Call for Contributions

January 22, 2019

The revolutionary left in Sub-Saharan Africa (1960’s-1970’s): a political and social history to be written

Background

The reason for this symposium stems from the following observation: while the revolutionary left movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Europe, the United States, Latin America and elsewhere have been the subject of abundant literature, similar movements that emerged during this period in Africa are still unknown. There are two main reasons for this ignorance: firstly, it was often an underground history with actors operating in hiding, and secondly, it is also a long-concealed history, either because of defeat (political and sometimes military), or of a certain form of self-censorship due to the subsequent reconversion of former revolutionary actors within the ruling elite or other reasons of ‘disavowal’ of this left-wing activist past.

The symposium is therefore meant to help reveal the invisible, forgotten and retrospectively compressed history of these left-wing movements in order to better appreciate the role they played in this period’s political power relationships, in the broad sense, within post-colonial African States. Beyond the political scope, it will attempt to assess their influence within the process for the ‘modernization of men’, according to Pierre Fougeyrollas’ formula about Senegal, in other words, the post-colonial societal genesis.

From the 1960s onwards, and especially during the following decade, the dynamics of this revolutionary left developed, on the occasion of certain insurrectional events that sometimes led to changes of government, or to the advent of so-called revolutionary regimes, or those professing Marxism or Marxism-Leninism (Congo, Madagascar, Ethiopia, Benin etc.). For this reason, this politicization trend could not be completely overlooked.

Thus, the issue of revolutionary left-wing movements has been addressed contiguously by two types of writings:

– those that studied the revolutionary regimes of the 1970s, most of which were published in the late 1980s and early 1990s, influenced by international geopolitics (East-West cleavage and then the rivalry within the ‘communist’ camp between the USSR model and the Chinese model) on the external level and focusing internally on the ‘reality’ of socialism established by these regimes (see for example the term ‘Marxoids’ applied to the Kerekou regime);

– then on May 1968 in Africa and the Global Sixties, published in recent years, to show that Africa has been part of this broad movement of anti-systemic protest which often tends to be limited to Western countries.

However, the intrinsic history of these ‘anti-systemic’ left-wing movements has yet to be written, probably because the history and sociology of revolutions tend to focus mainly on revolutions that have marked world history, primarily the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions. However, it is also expected that lessons could be learnt from revolutionary movements that have not achieved their goals, in classical terms, of overthrowing governments. Moreover, it can always be considered that even the most emblematic revolutions in world history have also had their share of losers, who would have preferred this revolutionary process to take a different direction, when it took a ‘Thermidorian’ path to use an expression inspired by the French Revolution.

To return to the African continent, at first sight, these left-wing forces were in continuity with the anti-colonialist struggles that preceded the recognition of African independence.

However, they were also confronted with ‘neo-colonial’ African regimes, i.e. supported or even maintained by Western powers. In the case of territories colonized by France, the conflictual nature of this decolonization has been marked by episodes of ‘confiscation’ of independence as part of a ‘French-African’ group (‘Françafrique’), which sometimes led to attempts at armed opposition, as in Cameroon with the UPC or in Niger with the Sawaba.

A while later, in the context of the Global Sixties of worldwide protest, where the center of gravity of the ‘world revolution’ seemed to shift further south, a new left occasionally emerged and ideologically distanced itself from the ‘old’ anti-colonialist left that sprang from the struggles for independence, which were sometimes overwhelmed by this rising generation who ultimately criticized it for not being ‘revolutionary’ enough or for being willing to compromise with the regimes in place.

Considerations contributions should therefore take stock of these different ideological positions claiming to be close to different orientations of international or ‘geopolitical’ Marxism:

on the one hand, allegiance to pro-USSR ‘orthodoxy’ for parties such as PAI in Senegal or G-80 in Niger,
on the other hand, reference to Mao’s China for the Kahidines in Mauritania or And Jëf in Senegal, or Enver Hodja’s Albania for the Voltaic Revolutionary Communist Party (PCRV), or the Communist Party of Dahomey (PCD) without forgetting the case of Trotskyist groups that were sometimes able to establish themselves as in Senegal (GOR) or pan-Africanism (see, for example, the case of RND founded by Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal or MOJA in Liberia), or
any radical ideology that can be categorized as leftist, while linking them to the effective strategies of these different groups or organizations, most of them underground or based abroad.

With regard to these ideological issues, contributors are expected to be able to identify references to revolutionary theories and experiences outside Africa but also to highlight, where they have existed, attempts to ‘indigenize’ this universalist referent.

Beyond an event-driven, ideological and organizational history that will have to be reconstructed with the available written (leaflets, brochures) and oral (testimonies of former activists) sources, there is a need to clarify the social base (or social bases) of these political movements:

were they limited to the intelligentsia in cities (or even the capital)?, or
did they sometimes manage to establish themselves locally among peasant or urban popular populations?

So what conclusions can be drawn from attempts to ‘integrate the masses’, to use the language of the slogan of the Fédération des étudiants d’Afrique noire en France (FEANF) launched in the 1960s? More specifically, we could examine the interactions between these left-wing movements and social movements, particularly students who have often been the vectors of this revolutionary politicization, but also workers (through the influence of revolutionary militants of trade unions) or youth or women’s movements. In this respect, we could also focus on the linkage between the underground activities of political organizations and the more ‘open’ game within these mass movements.

In connection with the militarization of the political game, one can take stock of guerrilla attempts, including when they proved to be resounding failures, as was the case in Senegal with the PAI in 1964 or in Congo with Ange Diawara’s JMNR in 1972. Similarly, in some countries, the relationship between this radical left and certain ‘progressive’ or even ‘revolutionary’ soldiers is an interesting subject since it was established in a number of situations in which these soldiers have had the support of certain fractions of the left, to take over state power (Sudan in 1969-71, Ethiopia in 1974-77, Burkina Faso in 1983-87).

Moreover, apart from these situations in which political power relations end up by being militarized, it may be appropriate to examine strategies to build counter powers to the regime in place, by setting up a ‘revolutionary’ or at least ‘autonomous’ trade unionism, for example, or other associative forms that are not subservient to the ruling party (see in the case of Burkina Faso, the establishment of CGT-B or MBDHP in the 1980s).

Finally, beyond the organizational attempts, there may also have been attempts motivated by an anti-imperialist sentiment to reject symbols of Western culture and promote a national or African culture (see the manifesto of the Senegalese Cultural Front published in 1977). In this perspective, one can also bring up the issue of hegemony and, in particular, the confrontation/ coexistence with religious authorities, which may have been a problem in the case of radical movements that have sometimes been exposed to stigmatization – ‘communism’ equals ‘atheism’ – meant to discredit their action (see the case of the Communist Party of Sudan).

Beyond the framework of the post-colonial states in formation, the links between the development of these left-wing movements and the international context can also be examined through contacts with other militant forces and the solidarity expressed for other ‘causes’, in favour of other organizations of the revolutionary left in Africa, or the latest national liberation movements in the struggle against Portuguese colonialism or the anti-apartheid movements in South Africa and, beyond the African continent, radical movements like the Black Panthers or armed struggle movements like the Palestinian fedayeens. In the same vein, it might be essential to highlight the role of Diaspora activists (students among others) in order to understand the efforts deployed to effectively implement such solidarity.

Finally, one might wonder what the legacy of this revolutionary left beyond the geopolitical upheavals of the 1990s actually is. Should we consider that the fall of the Berlin Wall has definitively relegated into the ‘dustbins of history’, these left-wing movements, which often profess Marxism. However, one cannot ignore that in many African societies, the multi-party system (including ‘civil society organizations’) emerging at that time was, to a large extent, built by actors from this revolutionary left.

Even if the symposium fails to assess the politics of the left in post-colonial Africa, the issue of the material and ideological dependence towards the Eastern Block or/and relevance of Marxist ideas for Africa and the South cannot be ignored, as some postcolonial theorists do. Besides, how the leftist activists tried to adapt their ideology and political action to the post-Cold War situation and the neoliberal agenda in the 1990’s is also relevant. To conclude, the political and societal legacy of this radical left can also be discussed, bearing in mind that sometimes, as was seen in recent years, it is through memorial activities that we start accessing knowledge about a history that has yet to be written.

In addition to the participation of researchers this symposium welcomes former actors of this revolutionary left who will be able to intervene in the discussions or even intervene during a round table which will be specifically organized for them.

Contribute

Contributors are invited to submit a proposal in the form of an abstract (in English or in French) not exceeding 5,000 characters to the following e-mail address: revleftafrica@rosalux.org by no later than 1 March 2019. Proposals will be reviewed.

On 31 March 2019, selected contributors will be invited to write their contributions of between 30,000 and 60,000 characters by 15 September 2019 at the latest.

A symposium is scheduled to be held in Dakar on 31 October and 1 November 2019.

Committee: Ibrahim ABDULLAH, Jimi ADESINA, Hakim ADI, Kate ALEXANDER, Pascal BIANCHINI (organiser), Françoise BLUM, Carlos CARDOSO, Jean COPANS, Thierno DIOP, Mor NDAO, Ndongo Samba SYLLA (organiser), Leo ZEILIG

The Capitalist Game: Football in Africa

ROAPE

January 22, 2019

Adam Rodgers Johns explores the commercialisation of football in Africa. He argues that at the professional level the continent’s most popular sport provides us with fertile grounds for the analysis of capitalism in Africa.

By Adam Rodgers Johns

The trend towards the commercialisation of football is not limited to the most powerful and competitive leagues in Western Europe but affects all regions of the world, including Africa. In recent years, the commercialisation of elite level professional football has affected the world’s most popular sport at unprecedented levels – from ownership, sponsorship, ticket sales to TV licensing. There are numerous ways in which Africa is linked to the global business of football. For example, the huge popularity of European, specifically English football, has significant commercial implications in terms of broadcasting revenue, merchandise and gambling.

There are a number of examples from the African continent where there has been an attempt to create a commercial football culture. The commercialisation of football at the professional level is impacting the continent’s most popular sport in unexpected and largely unexplored ways. Following debates in this series on Capitalism in Africa, developments in football represents an example of the unstudied capitalist phenomena of Africa, and provides an opportunity to reverse this trend.

The adoption of new business models is changing how we think about the global game. For example, within six years of being founded by the Red Bull drinks company, RasenBallsport (RB) Leipzig had achieved the remarkable feat of obtaining six promotions in six years to reach Germany’s top ranking, finishing as runners-up and qualifying for the 2017–18 UEFA Champions League in their first season in the Bundesliga. The City Football Group (CFG), despite being only five years old, already owns six clubs on four continents and is rapidly becoming one of the most powerful forces in the world’s favourite sport.

Earlier this year the Rwandan state announced that it had signed a controversial ‘Visit Rwanda’ sleeve sponsorship deal with Arsenal FC in a deal reportedly worth £30 million. The expropriation of African players to European leagues represents another area where Africa has been fully integrated into the networks of global capitalist sport. Transfer fees continue to inflate exponentially; the Senegalese footballer Sadio Mane became the most expensive African football player in history when he signed to Liverpool in 2016 for a £35 million transfer fee.

There has been a steady rise in the football academy industry in Africa as European clubs attempt to capitalise on the business of player development. Several top European teams have academies in East Africa, such as Juventus in Nairobi and Barcelona in Rwanda and Uganda. Following structural adjustment in the 1980s there was a lack of investment in sport, and therefore these academies were generally welcomed.

However, there are also private, non-affiliated academies that expose young Africans to the greed of non-certified agents and convince them to sign exploitative contracts. This has been likened to a form of neo-colonial exploitation; the export of raw materials, in this case African football talent, for consumption and wealth generation in the European core. Recently it emerged that Manchester City has been illegitimately funding an academy in Ghana. Profiting from the business of player development is the stated intention of the City Football Group: ‘It’s like venture capital in that if you invest 10 million each in 10 players, you just need one to get to the top who is going to be worth 100 million’ Ferran Soriano, the Manchester City CEO is quoted as saying.

Evidently, in business terms (TV revenues, ticket sales, advertisement, club budget, players’ salaries, etc.), Africa as a region is to-date peripheral in global football. Scholar Paul Darby describes the peripheral relationship of African football to European football in terms of dependency and exploitation, evident in the transfer of African players to European leagues, and the mass spectatorship for European football. Nevertheless, domestic football remains extremely popular and occupies an important position in society.

Studying capitalism in Africa through the lens of commercial football provides fertile grounds for empirical analysis, for example in terms of merchandise, stadia development, privatisation of ownership, media and broadcasting, sponsorship, advertising, slogans, supporter behaviour (flags, songs, routines), players/supporters subjectivities and more. Analysing these areas allows us to explore the repercussions of the embedding of an ever more advanced spirit of commerce into previously less commercialised social realms. Moreover, football is a social realm with unparalleled levels of popularity and everyday engagement which provides further opportunity for investigation.

