The Internationalisation of Zambia’s Liberation Struggle

October 24, 2019

On the anniversary of Zambia’s independence, Robert Power examines the birth of the Zambian nation by shedding light on the connections that existed between political activists and anti-colonial organisations and governments that proved so vital in winning the liberation struggle in 1964. Power writes about the astonishing transnational connections and solidarity that proliferated from the early 1950s.

By Robert Power

When reflecting on the achievements of liberation movements in Africa, it is all too easy to regard their achievements as a product of the context in which they were operating. The notion of ‘pushing at an open door’, which had ostensibly been opened by the United States, essentially leaves the lingering impression that political activism took place within a binary framework: mobilisation and activism ‘on the ground’ and projection of popular support to the colonial metropole in order to expedite independence. Whilst more recent scholarship, and I allude to Andrew Cohen’s study, ‘The Failed Experiment of the Central African Federation’, have endeavoured to shift the focus from power politics, few studies have examined the extent to which liberation movements themselves helped feed into, and in some cases even mould, the international political dispensation then materialising. Closer scrutiny of evidence, however, reveals a complex and intricate network of transnational connections proliferating in the early 1950s that exercised a decisive, and lasting, impact upon African politics.

Origins of UNIP’s ‘International’ Campaign

In 2006, Kenneth Kaunda, former leader of the United National Independence Party commented that he owed the achievement of Zambian independence not only to the Zambian ‘people’, but to ‘our supporters elsewhere’. This was an interesting remark, especially given KK’s centrality to the liberation struggle. So, who, then, were these supporters ‘elsewhere’ and what role did they play in the Zambian liberation struggle?

The political activism of the Zambian African National Congress did much to raise attention to the discriminatory racial policies of the British Colonial Office in Central Africa in the early 1950s. Whilst the imposition of the Central African Federation couldn’t be prevented, the campaign against the scheme which placed African advancement in the hands of white settlers resulted in the acquiring of support from influential anti-colonial campaign groups that were to prove vital in establishing the ANC as a political party. It also marked a shift away from more traditional campaign methods – isolated, regional, protests and negotiation – in favour of large-scale boycotts, non-cooperation, and, crucially, cultivation of powerful external forces likely to exercise significant influence on the situation materialising in Northern Rhodesia.

The Internationalisation of the Anti-Federation Struggle

Coming soon after an acrimonious split in the ANC in October, the All-African Peoples Conference, held in Accra in December 1958, marked a significant turning point for political activists. Whilst marginalising ANC President Harry Nkumbula, holding him responsible for the split, Kenneth Kaunda’s newly formed Zambia African National Congress emerged from the Conference as the preferred interlocutor of Northern Rhodesia’s problems. It was perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that following the banning of ZANC in March 1959, it was only by virtue of the moral, financial, and practical assistance given to former ZANC activists by external supporters that momentum was sustained behind the anti-Federation struggle. Soon after the formation of the United National Independence Party from the embers of ZANC in October of the same year, support from British anti-colonialists provided UNIP leaders, most of whom were former ZANC luminaries, a decisive, early, boost. Not only did it serve to legitimise UNIP’s ‘national’ programme, but it proved that the struggle against colonialism and racial discrimination could not be won alone.

UNIP’s international campaign began initially with a view to replicating party organisation in Northern Rhodesia abroad. Appointed by his brother, Sikota, as UNIP’s representative in the United States in early 1960, Arthur Wina emphasised the need to establish a ‘solid administrative entity’ overseas with a view to uniting all Zambians in the struggle for independence.^[1] UNIP embarked upon a diplomatic offensive in 1961, despatching senior party representatives to establish party branches in key locations.^[2] The aim was to ‘draw the widest attention’ to the plight of Africans in Northern Rhodesia in the hope that foreign governments might lend financial support and diplomatic assistance to enable UNIP to fight federation using democratic means.^[3]

Much can be said of the extent of the sophistication and strategy of the campaign upon studying the documentary evidence (which can now be viewed online as part of the British Library Endangered Archives Project). The party’s approach differed according to the political sensibilities of the countries in which representatives operated. By appealing to the American government, and American anticolonial organisations, for instance, UNIP went to great lengths to temper its appeal, emphasising the ‘sensible’ credentials of the party.^[4] When Kaunda petitioned the US government to intervene during a spate of riots that broke out in the summer of 1961, Kaunda deliberately played up UNIP’s commitment to democratic credentials, imploring, in the name of God and humanity, to raise the matter at the UN and the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan directly. Such an approach stood in stark contrast to requests made for assistance during the Belgrade Conference in September.

Impact of UNIP’s International Campaign on the Struggle for Independence

By 1962, UNIP had largely succeeded in achieving the goals set out by party leaders. Not only had the party improved its economic position, giving leaders great confidence in claiming for themselves the national dispensation then materialising, but the activities of party representatives helped forge links with powerful pan-African and international figures. These networks provided UNIP with an enhanced international status, giving greater exposure to the liberation struggle. Links with Julius Nyerere’s Tanganyikan African National Union, for instance, proved especially important. Not only did TANU provide UNIP with resources to assist UNIP’s mobilisation campaign at home, but Nyerere’s prominence in pan-African affairs helped win for Kaunda the Presidency of the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East, Central, and Southern Africa in February 1962. It was arguably this status that gained Kaunda an audience with the UN Committee of Seventeen in New York in April. There, he was able to draw attention to the protracted battle for greater constitutional rights in Northern Rhodesia.^[5] Representatives from Tanganyika, India, Ethiopia, Tunisia, and the USSR were unanimous in their support for UNIP after Kaunda’s speech. Just four weeks later, the UN Special Committee on Colonialism approved a motion in favour of calling for immediate independence in Northern Rhodesia by 12 votes to 4.^[6]

The focus of the UN spotlight on the Federation gave rise to increased American interest. Having initially remained ambivalent to criticism of Britain’s policy in the region, by October 1962 the American government appeared to soften its attitude towards the idea of accelerated African advancement that would eventuate in independence.^[7] The change in position undoubtedly owed much to the anti-colonial climate prevailing in the UN, but whether such changes would have occurred without UNIP’s initiatives is debatable. Having paid close scrutiny to publicising Northern Rhodesia’s problems, and having visited the US several times between 1960 and 1963, Kaunda successfully created for himself and his party the image of a popular, and moderate, politician with whom the West could cooperate.^[8] A story in Life magazine in May 1960 portrayed him as a patriotic practitioner of democracy likely to become the first leader of an independent Zambia.^[9] This endorsement from Life publisher Henry Luce, a strident anti-communist, provided instant credibility for Kaunda. It was this image that won him influential allies who were then able to lobby his cause in the highest of political circles. Whilst anxieties pertaining to UNIP’s ‘lack of experience’ were not altogether dispelled, UNIP’s moderation and progressiveness was a source of optimism to sceptics.

Conclusion

The intention here has been to provide a brief snapshot of what became an expansive and complex network of connections that a small number of progressive, internationalist, UNIP political activists were able to cultivate within a short space of time. By placing the struggle against racial prejudice and federation within such a context, it is suggested that much can be learned from the lessons of the past. Futures can indeed be won, and lost, through an approach which transcends the narrow parameters of the nation state. For UNIP, winning support of the UN and influential lobby groups in the US played a key role in increasing the party’s credibility, allowing UNIP leaders to frame the anti-federation struggle in an exclusively UNIP context. In turn, the support received not only improved UNIP’s domestic position, in practical and moral terms, but it also helped the party apply yet more pressure upon the British to concede to UNIP’s secession demands. For the party’s main rival, Harry Nkumbula’s ANC, it was very much a case of a future ‘lost’. Whilst the party continued to function domestically, its international standing reduced the capacity of the party to win support elsewhere. Subsequently, its ability to function on a national level was severely compromised. Attracting international support was not simply a matter of affecting decidedly international, in this case anti-colonial, considerations, it directly impacted upon the fortunes and future of the Zambian people too.

Rob Power is a historian specialising in the history of modern Africa, dealing in particular with the history of decolonisation and African liberation movements. He teaches at the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Featured Photograph: President Kennedy greeting Kenneth Kaunda (April 15, 1961).

Notes

[1] Wina quote taken from Mulford, D., Zambia, p.144

[2] Makasa, K., Zambia’s March to Political Freedom (Nairobi, 1985), p.136. Arthur Wina continued his activities in Washington, Mainza Chona was sent to assist the UNIP London Committee, Rueben Kamanga was sent to Cairo, Mulemba to Accra and Makasa to Dar-es-Salaam.

[3] BL, EAP 121, UNIP 6/7/2, Makasa to Ambassador of Italy, 9 Jan., 1962. ‘Our objective’, Makasa wrote to Italy’s ambassador in Dar-es-Salaam, ‘is to make sure that people do not forget our plight’.

[4] Statement by Kenneth Kaunda, President, United National Independence Party of Northern Rhodesia, delivered New York, 11 Apr., 1961, http://www.aluka.org/documents, accessed 27 Oct., 2018.

[5] SOAS, MCF Box 52, COU 96(a), Northern Rhodesia Africa News Survey, published by UNIP international and Publicity Bureau, vol. 11, No. 3, Jun., 1962

[6] Cohen, A., ‘A difficult, tedious and unwanted task’, Representing the Central African Federation in the United Nations, 1960-1963’, p.116. Voting in favour were Cambodia, Ethiopia, India, Mali, Poland, Syria, Tanganyika, Tunisia, the USSR, Venezuela, and Yugoslavia. Opposing were Australia, Italy, Britain, and the US.

[7] FRUS, 1961-63, vol.21, 493-5

[8] NA, CO 1015/2247, Colonial Attaché in US to Macleod, 25 Aug., 1961

[9] Life, ‘Rising African Leader Takes Look at the US,’ 30 May 1960, pp.89–92.

Gone but not Forgotten: The Consequences of Forty Years in Power

ROAPE

October 22, 2019

David Moore reflects on Robert Mugabe’s life, politics and ZANU-PF. He sees Mugabe’s rule containing a blend of stultified Marxism and liberalism – a kind of ‘market Stalinism’. Discussing the coup that toppled Mugabe in 2017, Moore sees continuity in Zimbabwe’s liberation history. He asks, to what extent is this constant history of near-coups and coup-paranoia wired into the very structures of Zimbabwe’s political sociology and culture of class and state formation?

By David Moore

The outpouring of reflections and commentary on Robert Mugabe’s death – it even made the New Yorker, which commented on the continent-wide implications for ‘democracy’– nearly two years after his presidency of Zimbabwe passed away,[1] has been mixed but dominated by predictable statesmen-like glorification. This author’s catalogue of condemnation may have been too severe, given Zimbabwe’s many diplomatic and cultural proscriptions regarding discussing the dead. Perhaps South Africa’s past-president Thabo Mbeki’s was most hagiographical, thus rendering severe criticism even from within the ‘triple alliance’ that is purported to govern that country.

The most remarkable aspect of Thabo Mbeki’s praise-singing was his forgetfulness: just eighteen years ago, as Zimbabwe’s never-ending crisis was beginning to hit hard, he wrote a 26-page screed for the ANC’s consumption that condemned Mugabe roundly.[2] For a ‘scientific-socialist’ schooled in the dialectics between Sussex and Leningrad, there can be no insult greater than accusing one’s political peers of being reduced to reliance on the ‘lumpen-proletariat’ for political support. But for the multi-staged attempt at the National Democratic Revolution and how Zimbabwe’s revolutionary party had failed it, one might have been reading an International Monetary Fund/World Bank guide to good economic governance. Furthermore, it ended on a note praising the bracing effect of free and fair elections, around the corner in 2002.

The advisory note (did anyone with power in Zimbabwe read it?) may have been a result of Mbeki’s concurrent efforts to bring Nepad (a new economic partnership for African development replete with a begging bowl for US$64 billion, seemingly dormant now) and an immersion in neo-liberal political economy for the continent as well as at home. It may also serve as an example of what happens when a certain form of stultified Marxism blends with an equally blunt liberal terrain (Boris Kagarlitsky called this ‘market Stalinism’). No matter: it did not last long. When the 2002 presidential elections took place amidst lots of violence and underhandedness, Mbeki’s government did its best to hide its own observations teams’ analysis. It took a dozen years for the courts to release the report of Mbeki’s second team, sent to Zimbabwe to investigate his first observer groups’ regime-friendly findings. The Khampepe Report confirmed that the elections were far from free or fair.

Shortly before the court’s release of the news about the South African analysis of the 2002 elections, Mbeki was back on the cultural imperialism track. Perhaps in 2001 he had been subjected to the syndrome in which ‘we, as Africans, don’t know enough about ourselves and continue to be enslaved by a narrative about ourselves told by other people’ (in his case, two ‘foreign ideologies’ stirred into an unpalatable NDR stew). Zimbabweans, he said, were on ‘the frontline in terms of defending our right as Africans to determine our future, and they are paying a price for that’. By 2018, however, Mbeki was turning to the NDR once again to bemoan the ANC’s promotion of land expropriation without compensation: that, he wrote, recalled ‘the circumstances of the formation of the PAC in 1959!’, and ‘in reality … the ANC accepted the leadership of the EFF!’ (The Economic Freedom Fighters in South Africa veer perilously close to fascism at times: perhaps the label ‘authoritarian populism’ is more appropriate and nuanced.[3]) When discussing other African ‘settler-colonial’ countries with different ways of dealing with relocated Europeans he included Algeria, but not Zimbabwe.[4] His eulogies for Mugabe now seem to put him in the EFF camp.

The celebratory notions of ‘international’ solidarity between powerful friends soon washes up on the rocks of an equally denuded notion of cultural integrity and sovereignty. No wonder Mugabe had friends all over: when he said to Tony Blair (and his ‘gay gangsters’) that he should keep his England and Mugabe would keep his Zimbabwe, he encapsulated a moment of feudalism transfused with an anti-imperialism born more of psychological insult than political economy clarity. That resonated with his erstwhile comrades across the continent and indeed what used to be called the ‘third world’.

Toward the ‘real story’

However, this is not what intrigued me about Mugabe’s departure from this mortal coil. I happened to be working in fits and starts on a book about the November 2017 ‘coup’, during which one faction – deeply embedded in ZANU (PF)’s ‘securocrats’ – forced him to retire. The group’s premise was that the faction surrounding him and his possibly presidentially bound partner, Grace, were criminals who had to be removed from his environs. When they were gone, though, the ‘Lacoste’ faction (its leader, now President Emmerson Mnangagwa) decided to push Mugabe all the way out. Thus their dominance of the party and its state (including, of course, recalcitrant elements in the sections of the security forces – especially the ‘civilian’ intelligence apparatuses and the police – that found themselves on the losing side of the ‘militarily assisted transition’), would be ensured.

What struck me at the moment of the coup was that it was nothing new: it fit into a long history of violence-laden struggles for power within Zimbabwe’s nationalist movements and parties – especially the party that still rules today.

At its starting point in 1963, when what is now ZANU (PF) (Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front) split off from the ‘founding nationalists’ in ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People’s Union), there were many bricks and stones thrown and fires lit at the homes of politicians of any stripe. Even before that in the trade unions, those on the wrong side of the East-West divide were labelled ‘sell-outs’ promiscuously and beaten to the verge of death.

