Colonial legacies are very much alive and well across the African continent. Even the term ‘colonial legacies’ implies the influences and outcomes of colonialism are in fact over, yet contemporary economic, political and social structures across regions in Africa continue to be shaped by their distinctive experiences from the period of colonialism. Assessing the long-term effects of colonialism through public investment decisions illuminates the interplay between colonial interventions and domestic decision-making in contemporary policy-making. In this blogpost expenditure on railroad infrastructure and education will be explored to offer a contribution to understanding why these investments matter and their implications for urban path dependence.
In 1972 Walter Rodney provided an economic analysis of the development of Europe and the subsequent ‘underdevelopment of the rest’ as a dialectical process in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, this foregrounds the discussion on the roots of Africa’s underdevelopment and provides a foundation to understanding the extractive nature of colonisers’ behaviours. Influenced by Marxist ideas and the traditions of Andre Gunder Frank and other dependency theorists, the crux of Rodney’s analysis rests on a discussion of the intimate relationship between Europe’s growth and Africa’s developmental stagnation. He refers to ‘underdevelopment’ as centuries of exploitation and metropolitan imperialism, principally leading to stalled industrialisation and lack of technology. In his own words, Rodney argued ‘what was called the ‘development of Africa’ by the colonialists was a cynical shorthand expression for the “intensification of colonial exploitation in Africa to develop capitalist Europe.”’ This illustrates the contradictory nature of the capitalist project, generating wealth for the colonial exploiters while impoverishing the exploited. As Rodney discusses, the central role of trading and the selling and enslaving of Africans facilitated the economic benefits reaped by the European capitalists, particularly in England where this ‘human capital’ helped precipitate the take-off of the Industrial Revolution. Simultaneously, this form of capitalist expansion suppressed African development growth potential, predominantly through what Lee Wengraf has argued on roape.net as ‘the lost labour potential…’ and the narrowing of exports to ‘just a few commodities, undermining the development of productive capacity in Africa itself.’
Contributing to the discussion on the implications of colonialism, the construction of colonial railroads and broader investments in public finance helps us to understand contemporary patterns of economic activity on the continent. Indeed, Rodney’s emphasis on the colonisers’ extractive, capitalist approach was embedded in railroad infrastructural decisions, providing a means to create an agricultural export industry, further European mining interests and ensure military domination with lines built to establish effective control of the population. In Rémi Jedwab and Alexander Moradi’s recent study on economic development in Kenya and Ghana, between 1901 and 1962, the railroad in Kenya led to a concentration of European and African settlers in tandem with the development of coffee and tea production. Similarly in Ghana, railroad infrastructure cut transport costs, with the expansion of rural communities along the line key in providing human capital for cocoa production, contributing to the increased profitability of cocoa exports. Expanding these findings to 39 other sub-Saharan African countries, Jedwab and Moradi concluded that investment in railroads helped determine the location of the main cities in the post-colonial era, including Nairobi and Johannesburg. Cities that served the extraction of profitable agricultural and mineral export.
Developing some of these arguments Rémi Jedwab, Edward Kerby, Alexander Moradi argued in 2017 that railroads contributed to path dependence holds true in the context of the subsequent demise of colonial railroads in the post-independence era. Due to poor infrastructural management and the exodus of European and Asian settlers, colonial railroad infrastructure collapsed and yet despite this, locations along these railroads continue to be more urbanised, easing accessibility to public services for the region’s citizens and railroad cities retaining their wealth compared to cities located further afield from the lines. However, a broader examination of the continent’s railroads exhibits a sparser network and reveals variation of the colonial experience through disparities of economic geography between regions shaped by these infrastructural investments. It also demonstrates the interplay between historical, external interventions and domestic decision-making in the post-colonial era. Urban, infrastructural ‘hotspots’ offered an environment of greater financial viability and security for national economic planning. Indeed, Jedwab, Kerby and Moradi term this source of path dependence as ‘spatial coordination failures’, situating the persistence in contemporary urban patterns in Kenya in the context of railroad cities which ‘served as a mechanism to “coordinate” locational decisions and spatial investments in subsequent periods’, with similar conclusions drawn from Ghana. Crucially, these differences across regions have shaped the variations in contemporary economic geography, perpetuating inequality and weakening opportunities for redistribution within regions suffering from urban and rural inequalities.
Digging deeper into these regional variations, district-level disparities can also highlight the enduring role of colonial investments in contemporary infrastructure. Concentrated economic planning in particular areas formed an attractive and cost-efficient foundation that encouraged future development planners to similarly set-up production and harness pre-existing human capital and resources as a mechanism of maximising efficiency. Elise Huillery encapsulates these processes in 2009 as ‘virtuous cycles’, emphasising the relationship between early colonial investments in education and health and current levels of schooling and health outcomes. She convincingly illustrates that ‘teachers continued to go where teachers used to be affected’ and in districts, which had a larger presence of teachers, their school rates have continued to measure higher. It is important to recognise here the substantial variation of quality and distribution of education spending between colonisers across the continent. In the historian Jan Vansina’s book Being Colonized he retraces the colonial experience of the Kuba people in central Congo and highlights the central role of alternative actors to the colonial administrators in bringing education and other aspects of ‘modernity’:
While aspiring to confer “civilisation” on its subjects, the colonial administration still did not envision spending large amounts of money to achieve it. That task was best left to the private sector, especially to the Christian missions, which were expected to transform Africans into “modern” people by a combination of religious conversation, education, and their own example of gracious living.
Indeed, Ewout Frankema’s study of the origins of formal education in sub-Saharan Africa illustrates that differences between gross primary school enrolment rates between British and non-British African colonies were, on average, better within the British African colonies. While the British discouraged the development of higher education for fears of it harbouring anti-colonial feelings. Conversely, the French generally neglected primary education, favouring higher education to help build up an elite workforce of professional administrators. Explanations of the gap between British and non-British primarily rest on Britain’s emphasis on missionary involvement to support their system of indirect rule, while the French’s suspicions of missionaries sustained their separation between the church and the state.
In 2015 Leonard Wantchekon, Marko Klašnja, Natalija Novta’s analysis of the longer-term implications of colonial education within communities in Benin illustrates that where missionaries were located became important in terms of spatial inequalities and had considerable impacts on communities. Indeed, when examining the outcomes of descendants who had access to mission schools at the village level, parents’ education has had ‘a large positive effect on their children’s educational attainment, living standards and social networks.’. The strength of extended families also illustrates that nieces and nephews benefit directly from the education of their uncles, and are more educated than descendants without any educated family members. The 2015 study speaks of a ‘virtuous cycle’, with the accumulation of human capital important in explaining differences in long-term development –with deep unevenness in the distribution of these colonial investment patterns.
Historical explanations advanced by Walter Rodney on early patterns of dependency resonate with contemporary social and economic realities of globalisation. Colonial legacies are very much alive and well across the African continent. More optimistic assessments of the continent as one that is ‘rising’ from years of economic underdevelopment, citing increasing attractiveness to foreign investors and sustained GDP growth, obscure, as Ian Taylor argued in ROAPE in 2016, the ‘dynamics which are accompanying a notional ‘rise’ of Africa but which are actually contributing to the continent being pushed further and further into underdevelopment and dependency.’ Africa’s ‘rise’ has been in tandem with limited structural change in the continent’s economies and is in fact linked to de-industrialisation and a continued reliance on primary products – a continued, bleak fulfilment of Rodney’s 1972 book on development and underdevelopment.
Manufacturing underdevelopment across many sub-Saharan African countries is particularly potent, as Taylor has argued, it is within ‘low-technology manufacturing where labour-intensive job-creating opportunities are found.’ Furthermore, despite sizeable infrastructural investments from China across the continent contributing to GDP growth, it is proving to be a limited and finite source of financial support when situated within the country’s growing debt-dependency. This blogpost has argued that many of the old patterns of dependency prevail and illustrates the urgency to transform Africa’s structural position in the global economy, de-industrialisation and agricultural stagnation.
Katie Barker studied politics at Leeds University and is currently a post-graduate at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests focus on politics, public policy and ownership in the development sector.
Featured Photograph: The arrival of the first train at Pretoria Station, Pretoria, South Africa, in 1893. Railroad construction in South Africa followed the discovery of gold near present-day Johannesburg in 1886. Pretoria, at the time the capital of the South African Republic, was connected by rail to Cape Town in 1893, and to Durban and Lourenço Marques (in the then-Portuguese colony of Mozambique) in 1895.
Samir Amin was an exceptionally humble person. In spite of his huge influence on younger generations, he never treated them patronizingly or with condescension. Samir did not see himself as a leader, teacher or mentor. He treated younger scholars and comrades as his equals, engaging with them and critiquing them where necessary.
It was 1973. My sequel to the first essay ‘Tanzania: The Silent Class Struggle’, called ‘The class struggle continues’ (which later became Class Struggles in Tanzania) was making rounds of comrades ‘underground’ in a mimeograph form. I can’t remember if I sent it to him or somehow he got hold of it. He read it through and took time to send me his comment:
As a young person half his age I was thrilled. It etched on me an everlasting impression. I had known Samir barely for two years. If my memory serves me right, I first met him in a workshop of the African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP) he had organised in Dar es Salaam. The fascination of listening to Samir and his colleagues was enormous. I had tried to plough through his Accumulation on World Scale but can’t claim to have understood it. Since then Samir remained a friend and a comrade, never failing to invite me although many a time I had to decline. I was among the few on the Nile cruise to celebrate his eightieth birthday. The celebration was a seminar. Every morning we would meet on the deck having read in the cabin the previous night. He was first to come, holding his partner, Isabella’s hand to help her negotiate steps, and last to leave. Isabella then was in frail health.
Samir has been variously described as a scholar, intellectual, all of which he deserves but for me, more than anything else, he was a political person. Working class politics permeated his every pore. Even during the worst of times, he did not shy away from declaring himself a Marxist, openly and proudly. He stood firm, unshakeable when many of his contemporaries and younger scholars sought refuge in mainstream intellectual fashions to become celebrities.
Neither did he covet awards, nor did he seek endorsement of Western universities, (particularly US) and scholarly organizations. But he genuinely appreciated and welcomed invitations from Third World institutions. He was enormously happy when I invited him to the University of Dar es Salaam to deliver the second Nyerere Annual Lecture in 2010. In the citation, I said:
As a militant Marxist scholar, Samir Amin has two outstanding qualities. He has been consistent and passionate throughout his life in the advocacy and defence of human emancipation from the vicious capitalist and imperialist system, regardless of the changing intellectual fashions. On this, he is uncompromising. Second, he has consciously done everything possible and seized every opportunity available to provide space, forum, and a training ground for young African scholars.
I said he was pre-eminently a political person. And now I can add what I couldn’t say then in the citation read from a scholarly podium. Once he had invited two of us to an IDEP workshop in Dakar. We needed to meet a comrade who was in exile then. We hesitatingly asked Samir if he could invite him also so that we could meet him. Without further ado or questions he did it!
The final time I met Samir Amin was last year when he came to Dar es Salaam to give a lecture. With Bashiru Ally, then a young emerging scholar, now the Secretary General of the ruling party, we had tea at my place. Samir was smoking away his cigar, copying the PDFs of his books on a flash drive for us. Samir was not one to respect intellectual property rights!
His intellectual works, scholarly contributions and political interventions have been sufficiently covered in dozens of tributes that are pouring in every day. I will not go over them. I wanted specifically to capture Samir’s attitude and treatment of younger generations, done as a matter of course and without pretense. When I first learnt of Samir’s passing on from Samia Zennadi, our mutual friend from Algeria, I could not find words to express my grief in prose. Spontaneously, the following stanza rolled out to capture the sentiment I have expressed in prose here:
A baobab has fallen
Plants will miss your shade
Shoots will miss your protection
I’ll miss your love and warmth
Yes, comrade, plants will not shrivel, and shoots will not die. They will continue to derive sustenance and inspiration from the baobab for, as Natasha wrote, you live on ‘in our imagination of a more just world and in the fight against oppression.’
Issa Shivji, Dar es Salaam, 19 August 2018
Samir Amin on Centre, Periphery and the World Economy: an appreciation of his original insights
By Peter Lawrence
Samir Amin, already a major figure in the political economy of development, was the author of the first article in the first ever issue of ROAPE, in 1974. As the editorial noted, the article was ‘a summary of his basic model of the workings of the international system as a whole, presented at length in his two recent books’ (the two- volume Accumulation on a World Scale, Monthly Review Press, 1974). The editorial continued:
It provides us with an ideal starting point: a general view of international capitalism, identifying the crucial differences in the dynamic of accumulation at the centre and at the periphery: differences which promote development in the metropoles and inhibit it in Africa. It is our hope that his work, which represents the most significant African contribution to the debate on underdevelopment, will be studied widely and discussed critically.
And so it was. Some of the subsequent issues of ROAPE in the 1970s, as well as books and articles in other journals published in that period endorsed or took issue implicitly or explicitly with his model of accumulation. The idea that a home grown capitalism was developing in African countries contested any view of the world in which Amin’s centre was inhibiting any possibility of, in his phrase, a ‘self-centred system’ in which value is transferred from the periphery to the centre through a process of unequal exchange where returns to labour at the periphery are less than returns to labour at the centre. Cheap labour produces the exports of raw material, both agricultural and mineral, to a centre where the value of labour embodied in the final product is higher. In his overall model, the centre produces the capital goods that produce the consumer goods for their mass markets. The periphery produces export goods which pay for the imports of what are relatively luxury products for a small elite class within the peripheral economies. Even if some of those consumer goods are produced within the peripheral economies, their markets are small and the capital goods needed for that production have to be imported from the centre.