Studies of football in Africa have emphasised the political embeddedness of football in Africa and inferior financial resources as the main impediments to the development of football on the continent. Following this assessment, it has been suggested that the development of football in Africa necessitates the creation of the type of professional and commercial culture which surrounds European football. It is believed that the privatisation of domestic football clubs will lead to increasing levels of professionalism and a move away from (alleged) practices of political corruption in the football sector.

Several examples from East Africa exemplify this growing phenomenon. In Tanzania, football since independence has been synonymous with the rivalry between Simba FC and Yanga SC. These clubs are supporter-owned, relying on their supporters for funding, and have the support of the ruling independence political party, CCM (literally the Revolutionary Party). Following independence football was highlighted as an area of culture central to the project of nation building, leading to the national rivalry between Yanga and Simba.

However, the creation from scratch in 2007 of Azam FC by the Tanzanian corporation Bakhresa Group has disturbed this status-quo. Bakhresa Group are a multinational conglomerate whose products under their signature Azam brand span from marine transport to ice-cream, soft-drinks to television service provision. Azam FC’s motto – ‘Better team, better products’ – demonstrate their shameless marketing model.

Azam FC’s commercial model is praised by supporters and non-supporters alike as a positive move in the development of football in the country. For example, their vastly superior financial resources have enabled them to build their own stadium (whereas Simba and Yanga play their matches in the national stadium). They also run a training academy and can afford to buy players from overseas. This has enabled their rapid rise to challenge for the national title, at the time of writing, Azam FC sit at the top of the Tanzanian Premier League. This stark example makes clear the potential of commercially-driven football teams to embed themselves in local football scenes.

Followers of the English Premier League may be familiar with the sports betting platform SportPesa, which has links with Arsenal, Southampton and Hull. The brand was launched in Kenya and ‘pesa’ is the Kiswahili word for money. In 2016 SportPesa became the commercial partner of the Kenya Football Federation – they have the naming rights to the Kenyan Premier League and are the main sponsor of the two most popular football clubs in the country, Gor Mahia FC and AFC Leopards SC.

This commercial partnership has impacted the structure of football, whereby previously each club operated as a SACCO (Saving and Credit Cooperative Organisation) and was funded directly by the supporters. Evidently, this commercial sponsorship is also intrinsically linked to the controversy surrounding the rise in gambling in Africa, another example of capitalist social phenomenon embedding itself on the continent.

In Uganda it was recently announced that StarTimes – the Chinese media company and digital TV operator with close links to the Chinese government – would be taking over both the naming and broadcast rights of the Uganda Premier League, in a ten-year deal reportedly worth $7 million. This is generally understood as the biggest sponsorship deal in Ugandan football to date and demonstrates a further instance where the commercialisation of football in East Africa is linked to wider developments in the political-economy of the region, namely Chinese investment.

These examples illustrate the commercialisation of football in East Africa, and the significant impact this is having on local football scenes. As Jörg Wiegratz has argued in this series, there is a substantial lack of empirical analysis directly concerned with capitalist social phenomena in Africa. Therefore, empirical research is required into how commercial models of football get embedded into local environments, and the changes this brings at economic, socio-cultural, and political-economic levels. The increasing commercialisation of football in East Africa provides an opportunity to explore the emergence of these processes in practice.

Wiegratz and I have recently teamed up to develop research questions on the dynamics of the commercialisation of football in Eastern Africa. They include: to what extent has commercialisation affected the development of football in each country: i.e. led to increasing levels of professionalism, improved the quality of performance and overall spectator experience? How has this affected the popularity of domestic football in comparison to the massive interest in European football? Is there any evidence that football development at the domestic level leads to an improvement at the continental and international level?

How do these new models and economic visions breed new desires and practices of accumulation in terms of match attendance/television viewing numbers, consumption of official merchandise and related products etc? How do these new configurations create new social categories and tensions between the individual and collective, for example by disturbing the status-quo and disrupting engrained supporter allegiances?

Furthermore, what changes has commercialisation triggered, especially at the economic and socio-cultural level (relationships, practices, norms, values, attitudes, ideas, discourses)? How has commercialisation interacted with (and possibly altered) the political embeddedness (power structures, varying interests, political allegiances, etc.) of domestic football in each country?

There is a shortage of academic literature on football, despite the heterogeneous economic, political and cultural significance of the global game. Studies in popular culture have often stressed the unique potential of popular culture to reflect contemporary reality, and football represents one area which can be understood as having this potential. Ultimately the mass popularity of football provides important insights on what people themselves consider important in their lives, and therefore necessitates deep analysis.

This, combined with the analytical lacuna on capitalism in Africa, provides fertile grounds for innovative research. Empirical analysis of these processes will allow us to identify what the implanting of the commercialisation of football in East Africa can tell us about the broader phenomenon of capitalism in Africa generally.

Adam Rodgers Johns is a freelance writer and postgraduate student in African Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He blogs here.

Race, Politics and Pan-Africanism

ROAPE

January 18, 2019

Mpumelelo Tshabalala discusses a symposium that marked the 60^th anniversary of the All Africa People’s Conference which was hosted at the University of London last month. The symposium created the space for reflection on the historical significance of the 1958 AAPC and on how it can be used to understand and shape where Africa is today. Tshabalala also raises some important questions about race and politics at the event.

By Mpumelelo Tshabalala

On Thursday, 6 December 2018 the All Africa People’s Conference’s (AAPC) 60-year commemorative event took place in one of Senate House Library’s grand, parliamentary styled rooms. The symposium was incredibly rich, evident in the effort made to set and comprehend the context of the original conference in 1958. Further to the presented content, accompanying the programme was a list of the AAPC’s delegates, fraternal delegates and observers, a 1958 map of the continent and information on the complimentary commemorative conference taking place in present day Ghana at the same time. The organisers had prioritized the inclusion of personal, narrative accounts of those present at the AAPC, so the list of speakers included three witnesses of the original event. Perhaps, most successfully, the symposium created the space for reflection on the historical significance of the 1958 AAPC and on how it can be used to understand and shape where Africa is today.

In a lot of ways this symposium felt historic – one such way was the opportunity to engage with living history. We were addressed by those with first-hand accounts of the AAPC. Zambia’s first President, Kenneth Kaunda recorded, two days prior, and shared a video link address in which his grey eyes looked tired but patient, and his frail hand waved a white handkerchief after each poignant sentiment.

Bereket Habte Selassie, present in 1958, described the experience of watching Kwame Nkrumah speak. He had since gone on to serve as Attorney General under Haile Selassie and took us through his decision to resign from the regime for reason of its imperialist policies. His nostalgic tone illustrated just how much the AAPC shaped his identity and contributed to his strong adherence to the principles of Pan-Africanism.

The celebrated Ghanaian writer, Cameron Duodu – who reported on the conference in 1958 – spoke with poetic cadence. He unpacked the ‘P’ in AAPC explaining that it was in fact a people’s conference and not a state conference as contrasted to the Conference of Independent African States held in Ghana earlier that year. He reminded us of the centrality of solidarity and unity as themes at the AAPC and the fact that these ideas rapidly led to the creation of the OAU. He brought into sharp focus the importance for Africans to overcome what another speaker had referred to as the continent’s global ‘humiliation’. Africans still need to be afforded the respect they deserve, the ‘right to manage and mismanage all their affairs.’ I was compelled to ululate after his address.

During the course of the morning, Dan Branch, Marika Sherwood and Leo Zeilig discussed the histories and influence of Tom Mboya (of Kenya’s trade union leadership), George Padmore (a Trinidadian activist) and Franz Fanon (the Martinique-born revolutionary) – individuals that had all participated in the AAPC.

The third session ‘Africa and the wider world’ was electric. Joseph Godson Amamoo delivered his views on ‘the African personality on the world stage’ – and it was the most interesting display of cognitive dissonance. It is jarring to watch an elder, black, African man incite tropes about Africans’ inability to rule – insinuating that Africa required the intervention of Western sponsored multinationals and the imposition of neo-liberal principles. During the question and answer session, two Black floor members rebutted his contribution. They spoke of the World Bank and IMF’s structural adjustment programmes, the de-industrialisation policies of colonialists, and France’s continued control of multiple francophone African countries’ economies. What was hard to see was Amamoo’s inability to concede the point – he maintained that Africa was not able to successfully self-govern.

Koffi de Lome was the youngest of the speakers on the panel and he articulated an interesting youth perspective under the heading ‘the resonance of the AAPC for Africa today – African lives matter’, leading me to question him on two issues from the floor.

I commented on what I regarded as the judgmental tone regarding where he feels the continent should be. He certainly painted the picture that the previous generation had not done enough to fulfill the hopes of the AAPC. I challenged him to contextualize this disappointment. I appealed to generosity in our judgment of previous generations. To reinforce this point, African ‘ethnic’ and ‘tribal violence’ is a mirror to the West’s fascism and xenophobia. Africa’s ‘corruption’, ‘neo-paternalism’ and ‘clientelism’ is matched by the West’s lack of transparency regarding political party funding. African leaders are, like most, susceptible to the corruption of power. Monolithic narratives describing the continent as a violent, corrupt, chaotic place are enacted to perpetuate racist double standards about which countries are viewed as ‘adults’ and which countries are treated as ‘infants’ within the global family.

My second point was to problematize Koffi’s belief that the discussion of race should not form a focus of Pan-Africanism. Demolishing divisions has to begin with a process of naming such divides. Having the language to discuss the way in which we allow our societies to be shaped by these entrenched divisions is essential if we are to deconstruct them. Thinking that we are a post-race generation is to completely underestimate the scope of race-based colonial domination. It should not soon be forgotten that it was colonialism that introduced meaning to skin color, and then used it to justify the forced kidnapping, murder and unethical medical experimentation on black bodies and the expropriation of their land. These actions structurally deformed our societies. Merely obliterating the use of racialized terms will not address the fact that these abuses have multiplied over the years and created structural inequality that is racialized within, among and between countries.

Overall, the list of symposium speakers was overwhelmingly male. The two female speakers were both white. While the participants were predominantly comprised of older white men. Sherwood was the only panelist I heard refer to a black woman’s contributions to Pan-Africanism – Amy Ashwood Garvey. As the day progressed the panels (and attendees) got progressively darker and younger in their composition and the focus of discussion shifted to how we ought to understand our past, Pan-Africanism and the influence that the AAPC has had on both.

I valued Zeilig’s presentation of an ‘unplugged’ Fanon. His talk ‘Franz Fanon: The Debate Over Violence versus Non-Violence’ cited some of Fanon’s speeches which called for individuals to take up arms. Zeilig’s presentation was also symbolically important. Watching a white man endorsing Black people’s agency to be violent runs contrary to my experiences at similar symposiums. More commonly white speakers discussing Black lives seldom choose to focus on white people’s responsibility to eradicate the racist structures from which they benefit. Zeilig was directed in a question by a white, female participant about the role non-violence should play in Black lives. I then asked him, almost in answer, about the role that white allies should play in encouraging their counterparts to stop paternalistically disrespecting Black people’s agency to engage in violence.

As a South African, I found Salem Mezhoud’s presentation on ‘Arabness’ and its relationship to ‘Africanness’ enlightening. During his session, he attempted to unpack Morocco’s precarious relationship with the notion of Africanness by looking at its associations with the OAU, EU, AU and ECOWAS. It was a provocative contrast of identity creation and race-making in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa and exposed the ramifications of these processes.

The question that continues to linger for me is whether Pan-Africanism is inherently an idea that originated in the diaspora and among elites with international experience and exposure? Most speakers at the symposium appeared to assume that Pan-Africanism had not been previously conceived of or aspired to prior to WEB Du Bois’ coining of the term. I tend to think otherwise. I wonder to what extent this assumption is informed by the tendency to focus on recorded Western history.

Mpumelelo ‘Mpumi’ Tshabalala – is currently pursuing her MSc at the School of Oriental and African Studies in African Politics. She is an attorney by profession and the founder of Mpumelelo Yesizwe Legal Consulting a South African consultancy advising on how areas of law can be used to transform African societies.

Featured Photograph: the map of the African continent from 1958 distributed to participants of the symposium in December.

A New Generation of Popular Protest in Zimbabwe

ROAPE

January 15, 2019

In this blogpost Farai Chipato addresses the emergence of a new range of social movements in Zimbabwe over the past five years, their achievements in resisting the ruling party and the prospects that these groups could provide long-term radical social and economic change.

By Farai Chipato

Over the past five years, Zimbabwe has been seized by a series of interlocking crises, from economic stagnation, to a military coup, and a contested presidential election. In 2013, ZANU-PF, the country’s ruling party won a surprise landslide victory, ushering in President Robert Mugabe to his fifth term in office. The win allowed the ruling party to shake off its erstwhile coalition partners, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and consolidate its grip on power, after five years of a unity government that had seen grudging co-operation from the former rivals.

ZANU-PF’s return to uncontested power saw Zimbabwe falling back into the economic stagnation and political repression that had preceded the coalition government, dashing the hopes of opposition supporters and civil society activists committed to social and economic change. The election loss was the latest defeat in a long running struggle by the opposition, creating a sense of fatigue among pro-democracy activists and their international funders. Zimbabwe’s trade unions, heirs to a long and distinguished legacy of labour activism, had been decimated by years of economic hardship, leaving them weak and unable to mount a sustained challenge to the newly invigorated government.

