a sub-department of government under the direction of James O’Connell, an Irish priest who doubled-up as a sailor (his ship had been torpedoed in the Second World War) and was later the founding Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford.[1] He was replaced by Joseph E. Black, who worked for the Rockefeller Foundation, one of a number of US institutions involved in trying to ease out the Brits in favour of doing things the American way. The game plan was rapidly to accelerate the number of Nigerians, preferably US-trained, as members of the faculty.
Enhancing the number of Nigerians on the staff chimed well with the aims of the university. O’Connell was packed off to Kano, as was a US lecturer who did not quite fit (he had close links to the US State Department). The headship was temporarily held by Joseph Black who, in 1964, left in favour of an accomplished young Nigerian scholar, E. U. Essien-Udom. Essien had completed his doctorate at Chicago and had held junior positions at Harvard and Brown. In addition to the existing academic staff, ‘Essien’ (as we knew him) was joined by Lawrence (‘Larry’) Ekpebu (trained at Harvard), while the return of another star, a young doctoral student who had completed his PhD at Berkeley, was eagerly anticipated. All was going in the planned direction, when a series of misfortunes struck.
After the outbreak of the civil war, Kenneth Dike, a distinguished historian of Igbo origin and the university’s first Nigerian vice-chancellor, refused to return from a trip abroad, fearing for his safety. Very early one morning, a low rumble of cars was heard all over the campus. Dike’s anxiety had spread to other staff and, without notice, a huge convoy filled with Igbo academics and their families set off to the Eastern Region. A few remained. One Igbo member of staff in the political science department, Ukpabi Asika, declared his support for the Federal government and became governor of the zone that had been carved out of Biafra after the fall of Enugu in October 1967. Echoing the appellation of the British traitor who worked for the Nazis in the Second World War, Radio Biafra sarcastically, and unjustly, called Asika ‘Lord Haw Haw’. Later, after Port Harcourt had fallen to the Federal forces, another colleague, Larry Ekpebu, was appointed administrator of ‘Rivers’ (his home area, soon to be the Rivers State). These absences were difficult to manage. But the biggest blow to political science fell in January or February 1968, when a chilling memo was sent around the department. The young man newly armed with his PhD from Berkeley (sadly we cannot now recall his name) had died in a car crash on the Lagos–Ibadan road just weeks after his return to Nigeria.
We were invited to the funeral at the church and burial ground on the campus. Finding what we could in the way of respectable clothing (Robin had abandoned his only suit in England), we stood quietly at the back as the oh-so-normal service commenced. Suddenly, without warning, the deceased young man’s wife cried out in anguish and jumped into the grave on top of the coffin, violently beating off all attempts to pull her out for ten to fifteen minutes. We were astonished at this turn of events and Selina began to sob. Later, she was reassured by someone at the funeral that this was normal; a bereaved wife was expected to demonstrate convincingly that she was totally gutted. When Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz arrived in Oz, she uttered the memorable line, ‘I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.’ We felt much the same. We were not in north-west London anymore. Perhaps our fellow mourner was simply trying to console Selina but, if not, we needed to ramp up our learning curve. Adjusting to Nigerian ways was going to be more challenging than we had imagined.
Essien and Ruby Essien-Udom
At the request of two of the lecturers, Robin had been giving the odd tutorial in the department, but when we were unexpectedly summonsed to a meal at Essien’s home one evening, we realized something was afoot. As the evening wore to a close, Essien and his wife Ruby exchanged glances and Essien sprang his trap. Robin was enjoined to accept a lectureship in the department. It was clear that Essien was desperate and that appointing an inexperienced, South African-born doctoral candidate to a job at Nigeria’s flagship university was not something he had anticipated or wanted. The students were demanding to be taught and he had simply run out of available academics. The conversation over dinner that evening had been cordial, but it was clear that both of us were being given the once over by Essien and Ruby. No, that puts it too mildly! More plainly, we were being minutely scrutinized to see whether we displayed one iota of racism or one smidgen of colonial entitlement.
We had passed the test, but this was an examination more difficult for our examiners than it was for us, the somewhat bemused and reluctant candidates. We need to provide some background to explain this. When he had studied in the USA (at Oberlin and Chicago), Essien had become very close to Elijah Mohammed, the leader of the Black Muslim movement, his wife, and other leaders and members of the Nation of Islam. The result was a remarkable and insightful book, Black Nationalism, based on participant observation over a two-year period in Chicago.[2]
While in the US Essien had also married Ruby Moloney, who was our hostess on that memorable evening in Ibadan. She was a tall, confident, intelligent African American active in the movements for black civil rights and political empowerment. When Malcolm X visited Nigeria, she had arranged his visit. Essien himself had also become close to Amy Garvey (the widow of the famous black leader, Marcus Garvey). He later edited the Garvey papers and, with Amy Garvey, published a collection titled More Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey. In recognition of his engagement with the major leaders of the African American struggle in the US, Essien was dubbed ‘the Black Power professor’ by the students at Ibadan. He relished the sobriquet.
You will get the picture. We were objects of suspicion, but also of curiosity. It took a long while before Essien and Ruby dropped their guard. Throughout our period in Ibadan they treated us courteously, but rarely warmly and effusively, while we were careful to remain attentive to the hierarchy that separated us. Essien even asked Robin to act as head of department for a short while when no-one suitable was around, a sign of his increased trust. Years later, when we had returned to the UK and Robin held a lectureship at the Centre for West African Studies at Birmingham, he successfully nominated Essien for the Cadbury Visiting Fellowship, a prestigious attachment supported by the Cadbury trusts. At last, the four of us connected without inhibition and enjoyed sociable meals, movies and visits to the experimental and avantgarde Arts Lab.[3]
Ruby had persuaded her mother, known as Mama Ruby, to join them in the house in an upmarket estate in Selly Park that came with the fellowship. We recall arriving back, a bit worse for wear and thrown by their failure to take a key to the house. Not to worry, Mama Ruby would let us in. We bellowed ‘Mama Ruby’ till we were hoarse and threw stones at the upstairs windows. Eventually, she stumbled out and admitted us, but not before lights were switched on in the surrounding houses and the neighbours clucked their disapproval. One letter from Ruby, when she and Essien had moved to Calabar, survives (below):
7 May 1974
Dear Robin,
Your splendid looking new book has just reached us. Congratulations and many thanks.
