A response to Ludo de Witte on Dag Hammarskjöld, Katanga, and the coup against the Lumumba government
Henning Melber challenges Ludo de Witte who claims to reveal the “true role” of Dag Hammarskjöld “in the imperialist catastrophe that savaged the Congo”. Melber argues that De Witte’s blogpost offers no new empirical evidence, and demonstrates a failure to understand global institutions and the role of individuals within them. He argues Ludo de Witte shows a total denial of local dynamics and agency, which has led to misperceptions bordering on conspiracy theories.
By Henning Melber
“A terrible myth has developed around the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld”, opens the intro to Ludo de Witte’s blog of 8 February on ROAPE. It recycles his “revelations” of “the true role” of Hammarskjöld, whom he refers to as “Mr. H” (more fondly called “the boss” by his staff). Since almost 30 years de Witte has accused him to be “one of the architects of the Congo crisis that led to the removal and murder” of Patrice Lumumba. His blogpost claims to reveal the “true role” of Hammarskjöld “in the imperialist catastrophe that savaged the Congo”. It offers no new empirical evidence. It is an interesting example how a lack of understanding of global governance institutions and the limited role of individuals within institutionalised asymmetric power relations, combined with total denial of local dynamics and agency, leads to misperceptions bordering on conspiracy theories.
My counter arguments are – as those of de Witte – based on earlier work. This includes my article in ROAPE in 2012 and my monograph Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations and the Decolonisation of Africa, which offers detailed references and sources for all what follows (and more). Beyond the case of the Congo, it puts Hammarskjöld’s approach into a wider context, including his anything but “imperialist” role in handling the so-called Suez crisis (1956), and being – much to his anger – prevented from opposing the French occupation of Bizerte (1961). Both cases show in opposite ways the scope and limitations of the office held. Limitations, which were also visible in the case of the Congo.
As de Witte mentions, the Congolese government requested the UN to assist expelling Belgian troops and ending the secession of Katanga. But the Security Council, which – then as now – has the decision-making power, dealt with the matter only because Hammarskjöld used for the first time his right under Article 99 of the Charter to bring matters to its attention. After intensive negotiations a draft resolution was tabled (in consultations with Hammarskjöld) by Tunisia, a strategic move already successfully applied in the Suez crisis. Adopted with the votes of the US and the USSR, with France and the UK abstaining, the compromise led to opposing interpretations by the USSR and the US. As we know since then, a problem the UN has not managed to resolve. Another resolution – again submitted by Tunisia – therefore requested all states “to refrain from any action which might undermine the territorial integrity and the political independence of the Republic of the Congo”. Again, we now know, implementation remains in many cases wishful thinking. Is the UN Secretary General to be blamed for that?
The mandate of the Blue Helmets of ONUC (Opération des Nations Unies au Congo), including in the main a contingent of over 11,000 soldiers from six African Member States, Ireland, and Sweden, remained disputed. Confronted with different expectations, Hammarskjöld defended the ONUC abstention from direct interference into domestic policy of a sovereign state, in line with the UN Charter. As Hammarskjöld stated in the General Assembly with reference to the contested meaning of the resolutions adopted: “one gets the impression that the Congo operation is looked at as being in the hands of the Secretary-General, as somehow distinct from the United Nations. No: this is your operation … It is for you to indicate what you want to have done.” Backed by the Southern Member States, he refused to resign, as demanded by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. As Brian Urquhart (1919-2021), the longest ever serving UN official, stated in an interview for the UN History Project, this made Hammarskjöld “a heroic figure in the West – which was the last thing he wanted to be.”
When Lumumba was ousted from office, Hammarskjöld asked for legal advice on how to react. He was advised to follow the Loi Fondamentale as the provisional constitution of the Congo. It allowed the President – Joseph Kasa-Vubu – to dismiss the Prime Minister if – as had been the case – it was endorsed by at least one minister. But while Hammarskjöld felt there was no mandate for ONUC to reinstate Lumumba by force, he regarded him as the legitimate Prime Minister. Both Lise Namikas and Alanna O’Malley – far from being sympathetic of Western (neo)colonialism or uncritical of Hammarskjöld – agree, that despite animosities in the personal interaction between the two, Hammarskjöld was convinced that without Lumumba a solution for the Congo was impossible.
When Lumumba at the end of November decided to leave his residence guarded by the Blue Helmets to mobilise for his return to office, the ONUC mandate did not allow his continued personal protection, as an undue interference in domestic affairs. Learning of Lumumba’s capture, Hammarskjöld warned Kasa-Vubu in a letter on 3 December against action “taken contrary to recognized rules of law”, putting “in jeopardy the international prestige of the Republic of the Congo” as “a most serious blow to principles to be upheld by the United Nations”. In another letter two days later, he referred to the Charter principle of “respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all” and urged that the “International Red Cross be asked to examine the detained persons and their places and conditions of detention”. Kasa-Vubu rejected on 7 December the demands as partial interference.
Learning of Lumumba’s execution, Hammarskjöld wrote in a letter to John Steinbeck, which is archived in the Dag Hammarskjöld Papers at the Royal Library in Stockholm: “no one, in the long pull, will really profit from Lumumba’s death, least of all those outside the Congo who now strain to do so but should one day confront a reckoning with truth and decency.” As Brian Urquhart remembered: “I think it took a great toll on him; he became extremely irascible, extremely emotional … and it really was a very gloomy time.”
To prevent any misinterpretation: Hammarskjöld was not infallible. But blaming him for an active role in Lumumba’s assassination is as far-fetched as turning him into an anti-imperialist icon. In the case of the Congo he made some bad choices of staff, appointed and was not always in full command or control over the dynamics unfolding. Such a nuanced approach lacks de Witte’s sweeping condemnation.
There were indeed contradictions and inconsistencies, suggesting that the Congo operation was at times influenced more by individuals rather than being a concerted action based on a common strategy. Communication with competing Congolese factions was at best complicated. Confusing situations required often quick decisions and actions. Much responsibility and room for manoeuvre was left to individuals on the ground and in the UN Secretariat. The “Congo Club”, composed of senior staff members directly involved in the operations and was a mix, in which personal chemistry – especially a toxic relation between the Afro-American Ralph Bunche and Patrice Lumumba – played a negative role beyond the direct influence and control of the Secretary-General.
Influential officials shared, as Georges Nzongola-Ntalala observed, “a common Cold War outlook with Western policy makers and saw their mission in the Congo as that of preserving the then existing balance of forces in the world.” But there is no convincing evidence that this happened with the authorisation or acceptance of Hammarskjöld. Blaming him, borders to accusing Antonio Guterres for not preventing the genocidal warfare of Israel in Gaza.
Hammarskjöld articulated his frustration on 13 February 1961 in the Security Council. When the UN was accused to have acted in complicity with Western interests and should be held responsible for the brutal murder of Lumumba, he responded: “For seven or eight months, through efforts far beyond the imagination of those who founded this Organization, it has tried to counter tendencies to introduce the Big-Power conflict into Africa and put the young African countries under the shadow of the Cold War. … We effectively countered efforts from all sides to make the Congo a happy hunting ground for national interests.” It is indeed debatable if this was achieved. But it is fair to give him credit, as Catherine Goetze does, “that he particularly sought to order the world according to a specific idea of how the rules of the world should be written, and not how the brute force of the states shaped it.”
Dag Hammarskjöld’s agenda was anti-hegemonic; where he failed as Secretary-General, it was a failure by all others too, who followed him in the office. Not always for personal lack of commitment, political bias, or incompetence.
Ludo de Witte could have shown more awareness of the limitations of individual actors within institutionalised global governance – not least being aware of more recent examples, when any meaningful role of the UN in conflict prevention or solution has been blocked, at the cost of millions of lives. It is somewhat a sad irony to target the Secretary-General, who is widely considered as a role model in the search for even-handed approaches, while being fully aware of the limitations of his office.
For those in doubt of what to make of Dag Hammarskjöld, and willing to give him a minimum degree of trust, it might be instructive to read some of his statements and speeches between 1953 and 1961. They are documented in four volumes (amounting to more than 2,000 pages). Despite the usual inherent discrepancies between word and action – even more so when action was prevented by those who were in command of the organisation’s role in international politics (and these were the Security Council’s permanent five Member States, not the Secretary-General) – they are indicative of Hammarskjöld’s values and principles. Alternatively, the biography by Roger Lipsey or the study of his role in the UN system by Manuel Fröhlich might do no harm. As these show, his convictions were far from being a willing instrument of Western imperialism.
Jesse Harasta describes the complex dynamics of contemporary imperialism and resistance. Understanding a world system divided into Core, Semi-Periphery and Periphery is essential to the workings of global capitalism. Harasta argues that Gulf states have engaged in an active imperial re-peripheralization of the Horn of Africa.
By Jesse Harasta
Since the beginning of the 2023 Israeli assault upon Gaza, the Red Sea has been the most significant non-Palestinian theatre of the war. The Houthis of Yemen have presented a potent challenge to the global movement of goods that has precipitated the full intervention of the United States and others in a so-far unsuccessful containment campaign.
At the same time, in an apparently unrelated event, the BRICS alliance announced its long-awaited expansion by welcoming five new members – Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE – all with significant involvement in the Red Sea area.
If these events seem recent and coincidental, it is only because we have largely overlooked elements of the complex dynamics of contemporary imperialism and resistance. The Red Sea region uniquely combines three aspects of the imperial world system: it is a central conduit for global trade, a site of violent re-peripheralization, and home to dynamic resistance to those trends. This confluence is several decades old now but has been under analyzed; by developing a subtler understanding of the layered dynamics of contemporary imperialism, we can better interpret these events.
Understanding the World System
For decades, Marxist scholars developed Capitalist World System theory upon the work of Immanuel Wallerstein and others. They view the current global distribution of wealth between the Global North and South not as a product of policies or culture of particular nations, but instead of a single system. Put simply, the Global North is wealthy because the Global South is poor and vice-versa.
Within this system, the world’s nations are roughly divided into three categories: the Core (wealthier regions with complex economies, effective states able to project military power, and corporate power centers), the Periphery (regions producing only a few basic products for the global economy, with weak or non-existent states, and decentered from corporate decision making) and the Semi-Periphery (those states that mediate between the two, in a position of both exploiter and exploited).
The most important aspect of the World System is its central dynamic: the exploitation of the Periphery by the Core, generating a net outflow of wealth generated by the Periphery’s labour and natural resources.
This system, like all entities founded upon exploitation, is inherently unstable as the exploited will inevitably resist oppression. It must be ultimately maintained through force and therefore, different iterations of the World System have been dominated by a central Hegemon. America is the current Hegemon, singularly able to enforce the central dynamic through the projection of military might.
A common misconception is to define only actions coordinated by the Hegemon or Core states as “imperialist,” which blinds us to many important processes. Instead, we can more usefully define “imperialism” as any act that reinforces the core dynamic of the World System, including acts by Semi-peripheral or Peripheral elites seeking to ‘rise’ in the system.
I explored this process in my recent essay “Non-Hegemonic Imperialism within the Capitalist World-System: A Rwandan Case Study”, in Socialism and Democracy. There, I differentiate between Hegemonic Imperialism, which includes actions by the Core to maintain and deepen existing relations of exploitation, and Non-Hegemonic Imperialism, actions by Peripheral and Semi-peripheral elites to renegotiate their states’ position.