In the seventies during the liberation struggle, generational and ideological challenges to the ‘old guard’ leaders were quelled with arms by the leaders of status quo nationalism seeing any – especially intellectual – challenge as tantamount to treasonous coups sponsored by imperialists (or less openly, attributed to ethnically based power grabs). The ‘imperialists’ – a catchall phrase including ‘social imperialists’, the Maoist-inspired label for those from the Soviet Union who might have thought they were just the peoples’ representatives abroad, as well as the Rhodesians, the British, the Israelis, and the Chinese too, for the ZAPU side of the fence – took on a lot of blame for struggles with indigenous roots. Archival digging and interviews have unearthed much evidence about these moments.[5]

The eighties were marred by the genocidal massacres of Gukurahundi, which also carried the carnage of the Cold War with it. Questions about the degree to which Zimbabwe’s new rulers utilised the ‘west’s’ infatuation with Soviet influence and fears that a ZAPU-ANC (South Africa’s African National Congress, seen by many Cold Warriors as a USSR proxy) are still asked, not least by those haunted by the many thousands of deaths in Matabeleland and the Midlands for which ZANU (PF) is responsible.[6]

As the structural adjusted 1990s took over Zimbabwe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the invasion of liberal democracy (perhaps ironically, on the back of increasing trade union struggles) amidst economic decline and the rise of the ‘war veterans’ struck fear into the ruling party: again, the Movement for Democratic Change became the puppets of the British Labour Party á la Tony ‘Bliar’: student leaders (still, often, adherents to the International Socialist Organisation) were beaten while MDC supporters were tortured and killed by the hundreds.

The intra-party ‘coup’ (the use of that nomenclature is contested, because the soldiers kept quite close to constitutional lines, which in any case were bound to be interpreted loosely by hand-picked courts and international actors happy to see Mugabe go by any means necessary) was only the clearest example of a syndrome that had been simmering to a boil since at least 2014 when one vice-president Joice Mujuru, was chased out of office chillingly, just three years since her powerful husband Solomon had been killed and burnt, or vice versa, ‘probably.’ It was a petit coup, but the number of soldiers involved indicates immediate readiness had something gone wrong. Furthermore, ‘official’ estimates of the dead (one or two Israeli ‘security guards’ at a cabinet minister’s home) are probably low.

The recent history of Zimbabwe’s ‘post-Mugabe-and-MAT (military-assisted-transitions) moment’ is one of escalated continuity in this regard. Just after the mid-2018 elections, six protestors and innocent bystanders were killed in political demonstrations about slow ballot counting.[7] January 2019, seventeen murders and the same number of rapes, plus hundreds of beatings, during demonstrations that went awry after an unprecedented fuel price rise. ZANU (PF) has taken renewed delight in pointing blame towards foreign NGOs and their proxies: in advance of widely anticipated demonstrations in mid-July, the state newspapers announced the miraculous discovery of a nefarious Serbian-led group of regime-change puppets. On the return of some of them from meetings in the Maldives, seven were arrested and charged with treason. This will be déjà vu for those who were student activists in the early 2000s.[8]

The questions needing answers are: first, to what extent is this constant history of near-coups and/or coup-paranoia wired into the very structures of Zimbabwe’s political sociology and culture of class and state formation?; second, did Mugabe, in a somewhat, but never truly consolidated Bonapartist mode, hasten or slow down these tendencies?; and third, will these tendencies – exacerbated by a stalemated battle between corrupt cabals and weak neo-liberals (further enfeebled by the authoritarian political blunders that have evaporated the international – especially British – welcoming the coup initially), and flowing down to the frustrated and very poor lower ranks among the soldiers – lead to ZANU (PF)’s and thus Zimbabwe’s implosion?

Mugabe managed all these contradictions until he was too old to hold on to them. Aprés Mugabe: les deluges?

David Moore has been Professor of Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg since mid-2008. His PhD is from York University in Toronto. He has taught in Canada, Australia, and at the University of KwaZulu-Natal before moving to Johannesburg.

Featured Photograph: Romanian communist party leader Nicolae Ceausescu receiving Robert Mugabe (21 December, 1976).

Notes

[1] Moore, ‘A Very Zimbabwean Coup: November 13-24 2017 – Context, Event, Prospects’, Transformation, 97 (2018).

[2] Thabo Mbeki, ‘How Will Zimbabwe Defeat Its Enemies? A Discussion Document,’ African National Congress mimeograph, July 10, 2001, republished with some changes in ‘The Mbeki-Mugabe Papers: A Discussion Document’, (not for publication or distribution) August 2001’, New Agenda, 2nd Quarter (2008). The paper is discussed in my ‘A Decade of Disquieting Diplomacy: South Africa, Zimbabwe and the Ideology of the National Democratic Revolution, 1999-2009’, History Compass, 8, 8 (2010), 752-67.

[3] Moore, ‘Review Article: Articulations, More Articulations … and Accumulation’, Transformation, 99, 2019) 81-112, Accessed October 4 2019 at https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/198.

[4] Moore ‘Two perspectives on Zimbabwe’s National Democratic Revolution: Thabo Mbeki and Wilfred Mhanda’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 30:1, 119-138, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2012.639655 and Wilfred Mhanda aka ‘Dzino’ Machingura’s. “A Treatise on Zimbabwe’s Liberation Struggle: Some Theoretical Problems.” 1978 https://roape.net/2016/03/29/a-prison-notebook-mhandas-treatise-on-zimbabwes-liberation, written during imprisonment in Mozambique, by the Mozambican state at the behest of Robert Mugabe. Also see Wilfred Mhanda, 2011. Dzino: Memories of a Freedom Fighter. Harare: Weaver Press.

[5] Moore, ‘Lionel Cliffe and the Generation(s) of Zimbabwean Politics’, Review of African Political Economy, Special Lionel Cliffe Memorial Edition, 43, S1, (September 2016), 167–186, Accessed October 4 2019. At DOI:

10.1080/03056244.2016.1214116..

[6] Bulawayo News. 2019. ‘Zanu-PF Refused to Shelter Exiled ANC Cadres’. March 31 2019. Accessed August 8, 2019. At https://bulawayo24.com/index-id-news-sc-national-byo-159533.html.

[7] Moore, ‘Will Zimbabwe’s messy election get messier – or will a new path be taken?’ theconversation.com, August 7, 2018,; ‘Zimbabwe: a future finely balanced between democracy and militarisation’, theconversation.com, August 28, 2018.

[8] Leo Zelig, Revolt and Protest: Student Politics and Activism in Sub-Saharan Africa, London: IB Tauris, 2007; Dan Hodgkinson, ‘Marked Out: An Oral History of Zimbabwean Student Activism, 1954-2016’, PhD Thesis, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, 2018.

Capitalism and Resource Nationalism in Africa

ROAPE

October 17, 2019

In recent years governments across Southern Africa have targeted foreign investors, increased taxation on mining companies and enacted indigenisation. In this blogpost, Alex Caramento and Richard Saunders investigate the social forces currently shaping resource nationalism in the region. They hope to initiate a discussion on the various responses to extractive capitalism in Southern Africa.

By Alex Caramento and Richard Saunders

In the past decade, Southern African governments have revised national mining codes, stripped foreign investors of their concessions, increased taxation and prosecuted tax evading firms, and enacted indigenisation and local content measures. We are undoubtedly witnessing the return of ‘resource nationalism’ to the region. Yet aside from attributions of the phenomenon to heightened mineral prices and rent-seeking by predatory elites, there has been little investigation of the variables and social forces currently shaping and driving resource nationalist politics. Moreover, the focus of most commentary and scholarship on resource nationalism has been on the relationship between large-scale, foreign-owned mining firms and the African state. The role of other social forces and organised interests have been mostly ignored by the recent spate of business journalism and academic research. We argue that two critical lines of inquiry require urgent attention. First, we ask how the current wave of resource nationalism is different from the previous one. We suggest that contemporary resource nationalism cannot be sufficiently understood as simply a case of ‘history repeating itself.’ Secondly, we argue, explaining divergent resource nationalist policies requires an investigation of substantially new drivers currently at play. Although the early outcomes of resource nationalist projects have been largely ambiguous, affected by the current balance of political forces and broader structural constraints, the demands and grievances which have informed these projects have generated important points of critique of extractive capitalism. Following emerging local debates, this blogpost endeavours to initiate a wider discussion on the varying responses to extractive capitalism in Southern Africa by advancing some preliminary thoughts arising from current research.

Resource Nationalism, Now and Then

Two waves of resource nationalism have swept over the African sub-continent: the first wave in the 1960s and 1970s, following the attainment of independence; and the current second wave, which began in the late 2000s. The first wave involved policies that sought greater national ownership and control over mining assets. In contrast, the current wave has not typically involved a significant effort to nationalise or indigenise mining assets. In the case of the recent Konkola Copper Mines (KCM) takeover, for example, the Zambian government did not plan to takeover the mine but rather find a more suitable investor. Former Presidential Spokesman Amos Chanda went so far as to make the point of assuring other foreign investors that ‘[t]here will be no takeover (and) no seizure of private assets.’[1] Instead of greater state (or indigenous) ownership and control, the second wave of resource nationalist strategies have typically sought to increase mining taxation, improve regulatory oversight and cultivate productive linkages to mining. At first glance these measures have appeared to be relatively restrained compared to previous policy interventions like nationalisation, the cancellation of management contracts and the establishment of state-controlled mineral marketing agencies. And yet they should not be dismissed as ‘business as usual’. In several cases, recent measures have threatened the profitability of foreign mining firms; in response, miners have increasingly employed a range of means at their disposal – from threatening to place mines under care and maintenance, to actively pursuing international arbitration – to blunt and deflect the sharpest edges of the current wave of reform.

The Dynamics of Contemporary Resource Nationalism

Media commentary and academic debates on resource nationalism tend to employ a simplistic approach to the examination of the phenomenon. They attribute resource nationalism to an upswing in market cycles: when primary commodity prices are high, states possess greater leverage and are more inclined to secure concessions from extractive firms; when prices are low, mining firms possess greater leverage and are able to push states to adopt more market-friendly extractive regimes. Surging primary commodity prices have no doubt been one of the factors enabling the emergence of resource nationalism, but there have been other dynamics which have also been critical in shaping its form and trajectory. We identify four key developments in contemporary resource nationalist strategies.

Liberalisation of African mining regimes. In the 1990s, state-owned mining assets were privatised, and foreign investors were provided generous regulatory and taxation concessions with the enactment of generous mining codes. These measures had largely negative social, economic and environmental consequences for mining communities and local supply chains. And as mineral prices began to rebound in the mid-2000s such concessions brought limited taxation revenue on the one hand and exorbitant corporate profits on the other.
Empty promises and resurgent voices. Artisanal and small-scale miners, mineworkers, domestic mine suppliers and contractors, and mining communities were marginalised by the liberalisation of African mining regimes, despite promises and expectations to the contrary. Neoliberal structural adjustment failed to deliver ‘sustainable mining development’ or to facilitate the ‘legalization and improved organisation of artisanal mining’, while the parallel opening of democratic spaces, however narrow, provided opportunities for the aforementioned constituencies to register their displeasure.
Rising political contestation. The emergence of popular grievances over perceived lack of benefits or spillovers from resource extraction helped to ignite political contestation in the region. In an effort to counter electoral threats posed by opposition parties or internal party rivals, embattled governments and politicians introduced measures to increase taxation, indigenize ownership, and strengthen productive linkages to mining. The recent takeover of KCM can be partially attributed to the threat posed to the ruling Patriotic Front government’s electoral dominance over the Copperbelt Province following the victory of Chishimba Kambwili’s National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the recent byelection for Roan Constituency parliamentary seat. Similarly, the problematic implementation of ‘indigenisation and economic empowerment’ in Zimbabwe was closely linked to the ruling ZANU-PF’s crisis of political legitimacy and electoral challenges in 2008 and 2013.[2]
New foreign mining actors. Emerging investors like the Chinese enabled African governments to discipline ‘traditional’ foreign investors (i.e. Canadians, South Africans, Australians, etc.) by offering a competitive investment alternative. The point here is not whether Chinese mine investments have differed from those of other players in terms of investment stability or developmental spillovers, as some scholars have suggested. Rather, the key point is that new alternatives threaten to shake-up the hegemony of traditional leading investment players emerged as a feature of large-scale mining (LSM) in Southern Africa.

Diverse Social Forces and Interests

Much of the current scholarship on resource nationalism focuses almost exclusively on the relations between the state and LSM firms. Other social forces and interests are typically ignored. This narrowness has weakened explanatory capacity. Numerous local social forces have contributed to the shaping of mining policy reform, to varying degrees. For example, domestic mine supply and contracting firms have demanded mandatory procurement quotas and local content measures to secure more business from the mines. Local communities surrounding mine sites have sought greater employment opportunities and the decentralised redistribution of fiscal receipts. Civil society organisations (CSOs) have advocated for greater transparency in the collection and allocation of resource rents and have encouraged African governments to counter LSM’s efforts to evade taxation. CSOs have also sought to challenge the dislocation and environmental devastation of communities that reside near LSM operations.

Mining labour has sought less precarious work, improved and harmonised compensation packages, the domestication of mining employment, greater investment in skills development and increased workplace health and safety. Together, these interventions have led to both greater pressure on the state and strengthened state volition to challenge foreign mining capital. Finally, artisanal and small-scale miners (ASM) have sought to challenge property rights’ regimes (for example, securing affordable and simplified access to land tenure, including tailings dumps), and to secure better access to finance, machinery and services in support of expanded operations.

We do not suggest that all of these social forces have had equal influence over the various mining policies enacted under the contemporary wave of resource nationalism. While heightened political contestation has enabled the inclusion of formerly marginalised voices, their impact on policy outcomes has frequently been deflected, with their influence dependent upon the prevailing balance of forces and broader structural constraints. The mounting debt levels of many African states, for instance, have tended to influence reforms towards a more short-term outlook, increasingly dictated by the need to overcome successive fiscal crises. Nevertheless, contemporary policy debates have brought the demands of these multiple constituencies to the fore, pointing to new political possibilities.

The Need for Comparative Research

The current wave of resource nationalism, though having emerged largely in response to the liberalisation of African mining regimes, has not entailed a complete repudiation and reversal of the neoliberal status quo. And while foreign mining investors are arguably on the defensive at the moment, they have not been without the means to defend their interests. Moreover, many measures associated with the current wave of resource nationalism have either been diluted by donor agencies or complicated by the fiscal vulnerabilities of Africans states. Nonetheless, resource nationalist demands remain important points of contestation in the region. The ‘enclavist’ proclivities of extractive capitalism, the pronounced efforts of foreign mining investors to evade taxation, their sustained campaign to discipline, retrench and casualise their workforces, and their adherence to exclusionary property rights regimes (that fail to accommodate ASM) – to offer just a sampling of transgressions – have emboldened mining communities, trade unions, and civil society groups to demand corrective interventions from governments.

These economic grievances and the political vulnerability of governing regimes which have enabled their reception are not going to go away any time soon; if anything, they are being amplified by sustained disillusionment with extractive capitalism in the region. The vacuous ‘solutions’ proffered by multilateral institutions, donor agencies, and LSM amount to tinkering with, rather than the substantive revision of, African mining regulatory regimes. Currently, a diverse set of policies are being pursued in the context of a variety of structural and socio-economic conditions across the region. It is only with the examination of these parallel initiatives through comparative research that we can begin to understand the range of possibilities and limitations of contemporary resource nationalism, and its potential for achieving strengthened redistributive possibilities across Africa.

