Falling Statues and Morality: Cecil Rhodes can’t be rescued by history

June 16, 2020

Across the world statues connected with slavery, oppression and colonialism have been falling. Robin Cohen argues that opponents of removing statues fail to acknowledge the degree of commonality in moral standards between the past and the present. Looking at the case of Oxford, Cohen explains that the time has come for Cecil Rhodes to fall – everywhere.

By Robin Cohen

All over the world, the Black Lives Matter movement has targeted statues that have been associated with colonialism, slavery and oppression. Fallen statures include Captain Hamilton in Hamilton (New Zealand), King Leopold in Antwerp, Edward Colston in Bristol, and Robert Milligan in London. At least nine other statues have been taken down in the US and dozens more are on the target list of protesters. In Oxford, the protests centre on the statue of Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902), the British mine owner and imperialist who gave his name to Rhodesia (before that was changed to Zimbabwe) and endowed the Rhodes Scholarship programme. He was a benefactor to Oriel College, Oxford, where his statue hovers over the gateway to the college. Rhodes is also depicted on a plaque on Oriel’s property in King Edward Street, Oxford, citing his ‘great services to his country’. Prime Minister Johnson, like many others, has argued that judging figures like Rhodes by current moral standards is illegitimate and anachronistic. The implication of this defence is that even though we may now come to a different view, Rhodes’s conduct was admired, or at least accepted, by his contemporaries who also supported his imperialist ideas.

Contemporaries who opposed Rhodes

But was this true? Rhodes’s customary deceit was to use his company, the British South African Company (BSAC), to negotiate a mining concession with African rulers, then send in settlers and administrators, and finally annex their territory with brute force. In 1896, the Ndebele in alliance with the Shona had had enough of this chicanery and rose in full-scale revolt. This was suppressed with Maxim guns, resulting in the deaths of about 2,000 Africans and 364 white troops and settlers. Known misleadingly in old British and South African history books as the Second Matabele War, it is identified by Zimbabweans as the First Chimurenga [liberation struggle] or the First War of Independence.

Rhodes’s political base was the Cape Colony, where he served as Prime Minister (between 1890–6). However, in the genteel surroundings of white Cape society, few were clapping his exploits. Many of Rhodes’s contemporaries did not admire him. Let me start with a minor but telling family recollection. My wife’s grandmother was married into Cape Town’s small political elite and was expected to endure Cecil Rhodes’s company at official receptions on many occasions. Her considered opinion was blunt: ‘Rhodes is not a gentleman’. Given how painfully polite she was, this would translate nowadays to ‘What a contemptible scoundrel!’

Another family member, Sir James Tennant Molteno, the speaker of the Cape Legislature, strongly opposed Rhodes’s imperialism and by supporting the moves to make Bechuanaland a protectorate of the British Crown, helped to impede Rhodes’s proposed annexation of territory from Cape to Cairo. Rhodes tried his usual manoeuvre again in 1895, using the BSAC to acquire a large chunk of land in North East Bechuanaland, a plan frustrated by three Tswana chiefs who visited London and demanded that the British honour their agreement to protect them from incorporation into the Cape Colony.

Another damming verdict came from Olive Schreiner, one of South Africa’s most prescient anti-racist and anti-sexist campaigners who, in April 1897, wrote to John X. Merriman: ‘We fight Rhodes because he means so much of oppression, injustice, and moral degradation to South Africa – but if he passed away tomorrow there still remains the terrible fact that something in our society has formed the matrix which has fed, nourished, built up such a man!’[1] It should be added that her correspondent, John X. Merriman, later the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, had served as Treasurer-General in Rhodes’s government but resigned in 1893 when the extent of Rhodes’s corrupt business dealings were revealed. This was known as the ‘Logan Scandal’.

In short, the pro-Rhodes argument that we are unfairly judging him by current standards is deeply defective. African communities and chiefs, and whites with moral stature, including a significant number of people in high office, saw Rhodes for what he was, a ruthless reprobate, and did not approve of his imperialist adventures. For reasons of self-restraint, I must forbear telling the full story of how Rhodes was the principle actor in dragging Britain into the South African War (1899–1902), where the consequent deaths comprised 22,000 British troops, 25,000 Afrikaners (many in concentration camps) and the often forgotten (surprise, surprise) 12,000 Africans. The indelible stain of Britain’s first concentration camps has not disappeared.

Conclusion

Evoking ‘changing moral standards’ in Rhodes’s favour is not a compelling argument. It fails to accept the arrogance of ‘presentism’ (that we would have done things better and that we are morally superior). It fails to recognize the extent of opposition to Rhodes, from both African and white social actors. It fails, finally, to acknowledge the degree of commonality in moral standards, then and now. As Robert Cook, the historian of the American Civil War, put it: ‘the truth, as I see it, is that in general terms today’s morals are not as different from those of the past as some commentators profess to believe. In the nineteenth century, for example, significant numbers of Britons thought that empire-building was wrong and that slavery was a sin that had to be eradicated’.

What, finally, of the argument that taking a statue down is a form of erasure – that if there is nothing there, there is nothing to learn. Those of us who want the Rhodes statue to fall are asked to learn from history. This is the strongest argument of the ‘standists’, but one that can easily be addressed by suggesting a replacement. Obviously, what is appropriate will need consultation and agreement between many interested parties – going well beyond the governing body of the college. I would like to suggest a new version of ‘The Unknown Miner’ – a sculpture of a resilient African whose manual labour produced Rhodes’s wealth and filled Oriel College’s coffers.[2] Rhodes’s statue was erected in 1908. Perhaps such a replacement would provide a better history lesson we can all learn from for the next 112 years.

Robin Cohen is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies, University of Oxford, a former Dean of Humanities, University of Cape Town and a founding member of ROAPE.

Notes

[1] Paul Maylam The Cult of Rhodes Cape Town: David Philip, p. 87.

[2] See Wald’s sculpture of that name in front of the Chamber of Mines building at the Faculty of Engineering, University of the Witwatersrand. For copyright reasons I’m not sure the image can be reproduced, but look at it here.

In Defence of Walter Rodney: Workers, Imperialism & Exploitation

ROAPE

June 11, 2020

In a robust defence of Walter Rodney’s work, Walter Daum argues that we must recognise and celebrate Rodney’s commitment to working-class internationalism. Rodney did not regard workers in the North as ‘natural allies’ of their own exploiters. Daum explains how Rodney’s argument that African (and by extension Southern) workers were more exploited applies all the more to the world we now live in today.

By Walter Daum

In his response to Andy Higginbottom’s post on ‘The Revolutionary Legacy of Walter Rodney’, Chinedu Chukwudinma asserts that, contrary to Rodney, ‘Western workers … tend to be more exploited … than African workers.’ Chukwudinma is not denying that African workers are paid significantly less, his claim is that their rate of exploitation in the Marxist sense is lower. This claim is consistent with the widespread theory that workers in the imperialist countries (in brief, the North) face a higher rate of exploitation than workers in the countries dominated and exploited by imperialism (the South). The theory has been defended by a variety of Marxist theorists – Chukwudinma cites Martin Legassick and Alex Callinicos, and they in turn refer, respectively, to Geoffrey Kay and Michael Kidron.[1]

In a previous response, Cecil Gutzmore took on a broad range of Chukwudinma’s criticisms of Rodney. In this blogpost I will focus on the rate of exploitation and challenge the idea that Northern workers are more exploited. I will examine Chukwudinma’s chain of citations and show that the whole edifice rests on theoretically shaky grounds, even when the authors bring to bear passages from Marx as their authority. I will also cite several sources that provide data indicating the contrary, namely that Southern workers labor under a higher rate of exploitation.

Rodney’s Examples

To begin, let’s look briefly at Rodney’s evidence. In order to show the greater exploitation of African workers, Rodney presented several examples. One was that European colonial capitalists paid Africans less than a living wage, ‘a wage usually insufficient to keep the worker physically alive.’ In Marxist terms, this meant that African workers were paid less than the value of their labor power. This might be thought of as absolute super-exploitation.

Rodney also presented cases of workers undergoing a rate of exploitation significantly higher than capitalists pay elsewhere; that can be called relative super-exploitation. For example, in Africa, ‘when a white and a black filled the same post, the white man was sure to be paid considerably more’; he cited factors of 10 or as much as 25. On the international level, he noted a shipping company in 1955 in which ‘of the total amount spend on loading and discharging cargo moving between Africa and America,’ the American dock workers were paid five times the wages of the African workers, even though ‘it was the same amount of cargo loaded and unloaded at both ends.’[2] These examples of lower pay for the same work clearly show black and African workers subject to a higher rate of exploitation.

Chukwudinma does not mention these examples. He does quote another comparison Rodney made in the same section of his book: ‘A Scottish or German coalminer … could virtually earn in an hour what the Enugu miner was paid for a six-day week.’ Later in his post he refers back to this comparison: ‘If a high-income Scottish miner creates, relative to his earnings, a larger amount of surplus value than his lower paid Nigerian counterpart, he’s more exploited.’ But that is a big ‘if,’ assuming without evidence that the Scottish miner does produce so much value. And even if it appears true on the surface, the real amount of surplus value the hypothetical Scottish worker creates can be very different (see the section on productivity below).

Chukwudinma not only disagrees with Rodney’s analysis, he draws a political lesson from it, namely that Rodney must believe that the greater exploitation of African workers means that their exploitation is in the class interest of Western workers. He writes: ‘Rodney concludes that colonialism was in the interest of all classes in the West and white workers were natural allies of the capitalist class in their support for the racist colonial project.’

Gutzmore questions this conclusion ‘Where in his work does Walter Rodney ever say that “white workers” were the “natural allies of the capitalist class?”’ Chukwudinma does not give a specific citation but it may be that he had in mind this paragraph:

European workers have paid a great price for the few material benefits which accrued to them as crumbs from the colonial table. The class in power controls the dissemination of information. The capitalists misinformed and miseducated workers in the metropoles to the point where they became allies in colonial exploitation. In accepting to be led like sheep, European workers were perpetuating their own enslavement to the capitalists. They ceased to seek political power and contented themselves with bargaining for small wage increases, which were usually counterbalanced by increased costs of living. They ceased to be creative and allowed bourgeois cultural decadence to overtake them all. They failed to exercise any independent judgement on the great issues of war and peace, and therefore ended up by slaughtering not only colonial peoples but also themselves.[3]

Rodney does say here that European workers ‘became allies in colonial exploitation,’ but this passage cannot be read as saying that they were ‘natural allies’ of their own exploiters, in the sense that such an alliance was inherently in their class interest. It clearly wasn’t, in Rodney’s view, since they ‘ended up by slaughtering …also themselves.’ Chukwudinma misreads Rodney and thereby in effect denies Rodney’s commitment to working-class internationalism.

The FDI Flow Argument

To argue that Rodney’s claim of higher African exploitation is false, Chukwudinma offers two reasons. I take the second one first since it requires a briefer discussion. It is based on the destinations of imperialist foreign investment. Chukwudinma writes:

Rodney’s affirmation that African workers are more exploited than Western ones does not match the patterns of capital investment between rich and poor countries. The World Bank figures showed that two-thirds of all Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) went to developed countries of North America, Europe and Japan between 1965 and 1983. … These figures indicated that the Western capitalist class sought higher profits by investing in their own advanced economies where workers were skilled and productive.

The destination of FDI is a very indirect indicator of the rate of exploitation. Yes, where investment goes does in good part reflect where higher profits are to be made, and higher rates of exploitation would contribute to that. But there are other factors, for example, transport costs and the development of superstructure. FDI, moreover, is not a complete guide to productive investment abroad. Other components are loans to foreign governments and producers and outsourcing of production to foreign firms (which amounts to the investment of circulating rather than fixed capital). Perhaps most important, when one imperialist firm invests in another in a different imperialist country, the profits it obtains are not necessarily produced by Northern labor – the invested-in firm is likely to draw surplus value from its own imperialist investments in the South. So FDI directed to the North could in reality yield profits made by exploiting workers in the South.

Let’s also note that even though Chukwudinma is claiming that Northern workers are the more exploited today, not just when Rodney was writing, he is using data that is well out of date. The pattern of foreign investment has changed. United Nations figures show that in 2018, the FDI inflows of ‘developing economies’ exceeded that of ‘developed economies.’ [4]This shift should be obvious by now: imperialism has depended for decades on globalized industrial super-exploitation, so that today a large majority of the world’s industrial workers are in the Global South.

Chukwudinma appears to have taken his 1965-to-1983 FDI argument directly from a 1992 article by Callinicos which he looks to for theoretical support.[5]In a subsequent work Callinicos updated his data on FDI flows to range from 1992 to 2006, and he made the same claim: ‘the figures are indicative of the judgments of relative profitability made by those controlling internationally mobile capital: these continue massively to favour the advanced economies.’ [6] But this assessment has been refuted by John Smith, who pointed out among other things that 1) over two-thirds of the FDI between Northern countries is aimed at mergers and acquisitions (changes in titles of ownership rather than new investment); and 2) that rates of return on FDI are over twice as high in the South as in the North.[7]All the more reason to question the link between FDI flows and relative rates of exploitation.

Productivity Illusions

Chukwudinma’s other justification for rejecting Rodney’s case is a common productivity argument:

The first reason why Rodney’s argument does not hold true … is because he fails to account for the differentials in productivity. The higher wages for Western workers reflect their higher productivity and they have a greater cost for their reproduction than African workers. Western workers therefore tend to be more exploited because their larger output (or productivity) means that their capitalist employers extract more surplus value.

There are several problems here. One is that ‘larger output’ need not reflect greater surplus value or greater exploitation. Recall that in Marx’s terms the output that workers produce in a given period of time can be subdivided into the three components, c + v + s, where c stands for the constant capital consumed (e.g., materials, energy, a fraction of fixed capital costs), v represents wage costs, and s is the surplus value that the capitalists take as their profit. As technology advances, the relative weight of the c component increases. But the formula for the rate of exploitation, s/v, does not involve c. The larger output per worker creates the illusion that the workers are producing more surplus value and therefore that they are more exploited – whereas they are mainly adding larger quantities of constant capital to their output and adding more use-value.

Second, there is a connection between productivity and exploitation, but it is not the seemingly obvious one that the productivity of workers in a given firm or sector determines their rate of exploitation. For Marx, the rate of surplus value can be increased in the relative sense by cheapening the cost of labor power; that is, by cheapening the goods that workers buy to reproduce their labor power. This is accomplished by raising the productivity of labor in the wage-good industries and those industries that feed into them. So, workers’ wages and rates of exploitation need not reflect the productivity of the sector they work in.

Underlying all this is the further problem is that productivity means the quantity of output compared to the amount of labor employed in producing it; greater productivity means that more commodities are produced in the same number of labor hours or fewer. In use-value terms, the workers who work with the most advanced equipment are more productive: they produce more goods per hour. But productivity in this sense cannot be compared between different sectors of industry, since the use-values of different commodities are incommensurable.[8] Moreover, capitalists are concerned about use-value only as a means for expanding exchange value. So official statistics measure the output created or added in terms of monetary value. This looks suspiciously like the c + v + s formula, with the c removed in the case of value added. But the resemblance is deceptive, it is based on looking only at the first volume of Marx’s Capital.

