Creating Space for Dissent: an interview with Paddington Mutekwe

September 24, 2020

In an interview with the Paddington Mutekwe, roape.net asks about his research on resistance and the Zimbabwean working class. Mutekwe, who has recently won ROAPE’s Ruth First Prize, talks about the astonishing richness in subterranean forms of resistance among mine workers in Zimbabwe.

Can you please tell roape.net a little about yourself, your background and politics? How did you come to research?

I was born and bred in Zimbabwe’s Mashonaland West province and soon after completing my A Levels I worked at Zimplats [Zimbabwe Platinum Mines is the leading mining company in the country] that was in 2008. While I was working at Zimplats I also applied for admission to study at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa where I was admitted for a BA (Law) majoring in sociology. Initially, I wanted to finish my BA (Law) and then move on to do a LLB (Bachelor of Laws). However, along the way, in my 3^rd year, I fell in love with sociology and in the end I chose to focus on an Honours in Industrial Sociology – my legal career was over, before it had even begun.

In 2015 after my Honours, I registered for a MA in Industrial Sociology and my dissertation focused on mineworkers, which resulted in my article in ROAPE (which can be accessed for free here). Currently I am studying for my PhD in sociology focusing on resistance and repression in Civil Society Organisations in Zimbabwe.

The ‘Zimbabwean crisis’ has been of one of the most extraordinarily devastating collapses of a society, people and state, that we have witnessed across Africa – in the period of neo-liberal restructuring. Can you tell us how it impacted on you directly and how it has influenced your research?

The effects of the Zimbabwean crisis on me has been devastating because I was born in a poor family, grew up in a scantily developed rural area, with badly resourced clinics and schools, life was not easy – to put it mildly. For example, I remember the schools I went to could not afford textbooks, so our teachers had to write notes on chalkboards for us to copy down and read. It was in 2007 when I was finishing my A Levels that the economic crisis intensified and teachers went on strike, many left the country to look for greener pastures, so the students had to do much of the learning on their own. We effectively taught ourselves.

Apart from these difficulties, the poor wages that I earned at Zimplats, the general suffering around me, pushed me to consider continuing my education. The decision to continue in education had its own challenges because the crisis impacted the entire education system in Zimbabwe, so that by 2008 even in universities not much real teaching and learning was taking place.

It was clear that I could not really advance in a local university but I was lucky enough to have an uncle who was doing his PhD in South Africa. He offered to take care of me, to cover my fees and that is how I ended up in Johannesburg. In summary, it was the battles I faced growing up that stirred my interest to understand workers’ struggles and issues of resistance and repression in general.

Your article, for which you won the Ruth First prize, focuses on forms of subterranean resistance and struggle in Zimbabwe. Can you talk a little about how you started this research? What motivated you to look at this aspect of resistance in Zimbabwe?

I had already developed an interest in worker class resistance and having worked at Zimplats myself, it seemed obvious to focus on the experiences of mineworkers. When I worked at Zimplats I had learned that mineworkers there were seriously disgruntled with their conditions and salaries but due to the crisis in Zimbabwe they did not feel they had many options at their disposal. They couldn’t easily find other employment in an economy with more than 80 percent unemployment in the formal sector.

Another thing that preoccupied me was the lack of strikes at Zimplats, there were poor working conditions yet a low level of strike action. Sometimes the most obvious questions are the best ones; so, I was intensely curious about what could be the reasons for the low level of ‘official’ action. I was also curious of the degree to which workers are unionised and the activities of unions at the mines.

So, when I started on my masters my first topic had something to do with the effects of draconian laws, like POSA, on the mineworkers right to strike [the Public Order and Security Act is a piece of legislation introduced in 2002 which prohibits demonstrations and gathering without prior permission from the Zimbabwe Republic Police].

However, in my first meeting with my supervisors, Luke Sinwell and Tapiwa Chagonda, they pointed me in the direction of the works of James Scott. I read Scott’s work incredibly closely and afterwards I developed an interest in subterranean forms of resistance. Prior to this I had focused almost exclusively on overt forms of action instead of broadening ‘resistance’ to cover covert forms of protest as Scott has shown. From then on, I decided to investigate hidden forms of workplace resistance that mineworkers were engaging in.

In terms of conducting fieldwork, working closely with workers in Zimplats, can you tell us some of the challenges you have faced and how you managed to deal/overcome them in the course of your fieldwork and research?

Perhaps surprisingly, I did not face many challenges during my fieldwork possibly because I was not new to mineworkers. I knew the mines; I knew some of the workers – this was a big advantage. Firstly, I had worked with many of them before or had developed friendships with them when I had been there. Secondly, Zimplats is in Mhondoro Ngezi constituency, which is where I come from, and as a consequence many of the people working there are from the same village as me so I was never viewed as a stranger. Thirdly, many of my childhood friends work at Zimplats so during my stay at the mine compound I was hosted by a friend who acted as my key informant, he was able to orient me with rich and detailed information on the changes that had taken place since I had left years before. I started to conduct my research in January 2016.

Besides these advantages, I did face some serious challenges when I interviewed mineworkers that I had worked with before. Many of these workers did not explain in detail their experiences, they simply assumed I knew because I had worked there before. In such instances, I had to probe and ask them to explain in much more painstaking detail. Frequently, I had to rephrase many of my questions so that they focused on their individual experiences, views, perceptions, and motivations.

Another challenge had to do with time, many of the mineworkers were difficult to get hold of as they would disappear after work and often did not stay in the mine compound but in nearby cities or their home villages. However, this was not a major obstacle since my informant-friend knew many mineworkers across different shifts and he managed to set me up with workers he knew would be available.

Lastly, because I also wanted to observe mineworkers informally, I would often sit with them in bars or small restaurants where they were would casually share their experiences of work with each other while drinking. These places posed challenges especially from sex workers who realized my face was new in town and they saw me as a potential client. I found their presence disruptive and occasionally exasperating. I tried my best to overcome this by keeping my head to the ground to avoid being singled out for unwanted attention and in the end, most of them lost interest. The extreme difficulties and risks of their working lives was clear to me.

You mention, in the article, the decline in ‘organised’ forms of protest, in strikes and demonstrations, and in the official trade union movement – once a mighty force in Zimbabwe. How do you explain this decline, and do you see it as a permanent feature of Zimbabwean society? What could be done to reserve it?

I think there are many reasons for the decline in the trade union movement in Zimbabwe. The formation of the Movement of Democratic Change (MDC) in 1999, emerging from the organised labour movement, saw a shift of the most senior and experienced leaders of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) into full-time political positions in the MDC and in later as MPs in parliament. This left serious gaps in the trade union movement and affected its vibrancy, and its ability to act.

I also think the severe bleeding out of the economy has affected the strength of the trade unions as hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs and are today forced to survive in the informal economy – a sector almost entirely non-unionised. Both of these things have resulted in the trade unions losing a huge number of their members. Some of the workforce have also travelled to other countries to look for opportunities, or simply to survive, which in turn has affected union membership. Lastly, I think repression in the form of draconian laws in Zimbabwe that limit the ability of workers to engage in protected strikes has also had a detrimental impact on the trade union movement, as it has become difficult to organise freely.

However, I do not think it is a permanent feature of society because the fact that we do get workers in places like Zimplats engaging in hidden forms of resistance shows that workers still have their agency. More so, the fact that we also see wildcat protests in certain sectors of the economy shows that there are seeds that need to be watered by coalitions of working class groups and mobilised for mass stayaways and boycotts.

Finally, given the degree of repression, the trade union movement in Zimbabwe also desperately needs solidarity from regional and international working class groups to support the struggles of workers in the country. Most importantly the trade union movement needs a clearer ideology that is communicated to workers in each and every sector to make sure that they do not just see trade unions as bodies that are there to milk them of subscriptions. If I was forced to summarise, we need action, solidarity and ideology.

What lessons do you take away from the voices / interviews with workers at Zimplats in your research? What do they tell us about resistance, and how may they help others attempting to fight back?

I have learned that workers are not docile, they have their own ways of securing control of the labour process and to impact on the company’s profits that we may not see overtly. From the mineworkers’ voices one can see that they are extremely clear as to why they do what they do and the possible effects of their acts. This shows that irrespective of repression and the circumstances workers find themselves in, they can still create space for dissent. This then tells us that we should not confine our understanding of resistance to overt types of struggle but consider the hidden forms of fighting back as well.

However, the lesson for other groups of workers that may want to resist is to look for ways to combine the overt and covert forms of struggle to secure substantive material changes. This is vital because otherwise hidden forms of struggle may end up appearing like coping mechanisms and not efforts to transform lives and material conditions – which is a vital task of the movement in Zimbabwe, as it is elsewhere.

Paddington Mutekwe is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). His doctoral research investigates the dialectical relationship between resistance and repression in Civil Society Organisations in Zimbabwe between 2000 and 2020. He is a member of the UJ Centre for Social Change (UJCSC). His research interests include issues related to social movements, resistance, race, class, labour and politics. Mutekwe’s prize winning article can be read for free here.