Alex Caramento is a PhD Candidate (ABD) in the Department of Politics at York University (Toronto) where he studies the political economy of mine supply and service provision and resource nationalism in Zambia.

Richard Saunders is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at York University (Toronto), where he teaches African political economy. He is also a Research Associate with the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg. His most recent book is the edited collection Facets of Power: Politics, Profits and People in the Making of Zimbabwe’s Blood Diamonds (Wits University Press/Weaver Press, 2016).

Featured Photograph: Entrance to Konkola Copper Mines (1 June, 2008).

Notes

[1] Indeed, the seizure of KCM is an exceptional case, representing the culmination of tensions between Vedanta Resources and the Zambian government that stretch back to 2013, when the late President Michael Sata deported former KCM CEO Kishore Kumar in response to announced plans to mechanise mining operations and retrench 1,500 mineworkers.

[2] See Richard Saunders, The Politics of Resource Bargaining, Social Relations and Institutional Development in Zimbabwe Since Independence. UNRISD Working Paper #2019-1. Geneva: UNRISD, 2019.

Fanon, Marx and Black Liberation

ROAPE

October 15, 2019

On the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Frantz Fanon’s 1959 classic, A Dying Colonialism, Ken Olende considers Fanon’s complex relationship to class and Marxism. Fanon wrote during a period of intense anti-colonial struggle where links with Marxist ideas were taken for granted. Olende argues Fanon’s work was grounded in a deep understanding of capitalist society.

By Ken Olende

Frantz Fanon is experiencing a well-deserved renaissance which has led to the reissue of books including A Dying Colonialism and the appearance of previously unavailable work. He was politically active for a relatively short period, from the end of the Second World War until his death from leukaemia at the age of 36 in 1961, and the development of his ideas followed an explosive path. He is a thinker who is radically reinterpreted periodically, sometimes becoming almost unrecognisable.

Black American Eric Garner’s dying cry of ‘I can’t breathe’ as a police officer kept him in a choke hold in 2014 became the slogan of the Black Lives Matter movement. Protesters recalled Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks where he wrote: ‘It is not because the Indo-Chinese discovered a culture of their own that they revolted. Quite simply it was because it became impossible for them to breathe in more than one sense of the word.’[1] He was referring to Vietnamese resistance against imperialism—and the links between racism, colonialism and imperialism appear manifest.

Fanon wrote at a time of anti-colonial struggle where links with Marxist ideas were taken for granted. In the modern world not only is this not so, but many writers see his critiques of various positions by people who called themselves Marxists as a rejection of all Marxist ideas. I want to argue here why I think this is a mistaken position. Fanon’s relationship to class and Marxist arguments was far more complex and nuanced. And as Nigel Gibson has said, ‘Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth is not a story of wretchedness and suffering but of self-fashioning movements which through action become aware of themselves as subjects as they become aware of the betrayals of the leaders who speak in their name.’[2]

Fanon and Malcolm X: race, history and the dialectic

Fanon is also sometimes presented as a black separatist, who believed white people can have no role in the fight against racism and imperialism. This is despite the fact that Fanon’s wife Josie was white, from a French working class background. After his death she worked as a journalist for the Algerian press.[3] At the extreme, Afropessimist Frank Wilderson III argues that by definition black people cannot fit into Marxist categories, because the history of slavery excludes them from being part of the working class. ‘Civil society’s subaltern, the worker, is coded as waged, and wages are white. But Marxism has no account of this phenomenal birth and life-saving role played by the black subject.’[4]

In many ways it is odd that this argument denying black people a class role in US civil society should develop at a time of increasing class polarisation among African-Americans. As Darryl C Thomas argues in Futures of Black Radicalism, ‘One of the consequences of neoliberal/globalized US capitalism for many African Americans is a growing difference in life chances between poor and affluent blacks… a divide that is beginning to be reflected in black politics and black public opinion.’ [5] Yet, as Angela Davis comments in the same book, ‘With every generation of antiracist activism, it seems, narrow Black nationalism returns phoenix-like to claim our movements’ allegiance.’[6] To avoid that narrowness a wider furrow has to be dug.

Fanon was born in Martinique in the French Caribbean in 1925 (the same year as Malcolm X) and grew up in a culture that was incredibly sensitive to race. France carved an empire out of the Caribbean on the basis of slavery. At one point in the 18th century it controlled Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), which was the most profitable area of the colonial world until it was overthrown in a slave uprising. In a letter from the leaders of the revolt to the colonial assembly in Saint-Domingue, in 1792, rebel leader Toussaint Louverture raised issues that have been key for anti-racists ever since: ‘It is only by your avarice and our ignorance that anyone is still held in slavery up to this day, and we can neither see nor find the right that you pretend to have over us… We are your equals then, by natural right, and if nature pleases itself to diversify colours within the human race, it is not a crime to be born black or an advantage to be white.’ ^[7]

Modern racism developed with the slave trade and setbacks for it has always involved dialectical inversions. In Decolonising Dialectics, George Ciccariello-Maher asks, ‘What was the Haitian revolution if not a dialectical eruption in the last place master dialecticians would have chosen to look?’ [8] He means that the 19^th century philosopher G. W. F. Hegel – the ‘master dialectician’ – would have assumed that revolution could only occur in the most developed states of Europe.

In his first book Black Skin, White Masks Fanon describes how he felt growing up black and middle class in a French colony: ‘I am a black man—but of course I do not know it, because I am one. At home my mother sings to me in French, French love songs where there is never a mention of black people. Whenever I am naughty or when I make too much noise, I am told to ‘stop acting like a nigger’. A little later on we read white books and we gradually assimilate the prejudices, the myths, the folklore that come from Europe.’ [9]

He saw himself as French as a young man and volunteered to fight for the Free French in the Second World War. He was shocked at the racism he encountered in France. After the war he trained as a doctor, expressing the radicalised views that had developed with his experience. He argues: ‘All colonized people—in other words, people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed—position themselves in relation to the civilizing language; i.e., the metropolitan.’[10]

This echoes an earlier argument by black American radical WEB Du Bois: ‘It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.’[11] Du Bois wrote this in 1903—in 1963 he moved to the recently independent west African state of Ghana, supporting president Kwame Nkrumah’s attempt to promote socialism.

Fanon’s connection with Algeria began when he was posted to work as a psychiatrist just as the rebellion against the French was starting. France had invaded in the 1830s and incorporated the country into its empire. Indeed, it now claimed it was an indivisible part of France with the population as French citizens, though the Arab population was not treated in this way. The settler population, known as pieds-noirs enjoyed these benefits. At the end of the Second World War victory celebrations developed into calls for independence. The French killed thousands in a massacre in the town of Setif. Resistance grew into an armed independence movement.

Fanon joined the underground resistance organisation the Front de libération nationale (FLN). Now he found himself treating French soldiers in the day and guerrillas at night. Eventually he had to flee, living in exile in Tunis and travelling around supporting the revolutionary cause. But before the war was won he developed leukaemia. His best-known work The Wretched of the Earth was written rapidly in the last year of his life to get his ideas on paper before he died. The unremitting anti-colonialism of the book made Fanon a hero to resistance movements through the 1960s.

Both Fanon and later Malcolm X had epiphanies regarding their understanding of imperialism and racism connected to the Algerian war of independence. After the FLN’s victory, Malcolm visited the newly independent country and it helped him formulate the idea that colonised people had gained pride and respect through ‘nationalism’, and the colonised and previously enslaved people in the US could do the same – finding their own path to freedom with ‘black nationalism.’ For both there is a dialectical process at work relating to ideas of race. It was through travelling that Malcolm came to reject the idea that all whites were the problem, but it also caused him to shift on which groups of the oppressed he was referring to. So, he talks of colonised peoples, but then of the specific experience of ‘black’ Americans who have had the experience of slavery.

Ciccariello-Maher argues that ‘Malcolm’s trip [an 18-week tour of Africa in 1964] had convinced him that the African-American community needed to broaden its scope, forcefully participating in the African and Third World liberation movement against the remaining vestiges of colonialism and imperialism.’[12]

On Fanon, Ciccariello-Maher notes he was ‘a man for whom race, the ultimate crime against human unity, had no objective standing. “Blacks” only exist as such on the basis of “a series of affective disorders” resulting from a process of racialisation in which… “it is the racist who creates the inferiorised.”’ [13] Fanon took this argument from Jean Paul Sartre’s 1946 analysis of antisemitism, Anti-Semite and Jew. Ciccariello-Maher maintains that Fanon saw a dialectics ‘short circuited by white supremacy.’[14]

Wilderson argues that Fanon divides the world into the motherland and the colonised, ‘two different “species,” between which “no conciliation is possible”.’[15] But while Fanon talks of a movement of explosive change, of a shift in relations between fluid groups of people, Wilderson rejects any idea of change. Categories for him are fixed and permanent. He comments, ‘The phrase “not in service of a higher unity” dismisses any kind of dialectical optimism for a future synthesis.’[16]

As Fanon developed his anti-colonial theories, he was particularly inspired by two recent struggles. The first in Vietnam had seen the French militarily defeated at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the British defeat of the Mau Mau (Land and Freedom Army) in Kenya, East Africa, but at such a cost that they resolved not to fight such a war again and withdrew. Conversely, he was disgusted with the French left and particularly the Communist Party (PCF), which did not support the resistance in Algeria. This is one reason why though he was sympathetic to Marxist ideas he never came to identify with them. The party said it wanted rights for Algerians, but as part of France, denying them the right to self-determination. It was suspicious of the FLN which it did not regard as part of the left.[17]

Marxism, Racism and Class

When discussing Marxist attitudes and responses it is always worth remembering that there are different strands of thought that think of themselves as Marxist. For instance, returning to France in the late 1950s, Fanon stayed with Trotskyist Jean Ayme, who fully supported the Algerian resistance. ‘Among the documents that Ayme gave him to read, he was fascinated to discover the transcripts of the first four congresses of the Communist International… Fanon spent entire nights in their company.’ [18]

Marx himself had come to understand the vital importance of anti-colonial struggles. He wrote of Britain’s first colony to his collaborator Frederick Engels in 1869, ‘For a long time, I believed it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working-class ascendency… Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland.’[19] Marx had come to see how effectively the promotion of ethnic division hamstrung attempts to challenge capitalist exploitation. As he noted in Capital, in the US, ‘every independent workers’ movement was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.’[20] Marx saw the fight against racial oppression as absolutely key to the struggle of the working class against capitalism. At the end of the US Civil War in 1865 he wrote: ‘While the workingmen…allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned labourer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labour.’[21]

Such concerns were also central to the victorious communists in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution. They declared that the oppression of Muslims, that had been so central to the Russian Empire, was at an end. ‘Henceforth your beliefs and customs, your national and cultural institutions are declared free and inviolable.’[22] This attitude was one reason why so many Muslims came to support them during the Russian Civil War. It was also why they held a Congress of Peoples of the East—aimed at all colonised peoples—in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1920. This decided to support all anti-colonial struggles.

The first such conflict that the Communists related to was Turkish resistance to invasion. Turkey was the shrunken heart of the massive Ottoman Empire, which had been on the losing side in the war and was now being dismembered by the victors. The Soviet government trained and armed Kemel Ataturk’s Turkish nationalists, knowing that their victory would be a major blow to the imperial powers. But they also correctly predicted that once in government Ataturk would put down revolutionary activity. This knowledge was why Lenin warned the Indian revolutionary M N Roy, ‘don’t paint nationalism red.’ [23]

Fanon was right about the unremitting struggle needed to challenge imperialism and racism. He was right to be suspicious of the post-independence governments – Algeria soon became a dictatorship. However, he was wrong on the reasons. He accepted that there was no alternative to developing as a nation state. In The Wretched of the Earth Fanon argues—wrongly in my opinion—that the working class ‘constitute the most faithful followers of the nationalist parties, and who because of the privileged place which they hold in the colonial system constitute also the ‘bourgeois’ fraction of the colonized people.’[24]

Fanon was wrong to dismiss the working class, seeing them as little different from the bourgeoisie. He did not know that the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, which he discusses as an earlier inspiration, was started by a workers’ movement in radical trade unions. It was after this layer under Bildad Kaggia and Fred Kubai was arrested that the struggle moved into the forest.[25] The breaking of this urban movement and the retreat into the forests weakened rather than strengthening the rebellion.

Fanon’s engagement with Marxism

There have been many strands of Marxist thought and most black revolutionaries have engaged with them at some level. Those removing this strand from engagements with Fanon weakens our understanding of his legacy. Fanon in particular never regarded himself as a Marxist, but he engaged with Marxists and Marxist ideas. His fully justified resentment of the French Communist Party was based on its failure to support Algerian independence and thus to challenge the racism of French society.

Several writers who have recently revisited Fanon, including Leo Zeilig and Peter Hudis, have constructively engaged with these strands of his thinking without ever suggesting that he was a Marxist in disguise. Peter Hudis comments that when Fanon says in Wretched of the Earth, ‘A Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue’, his point is that it is ‘Slightly stretched, but not rejected or abandoned. Fanon never ceases to remind his readers that anti-black racism is deeply rooted in the structure of capitalist class society and cannot be understood apart from it.’[26] This seems to me to be the correct assessment of Fanon’s astonishing legacy.

Ken Olende is researching a PhD at Brighton University in Britain in Rethinking ‘blackness’ as a racial identity. He wrote the chapter, ‘The Roots of Racism’ in Say it Loud: Marxism and the Fight Against Racism edited by Brian Richardson (Bookmarks, 2013).

References

[1] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 201.

[2] Nigel C. Gibson, “The Rationality of Revolt and Fanon’s Relevance, 50 Years Later”, Karib – Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies, 2:1 (2015), 9.

[3] Leo Zeilig, Frantz Fanon: The Militant Philosopher of Third World Revolution (London: Bloomsbury , 2015), 31, 232.

[4] Frank Wilderson III, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?”, Social Identities, 9:2 (2003), 238.

[5] Darryl C Thomas, “Cedric J Robinson’s Meditation on Malcolm X’s black internationalism and the future of the Black Radical Tradition” in Futures of Black Radicalism ed. by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (London: Verso, 2017), 149.

[6] Angela Davis, “An interview on the futures of radicalism”, Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa and Johnson and Alex Lubin (London: Verso, 2017), 2.

[7] Toussaint L’Ouverture, The Haitian Revolution (Verso, 2008), 6.

[8] Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics, 157.

[9] Fanon, Black Skin, 168.

[10] Fanon, Black Skin, 2.

[11] WEB Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks (1903), 215.

[12] George Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics (Durham NC: Duke University, 2016), 157.

[13] Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics, 51.

[14] Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics, 7.

[15] Frank Wilderson III, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal” in Afropessimism: an Introduction, (Minneapolis: Racked & Dispatched, 2017), 69.

[16] Wilderson, “Prison Slave”, 69

[17] Leo Zeilig, “Pitfalls and Radical Mutations Frantz Fanon’s Revolutionary Life”, International Socialism 2:134 (2012), 153.

[18] Quoted Zeilig, “Pitfalls and Radical Mutations”, 152.

[19] quoted in Kevin B Anderson, Marx at the Margins (Chicago Il: Chicago, 2010), 144.