This process of renegotiation necessarily requires the creation of new peripheral zones dependent upon the emergent Semi-Periphery. Because the entire globe is currently integrated into the World System, this is “re”-peripheralization. As Hegemonic Imperialism supports the status quo, it often maintains situations created through historic brutality, but with minimal levels of ongoing violence. Re-peripheralization, however, involves the creation of new peripheral zones dependent upon the emergent state, a process which inevitably involves the creation of new class relationships, often involving violent hyper-exploitation.
Importantly, while the Core always eventually benefits from these processes, they may run counter to the immediate goals of particular Core states and can be conducted by the emergent power without Core involvement. Core elites have tremendous, but not infinite, power and have an interest in keeping down World System maintenance costs. Hence, it is possible for a Semi-Periphery to carve out zones of influence without significant Core response.
Role of the Sea
Naval power has long been the primary path to hegemonic power projection. Because of the crucial importance of security along sea routes, the Core powers have it in their interest to support relatively strong states along their shores. In fact, the structure of the British Empire was explicitly organized around seizing and maintaining control over sea chokepoints.
Connecting the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea/Suez are among the most important trade routes in the world. Vast quantities of trade pass through here, making it profoundly important to Core economies and elites: the 2021 Suez Canal blockage cost US$6-US$10 billion in profit losses.
Among the globe’s great trade choke points – Malacca, Panama, Gibraltar, and Hormuz – the Red Sea is the only one where trade is threatened by active insurgencies, civil war, and significant non-state actors.
The United States has taken direct steps to protect the Red Sea trade routes. It has been a military ally of Egypt for decades, and more recently has set up a significant presence in the small nation of Djibouti at the Sea’s southern end. Djibouti is particularly remarkable for hosting the militaries of ten states and its elite has carved out a space as the stable, pro-Core anchor in an otherwise unstable region.
This raises the question: if the Core prefers stability along the shores of the Red Sea what counters their interest and undermines stability in Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia? To understand the remarkable capacity of war-devastated peoples to threaten invaluable trade routes we need to understand not just the imperial actions of the Core states, but also the aspirations of regional Semi-peripheral state elites.
Re-Peripheralization of the Horn of Africa
Duffield and Stockton’s 2023 article “How capitalism is destroying the Horn of Africa: sheep and the crises in Somalia and Sudan” in ROAPE [based on their journal article here] demonstrates how the Gulf states have engaged in an active imperial re-peripheralization of the Horn of Africa. They start with the seemingly paradoxical observation that at the height of the conflicts and famines in Sudan and Somalia, these regions exported unprecedented meat to the Persian Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
They link the rapid urbanization of the post-1970s Gulf to the rise of voracious “militarized ranching.” Militarized ranching is “an environmentally destructive mode of militarised livestock production that, primarily involving sheep, is necessarily expansive, land-hungry, livelihood destroying and population displacing” (p.4). It is hostile to the central state and traditional substance agriculture and pastoralism and puts ethnicized communities in a state of perpetual war. In this context, Gulf and other regional powers compete over Red Sea ports, reorienting economic and political control away from national capitals and traditional domestic elites and towards new dependent classes – militia leaders and import-export compradors.
This violence has never been separated from the events of the Gulf, as “the Horn and the Gulf are locked into a deadly destruction–consumption embrace. […] Rather than separate national economies, Horn countries are organic parts of a single, ethnically structured geopolitical economy that differentially integrates the region’s labour” (p.4). This system violently inserted the region into a new peripheral relationship and, in the process, reorganized the relationship of both regions to the World System.
It is not only on the western shores of the Red Sea that Gulf Semi-Peripheries are aggressively annihilating pre-existing political, and socio-economic systems. Since 2015, the Saudis and Emiratis have fought a brutal war to re-peripheralize Yemen. While this campaign has not yet been successful, bothsides have occupied strategic territories.
The aristocratic/corporate Gulf elites seek to alter the World System and move their states into Core status, but doing so requires that they create their own dependent peripheries. This is Non-hegemonic Imperialism, as it does not challenge the fundamental dynamic of the capitalist world system but instead seeks to alter the list of Core nations.
This brings us back to the expansion of BRICS. Despite early hopes that it might serve as an anti-imperial force, it is increasingly obvious that the BRICS elites seek to strengthen their hand in the world system, not to overturn it. Even more so after its expansion, BRICS is a gathering of the most aspirational and aggressive of autocratic semi-peripheral elites willing to violently create dependent peripheries, especially as the power of the Hegemon wanes. In this context, we should expect to see the Red Sea become the stage for even more of the coming confrontations between the old Core, rising imperial powers and the people’s resistance to them.
Resistance
This conflict of imperial interests, with the Core desiring stable shorelines, and the Semi-periphery seeking to re-peripheralize new dependent territories, has resulted in unique forms of anti-imperial resistance.
These pirates are not primarily politically motivated but still presented a significant threat to the Core profits, resulting in naval operations by Core and prominent Semi-peripheral states which contained but never fully eliminated the threat.
While Somali piracy re-emerged in late 2023, the primary regional news was the organized anti-shipping campaign launched by the Houthis, a Shi’a aligned, revolutionary movement from the highlands of Yemen whose seizure of power sparked the Saudi-Emirati war. Over-hyped Iranian assistance aside, the Houthis are homegrown and have developed a sophisticated resistance to Saudi aerial warfare.
While they have attacked Saudi warships and shipping in the Red Sea since 2015, their willingness to join the Palestinian cause in late 2023 with missile attacks against Israeli-affiliated shipping was a major departure from their previous actions. While an American naval buildup has been largely successful at preventing strikes on shipping, the costs are high and, barring engagement on the Yemeni mainland, bear little chance of preventing a Houthi strategic victory.
Ultimately the remarkable capacity of the Houthis and Somalis to disrupt shipping is a product of the inevitable resistance born out of the Gulf states’ willingness to fuel their own urbanization and advancement in the World System on the backs of re-peripheralized regions.
If we limit our definition of imperialism as only pertaining to its Hegemonic forms, we miss most of what is happening on the ground in the region. We are left conceptually weak, not only in the Red Sea region, but in other front lines of re-periphalization, including the Donbass, the Eastern Congo, and Artsakh.
Jesse Harasta teaches at the University of Texas at San Antonio where he works in the Department of Academic Inquiry and Scholarship.
Featured Photograph: The World Book: organized knowledge in story and picture (1918).
Heike Becker writes about what has been going on in Germany since 7 October last year. She contextualises the German government’s unconditional support of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and astonishing efforts by government and civil society associations to silence critics of Israel’s actions. Becker points out the deafening silence in mainstream German politics and society about the thousands of children, women, and men who have been killed.
By Heike Becker
When I started expanding my long-time research on memory, colonialism and activism in Namibia and South Africa with a new project to investigate the role of memory activism within current decolonisation movements in Germany, among the first books I read was Susan Neiman’s then just-published Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (2019). Neiman, a Jewish-American, Berlin-based philosopher argued, in a nutshell, that German society had largely accepted responsibility for and learned from actions done by the country in the past (whereas Americans had not done so regarding their history of Jim Crow – thus the provocative title). Neiman reasoned that while particularly the former West Germany had resisted taking responsibility for the Holocaust of the European Jews, after German reunification in 1990 the country had developed an exemplary example of how to atone for an evil past.
Neiman’s book made a lot of sense to me then although I was dismayed by the fact that she makes very little mention of how Germany had atoned, or rather had failed to do so, for its colonial past, and especially the German empire’s genocide of the Herero and Nama in what was then German South West Africa, today’s Namibia. As I learnt during my initial field work in Berlin, and following the public, media and political, debates on postcolonialism and antisemitism that flared up time and again in 2020 and 2021, mainstream Germany’s stance was at best ambiguous.
For sure, in contrast to decades of colonial amnesia, the country’s colonial past became a topic of public discourse from the later 2010s onwards, with a focus on museums, human remains, restoration and reparation. Some civil society initiatives received substantial state funding for projects to decolonise the public space. In 2021 the German government concluded what has been termed the ‘reconciliation agreement’ with Namibia, still controversial and contested, but one could argue that, slowly and awkwardly, some progress had been made.
Yet, postcolonial and decolonial activists, artists and scholars also felt an ever-tightening space. The antisemitism allegations against Achille Mbembe in the northern spring of 2020, and the media uproar that followed the publication of the German edition of Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization in early 2021 were just the tip of the iceberg. In 2022, Germany’s high-profile contemporary art exhibition DOCUMENTA came under attack for alleged antisemitism, when the event, which takes place every five years in Kassel, was curated by the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa.
It appears at times that Germany has been trying hard to focus on its own sensibilities and to close off from the challenges of decolonisation and the postcolonial world. A flurry of antisemitism accusations hit particularly those of Arab and Muslim backgrounds, Black and Afro-diasporic people, and also anti-Zionist left-wing Jews. In fact, everyone who dared calling for an expansion of the country’s ‘memory culture’, so celebrated in Neiman’s book, could quickly end up being suspected of ‘relativising’ the Holocaust. In 2021 the Australian historian Dirk Moses provoked a heated debate about what he described as the “new German catechism”, that is, the German government’s and the country’s leading media houses’ insistence that comparing the memory of the Holocaust with other genocides was more than just probing the moral foundation of post-1945 Germany; it was “an apostasy from the right faith”.
Although not unprecedented thus, what has been going on in Germany since 7 October 2023 has been quite incredible. The German government’s 12 January 2024 stringent declaration, even before any words had been heard from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, that it would join the ICJ main hearing as a third party in support of Israel may be unparalleled, even among Western governments, but it is not at all surprising considering the country’s general atmosphere since 7 October.
Susan Neiman was among the first who raised concern, in the New York Review of Books (NYRB) on 19 October 2023, about what she termed “philosemitic McCarthyism”, and on 3 November, writing again in the NYRB, she pointed out that, “in recent weeks, Germany’s reflexive defences of Israel and suppression of its critics have assumed a fevered pitch.”
In the first week of February 2024, the much-admired Lebanese-Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage was sacked from his position as a visiting senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. The unilateral severance of Hage’s association with the Institute resulted from an article, published a few days earlier in a right-wing German newspaper, in which Hage was accused of antisemitism due to his alleged “fiery BDS [the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement] activism.”
The DIE WELT journalists referenced a selected few of his recent social media comments on the current Gaza war. Hage, who is globally renowned for his profound and insightful scholarship on ethnonationalism, immigration and race in Australia, as well as his Middle-Eastern anthropology, responded with a statement, in which he clarified his position. He pointed out his consistent analysis, as expressed in both his academic writings and his social media posts: “I have a political ideal of a multi-religious society made from Christians, Muslims and Jews living together on that land. … I have criticised both Israelis and Palestinians who work against such a goal. If Israel has copped and continues to cop the biggest criticism it is because its colonial ethno-nationalist project is by far the biggest obstacle towards achieving such aim.” Hage’s contemplations on framing the 2023 Gaza war were pertinent in a thoughtful and moving article, published on the ALLEGRA LAB blog-website in November 2023.
This has been the first prominent case of supposedly philosemitic McCarthyism in the academic realm, although there have certainly been threats in German, Austrian and Swiss academic institutions for some time. Mostly, censoring has targeted artists and the cultural sector, exhibitions and symposia long in the planning have been cancelled, prize awards have been withdrawn or award ceremonies awkwardly re-drawn, a major cultural institution in Berlin had its core funding cancelled, the list goes on and on. Introduced on 5 January, the conservative regional council of Berlin announced that it would introduce a new measure. Supposedly intended to combat antisemitism, state funding would in future be awarded only to applicants who commit in writing to a controversial antisemitism clause, based on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which proscribes criticism of Israel as “antisemitic”. Critics made clear that this clause was going to silence any critics of the state and politics of Israel and undermine freedom of expression.