Featured Photograph: ‘At least 23 illegal Zimbabwean gold miners feared dead after shafts flooded’ (15 February 2019).

Shipping out: From Liverpool to Ibadan

ROAPE

September 22, 2020

This post is a chapter from a joint memoir that is being written by Selina Molteno and Robin Cohen about their period in Nigeria, September 1967–September 1969, which was framed by the Nigerian Civil War. The extract tells a personal story and also provides some more general insight into those tumultuous years. Here they describe how they met, married and travelled to Nigeria on one of the last mailboats from Liverpool. The hazardous journey to their new life in Ibadan is vividly conveyed.

By Selina Molteno and Robin Cohen

We met on Christmas Day, 1965. At that time, Selina was living with her friend Anne Darnborough (now Anne Page) at 116 Crawford Street, off Baker Street, in West London. Anne, whom she had known since she first came to London in 1959, was working for the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Charlotte Street at the time and it was she who secured Selina a job there as the membership secretary. Selina and Anne were young, idealistic and outraged about the iniquities of apartheid. They had inherited the accommodation from the South African writer Lewis Nkosi, who was by then married with twin daughters and in need of more space. The accommodation consisted of two rooms on the second floor of a house above a shoemaker’s shop. There was a gas cooker on a small landing at the top of the stairs leading to their bedrooms. They shared a bathroom with the occupants of the two rooms on the floor below. Anne’s parents were visiting at the time the tenancy started. Her mother wept at the sight of the naked light bulbs and at what she regarded as the sordid accommodation. Selina and Anne thought it was perfect. They decorated it with a lick of white paint in no time, bought some cheap Chinese paper lanterns to cover the naked light bulbs and Selina made some orange hessian curtains for the windows. The effect was very à la mode as, of course, were the flatmates.

Selina and Anne had, through a mutual friend, already met Robin’s brother Stan and his wife Ruth, so it went without saying that Robin, Stan’s younger brother who had recently arrived in London after having graduated from Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, would also come to their Christmas party. Selina still recollects the front-door bell ringing and going down two floors to answer it. There stood Stan, Ruth and Robin and her first thought was, ‘I really like his [Robin’s] corduroy trousers!’ It is difficult to believe it, but those were the days when corduroy was fashionable. Maybe it was not love at first sight, but it was certainly instant mutual attraction. As the party got going everyone became tipsy and danced with unrestrained fervour to the many replays of E. C. Arinze’s highlife song celebrating Nigeria’s independence, Freedom Highlife. The lyrics were hardly subtle, but they resonated with the company: ‘Freedom for you/Freedom for everyone/Freedom for me/Freedom for mummy/Freedom for daddy/Freedom for the poor/Freedom for the rich/Hip-hip hurrah’. We so wanted that for South Africa. With our already strong and now musically enhanced belief in freedom, our friendship blossomed. On 16 June 1967, we tied the knot.

Leaving Liverpool

For more than a century the Elder Dempster Line, which was based in Liverpool, had been carrying shipments of goods, travellers and the Royal Mail by sea to and from West Africa. Given that we were planning to go for two years and would therefore be taking a fair amount of luggage, including a rather dilapidated Ford Anglia motorcar, the sea voyage was both a sensible choice and one that befitted our new status as ‘British expatriates’. This somewhat uncomfortable label was hung around our necks even though we had never heard the word ‘expatriate’ before and hated the implied colonial association. To be clear, we were definitely not a buttoned-up couple of old farts equipped with khaki shorts, puttees and pith helmets (just in case you were wondering). We were not the only ones from the Centre of West African Studies at Birmingham to be heading for West Africa. Our friends Paul and Sue Kennedy, along with their new-born daughter Anna, and Patricia Leyland, with her two-year-old daughter Helen in tow, would be going with us as far as Accra, where they would be pursuing their own further studies at the University of Ghana at Legon.[1]

We sailed on one of the two remaining Elder Dempster ships plying the route, the Apapa. As John Martin, the Catering Officer on board, explains in his memoir:

Until the latter part of 1967 a mailboat would sail from Liverpool to Lagos every other Friday. Each ship would undertake a complete round voyage in six weeks. 13 days to Lagos via Las Palmas, Bathurst, Freetown, Monrovia and Tema. A 5-day turn-round at Apapa wharves [Lagos] and 13 days back, calling at Takoradi instead of Tema. Back in Liverpool there was a ten-day turn-round – before the next trip. Because of their regular schedules the company was contracted to carry Royal and Colonial Mail to West Africa.[2]

Apart from our car, we also had a packing case to go into the hold, so we had to get to Liverpool before the actual sailing date. This meant spending the night before our journey at a bed and breakfast, run by a world-weary Irish landlady. The bed took up so much of the room there was no space for our suitcases. Somehow breakfast never arrived. We swore never to darken the doors of that establishment again, a vow we have found remarkably easy to keep. The ship floating there in the dock looking very stately and, as if in a rebuke to our Liverpool landlady, the breakfasts were capacious and delicious. Selina also remembers being presented every morning with a crossword puzzle to solve, focusing her mind on something other than the fact that Nigeria was fast escalating into a civil war. In fact, the civil war (also known as the Biafran War) was becoming a looming reality as we approached West Africa. Routine trips by sea were not to last for much longer. From then on, aeroplanes became the optimal means of conveyance, unless of course one is thinking of ‘cruises’, which is something quite different.

We travelled on the last outbound voyage of the Apapa.

It soon became apparent that the Centre of West African Studies in Birmingham was not the only establishment from which the University of Ibadan recruited its British staff members. There were a few others we met in the lounge who were also going to Ibadan to take up posts there. One couple, to whom we were instantly attracted and whom we still love all these years later, were Linda and Martin Corner. Martin, who was an authority on D. H. Lawrence, was to join the English Department. He and Linda were also newlyweds, so we had a lot in common with them. Another was Chris Beer, a politics student, and I remember that he and Robin developed a good intellectual rapport while we were still on-board. Then, there was Arif Hussain, an historian, always resplendent in an impeccably laundered pink shirt, a garment of which he seemed to have lots of replicas. When gently teased about his shirt, he claimed that as he was from Pakistan, he knew how to handle hot weather. He was travelling on his own, for his wife Ena and their two children would be following by air. He and Ena subsequently became close friends of ours, though Arif and Ena later experienced some marital discord and divorced.

Selina catching some rays on board.

As we sailed south the weather grew steamier and warmer, but we loved the sense of adventure as we spotted land, quaffed free cocktails, looked out at the dolphins and indulged in long chats with our old and newfound friends. Travelling by air, especially after the security measures following 9/11, is truly a second-rate experience compared with an Elder Dempster voyage. The ship made its usual stop at Freetown, Sierra Leone, and we were intrigued and delighted with the trail of beautifully-turned out Creole families and couples who pranced up the gang plank to have tea on board while the ship was in port. They were genteel with perfectly-calibrated English manners.[3] As we left Freetown, another surprise awaited us. In recognition that this was the last voyage of the Apapa, the dockworkers staged a mock colonial tableau, parading up and down with umbrellas, wooden rifles and pith helmets, marching, saluting each other and generally arsing about. It was hilarious.

Deck mates: Selina, Paul and Sue Kennedy.

When we left Tema, the site of the new docks built by Ghana’s first fully-trained architect, the mood was very different. A chillingly large number of people left the ship, including our friends from Birmingham, Paul and Sue Kennedy and Pat Leyland. We truly were a diminishing band, and our apprehension was amplified when we heard on the tannoy the completely fallacious report on the BBC that Ibadan (our destination!) had fallen to advancing Biafran troops. The reporter was Frederick Forsyth, who was then working for the BBC but who subsequently found fame and fortune as a novelist. Enough said. We also were confronted one day in the lounge by a very woebegone waiter who served the tea and cakes without his usual good humour. When asked what the problem was, he explained that his friend, an Igbo, had tried to get off the ship at Ghana, without luck. Many of the Igbos on board were frightened by the thought of what awaited them in Lagos.

While everyone clucked sympathetically, Selina jumped into action and, dragging Robin along for additional support, demanded to see Captain Hutchinson. ‘What are you doing about it?’ ‘This is a British ship.’ ‘You have to protect your crew!’ The fierceness of her demands and questions at first threw the captain, but he then explained that the Elder Dempster line had long-standing financial interests in Nigeria, that he had been in the war (‘the war’ always means the Second World War to someone of that age) and getting shot was not too bad. ‘I notice you didn’t get shot,’ Selina retorted on our way out. As we walked off the gang plank at Lagos, the captain drew Selina aside. ‘He’s in the bowels of the engine room. They’ll never find him.’ We left the Apapa in reasonably cheerful form, thinking Selina had done a good turn. As we were preparing this book, we found out for the first time that things had not turned out well. Perhaps we had saved one life, but in his memoir posted on the web, John Martin recounts the following dreadful outcome:

The army came on board and started to segregate them [the crew] with an officer identifying nationality and Nigerian tribal affiliations – even by cheek scarring. … Despite the efforts of Captain Hutchinson insisting the crew were under his protection, claiming the authority of the British Flag, those identified as Igbos, the last being the Master-at-Arms himself, were taken off the ship under armed escort. The last we saw of them was being taken round to the back of the sheds. Gunfire was heard. Bodies were seen floating in the lagoon on an outgoing tide.[4]

The ‘Sagamu sisters’ and other tales of ‘The Road’

Unaware of the grisly fate of the Igbo crew, we set off in the bus sent by the University of Ibadan to collect us shipmates. We were a dishevelled group, with the exception of Arif in his pink shirt. It was hotter and more humid than anywhere we had previously encountered. There was no air conditioning in the bus and if we opened the windows the dust from the busy, unmade streets of Lagos enveloped us. As we reached the more open road, verdant bushes and trees, some in a Disney-like green, greeted us and we were able to ventilate the bus with fresher air.