[20] Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1 [1867] (London: Penguin, 1976), 414.

[21] Karl Marx, Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln.

[22] John Riddell (ed), To See the Dawn (Pathfinder, 1993), 13.

[23] M N Roy, Memoirs (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1964), 395.

[24] Fanon, Wretched, 86.

[25] See for instance Bildad Kaggia, Roots of Freedom (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1975) and Makhan Singh, History of Kenya’s Trade Union Movement, to 1952 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969).

[26] Peter Hudis Race, Class and New Humanism, https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/race-class-and-new-humanism/

Misunderstanding and Misrepresenting Walter Rodney

ROAPE

October 10, 2019

In a wide-ranging defence of the legacy of Walter Rodney, Cecil Gutzmore takes on Chinedu Chukwudinma’s critique of Rodney’s work. Theoretical rigour and principled arguments are essentials in Marxism, but Gutzmore sees little evidence of these in Chukwudinma’s blogpost.

By Cecil Gutzmore

Chinedu Chukwudinma’s ‘critique’ of Walter Rodney is poorly applied, poorly argued and misguided. Despite claiming a ‘deeper understanding’ than the review by Andy Higginbottom of Verso Books’ reissue of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (2018), Chukwudinma conveys misunderstanding of and misrepresents Rodney’s output.

It would of course be extraordinary were it to be the case that, even of so accomplished a Marxist and revolutionary Pan-Afrikanist as was Walter Rodney, his considerable political-intellectual output turned out to be completely error-free. Or that, decades after his 1980 assassination by US imperialism operating through Guyanese neo-colonial forces, no such errors could be identified and be the welcome subject of serious discussion. Theoretical rigour and principled, sound argument are essentials of the business of building with and on Walter’s considerable achievements. Yet little of these are visible in Chukwudinma’s blogpost.

Rodney’s praxis combined critical adherence to Marxism with challenging its more narrowly ‘class’-bound version. He developed with considerable care such concepts as capitalism-imperialism, colonialism, settler-colonialism, neo-colonialism; he addressed the specific mechanisms of imperialist exploitation – treating foreign direct investment (FDI) as principal amongst these – and racially structured modes of exploitation and oppression. These concepts matter profoundly in dealing with all parts of Rodney’s output and any serious critique of it.

Chukwudinma’s lack of rigour looms large. His blog can be read as consisting of three parts. An opening in which Walter Rodney is praised for the achievement within Afrikan historiography of dispatching with some clearly outdated, grievously Eurocentric Western academic historians. Rodney is also praised for ‘restor[ing] the dignity of African people and highlight[ing] the weight and significance of their contribution to history.’ Matters change in the second and third parts, where Chukwudinma seeks to prove that in (a) Afrikan colonial and neo-colonial historiography and (b) Marxist political-economy, Walter Rodney is in fundamental error. Were Chukwudinma’s arguments proven it would represent the dismantling of Rodney’s justly acclaimed theoretical achievements. No such result is achieved by Chukwudinma, except perhaps to the satisfaction of the particular brand of ‘Marxist’ left sectarianism that has provided him with his arguments.

The single point in Chukwudinma’s favour is that he does not misquote Walter Rodney. This, however, he totally undermines by his use of a plethora of methodologically and theoretically dubious procedures. These include: (a) questionably attributing Rodney’s work to that of certain ‘dependency theorists’; (b) systematically attributing their alleged positions to ‘Rodney’; (c) erecting a straw man/figmental ‘Rodney’ as the object of his largely misplaced and misdirected criticisms (d) even when actually quoting Rodney, he undermines his own criticisms by careless and unjustified conflation of key concepts, (e) using inapplicable or even absurd counter-examples, (f) oversights in relation to both Rodney’s concepts and supposed counter-evidence while (g) misleadingly deploying World Bank and International Labour Organisation (ILO) sourced statistical data but ignoring material from other sources that bear more profoundly on the issues at stake.

Afrika’s Industrialisation Blocked?

Within the second and third parts of his blogpost, an outright assault on Walter Rodney’s output as a Marxist African historian and political-economist, Chukwudinma says that in HEUA:

Walter Rodney adopted dependency theory’s central idea that imperialism condemns poor nations to stagnation, as he wrote: “Whenever internal forces seemed to push in the direction of African industrialisation, they were deliberately blocked by the colonial governments acting on behalf of the metropolitan industrialist.” (Emphasis added)

He speaks further of ‘Rodney’s views that British colonialism always stifled industrialisation and failed to create a powerful working class.’ (Emphasis added)

Chukwudinma conflates the major concepts ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’ to obvious ill-effect. The claim contained in Rodney’s actual words is neither original to him, nor was it discovered by the ‘dependency theorists’ Chukwundinma mentions. Since Rodney is speaking accurately about the well-documented workings of colonialism in Afrika, it is difficult to imagine from where would be conjured-up valid evidence effectively to refute his claims regarding colonialism’s anti-industrialisation practices in that continent (and in his own region of origin, the Caribbean). Rodney’s quoted claim also holds for other geographical areas. British colonialism was, after all, the system that notoriously ‘de-industrialised’ India after 1763.[1]

By denying a key reality of the history of British (Afrikan) colonialism, Chukwudinma gives himself an unsolvabl difficulty. In attempting to overcome this he simply mobilises wholly misleading ‘counter examples’: Hong Kong and South Africa are used for this purpose. He clearly has little understanding of how exceptions work and casually interpolates ‘always’ into ‘Rodney’s’ position. The counterexamples used to exemplify colonies that ‘industrialised’ under British rule prove nothing against Rodney.

Hong Kong, which is not part of Afrika, was never a typical British colony. Even though light-industrial production occurred there before the British surrendered the colony back to China in 1997, it hardly forms an example of the manufacturing industrial social formation that is at the core of Rodney’s claim.

Only very serious oversight of how the actual formation of extractivist settler-colonialism was constituted could allow Chukwudinma to bring forward South Afrika to exemplify an ‘industrialised’ British colony that invalidates Rodney’s claim. South Afrika was industrialised under the rule of the British colonial state and capitalist interests, not in manufacturing but in mining and its auxiliary industries, as Rodney well knew. How could capitalism-imperialism, in its settler-colonial form in Southern Afrika, have assumed its extractivist character without the organised proletarianisation of Afrikan labour having first used land-grabs, taxation and other oppressive machinery against Afrikan males to drive them from ‘traditional’ productive activity on their land? Where exactly in his output did Walter Rodney exclude this ‘historically necessary’ mode of racist industrialising extractivism? Afrikan workers, that strawman Rodney is falsely said by Chukwudinma to have excluded from his history of colonialism in Afrika, were the key social force in the self-liberation process.

Furthermore Rodney recognised that apartheid intensified the processes of proletarianisation and urbanisation that – together with ‘hostelisation’ – produced the South Afrikan proletariat that is still super-oppressed and super-exploited at the hand of the ‘economically empowered’ neo-colonial class-fraction. South Afrika did aid and abet its neighbour and near satellite, Rhodesia, during the latter’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) when the Smith regime engaged in some sanctions-busting ‘autarkic industrialisation’. In others words, certain British ex-colonies (South Africa/UDI Rhodesia) in particular circumstances had specific kinds of ‘industrialisation’. Nowhere in his work does Rodney imply the non-actuality of this occurrence.

Even in the Afrikan colonies where British colonialism followed Rodney’s documented course of anti-industrialisation almost to the letter, small Afrikan colonial proletariats emerged in the contexts of transport systems, mining and the like.

Rodney, dependency theory and neo-colonialism

Chukwudinma’s attribution to Rodney of views said to belong to ‘dependency theory’ is, to say the least, problematic. Thus:

He [Rodney] believed that underdevelopment would continue even after Africa[n] nations achieved their independence. Rodney, like other dependency theorists, called upon intellectuals to break with capitalism and adopt state-directed socialist planned economies.

And:

However, Rodney’s solution proved unrealistic as African attempts to mirror the Soviet Union’s model of self-reliant development ended in failure by the early 1980s.

These remarks necessarily flow from Chukwudinma’s poor knowledge of neo-colonialism. Regrettably, it is a concept also known in too limited a manner by too many European thinkers, especially ‘Marxist’ left sectarians. A significant part of Rodney’s praxis involved both making a contribution – alongside the likes of Nkrumah, Fanon, Nabudare and Samir Amin – to that concept’s theoretical development and engaging in serious practical, revolutionary opposition to the class-fraction running neo-colonialism directly against the interest of the Afrikan masses and shamelessly on behalf of capitalism-imperialism. Rodney stands in the tradition of theorists on Afrika who did not merely accept top-down state-directed socialism but who offered a critique and resistance to new African ruling class. Readers wishing to grasp Walter Rodney’s approach to the disastrously failing efforts of the Afrikan neo-colonial leadership class-fraction will do well to read his paper written for the 1974 Sixth Pan-Afrikan Congress, which confounds Chukwudinma’s quite misleading remarks.

Rarely were attempts at development in Afrika based on the Soviet model. Nor were there any Cuba’s amongst the Afrikan neo-colonies. Cuba itself broke from the neo-colonial condition imposed on it by the USA, with its late-1950s revolution. Ghana certainly did not make any serious attempt to use the Soviet or Cuban models: much of Nkrumah’s advice came from Nicolas Kallog and Thomas Balogh (who also advised the 1960s British Labour Party); and from Sir Arthur Lewis, whose developmental model focused on the proportion of a social formation’s gross national product that had to be under the control of the state in order to achieve ‘take off.’

Chukwudinma makes a meal of neo-colonial Algeria’s attempt at ‘industrialisation’, using this as another counterexample against his strawman Rodney’s claim that imperialism prevented neo-colonial industrialisation. The Algerian economic instance proves nothing against Rodney. ‘Oil wealth’ offered a certain promise that neo-colonies have sought to use developmentally in myriad ways, with varying and limited degrees of success. The fall in oil and gas prices, mentioned by Chukwudinma, was but one of many obstacles faced.

Colonial exploitation of the Afrikan peasantry

Chukwudzinma is careless when he treats the dishonest purchasing practices of the colonial merchant stratum as more important than the colonial state marketing boards which he does not trouble to mention when he remarks:

The peasant/merchant relationship is different because it’s that of seller and buyer. The merchant may well cheat the peasant by buying the crops at a low price but this nonetheless represents a transfer of already produced value, which the peasantry created by employing their own labour power.

Chukwudzinma is uncomprehending of how Afrikan peasant family labour fails to show up in the market prices of commodities but is nonetheless super-exploited. The same is true regarding the place of the ‘agro-proletariat’ in the labour market in both Afrika and the Caribbean.[2]

Chukwudinma’s Assault on Walter Rodney’s Marxist Political-Economy

This turns on Chukwudinma discovery of a ‘crucial point where Rodney’s African nationalism overshadowed his Marxism’ enabling the astonishing, anti-Rodney, non-Marxist conclusion that ’Africa’s problem was not the hyper-exploitation of African labour but rather the relatively small importance imperialism gave to African labour.’ This confronts Walter on issues central to Marxist political-economy and precisely – along with the historiography of Afrika, Guyana and the Russian Revolution – the terrain of Rodney’s profound expertise.

Is there really just one ‘Marxism’ that knows ‘African nationalism’ to be a unitary political-ideological position with a supposed anti-proletarian class content, to which that ‘Marxism’ knows itself to be ever and always superior? This sails inseparably close to an insulting lack of awareness that there are serious Black/Afrikan Marxists – Walter Rodney was one – working to continue the development of Marxism through Revolutionary Pan-Afrikanism and vice versa in a manner parallel to work being conducted on and within Marxism by serious feminists.

There is an objective crisis now engulfing Marxism that undermines its position founded on a class analysis-based awareness of its own superiority over all other positions and certainly to ‘Afrikan nationalism’. Awareness of this crisis and of the work of Afrikans such as Rodney would produce both greater humility and generate the need urgently to be participants in the search for the well-theorised practical revolutionary successes now in such disturbingly short supply in the international class struggle.

Revolutionary Pan-Afrikanism is itself a doubly challenged victim in praxis; both because its best thinkers have drawn exhaustively upon Marxism, and because revolutionary Pan-Afrikanism is subject to a related crisis of its own. The very forces of capitalism-imperialism that now claim a ‘victory’ over socialism in the international class struggle have imposed neo-colonialism on the Afrikan masses. In addition, these forces have deepened oppression and exploitation that characterise the conditions of existence for Afrikans living in the metropoles after two decades of spectacular Afrikan mass struggle. The neo-colonial outcome has been brought about in the aftermath of the apparent victory of the Afrikan anti-colonial – sometimes armed – ‘revolution’. There is justification in neither Marxism nor in any of the several ‘Marxisms’ of the left sectarian parties/tendencies/groups that populate both the West and the ‘Third World’ for a superior attitude to ‘African nationalism’ that imbues Chukwudinma’s post.

What the perhaps unwary or ill-informed could mistake for an effective critique of Walter Rodney directed at one of his two areas of particular expertise, namely Marxist political-economy, is in fact again directed at Chukwudinma’s own strawman, at his figmental ‘Rodney’ construct:

The crucial point where Rodney’s African nationalism overshadowed his Marxism was in his belief that European workers materially benefit from the colonial exploitation of African workers and peasants … that African workers and peasant were exploited at higher rates than their European counterparts. The low wages paid to African workers guaranteed that higher amounts of surplus value was (sic) extracted from their labour, as Rodney wrote in HEUA: “A Scottish or German coalminer who could earn virtually in an hour what an Enugu miner was paid for a six day week.” For Rodney, the Western ruling class could use part of the enormous surplus extracted from African toilers to offer European workers material benefits in the form of increased wages, welfare reform and better working conditions. It could thus bribe the European proletariat and deter them from initiating revolutions. Rodney concludes that colonialism was in the interest of all classes in the West and white workers were natural allies of the capitalist class in their support for the racist colonial project. …“So long as African workers remain colonised, they had to think of themselves firstly as African workers, rather than members of an international proletariat. This was entirely in accordance with the reality.”

At issue here are undoubtedly important matters: the comparative levels and modes of labour and resource exploitation as between workers, resources and territories in the imperialist West and those in the ‘Third World’ (Afrika particularly); the political-ideological impact and effects of all this; the question of whether and to what extent the European/Metropolitan working classes benefited from and were politically-ideologically ‘bought off’ by their ruling class?

How, other than by engaging actively in struggle against imperialism in its racist-colonial manifestation could colonised Afrikan workers and peasants have concretely expressed their membership of the ‘international proletariat?’ Where in his work does Walter Rodney ever say that ‘white workers’ were the ‘natural allies of the capitalist class?’ And, should he have, he would have been incorrect!