It was against the backdrop of this exhaustion of opposition politics that a new group of social movements emerged to challenge the government. These movements broke away from the established NGO-based approach of prominent civil society organisation, by appealing to disaffected urban youth, creating three major upsurges in activism between 2013 and 2018.

Occupy Africa Unity Square

The first of the new wave of protests was ignited by the work of Itai Dzamara, a young journalist in the capital, Harare, whose lone protest in 2014 quickly expanded into an influential movement. Dzamara was driven by frustration with Zimbabwe’s economic decline and politically repressive government, which had left his generation in a state of perpetual insecurity. His disarmingly simple method, standing in Harare’s Africa Unity Square holding a placard reading ‘Failed Mugabe must go’, soon attracted attention from other disaffected young Zimbabweans, who joined in his regular protests. The movement was dubbed Occupy Africa Unity Square (OAUS), drawing inspiration from the protests that spread across the West after 2011.

The tenacity of this new, youthful generation of activists in the repressive environment post-2013 helped to raise the profile of their protests in central Harare, as they weathered harassment, violence and arrests from police and security agents attempting to disrupt their activities. Dzamara’s personal delivery of a petition to the president’s office in October 2014, calling for Mugabe’s resignation, further raised his profile, as did his subsequent detention and interrogation, along with two other activists.

As the OAUS began to organise rallies, punctuated by fiery speeches from its charismatic leaders, Dzamara was increasingly viewed as a threat to the ruling ZANU-PF, who were concerned with an Arab spring style uprising by an increasingly militant youth movement. The government became further alarmed when the movement started making connections with more established civil society organisations and the main opposition. In March 2015, Dzamara spoke at a major MDC rally, once again calling for Mugabe to go, and promising further action against ZANU-PF. Days later he was abducted in his local neighbourhood by government agents, with his whereabouts is still unknown as of 2019.

Whilst OAUS continued their protests into 2016, led by activist Dirk Frey and Itai Dzamara’s brother Patson, the momentum behind the wider movement stalled without its original leader and the opportunity to unite opposition forces was lost. However, the Dzamara’s disappearance attracted international attention, and generated outrage within Zimbabwe, continuing to inspire activists in his own movement, and more broadly.

The Hashtag movements

In April 2016, a second wave of protest activity emerged around a new figure, Pastor Evan Mawarire, a Pentecostal preacher who caused a social media stir by posting a video of himself, wrapped in the Zimbabwean flag, passionately voicing his frustrations with the state of the country. As the video went viral, Mawarire quickly became a leading voice of opposition to the government, as other young Zimbabweans on social media followed his lead in the #ThisFlag movement. The pastor soon faced police harassment and charges of inciting violence but continued to co-ordinate with other activists in calling for protests. In June 2016, 15 OAUS activists were arrested at another of their signature demonstrations, whilst a new movement, #Tajamuka/Sesjikile staged a protest at the Rainbow Towers Hotel in Harare, where the Vice President Phelekezela Mphoko had been living at tax payers’ expense since December 2014. The protest was led by former MDC politician Promise Mkwananzi, now an informal sector activist, and Sten Zvorwadza, of the National Union of Vendors Associations (NAVUZ), a combative advocate for informal workers.

The atmosphere of rebellion was compounded in late June, when riots broke out at Beitbridge on the South African border, as the government issued a blanket ban on all imported goods crossing into Zimbabwe. While the government relaxed the regulations somewhat in the face of the protests, activists continued to demonstrate, culminating in the torching of a customs warehouse in July 2016, as protestors fought running battles with riot police. The wave of protests, both in Harare and nationally, came to a head on 6 July, with a mass stay away, which left the streets of the capital empty. The protest was publicised by activists from #ThisFlag, #Tajamuka, and OAUS, with co-ordination and promotion through social media, particularly WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter.

Whilst a follow up protest was less successful, demonstrations were re-ignited in August, with the introduction of bond notes, a government issued currency that was intended to ease the shortage of US dollars, but which was seen as a return to the discredited Zimbabwean dollar, which had been abandoned due to hyper-inflation in 2008. Several protests went ahead over August, organised by groups like #Tajamuka, with demonstrators clashing with police, who used tear gas, batons and water cannons to quell the crowds.

Meanwhile, Mawarire’s legal troubles continued, and on 12 July he handed himself in to the police, to be charged with inciting public violence and disturbing the peace. While the charge was soon dismissed, direct condemnations followed from President Mugabe, and Mawarire decided to leave Zimbabwe for the USA, for his own safety, taking him out action until his return in February 2017. The movements were deprived of another influential leader, and the protests had failed to move the government on the bond notes issue. By early 2017, momentum had once again stalled.

The Coup that was not a Coup

The final set of protests was initiated by divisions within the ruling party but drew on the existing social movements and the energies that were unleashed in previous demonstrations. In November 2017, internal divisions in the ZANU-PF government came to a head, leading to the dismissal of Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa, whose faction had been at odds with an ascendant grouping around Robert Mugabe’s wife, Grace.

This precipitated a military coup by senior soldiers, who, alarmed by Grace Mugabe’s rise, sought to remove her husband. However, despite the successful detention and exile of Mugabe-loyalists by the military action, the president refused to resign, leaving the military awkwardly searching for a legal route to remove him without drawing international condemnation. Long-time opponents of Mugabe in Zimbabwe and the international community held back from criticising the coup, preferring a newly coined euphemism, ‘military assisted transition.’ On Saturday 18 November, a range of protest groups came together with ZANU-PF aligned war veterans to organise mass demonstrations in Harare and across the country, calling for Mugabe to go.

Zimbabweans turned out for the protests on an unprecedented scale, united across party divisions in the desire for change. Activists from the hashtag movements and OAUS helped to mobilise the youth through social media and led contingents during the event, which took on a joyful, irreverent, atmosphere, as an outpouring of frustrations over economic decline, corruption and mismanagement was vented in the streets. Protestors embraced the armed forces as heroes, as pictures were spread across the globe of triumphant Zimbabweans cheering tanks and congratulating soldiers. When Mugabe stepped down days later, the protests were seen as a defining moment in the political transition, as Emmerson Mnangagwa was sworn in as the new president.

Distinguishing the new social movements

The new social movements may have been inspired by a long legacy of activism in Zimbabwe, but they were marked out by some crucial differences from established organisations in civil society. One of the key factors for the movements was their youth focus. Young people represent an increasing proportion of Zimbabwe’s population, with the majority now subsisting through work in the informal sector. Whilst Zimbabwe has a relatively high proportion of university graduates, the lack of available employment has meant that many well-educated young people are either unemployed or under-employed, often left struggling to survive in the informal sector of the country’s major cities. It is these disaffected youth, along with militant student activists, who formed the core constituency of new social movements, rather than the professionals, intellectuals and trade unionists who were the driving force behind previous resistance movements in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

A second important factor was the use of social media in disseminating information, connecting activists and mobilising protestors. Young, urban Zimbabweans are increasingly connected to online communities, that allow them to converse freely without gathering for risky political meetings. Facebook is now one of the most popular forums for debate and many Zimbabweans are connected to a series of WhatsApp groups. Whilst Twitter is still a relatively elite space, it has seen significant debate, with key figures in the government, opposition and civil society engaging in conversations and often rancorous disagreement. The ability to share information widely through social media has allowed activists with little or no organisational structure to effectively mobilise significant numbers of demonstrators for actions, and spread their message beyond their immediate locality, capturing a national audience.

The increasing prominence of young women as leaders in social movements is another feature that has been noted in the post 2013-era. Whilst the most prominent activists, like Dzamara and Mawarire are men, as the movements grew, female activists played a greater role. Fadzayi Mahere, a young lawyer and activist, became one of the main voices of #ThisFlag due to her campaigning on social media, as well as her interviews with political figures that were broadcast on Facebook Live. Meanwhile, Linda Masarira of the OAUS and #Tajamuka became a powerful presence in street protests and was arrested and held in remand for several months on criminal charges, due to her participation in protest. Both Mahere and Masarira participated in the November 2017 protests, helping to mobilise their social media followers, and later announced their intention to run for parliament in the July 2018 elections.

The final important aspect of the new movements is their amorphous and structureless nature. The boundaries between movements are generally porous, as many activists simultaneously worked with several movements at once. As many of the moments were loosely convened over social media. #ThisFlag, for instance, has a huge social media reach, but is still relatively small in terms of staff. Charismatic leaders may create several organisations, moving between them, or leaving them dormant when new opportunities arise. This fluidity makes it difficult to keep track of these movements, and for them to attract funding, either from major donors or smaller philanthropists. Indeed, a key element of the success of these movements has been their refusal to conform to the professionalised structures and behaviours of traditional NGOs, instead presenting themselves as a new, unruly forced for change.

The social movements since the Coup

Having assisted in the removal of Robert Mugabe in November 2018, the new social movements, and more traditional civil society organisations benefited from the opening up of civic space by the new president. Between his inauguration and the July 2018 presidential and parliamentary elections, Mnangagwa pursued a strategy of international re-engagement, promising democratic reforms, the reduction of corruption, and proclaiming the country ‘open for business’ to entice international investors. In the run up to the elections, social movements sought to mobilise the populace to register as voters, and forged new alliances, exemplified by the Citizens Convention, an activist conference held days before the election to launch a new ‘Citizens Manifesto’, endorsed by a coalition of broadly progressive social movements.

However, the cautious optimism of the election campaign gave soon gave way, as Mnangagwa won a narrow victory against his MDC opponent, the popular Nelson Chamisa, amid charges of vote rigging, and questionable pronouncements from the government’s election commission. As protests broke out due to the delay in the announcement of the final results, the government unleashed the army to snuff out resistance, leading to several deaths in the ensuing violence.

Thus, despite the success of the new social movements in mobilising resistance prior to the elections, it remains unclear whether they can sustain their vitality and achieve real social change in the long term. It is important to note that the most successful action taken by the social movements, the removal of Robert Mugabe as president, was actually a protest in support of a military coup. The November demonstrations were the result of a faction within the ZANU-PF drawing on popular antipathy to Mugabe to resolve an intra-party dispute. Moreover, the new President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, has presided over a government that has overseen worsening economic conditions, an increasing militarisation of the state and an upsurge in repression of popular protest, following the July 2018 elections.

The impact of social movements across the political landscape more broadly is also mixed. Sten Zvorwadza and his vendors movement NAVUZ, once staunch opponents of the ruling party, have been co-opted into the new Mnangagwa government, remaining suspiciously silent during reprisals against informal traders following the July election. Meanwhile, leaders of the hashtag movements who attempted to transform their activist credentials into votes have been conspicuously unsuccessful. In May 2018, Evan Mawarire launched a campaign for the local council in Harare, as part of an alliance of independent candidates dubbed POVO, which included other prominent activists from the hashtag movements. However, Mawarire’s fame proved incapable of challenging established support for the main political parties, as none of the POVO candidates managed to win their respective seats. Fadzayi Mahere also pursued an independent candidacy, challenging for an MP’s seat in the Mount Pleasant suburb of Harare. Despite a sustained social media campaign, a highly professional manifesto, and high-profile activities in the community, Mahere was also defeated by her relatively unknown MDC challenger.

One of the key figures to emerge out of OAUS, Patson Dzamara, used his prominence to campaign for the opposition MDC Alliance presidential candidate Nelson Chamisa, who conducted a powerful and highly personal campaign against the president, based around his magnetic rally speeches. Chamisa proved popular, although he was unable to unseat Mnangagwa, and Dzamara was effectively absorbed into the MDC party, rather than offering a new direction for opposition politics.

The future of protest in Zimbabwe

In the aftermath of the July 2018 elections, the energy around social movements has dissipated somewhat, to be replaced by a renewed energy from the trade union movement. In October 2018, several leaders of the Zimbabwe Trade Union Congress (ZCTU) were arrested in a protest against a new tax on electronic financial transactions, creating a rallying point for resistance to the new government. By December, public sector unions were renewing protests from earlier in the year, demanding improved pay and conditions, as doctors went on strike, and the Amalgamated Rural Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (ARTUZ) staged a high-profile protest march from the city of Mutare, to the capital, Harare, continually dogged by police harassment.

What is clear is that as yet there has been little more than cosmetic change from the ZANU-PF government. At the same time, resistance to the ruling party remains fragmented, unable to coalesce into an effective opposition force. However, the renewed vitality of the trade union movement, together with the continuing low-key work of many of the new activists may provide the seeds for a future push that delivers real social and economic transformation in Zimbabwe.

Farai Chipato is a PhD candidate in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. His research concerns the relationship between development donors and civil society organisations in Zimbabwe, with particular reference to democracy and human rights issues.

Featured Photograph: Farai Chipato’s photograph of Kofi Annan addressing the National Citizens Convention in Harare on 19 July 2018.