When Chukwudinma says that Western (or Northern) ‘capitalist employers extract more surplus value,’ he implies that the extra surplus value comes from the labor of their own Northern workers. But that can be seen to be wrong if we look at the third volume of Capital. While the value added in a given line of production may equal v + s, in reality the surplus value captured by a firm is rarely equivalent to the value it creates. First, to the extent that the tendency for rates of profit to equalize is operative – that is, when capital is free to flow between firms and across borders – then the surplus value captured will be approximately proportional to the size of the firm’s investment. So, the most capital-intensive sectors will capture a portion of the surplus value created in the labor-intensive industries. Marx ironically called this process of proportionate sharing of surplus value ‘capitalist communism.’

However, in the imperialist era the dominant firms do not share surplus value ‘communistically’ or proportionately. They have monopoly advantages (e.g., in technology, market access and state support), and therefore can obtain higher profit rates by extracting a disproportionate share of surplus value. So, the ‘value added’ by a given firm represents not the value created by the workers it employs directly but a share of the world’s total surplus value reflective of the firm’s size and its monopoly power.

Apple’s use of Foxconn and other companies to manufacture components for and assemble its iStuff is a well-known example. Apple’s profits are in part derived not from the workers it employs directly but mainly from surplus value created by workers employed by companies down the value chain; those companies’ profit share is lower, and their productive labor is overwhelmingly in the South. Aside from its own suppliers, Apple’s monopoly of technology and markets means that through unequal exchange it captures a fraction of the surplus value created by productive workers all over the world economy – again, primarily in the global South.[9]

The Citation Chain

With a clearer understanding of productivity, we can now look at the theorists whose work Chukwudinma rests on. He cites Martin Legassick as his authority for the claim that the operation of capitalism’s laws of motion, ‘the constant transformation of productive forces,’ is what ‘enhances Western workers’ productivity, wages and their exploitation.’ Here is Legassick’s argument:

For Marx, the constant revolutionizing of the forces of production in the process of capitalist accumulation leads to the concentration of the ownership of ever more “dead labor” (instruments of production) in ever fewer hands, reproducing ever greater inequalities of wealth and power. This is by no means incompatible with, or negated by, the fact that such revolutionizing of the forces of production can be associated with higher real wages or higher living standards for the working class. Indeed to affirm that higher living standards may well be associated with a higher technical rate of exploitation is essential to any systematic understanding of Marx’s analysis.[10]

We will see below (in discussing citations from Marx) under what conditions higher working-class living standards are associated with a higher rate of exploitation. Just because the association ‘may well’ exist does not mean that it does in any concrete situation, in particular in comparing North and South. Legassick provides no actual data or further explanation showing a higher rate of exploitation in the North. He passes the buck to Geoffrey Kay, who reasons as follows:

[H]ighly paid workers will almost invariably be the most exploited. Some of the reasons for this are fairly obvious. A lowly paid worker barely able to make ends meet, illiterate, poorly housed, unhealthy and poorly equipped is much less productive than a highly paid worker who is educated, well-fed and well-equipped. It takes him much longer to produce the equivalent of his wage, and therefore the proportion of the working day he is able to give away free is much lower. The more productive highly paid worker, on the other hand, produces his wage in a much shorter time and is therefore able to perform much more surplus labor. By implication, therefore, the affluent workers of the developed countries are much more exploited than the badly paid workers of the underdeveloped world.[11]

This passage reads as if it’s making a case for employers, that low-paid workers deserve what they get. But it is a poor case. For one thing, it reproduces the fallacy that workers’ own productivity is what determines their rate of exploitation, not the productivity of the wage-good workers who supply their needs. For the sake of argument let’s assume that the two productivities are the same. But even so, plenty of workers, North and South, are literate and reasonably healthy while still being lowly paid. In any case, whether the ‘lowly paid … and poorly equipped’ worker takes much longer to produce the equivalent of his wage depends on just how low his wage is and how poorly equipped he is. If he (or very likely she) is half as productive as the highly paid worker but gets one-tenth the wage, then she produces the value of her labor power in much less time. Kay implicitly assumes that the wage gap is less than the productivity gap, not the other way around, without offering evidence. But such an assumption is unwarranted. The wage gap between the imperialist and imperialized countries is enormous, and we will show below that the productivity gap is comparatively small and decreasing.

Here is Chukwudinma’s other reference to Marxist authority:

Rodney focuses on the difference in wage levels between African and European workers to prove that the former was more exploited for the benefit of the latter. However, a real understanding of who is more exploited cannot be achieved by comparing income figures. As the radical theorist Alex Callinicos explains, Marx’s theory of exploitation examines the ‘relationship between the wages that workers receive representing the value of their labor power and the amounts of surplus value they produced for their employers.

We have already seen that Rodney did not focus solely on comparative income figures. In the examples cited at the beginning of this post, he compared the wages of African and European (or North American) workers who were doing the same labor and therefore producing the same amount of value – so that since the Africans were paid less, the surplus value extracted from them was greater, not less, than that extracted from the Europeans. As for Callinicos, his wording as quoted, simply restates Marx’s formula for the rate of exploitation as the ratio between surplus value extracted and variable capital invested, namely s/v. The question is, how much surplus value is produced? To answer this Callinicos continues:

A highly paid worker may well be more exploited than a low paid worker because the former produces, relative to his wages, a larger amount of surplus value than the latter does. There is indeed reason to believe that the generally higher wages paid to Western workers reflect the greater costs of their reproduction; but the expenditure in particular on education and training which forms part of these costs creates a more highly skilled workforce which is therefore more productive and more exploited than its Third World counterparts.[12]

Again, we see the assumption that more productive means more exploited. Callinicos’s ‘reason to believe’ that Western workers are more exploited is footnoted to Michael Kidron, the economic theorist of the International Socialist Tendency in its early days. Writing in 1974, Kidron used British and Indian data from the 1960’s to claim that British productivity was over 4 times Indian but average British wages were about 2 times Indian. Accordingly, he concluded that ‘the cost of a unit of labour-power of similar quality is less in Britain than it is in India.’[13]

Kidron’s calculations were based on economy-wide measures of productivity, not specifically those in the consumer goods industries (and those feeding into them) – which is what affects the value of labor power and therefore the rate of exploitation. Let’s again assume, nevertheless, that Kidron’s measure is close enough and look into the nuts and bolts of his argument. First, Kidron’s wage ratio was calculated not according to official rates of exchange (which made British wages 7 times Indian) but according to the ratio of average income to a ‘government recognized subsistence minimum.’ In Britain, that ratio was about 5.2/1; in India, about 2.7/1. (Thus, Kidron got his British/Indian wage ratio of about 2.) But this is misleading. For the investing imperialist, the relevant wage ratio is based on actual rates of exchange, since that is what the capitalist pays. So, on Kidron’s data, the British workers’ productivity advantage (4/1) is less than their wage advantage (7/1), for the same output the Indian workers are paid 4/7 of the rate of their British counterparts. For imperialist purposes Indian workers were more exploited.[14]

Furthermore, Kidron’s British to Indian productivity ratio of 4.44 was based on averaging industries with high and low levels of industrialization. If we consider that a capitalist deciding whether to shift production Southward would be looking at the more capital-intensive sectors, there the productivity ratio (based on the data Kidron cited) was 2.24, a much lower advantage for Britain. Of course, by now these numbers are a half-century old, but even using Kidron’s data the argument fails.[15]

Claiming Marx’s Authority

The citation chains from Chukwudinma to Legassick to Kay, and from Callinicos to Kidron, yield only one actual calculation of comparative rates of exploitation, Kidron’s – and an unconvincing one. The authors nevertheless believe they are marching in Marx’s footsteps. Kay in particular believes he has Marx on his side: ‘There is every indication that Marx took a higher rate of exploitation in the developed countries for granted.’ To show this, Kay cites two passages from Capital. But these passages are subject to misinterpretation, resting on the illusion that the imperialized countries are on the same historical growth path as their oppressors.

First, from Capital, Vol. I, Chapter 22, comparing a more advanced country with a more backward one:

[I]t will be found frequently that the daily or weekly wage in the first nation is higher than in the second, while the relative price of labor, i.e., the price of labor as compared both with the surplus value and the value of the product, stands higher in the second than the first.

This says that the second, more backward, country can have a higher ratio of the price of labor v to surplus value s. And if the ratio v/s is higher, its reciprocal, the rate of exploitation s/v, is lower. Indeed, Marx taught that productivity advances as capitalism develops, in particular in the industries that produce wage goods. So, the labor time necessary to produce the value of the workers’ labor power, v, goes down; the surplus s produced in the rest of the working day goes up and thus the rate of exploitation rises. Exploitation can rise without lowering the workers’ standard of living – it can even be raised, since some margin for improvement may be available from the higher productivity achieved.

This reasoning makes sense in its context of the gradually increasing productivity among similar capitalist countries, where a more backward country can be thought of as looking like a more advanced one at an earlier stage. In his preface to Capital Volume 1, Marx famously wrote: ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.’ This was undoubtedly intended to apply to the European countries following the industrializing path pioneered by Britain, but it is not a global recipe. It does not apply to colonial or semi-colonial industrial labor in the epoch of imperialism, since in this case the backward country is not at an earlier stage of development of a soon-to-be advanced country. Its workers are not being paid according to standards that US or European workers had at some point in the recent past nor is their pay rising to reach the standards of the imperialist countries.

The second passage that Kay cites is from Capital Volume III, Chapter 8, a numerical example in which Marx compares hypothetical European and Asian countries. In this the worker in the Asian country – ‘where little machinery, etc., is used, and where a given quantity of labor-power consumes relatively little raw material productively in a given time’ – faces a lower rate of exploitation but yields a higher rate of profit because of the very low investment in constant capital. Marx’s calculation is perfectly valid given its assumptions. But in the modern world not only is the cost of the labor power of oppressed-country workers far lower than that of imperialist-country workers. And as we will see, the super-exploited workers in the South are often using machinery whose productivity is not so far below that in the North.

Walter Rodney also invoked Marx and his theory but with greater insight into how imperialism functions. Here is one telling example of imperialist exploitation at a distance:

Karl Marx, in clarifying how capitalists appropriated part of the surplus of each worker, used the example of cotton. He explained that the value of the manufactured cotton included the value of the labour that went into growing the raw cotton, plus part of the value of the labour that made the spindles, plus the labour that went into the actual manufacture. From an African viewpoint, the first conclusion to be drawn is that the peasant working on African soil was being exploited by the industrialist who used African raw material in Europe or America. [16]

This interpretation of Marx accords with the analysis of the distribution of surplus value presented above in the discussion of productivity. Rodney continues:

It has been observed that … a cotton peasant in Chad … needed to work 50 days to earn what is needed to buy three metres of the cloth made from his own cotton in France. Yet, the French textile worker (using modern spindles) ran off three metres of cloth in a matter of minutes! … [T]here must be factors in the capitalist/colonialist system which permitted the great disparity in the relative value of labour in Chad and France. In the first the Chad peasant was defrauded through trade so that he sold cheap and bought dear, and therefore received a minute proportion of the value that he created with his labour. This was possible not because of mysterious “market forces” as bourgeois economists would like us to believe, but because of political power being vested entirely in the hands of the colonialists. It was a consequence of monopolistic domination, both economically and politically.

Rodney’s understanding of Marx allowed him to see that the laws of motion of capital, derived under the initial assumptions that the rates of exploitation and profit tend to be the same everywhere, have to be modified in order to deal with capitalist colonialism and imperialism. Marxists today face the task of working out just how the laws of motion operate in the present phase of imperialism based on industrial super-exploitation.

Evidence that Southern Workers are More Exploited

Now for some of the factual evidence on relative rates of exploitation in the academic and business literature. First in chronological order, Martin Landsberg observed in 1979 that, according to a US government report comparing the US to several ‘third-world’ countries:

For electronics assembly, foreign productivity was, on average, almost 90% of US levels, and for many other products it was found to be even higher than in the US. Productivity tended to be higher because management, design and even technology might be identical to that used in the DCC [developed capitalist country]. In addition, labor problems – unions, strikes, absenteeism – are kept down by the fear of starvation, repressive labor legislation or armed force.[17]

A narrow productivity together with a high wage gap between North and South is evidence of a greater rate of exploitation in the South.

Another study by Alice Amsden explicitly calculated and compared rates of surplus value (i.e., rate of exploitation) between advanced capitalist countries and ‘less developed countries’ (LDCs). It concluded:

The major finding is that rates of surplus value in the manufacturing sector of LDCs far exceed rates of surplus value in the manufacturing sector of advanced capitalist countries.[18]

In her calculations, taken over the period from 1969 to 1977, the average rate of surplus value in a selection of over a dozen advanced (mostly imperialist) economies was 2.09, whereas in Latin America it was 5.86, in Africa 3.36, in the Middle East 3.22, and in Asia, 4.26. She explains in part,

The extraordinarily high rates of surplus value in countries which are now described as semi-industrialised may be hypothesised to stem from a combination of advanced technology and wage levels that are still abysmal. By contrast, the lower rates of surplus value in other LDCs may arise because of a lesser absorption of modern technology which contributes both directly and indirectly to lower productivity: through minimal inputs of physical capital and modern techniques in the production of both consumer and producer goods, which give rise to impoverished absolute standards of consumption, which in turn render workers physically incapable of producing much in a short amount of time.

But even the lower rates of surplus value in the poorest countries are greater than in the dominant countries.

In short, the rate of surplus value may be highest in countries at intermediate levels of per capita income because capitalism is at its most uneven: the unity of labour lags behind the development of the productive forces while the unemployment of labour races ahead of it. At lower levels of per capita income, both the lesser development of the productive forces and the concomitant failure to forge a disciplined labour force result in a lower s/v. In countries at the highest level of per capita income and the highest level of the labour movement’s strength, the wage effect triumphs over the productivity effect and s/v is lower still.

Along the same lines, an article in the US journal Business Week from 1999 presented a table comparing wages and productivity in apparel manufacturing in selected countries:

SEEKING LOW-COST LABOR
Apparel manufacturing in 1998, in U.S. dollars [19]

Country	Productivity Index	Hourly Compensation (wages & benefits, $U.S.)
United States	100	$8.00
Dominican Republic	70	$1.15
Malaysia	65	$1.15
Mexico	70	$0.85
Guatemala	70	$0.65
Thailand	65	$0.65
Indonesia	50	$0.15

The article does not supply the figures that these numbers are based on, but the table is enough to make a comparison. In the Dominican Republic, for example, the wage is about one-seventh of the US wage, so the capitalists’ wage advantage is much greater than the 70% productivity disadvantage, the workers get 21% of US pay for the same output. Overall, for the same output the workers in these countries are paid from 22% (Malaysia) to 3.8% (Indonesia) of what US workers get. It’s not even close.