After more than 6,000 signatories of an open letter protested against this clause, and boycott actions proposed and supported by numerous international artists, the Berlin senate Department of Culture backed down and withdrew the clause. The successful collective actions are, some hope, a few cracks in the wall of Germany’s deafening silence regarding the violence and deaths in Gaza. There have been also some brave statements in defence of freedom of cultural expression and research, including a statement made by the German association of social and cultural anthropologists on 12 February, which expressed concern over the attacks on renown intellectuals and warned against “our public sphere [being] shaped by reductionist judgements of socially complex conflict dynamics and indiscriminate accusations of antisemitism.”
Yet, listening to German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s new year’s address, the deafening silence, which has been pertinent in German public discourse, came to me as a terrible – and lasting – shock that the head of the German government had not even one word of compassion to spare about the dying, freezing, starving people of Gaza after having expressed his government’s profound grief about Hamas’s attack on Israel. But then total silence followed: Not a word about the thousands of children, women, and men who have been killed by Israel’s air strikes and ground war. Not one word. None. Complete deafening silence.
This made it abundantly clear that in the dominant German discourse “Never Again” does not mean “never again for anyone”. Instead, the German government’s unconditional support of Israel’s conduct in Gaza comes across as just a logical conclusion of what Susan Neiman termed in one of her recent articles “historical reckoning haywire.”
Considering the unspeakable devastation in Gaza, it seems self-indulgent to speak about the personal and affective, but here I go: I have been tearing up a lot lately. I came of age in 1970s West Germany and was part of a 1980s generation of young activists who set out to break the walls of silence about the genocides of the Jews, the Sinti and Roma, and other ‘undesirables’ that continued to prevail in West Germany, as it was then. I defiantly wore my Palestinian keffiyeh on marches against antisemitism and racism in Germany, as well as on rallies against apartheid in South Africa and Namibia. Despite all the contradictions of the past few years, I was getting cautiously hopeful, never did I think I was once more going to be so deeply ashamed of being German.
Heike Becker focuses on the politics of memory, popular culture, activism, and social movements of resistance in southern Africa (South Africa and Namibia). She also works on decolonize memory activism and anti-racist politics in Germany and the UK. Heike has been a major contributor to roape.net since 2014.
Featured Photograph: Pro-Palestinian demonstration in Germany on 10 February; such protests are incredibly tough for activists, artists and intellectuals to attend, organise and support (Credit: Heike Becker).
Moses, A. Dirk. 2021. ‘The German Catechism’. Geschichte der Gegenwart, 23 May 2021.
Neiman, Susan. 2023. ‘Germany On Edge’. New York Review of Books, November 3, 2023 issue.
Neiman, Susan. 2023. ‘Historical Reckoning Gone Haywire’. New York Review of Books, October 19, 2023 issue.
Neiman, Susan. 2019. Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. London: Allen Lane.
Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (German: 2021. Multidirektionale Erinnerung: Holocaustgedenken im Zeitalter der Dekolonisierung. Berlin: Metropol Verlag)
A terrible myth has developed around the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, who died in a plane crash in 1961. Ludo De Witte explains that the UN chief was one of the architects of the Congo crisis that led to the removal and murder of the country’s first leader, Patrice Lumumba. De Witte reveals the true role of the UN, and Hammarskjöld, in the imperialist catastrophe that savaged the Congo in 1960.
By Ludo De Witte
On an almost monthly basis the press, and scholars, focus on the death of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, in a plane crash near the Rhodesian town of Ndola, not far from the Congo-Katanga border, on the night of 17 – 18 September 1961. Accident or assassination attempt? And if it was an assassination, who was guilty?
These are questions to which the UN itself is seeking answers. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that the plane was shot down. If this is indeed the case, we must look for the perpetrators in what was then Katanga, a Congolese province which, shortly after Congo’s independence, broke away from the central power with the powerful mining company Union Minière (Umicore) and local politicians in the entourage of Moïse Tshombe. This was done with the enthusiastic support of Belgium, which provided soldiers, diplomats, civil servants, and mercenaries to support the secession, with the aim of irreparably weakening Patrice Lumumba’s central government.
It is not the crash and death of Dag Hammarskjöld – commonly known as ‘Mr H’ – that I am referring to here, but his role (and that of the UN) in the Congo Crisis. The United Nations is still a taboo subject in media circles. Critical remarks about UN operations are unwelcome, because for the West, and especially for a small country like Belgium, the organisation is a major instrument for influencing world politics.
Benefiting from the presumption that his plane was attacked by Katangese forces, the Secretary General has acquired the image of a man who had to pay with his life for his fight for a unified Congo. The Belgian paper De Standaard puts it this way:
Officially, the Western powers could not support the secession of Katanga – that would run counter to a UN peacekeeping operation supporting the Congolese army in its fight against Tshombe. But behind the scenes they were not above it. The UN’s Number 1 was a thorn in their side. He was a little too zealous in his mission to reunify the Congo and put an end to the civil war in Katanga.
Is it really true that Hammarskjöld who led the peacekeeping force on the Security Council sent to the Congo were primarily aiming to re-establish a unitary state, against Western (mining) interests? Noble principles opposed to (neo)colonialism?
This view fits in perfectly with the myth of ‘Mr H’: posthumously acclaimed with the Nobel Peace Prize, he has become an icon of international pacifist diplomacy. The investigation carried out in the United Nations archives, the conclusions of which can be found in my book Crisis in Kongo (1996), invalidates this myth. Hammarskjöld fully supported Katangese secession for as long as Patrice Lumumba was in power. And this, it should be noted, was done with a peacekeeping force who came to the Congo at the express request of the Congolese government to expel Belgian troops and put an end to Katanga’s secession. The secession of rich Katanga – which accounted for two thirds of Congolese public revenue – was in the view of Belgium and the United States supposed to ruin the central state and contribute to Lumumba’s downfall. The UN bureaucracy around Hammarskjöld made common cause with Brussels and Washington.
It was only after Lumumba’s assassination (17 January 1961), when the nationalist threat had been averted, that the West changed sides. Secession, a weapon against the Lumumba government, had become superfluous. The United Nations Security Council put the reintegration of Katanga on the agenda (Security Council Resolution 161, 21 February 1961). It was only then that Mr H spoke out against secession, to the great displeasure of the diehards in Katanga, who dreamt of an eternal replica of apartheid South Africa in the heart of Africa. These diehards were to be found among the “colonial staff” of Union Minière; among the staff of the CIA, which continued to fully support secession; and among the Belgian and South-African mercenaries in the Katangese armed forces. A fine illustration of a genie that could not be squeezed back into its bottle: secession was not finally defeated until early 1963.
From the very first day of the Congo Crisis, Hammarskjöld and the United Nations were in league with Western forces, both before and after the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. To such an extent that without the actions of the United Nations, the overthrow of the Congolese government and its replacement by a meekly pro-Western regime would not have been on easy operation.
The popular imagery of the United Nations with its “civilian servants” as the embodiment of “the international community” on its way to a world of democracy, peace and human rights does not stand up to scrutiny in this case. The UN is a concentrated expression of global power relations, which in turn reinforces through its interventions. Just as it did in 1960-61, it continues to function today at the service of an imperialist system that ensures a net transfer of billions of dollars each year from South to North, via interest transfers, capital flight and unfair trade in goods and raw materials.
By way of illustration, here are a few points that illustrate the complicity of the top bureaucrats of the United Nations in the establishment of the neo-colonial regime in the Congo. They are analysed in detail in my book Crisis in Congo, freely available in Dutch here.
The list of UN and Hammarskjöld sanctioned interventions is impressive:
July 1960: after the Belgian military intervention in the Congo and the secession of Katanga with the support of Belgian soldiers, shortly after independence, President Kasa Vubu and Prime Minister Lumumba requested the assistance of the United Nations for “the protection of the national territory against the act of aggression by Belgian troops” (13 July). Mr H quickly had the UN force deployed, but not in Katanga, where the Belgians could quietly develop the secession.
August 1960. Under pressure from the Congolese government and African public opinion, Mr H was finally forced to send peacekeepers to Katanga. But the UN Secretary General paid a prior visit to Katangan “President” Tshombe – the author of a coup d’état! – “to give Tshombe some form of guarantee that he would not jeopardise his personal political future or the legitimate objectives he was defending by accepting UN troops” (telegram from Mr H to his staff, 26 July). Hammarskjöld was in agreement with Washington and Brussels, who wanted to build a reorganised neo-colonial Congolese power around Katanga.
During secret talks with Tshombe and his Belgian guardians, it was decided that peacekeepers would be sent to Katanga. Not to put an end to secession, but to “freeze” it. The “conflict” between Lumumba and Tshombe was considered to be “a constitutional political conflict that should be the subject of negotiations between the two parties”. The UN would remain outside these discussions. The UN force could not be used to bring the Tshombe regime to power, and the Congolese government was forbidden to use UN facilities to bring civilian or military personnel to Katanga against Tshombe’s wishes. From that moment on, the United Nations formed not only a political but also a military buffer between the Congolese government and the Katangese authorities.Moreover, the Belgian soldiers in Katanga did not leave, rather they donned “Katangese” uniforms the small secessionist army of Katanga.
9 August 1960. UN support for Katanga’s secession prompted Forminière, a Société Générale subsidiary that mined diamonds, to separate South Kasai from the central government as well. Lumumba had no choice but to send Congolese troops to Kasai and Katanga. The capital of Kasai was quickly taken, but Hammarskjöld positioned peacekeepers on the borders of Katanga to prevent Tshombe’s downfall.
A telegram dated 26 August from the US mission to the UN states that Hammarskjöld was more convinced than ever that Lumumba had to be “broken”. Hammarskjöld took up the theme again in a telegram dated 1 September: “There is a page that must be turned and it is that of Lumumba, Gizenga and Gbenye with their totally erroneous interpretation of their rights concerning the United Nations and their role in the world”.
Early September 1960. Hammarskjöld sent a man he trusted, the American Andrew Cordier, to the Congo. Before joining the UN, Cordier had been a top bureaucrat from the US State Department. He discussed the overthrow of the Lumumba government with President Kasa Vubu’s entourage. A coup d’état, since under the Congolese constitution the president had only a ceremonial function. Under the constitution, it was up to the National Assembly to appoint or dismiss the government, and Lumumba had a majority there. In a telegram to Cordier, Mr H encouraged the coup. He referred to a “state of emergency” and told Cordier that he “could allow himself to do on the ground what, within the framework of imperative principles, I could not justify if I did it myself: to run the risk of not being recognised when it hardly matters any more”.
On 5 September, President Kasa Vubu read a statement on Congolese radio in which he dismissed Lumumba. But Prime Minister Lumumba retained the support of parliament. The reaction was swift: on 14 September Commander-in-Chief Mobutu suspended parliament. The UN’s support for Kasa Vubu and Mobutu was decisive. The UN force closed the radio station and airports in the Congolese capital, preventing Lumumba from mobilising supporters and friendly troops. In a telegram, Hammarskjöld revealed that the United States had made US$1m available to UN officers to pay the wages and food of Congolese army units that chose to side with Kasa Vubu and Mobutu. This did not escape the attention of the pro-Western press, as The Times wrote: “So there you have the UN, apparently in the middle as always, but obviously leaning in one direction”.
