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Systematic Police Brutality and Killings: an update from Kenya

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ROAPE
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In a report from Kenya, Gacheke Gachihi asks if the state is fighting Covid-19 or the poor? He writes that since the curfew was enforced across the country the police continue to systematically brutalise and terrorise people living in informal settlements. Introducing a film on state violence and Covid-19 in Kenya, Gacheke argues the poor must demand the right to healthcare, water and livelihood enshrined in the country’s constitution.

By Gacheke Gachihi

It is one month since the first case of Covid-19 was reported in Kenya, and we have seen police brutality and killings in a massive social crisis as the government enforce a curfew from 7pm – 5am countywide to curb the spread of coronavirus. The government has imposed a partial lock-down in the major cities of Nairobi, Mombasa and Kilifi.

Social crisis, economic hardship and brutality are the hallmarks of the Covid-19 response by the Kenyan government. Ordinary people are struggling to cope with the repressive measures which are inherently violent, disorganised, and dehumanising as the state tries to curb the spread of infections from the developed world. Yet, with limited resources and a corrupt and illegitimate state, the challenges are enormous.

For decades the Kenyan government has neglected basics services for ordinary people especially in the informal settlements and rural peasants’ areas where 70 percent of the population lives without water, housing, education and healthcare services.  The crisis of neoliberal capitalism that has commodified and privatised basic services is at the heart of the disaster confronting Kenyan society. As a result of this alarming situation Kenya lacks the resources to provide healthcare for 47 millions Kenya during the Covid-19 crisis.

The Minister of Health, Mutahi Kagwe, announced today (14 April) numerous coronavirus cases in different counties in Kenya, totalling 208 positive coronavirus cases detected with eight related deaths, and more than 2000 peoples being held in strict quarantine, as more tracing and testing continues. As elsewhere in the world, it is front-line health workers who make-up part of the casualty figures of this global health crisis across the country.

                                                                               Calvin Otieno hood creations

The police continue with systematic extortion and killings, last week, for example, two young people from an informal settlement in Nairobi were killed by the police. The police claim to be enforcing the curfew, yet the poor are being picked off and murdered. Yassin Moyo, a 13 years old pupil from Valley Bridge primary school, from Mathare Kiamaiko Village was shot  by the police while he was standing on the balcony of his family’s small dwelling in Kiamaiko. Another case saw John Muuo Muli, a car washer in Ruai, who was beaten by the police last Friday and left for dead, initially his brother could not take him to hospital for the fear of further police harassment, and instead stayed with him until the morning. Only then, hours after being almost beaten to death, was he taken to Mama Lucy hospital. John succumbed to his injuries and died, making 12 cases of police killings in the country since the curfew started two weeks ago – a larger number than the official tally of the victims of the virus across Kenya.

Members of the Social Justice Centre Working Group and the network of community health workers provide solidarity for the families of those killed and demand the government take responsibility as we continue to document and expose police violence and extortion in the informal settlement.  The cases of the police using force to impose the curfew and intimidate citizens by instilling fear are escalating by the day. At the same time, people are demanding the right to healthcare, water and livelihood as the government impose and enforce a strict and punitive curfew with total disregard to the basics needs of most citizens.

As social justice movement activists we have not given up hope in this crisis as we know that this is a struggle for dignity and justice. We also know that the impact of the coronavirus epidemic in Kenya will overwhelmingly affect the poor, so it is imperative that we continue our work of solidarity and fundraising to support the community with small packages of ‘livelihood goods’ from collective solidarity funds. Yet we must also continue to conduct campaigns to demand water and sanitation in the informal settlements where we have 16 Social Justice Centres.

We have recently made a video documentary addressed to the Kenyan President from all our Social Justice Centres on Covid-19, police killings and the urgent need for water and sanitation.

Please watch and share the documentary. We demand the President obey the constitution and fulfil our constitutional rights of social justice based on article 43, and the right to food, water for all, healthcare for all, education and housing for all.

Our Arts for Social Justice Campaign has been conducting public education using art and graffiti as part of political and public education on Covid-19, and our efforts to build a social justice movement among the young. We continued to monitor human rights violations by the state and demand access to water and sanitation in Kenya.

Gacheke Gachihi is the Coordinator of Mathare Social Justice Centre and a member of Social Justice Centre Working Group Steering Committee. He is a regular contributor to roape.net and he was interviewed here.

Featured Photograph: Calvin Otieno hood creations.

Zimbabwe and Burkina Faso – no to police brutality

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ROAPE
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Zimbabwe and Burkina Faso – no to police brutality, mass testing and treatment now

Tafadzwa Choto reports from Zimbabwe, and Didier Kiendrebeogo from Burkina Faso on the struggle of the poor for treatment, food and an end to police brutality during the Covid-19 outbreak. Both argue that social distancing must combine with social solidarity of the poor against the elite.

The struggle for survival: community committees must support one another

By Tafadzwa Choto

Thursday 9 April is day 11 of the scheduled 21 days of lockdown that started on the 30 March.  Though I am slowly adjusting to this new life of being indoors in order to prevent the further spread of coronavirus it has been difficult and I can’t wait for the end when I can take a walk or run or just to get some fresh air.

On Wednesday 8 April, Zimbabwe had recorded 11 positive cases and three deaths. Yet no one is in any doubt that cases of infection are much higher as less than 500 people have been tested so far.

The slow approach and lack of transparency on the part of Ministry of Health in handling this global pandemic is likely to have a disastrous impact in Zimbabwe if drastic action is not immediately taken – the lock-down on its own is not enough.  Once again, the victims of Covid-19 show that little has been done even after the Covid-19 task-force lead by the Vice-President Kembo Mohadi was set-up.

The second official recorded death to the virus was only revealed in an update of the Ministry of Health and Child Care on the evening of Tuesday 7 April, yet the person had died on the 4 Apriland tested positive on 2 April. The deceased, a 79-year old Bulawayo man, contracted the virus in Hwange, a tourist town. His death showed that the results are not coming out immediately.  There are still no diagnostic facilities for Covid-19 cases outside Harare with all detecting is still done in the capital and then sent to South Africa for verification.

The second death also showed the continued lack of preparedness in handling severe Covid-19 cases in the country. This man died in an ordinary hospital after being treated by medical staff who were not adequately equipped with personal protective equipment (PPE). This incident demonstrates that medical staff and others are exposed to high risk of infection. The designated hospitals and clinics are still not fully equipped with necessary equipment including the PPE for its personnel.

On Sunday 5 April doctors represented by Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR) launched a High Court appeal against the government, arguing that they are at risk of contracting Covid-19 as the state has not yet put in place adequate measures to protect health workers (doctors, nurses, nurse aid and pharmacists among others) against the deadly epidemic. The appeal also argued for the need to roll-out robust screening and testing of people with symptoms to prevent Zimbabweans from being exposed to the virus. As we have seen in other countries, in-country transmissions can spread like wild-fire and its now urgent to screen and test as many people as possible and track those who have been in contact with the infected.

The lockdown has also given the government the opportunity to crackdown on Zimbabweans, conveniently averting the danger of rebellion against economic and political crisis that the country has faced for years. Escalating police brutality is emerging. There have been innumerable cases of abuse by uniformed forces – humiliating people and making them do degrading physical exercises. So far more than 200 people have been arrested for failing to follow the lockdown procedures. Disturbing images are circulating of arrested people packed like sardines into police trucks with no physical distancing being observed. Worse still, the police who are making the arrests are not equipped with any PPE, inevitably leading to the further spread of Covid-19. Not only are people humiliated and ‘punished’ by the police but there are disturbing videos also circulating of people being beaten by police in most major cities of Zimbabwe. There have also been reports of teargas being fired in the major townships of Chitungwiza and Kuwadzana.

The lockdown in Zimbabwe comes against the background of a period of severe economic crisis with about 60% of the population being declared food insecure worsened by the drought that the country has recently experience. The drought has seen shortages of maize meal (the staple food) with long queues for the commodity now the order of the day and with no physical distance observed, or possible. There is hyperinflation with the prices of most basic commodities beyond the reach of ordinary people. The crisis has also seen people resorting to any means necessary to feed their families. In most cases those being harassed and arrested by the police are simply trying to eke out an existence with more than 80% employed in the informal sector. These people survive from hand to mouth and with the lockdown they are unable to earn anything, playing hide and seek with the police to continue their urgent and necessary trading operations. Last week a video circulated of the police destroyed fresh vegetables of the vendors in Mutare that attracted a huge outcry across the country forcing the president to allow farmers and traders to bring in their fresh produce into major markets such as Mbare Musika.  This is a welcome move not only to farmers and traders but to the majority of township residents who rely on this produce, which is much cheaper than the large supermarkets such as Pick and Pay and Bon Marche, that have been allowed to continue operations without any state harassment.

The World Health Organisation anticipates that the coming weeks are key in Africa and the continent may become the epicentre for the virus. Already the infection rate and deaths are increasing in South Africa, where there has been testing.

Already the elite in Zimbabwe have started equipping their hospitals, the same globe-trotting class who brought the virus into the country in the first place. The working poor can only get the treatment and protection they need through solidarity, while using their community committees to support one another. Physical distance must combine with social solidarity.

Antonater Tafadzwa Choto is a well-known labour activist, researcher and currently a PhD candidate based in Harare. She was interviewed on roape.net; the interview can be accessed here.

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Punishing the poor in the name of fighting the infection

By Didier Kiendrebeogo

By 6 April, Burkina Faso officially had more than 360 confirmed cases of people infected with the coronavirus (Covid-19), with 18 deaths. Several main cities in the country including Ouagadougou and Bobo Dioulasso are locked down and inter-urban passenger transport is prohibited. The curfew from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. decreed by the president on 21 March  has led to massive violations of human rights with ‘caning’ and punishments of those the police regard as violating the law, including of the sick who have sought medical treatment. Often the ‘punishments’ have been perpetrated in private homes where soldiers have broken in.

For the past ten days the markets have been closed. This has meant millions of Burkinabès have been unable to provide for their basic needs. Armed groups active in the country have also increased their activities. In addition to the killings, they prohibit the entry of food into certain localities under their control.

We must recall that the government suspended the wages of 731 trade unionists in March and closed down almost everything else. The suffering of the populations is beyond our imagination. Difficulties in accessing drinking water, food, health care and electricity has spread across the country.

Faced with various criticisms, the President of Burkina Faso made a second address to the nation on 2 April. He did not say a word about the ongoing crackdown of his government on civil servants. Though he took steps to assist certain groups, unfortunately, these measures are favourable only to the wealthy. For example, with approximately CFA178bn (approx £1bn) of measures announced, CFA121bn are planned for hotel rentals to accommodate “patients”, or 70% of the total sum. The other measures concern free water at standpipes and the provision of electricity for a category of subscribers to the national electricity company. Unfortunately, water was already scarce at the fountains and the curfew no longer allows women to spend the night there to wait for the water as before. In addition, most people do not know how to access the support which the government claims is available.

Several civil society organizations denounce the measures announced, and the impossibility of actually accessing them. However, these measures are completely ineffective in relieving the suffering of the urban and rural poor living in increasingly impossible circumstances.

Didier Kiendrebeogo in a leading activist in the Organisation Démocratique de la Jeunesse (ODJ) in Burkina Faso.

Featured Photograph: Police round-up people who do not have permits to be in Harare during Zimbabwe’s Covid-19 lockdown (Tendai Marima).

Seriously Funny: Politics, Health and Comedy in Sierra Leone

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ROAPE
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During the West African Ebola crisis, outreach became critical to combating the spread of infection. In Sierra Leone, Laura Martin writes, comedians proved to be a popular and effective means of spreading these messages, as well as offering relief to quarantined homes. Comedians thrived during this period with regular employment opportunities by local government and NGOs.  Today, comedy outreach is becoming re-popularised as Sierra Leone fights against the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, being a ‘legitimate’ respectable comedian in Sierra Leone is bound up in social and political capital entirely unrelated to comedic talents…

By Laura S. Martin

Sierra Leone is not a country particularly well known for its comedians.  Unlike Nigeria and South Africa, which have substantial global followings, Sierra Leone’s comedy industry is still relatively new and comprised of people with different backgrounds and life trajectories (although it remains almost entirely male-dominated).  Virtually no one does comedy as a full-time job. While for some comedians this is because it is not consistent enough work, the industry can be very lucrative for the more well-known names. In theory, a sign of success is the ability to have a steady income by making a living solely as a comedian.  In Sierra Leone, however, this is not the case. Successful comedians maintain other careers in order to legitimise their comedic status as ‘serious.’