I don’t know whether Essien was able to drop you a line since our departure. Well, we had our grand tour of the West Indies and our fill of New York terror and then returned home to a new life.
Essien finds his job absorbing, mine is challenging (I am the Assistant Personnel Officer at the Calabar Campus of the University of Nigeria), but it’s not as interesting as editing.
How are Selina and the children? I suppose at this time of year you’re beginning to think about the long vac. How did the new house work out?
Calabar is a long way from Ibadan in many ways. I suppose it is something like a ‘primitive Eden’ to quote Essien, but sometimes I would prefer Babylon. Nevertheless, it’s not really so much worse than other Nigerian towns. It has a kind of rural charm still, which is under heavy attack by the bulldozers, and there are already signs of traffic jams to come. I suppose as Time Magazine would say, we are rushing headlong into the nineteenth century. That’s fair enough by me, and if New York is any indicator, I hope I can jump off before we reach mid-twentieth century. Though I must say, the big city in Britain is much better because of the discipline of the society.
We would love to hear from you or Selina when there is time.
Fond regards,
Ruby
Robin’s teaching
Teaching was a challenge. Robin had completed three years of political theory as an undergraduate, so the first course he was assigned did not test his knowledge unduly. It followed a conventional curriculum on the history of political thought, starting with Plato and Aristotle, touching on Seneca, attending to the social contract theorists like Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, wrestling with Hegel and Marx, and concluding with the totalitarian thought of the twentieth century. Not so far mentioned, as he deserves special comment, is Machiavelli. In the trade, this type of course had acquired a nickname: ‘From Plato to NATO’. Robin describes his students in this course as listless and often staring into space, despite his best efforts. Not so when he discussed Machiavelli, whose ideas were an instant hit. Cruelty and murder, force and deception, deviousness, selfishness and egotism – the class could not get enough of it. It took a while to work out why, then a possible explanation emerged. Sixteenth-century Italian city-states (like Venice, Florence, Amalfi, Milan and the Papal states) resembled Yoruba city-states (like Oyo, Ibadan, Ife and the Ijebu states). While British colonial administrators had been hopeless at figuring out the complexity of Yoruba precolonial urban micro-polities, the author of The Prince spoke directly to the alliances, plots and counterplots between city-states and the fiendishly complicated patterns of succession within them. At last, so Robin intuited, the students saw someone in the Western canon of political science speaking to the western Nigerian experience.
Other parts of his teaching needed more desperate measures. At one point, Robin was navigating across three courses, one of which, comparative politics, required him to lecture on the UK, the US (both OK), France and India (about which he knew next to nothing). He raced from lecture hall to the library, refusing to issue a reading list until the day of the lecture so he could beat the more assiduous students to the scarce copies of the relevant books. It was a trial by fire, but at least gave him the skill to think on his feet and give some kind of coherence to a hastily prepared talk.
The flow of lecture preparation, classes and essay marking was remorseless, and Robin was thrown by the remarks of some of the students to whom he had given poor marks. Despite patient explanations of where they had gone wrong, an errant half-dozen or so students hit back, accusing him of incompetence and failure to explain himself adequately. They could not be at fault; it must be him. This display of braggadocio was done with a bewildering display of vehemence, good humour and whooping laughter – another experience to chalk up to cultural difference (English undergraduates of the time meekly accepted whatever marks they were assigned).
Billy Dudley
Fortunately, Robin had a strong supporter in the form of Billy Dudley, a senior member of the politics department, who explained all the tricks of the trade, including how the students were testing him to see whether his grades were open to ‘negotiation’. Billy and his wife Valerie were great friends to both of us. We had no telephone at home and (note to younger readers) mobile phones did not exist at the time, but Valerie and Billy allowed us to use theirs when family emergencies or joyful news needed urgent communication. Billy loved a cold beer at the staff club after class and we could always crack a bottle (no glasses used) whenever we needed guidance and friendship, or a marvellously coherent explanation of the bewildering twists and turns of Nigerian politics.
Billy’s appointment pre-dated the ‘Americanization’ of the department. He was a graduate of University College, Leicester, which awarded University of London degrees at the time and he knew Robin’s supervisor, Ken Post, and another one of Robin’s mentors, Dennis Austin, the chronicler of Ghanaian politics and director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London.[4] Billy’s doctorate was published as Parties and Politics in Northern Nigeria, while he later wrote an insightful book using game theory to explain Nigerian politics preceding and during the war as well as an introductory textbook. He also drafted the post-war Nigerian Constitution and edited a magazine, Nigerian Opinion, where Robin published some of his earliest articles. He was fiercely intelligent, immensely energetic and had a slightly off-beat, wild streak in his temperament. We surmised, with no evidence, that his Scottish father (he had a Nigerian mother) had fostered this.
Billy Dudley’s most popular book (though not his best).
This unrestrained part of Billy’s personality got them both into trouble on one occasion when Billy persuaded Robin to accompany him to look at the ongoing war first-hand. Billy served on some Mid-Western development board and this provided the occasion to set out to Benin City, quite close to the front. As Billy drove further east, they chatted to the troops. The plan was to overnight in Benin City, but impulsively Billy decided they needed to return to Ibadan not long before nightfall. In Nigeria, the word nightfall was all too appropriate – at the end of day the sun swiftly disappeared into the earth’s bosom like a flaming lead balloon. The road was poor and there was no moon. At first, all was well. Billy had secured a pass from the military governor of the Region and it worked like magic when the soldiers on the numerous roadblocks recognised the governor’s name.
As they got closer to Ibadan, the expressions on the soldiers’ faces at the roadblocks looked more dubious and finally Robin and Billy were stopped and ordered to get out of the car. The soldiers were nervous and started shouting. They demanded Robin’s passport as ID and carefully scrutinized it. Where was Billy’s passport? He indignantly replied he did not need one as he was Nigerian. At which point it all went wrong. They laughed at his claim, as (having a Scottish father) he was lighter in skin colour than most Nigerians. Billy, an ardent Nigerian nationalist, was furious. Suddenly, there was a growl at the back, soon taken up by others. ‘Tzenis, ‘Tzenis’, it sounded like. Did they mean ‘Tennis’? This was bizarre, but Robin and Billy thought they had better play along and mimicked being at Wimbledon. No, they meant, it was soon clear, ‘Chinese’. There had been reports of the Chinese government siding with the Biafrans and in an instant Billy had been classified as a Chinese spy, with Robin as his accomplice. Several machine guns were trained on them and it was only after Billy greeted the soldiers in Warri pidgin and Yoruba that they slowly backed off. No Chinese person could be that fluent. It had been a close-run thing and Robin and Billy arrived in Ibadan well after midnight in a subdued mood.