From 10 October 1960, Mobutu’s troops permanently surrounded Lumumba’s residence. Lumumba was “protected” by a double cordon of soldiers: the first circle consisted of the blue helmets “protecting” him; the outer circle, soldiers of the Congolese army, who wanted to arrest him. The encirclement was in response to the wishes of the neo-colonial coalition, which wanted to cut Lumumba off from his base. Lumumba had become a political exile in his own country. The US ambassador to Congo, Clare H. Timberlake, wrote in a reassuring telegram that Lumumba’s physical isolation meant his “political death”. Rajeshwar Dayal, the head of the ONUC (United Nations Operation in the Congo), told Hammarskjöld: “Lumumba is in fact a virtual prisoner in his house, with no free contact with anyone and no telephone”.
End of November 1960. Under massive pressure from the West, the UN General Assembly recognises Kasa Vubu’s delegation as the Congo’s legal representative. Having lost all faith in the UN, the dismissed prime minister left his residence incognito. With a few loyal followers, he tried to reach Stanleyville, where the nationalist forces were regrouping. But on the way he fell into the hands of Mobutu’s troops, which led to his death six weeks later. UN documents indicate that the UN was responsible for the arrest of the prime minister. Lumumba, pursued by Mobutu’s troops in the Kasai, called on Ghanaian peacekeepers to intervene. The latter wanted to take him under their protection, but their officers forbade them to do so, whereupon Lumumba fell into Mobutu’s hands. Shortly before, General Von Horn, supreme commander of the UN forces in Congo, had ordered the Ghanaian peacekeepers not to protect Lumumba: “I repeat, no action can be taken by you concerning Lumumba. We were responsible for his personal security only in his house in Leopoldville. We always considered and made it known that it was at his own risk that he would venture to leave his house”. A copy of this telegram of 1 December was sent to New York.
After Lumumba’s death, Hammarskjöld lied to the Security Council about Lumumba’s arrest and the role played by the United Nations: “Lumumba (…) was arrested in the country without the UN having the slightest possibility of opposing it, given that it had no control over the situation” (statement of 15 February 1961).
On 17 January Lumumba and his comrades Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito were taken to Katanga in a DC-4 plane. They were tortured during the flight. At 5 p.m. they were dragged onto the tarmac at Elisabethville and handed over to Belgian officers and their troops. One Belgian officer described the prisoners as “a human mass (…), their shirts in tatters, blood at the corners of their mouths, their faces swollen, shattered, exhausted, more dead than alive”. The Swedish UN troops watched from a distance. That day, the ONUC guard consisted of six soldiers, under the command of NCO Lindgren, who wrote a report on the events. Four hours after their arrival, the three nationalist leaders were dead.
The UN in no way hindered the action of the regime in Katanga and the Belgians who were manoeuvring to carry out the murder of Lumumba. The UN chief in Katanga, New Zealander Ian Berendsen, later said that he had been informed of the arrival of Lumumba, Mpolo and Okito “one or two hours” after the DC-4 had landed by NCO Lindgren. But the local UN chief did not bother to put pressure on Tshombe or the Katangese army leadership. It was only on 18 January, and then only in passing, that Berendsen mentioned it to Tshombe. In a letter to Tshombe dated 19 January, ostensibly only written ‘for the record’, Hammarskjöld did not demanded the release of the three, nor their transfer to the Congolese capital; he only asked for their humane treatment. But by then it was already too late to influence events.
Ludo De Witte is an investigative journalist, and writer of The Assassination of Lumumba (Verso, London) and Meurtre au Burundi (in English, Murder in Burundi) (Investig’Action/IWACU, Brussels), on the liquidation of the Burundese Prime Minister Louis Rwagasore in October 1961.
ROAPE’s Ray Bush reviews a major new volume on the politics, practice and legacy of Lenin. In a highly original volume, the editors, Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichorn and Patrick Anderson, have assembled contributions including love letters, fiction and political treatises which affirm the significance of Lenin’s contribution to understanding and engaging in revolutionary moments. Bush commends a breathtaking array of contributions each animated by the desire to undermine the horrors of militarised, genocidal late capitalism.
By Ray Bush
The mention of Lenin’s name generates anxiety and concern among the ruling class and reactionary social and class forces everywhere. His shadow is (mostly) enlivened by Leninists deploying often varied understandings of theory and practice for revolutionary transformation. It just isn’t enough to tear down his statue as fascists in Ukraine and elsewhere enjoy so much. As one contribution in this collection notes, ‘A proper memorial to Lenin is not a monument but a practice’. ‘Lenin’s cause is a workers cause. It is a daily commitment to engage in society, its transformation, and the liberation of workers’ (see Anatoli Ulyanov’s essay in the collection ).
The editors of this collection on Lenin and his lasting influence, have collated a simply wonderful and critically engaged celebration of the 20th century’s most significant political actor. It’s difficult to summarise the 104 contributions that include poems, love letters, imaginary dreams, fiction and ‘dialogue’ with Lenin as well as theoretical treaties and political manifestos. The collection provides insight and dynamic interpretations of the range of many of Lenin’s contributions to political struggles that shaped revolutionary transformations for generations and continues to do so.
The editors, Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichorn and Patrick Anderson, joined by Johann Salazar as founders of Kick Ass Books have in their words attempted ‘to create a new style of left-activist publications: edited volumes dictated by the actually lived struggles, questions and convictions of our contributors, expressed in a variety of forms that speak to their own personal-political reality’. In doing this they have assembled a volume that delivers their promise to promote ‘lesser heard voices’ in combatting ‘revisionist histories’ reclaiming ‘the dignity of past victories and defeats’ that may help contest present day oppressions. They have certainly succeeded in this volume on Lenin. It provides a ‘platform for a truly broad range of authors and artists’ who express their thoughts, visions and pain deploying narrative, poetry, song and images as vehicles for highlighting struggles against oppression. The volume includes activists and examples of activism from more than 50 countries including Afghanistan, Philippines, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Tanzania, Russia and Ukraine, Peru, Thailand, Cuba, Slovenia.
Yet this is not a Cook’s tour. On the contrary. The editors claim the immodest project of the book is to be an active part of the process of ‘communisting’, in an ‘unapologetically Leninist’ way. This advances Nadezhda Krupskaya’s call to ‘learn to live with Ilyich without Ilyich’ or to do all that is possible to put ‘his teachings into practice’. For that to be delivered Lenin’s manner of struggle is central and in that call to arms, literally and metaphorically, this volume assembles a breathtaking array of contributions. They both affirm and continue to highlight the significance of Lenin’s contribution to understanding and engaging in revolutionary moments. It also crucially helps to foster and drive struggles against contemporary hegemonic ruling classes.
The book is at its analytical best, and most fervent, when it reminds the reader what, and how, Lenin explored and analysed historically specific conjunctures and how he argued against those who tried to undermine him. That might have been over issues of theory – the central importance of dialectical and historical materialism or why pulling Czarist Russia out of the imperialist WWI was an integral and systemic part of Marxist analysis.
The volume is less exciting when contributors slip into the world of reflection, ‘well, what would Lenin have done now’? or worse, when some contributions flirt with Trotsky’s critique of Stalin, asserting that Lenin had tried too late and unsuccessfully to prevent Stalin’s rise to power. That doesn’t work well where authors fail to present the historical context of persistent imperialist military and economic attempts to scupper the October revolution and the building of socialism. Several authors also rhetorically talk of Russian and Chinese imperialism with no substantiation other than the Russia-Ukraine conflict and trade war between China and Washington and a (continuing) poor (and exploited) Chinese working class without providing any evidence.
This is nevertheless an exhilarating collection that grabs you from the start. It’s a ‘who done it?’ that doesn’t lose traction when we know exactly who the main player is and why unpacking his analyses helps to inform contemporary villains and class enemies. There are at least two big takeaways that wet the appetite, exciting a return to Lenin to help inform analyses of key global drama’s and conflicts: Politics (class stuggle) and imperialism.
Lenin was a political pragmatist with a keen eye on delivering the goal of socialism. While he noted that revolution will likely only be possible when ‘lower classes do not want to live in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way’ he always had a keen eye on how social and political mobilisation could push a class impasse into a revolutionary transformation. This involved more than the development and focus on the vanguard party, over which so much has been said often by over zealous party hacks who may reify organisation and theories of class purity instead of engagement with social and political mobilisations that may be structured, initially at least, around issues of gender and race. Lenin was acutely aware of struggles around social reproduction for instance as several authors here note (see the essay’s by Anara Moldosheva; Espasandín Cárdenas; Daria Dyakonova; Elsaa and La’al).
Lenin’s pragmatism was grounded in the understanding that socialist transformation required ‘revolutionary theory’ because without it, as he famously argued in What is to be Done ‘there can be no revolutionary movement’ (see Sandro Mezzadra in the volume). The relationship between theory and practice in the development of revolutionary politics is a recurrent theme in this collection. We are reminded of his oft quoted favourite passage from Goethe’s Faust reflecting on Mephistopheles, ‘theory my friend is grey but green is the eternal tree of life’. As one contributor notes, ‘The historical task of the revolutionary organisation does not ..consist in somehow magically awakening (dead) labour and the sleeping masses into a revolutionary class, but to detect and to participate in the process of their awakening’ (Gal Kirn).
Political pragmatism is used in contemporary politics as a stick to usually beat conservative politicians with but Lenin’s analytical clarity was to always remind his interlocutors that while the vanguard party was essential to edge towards delivering a revolutionary transition, the frequently used ‘correct line’ of contemporary self-declared Marxist (Trotskyist?) parties may be reluctant to engage with ‘elements of rupture and discontinuity’ – how objective conditions may quickly change and revolutionary parties need to adapt to changing political conjunctures (Mezzadra, for example, highlights this point). This theme underpins several contributions on Zimbabwe (Tafadzwa Choto) Nigeria (Baba Aye) and Afghanistan (Naweed).
Lenin was scathing about promoting what might be called politically correct positions in arguing against the capitalist ruling class or non revolutionary groups or other so called revolutionaries. For while Lenin was more than able to hold his own in polemical combat ‘what was primary for him was helping mobilise practical struggles capable of materially defending and advancing the urgent needs of workers and the oppressed’ (Paul Le Blanc). ‘Political practice’ for Lenin maintained ‘its specificity when acting upon the concrete situation’ (Natalia Romé). Lenin many times reminded comrades of Marx and Engels’ comment, ‘Our theory is not a dogma, but a guide to action’.
And herein lies one of the ever present constants that gnaws at the well-being of the capitalist class: Marxism/Leninism, and Mao Zedong thought, deploys critical political economy that highlights the stuctural flaws in capitalism and the specific social historical analysis to intervene to overthrow it. The tools to analyse the conjuncture underpin Lenin’s ability to develop a conception of emancipatory politics. ‘It is in this sense that Lenin can be said to have been the inventor of politics’. Lenin promotes three core principles – the building of a political party that represents the working class in the political arena’, ‘to outline and fight for a uniquely dialectical proletarian politics’ and a communist future, and the insistence that the party has ‘confidence in the independent action of the broad masses and not just that of the working class’ (see, in particular, Michael Neocosmos’ contribution).