The Revolutionary Legacy of Walter Rodney

ROAPE

January 8, 2019

Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is a masterpiece. In this review of the new edition of the book by Verso, Andy Higginbottom celebrates a classic that has lost none of its power. The book brings together in a broad narrative the history of the African continent from a perspective that is at one and the same time Pan-Africanist and Marxist. For all of those interested in Africa’s history and future, the book must be studied once more.

Review of Walter Rodney (2018) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London/New York: Verso)

By Andy Higginbottom

This book is a masterpiece. Walter Rodney wrote How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (HEUA) in his late twenties while a lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The book brings together in a broad narrative the history of the African continent from a perspective that is at one and the same time Pan Africanist and Marxist. Moreover, it is an original contribution to what was known as the dependency school emanating from Latin America. [1]

The re-edition of HEUA by Verso is to be fully welcomed. As well as the Introduction to the 1982 edition, written shortly after Rodney’s murder, the new edition carries a short and inspiring Foreword by Angela Davis, which sets the scene well in stating that none of the fundamental problems addressed by Rodney have been resolved. One of these threads, Davis notes, is how the condition of African labouring women, as well as men, was pushed down by colonialism. Davis rightly calls on the readership to pick up and ‘deepen Walter Rodney’s legacy’. Let us now review that legacy.

HEUA takes forward the Marxist theory of dependency and underdevelopment from a Pan Africanist perspective. It is a sign of the range and depth of HEUA that there are at least three major debates that it enjoins with various historians, all apologists for European imperialism. The first debate concerns the specific destructive awfulness of the European slave trade. The second debate is over whether Europe benefitted economically from the late nineteenth century ‘Scramble for Africa’ and the colonial regimes that were installed. The third debate concerns the intersection of race and class, the position of the African working poor and the nature of their exploitation under the European colonial regimes. In this review I will identify some of Rodney’s protagonists and the arguments in these debates because of their continuing ideological significance.

As characterises all of Rodney’s writing, the structure of HEUA is clear and methodical. Chapter 1 is a paradigm statement which asks, ‘what is development?’ and ‘what is underdevelopment?’[2] In responding, Rodney outlines his main argument: that Africa’s poverty and underdevelopment are not due to any intrinsic social or biological attributes of Africans but arise from systemic predatory external relations that have in turn become internalised. Whilst some of the specific mechanisms changed, the book’s central message is that for centuries European capitalist imperialism exploited Africa.

Chapters 2 and 3 look at African history up to and then after the arrival of the European slave trade, respectively. Here Rodney counteracts the then emerging orthodoxy (especially of English establishment academia) which tended to minimise the novelty, extent and sheer destructiveness of European slavery for Africa’s development.

Africa’s own history up to the 15^th century was remarkably varied and Rodney charts this in overview and then surveys the internal dynamics of several societies. In his conclusion to this chapter Rodney returns to the concept of development, which he sees as normally arising from the ‘slow imperceptible expansion in social productive capacity ultimately amounted to a qualitative difference, with the arrival at the new stage sometimes being announced by social violence’ (p. 82). His assessment is that in the fifteenth century by and large African societies were still generally characterised by communalism, and only exceptionally had they entered into a degree of class differentiation similar to feudalism in Europe, as in Egypt and Ethiopia.

Of importance for the ideological arguments to come, Rodney further emphasises that while forms of enslavement existed in the pre-European slave trade period, care should be taken as the same term is applied to quite different processes, he analyses their character as specific forms of social oppression that were qualitatively different from what was to come. He summarises ‘slavery as a mode of production was not present in any African society, although some slaves were to be found where the decomposition of communal equality had gone furthest’(p. 82). Here Rodney makes a methodological point that Africa’s history has to be studied both in its own right as well as in comparison to Europe and other parts of the world.

Although Rodney is only occasionally explicit in his text, this is the first big debate against which his synthetic interpretation is positioned.[3] In 1969 historian J. D. Fage wrote that slavery was endemic in Africa before the 15th century and moreover that trade was stimulated by the coastal groups of Africans who willingly cooperated with the Europeans, and benefitted by kidnapping from Africa’s interior.[4] Fage concluded that the European slave trade ‘was essentially only one aspect of a very wide process of economic and political development and social change in West Africa’ (1969, p. 404). There was a connected discussion on the number of captured Africans. The academic consensus, based on counting the arrivals in the Americas, centring on around 11 million. Basing his argument on this data, Fage continues:

…the volume and distribution of the export slave trade do not suggest that the loss of population and other effects of the export of labour to the Americas need have had universally damaging effects on the development of West Africa. Rather, it is suggested, West African rulers and merchants reacted to the demand with economic reasoning, and used it to strengthen streams of economic and political development that were already current before the Atlantic slave trade began (1969, p. 404).

Against this benign view sanitising European destruction, Rodney writes in terms resonant today:

In one sense, it is preferable to ignore such rubbish and isolate our youth from its insults; but unfortunately one of the aspects of current African underdevelopment is that the capitalist publishers and bourgeois scholars dominate the scene and help mould opinions the world over. It is for that reason that writing of the type which justifies the trade in slaves has to be exposed as racist bourgeois propaganda, having no connection with reality or logic. It is a question not merely of history but of present day liberation struggle in Africa (p. 117).

Chapter 4 is the central pivot of the book. Its earlier sections are about the impact of European slavery and can be seen as a chapter in its own right. Rodney’s point is that the European slave trade was both hugely beneficial to Europe and a basic factor in African underdevelopment. In terms of the huge impulse to capitalism that slavery and the slave trade brought, Rodney refers approvingly to the classic of Eric Williams arguing their significance in fuelling the industrial revolution in England.[5] Rodney agrees with another Williams thesis, that African were enslaved ‘for economic reasons, so that their labor power could be exploited’ (p. 103).

The extreme destruction of the European slave trade went beyond the numbers of young African men and women who ended up in the Americas, because the process of their capture generated continuing wars between collaborators and resisters across West Africa and parts of Central and Southern Africa. Rodney also argues that European slaveholder interest was behind the ‘East African Slave Trade’ (p. 109). He shows that whilst the populations of Europe and Asia more than doubled between 1650 and 1850, there was no increase at all in Africa during the two centuries when the trade was its height. The population lost was ten times greater than the 11 million normally cited. Thus, due to slavery, Europe’s expansion sucked the life force of Africans, its success was based on the destruction and distortion of Africa’s development for centuries, even before its further subordination under colonial rule.

Further into Chapter 4 Rodney explains the mid nineteenth century interregnum between Britain ending slavery in its colonies (in 1834) and the ‘Scramble for Africa’ that reached its apogee in the Berlin Conference 1884/5 which decided how the continent would be fully divided up between the rival West European powers. Following a similar approach to that in Chapter 2, Rodney again provides several detailed accounts of different regions, explaining how they fitted into a complex pattern of politico-military developments beset with technological and economic stagnation. This review cannot do justice to the wealth of insight in the detailed studies, as we are sticking with the broader contours of Rodney’s argument.

‘The Coming of Imperialism and Colonialism’ is a key section that takes us into the second major debate. Rodney argues against the ‘curious interpretation of the Scramble and African partition which virtually amounts to saying that colonialism came about because of Africa’s needs rather than those of Europe’ (p. 164). Rodney’s account of colonialism is completely opposed to the orthodoxy of British establishment ‘Oxbridge’ historians such as D.K. Fieldhouse who, he argues, ‘proclaim that colonialism was not essentially economic, and that the colonisers did not gain’ (p.363). In Chapter 5 Rodney explains the many ways that colonisation of Africa contributed to the development of capitalism in Europe. There are many illustrative details, he gives the example of Anglo-Dutch conglomerate Unilever as ‘a major beneficiary of African exploitation’ . Fieldhouse’s later works can be read as an extended response to Rodney’s underdevelopment paradigm. Fieldhouse went on to write:

Unfortunately for the record of colonialism it often proved necessary to use methods unacceptable to humanitarians, then and later, to persuade Africans and some other indigenous peoples to undertake regular work or to produce for the market (1983, p. 73)[6]

Much more unfortunate for the Africans and those other peoples who had ‘unacceptable methods’ i.e. systematic violence, forced upon them! The persistence of English apology for empire as typified by Fieldhouse (one can find all too many examples today) is all the more reason to bring Rodney’s African anti-imperialist history back centre stage.

Chapter 6 of HEUA critically evaluates the supposed benefits of colonialism for Africans. Here Rodney tackles the big myths, that at least the Europeans built railways, schools and the like. He brings out that in one field after another, most especially in education, how colonialism underdeveloped Africa. Rodney argues that colonial education’s promotion of individualism was particularly destructive. There were some minor facilities post 1945 as European colonial powers entered the end game of their rule, and sought to encourage loyalty amongst some sections of the occupied populations, but having weighed these claims the overall evaluation ‘it would be an act of the most brazen fraud to weigh the paltry social amenities provided during the colonial epoch against the exploitation, and to arrive at the conclusion that the good outweighed the bad’ (p. 246). Even more categorically, ‘the only positive development in colonialism was when it ended’ (p. 320).

Rodney’s book stands out because it provides us with an integrated history of Africa from the standpoint of the dependency/underdevelopment paradigm, which is that capitalism and imperialism are ‘an integral system involving the transfer of funds and other benefits from colonies to metropoles’ (p. 362). Beyond the notion of transfer, Rodney’s history is an example of the Marxist theory of dependency, in that he analyses the class relations involved, that takes us on to the original source of the transferred funds, African labour in different forms of exploitation, from peasant producers to migrant labour.

Rodney had a great sense of how the working poor of Africa suffered under slavery and colonialism. ‘Capitalists under colonialism did not pay for an African to maintain himself and family.’ (p. 265) One of HEUA’s virtues is that it consistently expresses a class standpoint, connecting national oppression with the specific modes of labour exploitation. ‘By any standards, labour was cheap in Africa, and the amount of surplus extracted from the African labourer was great. The employer under colonialism paid an extremely small wage – a wage usually insufficient to keep the worker physically alive – and, therefore, he had to grow food to survive’ (p.172). Perhaps under the influence of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, [7] Rodney uses the term ‘surplus’, whereas it is clear from the context that what is meant is ‘surplus-value’, as Marx defined the concept. Taking from Marx cotton spinning as the example, Rodney draws attention to ‘the labour that went into growing the raw cotton’ and observes that ‘from an African viewpoint, the first conclusion to be drawn is that the peasant working on African soil was being exploited by the industrialist who used African raw material in Europe or America. Secondly, it is necessary to realise that the African contribution of unskilled labour was valued far less than the European contribution of skilled labour’ (p. 266).

Leaving aside for now that the African labourer was also skilled, Rodney argues that their much lower reward (‘valued far less’) was not due to the playing out of free market forces, but the result of repressive ‘monopolistic domination’ by the colonial state. Rodney repeatedly reminds us that although in the same system, the colonial face of capitalism was distinct from its metropolitan face, where at least ‘the rise of the bourgeois class indirectly benefitted the working classes, through promoting technology and raising the standard of living.’ By contrast, ‘in Africa, colonialism did not bring those benefits, it merely intensified the rate of exploitation of African labour and continued to export the surplus’ (p. 312).

In his critical review of HEUA, the South African historian and Trotskyist Martin Leggasick commented that of the work’s ‘limitations and deficiencies’, the most significant ‘is the manner in which its Marxism is at crucial points overtaken by its African nationalism’ and, to reinforce the point, ‘even the title has this implication’ (1976, p. 436).[8] Legassick challenged the wider conceptual framework ‘of the “development-underdevelopment” paradigm’; and was particularly concerned to deny that African workers were more exploited than European workers, whose ‘higher living standards may well be associated with a higher technical rate of exploitation is essential to any systematic understanding of Marx’s analysis’ (p. 436). The reason Legassick gave for European workers getting higher pay is their presumed higher productivity because of working with machines, and hence producing more ‘relative surplus value’. This one sided reading of Capital is the hallmark of Eurocentric Marxism and marks the terrain of the third debate around HEUA, which remains ongoing. Legassick is typical of the Eurocentric Marxist school in his further claim that Rodney is overly concerned with the transfer of surplus from Africa to Europe and is not concerned with the class relations of the production of that surplus, which is blatantly inaccurate. Rodney shows that ‘wages paid to workers in Europe and North America were much higher than wages paid to African workers in comparable categories’ (p. 177, emphasis added). He reports disparities of between four and up to even thirty times, that ‘illustrate how much greater was the rate of exploitation of African workers’ (p. 177). This third debate is vital in considering the continuities of international exploitation as Africa moved out of colonial occupation, to formally independent states where nonetheless mechanisms of underdevelopment and brutal exploitation of African labour continue to operate.