Christopher Beer and Christina Le Moignan
Amazingly, Robin was not the only British graduate student to decide to come to Nigeria. On our voyage to Nigeria, we were accompanied by Christopher Beer, who decided to study the peasantry in and around Ibadan (in parallel with Robin’s study of the working class). His excellent thesis was long delayed in publication by Ibadan University Press and, as a result, he was somewhat disadvantaged in his plan to become an academic. We were also joined by Christina Le Moignan who, like Robin, had used a scholarship to come from Britain to Nigeria. We admired her resilience and bravery. Christina stayed in a woman’s hall of residence and seems to have had a stomach coated with iron. Whereas most expatriates struggled with the unfamiliar food, Christina tucked into the hall food heartily. On one occasion, when some drunken soldiers entered the campus with the clear intent of demanding sex with the women students, Christina linked arms with others to deny the soldiers entry and faced them down. As we left Ibadan, Christina inherited Robin’s ‘Plato to NATO’ course and one letter from her and one from Chris have survived:
From Christina Le Moignan
Ibadan
Nigeria
25 September 1969
Dear Robin
Many thanks for the History of Political Thought things, and your letter. It’ll be most useful, especially about the modern stuff, about which I am more or less a total blank. I saw Billy in the vac. and think I shall in fact probably be doing it rather more along his lines – partly because it seems sensible to use this year as a sort of try-out period for the course system which we will finally develop, but also because I must include the Greeks, since they’re the only people I know anything about!
I am writing now on the off chance that you may be able to give me some information we need rather urgently. Is there anyone you taught last year that you think could/should be suggested for a Rockefeller scholarship? I realize the second year is rather early to tell, but we have no candidates from last year’s final year, and it seems a pity not to put in for one if there’s anyone outstanding. Of course, as always, things have been impossibly late. Local interviews are supposed to occur by the end of September and the information from the VC’s office only came on September 20th. I didn’t hear of it until yesterday. So, if there’s anyone that strikes you as worth a shot, could you let me have his name as soon as possible? I’d be most grateful.
Essien is going away tomorrow for a week, leaving me holding all the beginning of session babies, including registration! But I can hardly feel bitter, since he is going to Calabar to bury his mother! We have no confidence that our two other members of staff are going to arrive before the beginning of term, though Essien mutters something about their both being expected this weekend. Does it all make you feel nostalgic?!
I do hope that Birmingham goes well for you all. Essien seemed to think you had made good progress on the thesis. I expect to be back next Easter, on National Assistance, if no other way.
Love to Selina. How was the trip home?
Christina
From C. E. Beer
University of Ibadan
Nigeria
7 August 1971
Dear Robin and Selina,
Thanks very much for your card at Christmas, which made me feel very guilty as I still owe you a letter from the beginning of last year! Glad to know that you are still at Birmingham – how is Miranda and the new one, Jason.
Everything is much the same here. Billy [Dudley] has returned as associate professor and for the time being doesn’t seem too unhappy though he’s as moody as ever. Christina [Le Moignan] left just before Xmas having achieved, what seems to me at the moment, the impossible, her Ph.D. The oral went without any hitch which wasn’t surprising as her thesis was such a thorough piece of work. Everybody seems to have left here now who I was at all friendly with at the beginning or at least will be leaving at the end of this session.
My own work has I suppose been progressing but at a snail’s pace. I’ve written up 6 chapters out of 9 but have quite a lot of rewriting to do on the second draft. At the moment I have real problems about finances, as for some reason they didn’t want to extend my scholarship for a fourth year! Billy mobilised all the big guns he could (which are quite considerable) and I’m living in hope arriving before the bailiffs.
Cholera has also arrived in Ibadan this week and today (of all days) the junior staff on the University are on a ‘go-slow’ i.e. strike over the non-implementation of a pay award they were supposed to get in 1969 (Ani Report?) Result = no water, no food for students, no electricity on the campus the day after Boyd in his Scottish wisdom forbade anyone to eat off campus, (or drink) because of said cholera, and advised all to stay at home, not travel, and not go into town. There is a meeting tonight to decide whether the University should be closed (we opened on Monday!)
I don’t know how your work is going Robin – I have some newspapers that I will send on to you (or perhaps just the cuttings) re trade union action over wages last month and their negotiations with the Federal Military Government. It seemed rather interesting to me, as for once the union centres seemed to be working in collaboration with each other – they were successful also in getting an increase across the board for lower paid workers. I haven’t yet sorted them out but will try to this week.
Best of luck and all good wishes for the New Year, I’ll try not to be so long in writing again.
Chris
P.S. Brother Adejumo is always wishing to be remembered to you – he is still keeping my car on the road though it’s getting more difficult daily. He’s now moved into his own place at Ore-Meji. [5]
Letters from students
We also discovered a few letters from Robin’s students, and we reproduce them below.
To Robin from Adeniyi Adejuwon
Nnamdi Azikiwe Hall
University of Ibadan
5 October 1969
My dear lecturer,
Kindly forgive me for keeping a bit long before writing to you. I have had to make my fees for this session. Now I am a bit settled having completed all the registration formalities.
How are you? How is your wife? Hope you are by now well-adjusted to that new circumstance? Your work is going on well I feel?
My mates and myself miss you very much. In fact, I had been nursing the hope that I would find my guardian in you during this my first year. Indeed, I miss you very much.
Despite your absence, I still believe there is a lot of help you can render not for me alone but for us. However, I like to find out from you what I can do to further my education. I intend to study either in England or America after my first degree. I do not know what fields are open to me and how to scheme it all. I am also ignorant about the way one finds a school. All I know as told to me by you is that a good pass is a must. I shall by all means and the grace of God make this my goal.