The pit stop was at a roadside ‘rest house’ (the colonial description of an overnight stay and bar/café) in Sagamu. Nowadays Sagamu is peppered with decent hotels and motels and is the main interchange on the ten-lane 127km Lagos–Ibadan expressway. In 1967, the road was one lane in each direction, and we were ushered into a sleepy café serving Fanta with extra dollops of orange food dye, very sugary lemonade and bottles of Guinness. Guinness had opened a massive brewery in Lagos and the labels read ‘Lagos and Dublin’. The beer was blatantly advertised as an aid to virility. Beaming strong guys with flowing agbadas and naughty looks were on many billboards proclaiming, ‘Guinness is Good for You, It Gives You Strength.’ At that time, the Sagamu rest house toilets were foul, so many used the bush, rather than face the malodorous ordeal. This included most Nigerian women and one or two of the more experienced expatriates, who would unwrap their marvellously colourful long skirts (called iros or lappas) and, like the men, pee standing up.

In the bus again, and the penny suddenly dropped. This was not simply the road from Lagos to Ibadan, this was The Road, the title of a 1965 play written by Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s eminent writer, who was subsequently to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Robin had seen the play at the Theatre Royal, Stratford (London) and had reviewed it for Anti-Apartheid News. The play suddenly made more sense. The twists in the road, the velocity of the cars, the wrecks and the apparent nonchalance of the drivers were all there in front of us. Soyinka subsequently confirmed that the idea for the play came to him after a road trip to Lagos, when a white cockerel smashed into his windscreen and a mile later, he encountered a corpse lying in the road after a fatal car accident. A central character in the play is ‘the Professor’ who collects parts from smashed cars to sell on. The Professor is in a Faustian pact with Ogun, the Yoruba god of the road (the deity is a busy one, being the god of thunder, lightning and lots of other things too). Ogun is notoriously predatory and always on the lookout for fresh meat – The Road feeds his insatiable appetite while supplying the Professor with his stock in trade.[5]

We learned to fear that road and hated going to Lagos. The taxi drivers in their Peugeot 404s had to make at least two trips to make their journeys pay and put their feet on their accelerators. We also witnessed a truck driver belting along with both feet out of the window, cooling off. We supposed he had placed a brick on the accelerator. As the war progressed, roadblocks were set up for security reasons and though they were a nuisance, we could do nothing but tolerate them. However, one always had to look out for fake roadblocks set up by deserting soldiers who carried weapons and were dressed in uniform but were there trying to scalp innocent travellers. Sadly, we also lost a young Nigerian colleague at Ibadan in a road accident not far from Sagamu.

Ibadan and the University

We were not quite sure what to expect but were somewhat bemused as we entered the city. If you can imagine the work of Georges-Eugene Haussmann in methodically laying out the avenues and boulevards of Paris, then turning that around 180 degrees, you would have some idea of Ibadan in the 1960s – the higgledy-piggledy houses, sagging tin roofs, hills and dips, markets, shops, stalls, paths, roads and streets had blatantly defied the clean lines of the town planners, architects and modernizers. Here and there – in Mapo Hall, Cocoa House and the Premier Inn (an Israeli-built hotel) – modernity had been at work but turn only a few metres away and the unruly ways of the old city reasserted themselves. The key to understanding this strange urban landscape is that Ibadan was a pre-colonial city, with farmers historically commuting outside the city’s defence perimeter to toil in their fields. Its odd appearance was somewhat charming.

We looped around an apology for a ring road, entered an impressive gateway, and finally got a glimpse of our new place of work. The University of Ibadan had been built (along with Legon in Ghana, Makerere in Uganda, the University of Dar es Saleem and others) as a result of the Colonial Development and Welfare Act (1945/6) which authorized spending to prepare the colonies for independence. It is definitely not part of our brief to defend British colonialism in general, but it is fair to record that some important investments were made in education, agricultural development and welfare in the colonies, influenced by the incoming Labour government. In this spirit, two very prominent architects, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, were hired to build the University of Ibadan. The architects had also worked on the Festival of Britain and the Royal Festival Hall and there are echoes of this in some of the university’s buildings.

Tim Livsey, an architectural historian, accurately describes the style of the university as ‘tropical modern’. Though he admires their designs, Livsey also denounces the university’s buildings as too expensive and too elitist, finding echoes of Oxbridge in the intimate quadrangles in the halls of residence and elsewhere.[6] Having worked at Ibadan and Oxford (and six other universities) Robin finds this characterization a bit of a stretch. The architects worked intelligently with shaped concrete and ornate breeze blocks which, in fact, mimicked the emerging vernacular architecture in Nigeria. They also developed a simple and sensible form of air cooling. The gap between two breeze block walls was filled with palm fronds onto which dripped a steady trickle of water, lowering the temperature to tolerable levels. As the war progressed and the electricity supplies became erratic, the buildings that post-dated Fry and Drew’s, which relied on conventional air-conditioning, became sweat boxes and Robin manoeuvred as best he could to teach all his classes in the older lecture rooms.

One of the original Maxwell Fry/Jane Drew buildings, University of Ibadan

‘Oh no’, we have a steward

The bus from Lagos twisted quietly around the campus and came to a gentle halt at a little shop adjacent to the University of Ibadan Staff Club. Here a surprise awaited us. There was a line of male workers, known as stewards who, by some unknown process, had been assigned to each newcomer. They knew our names, but we did not know theirs. As new staff members stepped out of the bus, they were politely greeted by a steward who explained that he would be working for them. We held back a bit in the bus as we realized what was happening and noticed a certain amount of shuffling around in the queue of workers. Finally, it was our turn and it was quite clear that our hesitancy was more than matched by the steward who had been fingered to work for us. We were young, casually dressed, and definitely not employer material. Our designated steward’s disappointment was barely concealed. To be honest, we were uncomfortable and felt cornered. We had grown up in apartheid South Africa and our families had servants. We thought we had escaped all that by migrating to the UK and then independent Africa. When he introduced himself as Friday Etukudo, our embarrassment was complete. ‘His name is Friday,’ we muttered to each other, ‘and we are Mr and Mrs Robinson Crusoe!’[7]

9 Gbenro Ogunbiyi Close, Ibadan, our home for two years. Note the pawpaw trees, planted by Selina (a useful source of food), and Friday Etukudo’s bicycle.

We say more about Friday Etukudo elsewhere in our memoir, but it is necessary to record now that we thank our lucky stars that we had been paired with him by some unknown benign force. Friday was an absolutely wonderful employee and companion. Without his knowledge, loyalty and support we would have been in serious trouble on more than one occasion. We were taken to our house, a simple concrete bungalow, off campus in a nearby suburb, Bodija, to which Friday cycled each weekday morning for his half-day with us. Our new life in Ibadan had begun.

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: The gatehouse, University of Ibadan.

Notes

[1]. Pat Leyland (Kaufert) worked on migration, health and local development in the town of Tsito, Ghana, and later in life undertook research on the Inuit while at the University of Manitoba. She died in 2019. Paul Kennedy completed pioneering research on African entrepreneurs in Ghana and he and Robin later co-authored a popular textbook, Global Sociology (2013). Paul died in 2020. His obituary is here.

[2]. John Martin ‘Homeward Bound: The Experiences of a Caterer with Elder Dempster Lines’, March 2017.

[3]. Robin was much later in his academic career to spend four years researching Creoles and creolization, his interest in the process of sharing cultures having partly stemmed from this memory. See Robin Cohen and Olivia Sheringham, Encountering Difference: Diasporic Traces, Creolizing Places (2016). The best book on Sierra Leone’s Creoles is Arthur T. Porter’s Creoledom: A Study of Freetown Society (1963), a Creole himself and a former principal of Fourah Bay College.

[4]. John Martin ‘Homeward Bound: The Experiences of a Caterer with Elder Dempster Lines, March 2017.

[5]. See G. Vasistha Bhargavi, ‘Wole Soyinka’s The Road: The drama of existence in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones’, IUP Journal of English Studies, 11 (3) 2016.

[6]. See Tim Livsey’s ‘Building of the Month’ c20society.org.uk (14 February, 2014).