If, as Rodney wrote in 1972, colonialism in Africa had ended, what came after? A.M. Babu’s postscript gives important pointers to the actuality of the problem. In HEUA Rodney laid a thorough historical basis for the study of neo-colonialism in Africa, without itself yet being that study. Rodney’s own life was cut short, he was assassinated in 1980 because he was fighting on the frontline of struggle against neo-colonial capitalism in his home country Guyana. Nonetheless Rodney’s various writings on neo-colonialism are a further strand in his tremendous legacy, and part of the collective consciousness with his contemporaries committed to revolution in Africa, which requires a separate commentary.

HEUA stands on its own as a considerable achievement whose core arguments and debates deserve to be studied carefully by all interested in African liberation, and most especially the upcoming generation for whom it provides an outstanding example of committed revolutionary scholarship.

Andy Higginbottom is an Associate Professor at Kingston University, London. He is involved in solidarity groups supporting social movements in Colombia, South Africa and Tamil Eelam.

Featured Photograph: Verso Blog on ‘Walter Rodney and the Question of Power’ by CLR James.

References

[1] I would like to thank all the students at Kingston University who have worked with me in studying this text.

[2] Between the 1972 first edition by Bogle L’Ouverture and the 1982 Howard University edition, which is followed closely by this Verso edition, the italicisation of certain words for emphasis by the author has been lost in Chapter 1. This would be no more than a quibble except that some of these lost italics occur at key points of the overview argument that Rodney emphasises (see new edition p. 16). It is to be hoped that if there is a reprint by Verso these italics are recovered.

[3] Rodney is almost certainly referring to works by D. Mannix and M. Cowley (1963) Black Cargoes, a History of the Atlantic Slave Trade New York: Viking Press subsequently republished as a Penguin Classic (2002); and especially J. D. Fage (1959) Introduction to the History of West Africa Cambridge: Cambridge University Press which Rodney critiqued in in his 1966 article ‘African slavery and other forms of social oppression on the Upper Guinea Coast in the context of the Atlantic Slave-trade’ Journal of African History, 7 (3), pp. 431-443. This article was part of Rodney’s PhD thesis that was published in 1970 as A History of the Upper Guinea Coast: 1545-1800 New York: Monthly Review Press.

[4] Fage, J.D. (1969) ‘Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Context of West African History’ The Journal of African History, 10(3), pp. 393-404

[5] Williams, Eric (1994) Capitalism and Slavery. 2^nd edition. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press

[6] Fieldhouse, D.K. (1983) Colonialism 1870-1945: An Introduction Basingstoke/London: Macmillan

[7] Baran, Paul and Paul Sweezy (1966) Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press.

[8] Legassick, Martin (1976) ‘Perspectives on African “Underdevelopment”’ The Journal of African History, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 435-440

‘Calling us to revolt’: an interview with Helen Batubo

ROAPE

December 21, 2018

In an interview with roape.net Helen Batubo, an activist and worker in Nigeria, describes her experiences at the ROAPE workshop in Dar es Salaam in 2018. She argues that there are possibilities of influencing many other activists through these activities. Such events are crucial, she says, in ‘calling us to revolt.’

Can you please introduce yourself for readers of roape.net?

I was born in 1962, in Okrika, an island in the Niger Delta. I was the only daughter and became somewhat of a Tom boy to survive with my many brothers. My dad was my mum’s second husband, but we generally depended on my mum for our upbringing due to his drinking. My primary schooling was delayed by the Nigerian civil war and I later also saw the violence of the Niger Delta militants/gangs first hand. I have suffered my share of sexism and was nearly raped six times (I learnt to fight back after the first time). I ran away from home to join my uncle in Potiskum in the far north east of Nigeria, before gaining a place at Katsina Teacher Training College. Unfortunately, I had to leave before the course finished due to lack of money. I then settled in Kaduna with the father of my daughter and worked to enable him to gain a degree at the University of Benin. After we split up, I had many different jobs to survive and bring up my daughter who is now studying for her masters degree. I have been a sales representative, a printer, a welder, an IT teacher, a nurse and restaurant manager. I have suffered from some poor bosses, but never had the opportunity to benefit from membership of a trade union. I had to leave my most satisfying post, as a teacher in Kaduna, due to the community violence and then settled in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria. I have always had a strong feeling that we need a fairer world, from my own experience and the influence of the Afrobeat singer, Fela Kuti and the struggles against apartheid in South Africa. I was recently introduced to organised socialist politics and have been able to travel outside Nigeria for the first time, to the ROAPE meetings in Accra and Dar es Salaam.

Can you speak about the experience of the workshops you attended?

The workshop in Dar es Salaam gave me so much encouragement. It gave all of us insight and let us know what is happening in the different countries represented. Each person wanted to use their country as an example. So, I learnt the perspectives of the Tanzanians. In turn, the Tanzanians learnt from my ideas and we each learnt from the Kenyans. The workshop allowed us to share our experiences, so by the time we left we realised the different countries had similar problems. We learnt that our African leaders and the world leaders are collaborating to suppress their subjects.

Our countries do not work because of recycling people that are not fit, the masses giving their votes and supporting leaders based on sentiment. The rich people have a way of buying your voters card. Even when you know that the person you are clamouring for to be there, frequently they never get elected or work anyway in their own interests. own personal reasons and gain. Perhaps because the person is going to give you some small change, or if the person is of the same faith as you or of the same tribe as you or you are business associates. So, this is what I mean by choosing our leaders based on sentiment.

The workshop encouraged us to have a mind-set for revolt, to stand up and say no, where possible. The poor and the down trodden should stop blaming the rich because they only encourage them to be there. In the same way, African rulers should stop blaming their former colonial masters, they should stop pointing accusing fingers at the Europeans. They were colonised, quite correct. They were underdeveloped by them, correct. But for how long will they let themselves to be underdeveloped? Don’t they also have a mind to reason for themselves?

Given this situation, what would you argue is the solution?

The masses have to learn collectively to be reasonable and stop being sentimental. The problem is that the masses know the right people to elect to be their leaders, but rather they use sentiment to put the wrong people there. The masses need to look inwards and choose to do things correctly, not selling their votes, saying my brother, my sister should be there. They should elect leaders who have a heart and love the masses, there are people like that who we know. For example, there are people that are even less corrupt in mind than President Buhari of Nigeria, we know them.

Returning to the workshop, the best things were the general deliberations, analysis about how Africa is being impoverished by its leaders. I agree with the topic that indeed, our leaders do not have a heart for the common people, they do not love us! All they think about are their personal wealth, looting for their unborn generations. So, they go to any lengths to force their way into power and remain there. They use dictatorship, they use the military to protect themselves and to commit illicit atrocities.

The general aim of the workshop was to arouse in us radical stories, the radical mind to be able to say “no, enough is enough!” Enough of giving our vote or our mandate to leaders who do not have a focus, but just want to be there for power and wealth.

The possibilities of what we can do to influence others through these meetings that we are holding is crucial. So, the workshop influenced me by calling us to revolt. It must not always be the old people and the money bags that should rule us.

The workshop also helped me to understand the world better, about global warming, climate change and other things. The Europeans are not forcing our leaders to implement policies but they are working in more subtle ways. After all you can force a horse to the river, but you can’t force it to drink the water. If the Europeans are giving us unfavourable policies and our leaders choose to succumb it is not the fault of the Europeans? If our former colonial masters suggest their ideas, it is not mandatory for our rulers to succumb, if it is an unfavourable policy for our people.

Can you speak specifically about the sessions at the workshop, what stood out for you?

The long standing, manipulative and uncontrollable practices of the rich to continuously loot and amass the wealth of Africa was the overwhelming sense I got. Most of the resultant issues have been highlighted during our deliberations not only at the Tanzanian ROAPE workshop, but in our every day discussions as socialists.

Take for example, the session on ‘Imperialism in Africa today: The place of class struggles and progressive politics’, using my country Nigeria as point of reference. we discussed how most of the oppressed poor people assist the looting by protecting and defending the ill-gotten wealth of the few capitalists. The outrageously annoying thing is that many poor people, for a pittance, are so quick in singing the praises, flattering and encouraging the unrepentant looters. This, in turn, boosts the egos of the elite and encourages them to loot even more.

I want to submit, with an apology to persons of a like mindset of Marxism, that most Nigerians are blind followers who do not want to take a firm stand with credible truth. This may be for personal selfish reasons or for other religious or ethnic sentiments. They prefer to keep supporting and recycling square pegs in round holes, in the corridors of power, who continue to loot the wealth that should belong to the people.

If we are not ready to look inwards to identify and retrace our steps to principally correct practices, our undeserving leadership will continue to destroy our lives. Therefore, using this platform, roape.net, I want to say NO to all forms of further wealth looting. We should resolve to only give mandates to selfless, visionary statesmen and women who have the good of the poor uppermost in their hearts. We need such people to get into the saddle of leadership and headship of their states across Africa.

It is quite true that the ruling classes all over, especially in Africa, tend to use unwarranted force to cage citizens against the freedom of questioning their illicit spending. The bad news is that the idea paves the way for the rich to conspicuously loot without blinking or looking back. As a result, we have a society that does not have strong policies to checkmate its leaders and ensure accountability. How and when shall impoverishment be eradicated? The future therefore remains precarious, unless our collective consciousness acknowledges and confronts these ordeals.

So, in summary, what is the alternative? Are you hopeful about the future of the struggle for such an alternative?

Well, that’s difficult to say, if sentiment is still preferred above credibility, then we keep having these useless ‘talk-shows’, pantomimes. Of course, the global bourgeoisie have only succeeded thus far because the domestic rats delight in opening the doors to other rats. As ever, foreign bosses are only able to exploit the poor masses of Africa with the active co-operation of the local elite who have benefited from this relationship beyond their wildest dreams.

I think the workshops could be further improved by having more people there, but I know that this is difficult due to financial constraints. So, more people are not able to share their own ideas. As ever, it all boils down to money! By right, the power is in our hands. If we are doing things correctly, when they are enacting laws, they should include checks and balances. There should be laws that have to do with accountability. There are countries like China or Saudi Arabia, for example, where if you guilty of corruption then you face life in prison or even death. So, no-one talks openly about looting, they deal with their corrupt ministers and other leaders. But here in Africa, we just praise rich people in the hope of getting some small, minor change. It all depends on what we think we can achieve, and then how we fight for it – these were my lessons from the ROAPE workshops.

Helen Batubo is an activist and worker based in Abuja, Nigeria.

‘Hands off Africa!!’

ROAPE

December 20, 2018

Marking the 60^th anniversary of the All African People’s Conference in Accra in 1958

December 2018 marks the 60^th anniversary of the All African People’s Conference (AAPC), which was held in Accra, Ghana, between 5 and 13 December 1958. Under the slogan ‘Hands off Africa!!’, the AAPC was a watershed moment in the history of Africa’s liberation from colonial rule and white supremacy. To mark its significance, a major one day conference was held on 6 December 2018 at the University of London by the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (ICWS), School of Advanced Study, and Westminster United Nations Association, under the title of ‘Hands Off Africa!!’ The 1958 All African People’s Conference: Its Impact Then and Now’.

By Mandy Banton, David Wardrop and Susan Williams

The AAPC was inspired by Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister of newly-independent Ghana, and George Padmore, Nkrumah’s Adviser on African Affairs, to advance the ideology of Pan Africanism. Its main themes were non-alignment, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and African unity. More than 300 political and trade union leaders responded to the call, representing some 65 organisations from 28 African territories. A schedule of the principal organisations is here.

1958 map of Africa, showing the distribution of European colonial rule. United States Central Intelligence Agency. Africa, Administrative Divisions. [Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 1958] Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

The AAPC chairman was Tom Mboya, a prominent Kenyan trade unionist. Mboya drew a contrast between the conference in Ghana and a conference seventy-four years earlier, when the European powers had partitioned Africa – the Berlin conference of 1884. That meeting, he said, was known as the ‘scramble for Africa’. But, as of 1958, he said firmly, those same powers ‘will now decide to scram from Africa.’

Other delegates at the AAPC included Patrice Lumumba (representing the people of the Belgian Congo), Frantz Fanon (Algeria), Sekou Touré (Guinea), Kenneth Kaunda (Northern Rhodesia), Joshua Nkomo (Southern Rhodesia), Holden Roberto (Angola), Ezekiel Mphahlele and Alfred Hutchinson (South Africa), and Michael Scott (South West Africa). Fraternal delegates and observers also came from countries beyond the African continent, including Canada, China, India, Indonesia, the Soviet Union, the UK, and the US. There were a number of African Americans, some of whom represented civil rights groups.

The organizers of the conference stressed the importance of pacifism in achieving independence, but this was challenged: Fanon argued that Algeria could not achieve freedom from France without armed resistance. An impassioned ‘violence versus non-violence’ debate reverberated through the AAPC and through the subsequent years of the struggle for liberation.

Celebrating the anniversary in December 2018

Philip Murphy, the director of ICWS, opened the 2018 anniversary conference in London in a packed room. He expressed his pleasure that the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana was also marking the 60^th anniversary by holding a major three day conference in Accra – the venue of the AAPC. This event, which was taking place in the same week as the London conference, was shining a spotlight on many important issues relating to youth, women and the future, under the title of ‘Revisiting the 1958 All-African People’s Conference – The Unfinished Business of Liberation and Transformation’. The organizers of the two events – in London and in Accra – now hoped to build on their shared interests and to explore the possibility of future collaborations.