I am very well disposed to ‘launch the attack’ on the faculty in June. I hear regularly from my wife. I shall try to send a copy of our wedding picture to you.
Hope your research project is smooth? You are able to have the necessary data at your disposal I trust? I like to know whether you intend writing a book as I very much suspect. You are specialising in trade unionism or political economics I suspect? Kindly keep me abreast of these.
My friends Messrs Idode, Abatan, Dirrotoye and a host of others are well. They send to you and your wife a heap of greetings.
Bye for now.
Yours, Adeniyi.
From T. U. Okupa
P.O. Box 2728
Lagos
Nigeria
13 October 1969
Dear Mr Cohen,
I have been waiting for this time before writing you. Certainly, you must have settled down to the new situation in Birmingham since returning from Nigeria. I hope your wife and daughter are fine?
On my part, although I was not too happy about my last exams result, I have put it as a thing of the past behind me and am looking forward to the future with renewed enthusiasm. As a matter of fact, I still look forward to making an academic career, but in the meantime, I am working as an assistant secretary in the Federal Ministry of Trade here in Lagos.
Since I am not too sure that you will receive this letter, I intend it to be a pathfinder letter. By the time I receive your reply, then I would be sure that I have re-established contact with you and then I shall be writing more frequently. Just now permit me to quit here.
Yours sincerely, T.U. Okupa
From Adeoye Akinsanya
1414 E 59th Street #743
Chicago 37, Illinois
16 January 1970
Dear Mr Cohen,
I am sorry I have been unable to write you since you left Nigeria and in fact, I wish I knew when you left so that I could see you off. Since you and I left Nigeria, many breakthroughs have occurred, especially the war. This is a digression.
I was offered admission to the Universities of Chicago and Wisconsin while my applications to UCLA, Columbia, Yale and NW were late. I am now however at Chicago. I like the University of Chicago. It has a good department, and this is where Professor Essien-Udom did his doctorate. I hope I will be able to do my doctorate before going back home.
I have to thank you for all your help and stimulating my interest in political science. You played a leading role in shaping my career and I am very grateful for this. Words are not enough to express my gratitude. I wish I could thank you personally. I am very grateful.
I came here four weeks late. I was able to take two courses (Political Modernization in Tropical Africa and International Relations in the Middle East); the maximum is three. We had examinations at the end of the fall quarter – having B+ and A+ respectively. I am taking courses on the American Presidency and International Politics plus a seminar for the winter quarter. I will have courses on Political Theory/Administration during the spring quarter and, of course, I am attending summer school. The course requirement (for a doctorate) is 27 with three courses a quarter. At the end of the first year we are expected to present an MA paper (15,000 words) and take the Ph.D. prelim exams – four exam papers spread over two weeks taken simultaneously or two papers, both different in approach and subject, and fourth year, present a doctorate paper. Of course, there is a language requirement. I am writing my MA paper on Nationalisation in the Middle East and developing this for the Ph.D. thesis. Of course, I am not happy that the department/university has no African Studies Center. I wrote home – the Foreign Admission Officer – that I might need some funds for transportation were I to take some courses outside the University of Chicago. A request was made for the typing of my thesis. All requests were rejected. I doubt if the people ever wanted me back at Ibadan after my course. For example, they pay me £79 per month = $212.20 and if I share an apartment – which I do now, I pay $75 per month and spend $120 on my meals with the rising costs. If I get sick, I have to buy the drug while I pay $31 for medical insurance should I be hospitalised. Of course, I have to buy books, clothing materials and have some money for incidentals. Where is this coming? You pay tax on everything you buy. My intention now is to find a way of extending my fellowship after the second year to enable me to finish the doctorate. If not, I will try and secure a University of Chicago award. I am telling you in confidence.
Could you please let me buy Gillian White, Nationalisation of Foreign Property (London: Stevens & Sons, 1961) and let me know how much it costs. I could not locate it here.
My love to your wife, Adeoye
From Yomi Durotoye,
Zik Hall,
University of Ibadan.
19 January 1970
My dear Mr Cohen,
I promised to contact you at the end of the last session. Honestly, I did not forget, but I guess I was a bit too lazy.
How is your work going? Have you completed your thesis? Please let me know how far you have gone.
We are not doing badly here in the department. One Dr Adegbite from the University of Lagos takes us Advanced International Law. He is not doing badly at all. Dr Idang takes the Comparative Administration while the professor takes the Government and Politics of Nigeria since 1945.
My revision is not very encouraging. I discover every day that my pile of work is not in any way reducing and in fact it seems as if it grows every day.
I have applied for graduate admission and fellowships in UCLA, Dalhousie University Canada, Toronto University Canada, and McGill University Canada. I wish I could be admitted and awarded fellowships in any of these.
How is your wife and daughter? Greetings to them.
Write if you can but don’t really mind if you can’t reply on time.
Yours sincerely, Yomi
Institute of African Studies
Shortly after we arrived, Selina heard on the grapevine that there may be a position for an editor at the Institute of African Studies at the university and indeed there was. The job entailed trying to decipher the contents of a very scratchy and practically inaudible tape recording of the proceedings of a conference that had taken place some months, or perhaps even years, earlier between a group of Nigerian and Brazilian scholars on how traditional Yoruba religious practices imported from West Africa to the sugar and coffee plantations of Brazil had survived in their respective homes on either side of the Atlantic.
It was slow, laborious work, which would have been helped considerably if there had at least been some other form of access to the conference proceedings, such as printed papers, but alas that tape recording was the only source. This was long before the onset of the Internet, computers, word processing, or even electric typewriters. In any case, women were the only people who seemed capable of recording anything at all in those days, and certainly the only ones lowly enough to learn shorthand, take dictation and type letters for the boss to glance over and then disdainfully sign. Some genius had clearly thought that tape-recording the proceedings of a conference lasting several days was a brilliant idea, which no doubt it would have been had someone taken the trouble to ensure that it was audible. Anyway, so be it. She was content to spend her mornings listening to crackly sounds and deciphering whatever she could from them. The highlight of the job, however, was the coffee mornings. These took place regularly at 11.00 a.m. when everybody who happened to be working in the Institute of African Studies, a rather attractive, airy building near the library on the Ibadan campus, downed tools for the regular morning ritual. The company there was invariably pleasant and the conversations always interesting.