Brutal colonising, enslaving, pillage and other gruesome practices of external primary/primitive accumulation created and enforced the conditions on which all classes within the Western capitalist metropoles were socio-economically elevated and this was later maintained. The benefits themselves were experienced at every socially defined level from monarchy to the chimney-sweep. Rodney drew attention to some of the relevant source-literature via ‘further reading’ entries.[3]

Those at the bottom of the UK social formation who did not venture to the further reaches of empire but remained at home in their ‘place’ also benefited from that empire. This is neither to imply nor to say there was no gruesome poverty in the metropoles. However, members of the working class obtained employment in the factories that ‘added value’ to the raw materials lifted from the colonies. They made the manufactures sold in those protected markets of empire and the like. They manned the docks. They peopled all the structures that made the distributive department of the capitalist economy theorised by Karl Marx. They were sometimes famously progressive, as in the instance of Lancashire cotton workers of the 1860s and sometimes they supported the ideas or personnel of the likes of Sir Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell. They ripped jobs – and sometimes lives – from Afrikan fellow workers in the seaport towns in 1920s and 1930s Great Britain. They engaged in ‘race riots’ and the like after both World Wars I and II in which Afrikans sometimes lost lives. A currently ‘militant’ trade union formation, the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union (RMT), in Britain has racist conduct of some of these specific and particular kinds in its 1920s and 1930s past.[4]

Commitment to serious proletarian class politics and to the interest of the White and Afrikan/Black working class and peasantry has to allow an opening towards the integrating of these class- and race-historical truths into proletarian history and is a necessary part of enriching Marxism where class, race and gender are awarded their correct place. There is no basis of flirting with the romanticisation of the proletariat whether of Afrika or the metropoles and denial that the European working class received real benefits from their location at the centre of colonial and neo-colonial imperialism is one type of dangerous illusion.

Another important facet factor involves the troubled relationship between industrial and finance capital and is clearly visible in the instance of the United Kingdom in recent decades. The British working class lost out as British finance capital (The City) largely shunned investment in domestic manufacturing industry in the process lowering employment and wage levels nationally. As a consequence, the massive returns from British direct overseas capital investment and other finance-capitalist operations are precisely what corrected that ‘trade-gap’ and kept the UK economy viable, thus preserving the relatively high conditions of existence enjoyed by all classes in the UK, including the classes exploited in the middle and at the bottom. Little of this important and as yet un-ended story surfaces in any substantive manner in Martin Legassick, Chris Harman or Alex Callinicos as reported in Chukwudinma’s blog.

Chukwudinma points to the problem of whether and how the undeniable benefits of imperialist exploitation are distributed in the metropoles. Were these benefits received by parts of the working class? Did they succeed in ‘buying off’ of particular fractions of that class creating a counter-revolutionary ‘labour aristocracy’, as Rodney (and Lenin) writes? Finally, to what extent has this process played in the historically largely absent working class revolutionary movements in the heartlands of capitalism-imperialism? Clearly complex matters!

Summarising swathes of twentieth century history, for reasons of space, it is clear that whenever the system declared itself under threat the ruling classes in the metropoles used violent methods – they mobilised middle class ‘gang’ formations, military means and fascism – to defeat the working class. These processes involved much more than any ‘bought off’ section of workers alone.

On the related matter of comparing productivity levels, of wage disparities and comparative scales of super-/exploitation between African miners in South Afrika and those similarly employed in say Australia or metropolitan Scotland more needs to be said. Can this differential be addressed solely as a function of the racist dimension of capitalist-imperialist exploitation? Rodney did not say that this racist dimension could be identified as the sole determining factor.

Walter Rodney laid out in HEUA a Marxist political-economy-derived analysis of the main mechanisms of imperialist exploitation of Afrika, principal amongst which is capitalist foreign direct investment (FDI). He wrote:

More far-reaching than just trade is the actual ownership of the means of production in one country by the citizens of another. When citizens of Europe own the land and the mines of Africa, this is the most direct way of sucking the African continent. Under colonialism the ownership was complete and backed by military domination. Today in many African countries the foreign ownership is still present although the armies and the flags of the foreign powers have been removed. So long as foreigners own land, mines, factories, banks, insurance companies, means of transportation, newspapers, power stations, etc then for so long will the wealth of Africa flow outwards into the hands of those elements. In other words, in the absence of direct political control, foreign investment ensures that the natural resources and labour of Africa produce economic value which is lost to the continent.[5]

Not only does Chukwudinma reveal himself as unaware of and/or confused about Rodney’s valid Marxist conceptual apparatus, but he also presents Martin Legassick’s views against Rodney as if their strength is such as necessarily to close the argument in Legassick’s favour. In fact the latter’s profound seeming reference to the ‘constant transformation of productive forces’ is actually too abstract to impart or clarify very much at all. Recourse is also had by Chukwudinma to a conclusion that relies wholly on, uncritically used World Bank (WB) and International Labour Organisation (ILO)-derived data.

Those, like Rodney, familiar with Karl Marx’s work are aware that the latter theorised the issue of labour productivity in terms of how living labour (as waged labour power, but also possibly peasant labour) and dead/accumulated labour (capital) combine in the labour-process of production. Naturally, and of course under certain circumstances, capitalist productive forces are in transformation.

That Chukwudinma is content to explain key disparities in social conditions, economic accumulation and conditions of existence between workers in the metropoles and Afrika primarily in terms of the amounts of capitalist FDI is alarmingly indicated in his far-reaching, wholly Eurocentric and erroneous conclusion that: ‘Africa’s problem was not the hyper-exploitation of African labour but rather the relatively small importance imperialism gave to African labour.’

That conclusion is truly extraordinary, and it cannot be understood other than as a crystallisation of ‘Marxist’, left-sectarian Eurocentrism. Claiming the relatively limited delivery of FDI to Afrika as the presumed cause of Afrika’s ‘underdevelopment’ amounts to nothing less than a denial of Afrikan labour (peasant and worker) and resource super-exploitation under neo-colonialism. The story of the scale of capitalist exploitation from Afrika in the multiple forms of profits paid out as dividends, as profits held as accumulated cash-capital, locked up in company and resource values, and in myriad other forms does not make its way into Chukwudinma’s account. He appears to have no conception of the extent to which the even comparatively small alleged flow of FDI into Afrika is not original capital investment at all, but the re-investment of a minuscule portion of previously extracted capital, grown at compound interest. This is an issue informatively explored by Arghiri Emmanuel as long ago as the early 1970s when the focus was on the late 19^th– early 20^thcentury period and where the views of such pivotal figures as Hobson and Lenin were the object of analysis.[6]

Chukwudinma does not engage with the issue of why the combination in production of living labour (labour power) and accumulated/dead labour (capital) in Afrika involves so little capital input without diminishing the monumental scale and profitability of the resulting extractive output from that process. No attention is paid to what dictates the allegedly all-important ‘productive forces’ not needing to be in ‘constant transformation’ when set in motion in Afrika. Nor does he engage with such matters as labour-intensive deep mining vs open cast capital-intensive forms. Also ignored are the objective difference between direct foreign capitalist investment into Afrikan (and perhaps other) neo-colonies and the exchange of manufacturing investment and commercial capitals between the metropolitan centres. Some of the latter is nothing more than the storage of capital for tax-avoidances purposes in advantageous locations.

Nor does Chukwudzinma engage with the nature of capitalist motivation in the re-/location of industrial production to say China/East Asian ‘Tigers’ as opposed to Afrika. The nature of the neo-colonial handling of taxation policies and amortisation practices in Afrika, as Rodney argued powerfully, has the effect of almost immediately (within as little as two to three years) transforming FDI into the mechanism of protracted and massive extractive super-exploitation. In other words, the persistence of the colonial machinery of exploitation in combination with deadly neo-colonial ones objectively operate to produce an outcome in which not only is no actual capital transferred to Afrika but allegedly beneficial FDI is, on the contrary, precisely the major and essential mechanism that enables super-exploitation of Afrikan neo-colonies to take place.

While Chukwudinma’s blogpost ignored this and arrives at conclusions in contradiction to it, fortunately others are seeking a more objective understanding of the relationship between neo-colonial Afrika and the system of capitalism-imperialism. They are contesting politically and legally imperialism’s practices of super-exploitation conducted in combination with massive environmental degradation, assaults of the health of Afrikans while outright murder is resorted to as something of a terrorising practice and not an option exercised in extremis.[7]

Conclusion

Oversights and errors within Chikwudinma’s ‘analysis’ underpin his conclusion that are the direct opposite of objective reality. Capitalism-imperialism manages its operation of super-exploitation in Afrika through precisely the combination of surviving colonial and neo-colonial mechanisms of exploitation that Walter Rodney identified and discussed. A key achievement of Walter Rodney lay precisely in the quality of his analysis of the modalities by which since the late 19^thcentury metropolitan capitalist exploitation of Africa has depended on the extraction of capital from the latter via the mechanism of exploitation that foreign direct capitalist investment primarily is.

Few historians or political economists have an understanding of these matters that matches Walter Rodney’s. That and the other seriously revolutionary facets of his praxis explain why his life was ripped from him so soon, and why Chukwudinma’s baseless assault on Rodney’s political-intellectual achievement borders on the politically deplorable!

Cecil Gutzmore, formerly a lecturer at the University of West Indies, is a political activist, researcher, writer and pan-Afrikanist.

Featured image: Taken from Aaron Kamugisha’s ‘Caribbean revolutionary movements and 1968‘ New Frame, 28 January 2019 (illustration by Anastasya Eliseeva).

References

[1] See E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (Abacus, 1988); Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labour, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrant to the British West Indies 1838-1918 (John Hopkins UP, 2004); S. Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: what the British did to India, (Hurst, 2018); J. Wilson, India Conquered: the British Raj and the Chaos of Empire (Simon and Schuster, 2017).

[2] See R. Frucht, ‘A Caribbean Social Type: Neither “Peasant” nor ‘Proletarian”’ in Social and Economic Studies, Vol. 16, No. 3 September 1967, pp. 295-300

[3] W. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, (Tanzania Publishing House and Bogle L’Ouverture, 1972) pp. 362-3

[4] W. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa p. 27

[5] See H. Moody (ed) The Keys. ‘Britain’s Coloured Seamen’ by Chris Jones , Vol. V July-September 1937, p. 17; in much greater detail see The Key’s Vol.3 No. 2 Oct- December 1935, pp. 15 -24

[6] A. Emmanuel, ‘White-settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism’, New Left Review, Vol. 1 No. 73, May-June 1972, 35-57. This piece by Emmanuel is itself problematic in that it’s reading of white settler colonialism is as questionable as is its approach to neo-colonialism.

[7] Readers should read the campaigning – including legal campaigning – work of Foil Vedenta that embraces several Afrikan neo-colonies as well as the Indian sub-continental territories and War on Want’s The New Colonialism: Britain’s scramble for Africa’s energy and mineral resources (2016).

Month Nine of the Algerian Uprising

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October 8, 2019

Algeria is undergoing a period of dramatic popular resistance to an authoritarian regime in power for decades. In Emma Wilde Botta’s second blogpost, she focuses on the construction of Algeria’s political order, the dynamics of the current crisis, and an assessment of the ongoing impasse.

By Emma Wilde Botta

The Algerian people are again rising up in a struggle for democracy, continuing their long tradition of popular resistance to authoritarianism. In April, the 20-year reign of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika came to an end following weeks of massive street protests demanding his resignation. Now, the army generals are attempting to settle the crisis on their own terms and maintain autocratic rule. But the new balance of forces imposed by the streets has stalled these efforts. Algeria stands at a political impasse as a timid military regime faces a persistent but indecisive popular movement.

Algeria’s uprising has been animated by the basic idea that people living in a democratic state should have the power to elect their president through fair and free elections. Since independence, an opaque clique of army generals, businessmen, and bureaucrats – often referred to as le pouvoir (‘the power’) – have ruled Algeria. Bouteflika became president in 1999, but he functioned largely as a figurehead, implementing the decisions of le pouvoir. Popular discontent, economic stagnation, and rising unemployment have challenged the regime. In February, the long simmering political crisis erupted into an on-going uprising.

The development of ‘le pouvoir’

After Algeria’s independence from France, the first civilian president, Ahmed Ben Bella, and the military, headed by Houari Boumedienne, constructed a political system out of the destruction and trauma of the war. They attempted to address social issues by bolstering public institutions and establishing free health care, under the banner of ‘socialism.’ However, the formation of the political order had more to do with cementing military rule than establishing workers’ power.

In 1965, Ben Bella was deposed in a coup, ushering in decades of military rule. Resting on its revolutionary laurels, the army enjoyed a measure of popular support. However, demands for democracy grew louder and, in 1988, week-long riots erupted, driven in part by economic grievances. The army leadership was forced to implement constitutional reforms including ending the single-party system and recognizing the right to form unions and political organizations.

With the ban on political parties lifted, other forces were able to contest for power in the electoral arena. In 1990, when an Islamist party won a majority of parliamentary seats, the military declared a state of emergency and deposed sitting president Chali Bendjedid. A nearly ten-year bloody civil war ensued between the army and Islamists. In the 1999 presidential elections, the military establishment selected former minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika as their candidate, and he won on the basis of bringing peace to the country.

Bouteflika’s election coincided with a rise in oil and gas prices. This revenue financed generous social benefits, food subsidies, and lifted the standard of living for many Algerians. In 2004, Bouteflika was re-elected in a landslide. The oil and gas sector has become critical to the country’s economy, accounting for 20 percent of the gross domestic product and 85 percent of total exports. The regime has repeatedly used its massive oil wealth to increase social spending in times of unrest in an effort to pacify civil conflict.

Oil and gas money also facilitated the development of an extensive patronage system that enriched the upper strata of the military. Rampant corruption allowed a tiny elite to accumulate colossal wealth. Bouteflika ruled in partnership with the army generals and bureaucrats that had controlled the country since 1965. When his second term ended, parliament changed the constitution so that he could legally run for a third term.

As the Arab Spring swept the Middle East and North Africa in 2010-2011, Algerians protested against food prices, unemployment, and the state of emergency that had been in place for over 19 years. To avoid a revolutionary escalation, like in Tunisia or Egypt, Bouteflika lifted the state of emergency and granted economic concessions, temporarily quelling unrest.

But in 2014, oil and gas prices fell. In response, the regime implemented austerity measures, slashing social services and starving public health care and education. Unemployment rose to over 25% in a country where 70 percent of the population are younger than 30. A diminished social safety net combined with rising rates of unemployment fuelled popular discontent.

Bouteflika suffered a stroke in 2013 and has rarely been seen in public since. Despite this, he won a fourth presidential term in 2014. It was becoming more and more apparent that the charade of elections was concealing an entrenched power structure based on the military.

The 2019 popular movement

By the end of 2018, discontent with Bouteflika’s regime ran deep. Calls for demonstrations in the Bab El Oued neighbourhood of Algiers in mid-December went unheeded, but they foreshadowed what the new year would bring.

The announcement in early February that Bouteflika would seek a fifth term was the final straw. The possibility of another term for the ailing president was humiliating and an affront to people’s sense of democracy. Rabah Bouberras, a 32-year-old shopkeeper from the suburbs of Algiers, told The New York Times, ‘We’re not hungry. It’s a question of dignity.’

Protests spread to other cities. On Tuesday 19 February, thousands rallied in Kherrata to oppose his candidacy. In Khenela, demonstrators ripped down a poster of Bouteflika in an act of rebellion that would be repeated across the country. On Friday, the revolt swelled. Over 800,000 people demonstrated across the nation. The following Tuesday, thousands of students rallied in Algiers and several other cities.

The movement exploded in the third week with an estimated 3 million people mobilizing on 8 March, International Women’s Day. In a meagre bid to appease protesters, Bouteflika promised to cut his fifth term short and call for elections within a year if he won re-election in April.