Humour itself is a universal cultural characteristic, both used for ‘formal’ entertainment and as part of interrogating the prospects and challenges of everyday life.  Both ‘formal’ and everyday humour provide an important medium to say the unsayable, offering an ambiguous space that (theoretically) allows people to speak about sensitive subject matter.  Humour in the African context has largely been analysed as a political tool, looking at how different types of humour can be subversive, or ‘weapons of the weak’, as well as how people cope in times of social instability and political turmoil. While the role of humour itself has been analysed, there has been less attention to lives and roles of comedians.

There is a rich history of comedic figures in both traditional rituals and oral tradition across the continent.  In Sierra Leone, traditional dances and rituals often entail hierarchy inversion or incongruities resulting in humour.  For example, as part of their coming-of-age traditional initiation ceremony for the Bondo society, women perform plays imitating and mocking men in ways that would not usually be acceptable. Oral traditions, such as stories passed on to young children also encompass humorous anecdotes alongside moral lessons, notably the characters of bra spider and bra cunny rabit.

A ‘formal comedy sector’ is, however, still relatively new, in most parts of Africa. Stand-up comedy really only began in the 1990s (South Africa being the main exception).  In Sierra Leone, comedy in contemporary popular culture started with a group called The Professionals, led by the characters Lord Bongo Johnson and Dandogo, who in the 1980s and early 1990s used to circulate comedy sketches on TV, radio and cassette tapes.  These men were very popular and well-connected, performing for political leaders and visiting dignitaries. In September 1992, as the civil conflict was intensifying, the comedy troupe went to perform in the US and ultimately stayed.[1] The comedy vacuum was then filled by another TV sketch comedy series, Wanpot, which was broadcast once a week and made up of various characters who did slap stick comedy sketches.  Although the main actors in both groups are all relatively well-educated, their comic personas continue to influence how comedy and comedians are construed today.

Comedians I have interviewed point to these guys – who often dressed up in funny costumes and acted silly – as one reason that pursuing comedy is not seen as a ‘serious’ career.  Many people remember these sketches and while they find them entertaining, comedy by itself is not seen as respectable. Another reason for this is because many aspiring comedians perform on the street, often wearing makeup or masks, asking people for money, also not considered socially acceptable, even by other comedians. During one interview with a Makeni comedian, a boy selling bread walked by and said hello.  The comedian later told me he had dropped out of school and now was a street comedian, described by the interviewee as ‘not serious’ and bad for their reputations. Such experiences feed into Sierra Leoneans’ notion that comedy is associated with ‘drop-outs’ and ‘people who are lazy.’  As another comedian said: ‘There is a perception that comedians are not serious because they have nothing better to do.  But you have to be serious.’

The types of comedic engagements that comedians take on though varies substantially, particularly compared to how it is understood in the Global North.  In Sierra Leone, comedians are entrepreneurial, often doing different types of gigs and performing through various mediums. There are those who do traditional ‘stand-up’ comedy, although there are no ‘comedy clubs’; rather, individual comedians will organise events (sometimes with their own funds and other times with company sponsorship) where various comedians will perform in a single evening.  Many Sierra Leonean comedians started as radio DJs and continue to MC events, working as both a DJ and a comedian at events, such as weddings, birthdays and beauty pageants.  They also often do advertising and radio jingles. Others do sketch comedy in groups, which has in recent years been marketed to governmental organisations and NGOs as a way of conducting development outreach, prominent during the Ebola epidemic and is becoming re-popularised as Sierra Leone only recently began their fight against Covid-19.[2]

The diversity of these events is reflected in its audience.  While radio shows can theoretically be accessed by anyone, events such as formal stand up shows or beauty pageants often have entry fees and thus attract a more middle-class audience. Some comedians have ‘toured’ up-country and entry fees are more ‘creative’ – with participants offering food staples, such as cups of rice, palm wine or palm oil in exchange for entry. Outreach comedy activities will consist of diverse audiences of both rural and urban, wealthy and more impoverished populations, although attendees of these sessions in rural areas are still frequently the village elite – such as chiefs, teachers and religious leaders.

All of these gigs can be pretty lucrative and yet, many comedians maintain other jobs, both out of necessity and choice. For some lesser known comedians, the work is not consistent enough to be a reliable source of income and thus cannot actually be a ‘serious’ career.  One comedian I spoke with did not have a consistent job worked in construction and drove an Okada (motorbike) for additional income.  Even when they do perform, there is no guarantee of the agreed payment, as people organising events often treat the work as a ‘favour,’ again reinforcing the notion that it is not ‘serious’ work.  One comedian stated that he had performed at a beauty pageant the previous weekend but at the end of the evening, the organiser said the money ‘had finished’ and they were unable to pay.  In another instance, a man who managed comedians recounted an instance of a ‘big man’ inviting comedians to perform at a beach party (an hour from Freetown) and there was little payment and no food, drinks or accommodation for the performers, so some of the comedians stole items from the big man’s house as payment. In this instance, comedians, while perhaps creatively ‘obtaining payment’ they felt they were owed, simultaneously contributed to the ‘negative image’ of comedians as ‘not serious.’

Others comedians, however, continue to maintain ‘day jobs’ by choice.   Desmond Benya, one of Sierra Leone’s best-known comedians, has been a government employee at NASSIT (Sierra Leone’s pension programme) for sixteen years and has in this time obtained a Master’s degree in mass communications and become successful in comedy, at times being invited to events across Africa and Europe. He has also successfully managed to navigate different political landscapes over the past twenty years and as a result, has been able to maintain relations and government connections affording him further opportunities.

Even comedians I spoke with outside Freetown emphasised similar points. Jacob Hallowell (stage-name ‘top up’) who lives and works in Makeni teaches English at a private school.  His partner, Osman Sesay, has trained as an agronomist in Sierra Leone and is currently finishing his degree at a teacher’s training college. These men also emphasised the need to be ‘seen as serious and respectable’ in order to have their comedy taken seriously and to do that, they had to pursue more mainstream respected careers unrelated to arts or comedy.

Once established though, performances can be a means of obtaining other work and career opportunities, regardless of your comedic ‘status.’ As Desmond Benya stated: ‘if you use the mic correctly, it opens doors for you.’ As a professional, he has benefitted socially and economically, by obtaining other jobs and investment opportunities, as well as getting high profile backing for his own comedy shows, such as mobile phone companies and national banks. Osman Sesay also obtained opportunities through a government minister who he met while doing comedy campaigning on behalf of the All People’s Congress (APC) political party who were in power at that time. He was later given the opportunity to travel to Benin to study fish farming as a result of this connection. Many comedians, like Jacob Hallowell, have also received endorsement and advertising deals with local companies, such as mobile phone providers.

Becoming a comedian in Sierra Leone is, therefore, tied up with a wide array of social and economic factors. While not a particularly ‘big’ industry, there are an increasing number of people (particularly men) trying their hand at comedy but as part of the industry expanding, certain comedians have had to simultaneously combat the image of ‘lazyness’ that has long accompanied their art.  In so doing, they have had to take on additional ‘professional positions’ for their comedy, and their personal image, to become legitimate.  Once in comedy and with a reputation, it can bring additional opportunities and social connections for the performer, however breaking into this is a challenge and being taken ‘seriously’ as a comedian an even greater one.  Socioeconomic and political elements, such as education levels, social networks and political affiliation can also contribute to one’s ability to be recognised and ‘brought into’ the comedy circuit. However, the ability to maintain other, more ‘respectable’ careers acts as key to being ‘seriously funny.’

Laura S. Martin is a Global Challenges Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield and is working on the relationship between humour, violence and gender in Sierra Leone.

Featured Photograph: credit as applicable – source not identified

Notes

[1] Sadly, Lord Bongo Johnson (Godfrey Manley-Spain) killed his wife and himself in 2010 in Dallas, Texas.  Dandogo (Donald Nat-George) still lives in the US and in fact revived his character in his 2015 video entitled ‘Ebola – Back to Sender’

[2] Notably Freetown comedians have come together and produced ‘funny videos’, in partnership with the government, to spread messages about how to prevent Covid-19.

Out of the Ruins and Rubble: Covid-19 and the fightback in Africa

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ROAPE
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In an update on the Covid-19 pandemic across Africa, Heike Becker, Femi Aborisade and Issa Shivji, report on the reaction of governments, the struggles of poor communities and the urgency of building of a new world out of the ruins of the old.

South Africa – social distancing and social solidarity

By Heike Becker

The good news first: From today, Monday 6 April, the South African government has begun to roll out an ambitious programme of countrywide screening for the coronavirus infection. Mobile units and a corps of 10,000 health workers are screening and testing in the communities, with an intermediate aim of reaching at least 50,000 people over the coming week.

South Africa is today also halfway through the scheduled 21-day lock-down that came into force on midnight of 26 March. What has happened during the past 10 days? Except for a few locations where residents flaunted the lock-down protocols in the beginning, most people have been complying with the severe regulations.

South Africa’s 60 million people are only allowed to leave the house to do essential shopping for groceries or medicine, visit the doctor, or collect social grants – no allowance is made for outdoor exercise as even people in European countries that are hardest hit by the pandemic still enjoy.

There have been reports of violent abuse that residents of poor neighbourhoods have suffered at the hands of the enforcement services, especially the police. From Day 1 of the lock-down reports, photographs and videos have been circulating of officers beating people, even of shooting rubber bullets at people queuing at the entrance to a supermarket.

A group of people whose lives have been particularly affected by the lock-down protocols are the homeless, an approximate number of 70,000 people who live on the streets of cities across South Africa. They have been collected, more or less voluntarily, and accommodated in temporary facilities, some of them decently run, others dangerous mass encampments, such as the tented camp that the city of Cape Town has set up some 27 km outside the metropole for 4,000 street people. This is happening just as autumn temperatures have dropped over the past weekend to a wet and chilly 15 degrees Celsius.

The severe and cold South African winter is on the doorstep, and speculations are rife that with the peak of the pandemic in South Africa expected for early May the lock-down may be extended, possibly until the end of June, or even longer. People in the poorest communities have been bravely patient thus far, although many have lost their income, especially those who make a living day-by-day – the domestic workers, the waste-pickers, the informal traders who sell much of the fresh produce in the townships, and many others. There is hunger and the longer the lock-down will last the hungrier the marginalised majority of the world’s most unequal society will get.

The tremendous efforts of South African civil society have continued. There are a remarkable multitude of community initiatives that provide practical support, from soup kitchens and food baskets to hygiene and face mask-making. Beyond that, an impressive C19 People’s Coalition of over 190 organisations has been built over the past couple of weeks that is running campaigns for social solidarity under the banner ‘Stay Home. Stay Safe. Demand a Just Response to Covid-19!’ The C19 Coalition has put together a wide-ranging programme of action that includes income security for all, specifically the extension of social grants, general easy access to water and sanitation, and food security. The Coalition calls for the appropriation of essential private facilities for public use during the crisis, for free and open communication, and for proper training and resources for community health workers. It also asks that the inequalities within the country’s educational system be considered in the move to remote learning. With all this, the focus is on grassroots organisation and mobilisation, including the identification of strategies to divert violence, especially domestic violence, in the country’s communities and homes. The C19 programme programmatically articulates: ‘How each of us responds to the Covid-19 pandemic will determine who we are as a society. The better we respond now, the better we will be after the pandemic… Our response must be just, equitable, and redistributive if we are to meet the needs of all our people. In times of physical distancing, social solidarity is key.’

Heike Becker is an activist and teacher of social and cultural anthropology at UWC in South Africa. Her work and activism explores culture and politics and focuses particularly on popular culture, digital media and social movements in southern Africa. Heike is a regular contributor to roape.net.

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Nigeria – the hunger virus and Covid-19

By Femi Aborisade

One basic point I must make is that the Covid-19 induced lock-down measures and effects in Nigeria are not uniform. For example, in Oyo State, South West, Nigeria where I live, only night life is curtailed by the imposition of the curfew between 7pm and 6am. So, people are allowed to carry on their activities normally outside these hours. However, because of the total lock-down announced by the Federal Government and imposed on Abuja, Lagos and Ogun State, activities in all other states are affected to one degree or the other as interstate movements are prohibited.

On a general note, the lock-down has meant unprecedented hardship, hunger and anger. In some cases, ordinary people have been compelled to defy the lock-down as they are compelled to go out in search of means of livelihood. Some states share raw food and bread but on a limited scale, but frequently to such a limited extent that young people and women have been seen protesting in their streets in rejection of these ‘food rations.’ One group of protesters complained that only one loaf of bread worth two hundred Naira (about 45 pence) was given to 650 people living in about 240 houses on a particular street. Young people turned the bread into football, all in anger. In another location in Lagos, the food rations, similarly pathetic in quantity were distributed, to widows and old women. Community focused, community based health and rights organisations have been unanimous in making demands for government provision of water, food and drugs to ensure a successful lock-down.