The role of the broad masses in overturning capitalism and promoting socialist transformation is a recurrent theme in this collection (Alain Badiou) that also raises question of what or who is a revolutionary social force. Leo Zeilig reminds us in his engagement with resistance to capitalism of Walter Rodney’s words, ‘The only great people among the unfree are those who struggle to destroy the oppressor’. The role of classes in the transition to socialism provides the key linkage between Lenin’s politics, analysis of imperialism, the centrality of worker-peasant alliance and the national question and struggles for genuine sovereignty. These debates are ever present even when not always explicit in this volume and they include crucial arguments about race, black power and anti-imperialism (Issa Shivjii; Earl Bousquet; Christian Høgsbjerg).
Lenin’s Imperialism -the Highest Stage of Capitalism highlighted the transformation of late 19th century capitalism, the role that monopoly plays in the scramble for African resources and lays the ground for analysis on how and why the imperial triad of the US, EU and Japan promote the permanent dispossession of the Periperhy (Demba MoussaDembélé). Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia is his other monumentally empirically rich and analytically important work of engaged research that also underlines possibilities for emancipatory political intervention. He highlighted the significance of the trajectory of capitalist development and its impact in shaping economic development beyond the European and US economic powerhouses. Lenin also highlighted why, as in the case of Czarist Russia, revolutionary overthrow is possible where the industrial working class was small with the majority of the population being a mostly illiterate but socially differentiated peasantry – hence the need for worker-peasant alliances.
Lenin’s analysis from these two volumes continues to have immense implications for the Periphery. In Africa, for example, there is urbanisation without proletarianisation that may help explain why it was that Egypt and Tunisia are the locations of the two most recent, politically significant upheavals that were driven by small farmer mobilisations and by the dissafected landless and not by an (organised) industrial working class.
The contribution by Adam Mayer is important here as he notes that ‘Lenin taught us that monopoly capital rules through imperialism, which in the neocolonial context means domination also through war or the threat of war’. Mayer problematises the important role that militaries can and do play in creating conditions for social transformation, national liberation and anti-imperialism. In so doing, he also reminds us that a revolution can emerge in the absence of a numerically high or strategically strong industrial working class. As Mayer writes, ‘Class conscious peasants, informal workers, market women have attacked colonialist occupiers on African soil, and radical states [have] built radical armies on the continent’.
Mayer argues that while rallying behind soldiers may not always come easily to Marxists it is in fact our ‘dialectical responsibility’ to do so. Left support is necessary. As Cabral noted, ‘When your hut is burning, it is no use beating the tom-tom’…’we are not going to succeed in eliminating imperialism by shouting or by slinging insults, spoken or written, at it. For us, the worst or best we can say about imperialism, whatever its form, is to take up arms and struggle’ (Abel Djassi Amado).
This volume is ultimately, and at its core, a collection of hope and suggestions for creating the conditions to deliver the dream of socialism by undermining the horrors of militarised genocidal late capitalism. Buy it and spread the word.
Ray Bush is Professor Emeritus of African Studies at the School of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Leeds. He is also a leading member of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group.
Featured Photograph: A statue of Lenin at Kalyani, West Bengal (2 August 2016).
Towards the end of 2023, the fully open access and free to download Zambia Journal of Social Science published an edited collection of nine articles investigating and reflecting on the life and legacy of former Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda. Here, one of the collection’s editors Duncan Money introduces the body of work. The contributions are wide ranging, from those that deal directly with anti-colonial struggle – including an exploration of some of the tensions and failures within Zambia’s liberation movements – to those interrogating Kaunda’s postcolonial politics and governance, to a remarkable series of interviews with Kaunda and those close to him, which offer a fascinating glimpse into his daily life and habits.
By Duncan Money
The death of Zambia’s President Kenneth Kaunda on 17 June 2021 marked the end of era. Kaunda, known widely as KK, was the last of the generation of anti-colonial leaders who fought for independence in the 1950s and 1960s, and one of the best known.
Kaunda’s momentous life, his central role in events across the region and his legacy invites investigation and reflection, and we sought to provide this with an edited collection of nine articles published in the Zambia Journal of Social Science. These articles and an introduction to them by the editors – Marja Hinfelaar, Mary Mbewe and myself – are all free to read and download (as with all papers published by this Zambian journal).
Anti-colonialism and nationalism are perhaps inevitably the key themes of these articles. Kaunda is best remembered now as a symbol of the struggle against colonialism across Southern Africa. The specifics, however, are recalled less readily and there was a poignant moment at one of his last major public speeches, at the funeral of Nelson Mandela.
A photograph of Kenneth Kaunda on an election poster in readiness for the elections on January 21st, 1964.
Kaunda was a consummate showman. You can see this in the footage: Rising slowly from his seat, a man of 89 years, grasping a walking stick, he pauses, and then runs towards the stage. There, he sought to rouse the crowd with his trademark song ‘Tiyende Padmozi’, until, at the chorus, “his listeners did not dutifully sing along, as they had in the past.” Kaunda paused, “Ah, you have forgotten,” he admonished them gently.
Kaunda had outlived almost his entire political generation, his audience was gone.
Three articles in our collection deal directly with the anti-colonial struggle: those by Kaluba Jickson Chama, Chris Saunders and Jeff Schauer. Chama’s article deals with the earliest period on this collection, looking at the emergence of anti-colonial nationalism in rural Luapula in the 1950s and the politics of food. He notes though that the new independent government continued colonial agricultural policies, pointing to a tension between nationalist parties and their intended constituents.
Zambia paid a price for its commitment to the liberation of Southern Africa. The country was bombed both by Rhodesian and Portuguese forces and targeted with sabotage attacks. Schauer’s article looks at how Zambia armed itself in the face of aggression, securing arms from Britain. Such a military deal so soon after independence prompted accusations of neo-colonialism against Kaunda, but Schauer argued Zambia’s government used this to buy time and subsequently broadened its suppliers of arms beyond the former colonial power. Kaunda aimed to make “neocolonial relationships manageable, useful, and impermanent.”
Saunders looks into some of the tensions and failures within the liberation movements based in Zambia, the kind of details that are now overlooked in the memory of Kaunda as the iconic champion of liberation. Saunder’s focuses on Kaunda’s role in Namibia’s long struggle for independence and his relationship with the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO). Key disagreements between them included Kaunda’s 1969 proposal for a peaceful approach to Namibia’s transition, which led to the curtailment of SWAPO’s military operations from Zambia.
The other articles in the collection focus more on developments within Zambia.
One crucial and now much neglected topic is Kaunda’s development of what became Zambia’s governing ideology under the one-party state: humanism. Edward Mboyonga’s article on higher education takes seriously humanism as an ideology that aimed at decolonising society in Zambia. Mboyonga locates the establishment of Zambia’s first university in 1966 within the public good discourse, where the benefits of higher education did not only accrue to the individual, but to the society as well. Yet there was a tension between the professed egalitarianism of humanism and academic freedom, and Kaunda intervened to remove academics deemed critical of the government from the new institution.
Contradictions in the way Kaunda governed emerge too in Alexander Caramento and Agatha Siwale-Mulenga’s article on emerald mining, which raises questions about whether this supposed governing ideology of humanism was ever really followed. The establishment of an emerald industry is a good example of how the state implemented economic policy in ways that were contradictory to its stated aims. Though Kaunda spoke sympathetically about small scale miners, his policies for emerald mining entrenched dependence on foreign investment by partnering with a British firm and effectively criminalised artisanal mining. This has long-term consequences for the sector.
Kaunda (left) walking in Malawi with Hastings Banda, the first President of Malawi. National Archives of Malawi.
State ownership of Zambia’s economy was a relatively brief episode. Kaunda’s economic policies were rapidly and comprehensively reversed after he was ousted in the 1991 elections. Michael Gubser questions whether the structural adjustment that followed was inevitable, as is often assumed. Gubser goes back to the debates in the final years of Kaunda’s rule among intellectuals and activists about how to fix the country’s failing economy. Economic liberalisation was not the only or even the dominant idea in these debates, and Zambians imagined other possible futures for themselves in a moment of great political change. At the same time, there was a marked intellectual shift towards free-market economics, something exemplified by the one-time editor of the Journal of African Marxists Mbita Chitala becoming an advocate of structural adjustment as Deputy Finance Minister.
Kaunda’s economic policy and legacy are well-known. His close interest in wildlife conservation is less so. Chikondi Thole, Thomas Kweku Taylor and Thor Larsen examine Kaunda’s role in promoting tourism and conservation in South Luangwa, which he declared a national park in 1971 and where he took regular working holidays. Kaunda’s role in South Luangwa also provides insights into political life in the one-party state. Conservation was an area personally important to Kaunda and so he often bypassed state institutions to implement policy and used his personal connections with overseas donors to finance it.
The final two articles in the collection tackle the question of legacy.
Meldad L. Chama and Beatrice Kapanda Simataa argue that official memorialisation marginalised discontent and opposition to Kaunda. It is easy to forget that Kaunda was forced to abandon the one-party state in the face of mass protests and lost the subsequent 1991 election in a landslide. The mourning period, they argue, involved “forgetting and choosing what to remember about KK.” Indeed, those who remember Kaunda for his resolute opposition to apartheid may wish to forget his serenading North Korea’s Kim Il Sung with a variation of his famous call and response: ‘One Korea, One Nation!’
The final article by Victoria Phiri Chitungu is different. Other articles focus on Kaunda as a public figure and a symbol, and Kaunda as a real-life human being can sometimes disappear in this perspective. Chitungu and her team conducted a remarkable series of interviews with Kaunda and those close to him, and through them we get a glimpse into Kaunda’s personal life: the food he ate, the songs he sang, how he slept, and his family relationships. These interviews will become an important source for future work on Kaunda and his legacy.
Duncan Money is a freelance historian and his work focuses on Southern Africa and the mining industry.
Featured images: A portrait of Kenneth Kaunda, March 1983, and photos in the text. Wikimedia Commons
We republish a widely read article in commemoration of the 120th anniversary of the Ovaherero and Nama genocide in Namibia (1904-1908) by the German empire. Heike Becker discussed the 2021 agreement between the German and Namibian governments for special: reconciliation and reconstruction” projects benefiting the affected Ovaherero and Nama communities. Becker brilliantly delved into the issues of the agreement, highlighting the popular protests in Windhoek. The German-imposed agreement was criticized for excluding genocide victims and the Namibian people. Today, Namibian victims continue to struggle for adequate recognition and reparations, as Germany’s 1.1 billion pledge over 30 years pales in comparison to the 80 billion given to Israel, facing its own accusations of genocide against the Palestinians.
2021 Introduction: Heike Becker writes about the recent agreement between the German and Namibian governments for special “reconciliation and reconstruction” projects to benefit the Ovaherero and Nama communities that were directly affected by colonial genocide. Becker asks what are the possible international ramifications of the Namibian-German agreement? Will the deal possibly turn the tide more broadly for reparation claims from ex-colonies of the empires of European colonialism?
By Heike Becker
“Words cannot be found to relate what happened; it was too terrible.” This is how Jan Kubas, an eyewitness of the events that followed the battle of Ohamakari in what was then called German South West Africa, now Namibia, in 1904, articulated his struggle to express his memories of the German pursuit of the Ovaherero into the parched Omaheke desert. Kubas was a member of the racially-mixed Griqua people who lived at Grootfontein near the area where following the extermination order by German general Lothar von Trotha, thousands were driven into the barren Omaheke.