Re-reading the analysis in Amin’s article is a sobering experience: fast forwarding to the present, little has changed. Even if there were countries which tried in some way to break with the system – Nyerere’s Tanzania with its policy of Socialism and Self-reliance, for example – they never broke or were allowed to break with the system of capital accumulation in which profits found their way to the developed economies of what we now term the ‘Global North’. Of course there has been some development of capitalism in Africa but this has not resulted in significant structural changes to economies. They are still largely dependent on the vagaries of world commodity markets, exporting raw materials and importing capital and consumer goods directed to a domestic market of higher income consumers, whose income derives from the high end of commodity trading, financial activities and their servicing, and those with larger farms and estates. Meanwhile large proportions of the African populations languish on or below the poverty line. The self-centred economy described in Amin’s article and books, has as its ‘central determining relationship’ that of the production of capital goods for the production of consumer goods for the mass market. In the periphery on the other hand, that relationship is a ‘peripheral- dependent’ between earning export income in order to consume ‘luxury’ goods. In the capitalist developed countries this system had been achieved in Amin’s approach, by a ‘social contract’ between increasingly monopolised capital and organised labour which allowed for some degree of ‘planning’ to avoid the cyclical fluctuations associated with capitalism before the second world war and especially between the first and second world wars. Amin defines the underlying contradiction of capitalism which causes these fluctuations as one between what the system allows to be produced and what it prevents, in its search for profit, people to consume, but argues that ensuing cyclical fluctuations have been moderated by the ‘social contract’.
However, in analysing the system in this way, Amin rejected the prevailing view in both the capitalist ‘West’ and the socialist ‘East’ the idea that development entailed catching up with the developed capitalist countries. His key insight was to argue that given the way the global system worked, countries such as those of Africa were not going to achieve the status of a developed country by imitating their development trajectory, or by concentrating on their raw material export base and slowly industrialise by importing capital goods. The history of the world was not about followers catching up with leaders but about dominant civilizations being ‘transcended’ by peripheral ones as the former decline and the peripheral overtake them with different social organizations. In this case a socialist self-centred development would eventually transcend moribund capitalism. This required an overall strategy of ‘self-reliance’ but one built up from popular bases ‘becoming aware of reality’ (Amin’s emphasis) and allowed for the increasing domination of a ‘self-centred’ system. Of course the political activity required to achieve this in the face of an active and global imperialism has and continues to be the key issue, and not just in the periphery. As Amin observed:
It is quite appropriate to describe the task of transition thus: transition from the capitalist world system, based on hierarchies of nations, to a world socialist system, which cannot be made up of relatively isolated and autarkic ‘socialist’ nations. Here the true solidarity of the peoples involved in the struggle for reshaping the world comes to the fore, due to the limited prospects for progress in the Third World where the conditions for transcending advanced capitalism express nothing more than the weakness of the forces of socialism at the centre of the system. (ROAPE, 1974:20)
He regarded the China of the Cultural Revolution as addressing this issue and indeed although China developed in a way that Amin may not have foreseen there is some basis for the view that it did first ensure an autocentric development path, only engaging with global capitalism when it was in a strong position to do so. Much has changed in China since 1974, as is the case across the world. We are now possibly in an even less favourable phase of world history. The contradictions of capitalism at the centre are being resolved in ways which inhibit the periphery even further from a socialist self-centred development. In the past four decades we have lived through the triumph and the crisis of neoliberalism, the global financial monopolisation of capital, the colonisation of the State by private capital principally by the privatisation of state assets, and the liberalisation of the labour market with stricter anti-union laws and transnational freedom of movement resulting in the suppression of wages with the consequent increased social inequality and deprivation. Africa economies and the rest of peripheral capitalism have been ruthlessly subject to neoliberal policies which have made them even less able, even if willing, to pursue a self-centred path.
These developments are fundamentally the reaction to the falling profit rates of the 1970s as wages, after pressure from organised labour, took an increasing share of the value of output. Capital’s recovery of value from labour points to the central contradiction of capital that Amin set out in his article: that the only way value can be realised in a mass consumption market is for the masses to have the power to consume. As consumers’ incomes were squeezed under neoliberalism, this contradiction was resolved by increasing credit to consumers which led to the financial crash of 2007/8 and can only lead to another financial crash, which some believe is imminent. Underlying these developments is increased automation, computerization and robotization which reduces the need for physical labour, creates ever cheaper durable consumption goods and leads to a contradiction between technology and the way society is organised, or as Marx would have put it, between the productive forces and the relations of production.
Samir Amin’s later writings (see for example, The Implosion of Capitalism. Samir Amin, 2013) clearly recognised the changes that the world had seen since 1974 outlined above, but his conception of the period since 1974 as a long crisis of capitalism and his advocacy of peripheral countries ‘de-linking’ from the global economy, more fully discussed in John Saul’s contribution and touched on by Ray Bush, do find their origin in his work four decades earlier. It is a mark of the power of his original insights that they are as relevant today as they were then.
Peter Lawrence, Manchester, 19 August 2018
Samir Amin being interviewed by the Senegalese press after his presentation on Karl Marx’s Capital for the ‘Economic Saturday’, Dakar 4 February 2017
On Samir Amin…and the Importance of “Delinking”
By John S. Saul
I was a friend of the late Samir Amin – we met a number of times in our long and peripatetic lives and never without personal warmth and delight at the shared opportunity to compare and contrast our opinions and to further discuss them. I won’t say we knew each other well, never living in the same town nor even, very often, on the same continent; instead we tended to meet more by chance and then much too briefly. But there were few people whose company I enjoyed more, being a long-time admirer of his wide-ranging insights on the global workings of capital and of their impact on local patterns (not least in Africa) of both cooptation and resistance. Most of all, I admired his sheer ‘stick-to-it-iveness’: open but unbending as to principle, fearless and untiring in his analysis, firm in his spirit of friendship – in sum, a true ‘comrade on the left.’ But I will leave it to others who knew him at first-hand rather better than I did to speak further to such matters. Instead, I have been asked by Leo Zeilig to discuss, in honour of Samir’s memory, the concept of ‘delinking.’ For this is a concept central to Amin’s work
It would be naïve to think that the increased globalization of the capitalist economy can somehow be ignored by advocates of a socialist alternative. Not only is the ‘free’ global market a major point of reference for efforts by global capital (including those of its enforcers like the World Bank and the IMF) to enforce its writ, by force and/or by the seduction of Southern elites. But the over-bearing weight and lure of the global market-place can also have its seductions, as a smorgasbord of sparkling goods on offer and as an apparent source of quick and relatively easy profits and of the inflow of ‘foreign capital’ – albeit capital most often pegged to the production and overseas sale of mineral and other resources and to such limited additional production as meets the consumer needs of resident elites. How, then, to weigh – on some kind of national developmental balance-sheet of left provenance – the attendant costs and benefits of such links? And how best to conceive the new and essential kinds of democratic controls over such linkages that must/should be established? For only with some such controls in place could countries of the Global South expect to be the beneficiaries rather than the victims of global embrace. Without this, there is no intrinsic ‘magic of the market,’ no equal exchange between rich and poor; there is only, with the market left unchecked, the upward redistribution of resources from poor to rich.
And it is precisely here that Samir Amin helped point a way forward, advocating an ever more radical decolonization from central capitalist control, this to be achieved (to cite his dramatic formulation) through an actual and active ‘delinking’ of the economies of the Global South from the Empire of Capital that otherwise holds the South in its sway. For Amin, delinking was best defined as ‘the submission of external relations [to internal requirements], the opposite of the internal adjustment of the peripheries to the demands of the polarizing worldwide expansion of capital’ and it is seen as being ‘the only realistic alternative [since] reform of the [present] world system is utopian.’ For ‘history shows us that it is impossible to “catch up” within the framework of world capitalism’; in fact, ‘only a very long transition’ (with a self-conscious choice for delinking from the world of capitalist globalization as an essential first step) beyond the present situation of global polarization will suffice.
Yet, as Amin readily admits, there is no realistic haven of ‘autarky’ that one can look to, no way of avoiding some involvement in the broader market (as opportunity, though not, he argues, as seduction). What must occur, however, is the substitution of the present political economy of recolonization with an alternative that tilts effectively towards ‘delinking’ as a notional goal – invoking an auto-centric socio-economic alternative that is at once effective, efficient and productive. What would the programme of a national strategy erected on the premise of a strong tilt towards radical delinking from the presently existent and profoundly cancerous global capitalist system look like? The answer to this question could only begin to be found in a new project of genuine socialist planning – established on a national or regional scale – that sought to smash, precisely, the crippling (il)logic of present ‘market limitations’ upon development.
This, in turn, suggests the need for a programme that (following the formulations of the Guyanese economist Clive Thomas) embodies ‘the progressive convergence of the demand structure of the community and the needs of the population’ – this being the very reverse of the market fundamentalist’s global orthodoxy. One could then ground a ‘socialism of expanded reproduction’ – one that refuses the dilemma that has heretofore undermined the promise of the many ‘socialisms’ that have proven prone to falling into the Stalinist trap of ‘violently repressing mass consumption’ in the name of the supposed requirements of accumulation. For, far from accumulation and mass consumption being warring opposites, the premise would now be that accumulation could be driven forward precisely by finding outlets for production in meeting the growing requirements, the needs, of the mass of the population!
An effective industrialization strategy would thus base its ‘expanded reproduction’ – this to be premised, precisely, on ‘delinking’ on the one hand and on the ever increasing in-country exchanges between city and country, between industry and agriculture, with food and raw materials moving to the cities and with consumer goods and producer goods (the latter defined to include centrally such modest items as scythes, iron ploughs, hoes, axes, fertilizers and the like) moving to the countryside on the other. Collective savings geared to investment could then be seen as being drawn essentially, if not exclusively, from an expanding economic pool. Note that such a socialism of expanded reproduction makes the betterment of the people’s lot a short-term rather than a long-term project and thus promises a much sounder basis for an effective (rather than merely rhetorical) alliance of workers, peasants and others and for a democratic road to revolutionary socialism.
It is important to note that this approach is not intended to understate the simultaneous importance of potential South-South relations. Thus linkages such as those foreshadowed in the World Social Forum seek, multi-nationally, to sponsor a redefinition of the workings of the global economy; small wonder, then, that Amin himself devoted much of his later years to political work within the World Social Forum network to help recraft from below a world-wide movement and sensibility designed, if not to ‘overthrow’ capitalism, at least to effectively ‘regulate’ it in the interest of socially responsible and democratic purposes. To make, in short, the ‘globally necessary’ the ‘globally possible’!
Of course, even at the level of the national economy Amin was not proposing the extirpation of any and all market relations. True, the latter were dangerous, especially in terms of the possible generation of class-differentiated societies that they so often encouraged. At the same time his realism –designed to avoid the risks of unduly over-burdening the fledgling progressive states involved (over-burdening, that is, both public enterprise and the mechanisms of planning unduly)-means that the creation and empowerment of national movements capable of countering the logic of capitalism’s embrace, global and national, will be tough work. For – think about it – so strong are the global pressures against it that crafting the political basis necessary to sustain a socio-economic push in a quite opposite direction will not itself (and however ‘nationally necessary’) easily become the ‘nationally possible.’ Small wonder that Amin himself saw the global and national struggles for socialist strategies of delinking from the logic of market-primacy and the taking of the economy beyond global capitalism as being two sides of the same coin.
In sum, if the predominant importance of the kind of planning (democratic and needs-focussed, both globally and locally) is ever to be achieved, it will be planning which ensures that the centre of gravity of the economy remains egalitarian, collectively-premised and popularly-centred and controlled. It could, in this way, be expected to counter-balance the possible costs of any judicious deployment of market mechanisms, for example. Thus, the bottom-line would remain, as Amin emphasized to be necessary, a self-consciousness about societal transition away from market power and entrepreneurial class interest. Put quite simply, this would help ensure that no bourgeoisie, either foreign or domestic, would play a role that could justify any claim it might seek to make to continue to snatch inordinate wealth or superordinate power for itself. In fact, only the exercise of genuine ‘popular power’ could guarantee a politics that might hope to underpin an economic strategy premised on the realization of Samir Amin’s fundamental goal, that of ‘delinking’ from precisely those global-capitalist ‘imperatives’ that cannot but promise the global poor ill. It is time, to repeat, to make, politically, the globally and nationally necessary the globally and nationally possible.
John S. Saul, Toronto, 14 August 2018
A Tribute to Samir by Natasha Shivji
Dear Samir Amin,
I write this as if you were still here amongst us, for an individual such as yourself who has lived for a continent, remains alive well after their death. You will not be lost in histories past, you will not be deemed irrelevant by futures to come, you will stay here in the material present as we struggle for the continent you committed your life to.
As a young lecturer in 2009 I recall desperately looking for books, articles, and ideas to use for teaching in my history classrooms. Ideas produced within the continent, ones that did not simply regurgitate the formulas of the West. My sweet encounter with Global History: A View from the South was all I needed. I read your work alongside Walter Benjamin, writing histories in spaces of contradiction, histories of the oppressed in worlds shaped by the demands and exploits of capital. How are we to struggle to produce ideas on our own terms? I used these methods in my classes; methods that belonged to our history, relevant to our struggles that revolutionaries such as yourself had the audacity to speak of. Producing a framework relevant to our context wasn’t simply a parallel project to the Eurocentric view of the world, but it was in direct opposition to it. A view from the Global South was a history of the oppressed as a weapon against oppression, it did not fashionably sit side-by-side Eurocentrism as an ‘alternative,’ but it was indeed a confrontation with the assumptions of an Africa without history. An affirmation of an Africa that was complex and an Africa that was coerced into capitalistic social relations but found hope in the oppressed.
This was important for the young lecturer making sense of our history to a group of undergraduate students. It was important not to romanticize our futures as alternatives to the West, but not to become so pessimistic as to loose hope in the struggles that lay before us. It was precisely because of our contradictions that we found pockets of resistance everywhere. Class was not merely an imported Marxian term, but a lived history which we saw everywhere on the edges of capital in our world, in our shared history. It made sense to us through your writings.