A similar calculation by Timothy Kerswell computes average labor productivity in the automobile industries of nine countries by dividing each country’s annual value added per worker by the annual wage in years from 2000 to 2003. This gives, for example, the figures 8.69 for Mexico and 4.99 for India, compared to 4.28 for the US and 1.58 for Germany. Mexico’s value added is roughly one-half that of the US, but its wage is roughly one-fifth.[20] Again, the wage gap exceeds the productivity gap.

Perhaps the most interesting study is one that both exhibits and refutes the misreading of Marx. The authors assert, according to their understanding of Marxist theory and in the spirit of the citation chain discussed above, that ‘the higher productivity in developed countries should produce a clearly superior surplus value rate compared to underdeveloped countries.’ But they report that their empirical studies reveal the opposite: ‘underdeveloped countries show higher surplus-value rates than developed countries.’ For example, the ‘surplus-value rate in the United States was lower than that of Mexico between 1960 and 1987 … . The ratio between both rates remained 2 to 1 until 1982. This ratio increased to 3 to 1 in the following years until 1987.’[21] These authors’ own investigation refuted the assumption they shared with Chukwudinma and the authorities he relies on.

Conclusion

These calculations illustrate the general rule that while productivity may be lower in the South on average, that gap is outmatched by much lower wages. Rodney’s argument that African (and by extension Southern) workers were more exploited applies all the more to the world we now live in. That is the main reason imperialist capitalists have so dramatically shifted the direction of industrial investment Southward. Northern capital oversees both the extraction of extra surplus value from Southern labor and its systematic transfer to Northern coffers. Indeed, the super-exploitation of Southern industrial labor is a predominant characteristic of imperialism in the twenty-first century. Although the trend has been developing for decades, it was overlooked or denied by many Marxist observers but not by Walter Rodney. It is no ‘concession to Africa nationalism,’ as Chukwudinma believes, nor a deviation from Marxism, to point this out.

Thanks to John Smith, Andy Higginbottom and Jim Smith for comments on earlier drafts and related matters.

Walter Daum is the author of The Life and Death of Stalinism: a Resurrection of Marxist Theory (1990) and articles on Marxist economic analysis. He taught mathematics at the City College of New York for 35 years.

Featured Photograph: Abdi Latif Dahir, ‘West Africa loses over $2 billion to illegal fishing because governments don’t talk to each other’ (8 May 2017).

Notes

[1] In addition to these writers there are, for example, Charles Bettelheim, ‘Theoretical Comments,’ Appendix I, pp. 301-302, in Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange (1972); and Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (1975), pp. 354-355. The idea seems to trace back to Henryk Grossman, who wrote: ‘If we look at the sphere of production it follows that the economically backward countries have a higher rate of profit, due to their lower organic composition of capital, than the advanced countries. This is despite the fact that the rate of surplus value is much higher in the advanced countries and increases even more with the general development of capitalism and the productivity of labor.’ The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, pp 169-170 in the printed book (1929;1992) or p 105 online here.

[2] Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (2018, originally published in 1972). The above quotations are from pp. 176-178.

[3] Rodney, pp. 242-243.

[4] ‘Developing country flows managed to hold steady (rising by 2%), which helped push flows to the developing world to more than half (54%) of global flows, from 46% in 2017 and just over a third before the financial crisis.’

[5] Alex Callinicos ‘Race and Class’ International Socialism 2 : 55, Summer 1992.

[6] Callinicos, Imperialism and Global Political Economy (2009), pp. 199, 201.

[7] John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (2016), pp. 71-72; 77-78.

[8] ‘While, therefore, with reference to use value, the labor contained in a commodity counts only qualitatively, with reference to value it counts only quantitatively, and must first be reduced to human labor pure and simple. In the former case, it is a question of How and What, in the latter of How much? How long a time?’ Marx, Capital Volume I, Chapter 1, section 2.

[9] These problems were overlooked in a work that errs in the opposite direction from those discussed here, overestimating the rate of exploitation of the workers in China who assemble Apple’s iPhones: ‘The Rate of Exploitation (The Case of the iPhone),’ by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Notebook No 2. The huge amount of surplus-value that Apple commands is derived not just from the workers employed by Apple and its suppliers – and many are indeed brutally and relentlessly super-exploited – but also from workers all over the world.

[10] Legassick, ‘Perspectives on African ‘Underdevelopment’,’ Journal of African History, Vol. 17, No. 3 (1976), p. 437. Legassick’s claim about the rate of exploitation was challenged by Higginbottom, above citation.

[11] Kay, Development and Underdevelopment, A Marxist Analysis (1975), pp. 53-54. Later in his book Kay is a bit less certain: ‘In terms of value it is more than likely that wages in the developed countries are lower than those in the underdeveloped countries.’ (p. 116.)

[12] Callinicos, ‘Race and Class,’ cited above.

[13] Kidron, ‘Black Reformism: The Theory of Unequal Exchange,’ in Capitalism and Theory (1974), pp.99-103.

[14] A more recent calculation says that the UK/India unskilled wage gap is over 9 to 1; see Milanovic, ‘Global Inequality: From Class to Location, from Proletarians to Migrants,’ Global Policy, May 2012.

[15] Kidron justified the higher wages of British workers: ‘If there is one outstanding difference between the two [British and Indian workers] it lies in the different degrees to which they are culturally enriched. The average British worker can be expected to read and drive; he or she will normally be able to handle a wide range of tools and concepts and respond to a wide range of stimuli on the basis of knowledge rather than from personal experience. The Indian worker will not.’ As with Kay, this reads as patronizing and chauvinist. Needless to say, Indian (and other Southern) workers can handle concepts and be ‘culturally enriched’ – and yet be paid poorly.

[16] Rodney, above citation, pp. 266-267.

[17] Landsberg, ‘Export-Led Industrialization in the Third World: Manufacturing Imperialism,’ Review of Radical Political Economics, 11:4 (Winter 1979).

[18] Amsden, ‘An international comparison of the rate of surplus value in manufacturing industry,’ Cambridge Journal of Economics (1981).

[19] Business Week, May 3, 1999, p. 190.

[20] Kerswell, ‘Productivity and wages: what grows for workers without power and institutions,’ Social Change, 43(4), 2013.

[21] ‘Differences in Surplus value Rates between Developed and Underdeveloped Countries’ by B. Gloria Martinez Gonzalez and Alejandro Valle Baeza, Marxism 21 (2011).

A Life of Praxis with Walter Rodney: interview with Jesse Benjamin

ROAPE

June 9, 2020

In the week that marks the fortieth anniversary of the murder of the revolutionary Walter Rodney, Jesse Benjamin – member of the Walter Rodney Foundation – speaks to ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig about Rodney’s astonishing work, life and activism and how he speaks to the dehumanization of Black lives everywhere. Rodney’s work, Benjamin argues, remains vital for those now seeking to overturn the systems of oppression worldwide.

Firstly, can you tell us something about your own political and intellectual journey, how and where did it start?

I was born a citizen of the world, already with two citizenships due to my itinerant 1960s parents who had travelled and then started living in the Middle East. I had a third citizenship a year later when we got to rural Nova Scotia, where my brother was born, and my parents split up. Until I was 10, I then lived all over Toronto, from Etobicoke to Cabbage Town, from the ‘good school’ neighborhood of Forest Hills to years running between the recording studios and international vendors on the streets of Kensington Market.

I arrived to live in the US for the first time, just as the New York Islanders hockey team went on to win four Stanley Cups in a row – a literal miracle for a 3^rd grade Canadian kid with every pro hockey player’s cards in his collection, but it went almost completely unnoticed in upstate New York where we now lived, and wasn’t even on TV. Almost four years in a rural small town situation was a new experience with some good friends and a new love for computers, physics and sci-fi, but before I was 13 we moved suddenly again, to Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, surrounded by religious communities and the most shockingly new kind of overt and vulgar racism I had ever experienced within the confines of my then brief, ostensibly colorblind, ideologically liberal humanist upbringing. It was South African apartheid style racism in the schools and streets I was now on, and that was also formative.

I’ve traced my willingness to question and even stand against what is going on around me pretty far back. I recall failing only one class in Canada, my civics grade at a particular school, because I refused to stand or sing the anthem and the Queen-related song that followed it. I did do the subsequent state-mandated exercises to the piped-in music of Stevie Wonder every morning, but I did not want to align with the symbols of a single nationalism, even though I really liked Canada as a kid, it seemed ordered and largely fair compared to the adults in my world. I also remember anti-Pakistani racism from students and their parents within days of arriving to school in a more working-class immigrant community outside of Mississauga.

But the simmering race hatred we encountered in those early Reagan-era Brooklyn years was shocking and awoke me to my first attempts at more direct activism. Eastern Parkway was very white and Jewish on one side, and mostly Black and particularly Caribbean on the other side, and in hindsight as a young teenager I was one of the very few people with friends on both sides of this apartheid line around which violence could easily erupt on any given day and sometimes did.

By 1987 I’d dropped out of high school, relocated to the Middle East, gone through some pretty dramatic struggles, and improbably managed to join a radical Quaker international college in Jerusalem. I was introduced to Marxist theory, Paulo Freire and Edward Said, while doing fieldwork with marginalized Bedouin communities in the Naqab/Negev and Sinai Deserts. The next year I made my way to my school’s European Center as a Marxist 17-year-old.

While studying in London I was lucky to have a series of mentors who I officially made my teachers and took courses with, starting with my primary advisor, professor and musician Vic Gammon, who taught me political economic theory and ethnomusicology. Then my development theory mentors introduced me to Ewan MacColl – a folk musician, leader in street and radical community theatre praxis, ethnomusicologist, lifelong Marxist theorist and activist who was the same age as my grandfather. He was then starting a Marxist theory class for his disaffected ‘capitalist’ children, in his home in South London, together with his partner, folk singer Peggy Seeger. I joined the first session, as we read paragraphs aloud from the Communist Manifesto for several weekly meetings, then Lenin’s Imperialism, some Engels, always illuminated in unparalleled detail by Ewan but also by the general conversation at this close-in level. Ewan’s kids never showed, but he ran the group anyway, and he later insisted I take voice lessons from him to improve my diaphragmatic breathing, oratory, and ‘the way I carried myself.’ I tried to warn him that it might not be for everyone, but I did give it a serious shot and learned a lot from him in the process. He used a lot of Paul Robeson in our exercises, and I got to spend hours with their incredible record collection.

In my fourth year of college, I studied in Kenya for two years. I immersed in a coastal community north of Mombasa that was a mix of Mijikenda and Swahili cultures, including many descendants of formerly enslaved people from the brief plantation period that had emerged right in this area from the 1830s – 1890s. Land and the struggle for it was central. The deeper my investigations went I discovered evictions of thousands of people into undocumented, largely hidden rural slums, the commodification of land as a resource in itself, and increasingly shady land dealings. This continued on as my dissertation research and is still an active area of my work. Underdevelopment was explicit in this setting, so Walter Rodney became a primary theoretical framework for me as an undergrad, because it provided even better answers than world systems theory seemed to and provided direct explanations for the contradictions my studies were revealing.

So, underdevelopment became central to my thinking and has seeped into my work in many ways. To my knowledge, though it started with my unpublished 550-page undergraduate thesis, I am still one of the only people using underdevelopment as a primary explanation for the profound economic, political and cultural marginalization of the numerically predominant non-Swahili, largely Mijikenda people of coastal Kenya. After the tripod-mounted machine-gunning British were largely defeated by Me Ketilili and her Giriama rebels in 1913/1914 (because they levelled the playing field with spears dipped in one of the deadliest of all neurotoxins, produced locally of black mamba and deadly sea mollusk poisons), the British punished them for this humiliation by charting all subsequent colonial development to circumvent their territories. Thus, the Mijikenda hinterlands were deprived of roads or railways, schools and administrative centers, economic or any other forms of development, providing an unintended positive cocoon of cultural independence from the steady erosion of colonial cultures, but also producing undeniable long-term effects such as an almost complete lack of social science doctorates some seven decades later.[1]

Honestly, by the time I got to grad school in a more traditional state university setting back in upstate New York, in 1993, I not only had four years of serious fieldwork under my belt, I was also up to speed on most of the critical and radical theories of the day, and was already evaluating them on the basis of their applicability in real work contexts. So, I was probably a more intellectually aggressive and politically intense student than usual. I was also now a pretty experienced activist and, at least intellectually and morally, a self-avowed revolutionary. I quickly joined the growing social movements, was soon a campus leader, and we engaged in major social movements there for years, resisting arming of campus police, fighting to keep our co-op bus service, fighting state tuition raises and other regressive social policies, and mainly contesting racism and demanding a more diverse curriculum on campus in a cycle of incidents, actions, repressions, getting pepper-sprayed, building takeovers, marches and more occupations.

It became an education in and of itself, the struggles at SUNY Binghamton were almost a shadow PhD I accidentally enrolled in, as my closest comrades and I insisted on taking our classes into the world and our struggles into the classroom. For my first tenure track job, in Minnesota, I was hired to teach a required first year anti-racism course in a heavily white community with active racism and white supremacist organizing, with the expectation of incorporating community activism into all my work. I didn’t need the invitation, but I took it – we worked on dozens of issues like police profiling and brutality, and racist Native sports mascots, we fought to remove swastikas from the stone masonry of the regional Catholic cathedral and resisted anti-Somali and anti-Hmong violence. In Atlanta, my praxis came with me, as my colleagues soon discovered, and here one of my main groundings has been with the Rodney family and the Walter Rodney Foundation.

I am always on the lookout for activism and activist comrades, but I never expected the degree of involvement and movement we were a part of in Binghamton. But it was theory that truly reared its head unexpectedly when I needed it. In those same years I discovered coloniality and got to study with Anibal Quijano, and although we were in very different disciplines, Carole Boyce Davies was a significant influence as I deepened my knowledge of Pan-Africanism and Black radical thought, especially Black radical feminist thought. Rodney and Sylvia Wynter would be central in all of this.

How did you become involved and interested in the work of Walter Rodney? When did you first read his work and what were your first impressions?

Friends World College was a blessing on so many levels. I had survived a meandering transnational childhood, a religious cult, homelessness and drugs and now I wanted to understand the world in every way I could. Political economy, anthropology, philosophy became my primary tools, and for a few years I basically studied revolutionary thought and history. Every generative book that blew my mind in those early years led to a study of all the works in its bibliography, and so I studied the genealogy of revolutionary thought, from Marx and Engels to Che, Freire, Cabral. That is when Rodney’s name first started coming up. At the idyllic job I landed in London, working the late shift at Regent’s College Library, I talked to patrons of the Overseas Development Institute and basically anyone checking out any radical books, and in that context a dissident Eritrean PhD student insisted I read Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (HEUA) that weekend in order to continue our already intense discussion about development theory. So I did, with great appreciation. I remember being that radical librarian, who after reading this text, and Nkrumah’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, politely but earnestly told everyone I could about the blood soaked sugar slavery origins (Tate and Lyle Sugar Co.) of the stately Tate Reading room we were standing in as they checked out books with me. It was one of many times the world all around me was directly illuminated by Rodney.