In 1904 and 1905 the Ovaherero and Nama people of central and southern Namibia rose up against colonial rule and dispossession. The revolt was brutally crushed. By 1908, 80% of the Ovaherero and 50% of the Nama had succumbed to starvation and thirst, overwork and exposure to harsh climates. Thousands perished in the desert; many more died in the German concentration camps in places such as Windhoek, Swakopmund, and Shark Island.
A century after Jan Kubas struggled to articulate the horrors he witnessed in 1904, the German government has, at long last, officially acknowledged the colonial genocide. An agreement between the German and Namibian governments was recently concluded. According to the agreement, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will soon travel to Windhoek and offer a formal apology for the first genocide of the 20th century; the deal also stipulates additional German development aid for Namibia. These funds, to the amount of 1.3 Billion Euro, will be paid over the next thirty years. They will be earmarked for special “reconciliation and reconstruction” projects to benefit the Ovaherero and Nama communities that were directly affected by the genocide.
There are many open questions, however: What are possible international ramifications of the Namibian-German agreement? Will the deal possibly turn the tide more broadly for reparation claims from ex-colonies of the empires of European colonialism?
Penetrating questions need to be asked also about the extent to which Germany is committed to “working through” its violent colonial past. Has it, following decades of avoidance, truly committed to addressing its painful colonial past? Can the restitution of looted cultural objects and human remains from the postcolonial metropole’s museums and academic collections be considered a serious and sufficient effort at decolonization? What are the limitations of recent challenges to the historical staging of former colonial empires in the public space, such as monuments, and the renaming of streets, which were named after colonial despots?
And in national as well as transnational perspectives: What could be the next steps in going beyond dealing with the colonial past in purely symbolic terms? What kind of new solidarities are being forged in moves towards decolonization, racial justice and re-distribution?
Reactions
When the announcement that after almost six years of bi-lateral negotiations an agreement had been initialled by the Namibian envoy, Zedekia Ngavirue, and his German counterpart, Ruprecht Polenz, the German government and mainstream media celebrated this as a political and moral triumph: “Germany recognises Genocide” broadcast the main news bulletin of the state television ARD on 28 May 2021. The deal was quickly dubbed the “reconciliation agreement” in German discourse. The leader of the German delegation, Polenz remarked confidently that with the promise of special aid Germany would ensure that the acknowledgment and apology did not remain lip service.
The Namibian government’s announcement was much more subdued. President Hage Geingob’s spokesperson cautiously expressed that the agreement was a “first step in the right direction”. However, associations of the affected communities, the Ovaherero and Nama, whose ancestors had been victims of the genocide, were a whole lot more critical. They criticized the agreement on substantial as well as procedural grounds: For one, the German government had succeeded to enforce its stated principle not to pay reparations for the crimes committed during German colonial rule. And, as they had done for years, descendants of the victims protested that they had not been properly involved in the process. Ovaherero traditional leader Vekuii Rukoro, who sadly succumbed on the 18 June to the terrible Covid surge currently haunting Namibia, called the agreement “an insult“; a statement, which made front page headline news on the The Namibian newspaper.
Members of the victim associations took to the streets of Windhoek. Even those representatives of the affected communities, who had in the past been more amenable to the negotiation process, expressed their concerns in growing numbers. They particularly questioned the amount of the payment package, which was far lower than what had been expected by the Namibian government, who had rejected, in 2020, the earlier German offer of 10 million Euro compensation. While the amount offered now is an improvement on last year’s, it still falls short of Namibian expectations, as even Namibian Vice-President Nangolo Mbumba admitted although he officially accepted the German offer on behalf of his government.
For Namibians, and the descendants of the genocide victims in particular, it is not all about the amount of money though. Activist and politician Esther Muinjangue, the former Chairperson of the Ovaherero Genocide Foundation, now an opposition MP, and also Namibia’s Deputy Minister of Health and Social Services, cut to the chase when she unequivocally stated that “development aid can never replace reparations”.
The Namibian government’s official response on 4 June 2021 clearly attempted some damage control and referred to the agreed “reconstruction and reconciliation” payments as a “reparations package”. This is in distinct contradiction to the official language of the agreement that these payments were decidedly not reparations but an additional set of development aid. Three weeks after the announcement of the agreement, and what the German government had obviously hoped would bring closure to a painful past, there’s only one phrase to describe the situation: it’s a total mess.
Reparations
When former German Foreign Minister Joseph ‘Joschka’ Fischer visited Windhoek in October 2003 he went on record to say that there would be no apology that might give grounds for reparations for the genocide, which was committed by German colonial troops in Namibia. Fischer’s rather undiplomatic words are indicative of the intense and heated, historical and present relations that are at stake.
There is an underlying conjecture of the German-Namibian negotiations: what are the potential international ramifications of accepting legal, political and moral responsibility of reparations for colonial violence and genocide. Colonial Germany may have committed genocide, according to the UN definition, “with intent to destroy, …, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” only in Namibia; but it certainly carried out atrocities and mass killings also in other colonial territories. Esther Muinjangue nailed it when she said: “We know that the German Government is guilty equally when it comes to the people of Tanzania or when it comes to the people of Cameroon. So, they want to safeguard themselves.” The German government fears more claims from ex-colonies; it also fears claims from European countries such as Greece, which have never received compensation for World War Two war crimes.
Then there are the shared postcolonial anxieties among the former colonial empires. Would Germany’s acceptance of its colonial past open the floodgates to a surge of claims by formerly colonized nations, in Africa as elsewhere, against their erstwhile colonizers? Muinjangue thinks this a likelihood: “all countries that were present at the Berlin Conference of 1884 and divided up the African continent are guilty: France, Britain, Belgium, and many others. They all have blood on their hands – and they all fear that one day they will have to pay reparations for their crimes.” The fears of former empires, such as Britain, France and Belgium, have been the proverbial elephant in the room.
Not without us…
If any agreement between a former colonizing power and the formerly colonized should stand a chance of bringing about justice and reconciliation, the descendants of those affected must be closely listened to. This means that they should be appropriately included in the negotiations. This has been the vocal persistent demand of genocide victim groups for an inclusive process under the slogan “not without us” ever since the negotiations between Namibia and Germany began in 2015. In January 2017 representatives of Ovaherero and Nama traditional authorities filed a lawsuit in New York, which although ultimately unsuccessful, sent a strong message to Germany and the Namibian government that negotiations “without us” remained unacceptable for those whose ancestors were killed in the genocide.
A common grievance, often expressed in Namibia, questions Germany’s pronounced difference of responding to different victims of genocide. Ever since 1990, descendants of those who suffered under the colonial genocide have often asked me, why did Germany pay generous and easily negotiated reparations to Israel after the reparations programme, which was created when Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany and Israel signed the Luxembourg Agreement in 1952, but has been so recalcitrant regarding Namibians? Why did the German government readily include the Jewish Claims Conference as representatives of Jewish non-governmental organisations but insisted on government-to-government only talks with Namibia? Is it “because we are Africans”, with these words Namibians regularly express suspected racism.
Restitutions: Symbolic reparations, not quite…
Symbolic commemorations of Germany’s African genocide have taken place over the past few years. If not without controversy, human remains of genocide victims were repatriated from Germany to Namibia in 2011, 2014 and 2018. These had been shipped to academic and medical institutions in Germany, and had remained there until recently.
In 2019 some significant items of cultural memory, which had been stolen during colonial conquest, were returned to Namibia from the Linden Museum in Stuttgart. These included the slain Nama leader Hendrik Witbooi’s Bible and his riding whip.
Other former German colonies have also begun to claim restitution. In 2018 Tanzania’s ambassador to Berlin requested the repatriation of human remains, which are being stored in German museums and academic institutions. In Berlin alone the remains of 250 individuals were identified, and more are suspected to be in Bremen, Leipzig, Dresden, Freiburg, and Göttingen. Provenance research on the human remains from former German East Africa also include about 900 remains of colonized people from Rwanda, which together with today’s Tanzania and Burundi formed colonial German East Africa. Also, in 2018, the President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation promised funding for future provenance research in transnational collaborations on collections of human remains with the perspective of repatriation to Cameroon, Togo and Papua New Guinea.
Yet, the debacle of the Namibian-German “reconciliation” agreement points out that the attempts at addressing the German colonial past, including, but not restricted to the shared-divided history of Germany and Namibia, have thus far been at best half-hearted.
Bronzes, a boat & street names
At the same moment that the “reconciliation agreement” was presented in Germany with some fanfare, controversy erupted once again around the Humboldt-Forum. Berlin’s ambitious new museum is housed in the royal Prussian palace in central Berlin; the reconstructed Baroque structure that was built over the past decade at a cost of over 680 Million Euro. In this space in the historical centre of imperial Germany, controversially, ethnographic collections will be exhibited. The Humboldt-Forum has been at the centre of highly critical responses from anti-colonial and black community civil society organisations, cultural workers, as well as historians and anthropologists. Its claim to decolonization has been highly contradictory.
Just before news broke about the Namibian-German agreement, high-profile German politicians loudly congratulated each other for their decision to return some of the hundreds of Benin bronzes kept in German museum collections to Nigeria. Until recently Benin bronzes were meant to occupy pride of place in the new museum in central Berlin, where Germany wants to demonstrates its cosmopolitanism; now German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas celebrated the “turning point in our way of dealing with [our] colonial history”. Quite ironically, just a week later the next prominent scandal of colonial loot hit the news. A new book by the historian Götz Aly revealed the dark history of an artistically stunning vessel looted from former German-New Guinea in 1903.
Berlin’s leading museum officials displayed an astonishing level of ignorance. Even more astounding was the suggestion to continue exhibiting the beautifully decorated 16 metres long boat, that was built by residents of Luf Island in the Western part of the Hermit Group, and who fell victim to German colonial atrocities in the new museum by declaring it “a memorial to the horrors of the German colonial past”. This arrogance is indeed astounding since there is still no memorial in Berlin to honour the victims of German colonialism and genocide in the central Berlin space, near the Reichstag, where Germany honours the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and belatedly, now also the victims of the Porajmos (genocide of the Roma and Sinti), and the Nazis’ persecution of homosexuals.
A tongue-in-cheek suggestion came from a leading historian of German colonialism and genocide. In a column in die tageszeitung Jürgen Zimmerer, Professor of Global History at Hamburg University, asked why not turn the reconstructed Prussian Palace itself into a fitting memorial. His proposition: fill-up its centre courtyard with sand from the Omaheke desert, or break up the castle’s fake Baroque façade with barbed wire in remembrance of the concentration camps in colonial Namibia.
Then there is street renaming, the most noticeable form of postcolonial activism in the German public space. A well-known dispute over street names comes from Berlin’s Afrikanisches Viertel (‘African Quarter’), where from 2004 civil society activist groups have been calling for the renaming of streets, which are currently named after German colonial despots. The members of the long-standing activist group Berlin Postkolonial and other initiatives, now active in cities and towns across Germany, have employed decolonial guided walking tours as a main tool of intervention. Recently, one of Berlin’s oldest campaigns gained success when the former Wissmannstrasse in the borough of Neukölln was renamed Lucy-Lameck-Strasse. The infamous German colonial officer and administrator was thus supplanted with the Tanzanian liberation fighter and politician, who after her country’s independence campaigned for gender justice.
Entangled memory: from violent pasts to new solidarities
The question remains, how much real change can come from the symbolic engagement with the colonial past. A future-oriented trajectory will point out that, beyond symbolic action, Germany’s culture of remembrance has to face challenges for the country to understand its own history within European colonialism.