Soon after, I was elated when I met you at the University of Dar es Salaam campus in the Nkrumah hall in 2010, overflowing with students and a few lecturers who still believed in the importance of ideas. We eagerly listened to the exchanges from the high table adorned with bouquets and colored cloth. Samir Amin, you sat in the audience with your simple cloth bag, attentively listening with the rest of us. The talk was on Pan Africanism, a topic dear to us all as it held the dream of unity, for the continent. The question for all of us was clear: Whose unity? What was the basis of this unity? Our questions were not answered in the hall. In the naiveté of a young person but with the courage that comes with naiveté, I stood up and questioned the cultural unity that was being celebrated by one speaker, the oneness of Africa premised on its cultural heritage and riches. The assumptions of an ‘African’ way of being, an untouched history, stagnant and unresponsive to the exploits of the world, encapsulated by the fragile bubble of culture. I asked, what of the political unity Kwame Nkrumah spoke of? What of the anti-imperialist motive of a Pan African vision and what of a shared history of oppression? Were these not more urgent in constructing our Pan African vision? I sat down, and Samir Amin took the floor in agreement with the young woman who had just spoken before him. I vainly cling on to that memory to this day.
In very few words you reminded us that we did not have the luxury to speak of cultural unities in an unequal world, for we did not share one culture. Pan Africanism ought to be a project of the oppressed of Africa against imperialism and its compradors. Pan Africanism was not merely a celebration of who we were as a people but a forced assertion of our existence in the form of resistance. Pan Africanism must be thought of as a political project from below, as a class project in defense of the peasantry and working people and as an anti-imperialist project birthed from the nationalist movements. Asserting our intellect not merely as cultural artifacts but as political social beings strategizing a revolutionary future. Flowers did not adorn you nor did color cloth!
I started my PhD studies with a proposal of intellectual histories of Islam and Africa as political projects, writing of the tributary mode of production and the destruction of Islamic city-state formations. I was enthralled by the depth of these histories and the immensity of these worlds. However, these worlds brought us to a political present, one where superficial binaries concealed economic contradictions, where the world was polarized between the Orient Muslim and the modern non-Muslim. Who was the oppressed? What did Political Islam come to mean in our world? As I grappled with these questions I met you once again in 2015 at the CODESRIA General Assembly.
Once again, a brightly decorated panel accommodated speakers discussing Political Islam in Africa. Once again you were seated in the audience. This time not so patient with the discourse! You intervened in the discussion showing no sympathy for the advance of Islam on the continent as a political project or an alternative. Political Islam, at best was a cultural project that concealed the class character of our societies, that if given the chance would act as all purely cultural projects have acted historically, reactionary and against the oppressed masses. Political Islam, you emphasized was not a movement of the oppressed, it was an identity that sought a piece of the capitalist pie and at best it was a sigh of the oppressed, quickly coopted by the logic of the forces it sought to oppose.
You live on Samir Amin, your life and your ideas live on – not in dusty bookshelves nor in adorned panel discussions with colored cloth but in our imagination of a more just world and in the fight against oppression.
Natasha Issa Shivji, Dar es Salaam, 13 August 2018
Samir Amin: An appreciation
By Ray Bush
I met Samir Amin only once. I was lucky though as our meeting was spread over three days at a conference and I later interviewed him by telephone for ROAPE. I described him to friends and colleagues, who heard that I had been fortunate enough to spend time with him, as indefatigable – he would stride out ahead of the group to locate the baladi (local) place to eat and places to visit. He was trenchant in his defence of the working class and peasantry, full of energy and ideas and he was engaged with not only theory and concepts but with people and those downtrodden by capitalism. Thus, his energy and appetite for life, which was contagious, led him to understand people’s conditions of existence wherever he was. That was very clear. He was a sympathetic and humorous comrade who clearly drew inspiration for his Marxism from the lessons he was always learning by his engagement with people.
Of course, there was also a steely side, that did not let bullshit pass without critical comment. He chastened a government minister of a city state where our meeting took place and corrected him on his idiocy regarding free trade as a vehicle for promoting development in the Global South. Samir Amin was clear. Since 1970 we have been living in a period of ‘generalised monopoly capitalism’ – where monopoly capital controls everything, all sectors of life which have now reduced to zero the relative autonomy of agriculture and industry to the gains of imperialist monopoly rent. This has intensified and since 1970 there has been a qualitative change in capitalism different from an earlier period of crisis between the 1880s and World War 2.
He was clear that the internal contradictions of capitalism and financialisation were ruinous for the Global South , falling rates of growth in the capitalist centre by more than a half in the period after the 70s drove an intensification of imperialist rent, that capitalism was now largely anonymous, abstract capital in contrast to being more easily identified with the monied families of the early 20th century, needed to be understood in terms of how it is created and its consequences and it also needs to be ruthlessly challenged by the left. But the imperialist triad of the US, EU and Japan manages the world system and dominates in the areas of technology, access to resources, the creation and reproduction of a monetary and financial system of exploitation, dominance of the media and of course the armaments industry.
He saw China as a vehicle for contesting the dominance of the triad, as he said, he was probably the most frequent visitor to most parts of China of anyone on the left and China was crucial in advancing a polycentric world. Amin’s insights from his memorable and persistently important Accumulation on a World Scale need to be set alongside his optimism for moving from global capitalism to global socialism and communism. A vehicle to do that was to advance autocentred development in the South – an initially inward-looking strategy to advance a form of delinking. But delinking did not mean a crude autarky. It was instead to help fashion a sovereign popular project: one that could emerge from new historical blocs to counter the comprador bourgeoisie in Africa that has always benefited from imperialism. The agenda for the left was always to analyse the contradictions of capitalism, to identify what different class interests demanded and to then be clear about developing counter strategies to quash the triad and their cronies in the global South. To do that required what he called independent initiatives that would vary depending on the different socio-historical circumstances and different local experiences. Sadly, we will miss Samir Amin’s insights as to how the exciting prospect of generating sovereign popular projects to challenge imperialism might be developed.
Ray Bush, Leeds, 18 August 2018
Tribute to the Great Master, Comrade and Brother Samir Amin
By Ndongo Samba Sylla
Samir Amin (1931-2018) was one of the thinkers of the Global South who contributed decisively to starting the epistemological break with the Eurocentric discourse that permeates the social sciences and humanities. His passing on August 12 is a huge loss for his family, friends, collaborators and many sympathisers around the world. As much as the Marxist intellectual / Communist militant was exceptional with an uncompromising ethical commitment, Samir was also humble, obliging and generous. It was a privilege to have been able to collaborate with this father figure and ardent fighter for the internationalism of the peoples who always signed his emails with the mention ‘fraternally.’
It seems appropriate to reproduce the substance of the introduction that I brought during his lifetime and in his presence on October 25, 2014 at the University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar. That day, Demba Moussa Dembélé, in collaboration with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, organised a ceremony in honour of Samir Amin that brought together African intellectuals, diplomats, politicians, students, etc. The words I spoke on this occasion which seem to me even more relevant today than ever:
‘Taking advantage of the opportunity given to me here, I will, with much modesty, try to articulate the intellectual scope of our dear Professor and what I have learned from his teachings. You will understand in a certain way that this is a talk of a student who wandered about with ‘Aminian intuitions’ before having been properly invigorated following the discovery and reading of the writings of Samir Amin.
What fascinates us with Samir Amin is to a certain extent his ‘indiscipline.’ Indiscipline in a double sense. First, his thinking goes beyond existing academic divisions. Samir Amin has mobilised in his research knowledge that is relevant to areas such as history, politics, philosophy, anthropology, sociology of culture, sociology of religions, etc. Since his scientific contributions transcend the field of economics, it is reductive, therefore, to call him an ‘economist.’ And all the more so because we know the definition he gives of the ‘economist’, namely a ‘sincere believer convinced of the virtues of liberalism.’
Second, it must be said that Samir Amin occupies a rebel position in the Marxist citadel, an aspect often ignored. His point of view has always been that being a Marxist means starting from Marx, not stopping at Marx. Amin’s problem with many Western Marxists is either that they did not try to go beyond Marx or, if so, they were not able to lucidly appreciate the analytical implications of the intrinsically imperialist nature of historical capitalism. On the intellectual level, writes Amin, ‘historical Marxism and the left in general are poorly equipped to face the challenge of globalisation.’
If Samir Amin is a prolific thinker, it is because he is at first an undisciplined thinker. The original syntheses he produced and the new breath he brought to the theory of development would not be possible without an attitude of epistemological vigilance which consists in refusing the inconsiderate worship of idols, even if they are comforting on a psychological and ideological levels.
What must also be said about Amin is that he is a systematic thinker. By this I mean that he is one of the few intellectuals capable of proposing great theoretical syntheses which start from a careful examination of historical facts, which are based on coherent reasoning from beginning to end, which makes it possible to understand from a new angle the world in which we live and which continues to keep their relevance with the unfolding of historical time. His scientific work is therefore quite the opposite of standard economics theorists who have the license not to discuss the theoretical assumptions of their models, to disregard reality in the construction of their models, to ignore new facts that may refute them and not to scrutinise their analytical implications. Indeed, for standard economics, normal science consists in the enhancement of the ‘epistemology of ignorance’ (to use a concept of the Jamaican-American philosopher Charles Wade Mills).
It is not my purpose to go into the details of Amin’s scientific contributions. I will confine myself to indicating some lessons which seem to me essential.
From his earliest publications, Amin defended the thesis that capitalism should be understood as a global system with specific historical properties. One of them concerns the new relationship it introduces between the economic on the one hand, the political and the ideological on the other. Amin rightly observes that the law of value, the fact that the economy dictates its law in all social spheres, operates only in the capitalist system. In earlier systems, as he emphasises, power commanded wealth. With capitalism, it is wealth that now commands power. This inversion, far from being a violation of the canons of historical materialism, is illustrative of the subtlety of a thought attentive to the qualitative changes that punctuate historical evolution. In insisting on the historical specificity of the law of value, Samir Amin allows us to see, following Marx, that capitalism is accompanied by a form of alienation (commodity fetishism) which differs from the preceding forms of alienation of a religious type. It also protects us from the temptation to apply the laws of capitalism to the historical systems that preceded it. A trap in which most neoclassical economists fall: for example, in the latest book by Thomas Piketty who claims to talk about capitalism, yet there are charts that show the evolution of the global rate of return on capital before and after tax, from Antiquity to the present day!
One of the most important characteristics of the capitalist system, as opposed to the type of historical system that preceded it, and to which Samir Amin gave the name of ‘tributary mode of production,’ is its polarising nature. In other words, capitalism is a system which, far from homogenising the world under the rule of the law of value, creates and magnifies by necessity the economic inequalities between the countries of the centers and those of the peripheries. Indeed, the capitalist system is intrinsically imperialist. Imperialism, says Samir Amin in contradistinction to Lenin, is not the supreme stage of capitalism. Imperialism is inscribed in the DNA of capitalism. Moreover, its processes have evolved historically: from imperialisms in plural – that is competing imperialist powers – we moved to a collective imperialism of the Triad (United States, Europe and Japan). By insisting on the specifics of contemporary imperialism, Samir Amin distanced himself very early from the rather vague and nebulous theories of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, authors who defend the idea of an ‘Empire’ without imperialists.
As part of his conceptualisation of historical capitalism, Samir Amin could not help tackling Eurocentrism. As an important aspect of the dominant ideology, Eurocentrism has the function of hiding the true nature of the capitalist system, including its imperialist foundations and the form of alienation it produces, to distort the history of its genesis via its insistence on European exceptionalism, and to mask its polarising character. Through his criticism of Eurocentrism and the culturalist reactions that it provoked, Amin was able to highlight its racist cultural foundations, its ideological nature as well as its scientific limitations.
If Samir Amin offered one of the most penetrating and original critiques of ‘scientific capitalism’ (a humorous phrase I borrow from James Ferguson) he also pointed out what alternative paths can lead the ‘wretched of the earth’ towards the authentic human civilisation that capitalism can only refuse them. At this point, we arrive to the Aminian reflections around ‘delinking’: a concept that does not mean an autarchic retreat but rather ‘a strategic inversion in the vision of internal/external relations, in response to the unavoidable requirements of a self-centered development.’
The ‘delinking’ program is based on the observation that there can be no economic ‘catch-up’ within the capitalist system. For one simple reason: what exacerbates the polarisation between centers and peripheries is the fact that globalisation operates only in two dimensions – capital flows on one side, goods and services flows on the other – and does not concern labour movements. If the peripheral countries, about 80 percent of the world’s population, want to ‘catch up by imitating’ the countries of the centers, they would have to find, according to Amin, five to six new Americas in order to reduce their structural surplus of manpower. To ‘delink’ for the countries of the peripheries thus supposes to break out of the illusion of ‘catching up.’ Indeed, as Samir Amin says, when one realises, by virtue of the law of worldwide value, that the reproduction of the Western ‘model’ is impossible to realise in the global South, then it will be necessary to turn towards alternatives.
Yet, on this point, Samir Amin teaches us that the delinking strategies that were successful yesterday are not necessarily valid today. These must take into account the transformations of the capitalist/imperialist system. In the past, industrialisation could be an acceptable indicator of economic development. Nowadays, this is not necessarily the case because countries have been able to industrialise while remaining peripheral. So, according to Samir Amin, the opposition industrialised countries/non-industrialised countries has now lost its empirical relevance.