This was too little too late. Protests continued and an anonymous call was issued for a 5-day general strike. On 10 March, the regime reported that Bouteflika would not seek a fifth term but would stay in office until political reforms were implemented. Unsatisfied and outraged, massive crowds descended on Algiers on 15 March for the fourth Friday in a row in the largest demonstration yet. Algerian revolutionary hero Djamila Bouhired encouraged young protesters, saying, ‘Your elders liberated Algeria from colonial domination, and you are giving back to Algerians their liberties and their pride despoiled since independence.’

As the movement entered its fifth week, the upper strata of the military recognized the danger posed to the entire regime. General Ahmed Gaïd Salah, the army chief of staff and a long-time ally of the President, called for Bouteflika to step down due to poor health per article 102 of the constitution. If Boutefika would not, Salah proposed that the Constitutional Council declare him unfit on live TV. Boutefika’s billionaire allies began to abandon him as well.

On 2 April, the state news agency reported that Bouteflika had resigned. Under the terms of Algeria’s constitution, upper house speaker Abdelkader Bensalah was appointed interim president, and elections were scheduled for 4 July. The military leadership hoped this would be accepted as a path towards normalcy. Quick elections would allow them to reconsolidate their power.

But they underestimated the consciousness of the movement. The streets responded with ‘yetnahaw ga3’ (all of them will be removed) and demanded no elections until all Bouteflika-era officials, including Bensalah and Salah, were removed. The revolt, sparked by opposition to a figurehead, had developed into a systematic critique of the entire political order. Popular slogans such as ‘the system must go’ and ‘thieves you have destroyed the country’ reflected the growing demand for radical social and political change.

General Salah called for dialogue with the movement but was rebuffed. The president of Rally for Youth Action rejected the offer, saying he refused to negotiate with ‘symbols of the old system.’ In July, interim President Bensalah also called for dialogue, but protesters demanded the release of political prisoners and the resignation of all Bouteflika-era figures as preconditions. They chanted, ‘We will not be fooled by any dialogue. The people are conscious. They are not idiots.’

Alongside calls for dialogue, the ruling clique attempted to quell dissent and reconsolidate power by sacrificing regime officials and corrupt businessmen. In April, the military arrested several billionaires. A month later, the high level arrests continued and included Bouteflika’s brother and close advisor Said Bouteflika, former Secret Service head General Mohamed Mediene ‘Toufik’, and intelligence chief Athman Tartag.

Thus far, the regime has tactically avoided sending in the army to squash the nonviolent uprising. Ordering soldiers to harm fellow, peaceful citizens risks a breakdown in military discipline, and a soldiers’ revolt could bring down the whole system.

Despite the absence of army intervention, police and security forces have increasingly used repressive measures to deter crowds including tear gas and water cannons. At least one protester has died due to injuries inflicted by police.

Nature of the protests + organized labour

The revolution has attracted broad layers of society. The demand to end Bouteflika’s rule united people from all walks of life – working class youth, students, and women.

At their peak, the weekly protests brought out nearly 10 million people, about a quarter of the population. Nourdine Nana, a 59-year-old shopkeeper, told a journalist, ‘This is the first time we’ve all been together since 1962 [the date of Algeria’s independence] and it’s all because of Bouteflika.’ The demonstrations have been peaceful, joyous, creative celebrations of resistance.

Women have participated at an unprecedented level, the majority being young, urban, and highly educated. Many are demanding gender equality and the abolition of the oppressive Family Code. Artists have used their work to encourage protest and reflect the popular energy of the movement. New songs have become street anthems. The lyrics from rapper Soolking’s song Liberté, ‘Freedom, freedom, freedom, it is first in our hearts,’ have been tagged on walls across the country.

Industrial workers have been involved more as individuals than as an organized collective. Discontent has primarily been expressed in the streets rather than the workplace. The mid-March call for the 5-day general strike largely went unrealized. However, individual groups of workers did initiate workplace actions, and rank and file members of the official union defied their leadership and joined in.

Though revolutionary consciousness pervades the streets, the lack of an opposition coalition has hampered the movement. No organized force has emerged as the ‘organic leadership’ of the uprising. As a largely ‘leaderless’ movement, it has adopted a more horizontal nature, refusing official political intervention. Decades of corruption have fostered widespread mistrust of political parties and politicians.

Nascent organizing efforts to oppose Bouteflika existed prior to the 2019 uprising. In 2018, as worsening economic conditions fostered unrest, opposition political parties, citizen groups, and individuals founded the Mouwatana (citizenship) movement focused on discouraging Bouteflika from seeking a fifth term. However, neither the Mouwatana movement nor similar organizations have become notably influential among the masses.

There have been several, formal initiatives to bring together the movement and chart a way forward. On 15 June, a civil society conference invited 40 organizations and called for a transitional period of a year. While a conference on 6 July was attended by around 600 prominent Algerians and attempted to lay out a roadmap to new elections. The conference failed to take a critical stand against the military or directly call for the interim president to step down, instead suggesting dialogue. The movement dismissed the forum, led by a former diplomat and minister, as an attempt to undermine radical change. In mid-July, the president of the Civil Forum for Change proposed a list of experts with reputations for neutrality and without political ambition to mediate a political transition.

However, these civil society organizations (CSOs) lack legitimacy. Activist Nassim Balla explained, ‘People are used to regarding CSOs as receptacles of bad behaviour and corruption, as organisations that serve a handful of individuals intent on profiteering or building their own political career. Most Algerians do not trust them at all’.

The dearth of independent, dynamic civil society and political organizations is directly linked to decades of repression by the regime. When the ban on political parties was lifted following the 1988 riots, the regime moved to neutralize opposition parties, rendering them mostly symbolic. The left-wing parties that do exist are small, weak, and have been unable to take advantage of this political opening. Like in Sudan, the movement in the streets is not fighting under the banner of the Left.

The continuation of weekly student protests indicates that the student movement, long a target of the regime, has grown stronger and larger. The summer holidays have not dampened the momentum. Yassine, a 23 year old student, explained, ‘Despite the hot weather and the summer holiday, we are here in masses to stress that nothing will stop us as long as Bouteflika’s regime is still ruling.’

Protests continue uninterrupted in a weekly rhythm, but they have not developed into sit-ins or strikes. Organized labour has yet to become a decisive factor in the uprising. This is due in part to the regime’s efforts to significantly weaken unions. The official labour unions, including the largest union, the General Union of Algerian Workers (UGTA), have been co-opted and unable to function in the interests of workers. In an encouraging sign, the rank and file has been fighting to democratize the UGTA.

Independent labour unions have been involved in the movement from the start. However, they have failed to set a militant lead. On 27 April, rather than calling for a general strike to pressure the military to yield, a confederation of independent unions issued a broadly worded statement calling for ‘dialogue’ with ‘political powers’ and a ‘democratic transition’ while echoing the demand for a ‘radical change of the system.’

International powers have responded cautiously to events in Algeria. The European Union and the United States issued vague statements about respecting the rule of law and the rights of citizens. Iran and the Gulf monarchies have no major investments nor significant strategic interests in Algeria, unlike in Syria where they intervened swiftly. However, if the generals do move to take control in Algeria, international powers will inevitably swing behind the counterrevolution. The establishment of a military dictator to manage Algeria’s oil industry is preferable to the alternative of a (messy) democratic transition.

The Algerian uprising has inspired international solidarity among ordinary people. Activists in France and Tunisia have organized demonstrations in solidarity with the Algerian people. On 8 March, over 10,000 people in Paris rallied to support the uprising. A day later, hundreds of Tunisians demonstrated their solidarity.

Algerian scholar and activist Hamza Hamouchene laid out his assessment of the uprising:

In a nutshell, the Algerian revolution is still alive and there are signs that it will radicalize and enter a new escalation phase. …Civil disobedience and strikes must be structured within a framework of clearly formulated demands. The movement and its actions must find their political expression in a radical program and coherent strategy coming from the revolutionary-minded activists, trade unionists, and other leaders. We cannot afford a setback, as democratic space is shrinking week after week. We must continue fighting for democratic rights as well as individual and collective rights and freedoms and we must demand the immediate release of all political detainees and prisoners of conscience. The road is long, but I am hopeful.

Conclusion

The Algerian revolution continues unabated as it enters its ninth month. Even though the planned 4 July presidential elections failed to materialize, the ruling clique is still attempting to steer the country towards presidential elections on the basis of constitutional legitimacy. In mid-September, interim President Bensalah called for elections to be held on 12 December per the constitution. In response, tens of thousands marched in Algiers chanting ‘the people want the fall of Gaid Salah’ and ‘we want a civilian state, not a military state.’ The streets continue to reject elections on these terms, demand the release of political prisoners, and call for an end to le pouvoir.

In August, the movement showed signs of radicalizing. A new slogan rang through the streets: ‘civil disobedience is coming.’ For the movement to advance, the incredible energy and resolve in the streets will have to find its expression in the workplace. Labour and left-wing forces have an opportunity to put forward a bold strategy that harnesses the power of the rank and file.

So far, Algeria’s uprising has lacked a physical occupation that we have seen in the Sudanese and Egyptian revolutions. This, in combination with a military elite that is hesitant to impose its will through force, has produced a relatively bloodless uprising. However, the stand-off between the mass movement and the military can only continue so long. Eventually, the regime will be forced to directly confront the weekly street protests, and that will mean a price paid in the blood of protesters.

The final blogpost in this series will grapple with questions raised by the Sudanese and Algerian uprisings How do we account for the weakness of organized labour and the rank and file? The relative absence of organizations and the politics of the (revolutionary) left? What explains the gap between the revolutionary expression of these uprisings (i.e. mass popular mobilizations) and their overwhelmingly reformist strategy and vision? What general lessons can we learn from the struggles in Algeria and Sudan in order to strength other movements for liberation?

Emma Wilde Botta is socialist activist and writer based in Oakland, California. She has written extensively on the Arab Spring, the Gulf States, Iran, and US imperialism. Her writing has appeared in TruthOut, the International Socialist Review, and Socialist Worker.

Featured Photograph: A collage of the 2011 revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East, clockwise from top left the Egyptian revolution, Tunisian revolution, Yemeni uprising and the Syrian uprising (12 April, 2011).

Kenya’s Hunger Games

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October 3, 2019

Lena Grace Anyuolo describes the hunger games of capitalism in Kenya. In this diabolical world where the sponsors of jobs and healthcare are corporations, or rich individuals and media personalities who have the power to deliver life from poverty or fund-raise for a lifesaving medical procedure. Anyuolo is scathing about a form of existence where life or death depends on philanthropy or whether or not your story is worthy of a prime-time slot on TV.

By Lena Grace Anyuolo

About a month ago, Jeff Koinange, a leading news anchor and household name in Kenya made a fervent plea to Kenyans on behalf of his guest, 13-year-old Bianca Wambui who had been diagnosed with breast cancer but could not raise enough money for treatment. In an hour, 2.4 million (US$23,000) shillings had been raised.

The comments on the tweet by Citizen TV announcing the success of their fundraiser were varied and ranged from praise for Jeff Koinange or people being moved by the generosity of Kenyans, however, like a dark cloud on a sunny day, one comment asked, ‘What about the other Bianca’s out there?’ This brought to the fore the unsustainability of philanthropy as a method of healthcare management.

In 2015, reporter Denis Onsarigo covered a story, Desert of Death, an expose of toxic waste dumping that had been carried out by an American Oil Company, Amoco, in the 1980s in Marsabit County in Kenya during an oil exploration mission. Buried in pits dug in the earth was toxic mercury and arsenic that percolated into the water table and contaminated the drinking water in the wells. The residents and livestock drunk the poisoned water and it began to slowly kill them. The rate of throat and stomach cancer increased and in 2011, two residents each week were referred to hospitals in Meru town or Nairobi city for a biopsy. Most of the time, the residents could not afford the transport or medical bills for treatment.

But this skewed form of existence where one’s life or death depends on the philanthropy of others who determine whether or not your story is worthy of a prime-time feature does not only end with medical stories, it extends to how one earns their daily bread.

These are the hunger games of capitalism, where the sponsors or overlords are corporates like Safaricom or Coca Cola, or individuals like S. K. Macharia who own Citizen TV, and their scouts are Jeff Koinange and other influencers who have the clout to lift your life from poverty or fund-raise a lifesaving medical procedure.

To see just how pervasive this analogy is look at the format of popular game shows like East Africa’s Got Talent. The participants showcase their talent to a team of judges who decide whether or not their talent qualifies them for the next round bringing them closer to US$50,000 cash prize, which could mean a lot of things to the participants, such as better housing, education, healthcare, professional nurturing of their talent and so on. Never mind that their labour power, which is their talent is uncompensated while Citizen TV which airs the show in Kenya and Rapid Blue, the South African Company that produces it, rakes millions through sales of the show. Citizen TV also profits from advertising due to the ratings of the show.

In July, the story of Kevin Obede, a first class Actuarial Science Graduate who was living on the streets due to unemployment grabbed the headlines on prime-time news. It was tear jerking story. His pain and hopelessness was the story of many other graduates around the country. Within a week of the story, he was flooded with job offers.

On the #IkoKaziKe – a twitter hashtag that helps Kenyans hunt for work – the number of graduates looking for jobs far outweighs the job listings and #unemploymentdisasterke, the testimonies of ‘tarmacking’ (slang for job hunting) can scare you into accepting whatever job is offered to you. Pictures of graduates holding placards of their qualifications in traffic becomes a game of who will spot you, take a picture of the card, post it on social media and when it goes viral, then the job offers come flooding in. But then the participants in the ‘game’ became too many and the posts and pictures lost their effectiveness, so they turned to TV. One feature by Jeff Koinange and you have unlocked the top level of prosperity that is otherwise unreachable in the average person’s life.

Another example is KCB Lion’s Den. Here, aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their businesses to a team of judges — the ‘lions’ who are a group of successful business moguls who have the cash and know-how of what it takes to succeed. As the prey you have to impress these ‘overlords’ or corporate sponsors who have the power to turn your life around.

There is nothing wrong with competition, but if the ground is uneven, is it now a fair fight or simply playing God?

In the Hollywood film, The Hunger Games, the Capitol – the wealthy city-state at the centre of the fictional world – stages a series of competitions involving the 12 districts in a fight to the death scenario where the winner gets access to a better life than they lived in their districts. The games were set up by the Capitol as punishment to the 12 districts who had staged a rebellion years before. The districts are kept impoverished and each year, a boy and a girl from each district are put forward as representatives or tributes in the games. If one has sponsors who give you gifts critical to the winning of the games, then you have a better chance of making it. It is a competition for your humanity and the odds are unevenly stacked among the poorer districts in comparison to the wealthier district 1 and 2, who train their tributes for the games from birth.

We should think of the ‘districts’ as the Northern Frontier Province, the rural areas and urban settlements in Kenya. These were areas that were marginalised during colonialism and remained marginalised during flag independence and beyond when our country’s founding leaders entrenched colonial violence by taking for themselves the land that belonged to the peasant farmers. These farmers had been dispossessed during colonialism, and later through structural adjustment policies by the World Bank and IMF that heralded the neo-liberalism era.