[7]. The reference, for younger readers, is to a popular 1719 novel titled Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, which foreshadows colonialism and racial divisions of labour. Of course, the connection was only in our minds. It is common in West Africa to name children after the day they were born.

Accounting for the Dead in the Rwandan Genocide

ROAPE

September 17, 2020

Based on his ROAPE paper, Luc Reydams writes that the post-genocide Rwandan government made it clear that foreign help with demographic and forensic investigations was neither appreciated nor needed, and proceeded with its own counts of genocide victims. This blogpost argues that the official death toll in Rwanda roughly doubled the number of genocide victims. Reydams provides insight into how history and myth has been created in the new Rwanda.

By Luc Reydams

One of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes in post-colonial Africa is the Rwandan civil war and genocide of 1994. The war began in October 1990 when the armed wing of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded Rwanda from neighbouring Uganda. The RPF was (and is) dominated by Rwandan Tutsi who had grown up in exile. A fragile, internationally brokered peace agreement held from August 1993 until 6 April 1994 when unidentified persons shot down an airplane carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana, the chief of staff of the Rwandan armed forces, and three cabinet ministers (all Hutu). The attack triggered the resumption of the civil war and the beginning of the genocide against the Tutsi. Both ended in July when the RPF routed the government army and Hutu militias loyal to it. Paul Kagame, the commander of the RPF, and a small group of former Tutsi exiles have ruled Rwanda ever since.

A UN Commission of Experts reported in December 1994 that ‘an estimated 500,000 unarmed civilians have been murdered in Rwanda. That estimate indeed may err on the conservative side for […] some reliable estimates put the number of dead at close to 1 million’. The new government, for its part, spoke of more than two million victims and soon made clear that it neither appreciated nor needed foreign help with counting. It rejected offers of international agencies to conduct a population survey and thwarted excavations of mass graves by investigators of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The government also took over a census initiative launched by an association of genocide survivors, and proceeded with its own counts.

It should be noted that hyping numbers was part of the RPF’s communications strategy from the beginning of the civil war. Émigré circles in the early 1990s claimed that during and after the ‘Hutu Revolution’ (1959–1962) ‘several hundred thousands of Tutsi were savagely slaughtered’ and that the Tutsi diaspora had reached two million. In reality, between 10,000 and 14,000 Tutsi civilians were killed in the period 1959-1962 and Tutsi exiles in 1990 numbered between 500,000 and 600,000. I now turn to the two official censuses for which a report is available.

1996 Census: 1.2 million victims

Eric Rousseau was in his twenties when the genocide happened. The Belgian had befriended Rwandan exiles in Brussels and when they returned to Rwanda in 1994, he joined them, and his involvement with the new government began. Rousseau began working for cabinet minister Jacques Bihozagara, a cofounder of the RPF and former RPF representative in Belgium. Rousseau, who had studied marketing and advertising, proposed the creation of a Commission for the Memorial of the Genocide and Massacres. The plan was accepted and an inter-ministerial commission created. Except for Rousseau, all six members were Tutsi returnees.

The commission set out to identify massacre sites, count the victims and identify the perpetrators. Even with plenty of resources and expertise, just counting the victims would be a gigantic and time-consuming undertaking. Rousseau and his amateur team completed their field investigation in 56 days, and a month later the ‘Preliminary report on the identification of sites of the genocide and massacres that took place in Rwanda from April to July 1994’was ready.

It seems odd to distinguish between sites of ‘genocide’ and ‘massacres’ because what else is a genocide site than a massacre site? In Rwandan discourse, however, Tutsi were victims of genocide while Hutu who died in intra-Hutu violence were victims of massacres. Adding ‘massacres’ to the title, therefore, was a way to acknowledge Hutu deaths. The April–July 1994 time frame, on the other hand, excluded the tens of thousands of Hutu civilians allegedly killed by the RPF after it seized power.

As the principal author of the first official census report, Rousseau was called to testify before the ICTR: ‘We were able to get to an estimate based on the graves that we opened, the skulls that we counted, collation of testimonies. We arrived at an overall estimate [of] about 1.2 million’. When pressed by the defense about RPF killings of Hutu civilians, he replied that he had never heard about this before.

2000 Census: 1,074,017 victims

The 1996 census being ‘preliminary’, a new victim count was held in July 2000. The results were published in a report titled Dénombrement des victimes du génocide (Count of genocide victims). The title illustrates the shifting discourse about the events of 1994. By deleting the word ‘massacres’, Hutu victims are no longer acknowledged. All that happened in 1994 was a genocide against the Tutsi. The report states that the government has compiled a list of the names of all victims but that privacy laws prohibit publication. However, in Rwanda and elsewhere death (and birth) records are public, and the names of thousands of victims are engraved in the Wall of Names at the Kigali Genocide. The government’s concern for the privacy of the dead also cannot be reconciled with its policy of burying them in mass graves or publicly displaying their mummified bodies. The report speaks of a total of 1,074,017 victims, of whom 93.7% (1,006,354) Tutsi. The original census cards are kept under lock and key.

The government eventually settled on ‘more than a million’. The 2003 constitution opens by recalling ‘the genocide […] that decimated more than a million sons and daughters of Rwanda’. However, the 1996 and 2000 censuses present two major problems. Their tallies are far higher than the Tutsi population inside Rwanda in 1994. At the same time, they are far lower than the number of bodies reportedly buried at genocide cemeteries and memorials. The sections below discuss these inconsistencies.

Why ‘more than a million’ is impossible

A 1956 report from the Belgian colonial administration shows the following distribution for a population of 2,374,000: Hutu 82.74%, Tutsi 16.59%, and Twa 0.67%. Thus, in 1956 the number of Rwandan Tutsi stood at around 394,000. Importantly, ethnicity was based on self-identification. Since Tutsi enjoyed certain privileges, it cannot be excluded that a number of Hutu passed off as Tutsi. Therefore, 394,000 is a maximum population baseline.

The population more than tripled between 1956 and 1991, from 2,374,000 to 7,290,000 (including 50,000 foreigners). The increase corresponds to a net average annual growth rate of 3.2%. Surveys from 1970 and 1983 reveal that fertility rates of Hutu women were consistently higher than those of Tutsi women (see below).

Let us now briefly consider the turbulent pre- and post-independence years. The ‘Hutu Revolution’ of 1959–1962 and accompanying violence triggered an exodus of Tutsi elites to neighbouring countries. Among the first wave of refugees were an infant Paul Kagame and his parents. When in 1963 a band of Tutsi exiles invaded Rwanda to restore Tutsi rule, the government responded with brutal repression. Between 10,000 and 14,000 Tutsi civilians were massacred, causing a second exodus. A political crisis in 1972–73 triggered a third and final wave of Tutsi refugees.

Two independently commissioned studies calculated the size of the Tutsi diaspora in the early 1990s. Catherine Watson for the US Committee for Refugees arrived at ‘probably half a million’ in February 1991; or ±550,000 in April 1994 at a 3% growth rate. André Guichaoua for the UN Refugee Agency estimated the diaspora at ±550,000 in March 1991; or ±600,000 in April 1994 at a 3% growth rate. Gérard Prunier, on the other hand, counted 550,000 exiles in 1993 but 600,000–700,000 a year later. Whoever is right, these estimates undermine the claim of émigré circles that the Tutsi diaspora had reached two million.

As noted earlier, the average annual growth rate of the Rwandan population between 1956 and 1991 was 3.2% despite massacres and exodus. Health surveys suggest that the Hutu and Tutsi populations had different fertility rates. In 1970 Tutsi women had a ±17% lower birth rate than Hutu women; from the late 1970s until the mid-1980s the difference was ±31%. After 1987 the difference became negligible due to a ‘brutal decline’ of the overall fertility rate. Researchers concluded that ‘being Tutsi has no effect on fertility in the 1987–1992 period, while it has a negative and significant effect on fertility in both the 1982–1992 and 1977–1992 periods’.

It would be logical to infer that for a substantial period of time between 1956 and 1991 Rwanda’s Tutsi population grew at a lower rate than the Hutu. However, three caveats are called for. First, the lower birth rates of Tutsi were partially offset by higher survival rates. Second, the quality of the surveys is debatable. The 1983 survey was the first conducted by the then newly established National Population Office. Third, the surveys do not take into account intermarriage between Hutu and Tutsi. We do not know how prevalent it was and whether women in mixed marriages had the same fertility as their ethnic kin. The only thing we can be reasonably certain about is that the growth rate of the Tutsi population in Rwanda did not exceed that of Hutu.

Comparable data about the Tutsi diaspora do not seem available. Given that growth of the Rwandan population in the 1970s and early 1980s was among the highest in Africa, we can also be reasonably sure that the growth rate of the diaspora did not exceed that of Hutu in Rwanda. For the sake of my argument, I (liberally) assume that Tutsi in Rwanda and in the diaspora had the same growth rate as Hutu (3.2%) and that the total Tutsi population had increased from 394,000 in 1956 to around 1,264,000 in April 1994.