Murphy then introduced the former Commonwealth Secretary-General Chief Emeka Anyaoku, who delivered the keynote speech of the conference: ‘Pan-Africanism and Relations Today between Africa and the Commonwealth’. The speech eloquently explored the impact and significance of the AAPC and its role within the framework of the Pan African movement.

Reuniting participants after 60 years

Those attending the London event were given a unique opportunity to hear about the 1958 conference from three people who were actually there: Bereket Habte Selassie, Cameron Duodu, and the First President of Zambia, Dr Kenneth Kaunda.

Bereket Habte Selassie was a delegate from Ethiopia, which was one of only eight independent nations at that time on the African continent. ‘To young Africans like myself at the time,’ he said, ‘it was a moment at once defining and awe-inspiring.’ Selassie went on to become a leading scholar of African and Afro-American Studies at the University of North Carolina, as well as an activist for political reform in Eritrea and the principal author of Eritrea’s constitution. In 2011 he gave a lecture in the Distinguished Mwalimu Nyerere Lecture Series on ‘Reimagining Pan-Africanism.’

Cameron Duodu was then a young radio journalist, who reported on the conference for the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation. His nation, Ghana, had become independent from Britain as recently as 1957, the year before the AAPC. These were ‘heady days’, said Duodu, ‘The atmosphere in our part of Africa was quite intoxicating.’ Following the AAPC, he took on senior editorial roles in Ghanaian newspapers, magazines and broadcasting, and now writes as a freelance journalist for British and international newspapers and magazines.

**Cameron Duodu and Bereket Habte Selassie at the Hands Off Africa! Conference, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 6 December 2018. Photograph by Philip Murphy**

Kenneth Kaunda, First President of Zambia, had recorded a special message for the 2018 conference in London. Speaking about the importance of the AAPC in Accra, Dr Kaunda – holding a cherished photograph of Kwame Nkrumah – said that at last ‘we could see Africa as one. We left Accra very inspired and refreshed’. The recording had been produced by Gabriel C. Banda, Dr Kaunda’s personal assistant in Zambia; John Jones, of Networkers SouthNorth in Norway, facilitated the recording and introduced it, as one of the conference chairs.

There was yet another compelling personal connection between the AAPC and the London conference. Paul Boateng, who chaired the Round Table at the end of the day, told the audience that his father, Kwaku Boateng, had not only attended the AAPC but had also been involved in its organisation. Boateng recalled the unforgettable impact of the AAPC on his own life as a child, aged seven, living in Accra. He also vividly remembered drinking Coca-Cola with George Padmore.

Themes emerging from the conference

A range of issues were explored. Marika Sherwood of ICWS outlined the importance of George Padmore, utilising his worldwide contacts built up over many years, who ensured that intellectuals of the day and African leaders of the future were invited in 1958. The role of Tom Mboya in the AAPC was examined by Dan Branch, who teaches African History at the University of Warwick, who went on to explore Mboya’s backing by America’s CIA. This theme was taken up by Susan Williams, a Senior Fellow at ICWS, who gave a paper on the infiltration of the AAPC by foreign intelligence organizations.

David Wardrop noted that UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, in recognising the strength of the decolonisation movement in Africa, set up the UN Economic Commission for Africa in 1958, along with similar initiatives on other continents. Hammarskjöld was to lose his life in the search for peace in the Congo in 1961. Knox Chitiyo, a Fellow at the Africa Programme of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), gave an analysis of African defence and security, from the Organisation of African Unity to the African Union; this analysis offered a fresh perspective within a Pan African context.

**Screenshot from ‘Message by the First President of Zambia, Dr Kenneth Kaunda, to AAPC “Hands Off Africa!” London conference, December 2018’, produced by Gabriel C. Banda**

Joseph Godson Amamoo spoke about the ‘African personality’, which Nkrumah had asked Ghanaians to project on the world scene, to challenge racism against people from the African continent. Amamoo said that he had taken this instruction very seriously as Ghana’s first public relations adviser to the Ghana High Commission in London, and then as Ghana’s first ambassador to Hungary and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

There was animated discussion about the impact of the participation of Franz Fanon, who represented Algeria at the 1958 conference. This discussion was generated by the presentations by Leo Zeilig, whose books include a study of Frantz Fanon and who is an editor of the Review of African Political Economy, and by Salem Mezhoud, from the African Leadership Centre at King’s College London. They explored Fanon’s role as an advocate for the resort to violence as a necessary element in the fight for African independence and for perceptions of African unity.

Dialogue between the generations

The conference room was charged with energy throughout the day, as the different generations engaged in vigorous dialogue about many of the issues that were raised, including the role of women and the way forward for African countries.

The closing session of the conference was the Round Table, which was chaired by Boateng; the panel included Cameron Duodu, Bereket Selassie, Joseph Amamoo, and Hakim Adi, whose book Pan-Africanism: A History, had been published a few months before. The panellists offered thoughtful reflections on the ways in which the 1958 conference had contributed to the path taken by African countries over the subsequent sixty years.

Then Boateng invited contributions from the floor. When many hands immediately shot up, he said that everybody would be heard. A concern expressed by some of the students was that, very often in the UK, white people dominated events such as the conference that was taking place. This led to a lively debate. The panellists argued that there should be no colour bar – only a determination to bring about justice and to make the world a better place. Amamoo, whose most recent book is Racism: A Global Problem, recalled that Nkrumah had opposed racism and that the AAPC had been non-racial in its attendance.

There was keen interest when Bishop Trevor Mwamba, formerly Bishop of Botswana, and now Assistant Bishop, Diocese of Chelmsford and Vicar of Barking, identified the spirit behind the AAPC as the African philosophy of ‘Ubuntu’ – that a person is a person through other people. This meant, he said, that nations which were independent were morally compelled to help to liberate countries from colonial rule. The Bishop reminded the audience of Kwame Nkrumah’s independence speech in 1957: ‘Our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa.’

Koffi de Lome, the founder of the new organisation AfricanLivesMatter, shared his concern that today’s young Africans know too little about the struggles of those who had fought for the independence of their own country. He worried, he said, about the lack of continuity between the different generations and he welcomed the opportunity for them to come together at the London conference. He expressed with feeling his appreciation for the participation and the words of those who had attended the AAPC; he believed that everyone that day had learnt a great deal from them. His final words were: ‘No nation, no civilization has come to the fore without new organization, without thinking new thoughts, the struggle for the hearts and minds of our people must be fought for complete and total liberation of Africa! HandsOffAfrica! AfricaMustBeFree!’

Mandy Banton is a Senior Research Fellow at ICWS, David Wardrop is Chair of the Westminster United Nations Association, and Susan Williams is also a Senior Research Fellow at ICWS.

A film of the conference will shortly be accessible through the website of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London.

The organisers are extremely grateful for the generous sponsorship of United Nations Association London Region Trust and the Review of African Political Economy, without which this conference would not have been possible. Featured Photograph: All African People’s Conference leaflet, 1958. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

African Labour in Global Capitalism

ROAPE

December 18, 2018

Nick Bernards argues that placing African labour in capitalism requires that we think seriously and in historical perspective about the politics of irregular forms of work. In his contribution to ROAPE’s debate on capitalism in Africa, Bernards points out that the kinds of work performed by African workers have often been key reference points in global debates about governing irregular forms of work. These debates are often shaped in powerful ways by the unfolding and contingent relationships between the state and various segments of working classes on the continent.

By Nick Bernards

The exploitation of ‘free’ wage labour – in Marx’s double sense of those workers ‘free’ to sell their labour to whom they choose and ‘free’ of any other means of reproducing themselves – is a core characteristic of capitalist relations of production. On more than a few readings, it is the defining trait of capitalism. Wage labourers in this narrow sense have almost always made up a small fraction of the workforce across sub-Saharan Africa. In one estimate from the late 1920s, the proportion of African populations employed in wage labour ranged from 0.4 percent in Nigeria to 8.2 percent in the South African Transkei. The most recent figures from the International Labour Organization (ILO) have 85.8 percent of African workers in ‘informal’ forms of work.

So, comparing African political economies to abstract models of capitalism assuming ever-widening proletarianization would seem unlikely to tell us much. In different ways, Kate Meagher, Stefan Ouma, Horman Chitonge, and Elisio Macamo have (rightly) pointed this out on this debate series on roape.net. Yet, as Pnina Werbner shows in an excellent recent piece in ROAPE, studies of African working classes in particular have a long history of falling into precisely this trap – studying African labour primarily by comparing it to the ‘normal’ trajectories of proletarian labour in Europe.

On the other hand, it would be hard to dispute that the history of African development has long been profoundly shaped by its place in a world economy that is undeniably capitalist. Indeed, the development of the contemporary capitalist world economy fundamentally depended on the mobilization of African labour through the slave trade and the colonial plunder of African resources. Equally, the present context is marked by, among other things, large-scale land grabbing, extractivist development models, increasingly volatile prices for agricultural commodities, and the vicissitudes of private foreign debt. It would be difficult, in short, to understand contemporary patterns of African political economy without reference to their location in capitalist circuits of accumulation. There’s a danger, then, that in jettisoning ‘capitalism’ altogether from our studies of African political economies we risk missing important dynamics. Yet, as Jörg Wiegratz – the editor of this series – illustrates in a recent post in this series, current debates in African studies have often fallen into this trap as well.

So, we’re left with a paradox: African political economies, and especially their myriad labour regimes, don’t look much like conventional understandings of ‘capitalism’, but capitalism as a system of accumulation couldn’t exist in its current form without Africans and their (often non-proletarian) labour. Moreover, we can’t make much sense of the history and development of African political economies without some reference to capitalism as a system of accumulation on a global scale. I want to suggest in this post that the way forward here is, rather than asking what ‘capitalism’ tells us about Africa, we should be asking: ‘what does African labour tell us about capitalism?’

Placing African labour in capitalism

One promising direction here comes from critical political economists who have, in various ways, sought to place informal and unfree work in sub-Saharan Africa in the circuits of global capital. Marxian writers on unfree labour have pointed to the crucial role played by unfree forms of exploitation in facilitating contemporary global patterns of accumulation, including in Africa. ‘Informal’ work too, as Kate Meagher reminds us in her contribution to this debate series, is still often linked into global production networks through a variety of precarious forms of exploitation. For instance, seasonal agricultural workers play a vital role in producing cash crops for export; and labour brokers employing workers on hyper-casualized, temporary contracts are rife in the construction industry in many urban centres across the region.

Such interventions are vital, in no small part because these perspectives have enabled important critiques of the policy frameworks rolled out by the International Labour Organization (ILO), World Bank, and others around irregular forms – in which African labour has often played a central role. These frameworks have tended to treat informal economies, forced labour, and other forms of non-standard work as the products of the exclusion of certain workers from the normal workings of global capitalism. In 2002, for instance, in an ILO report on Decent Work and the Informal Sector, the relationship between informal work and ‘globalization’, is described as follows: ‘Where the informal sector is linked to globalization, it is often because a developing country has been excluded from integration into the global economy.’ The ILO increasingly suggests that these ‘exclusions’ from the global economy are compounded by ineffective regulation.

The main alternative to the ILO’s perspective in discussions of informal labour is the brand of institutional economics widely adopted by the World Bank. Here ‘informality’ becomes a form of poor people’s empowerment in the face of overregulation by the state, a reflection of entrepreneurial instincts to be encouraged by developing appropriate institutions. Policy initiatives to promote micro-enterprise development, access to credit, skills, and property rights follow logically from this way of thinking about the ‘informal.’ Here again, informality is understood in terms of exclusion from the normal operation of market forces.

In either case, policies designed without regard for the ways in which ‘informal’ work is embedded in wider capitalist economies are unlikely to be effective – at best they can offer half solutions that treat the symptoms rather than the causes of dispossession. Yet, there is still an important corollary that has often gone under explored. In practice, the lines between, say, ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ labour relations are indeed fluid and irregular forms of work are indeed integral to capitalist accumulation. But, as I argue in my recent book, The Global Governance of Precarity, the drawing of those boundaries themselves, and the implicit relegation of ‘informal’ or violent modes of exploitation to aberrant spaces outside the ‘normal’ workings of capitalism, are not just conceptual questions of concern to scholars of (African) political economy. They are fundamentally political ones, they are the artefacts of specific, historical, patterns of struggle and practices of governance. African labour, notably, has historically long been at the centre of debates around these questions on a global scale.

Placing African labour in capitalism, then, requires that we think seriously and in historical perspective about the politics of irregular forms of work. The kinds of work performed by African workers have often been key reference points in global debates about governing irregular forms of work. The ILO’s first convention on forced labour from 1930, for instance, was debated and negotiated through the 1920s in the context of growing concerns about colonial labour practices in Africa. But, as I show further in the remainder of this piece, such frameworks have always been contested, and often shaped in powerful ways by the unfolding and contingent relationships between the state and various segments of working classes.