Bianca Wambui came from Huruma, a ward in Mathare constituency in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. Mathare first started as a quarry where commercial stone mining took place. Most of the miners who worked at the quarry also lived there in caves hewn out of the rock. Later on, the British colonial government allowed them to build shacks. During the state of emergency, the crackdown on Kenyans suspected of being part of the ‘Mau Mau’ – the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) – heavily impacted Mathare as it was believed to be the centre of resistance in Nairobi. Their homes were demolished during the raids. Even after the war for independence, the new government led by Jomo Kenyatta did nothing to improve the lives of those who lived in Mathare, and instead asked them to go back to the rural areas as they made Nairobi look like a slum. Yet, where was the land? Had they not come to Nairobi because of precisely this reason —to find an alternative livelihood after being dispossessed of their ancestral land?

As you can see, one can draw parallels between the dystopian Hunger Games in Panem – the fictional country were the games take place – and the Hunger Games of Capitalism in Nairobi.

Therefore, if you do not get a sponsor who will help you win at the games, you will die of cancer like the residents in Northern Frontier Province who have to choose between sustaining their families or paying for cancer treatment. The poor do not have the smartphones to ask for funds from well-wishers or get on Jeff Koinange’s show, they sink into debt struggling to pay a medical bill, or travel back home empty handed if their talent or idea does not please the judges of a reality game show. Perhaps the biggest irony is that these shows serve as weekend or weekday evening entertainment for the workers in the ‘districts’ before waking up to serve capital. For these workers the taste of hope stays fresh on their tongues and the thought, ‘If only I get on the show,’ are carried like a prayer until the next opportunity to be on a prime-time reality show to share their story. The corporates like Safaricom that sponsor the shows are absolved of their exploitation of labour and complicity in this cruel system because they made one person’s dream come true on a game show.

At the end of the day it is a zero-sum game between capital and labour. Where capital is always the winner and doles out the ‘spoils’ – healthcare, right to dignified work, food to whomever is lucky and whoever wins in the diabolical game of life in Kenya.

Lena Grace Anyuolo is a writer and social justice activist with Mathare Social Justice Centre and Ukombozi Library. Her writing has appeared in Jalada’s 7th anthology themed After+Life and The Elephant.

Featured Photograph: The judges on East Africa’s Got Talent (Citizen TV, 13 July, 2019).

The President’s Ghetto: Where Bobi Wine Grew Up

ROAPE

October 1, 2019

Capitalizing on the growing disillusionment of Uganda’s development and the ubiquitous anger and discontent of the country’s youth, which represent over 75% of the population, Bobi Wine’s movement, known as People Power, has become a formidable political force. Sam Broadway tells the story of the people in Kamwokya where Wine grew up and where much of his political operations and support are centred today.

By Sam Broadway

This summer, as part of my research for New York University’s Global Journalism program, I travelled to Uganda where long-famous musician-turned Member of Parliament, Bobi Wine (real name, Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu), has made numerous headlines. In 2017, Wine announced his intention to run for a parliamentary seat in the Kyadondo East constituency of Kampala – Kyadondo is a working-class district which was also the site of the headquarters for the National Resistance Army (NRA) prior to their winning the Bush Rebellion in 1986. Since then, Uganda has known only one president, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, who’s National Resistance Movement (the political outgrowth of the NRA) has never lost a majority in parliament. In the 33 years since Yoweri Museveni took power, neoliberal economic policy has widened the gap between the rich and the poor, and education, while it has been expanded to larger segments of the population, no longer promises fulfilling employment. Bobi Wine’s immense popularity and well-known political leanings (Wine has been singing about the plight of the poor for nearly a decade), and his official announcement that he will stand for election as the next president of Uganda, promises to almost certainly and irreversibly alter the political landscape of the country. The following story is grounded in over a month of spending time with the people and place of Kamwokya where Bobi Wine grew up.

There is a mall in Kampala. With towering orange corners and white marble floors, it is a great temple to consumption. Its function is not unlike its decaying American sisters, though the Acacia Mall in Kololo is built for and attracts a much more affluent clientele. On Sundays, they descend on it to watch the latest Marvel movies in 3D (22.000 shillings, or $6 a ticket); shoppers dine on smoked salmon carpaccio (26.000 shillings or $7) while their children enjoy Playstation and virtual reality games (20.000 for 15 minutes, $5.50). Though truck beds packed with long-horned Ankole cows occasionally pass on the road outside the parking garage, no farmers or cowherds can be found licking ice cream by either of the mall’s two large fountains or eating chicken at the KFC.

Owned by a subsidiary of one of Uganda’s wealthiest men, the late Alykhan Karmali, known as Mukwano, the Acacia Mall casts a long shadow. Those who live under it can only dream of having enough cash to peruse the shops, try the ice cream, or eat the Colonel’s fried chicken. Many of these dreamers live in Kamwokya, a slum just five minutes by motorcycle from the mall’s main entrance.

Like most other slums in Kampala, Kamwokya sits at the bottom of a deep valley, downhill from wealthier neighbourhoods. Being downhill, it is the final resting place for so much wastewater from places like Acacia. On some nights, while walking up the road from the slum to the mall, before passing the fruit carts and the grilled chicken stands and the butcher shops, the stinging punch of piss and shit is overwhelming. The piss and shit of better-off Ugandans.

But Kamwokya is unlike Kampala’s other slums in at least one way. It is the home of the Ghetto President, the pop star-turned-politician, the man most loved in Uganda, and the 2021 presidential aspirant: Bobi Wine. In fact, it is just outside his childhood home, a quaint mudbrick and tin-roof structure, where the scent of Kampala’s cascading waste is most strong. And, graffitied in every direction the stench spreads, another reminder of the people’s love for Wine – FREE BOBI WINE, TUKOOYE M7 (we are tired of Museveni).

It was only a few days into my research that I more or less stumbled serendipitously into Kamwokya and the cache of material it would provide my reporting. I wanted to see Bobi Wine’s house, though, and my boda driver (motorcycle taxi) had taken me to his studio. I wanted to get to know the place where he had lived, the people he had relationships with, not only the place where he worked, the people he worked with. This was a bias I had not shed. If social life in the United States (and the rest of the Western world, for that matter) had been taken over by work life, if work had become the central point from which people formed relationships there, why not here. And the studio was conveniently located less than 200 meters from his house.

Along the main, paved road that descends from Kololo to the bustling working class, and even lower-middle class, outskirts of Kamwokya, there are several portals. Through them, ghetto youth pass from the winding, narrow, polluted and unnavigable alleys at the heart of the Kamwokya to a world outside, a world filled with vague promises of wealth and leisure, of which they only need to catch whiff to become anointed, respected, ‘known’ in the ghetto. While Bobi Wine’s studio, Fire Studioz, along with that of his older brother, Dream Studioz, are certainly two such portals, warping young starlets beyond their former clime, there is another, perhaps more significant in its diversity, that lies between them on the road.

Fire Base Barracks is a walled-off strip of land the shape of a twisted hourglass with a large blue main gate and a more discrete steel door exit near its middle. Adjacent to the entrance is a small conference room used by Bobi Wine to conduct some of the official business of his growing, immensely popular movement, People Power. The walls inside the conference room are decorated with the portraits of famous, black revolutionaries and leaders – Nelson Mandela, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., Thomas Sankara, Kwame Nkrumah, Haile Selassie I, and more. Towards the rear of the Barracks is where the training happens, but not in any revolutionary force of its own, but of young, ‘ghetto youth’ boxers.

**Some of the musicians and nature boys hanging in the backyard of Fire Base Barracks**

Fire Base is made up of several groups based on activity (for their own safety I won’t name any names). But the groups are as follows: the politicos, who are there less frequently but are close associates of Wine (his driver, his assistant) and help with the People Power day-to-day; the boxers, who train daily at 5pm and are mostly young men still in or just out of secondary school; the musicians, who record reggae, R&B and, to a lesser extent, hiphop and dress in their best ghetto-cum-streetwear, typically with flashy sunglasses; and, for lack of a better term, the Rastas, the ‘nature boys’ who amongst other activities smoke weed, chew khat with bubble gum, and make what they have to drink, smoke, or chew available to the musicians or boxers the activities of whom overlap with their own.

But you won’t see Bobi in the backyard. The backyard is for the boxers, the low-level musicians, and especially, the nature boys. This is their territory, their safe space to do that which they are accustomed. And a Bobi Wine fighting hard to leave his past reputation as the ‘President of Uganja’ – while still not alienating his roots with visits to the ghetto – won’t be found in the backyard of Fire Base (though, he will stand on the hill at its edge and, as he did me, greet those down below). Today, the Ghetto President is perhaps more Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu than he is Bobi Wine, and the bottleneck between Fire Base’s front and back sections is, in a way, a physical demarcation of his psycho-political transition.

Before I was aware of the significance of this Wine-Kyagulanyi transition, I was quite free with my pursuit of the story. I wanted to get to know the Fire Base crowd, all of them. And so, as the radical journalist I vainly believe myself to be, I joined them in whichever activity I found them conducting: smoking herb mixed with grabba, chewing khat mixed with comic-strip bubble gum, or drinking sorghum porridge mixed with rasta conversation.

As the weeks ran on I became paranoid that Wine’s wish to distance himself from the activities of the nature boys had extended by proxy to myself. Fortunately, I was wrong. In Uganda, and perhaps in many places throughout Africa, no public opinion is formed based on private hearsay. And so, I finally got my interview. Though, on the fourth occasion I met Wine, I was cautioned not to smoke with him around.

**Men gamble over African Poker by candlelight**

Of course, every one of the Fire Base contingent loves Wine. For them, like so many other young Ugandans, he possesses a pure, avuncular quality that they trust, admire, and feel close to however distant from it they might actually be. This same quality is extended to those characters populating Wine’s extended universe, and on any given night, it is readily apparent. This was certainly the case with King Lutz, one of the many Fire Studioz promoters as well as my own personal friend and guide, who can navigate the maze of Kamwokya without conscious thought, stopping only to pat familiar children on the head or greet his fans.

Kamwokya, as a working-class neighbourhood, might be filled with those who wake well before the sun rises, but by equivalent working-class impulses, it also comes quite alive once the sun has set. King, being Kamwokya-born, knew this, and it showed in his excited eyes and wide, open-mouthed, gap-toothed grin when he suggested taking me out on a Friday.

We started at Rumor, a swanky, string bulb-lit pub on the hill that technically belongs to another neighbourhood but nonetheless looks out over Kamwokya and is frequented by the ghetto’s upper crust for live local music. Then, across the street to the Rwandan-owned Supermarket (also a bar) that had long ago ceased the sale of every other less-profitable product that would constitute the full intention of its name, its shelves now sparsely populated by neatly-spaced bottles of wine and beer.

Supermarket is a haven for Fire Base-affiliates of all kinds – musicians, promoters, producers, environmentalist nature-boys, both established and up-and-coming – who gather to drink for cheap and to smoke in the narrow, unlit back-alley they’ve nicknamed Chinatown. But like Rumor, Supermarket can only boast a clientele from and a view of the ghetto.

Down at the roadside – the true epicentre of Kamwokya’s nightlife – the people are as lively as their activities are varied. At Cock N Bull, there are as many choices as there are stories of the building; those not suffering cheerfully in the bouncing humidity of the first-floor club or fighting to take a shot at the pool table amidst the crowded lip-syncing competition in the bar on the third, are transfixed by the outdated screens of black, plastic computers, their eyes growing dry as they place meagre yet hopeful wages on electronic games. Yet still more strain their own eyes by candlelight to see the real thing.

Across the street, past the row of Rolex stands where a chapati and omelette combo (known as a Rolex) costs 20 times less than the smoked salmon carpaccio served in the cafe at Acacia mall, there is a small, mud-brick portico with a low ceiling. Stepping through it is like stepping through a wardrobe that leads to another world, a world with a small, dimly lit pool table and two groups of men, staring at the rapid flash of cards being dealt by the light of two candles. The game is one of pure chance. Slap your money on the worn, oily surface of the wooden table – the more you mean it, the better your supposed odds – and, with speed, deal the cards. If your chosen card comes first, you win; if your opponents’, you lose. The game is absurdly fast and requires considerably more bravado than skill: ghetto poker.

For many in Kamwokya, gambling is a way out – if only out of their minds and if only for those small, nightly moments. For many others, especially the young, it is music – though with the government ban on Bobi Wine’s concerts even music’s promise has been stalled. And for others still, it is boxing; boxing in any form it can be organized. After all, boxing, unlike music, is entertainment that can be gambled on.

**A boy is declared the winner of an underage boxing match organized in Nakifuma**

My night out with King ended with a greasy, double Rolex (for the much more affordable 2.000 shillings or $0,50) and the false assumption that I had only learned something about Kamwokya. I would learn much later the meaning behind King’s own words, the ghetto is not some place in Uganda, it is a mentality. And indeed, the phenomenon transcends place. It was there at a bar called Antidot, in the strip-of-a-town called Nakifuma. It was there in the ring, some as young as 13, took swings at each other for temporary fame and glory. It was there in the soft red glow of the tidy bedroom-offices of prostitutes beckoning men going to and from the urinals. It was even there in Gulu, past the statue elephants guarding the market, past the hotels with their beef and chicken buffets – there in the thatched-roof dwellings of internally displaced people which they also call a ghetto.

The ghetto is the phenomenon that grows in the shadow of Acacia Mall, the shadow cast by the unequal distribution that is the hallmark of the Washington Consensus. And in the case of Uganda, the growing movement of People Power, with its populist language, its red berets, and its leader – whether he is called Bobi Wine or Kyagulanyi – the shadow is the disease and the cure.

Sam Broadway is studying Journalism and Africana Studies at New York University. He worked as an English teacher in Rwanda from 2013 to 2015. His primary academic interests are sub-Saharan African politics, socialism, and documentary photography, particularly in Ghana, Uganda, and Rwanda.

Featured Photograph: Local music promoter, King Lutz, who acted as Sam Broadway’s guide in Kamwokya (all photos in the text taken by Sam Broadway).

The Black Model – Decolonising Artistic Knowledge Production

ROAPE

September 26, 2019

Heike Becker reflects on an exhibition that foregrounded black subjects in 19^th and early 20^th century art. The exhibition restored the identities of the black models, often naming them for the very first time. Heike challenges us to face head-on the colonising act of invisibilising the black subject and fieldworker, without whose contributions the celebrated cultural and intellectual accomplishments of ‘Western’ scholars and artists would not have been possible.

By Heike Becker

For a few days in July this year I found myself in Paris. A highlight of the exquisite trip was a visit to Présence Africaine, the African bookshop and public window of the journal and publishing house by the same name, which has been a thriving home of African and diaspora culture and writing in France since 1947.

There was yet another tremendous occasion to encounter the African presence in France. For much of the northern spring and summer of 2019, for the first time an exhibition in the leading French museum of contemporary art foregrounded black subjects in 19^th and early 20^th century art. The Black Model: From Géricault to Matisse, which ran at the Musée d’Orsay from March to July this year, did more than simply revisit representations of black people in visual arts from the French revolution to the final decades of French colonialism in Africa. At the centre of this extraordinary exhibition were people of African descent who had sat as models for some of the most famous artists. Who were these women and men? What were their relations with the artists, and what their perspectives on wider society, in France and also in the Caribbean?

Indeed, some of those who sat for well-known French paintings came from Haiti and other islands in the Caribbean. Their faces were portrayed in famous artworks yet thus far they had remained nameless. To restore their identities, to even name them, often for the very first time, was the central aim of the exhibition.