His book was one of the reasons I decided to travel next to Africa, and my school had a Center in Kenya. I read an immense amount of Kenya-specific scholarship, and then two years later as I worked to complete the ethnography that would be my senior thesis I returned to Rodney, along with Marx, Lenin, Robert Brenner, Fred Cooper, Wallerstein, Roger van Zwanenberg and anyone else who seemed to helpfully explain the neocolonial squatter evictions and land privatization I was seeing.

Rodney was just so explanatory, his work provided the deepest of answers, and unmasked the dynamics usually left opaque or unexamined altogether. It used a nuanced and flexible Marxism and flexible thinking in general, to describe more than 500 years of history in Africa, and with a high degree of specificity for each region’s details. While reading Rodney again in Kenya I remember figuring out that East Africa Industries, which produced a preponderance of staple products in all the stores (like Blueband margarine and Omo laundry powder), was in fact not local as its name slyly implied, but just a regional hub of the Unilever corporation, the largest and most colonial of Dutch/Anglo multinationals since the deeply colonial roots of the Lever brothers. Lloyds of London and Barclays Bank were also indelibly located within their violent imperial origins. It was the only book that evoked major reactions, mostly loving, when I took it on the crowded matatu rides to town. Everywhere I went with that book people who were touched by a lecture or a work of Rodney’s announced themselves, started sharing their stories. That was a special experience in relation to a book unlike any I’d ever experienced.

Years later, in Binghamton New York, entrusted with my first ever solo-taught course as a now PhD student, I was teaching ‘Africa in the World System’, and in the third week or so, we had occupied buildings in protest, and I was teaching my class in the occupied building, sitting in our discussion circle, each reading and then discussing paragraphs from our main text HEUA. There in the introduction was the statement about Rodney teaching in Michigan, Cornell and Binghamton to pay his bills, having been blocked from working in Guyana by the dictator. So, my class discussed how crazy that was, how we’d received no loving history of his presence on our campus, how the activists would be so empowered to know about him. We asked why no building was named for him, no study lounge, nothing. Few of my activists friends knew much about him either, and my own knowledge was still limited to three books and several articles, so I started a Walter Rodney study group with some other students, focused on Rodney and his writings, as well as his scholar/activist model, which we were already trying to embody a version of.

Walter Rodney Speaks was key to this time for me, for the blueprint and legitimation it provided for the radical academic life I was slowly realizing I might actually continue working in long after my degree was completed. Rodney was a rare example of a truly committed intellectual, an important role model. We started monthly meetings around his scholarship, ran a petition and fundraiser to launch a scholarship, demanded the Student Union be named for him, and most consequently, after three years of work we held a major international conference on him and his work, run entirely by radical students, which became itself an historic event. That is where I met Patricia Rodney, Walter’s wife, and Asha Rodney, his youngest daughter, who I was very excited to be on a young scholars panel with. Patricia Rodney riveted us with an intimate session about all she had lived through with Walter and the assassination, a night none in attendance will ever forget.

Eight years later, when I got a job offer to work in suburban Atlanta, they were the only people I knew in the region, and the prospect of their friendship and collaboration was a significant factor in our move. My informal mentorship with Carole Boyce Davies – more of me being a dutiful follower and student really – was foundational too, including her unparalleled scholarship, internationalism and willingness to engage with student movements, her rigorous example on both sides of the scholar/activist divide. Wynter was also a key part of this period for me. She was one of two keynotes at our Rodney conference, together with George Lamming. She also came to some of our early coloniality studies sessions and one of our first conferences, and honestly blew us all away with her brilliance, her intensity and unique style, her appreciation and recitation of Nas, that she chilled and danced with us until after midnight at the party we set up in her honor, or came to our house for dinner on another visit.

For readers of roape.net who may not be overly familiar with Rodney’s work could you give us a brief overview?

Rodney is both loved and appreciated all across Africa and the Diaspora, but too often pigeonholed into categories and limitations that suit the needs of contemporary scholars. He is an ancestor via martyrdom in the cause of his people’s liberation, so interpreting his thought and ideas is, or should be especially sensitive. After achieving his PhD at 24, his body of work over the next 14 years made him one of the great Marxists and Pan-African scholars of the twentieth century, whose work is still insufficiently cited and engaged across a vast range of fields.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is by far his best-known book, still relevant and in print almost 50 years later because it dared to explain the fundamental relations of the world order like few other books ever have. He wrote erudite books like this for a broad general audience, and he also wrote refined historiographic works of anticolonial recuperation and reorientation that remarkably remain definitive in the historiography of both Guyana and the Upper Guinea Coast of West Africa. He was a peerless scholar/activist everywhere he went, an unusually solid example for us today, his concept and praxis of grounding providing a major pedagogic model. At a minimum, Rodney’s work is central to discussion of underdevelopment, Marxism, Black history, race/class, world systems, pan-Africanism, Guyana’s politics and history, Jamaica’s too, Caribbean studies, Tanzania’s Ujama politics and the Dar School of radical historiography, Education theory, and I would also argue that he should be more central to modern genealogies of how we understand the politics of knowledge, coloniality and decolonial theory.[2]

**Jesse Benjamin and Asha Rodney talking at Medu Books in Atlanta in 2019, Patricia Rodney on the left side**

You have recently coedited a book by Walter Rodney on the Russian revolution, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World. The book is based on the extensive and detailed lectures that Rodney prepared for an advanced course on the historiography of the revolution at the University of Dar es Salaam in the early 1970s. Can you tell us about how you came to put this extraordinary book together, the work that was involved and what you regard as its principal contribution?

Different versions of the history and status of the work were out there. I heard little traces. Horace Campbell was the only person I knew who’d really written much about it, in a little-known essay, and Rupert Lewis in his biography. Rodney was at the height of his powers when he was killed, and he had many projects almost finished and ready to work on in his travels and various moments for research and presentations. Somehow, he was able to continue his major research projects while organizing furiously and engaging in a steadily increasing battle with a dictatorship. Toward the end they were moving regularly between safe houses. Some of his unfinished works were confiscated from the Rodney home by the regime on the day of the assassination, others were saved and collected into what the family held together and preserved until it officially became the Walter Rodney Papers at the Archives Center of the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library.

Much later, while he was in town for a conference on race and integration in the post-WWII military industrial context of northern Atlanta/Marietta, I met with David Roediger who shared what he knew about the manuscript that Robin Kelley had worked on as a student of Ed Alpers in UCLA. And so, I got Robin together with Pat and Asha to form a plan and we worked to get the book out after that, over a few years, in conjunction with Verso. Rodney had written the book first as a series of lecture notes on the Russian Revolution, with the intention of developing them later as a book, and he used the same deep preparation for the class as the writing process, where he read the primary literature deeply and directly himself, taking meticulous notes on cards, starting from the ground up with his own independent evaluation of the history. Robin got to do a lot of work on the original handwritten drafts while they were in UCLA in the mid-80s in the care of Edward Alpers, before the Atlanta archive was set up. We now had the task of turning what was unfinished into a book, so we tried to leave it as close to the way it was in his papers, the reader gets to see the unfinished chapters in a few places, and wonder what other chapters he’d have added, what he would have revised before publishing. It’s a fresh take on the Russian Revolution, with the clear point of what could be learned for then-contemporary revolutions, anticolonial struggles and non-aligned movement blocs. It’s a snapshot of very critical 1970s thought, almost like a time capsule. For almost everyone it was an unexpected 10^th book, a text which flows with a voice that feels closer in style I think to How Europe than almost any other of his works. Rodney frames the work as part of Black Studies, with the obvious but radical notion that any area of the world could be the legitimate subject of this newly ensconced academic framework. I also argue that his critique of bourgeois scholarship and its obvious biases compared to the largely more accurate technocratic records of the Soviets, encapsulated his original Two World Views of the Russian Revolution title concept for the book, which revealed the epistemic and cultural level of his work, parallel with critiques of knowledge/power in Michel Foucault and Edward Said.

Why do you think the Russian revolution held such interest for a radical activist and researcher working in Africa, and focused on the struggles of the Third World?

When I think of the 1970s and the transnational Non-Aligned Movement in which Rodney was a major presence, it was a similar moment to the one we are facing now, a period of unwritten possibilities based on unprecedented ruptures in the capitalist world system, where better visions emerge to confront colonialism, imperialism and outright fascism. When you think of the fight against Portuguese colonialism or the forward advance of apartheid South Africa and the resistance that frontline states had to put up, with the help of Cuba, these were transnational struggles against imperial fascism. Fascist dictators were ascendant in the Americas and elsewhere then too, creating stark choices, and from our vantage point we see that, with a few exceptions, the better side did not win.

The post-Vietnam era was characterized by ‘low intensity conflicts’ and proxy wars, sometimes genocidal, often fueled by clandestine drug and arms running operations, from Guatemala and El Salvador to Indonesia and East Timor. A lot of that imperial history has been coming home to roost for decades, as the US metropole reimports the only remaining industries it has, bringing the technologies of its imperial ‘Third World’ domain back to the US. Things like debt manipulation, repackaged versions of structural adjustment and privatization, infinite wealth disparities, militarizations of all varieties. Just as we must now assess our situation and draw from the best and also the most illustrative examples that history has to offer, Rodney wanted to understand every aspect of the Russian Revolution in all of its complexity. And on close examination there are innumerable parallels that help raise questions and ideas in relation to many African and Third World nations, and really people everywhere, regarding land and peasant production, industrialization, ethnic and religious diversity, power and the state, power and the international arena.

You get a sense reading the book and looking through Rodney’s archive in Atlanta, of the phenomenal extent of his reading, his deep grasp of Marxism (and its various tendencies) and his knowledge of a wide-ranging literature on the revolution. What do you think the volume tells us about who Rodney was, how he worked and his political commitment?

How real and urgent his search for truth and answers was, but also how undoctrinaire and creative he was in his thinking. The groundings approach he already typified and then greatly refined during and ever after his Jamaican sojourn in 1968 was a very rigorous mode, one of self-reflection as to one’s role and capacity in a given space, one of studying thoroughly the deep historical roots of each place, and then the process of decolonizing our thinking sufficiently to the task of liberation. He mentions his interest in physics, he read about the natural world and the environment, he went wherever the questions and issues took him, and he was always independent in his thought, reading the original texts and forming his own analyses in the process, never skipping steps as a scholar, meticulous in his language and his argument. In his 20s he was openly contesting with the doyens of the field of African history and African studies in their peer-reviewed journals and remarkably holding his own. Really, he was boldly writing decolonial historiography and they were feeling threatened and therefore contending with him, not entirely successfully either. Because he was a prolific scholar and wrote in various media across his career, we can see many examples of his attempt to forge critical praxis wherever he was, grounded in Marxism and Pan-Africanism, always building his analysis from deep local roots and then navigating toward the primary contradictions, usually finding himself way ahead of almost everyone else, labeled a threat, surveilled. Already in grad school he and Pat were followed between restaurants and archives in Portugal where he was researching colonial history in his third or fourth language.

There is a balance of pragmatism and rigor on the one hand, and a creativity and realness on the other. When we read him, we find someone with the same questions as us: why is the world this way, and how can we understand it deeply enough to transform it? I am pained that we don’t get to see his intellect contending with the powerful theories that have emerged since the late 70s. His praxis, the way he grounded, the way he went to the deeper truth and called it out, the way he was willing to reach unusual or challenging conclusions based on the evidence even if it was groundbreaking or unexpected, these are all license for us in the present, models of how we can tend to the world and its contradictions today. And as you allude, even with the tragic loss of some of his work in the events around 1980, there is considerable work still either unpublished, obscure or little known, some of which will continue to flow out hopefully from the Verso loft. And scholars can seek his work, it is on all the servers and in journals which are increasingly accessible.

Rodney’s research and writing, at all points, was marked by his commitment to putting ‘ideas’, teaching, books and articles ‘to work’ in the vital and necessary struggle of continued liberation and revolution. How would you chart Rodney’s intellectual and activist trajectory from the 1960s to his murder in 1980?

Relentless, multifaceted, unfinished, focused on numerous projects at once, focused on Guyana and its very specific geometry in the final years, and might have helped lead the country to freedom and unification beyond what has since seemed remotely possible. He was unusual in connecting organically and genuinely with people in all lines of work and at all levels of poverty and dispossession, he seemed to have no boundaries in that regard. In Guyana he crossed over racial lines and united people with knowledge of shared colonial histories. In Binghamton I met more working-class people who remembered him than academics, people who attended an open lecture of his or took one of his classes or knew him from some interaction in town. His praxis was so powerful in 1968 Jamaica, at such a significant time, that he was expelled from the country in under 9 full months, leading to the Rodney Riots or Rebellion, an event of national, Caribbean and arguably world historical significance. In Tanzania he was a leading voice on campus and in the Dar School of Radical Historiography, and participated and was a leader in student social movements of national consequence, but he also left campus and taught and grounded with high school students, rural labor unions and collective farmers, and all sorts of groups that invited him.

Less seriously, but no less complexly, Rodney’s thinking and work put him at odds with the government again, though he was close with President Nyerere. His transnationalism was off putting to nationalist party leaders, as were his withering but essential critiques of comprador petty-bourgeois elites and neocolonialism, and he knew that his groundings would be deeper in Guyana than anywhere because it was his home society. His work there deserves more attention from PhD researchers and scholar visits to the archives, it was an incredibly rich grounding, probably his deepest of all. He produced his definitive, A History of the Guyanese Working People, and the subsequent two volumes intended to follow it were done or nearly completely when they were stolen from his house. He produced the beginnings of an ambitious children’s book series which was to cover the true historical stories of all the major groups in the country, to undermine the divide and conquer legacies that separated Guyanese communities. And his speeches to the Guyanese people, including ‘Peoples Power, No Dictator,’ are another set of documents altogether, some of his least known and most important, though his comrades have maintained a steady literature and engagement with this and all the literature in Dayclean, and more than a few other venues. He was planning to get out for a while, the complexities were staggering, political, legal, personal, familial; newly independent Zimbabwe had invited him and there was a plan to go when the bomb was planted in his walkie-talkie.

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‘We are with the hakuma’: a revolution on the asphalt

ROAPE

June 3, 2020

On 3 June 2019 there was a massacre of protestors camped around the headquarters of the Sudan Armed Forces in Khartoum – the protestors were attempting to reinvent politics for a world to come. Magdi el Gizouli and Edward Thomas write about the dynamics of the Sudanese revolution and the need to delve beyond the asphalt of cities and towns.

By Magdi el Gizouli and Edward Thomas

Over a year has passed since the momentous events that brought down the long rule of President Bashir in April 2019. In a second blow, Sudan’s revolutionary movement forced the hand of Bashir’s top generals to enter into a tenuous power sharing arrangement with the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC), a broad coalition of Bashir’s opponents. The thousands of protesters who camped around the headquarters of the Sudan Armed Forces in what was effectively a month-long siege restricted the manoeuvring space of Bashir’s generals and in the process attempted to reinvent politics for a world to come.