The origins of ‘informality’

The concept of ‘informal’ work, to cite a particularly important example, was popularized in no small part by a major ILO mission to Kenya under the auspices of the World Employment Programme (WEP). This WEP mission to Kenya in 1972, relied quite centrally and explicitly on the assumption that the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ were discrete spheres, the latter defined by its exclusion from the world economy. Hence, the core of the strategy laid out in the ILO report: ‘Our strategy of a redistribution from growth aims at establishing links that are at present absent between the formal and informal sectors.’

It’s worth pointing out that, while the concept of ‘informality’ was new in the 1970s, it clearly echoed colonial dichotomies between ‘modern’ (implicitly urban, capitalist, and Europeanized) and ‘traditional’ (rural, tribal, African) sectors of the economy. The fact that Africans were increasingly moving from supposedly ‘non-capitalist’ spaces in the countryside into ‘capitalist’ ones in the city was the source of much consternation for colonial officials and ILO staffers in the decade after WWII. ‘Development’ and economic growth were increasingly identified with the movement of people from (non-capitalist) ‘traditional’ activities in the countryside into (capitalist) ‘modern’ employment in urban spaces, and the concomitant increase in labour productivity– as in, for instance, W. Arthur Lewis’ seminal work. But colonial policy-makers increasingly fretted about how to manage these transitions, and how to govern those ‘classes of wage-earners who… could no longer rely on the solidarity engendered by the family or tribal community… and were consequently vulnerable to the ordinary risks of life and to the fluctuations of employment’, and about ‘the danger of permitting towns to expand beyond a certain limit; then they became unwieldy to administer and control.’

The preparatory work for the ILO mission to Kenya very clearly echoed similar concerns: ‘Perhaps more important than all the rest, there seems to exist, in Kenya, a very notorious dualism between the prosperous basis of certain aspects of the economic picture, highly productive farm units, relatively good infrastructure, sophisticated financial services, high-quality education, by European standards, in some schools, and the majority of the population.’ The concept of the ‘informal’ economy perhaps broke down the strict rural-urban dualism often implicit in these older statements – pointing, in effect, to ‘non-capitalist’ forms of work in urban spaces. However, it still very much framed the reduction of urban poverty in terms of finding ways of progressively incorporating African workers into global capitalism.

These perspectives were problematic. As a host of critics at the time – including figures like Colin Leys and Richard Sandbrook – pointed out, ‘informal’ economies often subsidized social reproduction in the context of low wages in the ‘formal’ sector. Among other things: street vendors provided cheap food and clothing, informal domestic labour directly enabled the reproduction of wage work, and ‘informal’ employment often supplemented the incomes for ‘formal’ workers and their households in the context of declining real wages. And in the region more broadly, dichotomies between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, or ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ economies, or ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ sectors, tended to occlude the ways in which individual workers and households often relied on livelihood strategies that cut across these areas of activity. In short, the concept of the ‘informal’ neatly excluded the ways in which irregular forms of work in Kenya were already linked with properly ‘capitalist’ accumulation in Kenya, particularly in subsidizing the very low wages paid by multinational firms operating in Kenya.

But, contemporary critics, like present-day political economists, too often stopped the argument there. The very things that made governing the ‘informal’ an inadequate means of addressing poverty also made it an effective political tool – it blocked any serious consideration of the structural roots of poverty, focusing instead on a relatively narrow set of technical responses aimed at fostering ‘links’ between formal and informal activity. Framing urban poverty in terms of ‘informality’ dovetailed with and helped reinforce a structure of state authority that sought to restrict any independent voice for labour in shaping development strategy. The WEP mission, it is worth noting, followed a period of consolidation and depoliticization of the labour movement. Kenya’s Central Organization of Trade Unions (COTU) had been formed in 1965 when the government dissolved the Kenya Federation of Labour (KFL) and the rival Kenyan African Workers’ Congress. The KFL had split over interlinked personal disagreements among the leadership, questions of international affiliation, and the ‘political’ independence of trade unions. The new COTU was led by the factions aligned to the government, and it was prevented from pursuing ‘political’ action. The government also identified unions the primary cause of unemployment in the 1970 report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Unemployment in 1970 – high levels of wage disparity between urban and rural areas, partly ‘as a result of the trade union activities’ were blamed for excessive rural-urban migration and the resort of capital to labour-saving technologies. The diagnosis of urban poverty as the result of the (non-capitalist) informal character of the forms of work performed by most Kenyans dovetailed well with this set of political dynamics.

Irregular work in neoliberal Africa

Irregular forms of labour have increased in numbers and political salience across much of sub-Saharan Africa in the neoliberal era. Structural adjustment brutally undercut working class livelihoods across the region, often prompting widespread protests and undercutting the legitimacy of many single-party governments. At the same time, the means through which postcolonial states had often disciplined strategically important segments of working classes – close links between trade unions and ruling parties in particular – were often severely damaged by structural adjustment. This pattern of failure, backlash, and state restructuring is crucial to understanding the re-articulation of policies towards ‘informal’ economies and ‘forced labour’ from the 1990s onwards. On one hand, neoliberal strategies of governance often shifted towards more localized, community-level interventions dealing with health, education, microfinance as mechanisms for poverty reduction in the aftermath of the failures of structural adjustment. On the other, the growth of irregular work and dismantling of postcolonial institutions often raised the strategic importance of finding new means of governing informal economies for African states. These dynamics have often dovetailed in the ILO’s work.

A useful example here comes via the ILO’s increasing promotion of ‘microinsurance’ policies as a means of providing social protection to ‘informal’ workers. Microinsurance refers to a range of simplified insurance products with very low premiums, targeted primarily at ‘informal’ workers lacking conventional social security. Officials in the Social Protection Department of the ILO initially used the concept of ‘microinsurance’ in the late 1990s to refer to means of providing alternative modes of social protection to informal workers left out of both state provision and market-based schemes, through ‘community-based’ forms of social protection. Since the early 2000s, microinsurance is increasingly promoted by a broader complex of organizations, including financial regulators, and framed in terms of ‘financial inclusion’, a shift that has been accompanied by a growing emphasis on promoting the development of commercial markets.

On a basic level, microinsurance boils down to an alternative, privatized means of providing social protection and healthcare, to informal workers not covered by conventional contributory social security. Making a market for small-scale, simplified insurance products, then, is a way of bringing excluded workers into the ‘normal’ workings of the state and market. It serves to deepen the commodification of labour insofar as it requires workers to find means of paying premiums on an ongoing basis even for the management of the vulnerabilities implicit in deregulated labour markets themselves.

As a means of reducing poverty and managing insecurity for ‘informal’ workers, microinsurance thus leaves a good deal to be desired. It is a quintessentially neoliberal solution which downloads responsibility for the provision of social protection onto poor individuals and communities, and again relies on an understanding of ‘informal’ workers as being excluded from the ‘normal’ workings of proletarian labour relations. It thus shares many of the same shortcomings as the related promotion of microcredit (expertly dismantled in Milford Bateman’s recent contribution to this debate). At best, this kind of scheme risks reinforcing a decidedly two-tiered system of social protection, with shrinking state pensions supporting a shrinking core of salaried workers and the remainder of the population covered by a privatized system partially underwritten by state subsidies.

Microinsurance makes sense as a political intervention in a context in which a growing proportion of the working population is involved in irregular forms of work. The rigid political distinction between formal and informal work implicit in the model of ‘responsible participation’ is no longer viable in the context of deindustrialization, privatization, and the casualization of work in a number of key industries. As with the Kenyan mission, the promotion of microinsurance diagnoses ‘informality’ as a result of exclusion from the normal workings of global capitalism and seeks to reduce poverty by forging new kinds of links. In obscuring the ways in which urban informality remains bound up with wider patterns of neoliberalization and capitalist restructuring, it similarly lends itself to depoliticized solutions.

Conclusion

I have two big points to underline here. First, debates about African labour and its links to global capitalism are never simply abstract or conceptual debates of purely academic interest. A big task for critical political economy needs to be confronting the ways in which the links between the irregular forms of work that are predominant in Africa (and increasingly elsewhere) and the global circuits of capital accumulation are governed and understood. These are crucial sites of political contestation and are closely entangled with broader patterns of political authority and state restructuring.

Second, and more broadly, if our frameworks for understanding ‘capitalism’ don’t allow us to make sense of African political economies, we should be reflecting on how African experiences push us to rethink those frameworks, rather than necessarily debating the value of ‘capitalism’ as a concept. One initial way of doing this, I think, is to suggest that the history of irregular work in Africa highlights the deeply political nature of our understandings of capitalism, and the contested understandings of the placement of irregular forms of labour performed by African workers in relation to global circuits of accumulation.

Nick Bernards teaches at the University of Warwick in Global Sustainable Development. His new book The Global Governance of Precarity looks at the widespread and pressing practical debates on precarious labour in the world economy.

Featured Photograph: A self-employed informal worker in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2010 (Guinivere Pedro).

Rodney’s Russian Revolution

ROAPE

December 13, 2018

Walter Rodney’s posthumous book The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World sought to understand the significance of the Revolution in order to the strengthen liberation movements that Rodney was directly involved in. As Martin Empson explains in this review, these movements took place in the context of historical colonial exploitation or in underdeveloped economies, economies that Rodney argues had been depleted of their wealth, resources and population by Western capitalism. What emerges is a fascinating study of 1917 from a different perspective from the one that emerges from the debates and histories written in Europe and North America.

By Martin Empson

Walter Rodney was a leading revolutionary intellectual of anti-colonial and revolutionary movements in Africa and the Caribbean. Born in 1942, by the 1960s he was a leading radical voice in the emerging Black Power movements. His academic work in Jamaica’s University of the West Indies was marked by attempts to relate to wider audiences than students and when the authorities banned him from ever returning to the country, riots exploded as thousands demonstrated in his support. Following this Rodney returned to Tanzania where he taught at the University of Dar es Salaam. This book is the first publication of Rodney’s writings about the Russian Revolution based on a series of university lectures he gave in Tanzania which attempted to understand the 1917 events through the experience of post-colonial Africa.

The first thing that should be said is that the editors and publishers have done a brilliant job in producing this book. It’s clear from the introduction that this is the result of years of work in archives and the editors, together with Rodney’s family, should be applauded to making this work available. Because the work remained unfinished in the form that Rodney would have liked due to his assassination in 1980 there are of course omissions. But it is clear that the author wanted this book to be available to a wide audience. Thankfully that is now possible.

The book begins with an over-view of the Russian Revolution and most importantly the economic and political context for 1917. Rodney also provides a detailed commentary on the historiography of the Russian Revolution, highlighting for instance, where authors who are critical of events are often linked to political forces (such as the Hoover Institution for War and Peace) hostile to the Soviet Union and radical movements in general. Rodney quotes one hostile account by Harold Fisher, which said that the Soviet ‘Communist movement…threatens our liberties and those of other free people.’ Rodney continues:

The reader would need to ask whether he or she is included in Fisher’s collective “our,” and whether he or she wants to be included, bearing in mind that the “free people” to whom he refers include the oppressed masses of Spain, Portugal, Greece and Latin America, plus (in 1955) all the colonised and exploited people of Africa and Asia and all the oppressed black people within in the United States!

Rodney here notes that the ‘views of the Russian Revolution’ are often shaped by prevailing political discourse and ignore some of the very factors that made the Revolution possible. But he is also writing about the Revolution in order to strengthen the anti-colonial movements of what today we would call the Global South. These movements took place in the context of historical colonial exploitation or in underdeveloped economies, economies that Rodney argues had been depleted of their wealth, resources and population by Western capitalism. So Rodney is keen to highlight the parallels between Russian in 1917 – with a huge peasantry and relatively small, but powerful working class – and countries like Tanzania where he was working. So this book, far more than most on the Russian Revolution, studies the peasantry. But Rodney does not ignore the central role of the working class. In fact, he follows Trotsky and celebrates the leadership of those workers:

Yet he [Trotsky] attacks the theory of a spontaneous and impersonal revolution as a liberal fiction… Both sides had been preparing for it for years. The fact that one cannot discover the identity of the leaders makes the revolution nameless, but not impersonal. The outbreak must be seen in the context of the generally propagandised condition of the workers, hence the conscious and tempered workers educated for the most part by the party of Lenin [Trotsky’s words].

Reading this I got a real sense of Rodney trying to understand the Russian Revolution for the purpose of emulating its movements. The chapter, “On the ‘Inevitability’ of the Russian Revolution” is clearly about teaching a Marxist understanding of social movements – arising out of historical contradictions, but being rooted in a concrete situation. Thus for Rodney the revolution of February 1917 was ‘made possible’ because of the ‘long-term forces that had been operating within feudalism’ but it wasn’t inevitable.