The Institute of African Studies, the pioneer of such institutes on the African continent, had been established by an Act of the Senate of the University of Ibadan in July 1962, so it was still quite new – a mere five years old – when we arrived. In effect, it was a postgraduate interdisciplinary research centre, offering courses, according to its current website, ‘in the core disciplines of African studies, spanning anthropology, African history, African law, African music, African visual arts, cultural and media studies.’
Drapers Hall (opened in 1969). High relief woodcarving by Dick E. Idehen displayed at the Institute of African Studies.
Selina remembers four people in particular from those days, though of course many more friendly faces would regularly appear in and then disappear from the morning coffee ritual.
The first of these was her boss, Professor Robert Gelston Armstrong (1917–1987). He was the director of the institute, an American anthropologist with an extraordinarily large range of both European and African languages at his disposal and clearly a scholar of considerable distinction in his field. Yet, despite all that, what she recalls most about him was his great modesty and diffidence. She never heard him raise his voice or express any frustration and he also never revealed anything about his personal life. He was never to be seen out and about in the town or on the campus and there was never any whiff of a family or of any friendship networks. In fact, he seemed to exist within a totally self-contained bubble and never gave even an inkling of needing anyone else in his life. However, one should not infer from this that he was necessarily socially isolated, but rather that we inhabited very different social circles. In fact, once Selina had exhausted any prospect of producing a credible publication from the conference proceedings, he appointed her as his personal secretary, a post she retained for the remainder of our stay in Nigeria and throughout this period, he was always amiable and exceedingly pleasant.
A second person at the institute who made an impression on Selina at that time was Robin Horton (1932–2019). He was a British anthropologist and philosopher, also of considerable distinction, and his main interest was in the Kalabari people of what is now known as the Rivers State in Nigeria. He was a warm and delightful man whose life had been devastated a few years before we came by a tragedy from which the whole campus community was still reeling. Robin Horton had married a Nigerian woman called Hanna Douglas who died in childbirth in Ibadan’s well-equipped, modern, state-of-the art, university hospital along with their twin daughters at the hands, or so the campus gossip had it, of the hospital staff who withheld from her the treatment that she and her babies required because they disapproved of her marriage to Robin Horton. This seemed odd to us because there were quite a few couples of different racial backgrounds around in our day and nobody seemed to object to or discriminate against them. In fact, Nigeria – in sharp contrast to many other former colonies – is refreshingly colour-blind, so the nurses’ objection was all the more inexplicable.
Anyway, at this time Robin Horton was working in Ibadan and bringing up Hanna’s much younger sister Sokari, who had been born in 1958 (Hanna was born in 1938) and for whom her older sister had been caring. He carried on that role and became Sokari’s guardian, so when we were on the campus, she was a little girl of about ten and Robin was undoubtedly very fond of her. This little girl has now grown up into the eminent London-based sculptor of international fame, Sokari Douglas Camp, who was awarded a CBE for her work in 2005.
Michael Crowder’s popular history of colonial West Africa.
The third memorable regular morning coffee drinker at the institute was Michael Crowder (1934–1988), an eminent British historian of Africa who, like Robin Horton, had first been introduced to Nigeria through the military service that young British men of their generation had to undergo after completing their schooling. At the time he was actually based at the University of Ile Ife, which was about an hour and a half’s drive from Ibadan, but he was nonetheless a regular visitor to the Ibadan campus and an amusing and delightful conversationalist.
Another of Selina’s colleagues at the Institute of African Studies was an administrator, Sam Iwezi. His presence on the campus was unusual at the time, for he was one of the few Igbos (though we all called them Ibos then) still remaining on the campus since the mass exodus from the campus in the early hours of one morning to which we have alluded. We got to know him quite well, partly because he was closer to our generation in terms of age, but also because his wife and Selina were both expecting their first babies at around the same time, so used to attend the same ante-natal clinics at the University College Hospital in Ibadan. A year after we had left Nigeria, he was ‘eased out’ of his job at the Institute of African Studies for reasons over which we will cast a veil. He wrote to us in detail giving his side of the story, but rather than reproduce his lengthy self-justifications, we include this letter making rather bitter but interesting observations on what happened to the Igbo community at the end of the war.
From Sam Iwezi
P.O. Box 2838
Lagos
13 August 1970
Dear Robin and Selina,
I am trying to forget all that [the dispute at the Institute] now and start afresh. I only hope it will fade into the past quickly. After six months of unemployment, I assumed duties in the Public Relations Department of the Christian Council on 1st August.
The war is ended, and we are watching with very keen interest the rehabilitation, resettlement and reconstruction – they call it the 3 Rs here – work of the government. Though they may be hampered by lack of funds but its recent decisions make for hate and regret and tells the Ibo people straight in the face that they are a defeated people who have no choice but to accept whatever is offered them. For instance, the government has ruled that a token sum of £20 will be paid to all those who paid in their Biafran money to the Central Bank after the end of the war. True, true, some of the people acquired ‘war’ wealth (as in Nigeria) but the majority of them were rich before the war. As you know, the Ibos were very successful businessmen. Some of them sold out all their businesses and landed property to flee to the East. I know three landlords in Ibadan who, after selling their houses, etc. returned to the East with about £18,000 each. For this set of people what will £20 mean? To them the government ruling is nothing short of murder! Again, they are required to pay school fees! From what? The £20? The civil servants in East Central have not had it any better – that is those of them given back their jobs – they are compelled, by an edict, to pay 25 per cent of their salaries for reconstruction work. Most of the schools are missionary owned and the proprietors have not had a clearance to reopen so their teachers have not been paid any salaries. How can a person like this be asked to pay tax and in arrears? Same story goes for the traders – no capital to resurrect their trade. The wholesome result is that the Ibo state is a den of armed daring robbers! You dare not venture on the road after 7.00 p.m. or you get stripped naked! Out of their own state, they are not wanted. In the Rivers State, they are not allowed even to get into the state, not to talk of reclaiming their property in Port Harcourt particularly (which they developed anyway). In Lagos itself some house owners won’t let their houses to Ibos! There are ugly remarks everywhere that could make one commit suicide. The resultant effect is that the Ibos believe that Biafra will rise again but then it won’t be as it was before. They believe that ‘our man’ will return to honour our money, penny for penny. I do not blame them. The government is ineffective, corrupt, unrealistic and insincere.