The 3 June 2019 massacre was the joint response of the military, the security and the militia, Sudan’s security establishment, to this daring popular assault. The unarmed protestors in the camp were gunned down at the break of dawn by an overwhelming number of troops in the uniforms of the militia Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the riot police. Corpses punctured by bullets were fished out of the Nile tied to concrete blocks and harrowing accounts of rape clouded public consciousness.

The massacre on 3 June was the moment of baptism for an upcoming generation in the fire and sword of Sudanese power games. No wonder, the politics of its commemoration is a competing ground for the querulous partners who came to inherit the levers of government.

Army generals, militia leaders, politicians and wannabe politicians all sing the praise of 3 June sacrifice and some even manage to display a few tears to the camera with the appropriate soundtrack in play. Despite these oft repeated pieties the facts of the event are yet to be officially established. The exact death toll remains unclarified, the number and fate of the forcible disappeared unknown and responsibility blurred in the smoke and mirrors of conflicting conspiracy theories.

A committee of investigation into the massacre was established by decree of the interim prime minister in October 2019 with a three months mandate that has since been extended. The committee, headed by a prominent lawyer with human rights credentials, joins representatives of the ministries of defence and interior, the very institutions accused of involvement in the bloodshed. Recently, the chairman of the committee said he was not bound by any timeline to declare his findings and in any case these findings will not be disclosed to the public but delivered to the judicial authorities. As expected, the committee of investigation into 3 June events, not unlike a growing list of other investigation committees established to probe incidents of state violence over the past 18 months, is so far a mechanism of bureaucratic obfuscation and deferral.

The massacre reflected the challenge that the imagination and the will on display in Sudan’s season of revolution posed to the array of forces that constitute the Sudanese establishment. The December revolution raised the question of political power, its locus, its bearers, its character and its accountability and answered that question with the invention of the residential neighbourhood-level ‘resistance committee’. Novel in content and form, the ‘resistance committee’ is an open access node of political power extraneous to the state that has stood its ground beyond the testing phase of mobilisation and protest and has managed since to divide, capture and exercise a good fraction of local authority. Indeed, the ‘resistance committee’ is arguably the gift of Sudan’s contemporary revolutionary experience to the world, a bold attempt at reclaiming the city and its hypercommodified resources, and the product of a globally recognisable collision of community and capital accumulation.[1] Few if any of Sudan’s resistance committee activists have been exposed to the ideas of Henri Lefebvre but would probably easily recognise the ‘Right to the City’ as an anchor of their praxis.[2]

Intrinsic to its challenge to the political order the December 2018 revolution pierced Sudan’s patriarchal hierarchies with a long lance. At the level of the spectacle, the iconic images of women at the forefront of the protest movement circulated widely in the shifting global circuits of digital attention. But beyond the economy of images, the social authority of Sudan’s jellabiya-clad preachers, teachers and fathers was temporarily suspended as a younger generation of women and men explored a realm of emancipation beyond the patriarchal grip. Preachers were shouted down from their mosque pulpits, teachers who had identified with the ideology of the regime were harassed on school grounds and fathers were disowned as regime stooges or complicit spectators to autocracy.

Interjected with these two planes of struggle, the political and the social, Sudan’s protest movement was a response to a regime of economic austerity construed in Islamist jargon at a moment of deep crisis. Unremitting monetisation, commercialisation and gruelling patterns of extraction that played out as cycles of rural wars, dispossession and urban immiseration engineered the set of contradictions that sustained Bashir’s rule for so many years and equally so prescribed his demise when their management escaped his designs.

The December 2018 revolution identified the self-enriching apparatchik of the Islamic Movement as the enemy. In the political jargon of the transitional government ‘dismantling’ of the old regime is deemed equivalent with plucking Islamists out of the state apparatus and confiscating assets of the ruling party and its numerous tentacles, frontmen and women. The protesters directed their anger against a recognisable figure of oppression, a form curated from fragments of scripture and the racist ideology of the propertied classes that had run its course as an idiom of dominance.

Already in Bashir’s twilight years a competing syntax of entrepreneurial glamour, investment hype, hygienic efficiency, digital flamboyance and liberal mores had overtaken clunky Islamism of yesteryear as a carrier of modernisation. The Islamists themselves were enchanted by the neoliberal successes of the Malaysian and Turkish models and agonised over the inability of their people to withstand ‘modernity’ with composure. Beards were neatly reduced to symbolic stripes, ablutions economised, and prayer outsourced to Sufi sages. The convergence of mosque and market had exhausted its rationale as the market penetrated even into the world thereafter with the differentiation of a superior version of high-cost access-limited tight-fenced cemetery grounds equipped with ready-dug graves and professional reciters.

Bashir’s Islamism, an enabler of the crude and visibly blood-drenched capture of resources, proved unfit to screen the more subtle and sharp processes of market penetration; content broke the seams of form. In its place, Sudan’s business moguls – wheat importers, commercial capitalists, telecommunication lords, real estate and hard currency speculators, gold and livestock traders – adopted the slick form of entrepreneurial acumen in line with the determinations of regional capital circuits and global requirements. Khartoum is not Dubai on the Nile, but the Nile is channelled through Dubai as it were.

So far, the transitional government has barely taken its foot off the pedal Bashir was pressing and has repackaged known policy formulas in the jargon of international development. Bread and fuel subsidies are being phased out with the introduction of a two-tier price system for both commodities, an available commercial and a scarce subsidized variety. Means-tested cash-transfers for ‘vulnerable’ families supported by the World Food Programme (WFP) are planned to be rolled out in the second half of the year to great applause. Whether further entanglement in the world of cash is the answer to Sudan’s crises is doubtable. Evidence from internally displaced camps in Darfur suggests that cash transfers had the paradoxical effect of aggravating food price hikes and market volatility. An increase in public sector wages, probably the largest single increase in the country’s history, exacerbated an inflationary wave with spiralling commodity prices. In dollar terms, the minimum wage increased from SDG 425 to SDG 3,000 per month. The Minister of Finance is hoping to offset the economic recession, now exacerbated by the Covid-19 lockdown measures, through spurring consumer spending.

The government was less ready to dish-out cash to producers and is still struggling to requisition wheat from farmers in Gezira and the Northern States at a fixed price negotiated in March 2020 that was even then considered by some below market price, and is now almost 30% above the government offer. The military governors of Gezira and Northern States ordered a prohibition under emergency law on the sale, purchase and transfer of wheat outside of their states to enforce the government monopoly and agents of the General Intelligence Service were deployed around the country to secure the wheat harvest.

The hakuma’s biases are hard to unlearn. The term hakuma, Arabic for government, is often deployed in a broad and creative sense to denote powerful structures: armies and police, bureaucracies and business. ‘We are with the hakuma and support President Bashir’, an elderly man in a hamlet close to the border between Sudan and the Central African Republic recently told a visiting government delegation joining members of the cabinet and the sovereignty council; he had no idea yet of the change of authority in Khartoum. A journalist who accompanied the delegation wrote in precise terms, the December 2018 revolution is locked on the asphalt road and is yet to delve into the vast wilderness of Sudan. The actual meaning and the metaphoric interpretation are probably both worth considering.

Magdi el Gizouli is a scholar and a fellow of the Rift Valley Institute. He writes on Sudanese affairs here and regularly contributes to roape.net.

Edward Thomas is a fellow of the Rift Valley Institute and a research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

ROAPE is hosting a webinar on the Sudanese revolution, with Magdi el Gizouli, Kholood Khair and Salma Abdalla, on 22 June at 5pm London time/ 6pm Khartoum time. If you want to attend please email website.editor@roape.net for the log-in details after 17 June.

Featured Photograph: Train arriving from Atbara city about 300 km from Khartoum where the revolution started in December 2018 (17 August 2019).

Notes

[1] John Emmius Davius, 1991, Contested Ground: Collective Action and the Urban Neighborhood, Cornell University Press, p.291.

[2] Henri Lefebvre, 1996, Writings on Cities, Oxford.

The Great Omission: Debating Anglophone African Studies

ROAPE

May 28, 2020

In this blogpost, ROAPE’s Jean Copans discusses his paper (available to read for free) on social class, African studies and linguistic divides. While lamenting how radical views have largely disappeared from the French intellectual scene, he notes that anglophone African studies almost entirely neglect work in French. Copans argues that we must transcend from the start the constraints imposed by geopolitical and linguistic zones.

By Jean Copans

Access for free Jean Copans’ paper, ‘Have the social classes of yesterday vanished from Africanist issues or are African societies made up of new classes? A French anthropologist’s perspective’

Why such a long, very personal, and now that Brexit is probably on the way, exotic title for my ROAPE paper? Some brief explanations.

99% of the researchers and academics published in ROAPE are of Anglo-Saxon training and culture. Very, very few French and francophone Africans publish in the Review. Many cannot write in English (though I have to thank my English readers and editors, especially ROAPE’s Clare Smedley, for having brought necessary corrections to my paper) but today there is a more tragic reason.

Radical views and radical commitments have largely disappeared from the French intellectual scene and especially from social sciences. But as the readers of this blogpost and of the Review know well, or should know, there was a time when ROAPE was more engaged with the radical French intellectual scene and francophone Africa.

So, let us begin as in a fairytale style: Once upon a time …

French Africanists are aware, and most of the time are well aware, of the works of their English, American, Nigerian, South African, Ghanaian etc colleagues not only those dealing with the anglophone African countries but more generally when dealing with the general themes of their discipline whatever the social science. A second concern of mine is that very few anthropologists (or even sociologists) can be listed among the authors of ROAPE.

Of course many political scientists or political economists are ‘cultured’ in those disciplines and read thoroughly but they do not feel overly concerned by the methodological and empirical problems involved in social science research at least in the Africanist experience and tradition. The same can be said also to some extent of French scholars but the familiarity with the contexts, the unconscious traditions and the ‘habits’ of other ‘methodological nationalisms’, as the German sociologist Ulrich Beck describes them, is in general very limited throughout the whole world.

To come to the point: Anglo-Saxon researchers know in fact little of the French way of thinking about anthropology and sociology and even if Pierre Bourdieu is translated extensively into English. The general thrust of French disciplinary developments and tendencies is understood only after much delay and in a very partial way.

Once again this is an extremely ordinary state of affairs but sometimes this ignorance or schematic understanding of the traditions of the ‘others’ can be very misleading. In the Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology edited in 2012 by Richard Fardon and his colleagues (two volumes and more than 70 authors), 2950 names are listed in the name index. Yet only 40 of them are French or Francophone and in fact more than half of those are philosophers and political scientists. If we discount the name of our ‘great ancestors’ such as Mauss or Durkheim only 0.5% of the total number of names in the index are French anthropologists born in the 1940s.

Therefore, it is a sad conclusion: contemporary French and Francophone social anthropology is nowhere to be seen in such a panorama. It is not the result of a sinister plot but the very nature of the secret state of professional culture outside the French speaking world.

Not a very anthropological attitude to say the least!

There is no French or francophone ROAPE anymore and the only domain where a radical paradigm can still be read in French is southern American studies.

These basic reflections thus explain my quite complicated title: I have written my paper not only to promote my personal views on the uses of the concept of class in African studies but more specifically to explain to those not particularly informed of the French tradition in this field (which of course come out largely of African studies). Why my/our – French – views are so distinct from the anglophone traditions when tackling the domain of social class analysis.

This ignorance is in my view quite paradoxical for the authors and readers of ROAPE are deeply concerned by the Marxist understanding of the world and the French have written extensively on this topic but … long ago!

The development of the French Marxist framework of thinking (1960-1980) is so specific that this story needs to be told. Only by recalling this history can I explain my point of view, reasoning and discussion of the papers published in the Review or in the blog section on capitalism in Africa. Everyone should be aware that my paper reflects a more collective and historical situation and not simply my ‘on-the-other-side-of-the-Channel’ idiosyncrasies.

I cannot summarize a paper that is already a summary of sorts. I will therefore only restate one of my major points at the end of the article: Such a vision of methodological issues and tools implies further reflexivity on the day-to-day impact of so-called methodological nationalism and, more generally, on the perverse effects of the traditional division of studies by culture or continent (here African Studies). In addition, we must transcend from the start the constraints imposed by geopolitical and linguistic zones: West Africa or East Africa; francophone or anglophone Africa; or, on a continental scale, Africa versus Latin America or South-East Asia. This approach also demands collective and ‘democratic’ research, independent of any ideological or teleological goals, since all societies would be, or would be in the process of becoming, class societies.

Throughout the article I also try to analyze the relationships between academic Marxism and militant and ideological versions of Marxism (both in the West and in Africa). My bibliography lists 106 references (38 from my works and 40 from French or French writing authors, only four of these being francophone African researchers). Of course I have read serious research works and the much more numerous purely ideological books dealing with purely imaginery classes. To paraphrase my conclusion, Marxist theories must not be automatically discarded with the bathwater of history, on grounds of globalised hypermodernity and continuous modernisation. If history is remodelling classes, then social scientists must rise to the challenge of systematically constructing but also reconstructing the objects of their reflection and research.

Access Jean Copans’ paper for free here: ‘Have the social classes of yesterday vanished from Africanist issues or are African societies made up of new classes? A French anthropologist’s perspective.’

Jean Copans carried out fieldwork in Senegal over 40 years (1967–2006). He has been on the editorial board of several journals (including Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, Politique Africaine and Revue Tiers Monde); has been a contributing editor to ROAPE from January 1981 until March 2008, when he joined the Review’s International Advisory Board; and has directed three series of books between 1974 and 2005 at François Maspero, Le Sycomore and Karthala publishing houses. He is the author or editor of 20 books and a great many papers.

Featured Photograph: From Verkijika G. Fanso’s article, ‘History explains why Cameroon is at war with itself over language and culture‘ The Conversation (15 October 2017).

African Entrepreneurship: the fetish of personal responsibility

ROAPE

May 26, 2020

Moses E. Ochonu writes that the increase of poverty in Africa from the 1980s, exacerbated by neoliberal reforms, opened the door to the veneration of entrepreneurship as a remedy for mass poverty. Looking at the history of entrepreneurship on the continent, Ochonu sees a mobile and malleable category which has little in common with the neoliberal fetishization of personal responsibility.

By Moses E. Ochonu

Scholarly interest on entrepreneurship has exploded in the last three decades outside the traditional quantitative disciplines of economics and business studies. This is traceable to the global ascent of neoliberal capitalism, which has drawn remote corners of the world into global webs of capital and substituted self-help entrepreneurship for state-directed ameliorative economic projects. Humanists and qualitative social scientists have brought much-needed critical perspectives to bear on the study of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship.

One of the legacies of this humanization of entrepreneurship studies is the extension of the observational and analytical lens to the Global South, a region of the world simultaneously regarded as a place dominated by a poverty-incubating pre-capitalist economic ethos and as a fertile ground for recruiting new entrepreneurs. In so far as the emphasis on producing indigenous entrepreneurs emanates from an assumption that Africa lacks capitalism and capitalist relations of production, an assumption that Horman Chitonge debunks in his blog in this series, there is a need to deconstruct paradigmatic understandings of not just capitalism but also of entrepreneurship, the supposed means to capitalism in Africa.