A community in Lagos protesting against the small quantity of rice and a two hundred Naira loaf of bread given to the entire community for the initial period of the 14-day lock-down.

Huge sums of money have been declared as set aside to fight Covid-19 by the Federal Government. But, in reality, it would appear that little is being used for this purpose. Only yesterday, it was announced that the Federal Government would take US$150m from the sovereign wealth fund to share between the different levels of government to fight the virus without providing any specific information about what the money would be used for.

Another community in Lagos were a government representative appeals to the community to accept what the government has allocated to them – three loaves of bread on top of small bags containing rice. He appeals to them to accept these gifts with ‘love’. The people reacted angrily and say that he is talking nonsense, they would not, they argue, accept hunger with love.

Whereas public offices are shut, Dangote workers, for example, are exempted from the lock-down and the workers are angry that adequate protection is not being made available for their health. Aliko Dangote is West Africa’s wealthiest businessman, who runs the Dangote Group employing thousands across Nigeria who work, principally, in his cement business. In response to the defiance of the lock-down by hungry and angry poor people, women and youths, some state governments such as Ekiti State in the Southwest and Kaduna state in the North West, are relaxing the lock-down, allowing movement on some days of the week to allow people go to the market to buy foodstuff.

But in situations where salaries are not paid, even market women are complaining of little activity. In Nigeria, there is no social security schemes to take care of the unemployed and the aged, etc. Therefore, people are saying, in the absence of public support, that the hunger virus is no different from Covid-19.

Femi Aborisade is a socialist, writer and lawyer based in Lagos. He was interviewed on roape.net and the interview can be accessed here.

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Tanzania – Chickens of capitalist modernity coming home to roost

By Issa Shivji

The fight against Covid-19 is as much a class struggle as any, perhaps fiercer. The pandemic is knocking on the doors of the continent. The ravages of five centuries of capitalist barbarity and its sycophant accomplices has left us most vulnerable. In Tanzania we have been made doubly vulnerable as floods are devastating some regions and rendering people shelter-less. I shudder to think what the consequences will be. But we must continue to hope and struggle as long as we live.

We are going through trying times. Humanity is on trial. This is the time when the worst and the best in us comes out in ways that we could not have been imagined in normal times. We are used to saying, ‘the personal is political’. Now the ‘social is personal’, so much so that the personal takes precedence, the social disappears. “Me first”, “my (family) first” overwhelms the ‘us’.

These are the times when ‘keep sane’, ‘stay sane’ become words of affection. Yet what is at stake is our humanity itself. We don’t say ‘be human’, ‘stay human’ for human is social and social is a distant second. Social is moral. Sanity is rational. And we are all children of Enlightenment rationality.

The chickens of capitalist modernity are coming home to roost.

But all is not bleak. It never is for we are humans and do not have the hide of a buffalo to be unaffected by human suffering. So, health workers are in the front line fighting the pandemic. Cuban doctors travel over the seas to save lives of fellow human beings while putting their own lives in danger. The Chinese send shiploads of medical kits to Italy and Iran in the people’s war (truly a peoples’ war) against Covid-19 (while Trump tightens the screws of sanctions against Iran and the EU mulls over financial instruments that would secure its loans to a fellow EU member). Humanity is not so bereft of humanness. No, it is not.

Julius Nyerere rhetorically asks in his article Usawa wa Binadamu (Human Equality) what is it that makes us all equal when we are so unequal in every respect. His answer: it is our humanness. Nyerere’s equality is human equality (moral). Enlightenment’s equality is legal equality (rational).

Why am I saying all this? I’m saying it because in such times of crisis our Enlightenment values, which inform the age of (capitalist) modernity, so starkly reveal themselves in all their nakedness. And they are barbaric to the core!

Will this pandemic teach us that humanity is crying out for a new civilisation, a civilisation whose centre is the human being, a social being with innate humanity, not an individual subject of the capitalist state who oozes out barbarity, greed and selfishness from every pore. People before property maybe sums it all up, though perhaps not sufficiently to drive our souls – nonetheless it is a good approximation to lead us on.

As I read the messages of love and warmth, of hope and solidarity from the continent, I cannot stop reflecting on how capitalist barbarity has destroyed our humanity yet how our underlying humanness is kicking in and that is what makes life.

In the name of struggle and solidarity, let us shout and scream:

  • Cancel all African debts
  • Send air loads of testing kits and medical supplies
  • And you African rulers divert funds from your grandiose projects and your filthy salaries and perks to feed our people in quarantine
  • without humongous feeding schemes, lock-down is not possible and without lock-down it will be impossible to control transmission.

Issa Shivji taught for years at the University of Dar es Salaam, Public law Department, and has written more than twenty books on Pan-Africanism, political economy, socialism and radical change in Africa. He is a longstanding member of ROAPE.

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The revenge of nature

By Issa Shivji

For over five centuries
Capital has devastated nature and human nurture.
Now nature is taking its revenge.
Once again capital will shield behind stimulus packages
While the working poor will die out packed like sardines in their slums.

Hope we should not lose, to despair we shall not surrender,
The struggle must continue.

We, the People of the World, will build a New Civilisation
Out of the ruins and rubbles of corona
We shall never again allow capital to ruin our homes and hearth
To build their domes and malls

Never again shall we subdue to its law and order
We shall stand up
Against their might
To fight back
And claim back our right to rebel

Never again revolution will be an episode
We will make it permanent
It will be the daily ablution
Five times a day
To wash away the sins of barbaric capitalism.

Stay calm
Stay human
Keep safe my friends

 

Featured Photograph: People on the move to the North West region of Cameroon, as Covid-19 restrictions began to bite (19 March 2020). 

Food Insecurity and Revolution

By
ROAPE
-

In a review of Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa: Agrarian Questions in Egypt and Tunisia, by Habib Ayeb and Ray Bush, Bettina Engels argues that the authors make a major contribution to countering the widely held notion that the peasantry is politically passive. The book also considers the vital role that family farmers played in the 2010 and 2011 uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.

By Bettina Engels

Popular protests, insurrections, regime changes and revolutions are mostly associated with urban people, be it the so-called middle classes or the poor masses. Mainstream and also many critical scholars still consider the peasantry to be somehow politically passive, concerned with satisfying all-day basic needs and hardly able to organize collective action or to make political demands. This holds particularly true when it comes to Africa and the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region.

The Middle East and North Africa represents rather a blind spot in critical agrarian studies. The new  book by Habib Ayeb and Ray Bush contributes to three fields of research: to critical agrarian studies by analysing rural class structures and the potential of the peasantry for radical transformation; to research on regime change and revolution by revealing the agency of small-holder peasants; and to studies of the MENA region, particularly of the uprisings that have been referred to as the ‘Arab spring’.

Ayeb and Bush investigate the political economy of agriculture and food in Tunisia and Egypt from a multi-scalar perspective, taking into account global food regimes and the policies of IFIs (International Financial Institutions), historical pathways and political dynamics on the national scale, rural-urban relations, and not least, the agency of the peasantry. They demonstrate how family farmers in both countries rejected the IFI and state policies, and as a consequence disabused governments, donors and mainstream researchers who claim that food security will be reached without the involvement of small peasants. Consequently, the book concludes with making a case for food sovereignty, which they understand as ‘a process without an end […] that promote peasant and small farmer demands for autonomy and control over food production and consumption’ (p. 149).

Theoretically, the analysis builds on historical materialism, dependency and world system theory, notably on Samir Amin’s work, on the food regime approach and on class analysis. As opposed to Henry Bernstein and others, the authors adhere to the term ‘peasant’ and to analysing the inner diversity of the peasantry and the multiplicity of activities that people in rural zones carry out from a perspective of class antagonism, hence rejecting the concept of ‘classes of labour’. They show that the peasantry does not fade away, as it is assumed by modernisation theory and several scholars in agrarian political economy, but that ‘family farmers and small-scale farming persists […] and is not entirely subordinated to the market: self-provisioning remains a crucial lifeline for small-scale farmers’ (p. 13).

A major contribution of the book consists in revealing the crucial role that family farmers played in the 2010 and 2011 uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. If they had taken note of the agency of the peasantry and their potential for resistance and uprising, observers would not have been as surprised by the turmoil, the book argues. In fact, the peasantry has been a driving force in the uprisings. According to Ayeb and Bush, this can be explained by a ‘double social and spatial marginalisation’ (p. 56) of farmers. The fact that the uprisings were largely spontaneous (‘social non-movements’, in Asef Bayat’s term) turned out to be an advantage and obstacle at the same time: while the lack of a formal organisation or a revolutionary party made it difficult for the authorities and security forces to pursue and repress the insurgents, it also allowed the old elite to rapidly recapture power.

The book provides outstanding insights for recent debates in critical agrarian studies, for research on insurrections, rebellions, and revolutions, and for studies of the MENA region. The analysis combines profound knowledge of agrarian Marxism on the one hand, and of rural transformations in Tunisia and Egypt on the other. It is rich in empirical data, though qualitative primary data could have been referred to even more comprehensively. The book’s particular merit is to relate agrarian change to rural and urban struggles for radical transformation. It links local struggles and rural inequality to national politics and global structures and processes, both macro-historical ones (food regimes, IFI influences, North-South relations) and more short-term events such as the 2007/2008 food price crisis.

Food Insecurity and Revolution in the middle East and North Africa. Agrarian Questions in Egypt and Tunisia, by Habib Ayeb and Ray Bush (Anthem Press, 2019) is available here.

Bettina Engels teaches at the Otto Suhr Institute for Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany and is a member of ROAPE’s Editiorial Working Group.

Pulverized: Capitalism, Africa and Covid-19

By
ROAPE
-

ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig and Hannah Cross ask if the experience of life with the Covid-19 outbreak is the common experience of life and death in the South. They argue that now is the moment to build unity behind an alternative social structure to capitalism in Africa and the Global North.

By Leo Zeilig and Hannah Cross

The Covid-19 pandemic is one of the greatest crises of our era – though the elements of the crisis, as they are now being experienced in the Global South and North, are not entirely unusual. State and military enforced restrictions on free movement, imposed isolation, curfews, with towns and cities locked down, are not unique in our lifetime, though they might be in the richest countries in the world.

As many of our readers know from direct experience, these aspects of state power, and the imposition of that power across society, is familiar to many countries and people – not least across Africa. The biggest crisis of our lives is not felt evenly across the globe (roape.net has posted contributions from activists and researchers on the continent, on the response to Covid-19 in their countries).

Millions on the continent have experienced real food crises, collapsed health systems and the terrible, and prolonged tragedy, of early and preventable deaths (remember that infectious diseases are common in many countries of the Global South). We have seen tragedies, of gigantic human proportions, unfold in rapid-fire succession in countries in which ROAPE has a long history.

Economic crisis hastened by restructuring advocated by the World Bank and IMF, in Zimbabwe, was initially followed eagerly by the ruling ZANU-PF in the 1990s, only to lead to a mass political crisis later that decade. The regime survived the popular uprisings, but the new century saw a deepening agricultural and economic depression, that cast millions into exile, and for those who stayed in the country, a life of bare existence.

As prices fluctuated, and the economic meltdown continued, food stores were empty of staple foods, and hospitals were inundated. Millions died. Today, 5.5 million people in the countryside and 2.2 million in urban areas remain in need of urgent assistance, and acute malnutrition continues to rise.

A similar story – though on an even deeper scale – impacted the Congo. Every aspect of society was transformed beyond recognition in the late 1990s as the combined ‘crisis’ crippled institutions, broke up flimsy health services, and overturned community support networks. In the wars supported and funded by multinational mining houses – big and small – hundreds of thousands were forced from their homes, as cities, towns and communities were either destroyed or abandoned as fighting spread from the east.

In 2014, in Burkina Faso, a popular movement – an insurrection, as activists there describe it – overthrew the country’s ‘democratic’ dictator, Blaise Compaoré. Compaoré’s project of ‘restructuring’ that began with his coup against his former comrade, the radical reformer, Thomas Sankara, in 1987, was supported, once more, by international donors, and companies – French, Canadian and Chinese, for example. The country also saw devastating deforestation, and landgrabs by mining companies backed by the government in Ouagadougou.

For years, the people of Burkina Faso suffered – a lamentable health care system bled by the state, severe repression against the country’s rich profusion of trade unions, protest groups and community organisations. Activists and demonstrators died in actions across decades. Others barely survived in the cities and rural areas (where water is often scarce), and food insecurity means chronic and widespread hunger. This in a country where climate change also undermines the livelihoods of 90 percent of inhabitants who rely on subsistence agriculture.