If we subtract 550,000 diaspora Tutsi (Watson’s figure) we are left with 714,000 inside Rwanda; 600,000 diaspora Tutsi (Guichaoua’s figure) leaves 664,000 in Rwanda. But if the diaspora counted 700,000 Tutsi (Prunier’s figure), then the number of Tutsi in Rwanda before the genocide decreases to 564,000. Assuming that 150,000–225,000 survived, the maximum number of Tutsi genocide victims is between 489,000 and 564,000. Thus it may be concluded that the official death toll is significantly inflated.

‘More than a million’ as propaganda

I submit that notwithstanding the government censuses, ‘more than a million’ is not an actual count but propaganda. There are interesting historical parallels in this regard between the RPF and the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale. The FLN fought a long and bloody war of independence from France (1954–1962), and in its aftermath murdered tens of thousands of native Muslim Algerians who had served in the French army. The RPF framed its struggle as a ‘war of liberation’ against what it considered a neo-colonial regime that perpetuated the divisions introduced by the coloniser; when the battle was over it reportedly killed tens of thousands of Hutu civilians. In Algeria the spoils of the war went to FLN cadres, in Rwanda to members of the RPF.

Post-war Algeria adopted a constitution with the following preamble: ‘The war of extermination waged by French imperialism was intensified and more than a million martyrs paid with their lives for the love of their country and liberty’. As in Rwanda, it is unclear how the Algerian government arrived at ‘more than a million’. The best scholarly estimates of Algerian deaths range between 200,000 and 300,000. In both countries the victors used the death of ‘more than a million’ countrymen and women to exculpate themselves and lay the foundation for radically new societies under their control.

Human remains exhumed and reburied

In the late 1990s the Rwandan government began progressively to exhume suspected mass graves and reinter any human remains found therein at designated genocide cemeteries and memorials. Individual identification and burial were not allowed because ‘For the state, the principal concern is the collective identification of victims […] as victims of the genocide’.

In 2008, RPF controlled media reported on the progress of the reburial project: ‘390 Genocide Memorial Sites have been set up across the country since 1994. Those sites accommodate remains of 1,002,755 victims of the mayhem while 851,756 others were buried in different cemeteries across the country. To these numbers should be added the remains of 97,567 people who have been identified but have not yet been given decent burial, bringing the total to 1,952,078 genocide victims’. The revelation gives a new twist to the government’s numbers game. If between 489,000 and 564,000 Tutsi died in the genocide and 1,952,078 human remains have been unearthed, then who are the ‘more than a million’ other victims? What is hidden behind this contradiction?

Conclusion

Casualty counts after a humanitarian catastrophe often are fraught with methodological and political pitfalls. In Rwanda the new government dominated by the victorious RPF soon made clear that it neither appreciated nor needed foreign help with counting the dead of the genocide, and proceeded with its own counts. Other than their final tallies very little is known about them. The processes were extremely opaque; lists of names of victims are kept secret; and reports, if published, are filled with data of questionable relevance. Information that would allow meaningful verification was left out, and data files are kept secret. The definition of ‘victim’ and the time frame of the conflict were revised to include some dead and exclude others.

The government eventually settled on ‘more than a million’ Tutsi victims, even though this number cannot possibly be reconciled with demographic data or, for that matter, with the number of victims reportedly buried at genocide cemeteries and memorials. The death of ‘more than a million’ Tutsi became the foundation of the new Rwanda and created the socio-political environment for the mass criminalization of Hutu. Between 2005 and 2012, popular Gacaca courts reportedly tried more than a million Hutu men and women. Thus the new Rwanda is built not only on the death of ‘more than a million’ Tutsi but also on the collective guilt of Hutu.

The full article in ROAPE, ‘More than a million’: the politics of accounting for the dead of the Rwandan genocide’ is free to access.

Luc Reydams is based in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, where he teaches international law, international organizations, transnational social movements, and the network society.

Featured Photograph: pictures of genocide victims at the Genocide Memorial Centre in Kigali, Rwanda (Adam Jones, 25 July 2012).

The Myth of Unconditionality in Development Aid

ROAPE

September 10, 2020

Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Western Kenya, Mario Schmidt argues that local interpretations of GiveDirectly’s unconditional cash transfer program unmask how the NGO’s ‘myth of unconditionality’ obscures structural inequalities of the development aid sector. Schmidt argues that in order to tackle these structural inequalities, cash transfers should be ‘ungifted’ and viewed as debts repaid and not as gifts offered.

By Mario Schmidt

The New York Times praises the US-American NGO GiveDirectly (GD), a GiveWell top charity, for offering a ‘glimpse into the future of not working’ and journalists from the UK to Kenya discuss GD’s unconditional cash transfer program as a revolutionary alternative in the field of development aid. German podcasts as well as international bestsellers such as Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists portray grateful beneficiaries whose lives have truly changed for the better since they received GD’s unconditional cash and started to invest it like the business people they were always meant to be. At first glance, GD indeed has an impressive CV. Since 2009, the NGO has distributed over US$160 million of unconditional cash transfers to over tens of thousands of poor people in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, the USA and Liberia in an allegedly unbureaucratic, corrupt-free and transparent way. Recipients are ‘sensitized’ in communal meetings (baraza), the cash transfers are evaluated by teams of internationally renowned behavioral economists conducting rigorous randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and the money arrives in the recipients’ mobile money wallets such as the ones from Mpesa, Kenya’s celebrated FinTech miracle, without passing through the hands of local politicians.

In 2015 and after finalizing a pilot program in the Western Kenyan constituency Rarieda (Siaya County), GD decided to penetrate my ethnographic field site, Homa Bay County. On the one hand, they thereby hoped to enlarge their pool of potential beneficiaries. On the other hand, they had planned to conduct further large-scale RCTs (one RCT implemented in the area, studied the effects of motivational videos on recipients’ spending behavior). To the surprise of GD, almost 50% of the households considered eligible for the program in Homa Bay County refused to participate. As a result, the household heads waived GD’s cash transfer which would have consisted of three transfers amounting to a total of 110,000 Kenyan Shillings (roughly US$1,000).

In order to understand what had happened in Homa Bay County and why so many households had refused to participate, I teamed up with Samson Okech, a former field officer of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) who had conducted surveys for GD in Siaya. Samson had been an IPA employee for over ten years and belongs to the extended family I work with most closely during fieldwork. During our long qualitative interviews with recipients of GD’s cash transfer and former field officers as well as Western Kenyans who refused to be enrolled in the program, the celebratory reports by journalists and scholars were replaced by a bleaker picture of an intervention riddled with misunderstandings and problems.

Before I offer a glimpse into what happened on the ground, I want to emphasize that I am neither politically nor economically against unconditional cash transfers which, without a doubt, have helped many individuals in Western Kenya and elsewhere. It is not the what, but the how against which I direct my critique. The following two sections illustrate that a substantial part of Homa Bay County’s population did not consider GD’s intervention as a one-time affair between themselves and GD. In contrast, they interpreted GD’s program either as an invitation into a long-term relationship of patronage or as a one-time transfer with obscured actors. These interpretations should make us aware of ethical problems entailed in conducting social experiments (see Kvangraven’s piece on Impoverished Economics, Chelwa’s and Muller’s The Poverty of Poor Economics or Ouma’s reflection upon GD’s randomisation process in Western Kenya). They can also crucially encourage us to think about ways of radically reconfiguring the political economy of development aid in Africa and elsewhere. Instead of framing relations between the West and the Rest as relations between charitable donors and obedient recipients, in my conclusion I propose to ‘ungift’ unconditional cash transfers as well as development aid as a whole. Taking inspiration from rumors claiming that Barack Obama, whose father came from Western Kenya, has created GD in order to rectify historical injustices, I suggest rethinking cash transfers as reparations or debts repaid. Consequently, recipients should no longer be used as ‘guinea pigs’ but appreciated as equal partners and autonomous subjects entitled to reap a substantial portion of the value produced in a global capitalist economy that, historically as well as structurally, depends on exploiting them.

Why money needs to be spent on ‘visible things’

Those were guidelines on how to use the money. It was important that what you did with the money was visible and could be evaluated’, William Owino explained to us after we had asked him about a ‘brochure’ several other respondents had mentioned. One of the studies on the impact of GD’s activities in Siaya also mentions these brochures. In order to ‘emphasize the unconditional nature of the transfer, households were provided with a brochure that listed a large number of potential uses of the transfer.’ When being asked which type of photographs and suggestions were included in these brochures, respondents mentioned photographs of newly constructed houses with iron sheets, clothes, food and other gik manenore (‘visible things’). When we inquired further if the depicted uses included drinking alcohol, betting, dancing or other morally ambiguous goods and services, the majority of our respondents dismissed that question by laughing or by adding that field officers had also advised them against using the money for other morally dubious services such as paying prostitutes or bride wealth for a second or third wife.