All this said there are some aspects to the book I disagreed with. Firstly I noted a few errors – Rodney writes that Trotsky returned to Russia at the outbreak of war, but he actually arrived back in 1917 just before Lenin. Rodney (or perhaps the editors) gets confused about the date of writing and publication of Trotsky’s seminal History of the Russian Revolution. In writing that it was written during discussions at Brest-Litovsk the author/editors are confusing this with the earlier and shorter History of the Russian Revolution to Brest-Litovsk, which Trotsky wrote as a polemic for German soldiers and was published much earlier. This is important as the later multi-volume book was part of Trotsky’s arguments about the legacy of the Revolution and first published in English in 1932. These errors should be corrected for any second edition.

More importantly in Rodney’s defence of the Revolution he fails to accept that there was a break between events of 1917, the early 1920s and the Soviet Union in the late 1920s onward. He sees continuity when it is essential to see the break. Rodney defends Stalin (though not completely) arguing that his errors were not the result of personal behaviour but that of the whole organisation and dismisses Trotsky’s criticisms of Stalin as being more about ‘personal character assassination.’ At times this leads to real problems of analysis. Rodney writes, for instance, that ‘By 1936, Stalin was the only one left in Russia from that original group [Bolshevik Old Guard].’ He omits to mention that this was because Stalin had executed or imprisoned most of the Old Bolsheviks! For Rodney ‘Socialism in One Country’ was not the invention of Stalin, but the reality of Russia’s isolation. But this is to misunderstand what Stalin was doing – his industrialisation programmes were a conscious turn away from the strategy of international revolution that Lenin and the Bolsheviks promoted. This meant that on Stalin’s orders the Communist International, which was intended as being a tool to encourage international revolution, became a tool for Russia foreign policy. Thus Rodney is wrong to write:

The failure of revolutions to take place in Western Europe was a function of imperialism, which strengthened their bourgeoisie and disarmed the workers. Stalin and the Russian Communist party and the Comintern had no control over that.

In fact the opposite is true. In Rodney’s eagerness to defend the Revolution from its critics, he ends up ignoring many of the problems of the Soviet Union under Stalin and his heirs. This is not to say that Rodney thought Stalin was a saint – far, far from it. But he does not acknowledge that the Soviet Union of the 1930s was not the revolutionary nation of the early 1920s. He does come close though:

Caught up in contradictions with capitalist powers, the Soviet Union has to strengthen its state apparatus. And in doing so, it is behaving so much like a capitalist state that it is demanding from China land areas once held by the former Tsarist state and it is invading other countries, as in Czechoslovakia.

I think there are two reasons for these errors. First is that Rodney follows Lenin in arguing that there is a labour aristocracy in the West, bought off by the benefits of Imperialism. Ironically however he then ignores that these workers were the ones that triggered the revolutionary movements in Germany and were the core of the Revolution in Russia. Secondly, I think Rodney is reacting against the role of US Imperialism in the Global South. It is not surprising in any way that a revolutionary would hate the legacy of colonialism and the new Imperialism that was being deployed in Africa, Asia and Latin America by the United States. But Rodney fails then to see that the role of the Soviet Union has become Imperialist too.

While noting these disagreements, I also have to agree with Walter Rodney’s family members who write in their acknowledgements that ‘This book provides an “African Perspective” for understanding the Russian Revolution… Readers are reminded that this work needs to be examined in the context of the world as it existed at that time and in the context of who Rodney was at that time, a twenty-eight year old enigmatic historian and scholar-activist, engaging, learning and earning his stripes.’ Had he not been assassinated there is no doubt that Rodney would have continued to be part of the growing movements in Africa and elsewhere against Imperialism and Colonialism. This book, in its final form, would have been developed and built upon, and while it has its problems it is also a fascinating study of 1917 from a different perspective to that which we normally get in Europe. I do hope it gets a wide readership and sparks further debates on what we can do in the 21st century to liberate humanity from the insanity of capitalism.

Martin Empson is a longstanding socialist based in Manchester, UK. He is the author of Land and Labour: Marxism, Ecology and Human History and Kill all the Gentlemen: Class Struggle in the English Countryside. He blogs about books he has read here.

The Great Green Illusion: Business as Usual for African Capitalism

ROAPE

December 11, 2018

Exposing the illusion of the green economy, Simone Claar argues that while the idea of greening capitalism might provide a clear conscience to regions in the North for addressing the ecological crisis, it perpetuates the exploitative relationship between the North and South. Through the green economy framework capitalism, development, and imperialism are ‘green-washed’ as capital invests in new environmental fields like renewable energy or clean cooking. Such a strategy will only ‘greenwash’ capitalism in Africa, leaving its exploitative and destructive nature unchanged.

By Simone Claar

Our planet is changing. Droughts, melting ice, heat waves, and floods are affecting the lives of millions of people across the world. African economies are among the most vulnerable in the developing world to the direct and indirect effects of climate change due in significant part to their geographical location and limited economic ability to address the impacts of extreme weather. In 2015/2016, a drought caused by El Niño hit Southern African states and enormously affected the economic life of countries in the region (see Gary Littlejohn’s blogpost). For example, the drought dramatically intensified energy access in Zambia as the levels of water in the Kariba Dam, which is the largest source of energy in Zambia and Zimbabwe, was too low to generate enough electricity. Low energy production resulted in electricity cut-offs for several hours a day. These circumstances hit not only private households but several industries and hence, the whole Zambian economy.

Moving further South, Cape Town provides another powerful example of the dramatic impact climate change is having in Southern Africa. In 2017/2018 the city was almost running out of water, to the point that the government started planning for day zero – the day when water reserves would be empty, and all non-essential water usage would be cut off (see Heike Becker’s blogpost). In preparation, the government started rationing the amount of water to 50 litres per person per day. At the same time, new business opportunities for saving water popped up, such as in well drilling and innovative water saving washing machines. Besides individual household answers, the municipal government supported desalination plants, and three have been running since August 2018.

Despite public and private efforts to sustain water access, in reality, the access depends on class, race and the place people live. Most poor black people have limited access to water while the middle class and the rich have used water for golf courses and swimming pools. They can also afford to buy technology for conserving and reusing water. The drought has affected the poor first and foremost and in doing so underlined the social inequality in Cape Town as well as in South Africa. Limited access to water has also impacted the agricultural sector across the Western Cape. The tourism sector in Cape Town declined although hotels and restaurants were hardly affected by the water crisis.

Currently, water levels in Southern African are rising again, however the next El Niño drought may not be far off. So, we can see that human-made climate change consists of short and long-term catastrophes that impact all spheres of public and private life.

Is the green economy the answer to the ecological crisis?

The global answer by international organizations (such as the United Nation, World Bank, OECD, or the African Development Bank) to climate change is ‘ecological modernization’, that is the call for a more sustainable capitalist economy that also considers the environment. In short, they support green growth for economic development.

For centuries, nature was regarded as a free resource within the capitalist mode of production. In practice, like labour, nature added to surplus value, but nature was used for production without any reciprocity. Moreover, hardly any replenishment of used resources took place. Against this context, adding an economic value and ‘capitalising’ – as suggested in the debate on the green economy – may seem at first glance as an important solution to the global ecological crisis. Consequently, the international focus of the UN and others has turned towards promoting sustainable development and the green growth paradigm in order to limit the effects of climate change.

The financial and economic crisis in 2007-2008 was a window of opportunity to bring green concepts to the table. In 2009, UNEP claimed in the New Green Deal for a transition to a green economy. This was a political concept linking economic growth to a reduction in carbon emissions, taking into account the vulnerability of the ecosystems as well as using resources and energy in an environmentally friendly way. Concepts, such as the sustainable development goals, support African states to plan and implement green development with technical assistance, capacity building, and finance.

Today pushing the green economy as a new economic chance for development in the South, in particular in the African context, is also a strategy for stabilizing and enhancing foreign markets by providing new economic opportunities. Addressing climate change is of secondary importance. The general mechanism of global capitalist development continues, and the green economy does not change the pattern of uneven development. The intellectual debates on shaping the greening of the economy are mainly taking place in the Northern hemisphere, while in the South those who are the most vulnerable to and affected by climate change are ignored.

At the same time, the North’s imperialist and exploitative behaviour continues to take place on the back of the South. The green economy might provide a clear conscience to regions in the North for addressing the ecological crisis, it perpetuates the exploitative relationship between the North and South. However, the Global South does not only react to international politics but also participates and shapes these processes within the existing economic structure. This means that African states are providing the legislation and policies for investments as well as for financial support by global institutions.

Overall, via the green economy framework capitalism, development, and imperialism are ‘green-washed’ as capital invests in new environmental fields like renewable energy or clean cooking. However, similar to fossil-fuel based capitalism the green paradigm changes little regarding the tendency of capitalism in Africa to perpetuate inequality. The green economy strategy is part of the process to transform capitalist societies into green capitalism. According to Ulrich Brand, green capitalism is ‘a new phase of the regulation of societal nature relations, which would not fundamentally stop the degradation.’ This transformation will not change the principal character of capitalism, globally. It will probably only ‘green-wash’ capitalism in Africa and transform it into a Green African Capitalism of the future.

Green African Capitalism or business as usual?

African economies are differently interwoven into global capitalist development and are still dependent on their former colonial powers. During the period of globalization and neoliberalism, African economies were even more challenged to maintain access to the global market for selling their natural resources and agricultural goods. In order to understand the connection between the green economy and Africa, we have to think about the specific characteristics of African capitalism.

In general, the entry point of green capitalist class relations is interwoven with the foreign capitalist class relations in African states, mainly related to the previous colonizers. At the same time, the location of the national capitalist class remains mainly within the national borders and focused on national economic development. The capitalist class that is linked to foreign capital, have strong ties to transnational capital and thus more options to benefit from the green market, in particular, finance and banking capital from South Africa (e.g., Standard Bank or Old Mutual). Thus, foreign capital, mainly large transnational corporations, have easier access to the emerging green market while domestic capital and local companies have limited access to knowledge, finance, and technology, as the winners of renewable energy tenders in South Africa and Zambia demonstrate.

Within the green economy there are also new possibilities for employment, but not for the workers within the fossil-fuel industry. The global labour movement calls for a ‘just transition’. This means that achieving a sustainable economy also involves massive social and economic changes and a transition for the workforce. Accordingly, the green economy should also provide new possibilities for employment in the new green sector and existing jobs transformed into green jobs. However, in the context of African societies, workers in the fossil-fuel sector are rightly scared of losing their jobs despite campaigns like one million climate jobs in South Africa that feed into the global discourse. Fossil-fuel jobs will disappear not only because of renewable energy but because of technological changes and closing down of old power stations.

Climate and renewable energy jobs need a mixture of low-skilled, semi-skilled and high-skilled workers. However, the overall number in comparison to mining jobs is likely to be smaller. Moreover, the new jobs might be in different geographical spaces, and not all workers can follow the new work, if these jobs even appear. In particular, high unemployment plagues African societies and most workers remain deeply skeptical about the green economy providing employment alternatives.

Currently, the ‘green-washing’ has had limited impact on the position of African states and societies in the global capitalist system. The ‘dependencies’ of African countries remain in the existing capitalist order, and the overall position of African economies in the global value chain also remains largely unchanged. Green capital, green investment, and green development may actually lead to an even deeper commodification of the environment, for instance, the creation of new dependencies on technology and knowledge from the North.

Within African states, changes may take place as new capital formations, and green elites emerge, but at the same time, the transnational relationship and global inequalities are not challenged. We know from previous developments like the displacement of people for building new dams that local businesses, communities, and trade unions are often left out of the decision-making process. Even if they are involved, they have limited power to change policy directions as foreign capital provides the funds as well as the technical equipment. We can expect the same process to take place in the area of the green economy. For instance, in the current debate on the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement in South Africa labour fears losing jobs in the fossil fuel sector, and demands more consultation or in the solar tender in Zambia most short-listed companies are foreign.

Moreover, further commodification also challenges state-owned energy companies as private firms provide renewable energy instead of the state. For example, the South African state-owned company Eskom can hardly compete in the private renewable energy market although it has to provide grid access for the private companies supplying renewable energy. Eskom did not make use of the chance to be part of the renewable energy market and instead attempted to wield its monopoly to block it.

In summary, the green economy does not change the nature of capitalism but supports the transformation towards a Green African Capitalism. The current processes at work on the continent indicate that there is limited room for African subaltern agency in shaping the green strategy. The rise in the green economy also brings along new ‘green’ elites that might undertake the transformation process themselves, while the popular classes hardly participate in these processes. Instead we see a deepening dependency on the relationship to the former colonizers despite the emergence of new players like China or the Arab states. Yet, for capitalism, the green strategy provides new accumulation spheres under the umbrella of greening the economy. So, the exploitation of nature will continue if there is no immediate real change in the nature of capitalism and politics in our current system.

Simone Claar is a senior researcher at the University of Kassel, and she teaches and conducts research on capitalism, class, trade, and labour. She is part of the ‘Glocalpower’ research group that works on funds, tools, and networks in African energy transition.

Featured Photograph: People filling water bottles at Newlands Spring, Newlands, Cape Town during the water crisis (6 February, 2018).

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