Recent years have seen flash floods and drought in Burkina Faso as elsewhere on the continent, which has destroyed crops, and have left thousands in a situation of acute undernourishment. Part of the disastrous impacts of climate change already being experienced across Africa.

Pulverized by decades of structural reform, the African continent will be affected by Covid-19 – it will likely rip through susceptible populations, particularly in urban and informal settlements, and could kill multitudes. But in populations already suffering grinding assault, typified by intermittent increases in intensity of deaths and illness, the unusualness of this wave of insult will only be fanned by a global narrative of a ‘novel threat’.

The examples, from across the continent, go on and on – the causes, long covered by ROAPE, are familiar ones: food production and the profitability of multinational corporations, land grabs, mining and the displacement of communities, class struggles and elite accumulation.

These elements of our collective analysis over years point clearly to the devastation – the ‘permanent’ crisis on the continent – and capital accumulation that lies at the heart of the Covid-19 outbreak, deadly and devastating as it is.

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?

We want to draw attention to two aspects of the Covid-19 crisis and direct our readers and supporters to vital analysis for understanding what is happening. The first is how a marginal virus – or pathogen – was able to transit so quickly across the globe.

The causes are not simply the ‘negative’ aspects of globalisation, that many commentators, left and right, are keen and able to point to. We must also see the increase in the rates of viruses as intimately connected to food production and the profit margins of international businesses. As Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu has stated, ‘Anyone who aims to understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous must investigate the industrial model of agriculture and, more specifically, livestock production.’ In a word, capitalism.

ROAPE had analysed how capital is directing land grabs into major forests and smallholder land across the Global South, and Africa in particular. As Wallace has shown, such land grabbing drives both deforestation and development which leads to the spread of disease. Once ‘contained’ viruses are now trickling into livestock and human populations.

Africa has spear-headed these developments, so, in Wallace’s words, ‘Ebola, Zika, the coronaviruses, yellow fever again, a variety of avian influenzas, and African swine fever in hog are among the many pathogens making their way out of the most remote hinterlands into peri-urban loops, regional capitals, and ultimately onto the global travel network.’

Secondly, in addition to these deep, structural sponsors of ‘remote’ pathogens, into the global economy, are other profound contradictions.

The most glaring is the response of governments in the Global North –  huge bailouts, in the UK totally £330 billion (in the first week of the crisis), of mostly big business, and with landlords prioritised over renters and old-fashioned scientific quackery to defend the state’s negligence of working people. Pressure however is building in some cases, and in some countries, for a fuller response that will include salary guarantees for workers already being laid off in their thousands and safety for those still in work. As ever, any progress will depend on the pressure applied, by workers themselves within and outside the trade union structure.

Already in the past fortnight in parts of the United States, there has been a moratorium on evictions, foreclosures, and utility shutoffs and the Congress has passed emergency unemployment and paid sick leave. In other words, doing what was considered ‘too socialist’ and ‘politically impossible’ at the beginning of the outbreak.

We believe that this is a moment to build unity behind an alternative social structure to capitalism, which will continue to fail all, in Africa and the Global North, despite its ready adaptiveness. Since ROAPE was established in 1974, this remains our hope and project.

The opinions and arguments in this blogpost are ours and they do not, necessarily, reflect those of the entire Editorial Working Group. We are grateful to Nadine Ezard and Sarah Grey for their input into the piece.

Leo Zeilig is editor of roape.net and Hannah Cross is chair of the Editorial Working Group of ROAPE.

Featured Photograph: Hundreds of students leaving Kigali for rural homes (16 March 2020).

Out of Control: Crisis, Covid-19 and Capitalism in Africa

By
ROAPE
-

Activists and researchers from across Africa speak about the impact of Covid-19 on their countries. Writing from Kenya, South Africa, Burkina Faso and Nigeria and Zimbabwe, Femi Aborisade, Heike Becker, Didier Kiendrebeogo, Gacheke Gachihi, Lena Anyuolo and Tafadzwa Choto look at how the crisis is taking shape – how governments are using the virus as a cover for wider repression, and the broader context of capitalism, climate change and popular struggles for radical change.

Nigeria: a perfect excuse for the business class

By Femi Aborisade

I live in Nigeria. My wife works in a government-owned hospital. I have children in tertiary institutions. I recently attended a conference in a major hotel in Lagos, the largest commercial centre in Nigeria. From yesterday (22 March), reports have it that the number of confirmed coronavirus cases is still relatively low, nine in Lagos and the remaining cases in some other states. Yet, the figure is likely to be more in reality.

Very few people have the opportunity to access medical care in hospitals. Many feel compelled to seek spiritual healing for their health conditions by approaching their pastors and imams for prayers because they lack the means to access health care even in public hospitals.

From what I experience directly and discussions with my children, personal protective equipment is not distributed to health workers, students and workers. There is no facility in public places, buildings, markets, bus stops and offices for water, public toilets, hand washing, etc. I have not witnessed any practical measure put in place to curtail the spread on the coronavirus epidemic in Nigeria. Unless measures are taken urgently, the outcome could be catastrophic.

The Central Bank of Nigeria has announced the setting aside of a huge fund, a N1.1tn [about £2.5bn] intervention fund to support local manufacturers, import substitution by the business class and to support health authorities to ensure laboratories, researchers and innovators work with global scientists to patent and produce vaccines and test kits in Nigeria.

This fund is a perfect guise to pass public resources to the business class. What is required is that the state should assume primary responsibility for health care and provision of free health services. In Nigeria, very few sick people go to the hospitals because of inability to afford the costs. Public hospitals are few. Where they are available, only consultation is largely free. Treatment has been commercialised. There is no information as to where coronavirus tests can take place. Many of the hospitals, public or private lack facilities to test, not to talk of having facilities to treat coronavirus. Indeed, Nigeria has been unable to eradicate mosquitoes and malaria. A government that is unable to control or eradicate malaria would be helpless in the event of coronavirus epidemic.

Many ordinary people live in crowded environments. Many are homeless. The outbreak of coronavirus epidemic calls for attention to be paid to ensure basic needs, including social housing and health care are provided for ordinary people. Rather the government is in a hurry to use the crisis to pass public wealth to their business partners. Governments are not concerned about regular payment of salaries and non-payment of the recently announced increase in national minimum wage but are concerned with looting in the name of the fight against the coronavirus.

Announcements are being made for temporary closure of schools and places having more than 50 persons. However, the central labour organisation, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), is worried that employers may use such closures and other measures dictated by the current period to attack the rights of the working class. The NLC has warned it would resist any attacks on the rights of the working class, under the guise of fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

Femi Aborisade is a socialist, writer and lawyer based in Lagos. He was recently interviewed on roape.net; the interview can be accessed here.

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South Africa: Covid-19 in the most unequal society on earth

By Heike Becker (please also read Heike’s update of the situation in South Africa in the comments section at the bottom of this blog)

The coronavirus crisis has truly arrived in South Africa over the past week. This morning (Saturday, 21 March), the statistics recorded just over 200 confirmed infections. Last Sunday, when the numbers stood at 68, then 85 confirmed cases, the cabinet went into a special meeting. The consultations took their time. President Cyril Ramaphosa was said to address the nation at 5pm, then at 6pm; eventually he came on screen about 7.30pm. The wait was worth it, everyone agrees. The presidential directive, supplemented and detailed the next morning by ministries, put firm restrictions into place. No gatherings of more than 100 people allowed. From Wednesday this week no visitors have been allowed into the country from ‘high-risk countries’ (defined as China, Iran, Italy, South Korea, UK, Germany, Spain and United States). Currently 14 airplanes from these countries are grounded at OR Tambo airport in Johannesburg. Non-South African citizens and residents on board will be sent back. Returning citizens and residents will have to go into 14 days’ quarantine. Schools are closed. Universities have suspended their academic programmes and entered into early, and in most places extended, academic recess. While not entirely deserted, the streets of suburban South Africa are eerily empty.

These are difficult times, mentally and emotionally deeply destabilising. Since the past weekend I have been constantly checking in with my students who are worried and feeling confused, struggling psychologically. They are also worried about the financial implications since lecturers at South African universities have been told to move teaching onto online platforms. Students, certainly at the predominantly black, working-class university where I teach, lack access to the internet now that most are off-campus in the townships and locations because they cannot afford the excessive prices for data packages charged by South African mobile network companies.

The university’s academic and administrative staff and students have been prohibited from coming to campus since yesterday, except for those students who have opted to stay on in the residence halls. Thankfully, the University of the Western Cape (UWC) unlike some other universities has not given 72-hour eviction notes to students in residence halls; Wits University in Johannesburg was taken to court by law students about this measure but the judge threw out the application this morning.

Two days ago, an academic from my faculty tested positive for Covid-19. There has been much direct and indirect exposure. Before developing suspected symptoms, the colleague, who had returned from an overseas trip, had interacted with staff and students, who again had interacted with others, all before the test results came back. I have been self-isolating since Wednesday, only leaving the house for solitary walks and exercise.

Like myself, many middle-class people have been given the option of working from home. This makes sense, especially since the first cases of Covid-19 were brought into the country by members of the globally mobile middle and upper classes. But now internal transmissions have started, and those most at risk are not the toilet-paper hoarding shoppers at Woolies, the beloved Woolworths outlets of affluent South Africa (think Marks & Spencer in the UK).

One big issue is paid leave for workers who have to use crowded public transport – imagine there is just one infected person in a crowded train carriage or minibus taxi, no space for physical distancing, no sanitisers, gloves or face masks. As I have been writing, I had to interrupt and attend to a conversation with UWC colleagues on WhatsApp:  we were shocked to learn that the cleaners – outsourced vulnerable workers – are still working on campus and thus still travelling to and from work in the unsafe conditions of South African public transport. Some of us in the faculty have been approaching the Dean to take this up with the institution’s executive, who will in turn have to raise the issue with the private companies that employ the most vulnerable workers at our institution where workers were not put back on the university’s payroll (see my blogpost From Johannesburg to London: student-worker struggles).

There is so little one can do while in self-isolation. I have been part of social media campaigns to urge South African mobile network companies with their excessively expensive data packages to make academic and other educational sites zero-rated for students. If our students don’t get proper internet access for online teaching, they will lose the semester (to be concluded in mid-May).

I understand from social media posts that there has been a meeting this morning to try and coordinate community-based responses in Cape Town. I don’t know much about it though and I can’t attend.

It’s bleak. Like the multiple environmental crises we have been facing (see my blogpost Cape Town Water Musings: the Politics of Environmental Crisis and Social Inequality), the pandemic once again reveals and deepens the divide between the few haves and the many have-nots in South Africa. My soul weeps when I think about the threats for sheer survival the many face in the most unequal society on earth.

Heike Becker teaches social and cultural anthropology at UWC in South Africa. Her work explores themes at the interface between culture and politics and focuses particularly on popular culture, digital media and social movements in southern Africa. Heike is a regular contributor to roape.net.

*

Burkina Faso: terrorism, pollution and the Covid-19 pandemic

By Didier Kiendrebeogo

The coronavirus was declared in Burkina Faso on 9 March. Quickly, government measures first targeted union demonstrations that were already under way. However, contaminated ministers and high officials continued to hold large rallies as part of their electoral campaigns (national elections are due to be held in November this year).

From 24 March we have 114 people who have tested positive, including at least five members of the government and four deaths all linked to Covid-19. These, of course, are only the official statistics. A free number has been set up for the population, but it is extremely difficult to get a response, or any assistance. The country does not have substantial equipment needed for testing. Only the wealthy have access.

The country already faces a climate emergency, foreign mining companies (around 15) pollute the environment and diseases are multiplying in the areas where they are active. Needless to say, this happens without people benefiting from the ‘dividends’ of mining and the state does nothing.

We must not forget that Burkina Faso has recently surprised the world. First by carrying out a popular insurrection in October 2014 to oust the dictator, Captain Blaise Compaoré, after 30 years in power. Then with a week of resistance in which the population forced the Presidential Security Regiment (RSP), a militia better equipped than the national army, during the coup d’état in September 2015, to hand back power to the government.

Today, the Burkinabè people must face a totally incompetent regime, which is content to plunder national wealth with multinationals and foreign government while repressing those who dare to resist and defend the dignity and aspirations of the people.

Almost a third of the country is under the control of armed groups (jihadist terrorists, drug traffickers and other armed bandits). A situation that has officially caused 700,000 internally displaced people, around 1,000 schools and health centres closed and more than 1,000 killed (civilians and soldiers), as well as incalculable material damage. The defence and security forces regularly complain about the lack of adequate equipment (armaments, rolling stock, fuel, protective equipment, etc.)