One of our respondents in Homa Bay took the issue of gik manenore to its extreme by expressing the opinion that GD’s money must be used to build a house with a fixed amount of iron sheets and according to a preassigned architectural plan so that GD, in their evaluation, would be able to identify the houses whose owners had benefited from their program quickly and without much effort. Such practices of ‘anticipatory obedience’ are also implicitly at work in the rationalizations of another respondent. He expected that GD’s field officers who had asked him questions about what he intended to do with the money during the initial survey – questions whose answers had, in his opinion, qualified him to receive the cash transfer – would one day return to see if he had really used the money according to his initially stated intention. The logic employed is clear: The ‘unconditional’ cash transfers needed to be spent on useful and, if possible, visible and countable things so that GD would return with further funds after a positive evaluation.

Recipients understood the relation with GD not as a one-off affair, but as an entrance into a long-term relation of fruitful dependency. In contrast to GD which, like most neoliberal capitalists, understands unconditional cash as a context-independent techno-fix, the inhabitants of Homa Bay framed money as an entity embedded in and crystallizing social power relations. From such a perspective, free money is not really free, but like Marcel Mauss’ famous gifts, an invitation into a ‘contract by trial’ which has the potential to turn into a long-term relationship benefitting both partners if recipients pass the test and reciprocate with obedience. While some actors framed the offer of unconditional cash as a test that could lead into an ongoing patron-client relationship between charitable donors and obedient recipients, others, the majority who refused to accept GD’s offer, interpreted it as a direct exchange relation with unseen actors.

Why money is never free

‘People in the market and those I met going home told me it is blood money’, Mary, a 40-year old mother remembered. After she had been sampled, Mary had never received money from GD but failed to understand why and believed the village elder had ‘eaten’ her money. She further told us that rumors about ‘blood money’ circulated in church services and funeral festivities. ‘Blood money’ refers to widespread beliefs that accepting GD’s cash implied entering into a debt relation with unknown actors such as a local group sacrificing children or the devil.

Comparable rumors playing with the well-known anthropological trope of money’s (anti)-reproductive potential circulate widely in Homa Bay: Husbands who wake up only to see their wives squatting in a corner of the room laying eggs, a huge snake that lives in Lake Victoria and vomits out all the money GD uses, mobile phones that can be charged under the armpit or find their way into the recipient’s bed if lost or thrown away (many people allegedly threw their phones away in order to cut the link to GD), money that replenishes automatically or a devilish cult of Norwegians that abducts Kenyan babies and transports them to Scandinavia where they are adopted into infertile marriages. All of these rumors, which are epitomized in a phrase some recipients considered to be GD’s slogan, Idak maber, to idak matin – (‘You live well, but you live short’) – revolve around the same paradox: Money initially offered with no strings attached, but whose reproductive potential will soon demand blood sacrifice or lead to a fundamental change in one’s own reproductive capacities.

Local attempts to ‘conditionalize’ GD’s unconditional cash as well as rumors about tit-for-tat exchanges with the devil undermine GD’s assumption that their cash transfers are perceived by recipients as unconditional. This has two consequences. On the one hand, it questions the validity of studies trying to prove that the program was successful as an unconditional cash transfer program. On the other hand, it urges us to focus on the unintended consequences caused by GD’s intervention. While Western Kenyans who have given consent to participate in the intervention invested their hopes in an ongoing charitable relation with GD, those who have refused to participate – as well as some who did – have been haunted by fear and anxiety triggered by situating GD’s activities in a hidden sphere.

All this raises ethical and political questions about GD’s intervention in Homa Bay County. Did GD, an actor that is neither democratically elected nor constitutionally backed up, have the right to intervene in an area where almost 50 % of the population refused to participate? Did the program really reach the poorest members of society if accepting the offer depended on understanding the complex networks of NGOs that constitute the aid landscape? Should it not be considered problematic that a US-American NGO uses whole counties of an independent country as laboratories where they experimentally test the feasibility of unconditional cash transfers in order to assure their donors that recipients of unconditional cash ‘really’ do not spend donations on alcohol and prostitutes?

Apart from raising these and other ethical and political questions, the reactions of the inhabitants of Homa Bay County can be understood as mirrors reflecting a distorted but illuminating image of the development aid sector. Narratives about women laying eggs and satanic cults sacrificing children exemplify an awareness of the fact that, on a structural level, the development aid sector is shot through with inequalities and obscure hierarchical power relations between donating and receiving actors. At the same time, recipients’ anticipatory obedience to use the cash on ‘visible things’ unmasks a system that appears overwhelmed by the necessity to constantly evaluate projects in order to secure further funding. By ‘conditionalizing’ cash transfers as long-term patronage relations or tit-for-tat exchanges with the devil, inhabitants of Homa Bay unmask GD’s ‘myth of unconditionality’ and thereby relocate GD into the wider development aid world in which they have never been equal partners.

Why we must ‘ungift’ development aid

‘I think it was because of Obama’, a former colleague of Samson who had administered the surveys of GD in Siaya County told me while we enjoyed a meal in a restaurant along Nairobi’s Moi Avenue after I had asked him why the rejection rates of GD’s program in Siaya had been so low. According to rumors that circulated widely during GD’s first years in Siaya, Barack Obama, whose father came from a village in Siaya County, had teamed up with Raila Odinga, an almost mythical Luo politician, in order to channel US-American funds ‘directly’ to Western Kenya, i.e. without passing through the Central Kenyan political elite who had – in 2007 as well as 2013 – ‘stolen’ the elections from Raila. As a consequence, at least some recipients did not agree with interpretations of the cash transfers as market exchanges with shadowy actors or invitations into long-term relationships of patronage. Rather, they conceptualized the transfers as reparations originating in Obama’s attempt to recoup losses accumulated by the Luo community due to political injustices provoked by the actions of what many consider to be a corrupt Kikuyu elite. This conjuring of a primordial ethnic alliance between Obama and Western Kenyans might strike many as chimerical. Be that as it may, we should acknowledge that the rumor of Obama’s intervention situates the cash transfers in a social relation between two equals who accept their mutual indebtedness and act accordingly by putting things straight. By reinterpreting GD as a clandestine operation invented by their political leaders, Barack Obama and Raila Odinga, inhabitants of Siaya portray themselves as belonging to a community of interdependent equals whose members are entitled to what the anthropologist James Ferguson has called their ‘rightful share’.

How would development aid look like if we dared to transfer this idea of a community whose members acknowledge their equality and mutual indebtedness to our global economic system? One way to redeem the fact that we all live in a highly connected capitalist economic system spanning the whole globe and depending on exploiting a huge portion of the global community would be to follow in the footsteps of the inhabitants of Siaya and rebrand cash transfers as reparations being paid for historical and structural injustices.

By way of conclusion, I want to suggest the idea of ‘ungifting’ development aid, i.e. to reframe it as a duty and to accept that recipients of cash transfers have the right to receive their share of the value produced by the global capitalist economic system. Consequently, cash transfers should be considered as debts repaid and not as gifts offered.

Names of individuals in this article have been anonymized.

Mario Schmidt is a postdoctoral researcher at the Graduate School for the Humanities at the University of Cologne, Germany. His publications cover a wide area of topics ranging from cultural classification of money in Western Kenya to gambling in Nairobi and the history of French anthropology.

Hunger, Anger and a New Social Movement in South Africa

ROAPE

September 8, 2020

This blogpost is about a new social movement, the C-19 People’s Coalition (C19PC) that has developed in South Africa in response to the Covid-19 crisis. Activist and researcher, Kate Alexander examines the Coalition’s Gauteng Community Organising Working Group. She highlights the issue of hunger as the government’s chief failing and as a spur for social movement organising.

By Kate Alexander

South Africa’s government moved quickly in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The first confirmed case was on 5 March 2020; a State of National Disaster was promulgated on 15 March, with this accompanied by closure of schools; a full lockdown was implemented from 26 March and the first death was announced the following day. Lockdown was draconian. Travel was prohibited except for essential services; only food shops, pharmacies and medical facilities were permitted to open (even the sale of cigarettes was illegal); and a curfew was enforced. From 1 May there was a slight easing of restrictions, with more industries and shops allowed to open; and there were further relaxation in most areas from 1 June. The number of confirmed cases is higher than elsewhere in Africa with 570,000 cases and 11,500 deaths recorded in mid-August. In our survey, 84.3% of adults felt the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was doing a good job or a very good job.

However, this is only one side of the story. South Africa has a higher level of income inequality than any other major country; and nearly 40% of the labour-force was unemployed even before the crisis. The implications of this inequality were apparent from the outset. For instance, when the wealthy Oppenheimer family donated R1 billion (about $55 million), leaving them a mere R134 billion approximately, this was widely commended, but when vast numbers of workers lost their jobs or were banned from informal trading, leaving them with next to nothing, this was barely noticed by mainstream media. Dividing the population between those on lower incomes (defined as less than R10,000 per month, about $550), who represented about 83% of adults, those on middle incomes (R10,000 to R40,000 per month), about 13% of adults, and those on higher incomes (above R40,000), about 4%, we found that 89% of those on lower incomes had difficulty paying their bills, compared to 27% on middle incomes and 13% on higher incomes. Differences were reflected, in particular, in responses to a question about the adverse impact of the crisis on your child’s education. Here 82% of those on lower incomes, 53% of those on middle incomes and 13% on upper incomes were ‘very concerned’. This contrast reflected, in particular, capacity to cope with on-line teaching. Hardly surprising, then, that when asked about personal happiness, only 11% of those on lower incomes were positive, compared with 26% of middle-income earners and 39% of those in the upper-income group.