The struggle today for the peoples of the peripheries is, according to Amin, to put an end to the ‘five monopolies’ exercised by the Triad, which are the basis of the polarising dynamics characteristic of contemporary capitalism. These include the monopoly of weapons of mass destruction, the monopoly of technologies, the control of financial flows, the monopoly of access to the planet’s natural resources and the monopoly of communications. Tackling these monopolies is obviously not an easy task. For Samir Amin, this requires ‘daring’, a daring that must be translated in the Global North by the emergence of an anti-monopolies front and in the Global South by that of an anti-comprador front. At a stage where, to use his own terms, capitalism has become ‘senile’, ‘abstract’ and even ‘barbaric’ the delinking program implies in particular for the countries of the South to defend family farming, via a more egalitarian distribution of land. Otherwise it is difficult to imagine how these countries could manage in a civilised way their structural excess of manpower. This would figure among the starting points for the long road towards socialism.
I will end by pointing out that Amin is also a man of great generosity. Thanks to his sense of initiative, he has helped to set up high quality research institutes (Enda Tiers Monde, CODESRIA, African Institute for Economic Development and Planning, World Forum for Alternatives, Third World Forum). Through his writings, his interventions and conferences, he has never ceased to give and to highlight the perspective of the Global South and the wretched of the earth. That he is at the moment one of the leading figures of the movement for a globalisation in the service of the peoples is not at all a surprise, considering his extraordinary intellectual itinerary.
Dear Professor, we will certainly never be able to pay tribute to you for the immensity and wealth of the contributions you have made over the last fifty years. But we will try to keep the Aminian tradition ‘hot’, especially with the younger generations. I also hope that the community of radical sympathisers, activists and researchers will soon be able to organise themselves in such a way as to be able to properly honour you. Thank you for your attention.’
Ndongo Samba Sylla, Dakar, August 16 2018
Featured Photograph: Samir Amin being interviewed by the Senegalese press after his presentation on Karl Marx’s Capital for the ‘Economic Saturday’, Dakar 4 February 2017
The series on capitalism in Africa on roape.net has so far provided some excellent reflections focused primarily in two areas: first, the utility of the concept of capitalism (seen as being both historically contingent and culturally loaded) for understanding African economic development processes; and second, the variable ways in which Africa is integrated – usually to its detriment – into the global capitalist system. My contribution takes a different angle by focusing on the inward rather than outward dimension of African capitalisms, and specifically the relationship between capitalism and urbanisation – or, more accurately, the development of urban areas, acknowledging that the ‘urban’ is now another increasingly contested concept both in global debates and in our understanding of changing African societies. Indeed, we are at a crossroads in terms of how urbanisation and urban development are understood both in their own right and in terms of their relationship to capitalism. I believe that understanding how these phenomena relate to each other in African contexts, where urbanisation and capitalism are co-evolving in distinctive and historically unprecedented ways, is particularly instructive for pushing forward this global debate.
In several earlier contributions to this series, a theme that recurs either implicitly or explicitly is the difference between analysing capitalism and analysing capital and its ‘operations’. Efforts over successive decades to analyse ‘African capitalism’ have focused, as one would expect, on the emergence and nature of capitalist systems as a whole, exploring relations of production and whether these resemble capitalism elsewhere. Yet, as Seth Schindler has recently argued, in much of Africa as in other developing regions there has been a ‘persistent disconnect’ between capital and labour. This echoes Chitonge’s observation in this series that ‘restricting the existence of capitalism to the dominance of wage labour relations has offered little insight into capitalist dynamics in Africa.’ In a sense, if we try too hard to look for industrial capitalism and associated wage relations, we miss much of what capital is actually doing and this is crucial because what capital is actually doing partly accounts for the very weaknesses of capitalist industrial development.
To push this further, one can observe that in analyses of African capitalism there has been a relative neglect of what Henri Lefebvre termed in 1970 the ‘secondary circuit’ of capital – in other words, land and real estate – when actually it is central to patterns of investment and growth. In fact, this ‘circuit’ is especially significant in much of Africa today due to low productivity, the limited scope for industrial profits and consequent pull of urban land rents.
This requires further unpacking. In her contribution to this series, Kate Meagher’s reference to the ‘welcome return to investment in industry and infrastructure’ rightly lauds the resurgence of approaches to investment resembling those from the mid-twentieth century, when industry and infrastructure were invested in simultaneously but also were understood as being intrinsically linked in the capitalist development process. However, this emphasis on the ‘return’ of such approaches obscures the extent to which today infrastructure is being massively prioritised over industry (in practice if not in policy) and is being conceived in ways that are often entirely de-linked from industry and industrial strategy.
Uganda’s current ‘infrastructure scramble’, to use a term coined by J Miguel Kanai and Seth Schindler, is a case in point. The emphasis currently being placed by both donors and the Ugandan government on transport infrastructure, funded by foreign loans and constructed by a range of mostly foreign contractors, is framed primarily in terms of decongestion and logistics, and their potential to contribute to economic growth – not in terms of industrial linkages or enhancing industrial production. As Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson highlighted, it is the nexus between extraction and logistics that often defines the operations of capital in the contemporary world. This sense that in many African countries infrastructure development is capitalist development also speaks to the concerns that others in this series have raised about the extraversion of African economies and the ongoing relevance of dependency theory.
However, a further and less-explored point is that the elevation of infrastructure as a development goal has a massive significance for real estate, in both intended and unintended ways, exponentially increasing its importance as a source of wealth and power, and a force that promotes the draining of capital away from industry and production itself, as I have argued elsewhere. This latter concern is especially pertinent in Africa’s many landlocked countries where the production of both infrastructure and real estate requires ‘heavy’ construction materials they are not well-equipped to produce domestically. Here there is an obvious tension when efforts to promote light manufacturing fixated on export markets are often starved of investment, while domestic capital is diverted to haul in expensive materials from outside in pursuit of infrastructure and real estate-led growth that does little for domestic production.
Indeed, the importation of construction materials often takes place on a scale that far exceeds value of leading exports from African countries lacking major natural resources. In Rwanda for example – a country associated with coffee that has worked hard to move up the coffee processing value chain and access high-end international coffee markets – the combined value of imported cement and large construction vehicles was more than a third higher that the total value of coffee exported in 2016. In Ethiopia, imports of various forms of iron alone – before you even consider other metals – were of around the same value of its entire agricultural and agri-processed exports, including its main sources of export revenue such as coffee, oily seeds, dried legumes and cut flowers.
This great dependence on imports does speak to the integration of Africa into global capitalist system that others in the series have highlighted but we also need consider what those imported materials do internally for African capitalisms. The flipside to Meagher’s analysis of the ongoing extraversion of African economies and its effects of labour precarity is the concentration of capital in construction, much of which is being ploughed into real estate – which, contrary to extraversion, is often a function of the parking of capital by domestic elites. To return to the case of Ethiopia, between 1994 and 2014, Ethiopian investors at home and abroad invested more in ‘real estate and related services’ than in any other sector. The Ethiopian diaspora was particularly active, channelling four times as much into real estate as manufacturing. Moreover, even the ‘extraverted’ infrastructure that has international connectivity as its primary aim can have the crucially important ‘introverted’ side effect of raising land values along its path and stimulating massive land speculation and investment in real estate, overwhelmingly by domestic elites. More often than not this occurs without robust mechanisms of tax and land value capture, which lessens the capacity of the state to invest in producing more redistributive forms of capitalist development.
All of this can be seen as further evidence of what Gavin Shatkin – writing about Asia in 2016 – has called ‘the real estate turn’, through which governments ‘seek to exploit urbanization processes in the interest of extending state power’. Indeed, ‘buying off’ important constituencies or potentially threatening opposition groups by enabling them to join the festival of increased land values is an important strategy in the contemporary governance of urban areas in Africa – a theme I return to below.
Before I do, however, we need to consider what it means to speak of the ‘urban’ in Africa today, since both the concept of the urban and the question of how we measure it are once again being vociferously contested. On the one hand, the ‘planetary urbanization’ discourse (see Brenner and Schmid, 2015) posits that societies across the world are increasingly characterised by modes of production and consumption inextricably linked to urban processes, thus making ‘the urban’ difficult to delimit spatially. On the other, research based on more conventional approaches which define urban areas primarily in relation to density claim that far from being around 40% urban (which is the conventional wisdom), Africa is actually 80% urban. Others argue that Africa’s urbanisation is overstated and even that parts of Africa are actually de-urbanising.
The fact that our definitions of the urban are so unsettled, and that there is no consensus on what constitutes urban socio-economic and demographic patterns, is not unrelated to how capitalism is changing. This dispute over the urban is linked to the fact that urban economies and land use don’t look like they used to, and that in most of the world they don’t look like they did in the places where both capitalist and urban theory was conceived. Under contemporary forms of capitalism, does it make more sense to define the urban in terms of the number of people in non-agricultural jobs, the density of human settlement, or the ways in which urban land is developed and infrastructurally-connected? In the past and in the experience of the global North, these things often overlapped quite closely. In much of Africa today, they do not. This is why Africa is a flashpoint for disputed definitions of the urban and an interesting place in which to pursue a better understanding of the role of cities in contemporary capitalism.
What seems clear is that in much of Africa, as elsewhere, the role played by urban land in relation to capital investment is increasingly characterised by property-led development, mega-projects and infrastructure. The growing literature on urban dispossession in African contexts (see for examples Gillespie 2016; Mbiba 2017) reflects the extent to which urban enclosures, ‘land grabs’, public-private conversions and informal sector crackdowns are pervasive occurrences, invariably in support of real estate or infrastructure developments. There are reasons to believe, however, that these are distinct from both Marxian ‘primitive accumulation’ – in which workers are forcibly separated from their means of production in order to create a reserve of cheap wage labour – and from Harvey’s concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’, which fixates on over-accumulated capital in search of a ‘spatial fix’. In fact, it is often not corporate capital seeking new returns that results in expulsions from urban space in Africa, but the capital of individuals seeking to park resources and stake their claim to the city in an age where cities are increasingly seen as Africa’s future.
These real estate investments are a form of accumulation, certainly but whether they are truly capitalist accumulation is more of a moot point. Importantly, sometimes these investments yield little or no return, and it isn’t always clear that the property in question is fully commodified. Drawing on Daniel Bin’s conceptualisation earlier in this series, we can suggest that whether urban real estate development in Africa amounts to ‘capitalist accumulation’ is an empirical question, as is the relationship between any given property’s use value and exchange value. Much urban property in any African city I am familiar with sits idle, much is not even completed. The ostensible conversion of money capital into real estate does not necessarily result in either proletarianization or commodification, the two processes through which Bin argues that capital expands.
Moreover, partly because of the uncertainty around African real estate markets, these markets are often not (yet) of much interest to major global corporate investors. Few African countries yet host Real Estate Investment Trusts – those increasingly notorious agents of financialization of the built environment – and most completely drop off corporate calculative tools such as Jones Lang LaSalle’s Global Real Estate Transparency Index. For this reason, I argue that aspects of urban real estate development in African contexts may be partly obscured by the current focus on financialization. It may be true, as Manuel Aalbers has recently argued, that the world is converging towards the ever-greater financialization of housing – but some places are still very much on the periphery of this process. Thus, while we may debate the old dependencia ideas of core/periphery and their link to colonial geographies, we can speak of a ‘finance periphery’ that has no obvious global North/South geography, because the South has places in which real estate is now highly penetrated by global financial institutions but also places (including much of Africa) in which it is not.
But – and this is a big but – the fact that global corporate finance is not much interested in investing in African property markets does not mean that nobody is. In fact, the steering of finance capital away from these places by global calculative regimes that make Africa look far too risky creates opportunities for domestic and diaspora capital. Consequently, we need to seek answers to the ‘real estatization’ of African economies not so much in international political economy as domestic political settlements.
This brings us back to the questions of power and politics. We cannot understand forms of capitalist development in Africa without understanding which groups of people exercise power over the economy, and – crucially – that these forms and sources of power are often not those conventionally associated with capitalist economic relations. This is not to say that African societies are somehow ‘pre-capitalist’, but rather to highlight that the productive interests classically associated with capitalism, and corporate shareholder interests associated with contemporary capitalism in the North, are not necessarily the most important interests in Africa. Indeed, conceptions of capitalism in which corporate power and shareholding are central must be of limited relevance on a continent where many countries – including the continent’s second and third most populous countries, Ethiopia and DR Congo, do not even have a stock exchange.
This is why, in his influential work on political settlements, Mushtaq Khan argued that political settlements in most developing countries are ‘clientelist’ rather than ‘capitalist’: power is often structured in accordance to patron-client ties and non-capitalist forms of authority rather than capitalist class relations. Strategically important groups, whether these are elites with capacity to destabilise the regime or organised social groups with substantial voting power and/or potential to mobilise major violence, need to be accommodated by governing regimes in ways that cannot be realised through capitalist institutions alone. This is why African governance is replete with informal institutions that enable key groups to garner predictable benefits, in order that a political settlement can be maintained.
One of the ways in which benefits can be distributed in any society is through access to land and opportunities to reap the increasing value of land (often linked to infrastructure), and this becomes particularly important in African cities where land values and real estate assume disproportionate importance due to the relative weakness of the productive economy. But the ways in which land, property and infrastructure are used to allocate benefits will happen differently depending on who the powerful groups in society are, and whether the formal institutions in place can be effectively used to allocate the benefits in question. If they can’t, then those benefits must be distributed informally.
I therefore argue in my own 2018 article on cities and political settlements that urban land and property, being of particular significance for domestic elites and other constituents, is a crucial tool for building and maintaining a political settlement – but also that the way in which this is done has important ‘side effects’ on the cities where it plays out. Thus in Kigali, where the appearance of law-like, ‘uncorrupt’ behaviour by governing elites is considered crucial for regime survival, you are more likely to see formal rules constantly changing to accommodate the necessary interests (which impacts investor confidence and creates substantial delays in realising investments), unlike in Kampala where the politics makes parcelling out land informally more expedient (hastening environmental degradation in the meantime). These cities reflect different varieties of clientelism and different modalities of distributing land rents to maintain a stable order.