Meanwhile the rulers plunder and divert the wealth of the country. Every day the press reveal fresh cases: embezzlement of minerals in collusion with foreign mining companies, huge sums of taxpayers’ money spent on the purchase of vehicles, the construction of bunkers in cities and in the countryside by ministers, salaries of ministers twice as high as the law officially permits, the award of public contracts to friends and members of the ruling party and its allies. The list goes on and on.

Faced with the accelerated collapse of the state, activists are trying to sound the alarm. What is the government’s reaction? Systematic bans on demonstrations, repression of protest marches, death threats, call for the murder of organisers, targeted assassinations of several heads of organisations, mass executions under the pretext of fighting terrorism, illegal and cuts in the salaries of civil servants, the suspension of wages of union officials, and mass dismissals…

Covid-19 has contributed an ‘additional’ virus to a country already on its knees.

Didier Kiendrebeogo in a leading activist in the Organisation Démocratique de la Jeunesse (ODJ) in Burkina Faso

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Kenya: Epidemic of poverty and violence in the informal settlements in Nairobi

By Gacheke Gachihi and Lena Anyuolo

In Kenya, the Ministry of Health update on 24 March put the number of cases at 25. On 23 March, the number of cases was 16, with tracing of 646 people who had been in contact with the 16 under way. All of them had come through Jomo Kenyatta International Airport between 4 and 17 March. The measures to stop the spread such as self-isolation and washing hands with soap and water are critical but will unfortunately be out of reach for the majority.

The majority of Kenya’s labour force due to the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the late 1980s is casual. Which means they live from hand to mouth and depend on a daily wage. Those in salaried employment do not have full benefits as they operate on contracts. Almost all of them are not in unions and in any case often these unions are weak. All are subject to the whims of the employer. The directive to work from home and self-isolate is impractical because it forces workers to choose between earning their daily bread or staying at home and starving. The situation is even more dire for those in rural areas who rely on selling their produce to towns and cities. But the closure of markets means potentially millions will not have the bus fare to go to health care facilities for treatment or the money to buy hand sanitiser and soap.

Kenya’s health care system is in shambles. Intentionally so. Our tax contributions to the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF) go towards funding private hospitals at the expense of public health facilities. On Mbagathi Way, in the capital Nairobi, the stark difference between Kenyatta National Hospital and the lavish private Nairobi Hospital shows who Kenya really belongs to. Should Kenya reach the patient levels of South Africa, where will the poor be treated? Is it in the dilapidated and understaffed public hospitals or the lavish private ones? The current directive of the health ministry to quarantine people in hotels at your own ‘subsidised cost’ of US$90 a night gives an idea of who will live and die.

Public housing in Kenya is a joke. In Mathare, a high-density area in Nairobi, 68,941 people live on in just a single square kilometre. In Kamkunji, another low-income area, 24,455 people live in a square kilometre. In Makadara, 16,150 people live in a square kilometre. In many cases people share a room that is also the kitchen, bedroom and living room. How will the workers quarantine or self-isolate? Meanwhile, the Kenyatta family is constructing luxury estate, the Northlands City, on a 11,000-acre plot along Thika Road, and will set aside 33 acres for a mall and hotel.

The state has behaved in a reckless way. The government has been condemned for allowing a China Southern Airlines flight to land in Kenya with 239 passengers  on 26 February, when China was at the peak of its Covid-19 crisis.  Some social justice activist argued this happened because of Kenya’s debt to China for funding infrastructure, they argued that the Chinese government was now in control of government decisions in Kenya.

After the government announced its first case of Covid-19 last week, the Social Justice Centres Working Group,  a collective of social justice centres, issued a statement  about the challenges of informal settlements that are densely populated. The guidelines are impossible for the poor in these settlements to follow even if their lives depended on it. The president, for example, advised citizens to work from home except those offering essential services.   Yet ‘essential services’ might mean very different things depending where you sit in the Kenyan class system. For example, in the informal settlements collective public toilets are essential services, water vending is part of essential services, hawking is an essential service because this how people stay alive and feed themselves and their families.  Working from home is a meaningless notion for the poor and marginalised.

A day in the house for most people living in the informal settlements means a day without a meal on the table. Such blatant disconnect from the common mwananchi [Swahili for ordinary citizen] and their lived reality shows a failed government.

As social justice activists, we demand that the government offer alternatives to the millions of Kenyans who are casual labourers and depend on daily earnings for survival.

The Ministry of Health has been in the front line, championing the use of sanitisers and hand washing, yet it has not provided a sustainable solution to the poor living in the informal settlements with no access to water. The assumption that all Kenyans can access water and soap was astonishing for a government that has privatised water and commodified basic services for the urban poor.

We demanded the government:

  1. Restore water supply to all the estates and slums and crack down on all water cartels extorting citizens.
  2. Speedily dispatch water tankers to areas that have no running water and depend on water points that are congested and expensive.
  3. Provide free or subsidised hand sanitisers clearly marked by the Ministry of Health.
  4. Equip government health centres with testing kits, trained personnel and ambulances so they can handle emergency cases.
  5. Control the prices of basic commodities to ensure most Kenyans can afford them, and give relief food to those who cannot.
  6. Stop police brutality and extortion in the informal settlements.
  7. Support frontline community health workers who are responding to the crisis in the urban poor.
  8. Provide cash grants for informal workers and homeless people.

Covid-19 is a manifestation of what Naomi Klein has described as the rise of disaster capitalism.

As a social justice movement our struggle is to fight an economic model of neoliberal capitalism that is inherently violent with torture, dehumanisation and cascading viruses, caused by an economic system that is out of control.

Gacheke Gachihi is Coordinator of Mathare Social Justice Centre and Member of Social Justice Centres Working Group Steering Committee.

Lena Anyuolo is a member of Ukombozi Library and Mathare Social Justice Centre. She is a social justice activist.

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Zimbabwe: the right to life for everyone

By Tafadzwa Choto

Zimbabwe has so far recorded three official cases of Covid-19 and there are a lot of speculations that there are more cases with the government hiding them.  It can also not be denied that there are some with the virus, but because there is no mass testing they are just going about and spreading it.  We can only expect these numbers to keep on rising as in most cases the infected don’t display any symptoms for days and will continue to spread the infection.

The country is ill-prepared, there is no oxygen which is critical to save Covid-19 patients at the designated hospitals and clinics. The medical staff, both doctors and nurses, are also ill-equipped to handle admitted patients.

The political and business elites go outside the country for treatment together with their families leaving poor families to die due to lack of adequate health equipment, medication and lack of human resources caused by the mass exodus outside the country for greener pastures.

Visits to Parirenyatwa, Harare, Mpilo, Chitungwiza, Gweru, Mutare hospitals, among other government hospitals, are a sorry tale. The government want the health system that they destroyed to work for their benefit.  The government has not prioritised procurement of ventilators for respiratory illnesses such as TB, asthma and now the coronavirus. The poor in Zimbabwe have been experiencing for two decades a rampage that has destroyed most public services, hospitals, schools and infrastructure. Ordinary people have seen their lives crushed by austerity measures, frequently dying of treatable illnesses. With this crisis caused by their corruption and their thirst for economic accumulation, the government now seeks our sympathy.

President Mnangagwa has announced measures to avoid the spread of the virus and save lives but these are not enough as they only apply to those who have money and do not address the needs of the majority.  Workers both in the formal and informal sector use public transport, and the virus can easily spread in these public taxis and vans.  No measures have been put in place.  The informal sector including small business and vendors cannot afford to stay at home as they live from hand to mouth and are forced to go out in order to make an income.

There are funds that have been made available by the international community to restrain the spread of the virus, yet these funds could easily be abused by the government, as we have seen on countless occasions in the past.  The government must also urgently come up with funds to curb the spread of Covid-19 before it becomes catastrophic.

Popular movements in the country demand:

  1. Government must take all necessary measures to stop the spread of coronavirus.
  2. Taxing of the rich to fund the controlling of Covid-19.
  3. The spread of coronavirus can only be combated by making testing available for everyone who has got symptoms to stop the spread of the virus.
  4. There is need for urgent installation of equipment such as oxygen machines that are critical at all hospitals and clinics that have been designated for the treatment of the virus.
  5. Nationalisation of all private hospitals as has been done in other countries to curb a disaster. No to equipping of any hospital designed for the ruling elite.
  6. Adequate training to our health workers on how to handle the virus victims, and they must also be given enough protective clothing. Risk allowance for all health workers.
  7. There is need for mass production and distribution by the government of facemasks, gloves, soap and sanitisers, and these must be freely distributed. No to profiteering through this crisis: any company that seeks to make profit must be heavily fined.
  8. Water deliveries to areas that don’t have water – and no water cuts during this period to ensure proper and safe sanitation.
  9. Workers must stop going to work but be paid their full salaries at the end of every month until the situation normalises. Those workers providing essential services must be given transport to and from work with adequate protective clothing.
  10. There is need for the involvement and training of community structures and churches in educating people against the spread of the virus. These people will disseminate reliable information and stop the spread of speculation that can do more harm to people, including heart attacks from falsehoods.
  11. Open churches, lodges and hotels to provide shelter to the homeless and those living in crowded conditions.

The only option that we have is to put pressure on our incompetent and corrupt neoliberal government to enforce measures to protect us. Already there is speculation that they are equipping themselves with the necessary equipment to cater for the elite at the expenses of the majority.  We must say NO to this and disrupt any activities taking place demanding right to life for everyone.  Let us practise social distance and where possible give each other solidarity. This is only possible if we come up with committees in our areas that will help educating people against the spread of the virus.  We did this in the fight against cholera and we can do it again.

Antonater Tafadzwa Choto is a well-known labour activist, researcher and currently a PhD candidate based in Harare. She was interviewed on roape.net; the interview can be accessed here.

Featured Photograph: Kibera informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya (7 May 2015).

Ecosocialism or barbarism: an interview with Ian Angus

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ROAPE
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In an interview with roape.net, ecosocialist and writer Ian Angus discusses the environmental crisis, the Anthropocene and Covid-19. He argues that new viruses, bacteria and parasites spread from wildlife to humans because capital is bulldozing primary forests, replacing them with profitable monocultures. Ecosocialists must patiently explain that permanent solutions will not be possible so long as capital rules the Earth.

Can you tell readers of ROAPE about yourself? Your background, life, activism and politics etc.

I was born in Canada and have lived here for my entire life. As a teenager, I was inspired by the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions, and became active in the Marxist left while still a student. I helped organize anti-war demonstrations and support for Latin American refugees in the 1960s and 1970s, and I wrote frequently for socialist publications in Canada and the U.S. My first book, published in 1981, was Canadian Bolsheviks, a history of the early years of the Communist Party of Canada.

Can you explain how, as a socialist and Marxist, you became aware of climate change for the first time? What were the books, events and issues, that first drew your attention to the issues?

I have always been deeply interested in science, so I have followed environmental issues for a long time — I’m really not sure when I first thought about climate change as a particular concern. However, in the 1990s I became interested in the discussions and debates about the possibility of a specifically Marxist analysis of the global environmental crisis. I read books and articles by a wide variety of green and red scholars, and for some time I was sympathetic to the view that Marx and Engels didn’t have much to say about nature, and that what they did say was inadequate or even wrong.

My ‘Eureka!’ moment was reading Marx’s Ecology, by John Bellamy Foster. Unlike other writers, Foster went back to the basics, showing in detail what Marx actually said about capitalism’s assaults on the natural world, and how it related to his materialist worldview. Marx analysed the great environmental crisis of his time — the decline of soil fertility in England and Europe — and identified its source as a capital-driven rupture in what he called the ‘universal metabolism of nature.’ As Foster showed, that concept of ‘metabolic rift’ provides an indispensable framework for understanding today’s ecological crises.

I was completely convinced by that analysis, and by the related work of Paul Burkett in Marx and Nature. After writing a number of articles on environmental issues, I started the online journal Climate & Capitalism in 2007, and in the same year helped to establish the Ecosocialist International Network (EIN). With Michael Löwy and Joel Kovel, I co-wrote the Second Ecosocialist Manifesto (also called the Belem Ecosocialist Declaration), in 2008. The EIN was short-lived, but it was an important first step: I think that the recently formed Global Ecosocialist Network will further advance the cause of building the mass movements we need.

A few years ago, you wrote Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System, can you talk about the arguments in the book, the concept of the Anthropocene, marking a new historical and geological epoch?