If there is anything I can do for you now that I am in Lagos, please let me know.
Thank you again. I appreciate your kindness very much.
With all good wishes, Yours sincerely,
Sam.
N.B. How’s Robin’s thesis going?
Post-scriptum
Readers might be interested in the fates and fortunes of some of the people mentioned in this blogpost:
Moving from his chair at Ibadan, Essien Essien-Udom moved first to Kalabar, then became the founding vice-chancellor of the University of Maiduguri (1975) and chairperson of the National Universities Commission between 1986 and 1992. After his retirement, Essien, Ruby and their son, Nkeruwem, based themselves in Washington DC. Essien died in 2002.
Billy Dudley became head of the department of political science in 1972 at Ibadan, was much revered by staff and students, achieving an almost iconic status. He died tragically young at 49, and Valerie and their children returned to the UK.
On her return to the UK, Christina Le Moignan had a stellar career in the Methodist church. She was ordained in 1976 and ministered in Huntingdon, Southampton, and Portchester. She was then a tutor at Queen’s College, Birmingham (1989–94) and president of the Methodist Conference (2001–2). She is author of Following the Lamb: A Reading of Revelation for the New Millennium (2000).
Christopher Beer published his thesis with Ibadan University Press as The Politics of Peasant Groups in Western Nigeria (1976) and subsequently had a long career in international student administration. We were lucky enough to bump into him in Cape Town in 2003, as friendly and cheerful as ever.
Adeoye Akinsanya returned from Chicago and had a distinguished career in political science at the universities of Ibadan, Lagos and Ilorin, with many publications to his name.
Robert Armstrong spent the rest of his life in Nigeria. Upon his retirement from the institute in 1983 he settled in Otukpo in Benue State in Nigeria where, in acknowledgement of his contribution to Nigerian scholarship, he was accorded the title of the Odejo of Idomaland. When he died at the age of 70 in Otukpo in May 1987, he was given a full Idoma funeral that lasted for two days.
In 1969, Robin Horton moved from the institute to the new Ile-Ife campus at the University of Ife. From there he went to the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Port Harcourt in Rivers State in 1978 and then, in 1997, he moved closer to his ultimate home in Buguma. He remarried twice and had children and grandchildren and was at last able to enjoy the family life that had so cruelly been wrenched from him by the tragic ending of his first marriage. He died in Buguma in December 2019 at the age of 87.
Michael Crowder’s notable career as an author, popular historian of Africa and editor of the pioneering arts periodical, Nigerian Magazine, was cut tragically short in the summer of 1988 when, at the age of 54, he stepped off a pavement in London, where he was at the time editing the Journal of African History, and was hit and killed by a passing car.
Selina Molteno has been a professional ballet dancer and an anti-apartheid activist. She has travelled widely and lived in Nigeria (1967–9), Trinidad (1977–9) and returned to her native country, South Africa, after the end of apartheid (2001–4). She now lives in Oxford in the UK where she founded a publishing service. With over 35 years’ experience in publishing she has piloted many books and articles from manuscript to successful publication. Her letters home during her period as a dancer based in Paris were published as Letters from an intrepid ballet dancer (2015).
Robin Cohen is an established scholar in development studies and sociology, known best for his writings on migration, diasporas and globalization. He has taught at seven universities in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and North America. He is now professor emeritus at the University of Oxford. His books include Labour and politics in Nigeria (1972), Global diasporas: An introduction (1997, rev. 2008), Global sociology (co-author, 2000, rev. 2007, 2013), Migration: Human movement from prehistory to the present (2019) and Refugia: Radical solutions to mass displacement (co-author, 2020).
Featured Photograph: A photo montage of E.U. Essien-Udom, Robin Horton and Adeoye Akinsanya.
Notes
[1]. O’Connell was a man not averse to treading on a few toes, usually because he took principled stands on ethical issues. He had left the department to work in Kano before Robin arrived. At the end of the civil war he got on the wrong side of some Nigerian politicians who gave him 24 hours to leave the country. Back in the UK, he founded an innovative and reputable department of peace studies at Bradford, which Mrs Thatcher and her government despised and denounced as ‘appeasement studies’.
[2]. E. U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: The Rise of the Black Muslims in the USA, London: Penguin Books, 1966. [First published by Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962.]
[3]. Described by the Guardian as ‘one of the emblematic institutions of the 1960s’. For more information see here.
[4]. See Robin’s obituary of Post ‘A tribute to Ken Post, 1935–2017’ Review of African Political Economy 44 (154) 2017, 1–3. Austin died in 2019, aged 97.
[5]. To explain, ‘Brother Adejumo’ ran a garage and kept our battered cars going with skill and not a little cunning.
John Loxley was a radical economist and a political activist. In a series of short eulogies by Issa Shivji, John Saul and Peter Lawrence, John is remembered as an extremely skilled and articulate economist and as an equally articulate and committed radical activist.
John Loxley spent a lifetime concerned with alternative economic theory and policy. He was born in Sheffield, England in 1942 into a large working class family and completed a Bachelor of Arts (with Honours) in Economics (1963) and a Ph.D. in Economics (1966) at the University of Leeds in England. His Ph.D. dissertation is entitled ‘The Development of the East African Monetary and Financial System, 1950-1964.’ In the mid-1960s, he began a career as a lecturer in the Economics Department at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda and the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, during which time he also served as a research manager and an economist for the National Bank of Commerce Tanzania while performing duties as director of the Department of Economics and Planning at the Institute of Finance.
Loxley moved to Canada in 1975 to take up the appointment of Secretary (Deputy Minister) of the Resource and Economic Development Sub-Committee for the Province of Manitoba. In July of 1977, he began teaching in the Department of Economics at the University of Manitoba where he later served as head of the department as well as the coordinator of Research, Global Political Economy Program for the Faculty of Arts.