The fact that most countries in Africa might be characterised as having clientelist rather than capitalist political settlements does not mean there is no capitalism. But it helps to join the dots between the weak foundations of industrial capitalism, the key role of land, infrastructure and real estate in the ‘operations’ of capital, the limits of commodification and the political relations that lie behind all this. Throughout this blogpost I have referred to African ‘capitalisms’ in plural, cognisant of Stefan Ouma’s exhortation to take a less holistic, universalizing frame to the topic. In cities across the continent, we see different and localized manifestations of capitalist penetration, as M. Anne Pitcher has likewise noted in her work on ‘varieties of residential capitalism’ in Africa. Continued exploration of how capital intersects with contemporary urban forms can help to bring Africa to its rightful position at the forefront of global debates on capitalist transformation.
Tom Goodfellow is a Senior Lecturer in the department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield. He is also a Research Associate of the Sheffield Institute for International Development and Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute.
Featured Photograph: Walking the tracks at Jinja, Uganda, 14 September, 2010
Popular Protest and Social Movements in Africa – Part 13
By David Seddon
In many African countries, the presidents and prime ministers who were originally elected for constitutionally-limited periods (usually two terms of office) are still in place; in other countries, presidents have recently been trying to extend their periods of office (and their powers) – more or less successfully. The latest attempts have been in Burkina Faso, Burundi, the DRC and Congo-Brazzaville, as previously discussed in earlier pieces in this series. The reasons for this seem all too clear – to consolidate and to extend their powers.
In 2016, the Republic of Congo and Uganda swore-in long serving leaders Denis Sassou Nguesso and Yoweri Museveni for fresh terms after polls that were contested by a section of the opposition. Equatorial Guineans also went to the polls and confirmed the mandate of Africa’s longest serving president – Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Chad’s Idris Déby Itno likewise got a mandate extension in 2016 after 25 years in charge. The following year, Paul Kagame extended his period in office successfully, against both domestic and foreign opposition. As at late 2017, three African heads of state had been in power for more than three decades: Mbasogo in Equatorial Guinea, Paul Biya in Cameroon, and Museveni in Uganda. More than a dozen other heads of state had been in power for at least ten years.
This systematic trend towards ‘elected dictatorships’ is widely opposed within these countries and on the continent in general. Yet little has been done to counteract it by regional organizations. In fact, in May 2015, a plan to restrict West African presidents to two terms in office was dropped ‘for the time being’ by heads of state at an ECOWAS summit. The Gambia and Togo – both of which had presidents in their third term of office – opposed the proposal. Domestically, there has been more resistance to this erosion of democracy, both from official parliamentary opposition parties where existent, and from citizens involved in protests. In some countries, this opposition has been effective.
In Burkina Faso in 2014, it was mass protests and revolution that brought about an effective resistance to efforts by Blaise Compaoré to extend his presidency; in Angola, José Eduardo dos Santos stepped down in 2017 after 38 years in office, and in Zimbabwe that same year Robert Mugabe was forced into retirement after 37 years in power in what was, in effect, an army-supported coup. The dynamics of the struggles to resist the erosion of constitutions limiting presidential terms of office differ considerably from case to case, and the effectiveness of those opposing such anti-democratic moves has also varied considerably. In this – the 13th of our series – we re-examine one of the cases discussed in our first and second issues– that of Burundi.
Burundi: The first presidency of Pierre Nkurunziza
Presidential and parliamentary elections took place in 2005 and Pierre Nkurunziza, once a leader of a rebel group, was elected president. A 2005 report on the reasons for Burundi’s poor economic performance since the 1960s suggested ‘poor governance’ was largely responsible, although Burundi had certain inherent disadvantages being small, heavily rural, land-locked and ‘over-populated’. The report argued that:
Most of post-colonial Burundi’s history has been dominated by military dictatorships. Three military Tutsi presidents (all) from Rutovu, a commune of the Southern province of Bururi, have been at the helm of the country for 34 years out of 41 since the country’s independence in 1962. Increasingly, the leadership’s greed and poor governance have generated grievances which, in turn, have led to a cycle of civil wars. From independence, the country has recorded five episodes of civil war that have claimed more than 500,000 lives and have produced about a million refugees. The latest civil war has been raging for ten years, so it is hardly surprising that the country’s economy is currently in tatters.
As of 2006, the Burundian government started negotiating with the Hutu-led Parti pour la libération du peuple Hutu (PALIPEHUTU) and rebels from their armed wing, Forces nationales de libération, (FROLINA) to bring peace to the country. The UN shut down its peacekeeping mission and re-focused on helping with reconstruction. Rwanda, the DRC and Burundi relaunched the regional Economic Community of the Great Lakes Countries. In addition, in 2007, Burundi, along with Rwanda, joined the East African Community. However, the terms of the September 2006 Ceasefire between the government and the last remaining armed opposition group, the FROLINA, were still not totally in place, and senior FROLINA members subsequently left the truce monitoring team, claiming that their security was threatened.
In September 2007, rival FROLINA factions clashed in the capital, killing 20 fighters and causing residents to begin fleeing. Rebel raids were reported in other parts of the country. The rebel factions disagreed with the government over disarmament and the release of political prisoners. In late 2007 and early 2008, FROLINA fighters attacked government-protected camps where former combatants were living. The homes of rural residents were also pillaged. In late March 2008, the FROLINA called on parliament to adopt a law guaranteeing them ‘provisional immunity’ from arrest. This would cover ordinary crimes, but not grave violations of international humanitarian law like war crimes or crimes against humanity. Even though the government had granted this in the past, the FROLINA was unable to obtain the provisional immunity requested and, on 17 April 2008, the FROLINA bombarded Bujumbura. The Burundian army fought back and the FROLINA suffered heavy losses.
A new ceasefire was signed on 26 May 2008. In August 2008, President Nkurunziza met with the FROLINA leader, Agathon Rwasa, with the mediation of Charles Nqakula, South Africa’s Minister for Safety and Security. They agreed to establish a commission to resolve any disputes that might arise during the peace negotiations. Gradually, over the next five years, peace returned to Burundi; refugee camps were progressively closed down and hundreds of thousands of refugees returned to their homes. But, after decades of conflict and political instability, the economy was in a parlous state, and it was not clear that all of the ethnic and related tensions had finally been reduced to a manageable level. The return of refugees, for example, prompted numerous conflicts over property (mainly land) rights.
The state of the economy
After so much conflict and disruption, and the absence of hundreds of thousands of rural people from their villages and their farms, the economy was in a poor state and was slow to recover. When it did, it was on the basis for the most part of subsistence agriculture.
At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, agriculture remained the mainstay of the Burundian economy, contributing some 35 per cent of GDP and 90 per cent of exports, and occupying more than 70 per cent of the Burundian labor force. The lives and livelihoods of the vast majority of the population (some 83 per cent) depended on agriculture; and 87 per cent of the population (50 per cent of which was under the age of 15) lived in the countryside. Rapid population growth was increasing population density and pressure on the land.
Little industry existed except the processing of agricultural exports. Although there was potential wealth in petroleum, nickel, copper, and other natural resources, the uncertain security situation prevented meaningful investor interest. Industrial development was hampered by Burundi’s distance from the sea and high transport costs, as well as the lack of domestic resources other than in agriculture. Burundi was one of the poorest countries in the world with an estimated per capita income of US$130. It was heavily dependent on bilateral and multilateral aid.
In a 2014 article titled The Blood Cries Out, Foreign Policy reported that the population growth rate was 2.5 percent per year, more than double the global average, and that a Burundian woman has on average 6.3 children, nearly triple the international fertility rate. Futhermore, ‘the vast majority of Burundians rely on subsistence farming, but under the weight of a booming population and in the long-standing absence of coherent policies governing land ownership, many people barely have enough earth to sustain themselves’. In 2014, the average size for a farm was about one acre. Not surprisingly, ‘the consequence is remarkable scarcity: according to the 2013 Global Hunger Index, Burundi had the severest hunger and malnourishment rates of all 120 countries ranked’. . Burundi is now a net food importer, with foodstuffs accounting for nearly 20 per cent of all imports.
Burundi in crisis
Burundi’s latest crisis began in June 2015 when President Nkurunziza announced his decision to run for a third term. His party, the Conseil national pour la défense de la démocratie (CNDD), descended from the Hutu rebel group he led during the civil war, argued that under the Constitution his first term did not count. He had been appointed by Parliament, not elected.
Mass protests in April 2015 led to a confrontation between the regime and the people, unleashing a cycle of violence that became ever more vicious. The first outbreak of demonstrations continued until 13 May 2015 when a coup attempt took place while Nkurunziza was out of the country. However, forces loyal to the president rapidly crushed the attempt; and on his return, Nkurunziza purged his government and arrested the coup leaders.
On 18 May, however, protesters took to the streets again despite a ban on demonstrations. These protests were swiftly quelled; but the situation remained tense and uncertain. By the third week of May, some 120,000 people had fled abroad. On 2 June, the killing of the leader of a small opposition party led to fresh protests, again the regime responded with force. On 11 June, a security chief claimed: ‘there are no more demonstrations in Bujumbura or inside the country’. In response, one civil society leader queried: ‘If there are no more demonstrations, why is it the police shoot every morning and night in Bujumbura’s neighborhoods? Why do we bury people every day killed by the police?’ (for further information on the 2015-16 crisis in Burundi, please see part two of this series here).
The situation continued to escalate, on 30 December 2015 Nkurunziza stated that African Union peacekeepers were not welcome and that the army would fight back if they tried to deploy in Burundi. Furthermore, there are now fears of a severe social and economic crisis, as major cuts in the health, education and agriculture sectors, envisaged in the 29 December 2015 austerity budget could further heighten the vulnerability of many Burundians and limit their access to basic services. A shortage of essential drugs is already reported in the country; and besides health, major concerns remain in the protection, foods security and nutrition sectors.
In early January 2016, Nkurunziza repeated his threat to counter any deployment of external peacekeepers after the African Union announced plans to send in 5,000 troops to protect civilians from escalating violence between government and rebel forces. On 9 January, the government refused to join peace talks with the opposition. On 14 January the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that over 230,000 Burundians had now fled the country, while at least 15,000 others were internally displaced in two provinces. At least 400 people, mostly civilians, had been killed since 26 April 2015, with the numbers rising in the last few months and the largest number killed in one month (162) being in December 2015. Not all of the killings, however, were recorded.
Government forces had responded by raiding areas considered to be centres of opposition to the regime. It seems that, during searches undertaken in the Musaga, Nyakabiga, Ngagara, Cibitoke and Mutanga neighbourhoods of Bujumbura on 11 and 12 December 2015, police, army and Imbonerakure militia forces arrested many young men who were later tortured, killed or taken to unknown destinations. Residents reported summary killings and the discovery of dozens of bodies. The UN rights office had documented more than 3,000 arrests and noted that while many had been released, an unknown number had ‘disappeared’. Investigators were planning to deploy on January 25th but were still waiting for a government response. On 22 January 2016, it was reported that a total of 728 people had died in demonstrations (41), armed clashes (333) and as a result of state violence against civilians (354).
Also, said the UN Human Rights Commissioner, at least 13 cases of sexual violence, in which security forces allegedly entered the houses of victims, separated the women and then raped or gang raped them, had been documented. One of the sexually abused women testified that her abuser told her she was paying the price for being a Tutsi. Another witness said Tutsis were being systematically killed, while Hutus were being spared. Tension between majority Hutus and minority Tutsis led to a civil war in Burundi in which 300,000 people died. It ended in 2005. The UN human rights chief warned of renewed violence between the two ethnic groups. ‘All the alarm signals, including the increasing ethnic dimension of the crisis, are flashing red’, he said. The future for Burundi in 2016, as we remarked in 2015 (in the second part of this series), looked bleak.
And indeed, in 2016, Burundi was again torn apart by conflict. Opposition supporters or those suspected of being supporters were arrested or went missing; and normal life was disrupted across the country as political unrest had its impact on lives and livelihoods. Almost half a million people were thought to have fled abroad in 2016. Figures provided by aid agencies working in the region suggested that on average, more than a hundred people a day had staggered across the Tanzanian border over the course of the year. They joined the 250,000 or so who were still spread across Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and the DRC in camps that were desperately overcrowded and short of food.
Most refugees had travelled at night, through scrub and forest, to avoid militias hunting down would-be defectors, who they brand traitors. Some of those intercepted were sent back with a warning, but many were assaulted and murdered. A report in The Guardian on 10 April 2016, suggested that
The government apparently hopes that, if it can stem the refugee crisis, an already distracted international community will find it easier to ignore problems within Burundi’s tight borders. The controls are so tight that tens of thousands of vulnerable people have gone into hiding inside the country, sheltering in forests or the homes of friends, rather than risk a crossing.
For those who did make it across the border, there was only the most basic protection in the ‘host’ countries. The shortage of funds and flood of new arrivals meant that refugee camps were packed, that food rations rarely stretched to more than one meal a day, and that women and children were subject to high levels of physical and sexual assault. Aid agencies reported that they expected to be supporting Burundian refugees for many years to come, even if the violence is halted within months.
Most of the refugees were wary of a military escalation inside the country and believed that foreign peacekeepers might be the country’s best hope of avoiding war. But among the camps of refugees and scattered exiles, a growing number of angry grieving survivors expressed a wish to return with a gun in their hands.
The perpetrators of many atrocities were said to be masked, anonymous men. But a group repeatedly named in stories of detention and harassment was the feared youth wing of the ruling party, the Imbonerakure. Their name means ‘those who see far’ in Kirundi, and they grew out of the same disbanded militia as the ruling party. Critics say they have never fully shaken off the mentality of war, although the government insists they are just a political group. They also appeared to be involved in reported efforts to turn the conflict into an ethnic one. With the government preaching hatred, there is a risk that Burundi could fracture further along ethnic lines, and an army at war with itself could drag the country back into full-blown civil war.