In the past few decades, scientific understanding of our planet has radically changed. A growing body of research has focused not just on individual environmental problems, but on the planet as a whole, and has shown that the Earth System is changing rapidly, in fundamental ways. The environmental conditions that prevailed since the last ice age — the only conditions in which human civilizations have existed — are now being swept away. Climate change is the most obvious example — the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now is much higher than at any time in the last two million years. That, along with many other radical shifts led many scientists to the conclusion that a new epoch in Earth System has begun. They call the new epoch the Anthropocene, and there is wide agreement that the decisive shift to new conditions occurred in the middle of the 20th century.

In Facing the Anthropocene, I tried to show how major changes in capitalism during and after World War II caused the global changes that scientists have identified. In essence, the metabolic rift that Marx identified has become an interrelated set of global rifts, immense breaks in Earth’s life support systems.

This global, all-encompassing crisis is the most important issue of our time. There was a time when socialists could legitimately treat environmental damage as just one of many capitalist problems, but that is no longer true. Fighting to limit the damage caused by capitalism today and then building socialism in Anthropocene conditions will involve challenges that no twentieth century socialist ever imagined. Understanding and preparing for those challenges must now be at the top of the socialist agenda.

I must say that I’ve been very pleased by the response to Facing the Anthropocene. It’s now in its third printing, it has been adopted as a required reading in many university-level environment courses, and it has been translated into several other languages.

There has been much talk of a Green New Deal, that harks back to public work programmes, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by the US President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. A similar radical ‘Green’ deal, we are told, needs to be enacted, presumably mobilising all the resources of the states to avoid an environmental catastrophe. What is your opinion about these proposals, advocated by Naomi Klein and other radical environmentalists?

In the United States, where the term originated, the label ‘Green New Deal’ is being used by a wide variety of politicians and activists for a wide range of proposals. Green New Deal plans range from liberal tax reforms to social democratic welfare plans, in some cases including nationalization of energy industries. Still other versions are promoted in other countries, particularly Canada and Britain. None of them challenges the capitalist system as such, but apart from that it is difficult to make general statements about their content — you have to know which plan is meant.

The details are important, but much more important, in my view, is whether a GND plan can help mobilize people outside of the corridors of power. In Marx’s words, ‘Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs.’ And as Naomi Klein says, ‘Only mass social movements can save us now.’

What we actually see from most politicians and NGOs, however, are top-down plans geared to persuading politicians and public officials, treating extra-parliamentary action as a sideshow, or steering it to electoral support for liberal politicians. That’s a formula for defeat. If that’s all a Green New Deal is, it’s just paper.

Having said that, the growing interest in green solutions is a positive sign. A few years ago, it would have been impossible for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [an American politician and activist] to get a hearing for her version of GND, let alone get it endorsed by other elected officials and seriously debated in the press and elsewhere. That won’t win the changes we need, but it shows that some of our rulers are starting to feel the heat of mass protests. So even if not intended by the authors, the idea of a Green New Deal may help to bring people into the streets.

ROAPE is a radical review and website on political economy, focused on Africa. Can you talk a little about the extent of the climate crisis on the continent – and the Global South more generally?

There’s a chapter in Facing the Anthropocene titled ‘We are not all in this together.’ The continuing brutal assault on Africa is clear evidence of that. The people and countries who bear the least responsibility for global warming are already its biggest victims. It’s a green cliché that we are all passengers on Spaceship Earth, but in reality a few passengers travel first-class, with reserved seats in the very best lifeboats, while the majority are on wooden benches exposed to the elements, with no lifeboats at all. Environmental apartheid is business as usual in the Anthropocene.

If fossil capitalism remains dominant, the Anthropocene will be a new dark age of barbarous rule by a few and barbaric suffering for most, particularly in the Global South. That’s why the masthead of Climate & Capitalism carries a slogan adapted from Rosa Luxemburg’s famous call for resistance to impending disaster in the First World War: ‘Ecosocialism or barbarism: There is no third way.’

Militant environmental activism shook the world last year, much of this led by school children, in strikes and protests. Can you speak about the role and importance of activism, and how these movements need to be linked to wider groups and an anti-capitalist politics?

As I’ve said, the task before us is to mobilize mass movements in the streets, outside the corridors of power. We should expect that those movements won’t be perfect, and they will take unexpected forms. No one I know of predicted the size of the global youth climate strike movement that Greta Thunberg initiated, or the impact of the Extinction Rebellion movement in Britain, but both are powerful examples of what must be done.

In Canada, the most effective mass campaigns are being led by indigenous people fighting to protect their traditional lands from exploitation by the oil and gas industry. Recently, their protests and blockades effectively shut down the country’s main rail lines, forcing the government to negotiate with the Wet’suwet’en people, who are fighting to keep a natural gas pipeline off their land.

In these situations, the worst thing that socialists can do — and unfortunately some radicals do exactly this — is to stand aside, criticizing the real movement because its demands aren’t radical enough or because the protestors have illusions about what’s possible within the existing system. We need to remember Marx’s famous insight that masses of people don’t change their ideas and then change the world — they change their ideas BY changing the world.

Ecosocialists need to be active participants in and builders of the real movement — and as we do that, we must patiently explain the need for radical change, showing that the global environmental crisis is actually a global crisis of capitalism, and permanent solutions will not be possible so long as capital rules the Earth.

Next to my desk, I have Gramsci’s famous aphorism, Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, because for me it defines what the ecosocialist attitude must be in our time. Capitalism is powerful, and we know that disaster is possible, but we cannot surrender to despair. If we fight, we may lose; if we don’t fight, we will lose. A conscious and collective struggle to stop capitalism’s hell-bound train is our only hope for a better world.

Many people are drawing the link between the climate crisis, capitalism and Covid-19 outbreak. Could you describe how, in your opinion, these issues are intimately linked?

Three years ago, the World Health Organization urged public health agencies to prepare for what they called ‘Disease X’ — the probable emergence of a new pathogen that would cause a global epidemic. None of the rich countries responded, they just continued their neoliberal austerity policies, slashing investments in medical research and health care. Even now, when Disease X has arrived, governments are spending more to rescue banks and oil companies than on saving lives.

New zoonotic diseases — viruses, bacteria and parasites that spread from wildlife to domestic animals and humans — are emerging around the world, because capital is bulldozing primary forests, replacing them with profitable monocultures. In the destabilized ecosystems that result, there are ever more opportunities for diseases like Ebola, Zika, Swine Fever, new influenzas, and now Covid-19 to infect nearby communities.

Global warming makes it worse, by allowing (or forcing) pathogens to leave isolated areas where they may have existed, unnoticed, for centuries or longer. Climate change also weakens the immune systems of people and animals, making them more vulnerable to diseases and more likely to experience extreme complications.

In short, capitalism puts profit before people, and that is killing us.

Ian Angus is editor of the online journal Climate & Capitalism, and author of several books, including Facing the Anthropocene and A Redder Shade of Green, both published by Monthly Review Press. He is a founding member of the Global Ecosocialist Network.

Environmental and Climate Justice in North Africa

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ROAPE
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In an account of his environmental activism and research in North Africa, Hamza Hamouchene insists that we cannot discuss the ecological and climate crisis without talking about social and economic justice and tackling national and popular sovereignty on natural resources.

By Hamza Hamouchene

The ecological crisis in North Africa finds its clear expression in acute environmental degradation, land exhaustion and loss of soil fertility, water poverty, over-exploitation of natural resources, pollution and disease, as well as effects of global warming such as desertification, recurrent heat waves, droughts and rising sea levels.[1] Based on my work in environmental and climate justice in North Africa for the last eight years, I believe that we can’t talk about the ecological and climate crisis without discussing social and economic justice and without addressing questions of national and popular sovereignty on natural resources.

In 2013, during my work at a radical NGO called Platform London that focused then on the human rights and environmental abuses of the fossil fuel industry, I was researching British energy and armament interests in Algeria and the UK’s desire to grab more Algerian gas. This research opened a new dimension in my activism and connected me with other environmental struggles around the world, and specifically the role of the fossil fuel industry in the climate crisis. So for some time, I had a specific focus on human generated climate change and I wrote about climate justice issues in North Africa at the time of the World Social Forum in Tunis and the Climate Talks in Paris, COP21 in 2015.  There was no doubt to me that the injustices associated with the climate crisis quintessentially epitomise the capitalist and imperialist exploitation of people and the planet.

When I started conducting fieldwork in the Maghreb countries (Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco) to document certain cases of environmental injustices and how people affected were responding and organising, I realised that the language of ‘climate and environmental justice’ needs to be adapted to the realities on the ground in order to avoid parachuting in of Eurocentric campaigns, discourses and strategies.. In other words, rather than using completely novel and imported concepts such as ‘climate justice’, we need to rethink and situate them more precisely in order to focus on specific issues that directly affect the livelihoods of people in the region ― issues such as water scarcity, drought, industrial pollution, and resource sovereignty. In this respect, the West African revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral was absolutely right when he said: ‘Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.’[2]

There is always an ecological element in the struggles I’ve come across, but that dimension was secondary to more pressing issues of socio-economic rights such as jobs, development of urban and rural infrastructure, the distribution of wealth, more popular inclusion in decision-making processes. Therefore, environmental problems in the Maghreb (and elsewhere) need to be analysed in a comprehensive way with consideration to social justice, entitlements, and fair redistribution.

This important realisation led me to work more specifically on questions of energy democracy and popular sovereignty on energy resources (fossil fuels and renewables) in the Maghreb and place them in a context of (neo)colonial relations, as sovereignty on resources is limited and has been curtailed by the power of authoritarian local elites, the EU and predatory private companies, domestic and foreign.

Throughout my travels in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, I witnessed the material reality of the ‘paradox of abundance’ or as it is also called the ‘resource curse’: poverty, unemployment, toxic waste, flares, dumped poisons, and resource pillaging takes place in areas rich in natural resources. [3] It would be simplistic (and misguided) to purely pin the responsibility of this on corrupt local elites and rent-seeking dictators. The biggest culprit is neo-colonial relationships that continue plundering our countries, mediated by multinationals, trade rules and agreements, the debt system, international institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, etc.[4]

For those who see history as a competition, our backwardness and poverty are merely the result of our failures; we lost, others won. But to quote the Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano: ‘the winners happen to have won thanks to our losing. The history of Africa’s (Latin America and Asia’s too) underdevelopment is an integral part of the history of world capitalism’s development.’

So, for me, we must reframe the environmental issue to take into account relations of capitalist exploitation and imperialist domination of people in the Maghreb. In addition, we must be sensitive to racial hierarchies that maintain environmental destruction and worsen the ecological crisis, whose impacts are felt more by the most vulnerable in the global South. That framing had to grapple with the extractivist (under)development model imposed on these countries since colonial times, a model that furthers their subordinate insertion into the global capitalist economy (on the one hand as a market for the dominant Western economies, and on the other, as a reservoir of cheap labour and natural resources) and entrenches practices of resource plunder and wealth robbery.

Extractivism refers to activities that overexploit natural resources destined particularly for export to world markets. As such, it is not limited to minerals and oil, it extends to productive activities which overexploit land, water and biodiversity, such as agribusiness, intensive forestry, industrial fish farming and mass tourism. It has been unleashed all over the world with the European conquest of the Americas in the 15th century and has been shaped by colonial violence, cruel dehumanisation of the ‘other’ (slavery) and sheer theft of resources. Extractivism in the Maghreband North Africa is not a new phenomenon. As a mode of accumulation and appropriation, it was structured through colonialism in the 19th century to respond to the demands of the metropolitan centres.

The Maghreb region plays a geostrategic role when it comes to the extractive sector, due to its proximity to Europe and the richness of its soil. Algeria is the third largest provider of gas to Europe, while Morocco and Tunisia are very important players in the production of phosphates, which are used as agricultural fertilisers, feeding global agrarian capitalism. Moreover, Tunisia and Morocco export considerable quantities of agricultural produce to Europe. This strategic importance is reflected in the North’s attempts to control these resources through political, military and economic pressure. This is seen in the use of ‘free trade’ deals, such as the ongoing negotiations around the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreements with Tunisia and Morocco. It is also seen in attempts of multinationals to have more control of Algeria’s natural resources through a new hydrocarbon law that they influenced to offer them more incentives and concessions as well as open the door for profitable exploitation of shale and offshore resources. In the case of occupied Western Sahara, extractivism is one aspect of colonial control. As in Libya, it becomes clear that we cannot disentangle the extractivist drive from the global war machinations and the militarist governance of the world as the country is the victim of the violence caused by fossil fuels, and the Western fighter jets and bombs that forage for their abundance.