About time! In a challenging move the curators had renamed some of the exhibited works. For instance, Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s, Portrait of a Black Woman (an item on loan from the Louvre’s collection), known as such since it was first presented in the Paris Salon of 1800, was renamed and is now known as Portrait of Madeleine, in an effort to present the story of the sitter. When viewing the exhibition, I learnt that the woman who looks back at the viewer with such amazing confidence and grace was Madeleine, an emancipated slave from Guadeloupe; she was also a domestic servant who worked in the house of the artist’s brother-in-law.

The curators of The Black Model did not rename the work of art that they presented as the exhibition’s centrepiece: Édouard Manet’s world famous Olympia. Ever since its initially controversial reception in 1865, the attention focused on Olympia, as the image of a naked white woman, ostensibly a prostitute, reclining in relaxed pose on a divan. The black woman, who is depicted in the right third part of the canvas, has hardly ever been discussed. In the recent exhibition though the presentation was focused on her. The strikingly attractive woman who posed for Manet for Olympia and other works has now been identified as ‘Laure’ who lived at the time in a modest neighbourhood of Paris. Viewers met the beautiful Laure again in the last room of the extensive show, which features re-imaginations of Olympia in a number of more recent works that shift the focus onto the erotic tension that exudes from the proximity of the white and black women’s bodies.

**Édouard Manet’s *Olympia* first exhibited in Paris in 1865**

As I made my way through the galleries on the ground floor of the stunning museum space, it suddenly hit me: the marvellous effort to properly acknowledge and name the unnamed black models of famous white French artists seemingly matched efforts of Africanising anthropology! Revisionist social histories of anthropology have for the past couple of decades emphasised the significance of the African research ‘assistants’ for celebrated studies, previously billed to the academically trained researcher alone.

At the turn to the 21^st century Lyn Schumaker’s acclaimed study of the networks and fieldwork that produced the knowledge that came out of the Rhodes-Livingstone-Institute utterly reshaped the understanding of knowledge production. Knowledge production had to be understood more appropriately as collaborative processes that involved (white, often male, European or South African) researchers, African research assistants and the people anthropologists used to call ‘informants’.

I wondered: Did this exhibition in Paris do something similar for the production of visual art? Was this an even more revolutionary act of curatorship: Shedding light on the collaborative processes that produce art thus removing the production of art from the realm of the ‘genial’ individual (white, mostly male, European) artist?

Focused on this important angle, The Black Model covers the period from the French revolution to the inter-war period of the mid-20^th century. The exhibition intersperses the presentation of famous and lesser-known art works that exemplify the changing representation of black people in French art of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Its periodization demonstrates the full – and often brutal – tensions and contradictions of liberation, racism and colonialism in French modern history. The historical narrative starts with the hopeful moment when slavery was abolished in the French colonies in 1794 following the radical spirit of the revolution and the 1791 slave uprising in Sainte Domingue (Haiti), as CLR James famously noted in his preface to The Black Jacobins, ‘the only successful slave revolt in history.’ But only eight years later Napoleon Bonaparte reinstated slavery and the slave trade, and in 1804 Haiti proclaimed independence. It took almost half a century until slavery was abolished for the second time in France in 1848.

At about the same time French colonialism in Africa flourished; the second half of the 19^th century and the early decades of the 20^th was in France – like elsewhere in Europe – when we saw the horrendous spectacles of ‘human zoos’. They only finally ended after World War 1, which saw the mobilisation of about 200,000 African soldiers, known as the Tirailleurs sénégalais in the French army and the arrival of Black American GIs in Paris. The exhibition stopped short of the infamous Thiaroye massacre of African recruits in 1944. Rather, the 1920s were celebrated – perhaps a little too uncritically – as the period that transformed Paris and the arts with jazz. A substantial part of the exhibition was further dedicated to the influence of the Harlem Renaissance on French artists like Henri Matisse.

This being an art exhibition of course, the changing representation of black people becomes apparent in an increasing attention to the portrayed individuals in the first half of the 20^th century. I enjoyed expressive portraits such as Félix Vallotton’s Aïcha (1922) yet was taken aback by the continuous stereotypes of black icons of 20^th century French arts and culture. Henri Matisse, and his celebration of the Harlem renaissance could have been given a more critical note I thought, given his continuation of the exotic fantasies of Tahiti.

**Larry Rivers produced *I Like Olympia in Black Face* in 1970**

These were small misgivings though, and instantly assuaged in the final gallery. This space was given to reinventions of Manet’s iconic Olympia in fascinating art works that challenged the racialising gaze of the art world. I particularly liked Larry Rivers’ I like Olympia in Black Face (1970) sculpture in painted wood, plastic and Plexiglass. Rivers doubles up the woman figure perched on the divan – on the upper tier the female figure on the settee is conventionally white and the attendant predictably black. On the other tier he turns the gaze around and we see a black woman in resting pose attended by a white woman. I also liked the noticeable presence of the cat – an overlooked detail of Manet’s painting. In Rivers’ reinterpretation of the iconic Olympia the feline too features in double, and in black and white.

Altogether The Black Model was a bold act of decolonising the political economy of artistic knowledge production. It faced head-on the colonising act of invisibilising the black – African and Caribbean – individuals, sitters and fieldworkers, without whose contributions the celebrated cultural and intellectual accomplishments of ‘Western’ scholars and artists would not have been possible.

Heike Becker is an activist and writer. As a professor at the University of the Western Cape she teaches anthropology and writes on politics, culture, and social movements across the continent. Heike is a regular contributor to roape.net.

Featured Photograph: ‘Portrait of a Black Woman’ by Marie-Guillemine Benoist in 1800 was part of ‘The Black Model: From Géricault to Matisse’ at Musée d’Orsay in Paris (Musée d’Orsay – facebook).

Under Construction: Unpacking Ethiopia’s Infrastructure Boom

ROAPE

September 24, 2019

Ethiopia invests a higher percentage of its GDP in public infrastructure than nearly every other country in the world. In this blogpost, Daniel Mains argues that the construction of infrastructure is a site for understanding the tense relationship between citizen and state in Ethiopia. In a contribution to the debate on Capitalism in Africa hosted by roape.net, Mains argues that an analytical method is needed that can examine these processes without assuming a capitalist society that is unified by a singular mode of economic production. Such an approach enables researchers to examine multiple, sometimes contradictory, economic dynamics.

By Daniel Mains

Categorizing African countries or societies as capitalist obscures more than it reveals. There should be no doubt that capitalist processes and relationships can be found in every corner of the African continent, but what does it mean to label a society as capitalist’? For me this implies that capitalism dominates social life and determines the vast majority of economic practices. From this perspective all economic practices, including gift giving, domestic labour, and producing for one’s self, become analytically subordinate to capitalism. I do not believe this is appropriate for Africa, or anywhere else in the world for that matter. Although analyses in the roape.net debate of Jorg Wiegratz’s and Horman Chitonge’s are certainly nuanced, as Elísio Macamo puts it, in categorizing societies as capitalist there is a risk for scholars to be ‘blinded by capitalism.’ For example, in Jörg Wiegratz’s compelling call to examine capitalism in Africa he provides an exhaustive list of ‘social phenomena that are typical of contemporary capitalist society across the world.’ The list includes things like mental illness, dating apps, and gated communities – all can be connected to capitalism, but all may exist independently of capitalism as well. The notion of a capitalist society obscures the degree to which these social phenomena have roots in causal factors not directly related to capitalism. As J.K. Gibson-Graham argued in the seminal book, The End of Capitalism (as we knew it), to conceptualize capitalism as encompassing any and all economic activities makes it nearly impossible to imagine alternative practices and methods of resisting inequality, outside of a massive structural revolution.

I follow Stefan Ouma in wishing to explore how economic dynamics interact with capitalist logics, without reducing complex processes to products of capitalism. Rather than labeling a society as capitalist (or using any other single term to describe a society), my approach has been to examine relationships between specific dynamics, some that are directly related to capitalism and some that are not. In my new book, Under Construction: Technologies of Development in Urban Ethiopia I take the construction of infrastructure as a site for understanding the often tense relationship between citizen and state in Ethiopia. As Tom Goodfellow points out, Ethiopia invests a higher percentage of its GDP in public infrastructure than nearly every other country in the world. This investment in infrastructure is partially responsible for Ethiopia’s rapid economic growth during the past decade. Constructing infrastructure in Ethiopia involves the sale of labour to owners of capital, accumulation by dispossession, and state intervention on behalf of capital, as well as corruption, gift exchange, and workers’ cooperatives building roads. There is no doubt that capital plays a major role in constructing infrastructure. That said, to label the bribes that Chinese construction companies give to Ethiopian government administrators as capitalist, immediately closes off useful lines of inquiry. What other economic logics shape the giving and receiving of bribes? How do Chinese and Ethiopian understandings of bribery differ from each other? How do personal relationships based in humor and friendship impact corruption?

In Under Construction I examine particular infrastructural technologies to articulate specific dynamics and relationships that are helpful for understanding capitalism, but do not depend on the notion of a capitalist society. For example, the Ethiopian government is currently spending billions of dollars to hire private companies, particularly the Italian business Salini, to build huge dams on its rivers. This is a clear case of accumulation by dispossession, but it is also grounded in historical center-periphery dynamics that are not directly connected to ownership of capital. One might argue that center-periphery dynamics simply serve the interests of capital, but why not argue the reverse? Why should one determine the other? An analytical method is needed that can examine processes like accumulation by dispossession without assuming a capitalist society that is unified by a singular mode of economic production. This approach enables researchers to examine multiple, sometimes contradictory, economic dynamics.

In the remainder of this blogpost I will explore the cases of public transportation provided by three-wheeled motorcycle taxis and the construction of cobblestone roads. Both of these technologies nicely demonstrate how many of the tensions associated with constructing infrastructure are rooted in the relationship between vital and historical materialisms. Vital materialism refers to the agency of things. In the case of infrastructure the particular qualities of different infrastructural technologies shape citizen/state relationships as well as broader inequalities. Historical materialism, of course, refers to Marx’s analytical method. Here, I draw from Donald Donham’s synthesis of Marx and anthropology. Donham argued that historical materialism can be used to understand economic relationships that are not determined by ownership of the means of production. Rather than ownership of the means of production, Donham argues that differences in control over the product of one’s labour shape conflicts and inequality. As I detail below, given my interest in economic practices that are not easily categorized as capitalist, this combination of historical and vital materialisms offers a very useful analytical approach.

In March 2015, drivers of three-wheeled motorcycle taxis in Hawassa refused to work and the city came to a standstill. In Hawassa, a city of 250,000 with only four state-owned busses, most residents relied on the three-wheelers, known by their brand name Bajaj, to move through the city. As one passenger noted, ‘If the Bajaj is lost, then everything is lost. Without the Bajaj we cannot move and there is no city.’ In other words, a city without Bajaj transportation is not a city because people are not free to move, socialize, and engage in commerce. Although Bajaj were owned and operated for profit by private individuals, they were tightly regulated by the Ethiopian state. The Bajaj driver strike was the culmination of long-standing anger among Bajaj drivers and owners regarding state regulation of the Bajaj system. As one of the leaders of an association for Bajaj owners told me, ‘Government administrators know nothing about how transportation works in this city! Passenger fares, Bajaj routes, all of this should be left to the market.’

The vast majority of Bajaj drivers lease their vehicles from owners. They pay a daily fee to use the vehicle, cover the cost of gas, and keep everything they earn from transporting passengers. The municipal government determines where and when they can operate their Bajaj and passenger fares. In the case of the Bajaj, conflicts cannot be understood only in terms of ownership of the means of production. The state does not own the means of production (the Bajaj) or consistently support the interests of Bajaj owners, and yet the state is in direct conflict with Bajaj drivers. Bajaj drivers consistently expressed resentment for the control that the state exerted over their livelihoods. The Bajaj case is also complicated by the fact that capital does not hire labour, rather drivers lease vehicles from owners – a dynamic that is common to many cases of paratransit in urban Africa.

Conflicts were centered on drivers’ lack of control over products of their labour, but equally important were the particular qualities of the Bajaj as an infrastructural technology. The particular characteristics of the Bajaj, as an inexpensive, flexible, and labour dependent transportation technology shape conflicts between administrators and drivers. In contrast to a minibus, the dominant mode of transportation in Addis Ababa, a Bajaj carries a maximum of three passengers, creating a great deal of potential work for drivers. In this sense a Bajaj is a pro-social technology because it generates incomes for numerous drivers and their families. Equally important is the fact that a three-wheel vehicle is much narrower and has a tighter turning radius than a four-wheeler. Its light weight and slow speed enable the Bajaj to stop quickly, meaning that it need not maintain a great deal of distance from the vehicle in front of it. Bajaj travel in clusters, often weaving in and out of traffic and stopping suddenly. All of these qualities supported government administrator claims that Bajaj are not ‘modern’ because they ‘close’ the street and prevent the easy movement of four-wheeled vehicles. At the time of my research government administrators were attempting to replace the Bajaj with what they considered to be more modern mini-busses, a move that severely threatened the livelihoods of Bajaj drivers and owners. Vital materialism brings analytical attention to these qualities of technology and the way they structure conflict. In Hawassa questions of labour and technology were essential for understanding conflicts over public transportation.

Cobblestone roads are another case of infrastructural development that is best understood in terms of a synthesis of vital and historical materialisms. Beginning in 2007, first with the help of the German Development Cooperation Office (GIZ) and then with assistance from the World Bank, Ethiopia has employed well over 100,000 people to build more than 1000 kilometers of cobblestone roads, primarily in urban areas. The Ethiopian state’s interest in cobblestone as an infrastructural technology is based largely in the particular qualities of stones. During the 1990s and early 2000s rates of youth unemployment in Ethiopian cities hovered around fifty percent and lengths of unemployment averaged three to four years. Idle young men had a particularly visible presence on the streets of urban Ethiopia. The chiseling and setting of stones has created jobs for some of these young men, allowed them to experience normative social maturation, and reduced some of the pressure on the state from disaffected young men.

The success of cobblestone as a development strategy is also based on the particular relations of production used to build cobblestone roads. In contrast to typical methods of building infrastructure, cobblestone workers are organized into cooperatives. The state distributes contracts to cobblestone cooperatives that share the profits from road building among the cooperative members. This means that building cobblestone roads is far more lucrative than similar forms of manual labour. It is worth asking how the construction of asphalt roads and dams would differ if the labourers who built these infrastructures shared the profits from million and billion dollar contracts among themselves. Cobblestone cooperatives demonstrates that this is not a purely hypothetical question, such labour relations have been successful in constructing durable infrastructures.

There are numerous connections between Bajaj transport, cobblestone roads, and capital – Bajaj drivers lease the means of production from owners; cobblestone roads facilitate the movement of goods and people that are essential for free markets. That said, there is limited analytical utility in analyzing the Bajaj or cobblestone roads as products of capitalism or a capitalist society. Historical materialism brings attention to tensions over labour that are not necessarily determined by capitalism. Vital materialism demands attention to the importance of technology. A synthesis of the two offers an analytical method that is highly useful for understanding conflict, inequality, and infrastructure across the African continent.

Daniel Mains is Wick Cary Associate Professor of Anthropology and African Studies in the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Hope is Cut: Youth, Unemployment, and the Future and Under Construction: Technologies of Development in Urban Ethiopia.

Featured Photograph: a cobblestone road being laid in Addis Ababa; the cover image of Daniel Mains’ new book.

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