Meanwhile, President Nkurunziza declared that he intended to remain in office and, in December 2017, threatened people not to campaign against the changes to the constitution that his government was proposing to implement after a referendum in May 2018.
Towards a Referendum
Prior to the referendum, the BBC and Voice of America were banned from the country for six months; and Radio France Internationale (RFI) received a ‘warning’ about its coverage. Despite a presidential decree that threatened three years’ imprisonment for anyone convicted of encouraging people not to vote, the Burundian opposition coalition, the Conseil National pour le Respect de l’Accord d’Arusha pour la paix et la Réconciliation au Burundi et la Restauration de l’Etat de Droit (CNARED) called on the people to boycott the referendum, which it accused of being the ‘death warrant’ of the Arusha Accords of 2000 which ended the Burundian Civil War.
Violence broke out ahead of the referendum planned for 17 May 2018. It took various different forms. On 8 May 2018, residents of Kinama, a neighbourhood in northeast Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, found the body of a man floating in a field of rice. His head was missing and he heart had been torn out. Stuck to his chest was a message written in Kirundi, the language spoken by most Burundians, saying: ‘traitors are punished’. Three days later, on 11 May, 26 people were killed in Cibitoke Province the north-west of the country in an attack by rebels who crossed into Burundi from neighbouring DRC. Three days after that, and only two days before the referendum, an opposition activist who had been campaigning against the proposed change to the constitution was murdered in the street by a pro-government group of young militiamen.
These incidents are reflections of the political instability and climate of fear that characterizes Burundi today. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly documented widespread abuses by security forces and government-sponsored organizations. The EU and the US denounced intimidation, repression and harassment of opposition supporters in the run up to the referendum. Burundi’s government suggested that these charges were based on malicious propaganda spread by exiles. The independent media, both domestic and foreign, was, however, severely constrained. The BBC and Voice of America transmitters were shut down, Radio France was warned and most foreign publications were denied accreditation.
Inside Burundi, the church is one of the few institutions that have spoken out against the proposed constitutional change: ‘most citizens today live in fear, even if they do not say so aloud’, said Monseigneur Joachim Ntahondereye, president of the Burundian Council of Churches. But Aimé Magera, a spokesman for the National Liberation Forces (FNL), an opposition party, has also said, of the situation during the two-week electoral campaign: ‘we have been beaten, threatened, harassed and attacked. So many have been arrested it is impossible to count’. Many Burundians expected the proposed constitutional amendment to pass comfortably, no matter how they actually voted. Already, before the vote, the president had named himself the ‘Supreme Eternal Guide’ with the clear intention of staying on as president for the foreseeable future.
Towards an elected dictatorship
A referendum on the constitution was held in Burundi on 17 May 2018. The proposed amendments to the constitution, enabling Nkurunziza to extend his period of office, were approved by over 70 per cent of the voters after a high (96 per cent) turnout. Reports from polling stations said that some people were forced to vote to avoid being beaten or arrested. Suspected opponents were ‘killed, raped, abducted, beaten, and intimidated’, according to Human Rights Watch, which documented at least 15 killings, six rapes and eight abductions during voting day.
The changes approved by the electorate will reintroduce the post of Prime Minister and reduce the number of Vice-Presidents from two to one. They also involve increasing the presidential term from five to seven years, albeit restricting a president to two consecutive terms. However, the amendments would also allow the incumbent, President Pierre Nkurunziza, now in office since 2005, to stand for re-election, and could prolong his regime until 2034, despite his having already served three terms, on the questionable basis that he was not elected the first time, but appointed. The amendments also reduce the parliamentary majority required to pass legislation. It may be argued that this gives the executive greater flexibility to meet the challenges to come; but it surely represents a further erosion of democracy in Burundi.
Also, a matter of concern is the gradual ethnic polarization of the army. It had been re-built under the Arusha accords with quotas for Tutsis and Hutus at all level of the officer corps, to win the trust of both groups. Yet many of the senior officers before 2005, most of whom were Tutsi, have been forced to retire or post abroad on peacekeeping missions in Somalia and the Central Africa Republic, some have been murdered. Meanwhile, rebels who served in Nkurunziza’s force – mostly Hutus – have risen up the ranks. The constitutional amendment opens up the possibility of doing away with ethnic quotas, allowing President Nkurunziza to make the army and police largely Hutu institutions. The implications of this are frightening.
The rise of elected dictators across Africa
On 24 May, the main opposition coalition, which rejected the results of the referendum, called on the Constitutional Court to invalidate the outcome of the referendum, and the next day filed a petition to this effect. It seems highly unlikely that the referendum will be invalidated. A possible response from the opposition parties is the mobilization of their cadres and the population at large to protest against the consolidation of Nkurunziza’s regime. In which case, there is always a possibility of another outbreak of conflict.
There is also little chance of intervention from outside to mitigate what appears like a deepening political and economic crisis in Burundi, with the potential to turn into another ethnic conflict – and even genocide. On the same day that the opposition filed a petition to the Constitutional Court to reverse the outcome of the referendum or to declare it null and void, the UN Special Envoy for Burundi urged the government to re-start discussions with the opposition. But the influence of the international community is limited.
Pressure at the regional level is also likely to be limited. The Tanzanian government played midwife to the Arusha accords yet, today, Tanzania itself is sliding into authoritarianism. Its president, John Magufuli, an ally of President Nkurunziza, has tried to force Burundian refugees back to their country of origin. Elsewhere, elected dictators, like Kabila in the DRC, Kagame in Rwanda and Museveni in Uganda, have all managed to ‘persuade’ their electorates to extend their terms of office – and Museveni has even abolished the presidential age limit of 75, which will allow him to run for a sixth presidential term in 2021.
Pre-existing constitutional two-term limits on the presidency have now been modified or eliminated in Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Chad, the DRC, Gabon, Rwanda, Togo and Uganda. In Eritrea, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Morocco, Somalia, South Sudan and Swaziland there is no constitutional two-term limit. Only in a few African states – Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria and Zambia – has the two-term limit been retained despite attempts to modify or eliminate them. In much of the West African Sahel and Central Africa, and in the Horn of Africa, elected dictators have managed to sweep aside the constitutional constraints on the duration of their regime, and many of these look set to retain power. It looks as though Nkurunziza, confirmed yet again as president of Burundi, will be another of these – unless there is a new wave of internal dissent and unrest.
David Seddon (criticalfaculty1@hotmail.co.uk) is a researcher and political activist who has written extensively on social movements, class struggles and political transitions across the developing world.
Featured Photograph: The aftermath of a grenade attack outside a bank in downtown Bujumbura, Burundi on 29 May 2015.
On 16 August 2012, the South African Police shot 34 platinum miners who were on strike for better wages and living and working conditions, while they were trying to disperse. Ten people had died before the massacre. The government set up the Farlam Inquiry which cost the people of South Africa R153 million. But it failed not only to ask the right questions—who gave the order to issue guns to the police? Who ordered them to shoot to kill? But also to address the material conditions that give rise to the community’s resistance.
The toxic collusion between Lonmin, the South African police and the ANC government comes from the top: as a Lonmin director at the time, now President, Cyril Ramaphosa called the labour dispute a ‘dastardly criminal act’ requiring ‘concomitant action,’ supporting a position which – with 800 police already on the ground in Marikana – would inevitably lead to violence. Although the evidence that the police killed and injured the miners is clear, 19 strikers were charged with murder, and many more remain in prison for other offences. There has been no compensation for the victims’ families or for the injured mineworkers.
Formerly a subsidiary of Lonrho – the notorious London Rhodesia company which even former Conservative prime minister Ted Heath called ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’ because of its corrupt profiteering – Lonmin preserves its colonial legacy as the corporate face of racial capitalism. Principal investors in Lonmin’s exploitation of African labour and nature are London-based asset management funds Investec, Majedie, Schroders, Standard Life and Legal & General who own 44% of the corporation. A consortium of banks including Lloyds, HSBC and RBS are its biggest lenders.
After six years of avoiding its responsibility for the Marikana Massacre, London-based mining corporation Lonmin has decided to cut and run from its platinum mining operation in South Africa by preparing to sell to Sibanye-Stillwater. Having made vast profits from extraction and exploitation since its founding under imperialist and white supremacist Cecil Rhodes, Lonmin has pledged a ‘covenant’ to repay the banks that financed their violence against people and nature. We support the demands of women’s organisation Sikhala Sonke and victims’ representatives that Lonmin must fulfil a social covenant with the community instead.
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS DEMAND THAT LONMIN:
Apologise to the South African nation and to the victims of the Massacre (families of the deceased, injured and arrested).
Pay reparations to the affected parties, including all dependents of the deceased mineworkers and the injured and arrested workers who survived the Massacre. This must also cover all psychological damage and/or emotional trauma for those who witnessed the arrests, injuries and deaths that took place during the massacre.
Join calls to release the miners in prison as a result of the massacre and to prosecute the police officers and intellectual authors of the Massacre.
Consult with all affected parties regarding the proposed commemorative monument.
Take responsibility for the environmental destruction at Marikana and ensure that people in the communities around the mine have sufficient water, proper sanitation and electricity.
Comply with the obligations of its Social and Labour Plan, the development of 2,638 (rental and ownership) accommodation units and 6,000 apartments that are genuinely affordable for mineworkers and the community, within the stipulated time-frames.
Add its voice to those calling to review the Farlam Commission and finance the legal process.
Stop using the excuse that it is now insolvent: it has made huge profits over the years. It must tell us what it has done with the money appropriated in 2011-12.
If Lonmin is sold to Sibanye-Stillwater, a company under which 21 miners have lost their lives in fatal accidents this year, the new owner must:
Take responsibility for the massacre and reparations, for providing housing and livelihoods and the other promises made.
Guarantee livelihoods for the workers.
Set aside money in the purchase price to assist with financing sustainable development projects, with independent problem-solving mechanisms and counselling.
Claude Lanzmann who died in Paris on 5 July this year at the age of 92 will forever be remembered for ‘Shoah’, his extraordinary 1985 nine-and-a-half-hour epic documentary that changed the world’s understanding of the Holocaust. The Shoah films compelled through touching, often shocking individual testimony, the result of eleven years of research and filming.
Less well-known than the French filmmaker’s engagement with the European holocaust experience and his controversial support of Israel, is his fierce anti-colonialist activism against France’s colonial war in Algeria and his close encounter with Frantz Fanon. Lanzmann, at the time a radical journalist and writer became significant during Fanon’s last year of life as an intermediary between the latter and his publisher and supporters in France. Notably Lanzmann organised a meeting in Rome in July 1961 between Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, which resulted in Sartre’s famous preface to the The Wretched of the Earth, the manuscript of which Fanon had brought along to give to Sartre. The physically and emotionally exhausting three days of intensive conversation were the first time Fanon met the French philosopher and activist, arguably his most profound intellectual influence. Lanzmann however had already had some months earlier an intriguing meeting with Fanon in his Tunis exile.
In 1952 Lanzmann had become – at Sartre’s invitation – a contributor to the radical French publication Les Temps Modernes after his return from Germany where he had taught Philosophy at the newly-founded Free University of Berlin in 1949 and from where he had reported as a journalist. He was among those on the French left who took an ardent anti-colonialist stand against France’s colonial war in Algeria. In the autumn of 1960 Lanzmann signed the ‘Manifesto of the 121’ that supported the independence struggle, denounced the torture practices by the colonial forces and endorsed resistance to military conscription into the French army. He also testified for the defence in the Paris trial against the more practical-radical supporters of the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) known as the porteurs de valises for the suitcases they carried full of money and ammunition for the FLN.
Soon afterwards Lanzmann travelled to Tunis, where the headquarters of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, the newspaper El Moudjahid, and the diplomatic and propaganda sections of the FLN were based. The French writer-activist was impressed by those he met there; he admired their cheerful optimism and conviction that they had won the war and Algerian independence was within close reach. ‘But,’ Lanzmann recounted decades later in his remarkable memoir The Patagonian Hare, ‘the encounter that really shook me, captivated me and that was to have a profound effect on my own life was my meeting with Frantz Fanon.’ Fanon was ill already with the leukaemia that would eventually kill him a year later and lying on a mattress on the floor of the apartment where he lived with his wife Josie and young son. Fanon spoke intensely. Lanzmann recalled:
I sat on the floor next to the mattress where Fanon lay and listened to him talk about the Algerian revolution for hours, stopping several times when the pain became unbearable. I put my hand on his forehead, which was bathed in sweat, and awkwardly tried to dry it, or I held his shoulder gently as though by mere touch I might ease his pain. But all the while Fanon spoke with a lyricism I had never before encountered … as he propped himself up on his elbow and announced like a visionary that Africa, the Africa of his dreams would not experience the Middle Ages as Europe had, one could not but be carried along by his words, could only subscribe to his glorious utopian ideal.
Even after his return to Paris weeks later, Lanzmann was ‘still completely carried away by this man whom I believed to be the keeper of the truth, and of the truth as a secret.’ In the meantime, Lanzmann had met several more times with Fanon, who was feeling better due to a brief remission of the cancer. They spoke about Fanon’s relationship with the FLN, and about Sartre and his book Critiquede la raison dialectique, which had recently been published. With characteristic immense passion Fanon claimed that the fighters of the ALN (National Liberation Army) had actually read and engaged with Sartre’s critical discussion of revolutionary experience and impasse. Fanon organised a trip for Lanzmann to go and visit what he called the fighters in ‘the interior’, whom he had painted in glowing colours to his French guest.