The creation of sacrifice zones – with sacrificial people – in order to maintain the accumulation of capital mainly in the centres of empire, goes hand in hand with the racial character of capitalism. It is important here to reflect on the mechanisms of dehumanising the other and the power of representing and constructing ‘ideas’ about them in order to entrench structures of domination and  robbery. Edward Said’s Orientalism offers an excellent framework of analysis for the past and the present. What is described in Orientalism as ‘disregarding, essentialising, denuding the humanity’ of another culture, people or geographical region, environmental or otherwise, continues today to be employed to justify violence towards the other and nature, violence in the shape of displacing populations, land and resource grabbing, making people pay for the social and environmental costs of extractivism, bombing, massacring, letting people drown in the Mediterranean and destroying the earth in the name of progress.

It follows that talking about just energy transitions needs to take into account this history and these factors, because how can we plan for a just transition towards renewable energies and sustainable ways of producing our food and materials when our natural resources are being plundered by multinationals and when our land and water resources are taken over by agribusiness and destructive industries?

Surely, we need to fight for popular sovereignty and democratic control over natural resources, energy and food systems as well as over productive capacities and technologies. We need to fight against land and water grabs and we must strive for more transparency against corruption in extractive industries. If our belief that the global ecological crisis is a consequence of the crisis of neoliberal capitalism and productivism, then the solutions we would need to propose must imagine a new world where our relations to nature and amongst ourselves are reconfigured so exploitation of nature and human beings will be brought to an end.

We need a radical break with the vision of capitalist development, a profound rupture with market mechanisms that enclose nature and a decoupling from predatory extractivism. We need to abandon the illusion that we are able to reproduce the economic growth model of industrialised countries. In this vein, it is paramount to continue the tasks of decolonisation and delinking in order to restore our denied humanity.[5] Through resistance to colonial and capitalist logics of appropriation and extraction, new imaginaries and counter-hegemonic alternatives are being born.

Hamza Hamouchene is an Algerian researcher-activist, commentator and a founding member of Algeria Solidarity Campaign (ASC), and Environmental Justice North Africa (EJNA). He recently joined the Transnational Institute (TNI) as their North Africa Programme Coordinator. He previously worked for War on Want, Global Justice Now and Platform London on issues of extractivism, resources, land and food sovereignty as well as climate, environmental, and trade justice. Hamza has written for the Review of African Political Economy and was recipient of the ROAPE Lionel Cliffe Memorial Research Scholarship.

Featured Photograph: A boy holding a placard with a slogan: ‘No to Shale Gas’ during a protest in Ain Salah, Algeria on February 2015 (BBOY LEE)

Notes

[1] El-Zein, A et al. (2014) ‘Health and ecological sustainability in the Arab world: a matter of survival’, The Lancet 383(9915): 458–476. See also Hamouchene, H. and Minio-Paluello, M. (eds.) (2015) The Coming Revolution in North Africa: The Struggle for Climate Justice. London-Tunis-Paris: Platform, Environmental Justice North Africa, Rosa Luxemburg and Ritimo. See also Lelieveld, J et al. (2016) ‘Strongly increasing heat extremes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in the 21st century’, Climatic Change 137(1-2): 245-260.

[2] Amilcar Cabral. Revolution in Guinea, stage 1, London, 1974, pp70-72.

[3] Alberto Acosta. ‘Extractivism and neoextractivism: two sides of the same curse’. In M. Lang & D. Mokrani. (eds).  Beyond Development: Alternative visions from Latin America. 2013. Quito & Amsterdam: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation & Transnational Institute.

[4] Nnimmo Bassey. To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa. 2012. Dakar & Oxford: Pambazuka Press.

[5] Samir Amin. Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World, 1990.  Zed Books and Samir Amin. The Implosion of Capitalism, 2013. Pluto Press.

 

Omar Blondin Diop: Seeking Revolution in Senegal

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ROAPE
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On May 11, 1973, young Senegalese revolutionary philosopher Omar Blondin Diop died in detention under suspicious circumstances. Our understanding of liberation movements in Africa tends to focus on struggles in colonial settings, yet Florian Bobin argues that sixty years after Senegal’s independence, Blondin Diop’s life, work, and legacy help reveal what revolutionary politics look like in a neo-colonial state.

Listen to Omar Blondin Diop’s story here. Read about it in French here. 

By Florian Bobin

In June 2020, a few weeks after the murder of George Floyd, Senegalese graffiti collective Radikal Bomb Shot painted a colossal mural in the capital Dakar in memory of Black liberation fighters from around the world. Alongside renowned pan-Africanist Cheikh Anta Diop and abolitionist Harriet Tubman, Omar Blondin Diop is depicted, cigarette in hand, reading historian Amzat Boukari-Yabara’s Africa Unite! A History of Pan-Africanism. The photograph that inspired this spray-painted portrait dates from 1970 and was captured shortly after his expulsion from France for partaking in the May ’68 protests. But five years later, the philosophy student Omar Blondin Diop was more than a radical dissident – he became a myth. When he died in prison fourteen months into his three-year sentence for “being a threat to national security,” authorities in Senegal claimed he committed suicide. Most had good reason to suspect he was murdered. Ever since, his family has tirelessly demanded justice be done, and artists alongside activists have taken the lead in holding on to his memory.

Omar Blondin Diop’s death cannot be understood as an isolated incident, but as one tragic episode in a long series of tenacious acts of state-led repression in Senegal. Decolonisation in Africa has often been the story of the birth of newly independent states in the 1960s. However, the persistence of foreign interests backed by national governments became a common sight in former French colonies. Well into nominal political independence, burgeoning autocracies largely stifled revolutionary prospects of emancipation from capitalism and imperialism. We don’t often hear of resistance movements in Senegal during Léopold Sédar Senghor’s rule (1960-1980) because his regime successfully marketed the country as “Africa’s democratic success story.” Yet, under the single-party rule of the Progressive Senegalese Union, authorities resorted to brutal methods: intimidating, arresting, imprisoning, torturing, and killing dissidents [1].

Omar Blondin Diop was born in the French colony of Niger in 1946. His father, a medical practitioner, had been transferred from Dakar, the administrative capital of French West-Africa, to a small city near Niamey. He did not hold radical positions, but colonial authorities suspected him of “anti-French sentiment” because of his involvement with trade unionism and support of the socialist French Section of the Workers’ International led by lawyer Lamine Guèye [2]. The metropole monitored what it labeled “anti-French elements” because of their fear of growing anti-colonial movements. Once Blondin Diop’s family was allowed to return to Senegal, he spent the better part of his childhood in Dakar. At the age of 14, he settled in France, where his father enrolled in medical school [3].

For much of the 1960s, Blondin Diop lived in France. He spent most of his secondary education in Paris, where he attended a prestigious teachers’ college and pursued his study of classical European thinkers, from Aristotle and Kant to Hegel and Rousseau. There, he began frequenting leftist circles. This is a time when anti-capitalist movements in Europe drew inspiration from China’s Cultural Revolution and strongly opposed American military aggression in Vietnam. Usually, Africans who pursued activism in France focused on politics from their home countries. Blondin Diop, for his part, had a foot in both worlds. Shortly after hearing about the Senegalese activist, radical filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard selected him to play in the movie “La Chinoise” (1967) [4]. In 1968, the 21-year-old student-professor actively partook in debates organized by far-left groups [5]. Inspired by the writings of Spinoza, Marx, and Fanon [6], he cultivated theoretical eclecticism – in and out of Situationism, Anarchism, Maoism, and Trotskyism, he never exclusively held onto one given ideology [7].

Due to his political activities, Blondin Diop was expelled from France to Senegal in late 1969. Alongside other Senegalese comrades who had studied in Europe, he participated in the Movement of Marxist-Leninist Youth. The grouping later gave birth to the influential anti-imperialist front And Jëf (To Act Together), which would be forced into hiding until the early 1980s. Pushing back formal structures, Blondin Diop promoted artistic performance. He developed the project of “a theater in the streets that will address the concerns and interests of the people,” closely related to Augusto Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed.” Expanding on art’s revolutionary potential, Blondin Diop writes: “Our theater will be a collective and active creation. Before playing in a neighborhood, we shall know its inhabitants, spend time with them, especially the young people. Our theater will go to the places where the population gathers (market, cinema, stadium). It is especially important that we make whatever we can ourselves. Moral conclusion: Better death than slavery” [8].

Independent Senegal was also a neo-colonial space. Senghor had initially opposed immediate independence, advocating instead for progressive autonomy over twenty years [9]. So, when he became President, he regularly called upon France’s support. In 1962, Senghor wrongfully accused his long-time collaborator Mamadou Dia, President of the Senegalese Council, of attempting a coup against him – Dia and his collaborators were later arrested and imprisoned for over ten years [10]. In 1968, when a general strike broke out in Dakar, the police suppressed the movement with the help of French troops. By 1971, Senghor’s embrace of France seemed to reach its peak with the state visit of French President Georges Pompidou, a close friend and former classmate [11]. For over a year, Dakar had been preparing for Pompidou’s 24-hour stay. On the official procession’s main route, authorities rehabilitated roads and buildings, attempting to invisibilise the city’s poverty.

To young radical activists, Senegal’s reception of the French President was an open provocation. A few weeks prior, a group inspired by the American Black Panther Party and the Uruguayan Tupamaros set fire to the French cultural centre in Dakar and the Ministry of Public Works building. During the actual visit, they attempted to charge the presidential motorcade. But they were caught. Among those convicted were two of Blondin Diop’s brothers. He, too, believed in direct action but was not involved in planning this attack. He had returned to Paris a few months earlier, after the lift of his entry ban [12]. Distressed, Blondin Diop decided, with close friends, to leave France to train for armed struggle. Aboard the Orient-Express, they crossed all of Europe by train before arriving in a Syrian camp with Fedayeen Palestinian fighters and Eritrean guerilleros. Their plan was to kidnap the French ambassador to Senegal in exchange of their imprisoned comrades [13].

Two months into military training, Blondin Diop and his comrades left the desert for the city. They were hoping to garner support from the Black Panther Party, which had briefly opened an international chapter in Algiers. A split within the movement, however, forced them to reconsider. After swinging by Conakry, they moved to Bamako where part of Blondin Diop’s family lived. From there, they reorganized. In late November 1971, the police arrested the group days before President Senghor’s first state visit to Mali in over a decade. Under the control of the infamous Director of National Security Tiékoro Bagayoko, intelligence services had been monitoring them for months. In Blondin Diop’s pocket, they found a letter mentioning the group’s plan to free their imprisoned friends. Extradited to Senegal, he was sentenced to three years in prison. For the more significant part of their days at Gorée, detainees were not allowed to leave their cells. To minimize interaction, experience of daylight was restricted – half an hour in the morning, another half hour in the afternoon.

Omar Blondin Diop was reported dead on May 11, 1973. He was 26 years old. The news came as a bombshell. Hundreds of young people stormed the streets and graffitied the capital’s walls: “Senghor, assassin; They are killing your children, wake up; Assassins, Blondin will live on.” From the very beginning, the Senegalese state covered up the crime. Going against official orders, the investigating judge started indicting two suspects – he had discovered in the prison’s registry that Blondin Diop had fainted days before the announcement of his death, and the penitentiary administration had done nothing about it. Before the judge had time to arrest a third suspect, authorities replaced him and closed the case [14]. Every May 11 until the 1990s, armed forces would surround Blondin Diop’s grave to prevent any form of public commemoration.

For decades, Omar Blondin Diop has been a source of inspiration for activists and artists in Senegal, and elsewhere [15]. In recent years, exhibitions, paintings, and movies have revisited his story – one which sadly resonates with contemporary politics. The authoritarian methods deployed by Senegal’s current administration illustrate how impunity feeds off of the past. President Macky Sall’s regime has repeatedly sought to suppress freedom of demonstration, embezzle public funds, and abuse of its authority. So long as governmental accountability serves no other purpose than an attractive concept to international donors, practices from the past are bound to live on. In Senegal today, as exemplified by the state-sponsored repression of the nationwide protests in March 2021, people are still imprisoned for demonstrating; activists like Guy Marius Sagna are time and again intimidated, arrested, and unlawfully detained. In this context, authorities have unsurprisingly refused to reopen Omar Blondin Diop’s case. Nonetheless, as his family’s saying goes, “No matter how long the night is, the sun always rises.”