Africa has been the centre of two crosscutting processes, one focused on the alleged prevalence of pre-capitalist or socialistic poverty, the other on producing entrepreneurs to combat that poverty. The escalation of poverty in Africa from the 1980s, itself partly a product of neoliberal reforms, ironically opened the door to the neoliberal veneration of entrepreneurship as a remedy for mass poverty. Many anti-poverty interventions in Africa today seek to remake Africans into rural and urban entrepreneurs through instruments such as microfinance, revolving credit, and cooperative lending.

The proliferation of entrepreneurial projects in Africa in the neoliberal moment inspired unprecedented Africanist scholarly interest in entrepreneurship, enterprise, innovation, African capitalism (or Africapitalism) and the culture of self-help. As new groups of entrepreneurs emerged on the continent and engaged in a variety of capitalist, wealth-creating activities, Africanist scholars from a variety of fields began to develop new vocabularies and concepts to explain this entrepreneurial wave. This scholarly corpus has been illuminating. But it has also been plagued by conceptual imprecision and confusion.

The problem, as I want to show in this reflection, was that the Africanist entrepreneurial perspective that emerged had blind spots imposed by dominant formulations developed to understand entrepreneurial cultures in Euro-American contexts. There are two other interrelated problems. One is a failure to develop an analytical toolkit that accommodates the capacious and amorphous entrepreneurial lives of Africans who were pigeonholed into the new neoliberal category of the entrepreneur. The second is a failure to adequately critique the exuberant, self-assured discourse of entrepreneurs as economic messiahs and replacements for the economic responsibilities of the dysfunctional African state.

The first problem turns on the deployment of notions and definitions derived from the dominant Schumpeterian perspective on entrepreneurship. Joseph Schumpeter’s major contribution to the study of entrepreneurship lies in going beyond understanding the entrepreneur as one who had the skill to ‘combine the factors of production’ and situating the entrepreneur in a more ambitious project of disrupting the process of value-creation. Schumpeter saw the entrepreneur not just in personal terms but also in terms of corporate agency, of the aggregate transformative impact of multiple, simultaneous, or successive entrepreneurial initiatives. Unlike other theorists, Schumpeter saw the entrepreneur not as a manager but as a catalyst, an innovator. Clearly, the empirical setting of Schumpeter’s theorization is a European industrial one, giving his postulations a decidedly Eurocentric flavor.

The Schumpeterian paradigm applies to the innovatively disruptive capacities of some contemporary African industrial entrepreneurs. However, this explanatory model is problematic when called upon to illuminate the activities and priorities of other African entrepreneurs outside the capitalist industrial matrix. The Schumpeterian explanation does not know what to do with Africans whose enterprise consists not of the familiar portfolios of our modern capitalist imagination but rather of an eclectic corpus of holdings embracing the social, political, artisanal, and economic realms.

In trying to understand African entrepreneurs in all their diversity, we have hamstrung our own conceptual liberty and boxed ourselves into an analytical corner. The effort to comprehend African entrepreneurial modalities has suffered as a result. Our love of neat, hard categories and vocational identifiers have stifled our ability to appreciate the full range of African entrepreneurship. As a historian, my frame of reference is the African past and that is where I’d like to go to develop this contention.

In precolonial Africa entrepreneurship was not a narrow, bounded vocation. Instead, entrepreneurship inhered in particular ways of doing things, and in any organized activity that promised personal or communal rewards. In this capacious definitional universe, enterprising warriors were entrepreneurs. They transformed the art of warfare from a regimented, sporadic activity to one with its own routines and protocols. Historian Uyilawa Usualele’s chapter in my edited volume, Entrepreneurship in Africa, rightly argues for a recognition of the entrepreneurial ingenuity of Benin warlords, spiritual consultants, priests, and religious purveyors whose repertoire included the professionalization and deft organization of multiple social vocations. Their sophisticated endeavor, Uyilawa demonstrates, entailed the adoption of business management principles that we today associate with entrepreneurs.

Warrior guilds, whether in precolonial Ibadan, Asante, Dahomey, Buganda, or Zulu, were sites of entrepreneurship. When systematized and conceptualized as a professional business venture, as it was in many precolonial African kingdoms, warring involved planning, management, delegation, tasks, goals, deliverables, compensation, the creation of value in the form of war spoils, the distribution of dividends, and reinvestment in processes that improved war making. War making entailed post-operational accounting, the calculation of profits, and periodic stocktaking — in other words, elaborate formal and informal bookkeeping. It was a business, and the guilds, warrior cults, and military training programs of precolonial African kingdoms were business schools of sorts. Many of today’s warlords are also conflict entrepreneurs, leveraging war as opportunities for profit.

I have chosen this unlikely example to illustrate my point that in Africa entrepreneurial pursuits were not and are still not wholly shaped by the narrow permutations of combining the forces of production — capital, labour, and knowledge — to produce a profit. The profit motive is not always central to entrepreneurial pursuits in the African context, although profit is an expected outcome of entrepreneurial acts. Furthermore, where present and clearly discernible as the primary catalyst in an enterprise, profit is articulated in less narrow terms than is posited in the economistic definitions of classical and neoliberal economic thought.

Historically, African entrepreneurs occupied multiple positions and professions in society; entrepreneurship was only one of several elements that defined them. Moreover, their entrepreneurial lives often existed in symbiosis with the demands, responsibilities, and ethics of the wider culture. Given this reality of multiple entrepreneurial trajectories and entwinements, it is perhaps more productive to speak of ‘entrepreneurial Africans’ than of ‘African entrepreneurs,’ a formulation at odds with the restrictive definitional criteria in normative capitalist thought. The term ‘African entrepreneurs’ assumes a consistent, permanent occupational identity of people whose lives were consumed and defined solely by their entrepreneurial engagements. ‘Entrepreneurial Africans’ advances a premise of entrepreneurial possibilities in multiple endeavours and professions.

This complex picture is further compounded by the existence of several ‘non-capitalist’ systems of production as well as the prevalence of hybrid practices in which self-interested capitalist rationalities coexisted with an ethos of value and reward. If the Schumpeterian model and its derivatives are applied uncritically to African entrepreneurial formations, they raise the question of whether, for instance, entrepreneurs could emerge and thrive outside capitalist relations in a communal African economic setting and if so whether the relationship between capitalism and entrepreneurship, which we have long taken for granted, can be sustained in the African context. This question is important because it alerts Africanist scholars of personal and group economies to what they might lose, what analytical opportunities they might miss, and what complexities and realities they might occlude or misread when they accord overarching analytical finality to concepts developed in other places and circumstances and deployed to explain African conditions. Elisio Macamo insightfully makes a similar argument in this series in regard to the concept of capitalism and its conceptual work in African social science scholarship.

The entrepreneurial independence that, even if only rhetorically, marked the evolution of capitalism in Europe, defined the Euro-American industrial experience, and catalyzed the emergence of a distinct entrepreneurial class in that context contrasts with the African entrepreneurial historical landscape. In precolonial times, African entrepreneurs operated at the intersection of profit and power, commerce and culture. Profitmaking was coextensive with social obligations. Entrepreneurs were mindful of societal expectations on them. Society, in turn, recognized that entrepreneurs had special gifts that had to be nurtured and liberated from the sociopolitical routines of daily life. Entrepreneurial pursuits were for-profit endeavors for the most part but profits and service to society were coterminous, as chapters by Gloria Chuku, Marta Musso, Martin Shanguhyia, and Chambi Chachage in the aforementioned Entrepreneurship in Africa volume demonstrate.

Political power holders cultivated entrepreneurs and were entrepreneurs in their own rights. Entrepreneurs, for their part, accessed the protective, logistical, and spiritual resources deposited in the political realm. Ultimately, the idea that individual profitmaking could and should coexist with the provision of societal benefit and that entrepreneurial projects should catalyze society’s economic potentials was an unwritten but well understood rule of business. Entrepreneurship, which was mobile and malleable, was the defining character of precolonial African political economy.

To speak of a political economy of entrepreneurship or an entrepreneurial political economy is to signal a uniquely African iteration of entrepreneurship in which the political and mercantile realms were and are in conversation and cooperation. The case of the precolonial Wangara mercantile network in West Africa is an example of the entwinement of value creation and political power. There is clearly a contemporary continuity to this reality. The most consequential and successful African entrepreneurs of today, such as Aliko Dangote, Strive Masiyiwa, Patrice Motsepe, Tony Elumelu, and others have direct or indirect tentacles in the realm of power and politics. Their business empires relate with host governments and political formations in ways that would offend contrived, self-righteous, and hypocritical business sensibilities in the West. Text-bookish neoliberal Western formulations proclaim the autonomies of the business and political spheres, but these autonomous zones do not exist in the West as many corporate and political corruption scandals have revealed. Although open to perversion and corruption, in their most productive manifestations, African entrepreneurial cultures that recognize the field of play between economics and politics stand in distinction from the neoliberal obsession with the idea of separating business and politics or protecting entrepreneurs from the alleged meddling and market distortions of political actors.

As African scholars, businesspeople, and policymakers search for an African business ethos, they will do well to consider this African historical partnership between profit and people.

My second point concerns the limit of entrepreneurship, which needs to be stressed to counterbalance the narrative of multipurpose amelioration that has developed around African entrepreneurship. We live in a neoliberal moment in which entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs are celebrated as potent economic agents, catalysts for poverty reduction and economic growth. Whether entrepreneurs deserve this outsized reputation in our interconnected and interdependent economic ecosystem is a legitimate question. When we talk glibly, and with scholarly certitude, about the capacity of entrepreneurship to lift Africans out of poverty, we are ignoring the structural elements of globalized capital that empower and privilege some while impoverishing and dispossessing others. We are ignoring the ways that global capitalist configurations undercut and complicate entrepreneurial possibilities and opportunities in Africa.

The conceptual impact of Africa’s long encounter with neoliberalism on discourses of African entrepreneurship is profound. The nexus of neoliberalism and entrepreneurship is not far-fetched. The neoliberal economic regime imposed on African economies by the Bretton Woods institutions in the 1980s and 1990s dictated an economic paradigm shift for African countries, one that redefined the relationships, obligations, and responsibilities between states and their citizens. One of the most remarkable outcomes of this shift has been the ‘increasing dominance of the figure of the entrepreneur.’[1] A corollary development has been the substitution of entrepreneurial self-help for redistributive, reconstructive, and structural economic reforms.

This lionization of the entrepreneur is a symptom of a deeper rhetorical, philosophical, and policy gesture in the direction of producing citizen-entrepreneurs who pursue thrift and profits, creatively take charge of their own welfare, innovatively add value to the economy, and thus relieve the state of financial obligations.[2] Neoliberal attempts to engineer into existence ideal entrepreneurial citizens that are self-reliant and removed from the nodes of state obligation were authorized by a new fetish of personal economic responsibility. These interventions absolved the African state of its developmental responsibilities, demanding that poor Africans pull themselves out of poverty by their own entrepreneurial bootstraps.

By seeking to transform postcolonial Africans into entrepreneurs, neoliberal economic interventions misread the African past as one in which Africans were pampered by states and as a result ceased to create value through entrepreneurial activity. In truth, there was never such a cessation of entrepreneurial ingenuity in African communities. Nor did states, despite their paternalistic rhetoric and claims, provide robust welfare protections to citizens. Neoliberal entrepreneurial initiatives were cast against a foundational ignorance of the fact that value creation in most African societies is an organic social endeavor and not the intensely individualized enterprise intelligible to neoclassical and neoliberal frames of analysis. Birthed in this original misunderstanding of Africa, the political economy of neoliberalism has entrenched the entrepreneurial figure venerated by IMF and World Bank policy documents as the discursive referent in studies of African economic revival. One outcome has been a profound transformation of the very vocabulary we use to designate some Africans as entrepreneurs and to withhold that designation from others.

The damage done by the neoliberal fetishization of African entrepreneurship is both discursive and practical. Important as entrepreneurs are to the present and future of Africa, all Africans cannot become entrepreneurs, at least not in the neoliberal sense of the word. This sober recognition, which is missing from most external economic reform prescriptions, ought to be a serious preoccupation of Africanist scholars of entrepreneurship. It is the task of Africanists who study capitalism, business, and entrepreneurship in Africa to modulate and critique the exaggerated instrumentalities of African entrepreneurship. This task is necessary to balance the analytical books because we have created a zero sum analytical calculus in which talking more about entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial catalysts results in less talk about structural inequalities inherent in the global capitalist system into which Africans, to varying degrees, have long been integrated.

I want to conclude this reflection with a proposal wrapped into a critique. There is a need to develop a new mode of African scholarship on business and enterprise. This proposed new field of qualitative African business and entrepreneurial studies must necessarily adopt a relaxed analytical framework capable of exploring complex economic lives in ways that traditional scholarship in African economic history, with its neat dichotomies between worker and merchant, king and commoner, bourgeoisie and peasant, is incapable of doing. This kind of study should be able to analyze African entrepreneurial lives that cross class divides and socioeconomic categories.

Traditional debates in the field of African economic history have rarely acknowledged, let alone theorized, the entrepreneurial ingenuity of Africans in a sustained way and in terms independent of other categories of analysis. This erasure is particularly common in the field of colonial economic history. Neoclassical and neoliberal scholars of modern African economic history overstate the instrumental agency of African entrepreneurs. On the opposite side, neo-Marxist and dependency theorists shun or dismiss entrepreneurs as a petit bourgeoisie class undermining the revolutionary struggles of workers and peasants. By lionizing or diminishing the figure of the African entrepreneur, the dominant schools of African economic history orphaned the African entrepreneur into a strange category where s/he is either overburdened with the task of saving dysfunctional economies or tossed aside as an economic saboteur.

In the end, the innovative ingenuity of Africans in many entrepreneurial fields is either denied or sensationalized by those who purport to speak for and about African entrepreneurs. What is lacking are stories of African entrepreneurship told by entrepreneurs themselves. We need African entrepreneurial stories curated by the entrepreneurs themselves or at least informed by their perspectives, their self-representation, and their understanding of their own struggles, aspirations, and visions. These stories have to go beyond ‘how I made it’ memoirs and autobiographies of entrepreneurial success and hagiographic scholarly narratives of problem-solving, self-redeeming African entrepreneurs.

Finally, the question of how we are telling the African entrepreneurship story is as important as who is telling it. The current triumphalist and hyperbolic tone of the conversation has produced a restrictive exercise in navel-gazing. It has also led to an explosion of self-validating, self-fulfilling rhetoric, in which the concept of entrepreneurship is not only advanced as a fail-safe substitute for the idea of the African developmental state posited compellingly by the late Thandika Mkandawire and others but is also used as a stand-in for more substantive debates about external and internal structural constraints on African development.