Public debates in Germany have frequently posited colonialism and Holocaust memory against each other; it is alleged that an expansion of “working through the past” to include the colonial era, would ‘relativize’ the Holocaust. In contrast to this supposed competition of memory, Michael Rothberg’s concept of Multidirectional Memory has recently garnered some interesting, though at times controversial attention in public debate. Rothberg’s intervention, translated into German only twelve years after the original publication of the book in 2009, has become a catalyst for productive dialogues. In a nutshell, Rothberg suggests that memory works productively through negotiation and cross-referencing with the result of more, not less memory.
Berlin-based Ovaherero activist Israel Kaunatjike
An interesting case to explore new ways of thinking about colonial memory, social change and solidarities relates to the historical legacies of racial science and eugenics, which were developed by the anthropologist Eugen Fischer on the basis of research in Namibia in 1908. Fischer’s research was mainly used in the European colonial empires. From 1927 it was further developed under his leadership at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWI-A) in Berlin-Dahlem. From 1933 it became the basis of the Nazi race laws that targeted Jews and other racially and socially ‘undesirables’. Today the colonial roots of racism and inequality, as well as the systematization of racial studies and eugenics in Nazi Germany, continue to raise questions about the politics of remembrance and decolonization.
During excavations on the grounds of the Free University, which now occupies the site of the former KWI-A, hastily buried human remains were discovered. In 2015 and 2016 the University commissioned archaeological expertise on these finds. The KWI-A entertained close connections to the Auschwitz camp. Thus the initial suspicion was that the excavated bones may have belonged to people murdered during the Nazi era. However, when the archaeological report was presented during a well-attended online meeting in February 2021, it turned out that the situation was more complex. Some of the remains seem to have originated indeed in crimes against humanity that were perpetrated during the Nazi terror. Others, however, are more likely to originate in anthropological collections from the colonial era. It appeared impossible to ascertain the regional origins of the remains of the about 250 individuals. This gave rise to new solidarities that originated in entangled forms of remembering the atrocities of the colonial and Nazi eras. Representatives of Jewish, Black, and Sinti and Roma communities now work together to ensure that these human remains are treated with dignity.
Such new forms of solidarity are already practiced in civil society and transnationally in the global anti-racist movement. When the global Black Lives Matter movement formed a year ago, young activists got involved in Germany as well as in Namibia. In Windhoek, the movement was directed primarily against the statue of the German colonial officer and alleged city founder Curt von François. Not only the Nama and Ovaherero communities, but also young Namibians from all sections of the population are confronting colonial legacies. Over the past year the young Namibian activists who campaigned against the offensive monument and who support the claims of the descendants of the genocide survivors, have clinched a number of social justice issues as part of their decolonizing activism, and have been calling for an end to sexism, patriarchy, and racism.
In Germany too, civil society activists have played a big role and the “reconciliation agreement” is owed, more than anything else, to their post-colonial remembrance work. Campaigning started around 2004, i.e., the time of the centenary of the genocide. In October 2016, for instance, an international civil society congress, “Restorative Justice after Genocide”, brought together over 50 Herero and Nama delegates and German solidarity activists in Berlin. The participants staged public protests and Ovaherero and Nama delegates held a press conference in the German Bundestag. And now that the, unsatisfactory, agreement is on the table, activists in Germany are again campaigning vibrantly in solidarity with the affected Namibian communities and have taken to the streets of Berlin. The current Namibia solidarity alliance brings together civil society outlets of long-standing, and young groups, who have come together during the past year’s surge of radical anti-racist activism.
The agreement that has been concluded falls short of expectations in many ways. However, it can be an impetus for the former colonial rulers and the formerly colonized to finally begin a meaningful conversation about the difficult divided history. The question arises as to whether the civil society decolonization movements in both Germany and Namibia can influence the future politics of remembrance in both their countries in a way that makes a solidarity-based post-colonial policy of reconciliation and justice possible.
Heike Becker focuses on the politics of memory, popular culture, digital media and social movements of resistance in southern Africa (South Africa and Namibia). She also works on decolonize memory activism and anti-racist politics in Germany and the UK. Heike is a regular contributor to roape.net.
Featured Photograph: Chained Herero and Nama prisoners during the genocide (Wiki Commons)
Photographs: The photographs were taken during a rally that was organised in Berlin on 28 May 2021 – it was held during the afternoon of the day when the agreement was officially announced by the German government. The space where the rally was held is on the grounds of where the infamous Berlin-Kongo conference was held in 1884/85 (all photographs were taken by Heike Becker).
The connection between Israel and apartheid South Africa has been repeated and disputed since October last year, but this is not new argues Graham Harrison. The comparison of Israel to apartheid was debated in the 1970s over a denunciation of Israel’s removals, settlements, walls and border-posts crisscrossing the occupied territories. Harrison teases out some of the similarities, and important differences, in the relationship between two states, and two chosen people.
By Graham Harrison
‘In Israel, economic goals arise naturally from the general goal of the survival of the state.’ Israeli General Director of the Ministry of Finance, 1985.
‘Israel and South Africa have a common lot. Both are engaged in a struggle for existence.’ South African newspaper Die Burger, 1968.
The association of Israel with apartheid South Africa has become prominent and contested since October last year, but it is not new. The likening of Israel to apartheid emerged in the 1970s through a condemnation of the Israeli state’s geopolitics expulsion, settlement, and later walls and checkpoints in the occupied territories.
The day-to-day lives of Palestinians in these walled and fenced zones is one of coercive control of movement and routine humiliation and frustration: the geopolitics of the ‘separation barrier, Israel’s apartheid wall’. This is China Mieville’s phrase, evoking especially the ‘high apartheid’ of Hendrick Verwoerd. After the incremental ratcheting up of racist legislation, Verwoerd sought to systematise and consolidate a totalising legislative project of racial dominance: Bantustans scattered on the peripheries of cities, mines, and commercial farms; the coerced expatriation of black South Africans; the massive and routine deployment of the police and army to arrest, shoot, and expel black Africans; the complete segregation of public services and amenities; the banning of black African political organisations; the mass criminalisation of black South Africans in cities without a pass and a baas (white employer).
The analogy is clear enough: between two highly-securitised states endeavouring to create facts on the ground through a military-administrative project that seems both absurd and abysmal in equal measure. Projects to create ethno-racialised denizens, pushed into quasi-states (recall that the Bantustans were given their own flags and governments under the rubric that they would progress towards nationhood), and subjected to heavy restrictions on their movements.
But, beyond this ethnic and de-nationalising cantonment, considerable debate exists concerning the degree of conceptual stretch that the apartheid analogy allows. Much of this questioning is important, interesting and adds nuance. For example, Israel has never had a ‘labour reserve’ economy in the way South Africa did (although a version of this did exist in the 1950s up to 1967). Nor is Gaza a version of a Bantustan, although it has hardly enjoyed anything like juridical statehood. And—although there is plenty of evidence of general social prejudice and some hard constitutional differentiations lurking behind its procedural democracy—there are Arab Israelis who have full formal citizenship rights in Israel, which no black, ‘coloured’, or Asian South Africans did until the mid 1980s (and even then in a highly restricted and qualified way, and not for black South Africans).
All of which is to say that analogies are not similes. There is little point in saying country A is like country B; but there are possible insights from exploring how there is something in a facet of country A’s politics that help us understand country B’s politics. Analogous thinking seeks out the ‘independent variable’, the phenomenon that connects facets of one political economy to another. As such, analogous thinking is partly about exploring degrees of similarity but also revealing generic features, features that might have salience in both cases and beyond.
The visceral politics of a chosen people
It was apartheid South Africa that gave the newly-formed Israel its first premier-level diplomatic visit. In 1953, Magnus Malan visited Israel. At first blush, this seems remarkable. South African politics had betrayed a long-standing antisemitism. But, the official narrative that the visit expressed was that the Israeli and South African governments had something primordially important in common: they were both states forged through righteous struggle in pursuit of a home for a chosen people. This idea was at the heart of the apartheid project as it was realised after 1948 with the victory of the National Party. It relied on the construction of a discourse in which the Afrikaaner had endured the oppressions of other peoples (black and English), had the will of God on their side, and had come to achieve sovereignty through their own tenacity.
There is something of the Ulster experience here; something in Taiwan’s post-1948 exile government; perhaps also Rwanda’s post-genocide ‘return’ government that took power after marching from Uganda. In each case, statehood was closely connected to the wielding of power by an ‘immigrant’ elite that faced a territory with which it was only partially familiar. The chosen/authentic/destined elite sees in the sovereignty it has won an existentialism value: without the state, we are nothing; removed from power, we will be erased. Apartheid South Africa, Israel, and to some degree the others briefly mentioned have all displayed considerable and tenacious authoritarianism as a result of this analogous historical experience.
Capitalism, modernity, and the siege state
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, both Israel and South Africa posted strong statistics in terms of economic growth, industrialisation and sectoral change, and productivity. Each also forged tight mutualities between states, corporately-organised labour, and capital. The state developed institutions to ‘lock in’ a political dispensation of support for capital that was realised through strategic subsidies and investment in infrastructure. Both made strong investments in their military-industrial complexes. Both achieved all of this through an ethno-national bonding that derived from its immigrant/siege sociology. Each developed a perception that capitalist transformation was not primarily a ‘good thing’ in itself but rather a difficult, violent, but necessary project to secure sovereignty in what was perceived as (to use the apartheid phrase) total onslaught. This gave each country a ‘crony capitalist’ or corporatist character Israel had its Histradut and South Africa its Broederbond), but one disciplined by the imperatives of ‘national security’. And both projects excluded, repressed, and (in South Africa’s case) exploited those who were racialised out of the benefits that modernisation had to offer.
No less importantly, both Israel and South Africa forged their authoritarian capitalist transformations through agrarian change that was, in essence, characterised by two interlinked processes: dispossession and heavy state support. Incumbent indigenous landowners, tenants, and peasants were removed from the land (through force of arms if necessary), and settler farmers would receive subsidies, infrastructural investment, and the more or less visible backing of the states instruments of coercion. Both countries invested heavily in irrigation, state marketing boards, and support for the introduction of new production technologies. Rural space, remade through settlement, consolidated through capitalist transformation.
Apartheid and the disenchantment of the West
The successful modernising drive in these two countries reveals in stark form a deep and pervasive equivocation in Western power and the flattering visions produces of its own dominance. This derives from the manifestation in each case of something attractive and something repellent. The modern cities, investment zones, tourism, and infrastructure seduce whilst the expulsions, violence, and racism undermine the liberal creed of human rights that broadly holds a global Western identity together. This agonism is nicely encapsulated in Stephen Gelb’s terms for the political economy of apartheid: racial Fordism. Something that resonates with the American experience of modernity—the suburb, the male industrial worker and family, the consumer society. And, a dissonance in its constitutionalised racial order. A similar agonism is explored in Amy Kaplan’s Our American Israel: its image of modernity presented in its military and its cities, juxtaposed with the historic fact that all of this is predicated on the expulsion of at least 700,000 Arab Palestinians and an ongoing war of attrition against Arabs in the occupied territories.
Both apartheid South African and Israel sought to operationalise the internal tensions of liberalism as a Western global ideology by presenting a modern image of their governance, obscuring their systemic human rights abuses and, when the latter became visible and contentious, articulating them through a frame of reference that might be called civilisational.