Florian Bobin is a researcher in History who studies 20th century liberation struggles and state violence in Senegal. This article is by no means a finality, but one contribution within a much larger biographical research project. It has been made possible thanks to the precious time and resources of Omar Blondin Diop’s family members, friends, and acquaintances, as well as activists and researchers. Sincerest acknowledgments to: Dialo Diop, Cheikh Hamala Diop, Alioune Sall ‘Paloma’, Ousmane Blondin Diop, Pape Konare Niang ‘Niangus’, Alymana Bathily, Jean-Claude Lambert, Omar Blondin Diop Jr, Mareme Blondin Diop, Khaly Moustapha Leye, Antoine Lefébure, Gilbert Vaudey, Bertrand Gallet, Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, Marc-Vincent Howlett, Patrick Talbot, Roland Colin, Aziz Salmone Fall, Ndongo Samba Sylla, Karim Ndiaye, Marie-Angélique Savané, Pape Touty Sow, Amadou Diagne ‘Vieux’, Ibez Diagne, Mansour Kebe, Ousmane Ndongo, Alioune Diop, Papalioune Dieng, Ndèye Fatou Kane, Kibili Demba Cissokho, Bara Diokhane, Barka Ba, Majaw Njaay, Khouma Gueye, Maky Sylla, Alhassane Diop, Hugues Segla, Fatimata Diallo Ba, Khalil Diallo, Awa Mbengue, Vincent Meessen, Pascal Bianchini, Françoise Blum, Martin Mourre, Omar Gueye, Armelle Mabon, Christelle Lamy, Woppa Diallo, Yannek Simalla, Leo Zeilig, David Morton, Tristan Bobin, Njoki Mbũrũ, Njambanene Koffi.

Featured Photograph: Vincent Meessen, Quincunx, 2018. Detail from a screenprint series depicting Omar Blondin Diop reading the 12th issue of Internationale situationniste (1969), Dakar, circa 1970. Original photo courtesy of Bouba Diallo.

Featured Map: Florian Bobin, Tristan Bobin, Original map for “Omar Blondin Diop: Seeking Revolution in Senegal,” Review of African Political Economy, 2020.

References

[1] Research on revolutionary politics in Senegal under Léopold Sédar Senghor’s rule is still underway. Over the past decade, a significant number of works have deepened our understanding of the period. As follows, a list of major ones: Ibrahima Wane, Chanson populaire et conscience politique au Sénégal. L’art de penser la nation (Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, 2013); Roland Colin, Sénégal notre pirogue : au soleil de la liberté (Présence Africaine, 2007); Alassane Diagne, Momsarew ou le pari de l’indépendance (2014); Pascal Bianchini, « The 1968 years: revolutionary politics in Senegal » (Review of African Political Economy, 2019), « 1968 au Sénégal : un héritage politique en perspective » (Canadian Journal of African Studies, 2021) & « Les paradoxes du Parti africain de l’indépendance (PAI) au Sénégal autour de la décennie 1960 » (2016); Sadio Camara, L’épopée du Parti Africain de l’Indépendance au Sénégal (1957-1980) (L’Harmattan, 2013); Moctar Fofana Niang, Trajectoire et documents du Parti Africain de l’Indépendance (P.A.I.) au Sénégal (Les Éditions de la Brousse, 2015); Ousmane William Mbaye, Président Dia (2012); Mouhamadou Moustapha Sow, « Le traitement informationnel des évènements de décembre 1962 à Dakar » (Revue d’Histoire Contemporaine de l’Afrique, 2021); Omar Gueye, Mai 1968 au Sénégal, Senghor face au mouvement syndical (Éditions Karthala, 2017); Abdoulaye Bathily, Mai 68 à Dakar ou la révolte universitaire et la démocratie. Le Sénégal cinquante ans après (L’Harmattan, 2018); Françoise Blum, Révolutions africaines : Congo, Sénégal, Madagascar, années 1960-1970 (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014) & « Sénégal 1968 : révolte étudiante et grève générale » (Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 2012); Bocar Niang and Pascal Scallon-Chouinard, « ‘Mai 68’ au Sénégal et les médias : une mémoire en questions » (Le Temps des médias, 2016); Yannek Simalla, Sénégal contestataire (2017-2020); Amadou Kah, De la lutte des classes à la bataille des places : le destin tragique de la gauche sénégalaise (L’Harmattan, 2016).

[2] This information was provided by Dialo Diop (brother of Omar Blondin Diop) in conversation with Cases Rebelles (9 May, 2018), and Omar in Memoriam (11 May, 2018).

[3] This information was provided by Cheikh Hamala Diop (brother of Omar Blondin Diop) in conversation with Florian Bobin (12 July, 2018 & 4 July, 2019).

[4] Actress and author Anne Wiazemsky describes Blondin Diop’s encounter with Jean-Luc Godard, her partner at the time, in her novel Une année studieuse (Gallimard, 2012, pp. 157-158). Upon learning that the filmmaker was looking for ‘a Marxist-Leninist student,’ her friend Antoine Gallimard suggested casting Blondin Diop, a close companion of his. Charmed by the Senegalese activist, Godard later selected him to play Comrade X—his ‘own role’—in the film La Chinoise (1967).

[5] Historian Michelle Zancarini-Fournel highlights Blondin Diop’s role in student mobilizing in 1968 (they had crossed paths a few times) in her piece ‘En souvenir d’Omar’ for the collective book Étudiants africains en mouvement : contribution à une histoire des années 1968 (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2017, pp. 11-12). ‘He probably didn’t go much to class that year, but he was at all the debates organized by far-left political groups,’ she writes.

[6] This information was provided by Alymana Bathily (a close friend of Omar Blondin Diop) in conversation with Florian Bobin (9 July, 2019).

[7] Alioune Sall ‘Paloma’ (a close friend of Omar Blondin Diop) insists on the necessity of understanding Blondin Diop as a complex, multi-faceted being, in his testimony for the 40th anniversary of his friend’s death (10 May, 2013).

[8] Artist Vincent Meessen published Blondin Diop’s ‘Urban Theater Project’ (circa 1970) in his artist book The Other Country (Sternberg Press, 2018, pp. 38-39).

[9] This information was provided by Roland Colin (chief of staff for President of the Senegalese Council Mamadou Dia, 1957-1962) in conversation with Étienne Smith and Thomas Perrot for Afrique contemporaine (2010, p. 118).

[10] Since Senegal’s independence in 1960, President of the Council Mamadou Dia had been increasingly calling for decentralizing public administration and empowering peasant communities. Towards the end of 1962, tension mounted within the ruling party (Progressive Senegalese Union), between sympathizers to Senghor and Dia. Among the former, some decided to table a vote of no confidence against Dia’s government. At the time, every decision went through the party first, provided that it was the only recognized political force. Dia opposed a motion he deemed illegitimate and Senghor accused him of ‘attempting a coup against him.’ On December 18, 1962, Senghor ordered the arrest of Dia, alongside ministers Valdiodio N’diaye, Ibrahima Sarr, Joseph Mbaye, and Alioune Tall. They were incarcerated in the arid region of Kedougou until 1974. Mansour Bouna Ndiaye (a young official within the ruling party in 1962) and Roland Colin (chief of staff for Mamadou Dia, 1957-1962) offer two thorough first-hand accounts of the ‘December 1962 crisis’ in their memoirs Panorama politique du Sénégal ou Les mémoires d’un enfant du siècle (Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1986, pp. 136-154) and Sénégal notre pirogue : au soleil de la liberté (Présence africaine, 2007, pp. 253-293). Colin also testified in Archives d’Afrique (Radio France Internationale, 2019).

[11] Léopold Sédar Senghor and Georges Pompidou met in 1928 at the prestigious secondary school lycée Louis-le-Grand. Maintaining a strong friendship throughout the years, they later collaborated politically, practically non-stop, between 1962 and 1974. While Senghor was Senegal’s President (1960-1980), Pompidou became France’s Prime Minister (1962-1968) and President (1969-1974). When Pompidou visited Dakar in February 1971, Senghor declared on the airport apron: ‘The Senegalese people feel particularly honored to receive the President of the French Republic. […] Because the French-Senegalese friendship dates back to nearly three centuries. […] I am pleased to host in my country an old classmate from high school, and a friend.’

[12] Senegalese authorities prided at President Senghor’s involvement in the reversal of Blondin Diop’s ban from the French territory (The White Book on the Suicide of Oumar Blondin Diop, Republic of Senegal, 1973, pp. 14-15). Historians Françoise Blum and Martin Mourre expose his possible motivations in their article Omar Blondin Diop : d’un monde l’autre (Centre d’histoire sociale des mondes contemporains, 2019): “Police sources explain this intervention by Senghor’s wish to rid Senegal of the very active Omar Blondin. He would have preferred knowing he was in France. For our part, we instead think that Senghor was concerned that the student pursued the brilliant studies he had started to become one of the flagships of Senegal’s future elite.” Evidently, Senghor saw himself in Blondin Diop: both were Senegalese, French-educated, and classically trained in the humanities. Perhaps, he believed that his younger compatriot could pursue his political agenda. But Blondin Diop famously disapproved of it in the strongest terms. By the late 1960s, the authorities had been closely monitoring him; it seemed apparent that they preferred to have him out of the country.

[13] This information was provided by Alioune Sall ‘Paloma’ in conversation with Françoise Blum and Martin Mourre for Maitron (8 May, 2019).

[14] This information was provided by Moustapha Touré (chief investigating judge of the High Court of Dakar, initially in charge of Blondin Diop’s case) in conversation with La Gazette (21 December, 2009). In this interview, he recounts the state’s efforts to intimidate and coerce him during his investigation: “I had made the decision to indict the prison officers who had custody of detainee Oumar Blondin Diop. There were three of them, but I had only charged two of them, waiting for the third. At the time, we were in the absolute reign of a single party. The order that was in place left little room for maneuver for senior officials like us. And yet, I had responsibly and fairly fulfilled my duty as a judge, where others would have chosen to do something else, by obeying orders emanating from the political authority. I naturally refused and came to the decision to indict, because I was convinced, against the advice of my department and the state, that the detainee could not have committed suicide. This was impossible under the conditions in which the autopsy report sought to accredit the thesis of suicide. I was reinforced in such a belief by the prison logbook [registry]. It carried edifying mentions in this regard. This logbook did indeed mention that detainee Oumar Blondin Diop had fainted during the week in which he was pronounced dead by suicide. Nowhere was a medical examination mentioned in this same logbook, in order to determine the causes of the recorded fainting. The circumstances revealed credible and consistent evidence, tending to prove that the suicide, officially mentioned to justify the death of Oumar Blondin Diop, was in reality made up. So, I decided, in the secrecy of my investigative office, to indict. After this indictment, deemed bold at the time, I was immediately transferred. Ten days later, I was promoted to president of the Court of Dakar and adviser to the Court of Appeal. Let’s say that at the time, it was like a kind of a promotion-sanction which tried to hide its true nature.”

[15] Accounts of Blondin Diop often focus solely on his activism, and not so much on his art. When he became a martyr figure, deeply traumatized activists, as well as artists, held on to his memory. Before his assassination, he had nurtured strong connections with artists who would later form the Laboratoire Agit’Art. In 2019, artist Mbaye Diop painted a mural of its members (Issa Samb ‘Joe Ouakam’, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Bouna Medoune Seye, Mame Less Dia, Mamadou Diop Traoré) on the wall of the Ngor Yaadikon Complex, and included Blondin Diop in it. As follows, a list of major pieces influenced by Omar Blondin Diop: Portrait d’Omar Diop (Issa Samb ‘Joe Ouakam’, 1974); Degluleen mbokk yi (El Hadji Momar Sambe ‘Mor Faama’, 1975); Omar Blondin Diop (Heldon, 1975); Lettre de Dakar (Libre Association d’Individus Libres, 1978); Afrik (Seydina Insa Wade, 1978) ; Le Temps de Tamango (Boubacar Boris Diop, 1981); Le lait s’était caillé trop tôt (Issa Samb ‘Joe Ouakam’, 1983); Omar 4.0. Hommage à Omar Blondin Diop (Bara Diokhane, 2013); Le malheur de vivre (Ndèye Fatou Kane, 2014); Congrès de Minuit (Laboratoire Agit’Art, 2016); L’enterrement d’Omar Blondin Diop (Issa Samb ‘Joe Ouakam’, non-daté); Omar B.D. (Issa Samb ‘Joe Ouakam’, 2017); Omar in May (Vincent Meessen, 2018); La Cloche des Fourmis (Laboratoire Agit’Art, 2018); Hommage à Omar Blondin Diop (Lebergedeliledengor, 2019); Omar Blondin Diop, le laborantin (Mbaye Diop, 2019); Juste un Mouvement (Vincent Meessen, 2018-2021);  The Wall the ñuulest (RBS Crew, 2020); Omar Blondin Diop pour le Frapp (Chics, 2021); URICA (RBS Crew, 2021).

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For 50 years, ROAPE has brought our readers pathbreaking analysis on radical African political economy in our quarterly review, and for more than ten years on our website. Subscriptions and donations are essential to keeping our review and website alive.
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We use cookies to collect and analyse information on site performance and usage, and to enhance and customise content. By clicking into any content on this site, you agree to allow cookies to be placed. To find out more see our
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