Moses Ochonu is Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair in History and Professor of African History at Vanderbilt University. He is the editor of Entrepreneurship in Africa: A Historical Approach (Indiana University Press, 2018).

Featured Photograph: A craftsman in Nigeria taken by Afolabi Olanrewaju Taiwo (26 August 2017).

Notes

[1] Thomas Martila, The Culture of Enterprise in Neoliberalism (London: Routledge, 2012). The quoted phrase is from the book’s blurb.

[2] See Yohei Miyauchi, “Imagined Entrepreneurs in Neoliberal South Africa: Informality and Spatial Justice in Post-Apartheid Cities,” MILA Special Issue (2014): 68-75.

Everything Changes, Everything Stays the Same: Congo’s Education Crisis

ROAPE

May 22, 2020

Cyril Brandt, Tom De Herdt and Stylianos Moshonas look at the implementation of the Free Primary Education policy (gratuité) introduced by Congo’s new President, the struggle over payroll management, the tensions between people allied to the current and the former president and the Covid-19 pandemic.

By Cyril Brandt, Tom De Herdt and Stylianos Moshonas

The world has started to think about ‘the day after’ the current Coivd-19 pandemic, namely how to manage the economic and social recovery while at the same time preparing for a possible next crisis. The doors of schools remain closed to hundreds of millions of children worldwide. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the majority of students do not have access to distance learning opportunities. Reopening schools is therefore a priority and expected to happen soon. But how muddy is the public ground on which to build a post Covid-19 education system in the Democratic Republic of Congo? Early March, just before the outbreak of Covid-19 in Africa, the DRC media reported that Tony Mwaba, a Member of Parliament of the President’s party Union pour la démocratie et le progrès social (UDPS), accused the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education of massive payroll fraud. He claimed to possess lists with the names of tens of thousands of people who would soon fraudulently appear on the educational payroll. At the beginning of May 2020, the government announced that over 250,000 names were removed from the original teacher census – reportedly because these persons did not comply with several technical conditions to become registered and paid. Does this prove that Tony Mwaba was successful, or are there other reasons for this surprising turn of events?

Below, we discuss these accusations and the government’s response in light of a number of background elements currently occupying the political and social stage in the DRC: The implementation of the Free Primary Education policy (gratuité) introduced by Congo’s new President, the struggle over payroll management, the tensions between people allied to the current and the former president and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Same, same but different

After 18 years rule of Joseph Kabila, the joy over the advent of a new President of a former opposition party has been severely tainted by alleged election fraud. The rigged results are assumed to be part of a deal between former President Kabila and current President Tshisekedi. Tshisekedi has struggled with Kabila’s on-going control of the parliament, much of the security sector and much of the country’s economic benefits. While the lion’s share of high-level rents are reaped in lucrative business deals, often via offshore companies, one of the main domestic structures for rent-seeking and employing people through state funds is the education sector. As of December 2017, slightly over 400,000 teachers and administrative staff were on the government’s payroll, and another 140,000 were formally registered but awaited their inclusion onto payroll. Ever increasing numbers reflect the inefficient and unplanned growth of the education system and its propensity to create jobs for administrative staff only remotely related to actual needs (which are huge). For several decades, households in the DRC have been obliged to co-finance various ‘public’ services and the education system is one of them.

School fees to cope with state implosion

School fees in the DRC date back to the ‘structural adjustment’ period of the eighties, but they exploded considerably in the early nineties, as a way for school networks to cope with the collapse of the Mobutu regime. School fees worked as a mixed blessing: they allowed a public service and its ancillary administration to survive the implosion of the DRC state in the nineties. They also provided for an incentive to expand the network of schools to areas with limited statehood. But they have also been one of the main barriers to reaching a universal primary education of decent quality.

After several failed attempts to abolish them, including a budget-neutral gratuité policy by former President Kabila in 2010, President Tshisekedi announced the immediate implementation of gratuité in August 2019, coupled to a government commitment to integrate all effective teachers in the public payroll.

Accusations

Various government and civil society actors have voiced accusations about illicit practices in relation to this policy. For example, the infamous ‘opération retour’ is noted, i.e. the requirement to transfer a part of the salary with the person who facilitated the inclusion on payroll. There are also provincial civil servants accusing their own department of adding fictitious teachers to the payroll .

Tony Mwaba’s accusations fit into this picture. This Member of Parliament from UDPS accuses the educational authorities of using the teacher payroll for patronage, adding ghost teachers (around 100,000 fictitious teachers, compared to a total of around 400,000), creating administrative offices and posts without need, adding teachers from private schools to the state’s payroll, amongst others. Counter-accusations immediately claimed that powerful actors – Vice-President of the Parliament Jean Marc Kabund (President of UDPS) and former Minister of Education Maker Mwangu – used Mr. Mwaba, revealing the highly politicized nature of the gratuité policy. But the accusations also point to a major obstacle that the gratuité reform faces, beyond a lack of public funding to supplant parents’ contributions, namely a lack of knowledge about who really works as a teacher. Indeed, even if the financial problem would be solved, the gratuité policy looks like walking blindfolded on one leg.

We explain below why this is so.

Controlling teachers’ salaries: mission impossible?

Parents obviously reacted enthusiastically to gratuité: they immediately withheld financial contributions and sent all their children to school. Yet teachers not-on-public payroll lost their main source of income and many of them absented themselves from schools. As a consequence, classrooms burst with students. All this increased the pressure on the government to rapidly register and pay teachers. In February 2020, the MEPST, the education ministry, launched the ‘Opération d’identification des enseignants – Nouvelles Unités, écoles et gestionnaires’ and promised to register and pay all teachers by April 2020.

However, the Congolese state administration has never had a complete overview of teachers. Back in the 1970s and 1980s no such details were needed: the Central Bank transferred ever increasing monthly lump-sums to provinces and school networks, who recruited their teachers locally. When, during the structural adjustment period, the IMF identified the civil service as a major source of leakage, SECOPE (Service de Contrôle et de la Paie des Enseignants) was created as a new department within the Ministry of Education and tasked with registering all teachers. What began as a highly reputed and feared department in 1985, crumbled amidst wider state collapse in the 1990s, however. True, the growing gap between official reality and actual practice created an important flexibility for the school networks to quickly reshuffle salaries to those who really teach, but the same flexibility also allowed the salary payment service to be misused – the kind of activities that Tony Mwaba is currently denouncing.

In fact, allegations have suggested a close link between SECOPE and politics: a part of its budget was reportedly systematically siphoned off to finance the ex-president’s party, kindly helped in this by the former Minister of Education, Maker Mwangu, an old-time political ally of Joseph Kabila. Given Mwangu’s alleged involvement in orchestrating armed conflict in Kasai province, such manoeuvres appear even more likely. Rumour has it that, upon arrival in office, the new Minister arriving in December 2016, Willy Bakonga (also PPRD, the former ruling party), would have asked ‘Mbongo eza wapi?’ (where is the money?). He apparently found it in a mass expansion of the private education sector and the creation of new administrative bodies and posts – which for a long time have also been funded through school fees.

The gratuité policy undoubtedly works as a catalyser in all this, the Ministry of Education is in firm control of the PPRD, President Kabila’s party, while the gratuité policy has been promoted as a major accomplishment of an electoral promise by President Tshisekedi (UDPS), whose position rests on an unholy alliance with the former President. One interpretation of Tony Mwaba’s intervention is that he intends to put the blame for a policy with an unclear future on the Ministry instead of the Presidency. In fact, it is interesting to note that about one hundred thousand teachers have been added to payroll since January 2020, while the central government has not transferred any money to the provincial governments (rétrocession) in about that same period.

Fictitious employees and payroll fraud at large

Viewed historically, such payroll manoeuvres are not that surprising. Over forty years ago, a close observer of the Zairian administration noted that fictitious employees – ghost workers – represented almost two thirds of the entire civil service; in fact, Mobutu himself admitted that much when he declared at a press conference held in Paris in March 1979 that budget cuts of two-thirds could be made easily by eliminating those from the payroll. Many indications suggest that this problem is far from being resolved.

Today, the wage bill absorbs over one-third of the domestic budget in the DRC. Since the early 2000s, the steady rise in the budget has been accompanied by a sustained increase in personnel remunerated by the state: between 2007 and 2017, personnel featuring on the public payroll rose from around 600,000 to over 1.3 million. However, public sector remunerations remain beset by severe problems, including an uneven and opaque distribution of salary supplements, and the fact that many civil servants often go unpaid.

This situation partly has to do with uncontrolled recruitment in violation of official legislation, which results in large numbers of new civil servants who have yet to be recognized by ministerial authorities. Part of this has to do with the very cumbersome procedure in which civil servants are registered, and then added onto the payroll – which relies on a procedure linking several institutions (line ministries, civil service, budget, finance, and central bank). The paradoxical result of this procedure was that, instead of allowing for multiple controls, it has increased the number of strata and actors involved in the payment of remunerations, and proportionally multiplied the concomitant risk of abuse and leakages.

The results are widespread allegations which periodically surface in the media concerning the embezzlement and leakage of remunerations through what a former minister of budget called ‘mafia networks’ skimming monies off the payroll through ghost workers. There have been policy initiatives explicitly targeted at reducing this problem: the policy of ‘bancarisation’, namely the payment of civil servants through individual bank accounts, and payroll reform, via upgrading the payroll software used at the Payroll Department of the Ministry of Budget, were both framed as solutions to the underlying problem of ghost workers. Each of those, however, has ended up reconfiguring the political economy of payroll fraud, rather than eliminating it.

After all, in the DRC, financial flows in the civil service – whether remuneration expenses or functioning costs – are typically heavily politicized. Ministerial cabinet authorities and senior bureaucrats are closely tied to the political parties that head particular ministries, and mobilisation of funds constitute major stakes around which political battles are fought out. As we already noted, this process helps explain current evolutions and disputes concerning the teachers’ payroll, but also extends beyond it.

As such, gratuité nearly facilitated massive payroll fraud via the proposed mass registration of teachers. The government, however, backpaddled early May and announced the results of the latest attempt to register all teachers. Of all teachers whose names were on the initial list, merely 144,944 teachers are eligible for registration whereas nearly 250,000 teachers were removed from the list as they did not comply with a number of criteria. We cannot tell whether Toni Mwaba’s public and detailed accusations are the reasons for this – if this were so, it would be a remarkable example of accountability. Either way, none of the remaining teachers have yet been formally registered or added to payroll.

SECOPE plays a primordial role in these dynamics as a cow that networks of powerful actors are trying to milk for their own benefits – not always with success, as we have just seen. The DRC’s current financial policies, and advocacy by Members of Parliament and civil society activists, might be reasons why the cow’s grazing land could dry out.

Within all of this, Covid-19 has taken up centre stage for three reasons: First, Covid-19 has curbed the opportunities for non-registered teachers to publicly demonstrate. Second, teachers in some regions are threatening not to return to school after they are reopened, as they were closed due to the pandemic at the end of March. Finally, the government is accused of using Covid-19 as a justification for the slow progress in registering and paying teachers.

Donors part of the game

Concerning the attempt to register and pay all teachers, the so-called international community has been half-heartedly present – and hence partly an accomplice from the very beginning. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the diagnosis of International Financial Institutions (IFIs) with regards to Zaire’s economic and debt crisis was ‘mismanagement’, to be addressed via organisational and managerial change. The status of Mobutu as a Cold War US-client precluded any stronger political stance with regards to regime change, and so this ‘mismanagement’ diagnosis by IFIs was adopted wholeheartedly by national authorities, insofar as it allowed for cosmetic changes via administrative overhaul rather than tackling the fundamental problems – which were eminently political – lying behind Zaire’s predicament.

While successive structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s failed to redress economic growth in Zaire, the policy of retrenchment did prefigure certain key changes: with public budgets slashed in health and education, a new network of private schools entered the scene, but most importantly, the informal privatisation of the public school networks set in, effectively shifting the burden of austerity onto the population which would now have to shoulder their administrative costs. Additionally, the deepening of economic crisis in the 1980s saw public sector remunerations slide into insignificance, partly through cutbacks in the wage bill, viand also their erosion in the face of rising prices. While IFIs and donors had pulled out of the country by the early 1990s, the effects of their policies would be long lasting and devastating.

Two decades later, when donors returned after the murder of Laurent-Désiré Kabila in 2001 one priority was the financial support of the process of post-conflict reconstruction, through the DRC’s integration in the process of debt relief and support for the DRC’s efforts to realise the Millennium Development Goals. The educational payroll system was identified as a major risk from the very beginning, but when the Congolese government did not fulfil initial project conditions, donors nevertheless continued their support. Sandwiched between short-term humanitarianism, politics as usual and long-term structural change, donors eventually opted for not rocking the boat.

Today as well, the World Bank will reportedly support the gratuité with a 1 billion dollar program, while it seems only a question of time for the short-term effects of such support to be neutralised by the effects of reproducing the status quo of opacity and systemic fraud in a context where domestic funding of the gratuité is structurally short.

Cyril Brandt is Associate Researcher at the Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp. Stylianos Moshonas (@SFMoshonas) is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp. Tom De Herdt (@tomdeherdt) is Professor at the Institute of Development Policy, University of Antwerp.

Featured Photograph: Secondary schools in Uvira, in South Kivu, demonstrate against corruption (8 December 2018).

Home in a Time of Covid

ROAPE

May 20, 2020

Ambreena Manji argues that we need a better understanding of home, labour and inequality in the pandemic and that feminist thought is central to a just future. Focusing on the Global South, she argues that women have borne the brunt of the violence directed towards the homes of working people.

By Ambreena Manji

One of the contradictions of the past few weeks is that as we have become isolated within our own borders, neighbourhoods and homes, we have also become joined around the globe in the incantation of new words: social distancing, lockdown, quarantine, curfew, shielding. To this list of what, after the Welsh Marxist theorist Raymond Williams, we might call our Covid keywords, we must also insist on adding evictions, demolitions, forced internal migrations, all of which have unfolded before our eyes in the first pandemic to occur in an age of social media.

At a recent webinar on Africa and the Pandemic, ROAPE’s Heike Becker described African governments as being more intent on flattening houses than on flattening the curve. I was provoked by this to revisit the literature on domicide, a word used to describe the deliberate destruction of home and the suffering of those who dwell in them. In this pandemic, there has been an under-theorisation of the meaning of home. Instrumentally, instructions to stay at home were not made on the basis of careful knowledge of how homes function as what Kathleen Lynch, John Baker and Maureen Lyons have described as enclosed places or political economies.

Feminists have long argued that affective relations and the conditions under which reproductive labour is provided are neglected and under-researched. This failure risks making the attempt to prevent the spread of Covid-19 not just instrumentally unworkable but also unjust. As Tshepo Mdlingozi pointed out when he wrote in relation to South Africa that ‘spatial colonialism makes it impossible and inhumane to enforce a lockdown in shack settlements.’ Similarly, OluTimehin Adegbeye has written that the World Health Organization is ‘promoting social distancing as an essential response to this pandemic, forgetting that there are many parts of the world where this single solution is contextually inadequate or even dangerous.’