Both countries excused their violence by contextualising it in relation to a barbaric hinterland. The apartheid catch-all term for this was swart gevaar—black peril. Apartheid was presented as an ‘outpost’ of Western modernity in a ‘tribal’ and turbulent region. Israel presented itself in the same way: a Western outpost in a volatile Arab middle-east. Each tested Western (and especially American) global liberal visions. They asked of the West: realistically, what is the priority in your values? In Israel’s case up to the present, and in South Africa’s case up to the mid 1980s when things started to change, the priority was the geopolitical combination of strategic allies and capitalist modernisation over the brutalised bodies of black Africans and Palestinians. In the words of American Chester Crocker’s (Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs) book title, South Africa existed in a ‘rough neighbourhood’. This trope produces a folksy metaphor that expresses very well a kind of global liberalism that will allocate human rights to a second order priority when the rights of capital and visions of security are threatened.
Israel parallax: the state that missed the post-Cold War liberal transition
Given a little distance from the polemics about the use of the term ‘apartheid Israel’, we can see that the political analogies are quite salient, even if they do not produce some kind of strict comparative correspondence. They both reveal something about the particular historical experience of both countries: the metaphysics of a chosen people wielding state power over territories with estranged indigenous populations over which they seek dominance. The drive to capitalist modernity that the combination of insecurity and economic transformation forges. They also betray an agonism in American global liberalism: its ‘organised hypocrisy’ concerning the declared unconditional and universal value of human rights and the commonplace downgrading of this value to an ancillary status after the rights of capital and state security.
In the present-day, in this analogy, Israel seems strangely prehistoric. South Africa is no longer an apartheid state and it managed its transition very well, all things considered. Both Northern Ireland and Taiwan, for that matter, have also de-escalated from the peculiar intensity of minority-siege-modernity politics. There is much to criticise in all of these cases but, in a more fundamental sense, the nature of political change is remarkable.
In the present-day, South Africa is not Israel’s analogue. South Africa has moved on. Its most likely analogue is perhaps Rwanda. Both still act within the bandwidth set by the origins of their establishing sovereignty: the militarism, military incursions beyond their frontiers, Romantic-religious discourses of destiny (in Rwanda an often Pentecostal Protestantism that was nurtured in exile and contrasted strongly with the ‘genocide adjacent’ Catholic church), the desire to modernise as a means to secure statehood, and the political differentiations between one ethno-national group and others. On and off, Benjamin Netanyahu has served as Prime Minister since 1996; Paul Kagame has served as Vice President and then President of Rwanda since 1994.
If we allow some stretched analogical speculation, we might argue that Israel is, in a sense, a country out of step with political time. It eschewed the peacemaking endeavours of the post-Cold War moment of liberal optimism, intensified its military-tech securitisation, moved into an increasingly conservative politics of nationhood and failed in even the most rudimentary way to identify a way out through the prevailing models of liberal transitology that characterised the 1990s. Our American Israel is now rivalled by Israelism, a documentary in which one can see the guilt and horror of those Americans who saw in Israel a spiritually-resonant manifestation of liberal modernity, went to live, work, and fight there, only to find routine rights violations and a deep prejudice amongst the IDF. For all of its modern accoutrements, Israel resembles a state in chronic condition: unable to move beyond the vexed conditions of its origins as a nation.
Graham Harrison teaches political economy at the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University and is on the editorial board of ROAPE. His recent book Developmentalism: The Normative and Transformative within Capitalism is published by Oxford University Press.
Featured Photograph: The Hawara checkpoint in the occupied West Bank, Palestine (12 June 2006).
One hundred years since Lenin’s death, Nigerian socialist Abiodun Olamosu describes of the revolutionary on his own political development. As the preeminent organiser of the Russian revolution, Lenin helped to determine the course of Olamosu’s life in Nigeria. Olamosu explores the development of Lenin’s work and legacy. He regards Stalin’s rise to power, and the Soviet Union, as an abomination to the body of ideas of Marxism and socialist internationalism.
By Abiodun Olamosu
Not long after I joined the socialist movement as a student at the Polytechnic of Ibadan in 1980, I was introduced to Marxist literature at the Progressive and Socialist Bookshop which was the sole depot of many left-wing publishers from UK, USSR and China that included Zed Books. By the time I entered university as a mature student, I had already worked as a full-time revolutionary assisting Ola Oni, a foremost Marxist revolutionary and scholar at the University of Ibadan where he lectured. He also owned the bookshop.
My generation were inspired by the history of Russia, the only country that achieved a successful socialist revolution in October 1917. We believed in the cause, and we thought we could replicate the revolution in Nigeria.
The Russian revolution of 1917 became clear to us through access to cheap books by the foremost socialist revolutionaries including Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin, Gorky, and other volumes by Russian writers published by Progress Publishers in Moscow. This was unlike any publisher from the West who charged a fortune for their books.
As a worker I was able to purchase the forty-five volumes of Lenin’s collected works, three volumes of Das Capital by Marx – his major works on political economy – and other works by Engels.
Lenin was a household name amongst comrades across the country, so there was no book that had his signature as the author that did not sell. I usually reserved a copy of any newly published volume of Lenin’s work in advance. His collected works served a useful purpose as reference on theoretical matters but also as a guide in practical struggles. Notable of his books and which I recall sold in their thousands, included his classics, Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism and State and Revolution. The close rival at the time remained The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
Across our offices, in our rooms, in the corridors and decorating meetings were posters of Lenin, Mandela and Marx published by the bookshop which were in higher demand than others including Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, Che Guevara, and Kwame Nkrumah.
Lenin remains one of the most brilliant contributors to Marxism as a distinguished original thinker in the area of imperialism, philosophy, the national question, trade union(ism), religion, state and revolution, education and the student movement. In truth, he has no equal in revolutionary politics, which as students we realised was the very reason he was able to win the revolution in Russia. His personal life was intertwined with his political activities.
My readings of the many biographies on Lenin at the university library in the 1980s further exposed me to the aspects of his life and revolutionary activities. Possibly for this reason I became determined to emulate Lenin by becoming a fulltime revolutionary, no other work interested me, and I was determined to advance the cause of the class struggle for socialism and revolution in Nigeria.
We looked to Lenin as an organiser of the revolution, and the revolutionary party. He was an inspiration to us in Nigeria, and we saw our conditions – though dramatically different – as sharing some elements with early Russian industrialisation, and the development of class consciousness.
What are the lessons from Lenin’s life?
While the bourgeois scholars and the press in the West could deceive a generation over their misrepresentation of Karl Marx a ‘reformist’ and simple scholar, they struggled to malign Lenin in the same way. After all, he had been a fulltime revolutionary who had combined theory with practice, but most importantly because he was able to lead a revolution in his own lifetime.
Lenin moved into revolutionary politics because of the murder of his older brother, Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov. His brother was executed along with other leading members of the Narodniks (a left-wing terrorist group) whose strategy of struggle hinged on the assassination of the Tsar and other senior figure of the government who personified the system of oppression and exploitation.
Lenin was expelled from his legal studies at the university and embraced Marxism in the 1890s, making a clear departure from of politics of the Narodniks who had dominated revolutionary politics in Russia. The Narodniks had as their main concentration the peasantry, and even when they turned to the working class, it was never to help organise the class to fight for their liberation but to sympathise with the cause to liberate the peasantry.
These were lessons we understood well in Nigeria.
Lenin started his revolutionary activities as a Marxist with four other pioneering members that included Julius Martov and Krzhizhanovsky. They started by forming study groups with workers from the industrial areas especially in the growing cities of Tsarist Russia. They were able to produce leaflets and newspapers that helped the agitation, propaganda, and education of the rank-and-file working class. What separated their method from that of educated elites of the Narodniks and Decembrists was that the working class had the revolutionary duty to liberate themselves.
Marxist revolutionaries built within the ranks of the working class itself. Lenin’s wife was one of those. With these methods, the labour movement was organised and grew in strength while the number of strikes increased with thousands, and tens of thousands of workers involved in the late 1890s and early 1900s.
The first broad socialist group – the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party – grew in strength to challenge the system. The party later broken into two, one faction led by Lenin and the other by Martov. These two groups were known as Bolsheviks (majority) and Mensheviks (minority) respectively. At first the break was because of disagreements on organisational perspectives and how to constitute a revolutionary party. But as time went by the opportunism of the Mensheviks revealed itself, and differences widened on a range of issues.
Lenin saw the Bolsheviks supporting a political party with fulltime revolutionaries constituting the core of the leadership of the party. As a young militant and revolutionary, I saw October 1917 occurring because of the revolutionary processes in Russia and across the world over decades, but importantly emerging from the work and involvement of the Bolsheviks. In addition, Lenin understood that the Russian revolution could only emerge from the revolutionary struggles of February1917 and the great ‘dress rehearsal’ in 1905 from which revolutionaries and the working class of October had learnt many great lessons.
Nevertheless, we saw the role of Lenin in leading the revolution as underscoring the position an individual can make in a social movement. This informed Leon Trotsky’s blunt statement: there would not have been October 1917 without Lenin. Trotsky was highlighting the enormous role that Lenin played in the revolutionary struggles of his era.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks not only achieved a revolution in Russia but underlined the potentialities of the working class in making a revolution in the weakest, peripheral areas of the capitalist world. Revolutionary possibilities in Nigeria – and much of Africa, and the Third World – was interpreted in this light. Though our Russian comrades were also aware that socialism could only truly be won internationally by spreading of the revolution to the developed capitalist countries. Revolutionary ‘permanence’, and internationalism, was a resolutely Leninist idea, rather than one original to Trotsky.
So the revolutionary state of Russia could at best be regarded as a socialist government-in-transition. Unfortunately, two important events broke this ‘transition’. This included the European invasion organised with the military forces of the White Guards to attack Russia with the objective of crushing the revolution in the years immediately following 1917. Though they failed in their efforts and the new Soviet state won the war, it came at a huge price for the revolution in the sacrifices made by the working people. The isolation of the revolution, and its failure to spread to other countries was also a factor in the rise of the bureaucracy with Stalin as its preeminent leader.
Joseph Stalin railroaded himself to power and led the great betrayal of the revolutionary process in Russia and the world. By the late 1930s, Stalin was the only former Bolshevik who had served with Lenin during the Russian revolution, having orchestrated the murder of almost every other leading Bolshevik. He led a government that became dictatorial and reduced the internationalist socialist tendency to ‘socialism in one country’. State capitalism was rationalised as socialism and as a model for other countries who were influenced by Soviet communism.
What an abomination to the body of ideas of Marxism and socialist internationalism! But as a young militant discovering this history, it was an important and hard lesson.
By the time Stalin consolidated himself in power he personified the brutal and autocratic state, and the degeneration to the revolution. Stalin and Stalinism was exported from the Soviet Union as communism until 1989.
Yet the rise of the bureaucracy in Russia was predicted by Lenin before his death and his polemics against the bureaucracy are among his most powerful final works. Before he died, he quickly tried to develop policies which could undermine the growth of the Soviet bureaucracy. He proposed the end to a standing army to be replaced with a militia of working people; no public official should earn more than the average worker, and above all the nationalised economy should be managed and put under the control of working people. Nationalisation without workers control was state capitalism.
These were the lessons we took from Lenin as students and revolutionaries in the 1980s in Nigeria. and they remain vital to us today.
Abiodun Olamosu is a leading Marxist activist in Nigeria and the Senior Researcher and Coordinator of the Centre for Social Policy and Labour Research. He is the National Secretary of Socialist Labour. Read a detailed interview with him on roape.net here.
Featured Photograph: Stamp of the Congo (Brazzaville) 1970, produced for the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birthday.
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