The government’s response to suffering among poorer people has been lackluster, inadequate and shambolic, notably in relation to food distribution. At the best of times, millions of people in South Africa suffer malnutrition, but starvation is minimized through delivery of hundreds-of-thousands of food parcels and school feeding schemes. Yet during lockdown there was a sudden burst in unemployment, with at least 3 million losing their jobs (many without any benefits or savings) and schools were closed, so there was a surge in the number of people without food. In truth, the government did not know the magnitude of the problem, and its food banks and supply systems were under-resourced and unprepared. Municipal councilors, mostly members of the governing African National Congress (ANC), were entrusted with distribution and frequently abused their power, delivering only to their supporters with the aim of winning votes ahead of next year’s local government elections. Pushed along by riots, telephone hotlines were established, but were quickly swamped by calls. Food queues sometimes extended more than a kilometer, and there were stampedes. The government attempted to work with NGOs but doing so through cumbersome procedures that slowed relief efforts. The food problem remains acute.

The crisis has revealed the government working against, rather than with, civil society. In many places this builds on years of distrust. There has been anger, in particular, over failure to deliver basic services and, more broadly, to dismantle structural injustice inherited from apartheid. How has civil society responded to the challenges of the pandemic and lockdown?

Civil society’s response

Trade unions were at the forefront of the struggle against apartheid, which culminated in the 1994 election, and they played a powerful role in improving workers’ conditions in the years that followed. But tensions emerged. The leadership of the largest federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), backed the government, which many workers regarded as favouring business interests. Matters came to a head after the Marikana Massacre in 2012, when the police shot and killed 34 striking mineworkers employed by Lonmin (whose largest shareholder was Ramaphosa, already a senior leader in the ANC). The federation’s largest union, the National Union of Metalworkers, broke away and established the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU).

Under the lockdown, there has been some unrest, mainly among workers in essential industries, but labour’s response has been weak. There are various reasons for this. In most industries, work was halted; gatherings were banned; COSATU supported the government; SAFTU’s charismatic leader Zwelinzima Vavi was taken ill with Covid-19 (though recovered); and retrenchments and short-time work have ensured that many, perhaps most, workers fear for their jobs.

Beyond the workplaces and unions, there has been a flurry of activity. Much of this has been purely local. In some of the more affluent areas, community activists have established soup kitchens for their hungry neighbours. Some churches and other faith-based organizations and some business owners have also been active. At a national level, the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, named after Nelson’ Mandela’s close comrade, has encouraged the development of Community Action Networks. However, the most substantial body to emerge so far is the C19PC.

C19PC was born out of a meeting held on 18 March, which was held partly online and partly face-to-face in Cape Town, where the convening organization, Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education, had its office. The meeting appointed a drafting team that, through numerous discussions and iterations, drew up a Programme of Action (POA). By 23 March, when it was published, the POA had attracted support from over 100 organizations, some small but including SAFTU and major not-for-profit organizations with a mass base, such as the Treatment Action Campaign, Equal Education, and Right-2-Know. The POA begins: ‘We, as civic organizations, trade unions, organizations of informal workers, faith-based organizations and community structures in South Africa, call on all people, every stakeholder and sector, to contain infection, reduce transmission and mitigate the social and political impacts of the Covid-19 virus.’ It then elaborated 10 areas of concern that raised key socio-economic issues. The POA has now been signed by 320 organizations; the drafting team became a Task Team and, later, a Facilitation Team; 21 working groups (WGs) were soon established, some issue-based, some providing technical support, and others for the country’s various provinces (there are 9 in all); and these WGs formed their own Working Group Conveners’ Forum.

In Gauteng, which includes Johannesburg and about a quarter of the country’s population, we had our first meeting on 23 March. This established a provincial Task Team and a number of working groups, including one that soon became the COWG. One leader of the COWG is Cleopatra Shezi, a Soweto activist who had been politicized by the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, and she drew in a layer of community activists involved in service delivery and housing struggles. Another leader is Bongani Xezwi, an organizer for Right-2-Know. We were joined by new activists who had come through Extinction Rebellion and student struggles. I had worked with Shezi for many years, and she was a CSC research assistant, and Xezwi and I conducted research together with them on the Marikana Massacre. Somehow, I emerged as the group’s convener. From the outset, we aimed to link activity around Covid-19 with strengthening community organization.

We had drafted a popular leaflet about Covid-19 by 22 March, and this was distributed in English and isiZulu. From the start we insisted that, for safety’s sake, activists wear a mask and surgical gloves and carry a bottle of sanitizer, and these became a kind of uniform that complemented our public education. Shezi was called upon to help pensioners at their monthly pay-out queues, and at supermarkets, she organized people to physically distance themselves from each other. Xezwi was active in a densely-packed shack settlement, where, with a large team of volunteers, he managed to persuade people to remain in their yards. This was no mean achievement, and it disproved the notion that that social distancing was impossible in informal settlements. His team even reached the point where it was possible to convince owners of illegal drinking places to close their businesses. Word spread and provided an example of what is possible through peer education. When the government relied on the guns of police and army it achieved far less.

Within a couple of weeks, the COWG had 16 team leaders, who, between them, mobilized about 250 volunteers in working-class areas of Johannesburg and elsewhere in south Gauteng. Some activists obtained official permits as essential workers, but in most cases the police just turned a blind eye. In addition, the group included half-a-dozen support workers, all volunteers, including the head of a legal NGO, a finance person, and a student with communication skills who helped with use of Zoom and, later, Google Forms. We worked with the C19PC (Gauteng) Food Security Working Group in developing a $1 million funding proposal and, to pull everything together, the two working groups secured the support of a community-oriented NGO willing to act as financial manager. In addition, the C19PC established a media working group that publicized what we were doing and assisted with crowd funding. Funds were slow to arrive, but they did eventually come in.

Food distribution was always going to be the big challenge. For this, we put together lists of very vulnerable households. Unlike the government, we included undocumented migrants. On 16 and 17 April bags of maize meal were delivered to 2000 households. A few days later we received a request to distribute 2500 of the government’s large parcels, which weigh about 22kg and are supposed to provide a family of 4 with enough food for 3 weeks. There was one bureaucratic obstacle after another, but eventually the parcels arrived on 13 May. Some were delayed because the freight company’s truck had been hi-jacked by criminals. We were already worried about security, mainly because people were very hungry and we could only feed a minority, and partly because of harassment from ANC members (who had sometimes thought, erroneously, that our activists were members of a different ANC faction). The team leaders required a measure of courage and considerable organizational ingenuity to get the job done, but they managed. They reported that recipients were happy, volunteers were happy and tired, and they were happy and tired and relieved.

Popular education and delivery of food might seem like small achievements, but in the circumstances they signaled possibilities for others attempting to maintain and strengthen working-class community organizations in South Africa’s lockdown, and they highlighted a weakness in the government’s response, which lies in its failure to work with civil society.

Future

Given the level of economic crisis the South African government had lifted most of its lockdown restrictions by the middle of August. It is under pressure, not only from businesses wishing to make profits, but also from workers wanting to reduce hunger. The government promulgated a series of regulations to reduce spread of infection for returning workers, but these are widely flouted. By the middle of May medical experts were estimating that about 40,000 people will die from Covid-19 before the end of November this year. Once infection takes off seriously in high-density areas, which is already beginning to happen in Cape Town, death is likely to spread quickly. There is a good chance of a shortage of hospital beds before the curve flattens, and there will be additional deaths from other causes as medical facilities are emptied to make space for Covid-19 patients. While unemployment will be reduced somewhat by lifting the lockdown, no experts believe it will return to previous levels, and it could pass the 50% mark. Hunger will not disappear. The government introduced a temporary ‘Social Relief of Distress Grant’ for unemployed people not receiving other grants, but it is only worth R350 ($19) per month, and many non-South Africans will be excluded, so food parcels were needed for many months.

There was resistance here and there. Hospital workers have protested, not only about shortages of PPE, but also because patients with TB and other serious illnesses are being sent home. Mineworkers won a court judgment about preconditions for returning to work. Teachers refused to re-open schools early in May. Such actions save lives. Elsewhere there were militant community protests about lack of food and failure to deliver critical services, and one protest included the slogan: ‘No electricity, no lockdown’. There has been a high level of protests in South Africa since 2012, and even before, and there was a peak in 2019. Many issues are unresolved, and with the easing of restrictions protests are likely to return. Ramaphosa has increased the size of the army, and military repression cannot be ruled out.