Loxley served as economic advisor to governments in Uganda, Tanzania, Madagascar, Mozambique, Manitoba, and during the incoming presidency of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. In 2002, a symposium was held in his honour at the University of Manitoba, ‘Governance and Adjustment in an Era of Globalization: An International Symposium in Honour of John Loxley’, followed by a book of published essays in 2005, Globalization, Neo-Conservative Policies and Democratic Alternatives: Essays in Honour of John Loxley. In 2010 John received the Galbraith Prize in Economics and Social Justice by the Progressive Forum.
John explained that it was during his work in Africa (Tanzania and Mozambique) where he truly ‘discovered what radical politics and social and economic transformation were about.’ In Africa, he was a part of the attempts to build socialism in the 1960s and 1970s, and it was also at this time that a series of banking reforms he proposed were implemented. In these contributions by his comrades and friends, John is remembered as a radical economists and political activist, and a loyal and committed friend.
Some of this biographical information has been taken from the University of Manitoba website here.
‘A committed radical activist’
John and I became great comrades in Tanzania in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we taught together and worked together politically – as we were invited to do – to help in the restructuring of the University of Dar es Salaam so as to fit it more positively into the newly-conceived socialist society that the Arusha Declaration had recently proclaimed to be Tanzania’s goal.
And then, later in the 1970s, we both found ourselves here in Canada, with me returning to my native Toronto and John (again an immigrant!), with Zeeba and their kids, at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. True, I didn’t see John – across the miles that separated us – as often as I would have liked in recent years but we always met up again, when we did, as firm friends, more or less starting our conversation at the very same point where we had broken it off the month or the year before!
And I continued to learn from him…and to admire him. And this perhaps for one reason in particular which I’ll attempt to spell out here briefly.
For he was capable, in a way I have seen few others able to do, of presenting himself, simultaneously, as two quite different people: both as an extremely skilled and articulate professional economist and as an equally articulate and committed radical activist. I remember this from Dar days: he could function downtown, cleanly and clearly, as a tough-minded economist and credible as such to other economists and ‘experts’ on short-term ‘official visits.’ And present himself, equally credibly and equally convincingly, on campus as a thoughtful and always focussed militant in support of progressive and eminently humane views and causes, helping to hone his students’ skills and advance our collective endeavours there.
But wait, he was even better than that. For he actually presented himself both downtown and at the university on the Hill as a totally un-fractured and non-schizophrenic presence, as a person who had found the way to be both a skilled professional economist AND a militant activist at the same time: two sides, in sum, of one golden coin.
I think this was also the personality and the skill that he brought with him to Winnipeg and to Manitoba and, no surprise, he made an important and similar contribution here as well.
As for me, I will miss him – at once, a tough-minded professional, a clear-eyed progressive and a dear friend.
John Saul
‘Marxist political-economy to bankers’
I heard the upsetting news of John’s passing from my friend John Saul. It bought back all the fond memories when John was in Dar es Salaam.
At the university where he taught, he as a quiet but very profound scholar. His writings are still being used today as a reference point. As a matter of fact, I quoted them in a biography Julius Nyerere which we have just published.
Then, when John was the director of the Institute of Finance Management, he hired me to do part-time lectures on Marxist political economy to bankers. Some of those bankers became bigshots in in the banking sector and when I meet them these days they still remind me of this course.
Later when John was in the North-South Institute he invited me to do a lecturer tour of Canadian universities. In 21 days, I visited as many universities and my last stop was Winnipeg where I stayed with John and Zeeba.
John made a major contribution and will be terribly missed.
Issa Shivji
‘Never gave up the struggle’
It is an honour and privilege to be able to say a few words about John, my good friend since we first met in Tanzania in 1968. We had the same doctoral supervisor at Leeds, Walter Newlyn, who, when I chose to do my fieldwork in Tanzania, told me to contact John. When I did, he immediately invited me to lunch at his and Zeeba’s beach side house – formerly owned by Barclays Bank– a far cry from Parson’s Cross. We became good friends. After my return to Leeds to write my thesis, and before I could get to Chapter 2, John, now in the University of Dar es Salaam economics department, wrote to ask me to apply for a lectureship as they were trying to hire like-minded economists sympathetic to Nyerere’s ujamaa socialist vision. So, thanks to John, I returned to Tanzania.
These were exciting times in a country that attracted and shaped the lives of many academics and policymakers from around the world who wanted to support Tanzania’s socialist development, and some who didn’t. My memories of John during that time are of his support for junior colleagues, his interest in what people were doing and his dedication to his students. But there were always the soccer matches in which John played with characteristic seriousness and enthusiasm, followed by the ritual visit to a nearby bar for a beer or three.
We met up regularly when he visited his family in Sheffield or when I was in Canada. On one occasion, John suggested that I come with my family to Winnipeg to do a summer school at University of Manitoba in 1989. He and Aurelie found us a house and especially ensured we experienced the festivals and, of course, the Blue Bombers. I particularly remember a long weekend at their lakeside house with a plentiful supply of beer and Leonard Cohen. That was great fun and characteristic of John’s enjoyment of life and ability to take a break from his heavy work schedule. I remember too John encouraging, if not instructing me to finish my thesis. Two years later I submitted it. He just had that ability to inspire people never to give up, as he himself never gave up the struggle for a more equitable and humane society.
We continued to meet up regularly, most notably at his 60th birthday celebrations and when he in turn made a surprise appearance at my 70th – typical of the close, loyal and supportive friend he was to me, as he was to so many others. We will all sorely miss him.
Peter Lawrence
Each of these contributions were delivered in an online tribute: ‘John Loxley: a Celebration of Life’ (31 August 2020) and available to watch on here.
In a clarion call for support and solidarity for the struggle of teachers in Zimbabwe, Tafadzwa Choto argues that there is now talk of a general strike to solve the long-standing crisis in the country. Government and bosses have declared war on workers, vendors, students, youths and the poor. There must be a militant riposte.
By Tafadzwa Choto
Mugabe was removed from power in a coup in November 2017 after being in power for 37 years. Emmerson Mnangagwa took over as the president of the second administration with the backing of military and the former army general Constantino Chiwengwa becoming the vice-president. The new administration headed by Mnangagwa and his team has not solved the two decades of economic, social and political crisis. The current junta has continued with Mugabe’s legacy of brutality and austerity. As the crisis worsens there is anger across society with talk now of a general strike to solve the long-standing crisis.