Covid has also thrown up critical existential questions about what we talk about when we talk about home. David Ndii has written that the Kenya authorities have an assumption that everyone has a true, rural home. This has meant that working people and the urban poor are treated as temporarily in the city and having no rights to it, an assumption with deep colonial roots. In India, the authorities announced a lockdown which Arundhati Roy has described as ‘towns and megacities…extrud[ing] their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual’ (in contrast, India’s repatriation by air of its overseas citizens has been meticulously organised).

When the stay home orders were made, little thought was given to what it means to ask poor families to educate children from home in overcrowded conditions at a time when care work is itself risky, disproportionately exposing women to greater risks of the disease. Our failure to imagine the homes of others was all the more striking because for those with access to technology, we have are able to look into the homes of others for the first time. Virtual meetings challenge the notion of home as enclosed, private spaces.

Similarly, some of us have spoken frankly and sometimes for the first time about our family commitments and how our jobs are built on an unencumbered male breadwinner model now thrown into disarray. The instruction by our employers to ‘work from home’ was striking: what do we imagine has been going on in homes other than work? The pandemic has made responsibilities for care work more visible at the same time as increasing its quantity as women try to do their jobs whilst simultaneously looking after those in their home. The under-theorisation of what takes place in the home was evident in other ways, from the neglect of a shadow pandemic of domestic violence to the lack of awareness of the ways of life of multigenerational homes where shielding the elderly is not practicable or where older people have long established roles in relation to care, quarantine and the dying.

The pandemic should compel us to think more clearly about home as a political economy. It has made visible and at the same time put under additional strain the work of social reproduction, that is the socially necessary labour expended to provide food, clothing, and shelter for consumption. That little value is attached to this caregiving is not natural but the outcome of political choices. Caregiving and emotional labour are unequally distributed. They fall disproportionately on women and most of all on minority women, the poorly paid and the precarious. They subordinate women in society. Women have of course struggled against that subordination. This is for instance richly evoked in Luise White’s study of early colonial Nairobi, entitled The Comforts of Home, which showed how women provided care labour for men in return for pay ‘in imitation of marriage’ and then went on to use the proceeds of that labour to become independent property owners in a growing city: in the words of one woman: ‘I built this house on my back’.

The gulf between the homes of the rich and the poor in the cities of the global south has meant that whilst many cocoon at home in safety, with adequate food and access to plentiful resources, (purchases of luxury cars in Kenya has shot up since the beginning of the pandemic: the car too functions as enclosed space), in other parts of the city, women are caring for people without pay, taking care of loved ones, ‘provisioning supplies, and finding ways to offset the enormous economic and social burdens of this time’. At the same time women have borne the brunt of the violence directed towards the homes of working people. The pandemic has confirmed what Patrick McAuslan described as the role of the bulldozer as ‘the principal tool of planning’. Evictions have taken place in defiance of court orders. The militarisation of cities such as Nairobi and Johannesburg has led to an increase in rape and sexual violence. Women are safe neither from intimate partners nor from strangers in the form of police prowling the streets during curfews.

Central to a just response to Covid must be the work of reimagining what is needed to sustain a just home. Foremost amongst these is an economy that recognises, redistributes and compensates the labour that is essential to sustaining us. A better understanding of the labour needed to reproduce a home and ensure its survival during a pandemic must be carried forward into the future to ensure that that home thrives. A starting point is to recognise the differential impact on women of violence, repression, precarity, sickness and domicide in a time of Covid.

Recovery should not mean a return to normal but should entail thinking about the ways in which the normal of others has been invisible to us, as Hannah Cross and Leo Zeilig remind us by asking: ‘Is not the experience of life with the Covid-19 outbreak, now being felt for the first time in many generations in the Global North, the common experience of life and death in the South?’ The Hawai’i state commission on the status of women, presenting its proposals for a feminist economic recovery from Covid-19, argues that we must speak ‘not only about response and recovery, but also of repair and revival: repair of historic harms and intergenerational trauma playing out as male domination, gender-based violence, economic insecurity, poor health and mass incarceration.’

What might a just home in a reparatory future look like?

Ambreena Manji is Professor of Land Law and Development at Cardiff School of Law and Politics. She is working on a book on care labour in African social history.

Featured Photograph: Lyla Latif, sketch from an original painting (artist unknown).

Fighting Africa’s Social Pandemics

ROAPE

May 18, 2020

Two reports from Kenya and Nigeria look at the impact of the pandemic in different areas of life. Nyambura Kamau writes how people have been advised to wash hands regularly with running water and soap but even the term ‘running water’ in Mathare – a collection of informal settlements in Nairobi – is a cruel mirage. While Lai Brown reports on the struggles of woman in Nigeria. For many women it is a case of a triple attack – there is the viral offensive in the streets, and hunger and domestic abuse inside homes.

Water scarcity during the Covid-19 pandemic

By Nyambura Kamau

On 4 March Kenya reported the first Covid-19 case. In order to stop contracting the disease, people have been advised to wash their hands regularly with running water and soap as well as maintaining social distancing. But the term ‘running water’ in Mathare – a collection of informal settlements in Nairobi – is a mirage.

There has been an inadequate water supply in the area for years, and water is only available three times a week in most wards. However, even this is not always the case. Sometimes the water available is contaminated and not fit for human consumption. In recent weeks the price of water has hiked from the normal five Kenya shillings per 20 litre jerry can to 10-20 shillings.

Since the post-election violence in the country twelve years ago, the water service provider cut the supply in almost all the wards in Mathare area. So now the main source of water is private suppliers in most wards, with water vendors and cartels involved in supplying water. While the plot owners who have water-meters are required to pay a standing fee of 407 Kenya shillings per month.

Not only is there inadequate water supply but the water is frequently contaminated. According to a research Maji ni Haki, Maji ni Uhai (‘water is life, water is a right’) carried out by Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC) in 2018, the water was found to be polluted by the bacteria Escherichia coli known as E Coli. Well known to cause bacterial infections like diarrhoea, fever and many more – often fatal infections in poor communities.

**Water point in Mashimoni area, Mathare. There has been lack of water for 12 years (Nyambura Kamau).**

Most of Mathare’s residents work as casual laborers in Eastleigh, which has been a hotspot of Covid-19 in Nairobi. Therefore, running water is an absolute necessity to wash your hands – before, during and after work in Eastleigh.

Yet, residents of Kosovo and Huruma, areas of Mathare, for example, have recently experienced respectively four and 13 days with no water. This is an enormous concern and needs urgent attention.

‘I have to walk to Ruaraka Constituency to fetch water’ says Salim, a resident of Kosovo. While, according to Alex, a worker at a car wash in Kosovo, they sometimes fetch water from Nairobi River to wash the cars. Elizabeth, a resident of Huruma, explains, ‘I have to walk to Kiamaiko or any other place to fetch water and carry it myself because relying on the water vendors is double the price that I do not have.’ In Huruma there has been a lack of water for at least two weeks.

Various government officials and well-wishers have donated tanks and soap, though woefully inadequate this has become essential during the crisis. Lack of water has been so rampant in Bondeni for example, that an emergency borehole is being drilled.

Most families in Mathare are unable to implement the new measures for the prevention of Covid-19 as thousands have lost their work and have no money to buy water, food or any other essentials, and social distancing sounds like an unkind joke in a high density settlement.

At the Social Justice Centre, we argue and campaign for the right to a clean and adequate supply of water.

Nyambura Kamau is an activist in the Water and Sanitation Campaign run by the Mathare Social Justice Centre.

***

Fighting Coronavirus and Gender-based Violence

By Lai Brown

There is rise in domestic violence on women and children in the last three months across the world in the wake of the Covid-19 lockdown measures that forces people to be together for longer hours, in stressful circumstances and with partners who are already aggressive or in other ways difficult to be with in even normal times.

The sad reality is that the cases of gender-based violence in Africa, particularly in my home country Nigeria, are likely to continue rising as Covid-19 spreads and the broader crisis in society continues.

The health crisis coupled with the severe crisis of an underdeveloped economy creates the conditions that increase vulnerability to domestic violence. This is particularly true in Nigeria, where decades of socio-economic crises have had a devastating impact on many working families and have widened social inequality across society. The government has moved to declare a widespread lockdown of society and economy without commensurate social supports such as providing foods, drugs, accommodation, and water .

After a few weeks in lockdown we saw a rise of gang violence with woman frequently being targeted. There are reports of women raped in their houses and female food vendors robbed in broad daylight.

In Osun State, in the southwest region of Nigeria, a woman was physically assaulted by policemen. Halima Abdul-Aziz was stopped on her way to get medical help for her ailing daughter. She was beaten by police officers who refused to listen to her reasons or bother to take her to the court; rather, they took the law into their own hands. In a press statement Abdul-Aziz demanded justice and explained that the violence she experience was an attack on all Nigeria women.

A similar tragic attack on a woman happened in River States, in the south of the country. On 23 April, a policeman killed a female colleague during the enforcement of the restriction of movement order. The slain policewoman was trying to prevent the task-force team from destroying the properties and goods of female traders. Roape.net readers should note that 80 percent of the traders are women and food vendors are among the ‘essential workers’ allowed to be out despite the restrictions on movement. Still, the conflict escalated and a woman who struggled for the lawful and fair treatment of women died.

The situation in Nigeria is remarkably and horribly similar in South Africa. The South Africa government’s gender-based violence and femicide command centre recorded over 120,000 calls from abused women and children within the first three weeks of lockdown, and these are only the number of woman able to make a call.

Patriarchal oppression and gender-based violence is a cause for social concern worldwide and increasing domestic violence can be observed across the globe during the pandemic. It was reported that in the Philippines, clerics and religious leaders claimed that genderqueer and LGBTQIA+ are responsible for the coronavirus pandemic. Such absurd claims are repeated on social media where the pandemic is frequently regarded as ‘God’s way’ of punishing us for the sin of sexual deviance. Those kinds of narratives are not just incorrect and illogical but also dangerous as they reinforce gender oppression and violence against women. Similarly, in United Kingdom in the first three weeks of the lockdown in March there were 16 domestic abuse murders, a figure far higher than usual.

In addition, as the SARS-CoV-2 virus chases the poor out of the street, in Africa and elsewhere, the hunger ‘virus’ attacks indoors. But for many women, particularly poor working-class women, it is a case of a triple attack – there is the viral offensive outside, and then hunger and domestic abuse inside their homes. Away from the homes, women make over 60 percent of the health workers on the front line of the fight against the pandemic in Nigeria.

For more than three decades the country has experience massive neoliberal restructuring which has impacted public health, with women health workers forced to confront these punishing and savage ‘reforms’. There is little in the way of a public health system in the country, and millions suffer as a consequence. What exists has been bled dry, with nurses in Enugu State University Teaching Hospital in April forced to protest due to the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE).

In summary, the Covid-19 crisis escalates our oppressive sexist culture in all its forms and contents. The spike in violence on women and domestic abuse in the context of the ravaging health crisis calls for conscious and collective actions to combat not only the coronavirus pandemic but also the ‘social pandemic’ of gender-based violence.

Collective action is needed to combat the health pandemic, and gender-based violence across the country. In Nigeria, we should insist that all victims of gender-based violence should be isolated from their aggressors and be resettled in secured and comfortable accommodation. The workers and caregivers on the front-line of the battle against Covid-19, who are largely women, must be provided with PPE against contracting the virus. The state must also ensure that caregivers are provided with free childcare during the period they are at work.

Lastly, we, as poor working-class people, must redouble our struggles for a society built on social solidarity. We have to take a stand against domestic violence in our communities and protect those who are vulnerable. As we fight these multiple pandemics, we must organize to build a new society built on democracy from below and equality, which will provide the objective conditions to put an end to all forms of oppression.

Lai Brown is the Organising Secretary of Automobile, Boatyards, Transport, Equipment and Allied Senior Staff Association (AUTOBATE), the automobile and boatyard workers’ union affiliated to Trade Union Congress (TUC) and the National Secretary of Socialist Workers and Youth League (SWL).

Feature Photograph: Children fetching water in Mathare. Water scarcity has been a norm in the informal settlements of Nairobi during the pandemic (Nyambura Kamau).

Africa and the Pandemic: Clampdown, Survival and Resistance

ROAPE

May 14, 2020

Last week ROAPE and BIEA organised a webinar on the Covid-19 pandemic in Africa. Activists and researchers from around the continent discussed the impact of the measures taken against the coronavirus by the ruling classes. In this blogpost we introduce the full video recording of the meeting with all of the speakers, Tafadzwa Choto, Femi Aborisade, Gacheke Gachihi, Lena Anyuolo, Gyekye Tanoh and Heike Becker.

The webinar, chaired by ROAPE’s Yao Graham in Ghana, asked what is happening across Africa since governments ordered the clampdown. We looked at the impact on the continent of the Covid-19 pandemic and the measures taken against it by the continents political and ruling classes, with a focus on the repercussions of the clampdown for activism and social movements. All of our speakers addressed what was happening at grassroots and national level, and how the popular classes were being affected.

Reporting from Kenya, Gacheke Gachihi and Lena Anyuolo asked if the state was really fighting Covid-19 or the poor? They argued that since the curfew was enforced across the country the police continue to systematically brutalise and terrorise people living in informal settlements, with many murdered by the army and police. Both argued that the poor must demand the right to healthcare, water and livelihood enshrined in the country’s constitution.

While Femi Aborisade argued that there was a constant struggle for food and survival in Nigeria, and an intensification in the repression of the poor during the country’s lockdown. In South Africa, Heike Becker looked at the reaction of the government, the struggles of poor communities and the urgency of building new activist groups and politics in the country. Tafadwza Choto from Zimbabwe discussed how the ZANU-PF government was using the virus as a cover for wider repression, as activists make the case for radical change.

Taking on the broader political economy of the crisis, Gyekye Tanoh addressed how economies and politics are likely to be reshaped by the virus and its consequences. Tanoh provided the webinar with a pan-African perspective on the likely impact of the global recession on the continent, the role of the IMF and IFIs, as well as the costs for workers, peasants, social movements, activists, and radical projects. He argued that now is the moment to build unity behind an alternative social structure to capitalism in Africa and the Global North.

The following list of speakers is in the order that they spoke:

Gyekye Tanoh is an activist and researcher based in Ghana working at Third World Network in Accra. Femi Aborisade is a human rights lawyer and activist in Nigeria, and a Contributing Editor of ROAPE. Heike Becker is an activist who teaches anthropology at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and is an expert on Southern African social movements. Antonater Tafadzwa Choto is a well-known labour activist, researcher and currently a PhD candidate based in Harare. Lena Anyuolo is a member of Ukombozi Library and Mathare Social Justice Centre in Nairobi. She is a social justice activist. Gacheke Gachihi is a coordinator of the Mathare Social Justice Centre in Nairobi, which organises campaigns against police brutality and killings in Kenya.

Featured Image: Graffiti artists work on a mural amid the outbreak of the coronavirus, in Dakar, Senegal on March 25, 2020 (Zohra Bensemra).

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