For Lanzmann, the first Frenchman to visit the area, the two-week trip to Ghardimaou on the border between Tunisia and Algeria was both enlightening and sobering. He realised that neither were these the true fighters of ‘the interior’, a guerrilla force operating inside the French colony, nor were they the famed peasant-warrior-philosophers of Fanon’s passionate portrayal. Instead, Lanzmann found the Armée des frontièrs, Algerian combatants and their leadership who had long ago crossed into the border zone; he also realised that their engagement with Sartre’s writing was limited to a seminar Fanon had given them on his recent visit to the border, his last political action and trip before the illness took full hold of him.
None the less the French writer-activist was captivated by the men who had started out fighting in the Wilayah guerrilla zones in the Algerian interior, and planned to write about the trip on his return to Paris. This however was not to be. Shortly after having arrived back he had encounters with members of different factions of the Algerian liberation forces, and realised their bitter and violent differences. So, he kept the story to himself and did not write anything, Lanzmann began to see that the Algerians were victims of racist violence in their colonised homeland as much as in France, whom the small number of solidarity activists on the French left had unsurprisingly idealized.
Lanzmann attended the celebrations of Algerian independence on 5 July 1962 along with ‘the whole of revolutionary Africa’, as he remembered. But then, just a few weeks later, the country’s first President, Ben Bella in one of his first speeches as head of state announced that the Algerian Republic was planning to send 100,000 troops to help liberate Palestine. His response, in Lanzmann’s own words, again in his memoir, perhaps best shows his deep-seated ambivalences, even ambiguities: ‘For me, it was over! I had thought that it was possible to believe both in an independent Algeria and the state of Israel. I was wrong.’
Despite his continued admiration for Fanon as a passionate philosopher-revolutionary and a warm and delicate person, Lanzmann’s impassioned anti-colonialism suffered severe disillusionment. Postcolonial Africa to him, as for many others, was a great disappointment. This was not the Africa of Fanon’s dreams, he declared in the Patagonian Hare, failing perhaps, to fully appreciate the critical power and insights of Fanon’s masterpiece, The Wretched of the Earth, which Lanzmann had helped to deliver.
Notwithstanding, Lanzmann’s conviction and vital role in the last phase of the Algerian independence war and his passionate anti-colonialism was ‘existential, almost physical’; it was grounded in deep empathy with those seeking to create a new life. And so was his Zionism, as Enzo Traverso writes in his critical appraisal of the great film maker and intellectual activist. Lanzmann’s expressed Zionist conviction – confounding as it has been to many on the left – perhaps should also be best understood as profound empathy with ‘a community of settlers and soldiers who had fled persecution and were ready to rebuild a new life after the Holocaust.’
In that sense perhaps, a critical-sympathetic appraisal of one of the last great activist intellectuals of the French post-war left may help understand that what was perplexing about his life-long lived commitment, onwards from the eighteen-year old who joined the communist Résistance in occupied France.
On the occasion of Lanzmann’s 90th birthday in November 2015, the Free University Berlin had invited him back to the place of his first job. During a two-day colloquium on his life and work he spoke eloquently and passionately about his experiences in Berlin just after World War 2. Characteristic were his comments on working with German students in the immediate post-war era, who were his contemporaries; the young men of course mostly former soldiers in the Wehrmacht (the German army from 1935-1945). Almost sixty years later Lanzmann still displayed considerable empathy with these young Germans despite the fresh unbearable pain he must have felt, having learnt just recently of the full extent of the Nazi atrocities. Interestingly too that Lanzmann left Berlin after a brief spell of teaching when the Alliance Française that paid his salary wouldn’t allow him to teach a course on antisemitism, which – he insisted during the 2015 entretien – had been specifically requested by his German students. It appears that the French authorities thought this might be too volatile. Sitting in the audience that evening I could not help thinking: What a great man, in all his complexity!
Heike Becker is a regular contributor to roape.net, she is an activist and writer. As a professor at the University of the Western Cape she teaches anthropology and writes on politics, culture, and social movements across the continent.
Featured Photograph: Banner outside the Minneapolis Police Department following the shooting of Jamar Clark on November 15, 2015
On June 5 this year in Addis Ababa, Abiy Ahmed, the new Prime Minister and head of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), announced his plan for the privatization of key sectors of the economy and the unconditional implementation of the Ethiopia Eritrea Border Commission (EEBC) rulings with Eritrea after the war fought at the end of the last century. What spurred this dramatic departure from the long-standing and zealously guarded state developmentalist ideology of Revolutionary Democratic Developmentalism (RDD) and this sudden move to break the deadlock in Ethiopian-Eritrean relations, which have remained hostile since the 1998-2000 war between the two countries?
In short, the difficult history of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) dating back to the armed struggle days has been the real cause for the impasse of the last twenty years. The border conflict was a pretext. So, it has taken an Oromo Prime Minister like Abiy, combined with the economic burden of sustaining an army on a war footing and the decline of different factions within the TPLF/EPRDF to enable the breakthrough. For roape.net I look at the background to the quiet revolution taking place inside Ethiopia.
The Ethiopian Economy
Ethiopia finds itself in economic difficulty, deeply in debt and under pressure from creditors despite reported average growth rates between 8 and 11 per cent since 2000, in part resulting from foreign investment – including loans from the People’s Republic of China – in the country’s agricultural and manufacturing sectors. Under the TPLF/EPRDF, RDD meant misuse of river waters and the ‘leasing’ of indigenous land to foreign capitalists. For example, Gambela, a region on the border with South Sudan, is the region worst affected by land leasing and resettlement. It was here that the TPLF earmarked almost half of the region for commercial farms, and since 2008, foreign companies have leased a total of 225,012 hectares in the region.
Increases in imported global food and fuel prices, rapid expansion of the money supply, and a large devaluation of its currency (the birr) have led to high inflation in recent years. Large and persistent government deficits, and the absence of virtually any stabilizing fiscal and monetary policies, have accelerated a downward economic spiral. In addition, theft from state enterprises and participation in the informal market is widespread.
Late in 2017 head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, visited the country, no doubt concerned by the dire situation. Ethiopia is classified by the IMF as slipping from moderate to high-debt status. China has been propping up the TPLF/EPRDF with loans and economic aid and it is significant that US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson went to Ethiopia right before he was fired by Donald Trump and told the government about the pitfalls of Chinese ‘easy credit’ loans with their extremely high interest rates. The terms of Chinese loans are not transparent, so it is hard to cite exact figures but we do know that, as of 2009, China had surpassed the United States as a trading partner with African countries, with Ethiopia ranked sixth in importance.
Ethiopia has a population of about 106 million people, of whom 41 per cent is under the age of 15 and more than 28 per cent is aged between 15 and 29. Youth unemployment is estimated at nearly 27 percent. The challenge on the economic front is immense. One major concern must be the potential resistance to change from those within the TPLF with vested interests in the RDD.
There has long been skepticism at the reported double-digit growth that the government claimed to have achieved for over a decade. Economies like Ethiopia inflate their GDP figures by fudging and redefining categories, by manipulating price estimations, and by introducing statistical assumptions in their estimation of growth that are gross misrepresentations. GDP is thus not a reliable indicator of the condition of the country’s economy.
More revealing economic indicators are capital outflow and currency exchange rates. Abiy and the TPLF/EPRDF will have been advised by the IMF and the US to implement austerity measures, if they want to overcome their foreign exchange crisis. In 2009 alone, illicit money leaving the Ethiopian economy totaled US$3.26 billion (which was double the amount in each of the two previous years). This was combined with rising domestic interest rates and import cost inflation. According to a study by the University of Massachusetts Political Economy Research Institute, Ethiopia lost $25 billion to capital flight from 1970 to 2010.
The foreign exchange crisis is so serious that the United Arab Emirates prince Shaikh Mohammad Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, recently deposited US$1 billion in the National Bank of Ethiopia to bolster the country’s fiscal and monetary policy, as well as to enhance the Bank’s liquidity and foreign exchange reserves. He also provided US$2 billion to stimulate the Ethiopian economy and to encourage joint investment.
Convincing the prince to deposit this money is one of the tangible diplomatic achievements of Abiy, along with the release of Ethiopian political prisoners jailed in Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Egypt. In return, it is reasonable to assume that the UAE is seeking Ethiopia’s diplomatic and political support in its rivalry with Qatar. Whatever direction these economic reforms take, it is clear that Ethiopia’s much lauded ‘revolutionary’ developmentalism has floundered (see Pádraig Carmody’s blogpost on roape.net).
The Border Conflict
In addition to his plans for the reform of the economy, Abiy has reiterated his intention to settle the border conflict with Eritrea by abandoning the previous rejectionist policies of the TPLF/EPRDF and, by ‘accepting the Algiers Agreement unconditionally’, to demarcate the border with Eritrea according to the EEBC decision. This has received a mixed reception, even though initially the TPLF/EPRDF accepted the ‘final and binding’ nature of the verdict from the EEBC.
When questioned in parliament as to why he had announced this change without consulting parliament, Abiy reminded members that they had decided 16 years before to accept the Algiers Agreement (a peace agreement signed in 2000 by the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments in the Algerian capital). He said he has seen signed documents to that effect in his office. He argued there is nothing new in his statements reviving the physical demarcation and delimitation of the 1000-kilometer border between the two countries. The more reasonable question that he raised was why the decision hasn’t been implemented.
He also reminded his parliament that Ethiopia has unresolved border disputes not only with Eritrea but also with Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia – not to mention the on-going internal conflict over regional boundaries, such as Wolkite and the Ogaden border with Oromia. In an effort to demystify the ‘borders’, he gave examples of how artificial African borders really are. Recently he cited how the Oromo in Borenna in Ethiopia have more in common with the Oromo in Kenya than with the Oromo in Hararghe or Wollega in Ethiopia. Colonialism drew the borders of Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia, with no regard for the indigenous peoples and their territories, he argued.
Abiy urged Ethiopians to think beyond borders and look to economic integration and the benefits of coordination between different countries in creating economies of scale. He also urged reflection on the cost of the Ethiopian/Eritrean standoff and the suffering of both peoples, reminding them that the 1998-2000 war between Eritrea and Ethiopia was arguably ‘the worst inter-state war in Africa.’
Reactions and Responses
Initially, Abiy’s announcement on ‘the border question’ was met with a mixed reception both in Ethiopia and in Eritrea, and provoked intense debate. The announcement also created confusion in Ethiopia because within 24 hours another broadcast by the TPLF stipulated the need for ‘discussion’ regarding the border issue and chastised Abiy for announcing his proposals without consultation with ‘the people.’ This TPLF statement temporarily dampened the widespread euphoria, leaving close observers wondering if the TPLF was even in agreement with Abiy’s initiative. When it comes to the border issue, Eritreans have come to expect only obfuscation from the political class.
Eritrea responded to Abiy’s initiative on 20 June 2018, by proposing a delegation to Addis Ababa to meet him and to ‘gauge developments in Ethiopia.’ The delegation arrived in Addis Ababa five days later to a warm welcome. Abiy flew to Eritrea within two weeks to an unprecedented reception. President Isaias Afeworki of Eritrea is scheduled to visit Addis Ababa in return.
Many Eritreans welcomed the proposals, because the on-going conflict over the border has entrenched the militarization of the entire society and undermined the economic development of the country. Forced recruitment into the armed forces is a major cause of Eritrean migration abroad, for which the country is now regularly in the headlines of the international media. Hopes are building that the resolution of the border issue with agreed demarcation can bring an end to the indefinite military service in Eritrea.
The reduction of migration from Eritrea could be achieved by scrapping the mandatory indefinite military service that has been maintained by the government since the war with Ethiopia. The challenge for the Eritrean government then would be providing employment and rehabilitation into civilian life for the hundreds of thousands serving in the armed forces. Yet, the unintended consequences of opening up Eritrea could pose a threat to Isaias Afeworki’s tight control over the regime, possibly leading to political reform and the end of big man rule.
International and Regional Actors
There are speculations that the visit to Eritrea, Djibouti and Ethiopia in April by the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Donald Yamamoto, may have been part of an effort to break the long stalemate by nudging Ethiopia to accept the Algiers Agreement. The ‘guarantors’ of the Algiers Agreement were the United States, the European Union and the African Union. For sixteen years, dereliction of duty on the part of these so-called guarantors enabled Ethiopia to flout the agreement with impunity. Ethiopia waged a ‘no war no peace’ strategy intended to bring Eritrea to its knees.
Why might the US be changing its policy toward the Eritrean regime by actively seeking a resolution? One probable reason is the changing regional and geopolitical reality. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are now actively working with the Eritrean president Isaias Afeworki in effect helping him break his isolation. The fear that a political vacuum may enable radical Islamist groups, like al-Shabab in Somalia, to gain a foothold in an unstable Eritrea or Ethiopia, is perhaps another reason.
The Trump administration may also have decided to break with the unconditional backing Ethiopia enjoyed from the Clinton and Obama administrations as part of their policy of isolating the Eritrean regime and maintaining security in the region. But this arrangement was always problematic, not least because al-Shabab had emerged as a result of US-backed Ethiopian intervention in Somalia in the first place.
Arguably, the Bush, Clinton and Obama administrations made things more difficult by interfering with the verdict of the EEBC. Former US Assistant Secretary of State, Jendayi Frazer, aided Condoleezza Rice in this regard, while President Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice, waged a vendetta against the Eritrean president, thus reinforcing the impasse. Ironically the only US official who stood firmly behind the EEBC decision was the right-wing maverick John Bolton, who was US Permanent Representative to the UN and is currently National Security Advisor to Donald Trump. Settling the border conflict would mean a profound change in the geopolitics of the region.