Action speaks louder than words and it also produces results. Thousands in Zimbabwe are standing in solidarity with the call for united action with teachers as they are incapacitated by slave wages. The call for a general strike by Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) in demand of US$ wages for all workers is also gaining massive support.
The teachers refused to return to school on 28 September. The salaries paid to civil servants especially teachers are insulting, ranging between monthly pay-outs of US$30-US$35. According to Zimstat the Total Consumption Poverty Line (TCPL) for a family of five is ZW$7 425 per month to manage monthly expenses, far less than teachers have been offered.
With the economy now fully dollarized radical unions such as the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) and Amalgamated Rural Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (ARTUZ) had remained steadfast, rejecting the Zim Dollar wages and demanding restoration of the October 2018 salaries of US$500 – US$550. Nurses and doctors have been on strike demanding the same. It was therefore welcome that seven other teachers’ unions have now joined in a united front and declared that teachers won’t go back to work.
The unions should guard against being bribed by the government with false promises as we saw in 2019, a tactic to prevent other civil servants and the private sector joining in the action. The country faces economic implosion, now experiencing hyper-inflation of over 800%, workers’ wages decimated, the informal sector shutdown and 8 million facing starvation. Anger is growing every day and the teachers’ action could trigger a veld-fire of strikes that the country has not seen since 1996.
The junta government has already foreseen this situation which is why it has awarded the uniformed forces higher increases, with a junior soldier of less than one-year experience earning double the wage of a teacher with over 20 years’ experience. These forces will be used against picket-lines and demonstrations to beat up workers. This can only be countered through proper mass mobilisation by cross union rank and file strike committees and tactical organising as we saw during the successful August 1996 civil servants’ strike. Through proper mobilisation the uniformed forces will grow to fear the masses.
The state arrogantly announced school opening dates without serious consultation with teachers’ unions, who are key stakeholders. Worse still, not enough measures have been put in place to safeguard teachers and students against the further spreading of Covid-19. What the government is currently doing is putting teachers, their families and learners at risk. We join teachers in their call for:
Urgently expedite consultations with all teachers’ unions with a view to sharing ideas on the way forward before the opening of schools. The unions represent those who will implement the schools’ re-opening exercise.
Restore the purchasing power parity of teachers’ salaries pegged at USD$500 to USD$550.
Pay a Covid-19 allowance that is a product of negotiations or agreement between employer and teachers rather than the current ‘benevolence gesture’ dubbed presidential prerogative. Teachers are now Covid-19 frontline workers who deserve this.
Pay salaries that resonate with workers’ qualifications, experience and responsibilities.
Establish an inclusive Covid-19 Task Force to assess schools’ preparedness before re-opening. Ensure that schools are safe to receive learners and teachers and their health, safety and welfare are prioritised. The US$600 million promised by government hasn’t reached schools, whose coffers are dry with no fees since closure in March 2020.
Give teachers and learners enough time to cover syllabi and prepare for exams. The period of two months from 28 September-1 December 2020 does not adequately compensate for the lost six months since schools closed.
Mass meetings
Although workers are incapacitated and unable to go to work it will be important for them to hold mass meetings in their regions or districts at least once a week to avoid victimisation and isolation which will result in some feeling forced to going back to work. These meetings must be held in addition to online ones.
These meetings will strengthen workers giving them confidence to continue their struggles. The labour forums of 1997 and 1998 showed us it is important to collaborate with rank-and-file members in-order to sustain the action. Government is likely to threaten workers with dismissal and replacement from the large reserve army of unemployed thousands of graduates. To counter this, it is crucial to get the support of associations of unemployed teachers and, crucially, to get the Zimbabwe National Association of Student Unions (ZINASU), students and pupils to support their teachers’ action so that that any scabs will not be able to undermine the action.
This time the serious union leaders must not be hoodwinked to call off or end action because of non-binding promises by government, or because some leaders become afraid or are co-opted by the government to betray the struggle. Time for useless talks is over — it’s time for action. It is either US$ salaries or no schools opening. If some union leaders end up betraying the struggle let the militant and radical ones continue the action, especially mobilising with other civil servants like nurses and doctors to join.
Action works and the money is there. Because of the strike action by nurses and doctors the government hurriedly gave workers a US$75 allowance, after having steadfastly refused to do this for over a year. If we now have united action, the government can be forced to concede to the workers’ demands. Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube recently highlighted a budget surplus of ZW$800 million and that the wages ratio to revenue is now less than 50% from over 90% in 2018. This surplus was secured because of austerity measures that impacted on the working-class, especially the decision to make payments in the useless bond notes. Let that money now be used to pay living wages.
Government and bosses have declared war on workers, vendors, students, youths and the poor. The only language they understand is united mass action that will bring the country to a stand-still. It is now time for workers to get mukoho wavo (their harvest) by a guaranteed living wage.
It is not only workers who are angry but also youths who are unemployed and tired of the current corrupt regime and want action. The call for action by the teachers, the largest section of workers, is a golden opportunity for other civil servants to come out and support the action. ZCTU too must mobilise for a national general strike and shutdown demanding restoration of October 2018 US$ wages for all workers, opening up for kombis (local transport) and the informal sector but not an opening of schools, colleges and universities until they are compliant with WHO protocols.
On 23 September we saw an International Day of Solidarity with Zimbabwe conducted by unions and progressive movements in Africa and globally which showed the potential for international solidarity. But for that action to be truly meaningful, it is the workers and youths of Zimbabwe who must now move into action. Varombo Tamuka—Abayanga Sesivhukile! We have the Power… Amandla! It is finally time for united action!
Antonater Tafadzwa Chotois a well-known labour activist, researcher and currently a PhD candidate based in Harare. She was interviewed on roape.net and the interview can be accessed here.
ROAPE calls on our supporters and readers to text and WhatsApp solidarity messages to the following strike leaders:
Robson Chere: + 1 202 855 8906 – Secretary General of the Amalgamated Rural Teachers Union of Zimbabwe.
Obert Masaraure: + 27 82 729 5212 – President of the Amalgamated Rural Teachers Union of Zimbabwe.
Raymond Manjongwe: +263 78 270 2836 – Secretary General of the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe.
Taka Zhou: + 263 77 293 7009 – President of the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe.
For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers pathbreaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive.
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For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers pathbreaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive.
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