From the perspective of the working-class, there is a need for greater co-ordination, both around issues raised directly by the pandemic and lockdown, including political issues and distribution of food and masks, but also around socio-economic concerns that will deepen. Is the C19PC capable of offering such co-ordination? This is far from clear. It faces a number of challenges. It developed, semi-spontaneously, with a multi-centred structure, and initially this was a strength, but it has been slow to respond to political challenges and there is pressure for greater centralization. At the same time, there is realization that the Covid Crisis will be with us for the rest of 2020, at least; it is not just a short-term emergency.

Many leaders are exhausted, under pressure from their normal jobs and, with a longer view in mind, would like to see a more professional form of organization (the national structure, unlike that in Gauteng, does not even have a bank account or serious fund-raising capacity). There was tension between the Facilitation Team and the Working Group Conveners’ Forum. Meanwhile, some of the activists question the tendency towards centralization and professionalization, and also oppose the politics of certain working groups (especially that on economics), and have made charges of ‘NGO-ization’ and ‘pragmatism’.

Whatever the future of C19PC, its short history has already demonstrated the capacity for working-class activists and their sympathizers to mobilize for social justice even under the conditions of a draconian lockdown.

This piece draws on a survey that the Centre for Social Change (CSC), of which Kate Alexander is the director, undertook with researchers from Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC); much of the detail comes from participation in the COWG and the Coalition more broadly; and the conclusion includes reference to long-term research on protests. [1]

Kate Alexander is an activist and Professor of Sociology, South African Research Chair in Social Change, and Director of the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg. Kate is a Contributing Editor of ROAPE. A version of this blogpost has also appeared in Spanish, ‘Hambre, ira y un nuevo movimiento social en Sudáfrica’ in Breno Bringel, Geoffrey Pleyers. (eds), Alerta global: Politicas, movimientos sociales y futuros en disputa en tiempos de pandemia(Buenos Aires: CLASCO, 2000).

Notes

[1] The Centre for Social Change is located within the University of Johannesburg. The HSRC researchers come from that institution’s Developmental, Capable and Ethical State division. Findings and analysis from the survey have appeared in a series of 10 short articles published by Daily Maverick. The articles have various authors, all members of the research team. These include: Kate Alexander, Martin Bekker, Narnia Bohler-Muller, Yul Derek Davids, Charles Hongoro, Mark Orkin, Benjamin Roberts, Stephen Rule, and Carin Runciman. For a glimpse of the work undertaken by COWG activists, see Bongani Xezwi and Kate Alexander, ‘State must enlist community activists in the war against Covid-19’, Daily Maverick, 31 March 2020. On protests see Peter Alexander et al ‘Frequency and turmoil: South Africa’s community protests 2005-2017’, SA Crime Quarterly 63 (2018).

Reclaim Economic and Monetary Sovereignty

ROAPE

September 7, 2020

Africa’s Pandemic Response Calls for Reclaiming Economic and Monetary Sovereignty: An Open Letter

This open letter calls for economic and monetary sovereignty in Africa and implementing an alternative, radical economic development model on the continent. These demands for deep structural reforms are urgent for the continent’s development and to strengthen the resilience of societies in the face of the pandemic. We call on our readers to sign the letter.

While Africa has, so far, been spared from the worst public health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the subsequent economic shutdown has brought Africa’s economic deficiencies and structural vulnerabilities into sharp focus. As a resource-rich continent, Africa has the capacity to provide a decent quality of life for all of its inhabitants. Africa is capable of offering universal public services, such as healthcare and education, and guaranteeing employment for people who want to work, while ensuring a decent income support system for those who cannot work. However, decades of colonial and postcolonial socio-economic dislocation exacerbated by market liberalization have forced African countries into a vicious cycle involving several structural deficiencies, characterized by:

a lack of food sovereignty;
a lack of energy sovereignty;
low value-added manufacturing and extractive industries.

This unholy trinity produces a very painful downward pressure on African exchange rates, which means higher prices for imports of vital necessities such as food, fuel, and life-saving medical products. In order to protect people from this type of imported inflation, African governments borrow foreign currencies in order to artificially keep African currencies ‘strong’ relative to the US dollar and the euro.

This artificial ‘band-aid’ solution forces African economies into a frantic mode of economic activity focused exclusively on earning dollars or euros to service this external debt. As a result, Africa’s economies have been trapped into an austerity model, often enforced via conditions set by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as the constant pressure from other creditors to protect their political and economic interests, which further encroaches on the economic, monetary, and political sovereignty of African countries.

Conditions imposed by the IMF and international creditors usually focus on five problematic and unfruitful policy strategies:

export-oriented growth;
liberalization of foreign direct investment (FDI);
over-promotion of tourism;
privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs);
liberalization of financial markets.

Each one of these strategies is a trap disguised as an economic solution. Export-led growth increases imports of energy, high value-added capital equipment and industrial components, and encourages the grabbing of land and resources, but only increases the exports of low value-added products. And, of course, not all developing countries can simultaneously follow such a model. If some countries want to achieve a trade surplus, there must be others willing to run a trade deficit.

FDI-led growth increases energy imports, and forces African countries into an endless race to the bottom in order to attract investors via tax breaks, subsidies, and weaker labor and environmental regulations. It also leads to financial volatility and significant net resource transfers to rich countries, with some taking the form of illicit financial flows. Tourism increases both energy and food imports, while adding substantial environmental costs in terms of its carbon footprint and water use.

Most SOEs were privatized in the 1990s (e.g. telecoms, electric companies, airlines, airports, etc.). Further privatization will devastate whatever little social safety nets remain under public control. Financial market liberalization typically requires deregulating finance, lowering capital gains taxes, removing capital controls, and artificially raising interest rates and exchange rates – all of which guarantee an attractive environment for the largest financial speculators in the world. They will flock in with a rush of ‘hot money’, only to ‘buy low and sell high’ then flee, leaving behind a depressed economy.

Finally, all free trade and investment agreements aim at accelerating and deepening these five strategies, pushing African economies deeper into this quagmire. This flawed economic development model further exacerbates Africa’s ‘brain drain’ which tragically, in some cases, takes the form of death boats and death roads for economic, health, and climate migrants.

These five ‘band-aid’ policy solutions tend to be attractive because they provide temporary relief in the form of job creation, and give the illusion of modernization and industrialization. However, in reality, these jobs are increasingly more precarious and susceptible to external shocks to the global supply chain, global demand, and global commodity prices. In other words, Africa’s economic destiny continues to be steered from abroad.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the roots of Africa’s economic problems. Therefore, the post-pandemic recovery will not be sustainable unless it addresses pre-existing structural deficiencies. To that end, given the impending climate crisis and the need for socio-ecological adaptation, economic policy must be based on alternative principles.

We call for a strategic plan focused on reclaiming monetary and economic sovereignty, which must include food sovereignty, (renewable) energy sovereignty, and an industrial policy centered on higher value-added content of manufacturing. Africa must put an end to its race-to-the-bottom approach to economic development in the name of competition and efficiency. Regional trade partnerships within the continent must be based on coordinated investments aimed at forming horizontal industrial linkages in strategic areas such as public health, transportation, telecommunications, research and development, and education.

We also call on Africa’s trading partners to acknowledge the failure of the extractive economic model and to embrace a new cooperation model that includes the transfer of technology, real partnerships in research and development, and sovereign insolvency structures — including sovereign debt cancellation — that preserve output and employment.

Africa must develop a clear and independent long-term vision to build resilience to external shocks. Economic and monetary sovereignty do not require isolation, but they do require a commitment to economic, social, and ecological priorities, which means mobilizing domestic and regional resources to improve the quality of life on the continent. This means becoming more selective when it comes to FDI, and export-oriented, extractive industries. It also means prioritizing eco-tourism, cultural heritage, and indigenous industries.

Mobilizing Africa’s resources begins with a commitment to full-employment policies (a Job Guarantee program), public health infrastructure, public education, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, sustainable stewardship of natural resources, and an uncompromising dedication to empowering youth and women via participatory democracy, transparency, and accountability. It’s time for Africa to aspire to a better future in which all of its people can thrive and realize their full potential. This future is within reach, and it starts with Africa reclaiming its economic and monetary sovereignty.

Signed:

Fadhel Kaboub, Denison University, Ohio, USA
Ndongo Samba Sylla, Dakar, Senegal
Kai Koddenbrock, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany
Ines Mahmoud, Tunis, Tunisia
Maha Ben Gadha, Tunis, Tunisia
Hannah Cross, London, UK

Signatures represent the authors’ personal opinions and not those of their employers or other institutional affiliations.

This letter is a follow-up initiative to the first conference on ‘The Quest for Economic and Monetary Sovereignty in Africa in the 21st Century’ (November 6-9, 2019 in Tunis). A volume of the conference will be published by Pluto Press (2021), and a second conference will take place in Dakar in 2021.

The open letter is available in 47 languages (including African languages, in most cases with an audio version). Although written from an African perspective, the issues we address are relevant to the Global South and beyond. For this reason, the signatories (about 500) come from all corners of the globe and include world-renowned radical economists. It is still possible to sign – please sign here.

Featured Photograph: Africa Unity Square, Harare – 1992 (Rob Worsnop).

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