In addition, the rich petrodollar countries of the Middle East are exploiting the conflicts in the Horn of Africa to increase their influence. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have established military bases in Assab (an Eritrean port) for their bombing campaigns in Yemen. The Saudi and UAE military presence in Eritrea is not particularly pleasant for Ethiopia. These countries may have leaned on Ethiopia and Eritrea to settle their dispute, hoping to secure their investments in a more stable Horn of Africa. In the context of Nile hydro politics, a growing alliance between Egypt and Eritrea is a threat to Ethiopia.
The rivalry of Saudi Arabia and the UAE with Qatar, Iran and Turkey is also being played out in the Horn of Africa. The UAE has established port facilities in Somaliland much to the chagrin of Somalia. Turkey is leasing land in Suakin in Sudan to establish a naval dock. Having good access to ports with road infrastructure already in place is also critical to Ethiopia. Abiy emphasized this in a speech he gave to parliament and admitted that he had travelled to Saudi Arabia to request space for Ethiopian cargo in Saudi ports. Eritrea could also benefit from Ethiopia’s use of its ports and perhaps even from the operations of Africa’s successful Ethiopian Airlines.
There is also the matter of Djibouti. Ethiopia is a landlocked country dependent for access on Djibouti’s ports for 95 per cent of its imports and exports. If a genuine settlement is achieved between Eritrea and Ethiopia, among the peace dividends for both countries would be the utilization of Eritrean ports for Ethiopian exports and imports, decreasing Ethiopia’s dependence on the costly Djibouti ports. Djibouti is a crowded place with foreign troops from the US, China, France, Japan, Italy and Saudi Arabia stationed in the tiny city-state.
Abiy’s Internal Challenges
Ethnic conflict in the south and southwest of the country, in the Moyale area, has deteriorated (after a brief hiatus) following the ascent of Abiy to the leadership. The Special Forces, in the service of TPLF generals involved in illicit activities in the Ogaden region in the Southeast, continue to be a menace. Amharas are being evicted and displaced from different parts of Oromia. So, there is still some danger that a faction of the TPLF which is regrouping in Tigray with its intelligence tentacles throughout Ethiopia may sabotage Abiy’s programme.
Anarchy, crime and vigilante ethnic killings are increasing, which suggests that things could spiral out of control. Millions are internally displaced and desperate. The TPLF authority at the federal level is seriously damaged, but it can still play a spoiler role in the Somali region – where the Chinese have begun to extract oil in the area contiguous to Oromia – by backing the notorious human rights violator, Abdi Mohamud Omar (known as Abdi Illey).
Abiy is pushing for an ‘all-Ethiopian nationalism’ pledging that the government of Ethiopia will cease to be the prerogative of a minority and will in future represent and embrace all Ethiopians. The allure of his message is steeped in the language of reconciliation and love. In building his support base, he has cobbled together a motley group of allies, some with contradictory visions. How he will manage these competing interests remains to be seen.
Another of his challenges will be to convince foreign investors that Ethiopia remains ‘open for business’, in the face of the continuing ethnic violence. Some foreign owned businesses have been torched by protesters. So, for example, Deep Kamra, country manager of the Dangote Cement factory, owned by Africa’s richest man, was recently murdered by unidentified assailants along with his secretary and driver. The extensive publicity given to the violence and the state of emergency has made it harder for Abiy to make the country seem attractive to investors – a key element in any neoliberal project.
Where now?
A big question remains whether Abiy can be the agent or midwife for transformative change, for genuine democracy in Ethiopia and whether his ‘quiet revolution’ can break the power of ruling cliques and their power bases in the country. Although he has promised term limits, Abiy himself is a contradiction, as a selected and not an elected leader. What many argue is urgently needed is a transitional government leading to constitutional rule and elections. Yet, he also urgently needs to tackle corruption. What will he do to try to retrieve the money stolen by corrupt officials which is estimated at over thirty billion dollars from US aid alone?
It remains unclear if Abiy can overcome the obstacles he is facing and consolidate the forces of integration, reconciliation and national unity that he claims to promote. His achievements in the first months of his leadership have been surprising by any measure but can there really be a shift from personal rule to deep structural transformation and sustainable democratic institutions that Ethiopia’s poor desperately need and deserve?
Yohannes Woldemariam is a political economist who has taught and worked in universities and research centers in Europe, Costa Rica, Africa and the United States. Currently, he is a visiting professor at the National University in Costa Rica and working on a book comparing and contrasting the Costa Rican and Eritrean experiences. He can be emailed at ywoldem@gmu.edu
Featured Photograph: President Isaias Afewerki and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sign the Joint Declaration of Peace and Friendship between Eritrea and Ethiopia on 9 July 2018.
From the editorial for no. 156 of ROAPE, Peter Lawrence discusses an issue that deals with the state and its function within the economy. ROAPE has since its inception engaged with issues relating to the nature and role of the State in Africa. In 1976, ROAPE focused on the class character of the state, debating which factions of the petty bourgeoisie, or the ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’, or a ‘political class’ dominated it. While the Debates section of this issue is devoted to the ROAPE/Third World Network workshop on radical political economy and industrialisation in Africa held in Accra last November. This is the first of a series of three workshops which ROAPE has sponsored across the continent in cooperation with local organisations. Readers can access these debates for free from our website by registering and logging in here.
By Peter Lawrence
The articles in this issue are in one way or the other concerned with the state and its function within the economy. ROAPE has since its inception engaged with issues relating to the nature and role of the State in Africa. ROAPE no. 5, published in 1976, focused on the class character of the state, debating which factions of the petty bourgeoisie, or the ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’, or a ‘political class’ dominated it. The state itself was variously labelled by the contributors to that issue as ‘relatively autonomous’, ‘overdeveloped’, ‘unsteady’ or in the case of Amin’s Uganda, ‘unhinged’. In the Global North, the state was not regarded as Marx and Engels’s executive committee of the bourgeoisie, but rather as relatively independent of class forces, acting as a referee between capital and labour and ensuring some degree of fair distribution of income and effective provision of health, social welfare and education services. This view fitted well with the idea of a capitalism declining under the weight of its own contradictions and socialism being on the agenda for the near future. In Africa, as in most of the Global South, the state, was seen as the necessary principal actor in mobilising resources for investment for development.
However, over the period in which neoliberalism became the dominant ideology buttressing capital’s political fight back against labour’s increasing share of value and the ensuing falling rate of profit, especially from manufacturing, the order of the day has been to force the state to retreat. Financial liberalization, the privatization of state assets, the subcontracting of public functions to private enterprises, curbs on public expenditure, and laws curtailing the rights of trades unions were the building blocks of a process that saw capital recapture a greater share of value. These policies were not only pursued by governments but also became the key parts of the policy instructions to countries of the Global South seeking help from the international financial institutions, along with other ‘liberalisation’ measures concerned with exchange rates, capital flows and trade. Yet these recommendations flew in the face of the history of the very successful East Asian economies, especially South Korea, examples of a ‘developmental state’ in which investment was directed by a technocratic elite to specific productive activities as part of a manufacturing industrial and rural development growth strategy involving parallel state investment in education, skills and social welfare.
The state under neoliberal capitalism has been undergoing a process of what can best be called colonisation by capital such that the interests of the dominant global capital, both financial and industrial, were effectively aligned with those of the state. Now commonly known as ‘state capture’, this alignment has been enabled by the ‘revolving door’ in which political figures move into business and back into politics and vice versa, by business lobbying, by business funding of political parties at election time, and, as a consequence of privatisations and sub-contracting of public services, by an increasingly systemic relationship between capital and the state. There have always been close relations between powerful business lobbies and governments, but nowhere near as blatant and corrupt as they have become.
Today, the neoliberal project is under attack as never before, especially in the Global South as its failure to achieve real structural change becomes increasingly evident. Even in the global North, it is clear that especially since the 2007-8 financial crash, there has been a failure to deal with the causes of that crisis and a new one is predicted to be imminent. For the countries of the African continent, the ‘developmental State’ is looking an attractive label to adopt, even if the policies that are being pursued by those countries that adopt it, with the possible exception of Ethiopia, do not encompass the range and intensity of execution that characterised East Asian developmental states.
The research articles in this issue relate to many of these themes, and especially in the case of the first three, to the ways in which global corporate power manipulates the state in its own interest, supplanting previously national capitalist class influence over government policy. In Malawi, Julia Smith and Kelley Lee show how the colonial and post-colonial states have pursued policies that have been in the interests of the tobacco industry. In the colonial period, policy detrimental to the growing number of smallholder growers was determined in favour of estate owners and tobacco companies. With independence, as some of the estates passed to political allies of President Hastings Kamuzu Banda, policy reinforced their new economic power once again to the disadvantage of the small holders, both in terms of the price they received and the quality of leaf they were permitted to grow. The increasing domination of the global industry by a few tobacco corporates then led to the state supported growth of contract farming, once again ensuring that the estate producers and the global corporates took a larger share of value. They also gained sufficient power to prevent the state from challenging them by changing policies in favour of smallholders. The authors point to another aspect of state capture which emphasises the importance to the Malawian economy of tobacco cultivation even though Malawians receive little of the value, with the corporates blaming the anti-smoking lobby for falling demand and lower prices.
‘State capture’ is a phrase which in South Africa came to be associated with the relationship between the Gupta family and their business activities and the then President, Jacob Zuma. Less attention has been given to other global and local interests that have been given favourable status in that country and which can also be seen as ‘state capture.’ David Masondo documents the way in which the South African motor industry has been subsidised by what he terms the ‘business nanny state’ as opposed to the ‘developmental state’ under which banner this policy sometimes has appeared. Unlike a development state which directs investment, in partnership with enterprises and with the agreement of the capitalist class, to specific areas of the economy in order to, for example, maximise upsteam and downstream linkages, the state in this case can only impact on the levels of production and exports. Masondo argues that what the Motor Industry Development Programme has done is to reinforce the business strategy of the global motor corporations that control the industry, a strategy which ensures their profits by lowering production costs through state incentives, subsidies and lowering of tariffs so that more production is located in the country. Whereas in the case of South Korea, for example, vehicles were produced under licence to begin with, but the developmental state ensured that these domestic producers could acquire and develop the technology not only to produce the whole car, rather than assemble imported parts, but develop automobile technology further so as to produce new locally designed models, thus keeping more of the value within the economy. Masondo shows that the original domestic automobile industry operating under licences from foreign corporates did not follow the South Korean path but was allowed to be subsumed into the strategies of the dominant global firms whose continued presence in the country was assured through state financial support.
The consequence of neoliberal market ‘freedoms’ is that global corporations, like those controlling the South African motor industry, are able to move capital around the world wherever it can generate the highest returns, with the supplicant governments offering financial incentives to compensate for higher start-up or operating costs. Hence there has been a call, especially from progressive quarters, for instituting capital controls. Ilias Alami examines the history of capital controls and in particular their class character in reproducing capitalist social relations. He argues that it is important to discover the class dynamics behind capital controls especially given the calls from trades unions and progressive groups and academics for controls over the flows of money-capital across borders. Whereas previous capital controls under the apartheid state were necessary to maintain state power in the interests of Afrikaner capital, for any new capital controls to be progressive, they would have to have the objective of transformation of social relations with a greater empowerment of labour. The range of policy measures which Alami suggests to achieve this objective, involving as they would substantial regulation of foreign exchange and other financial markets, does raise the question of how far state capture has gone that would prevent such policies even being proposed by a South African government (or most others around the world). The political question of how to mobilise popular support for such policies in the face of global capital mobility remains as yet unanswered.
The state, whether captured or not, interacts with its citizens in many guises. One is through the collection of taxes. In a fascinating account of boat traders and their relations with state agents on the River Congo in the DRC, Maria Eriksson Baaz , Ola Olsson and Judith Verweijen show how payments to different state authorities on the river by boat traders carrying goods and people along the river are regarded by the traders as legitimate taxes and the extent to which they regard such payments as official, the DRC authorities having made certain payments illegal. In spite of their illegality, many of these payments are still made to recognised state authorities such as military personnel stationed on the river. One factor determining the legality of a payment is whether it provides a service worth paying for, rescue from capsizing for instance, rather than whether it is within the letter of the law or collected by state agents. The authors suggest that our distinctions between official and unofficial, or indeed between legitimate and corrupt, are not necessarily relevant or helpful in understanding how such taxes are accepted and how the money collected is apportioned. In this case we see taxation, both legal and illegal used to fund the provision of services and used to remunerate the service providers directly in the absence of a conventional paid employment system.
The Debates section of this issue is larger than usual as it is devoted to the ROAPE/Third World Network workshop on Radical political economy and industrialisation in Africa held in Accra last November. This is the first of a series of three workshops which ROAPE has sponsored across the continent in cooperation with local organisations. A similar version of the second, held in Dar es Salaam in April of this year will appear in a forthcoming issue. These workshops deliberately avoided an academic character and included a substantial proportion of activists from across the continent as well as academics and those who fit both descriptions. The feedback from participants has been very positive as is evidenced by the response of speakers and other participants alike in respectively submitting their presentations and blogposts. The workshops have been filmed and we are planning for them to be available on our website. Most importantly for ROAPE, they reflected the journal’s original political purpose: to deliver a forum for progressive and socialist activists and academics on the African continent which provides an analysis of African realities that will assist, however modestly, progressive forces in their struggles against corporate imperialism. The workshops also reflect the other founding purpose of the journal: to find or stimulate answers to the question of what is to be done to effect radical change, a question more on the agenda today than ever before.
The full issue can be accessed on the Taylor and Francis website here.
Peter Lawrence is Emeritus Professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Keele University and has taught in Tanzania, Uganda, and Canada and spent periods of research in Tanzania, Hungary, Spain and India. He is a founding member of ROAPE and a member of the EWG.
Featured Photograph: part of the Diego Rivera 1934 mural ‘El hombre en cruce de caminos’ (‘Man at the Crossroads’) in the Bellas Artes building, Mexico City.
Knowledge of the involvement of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in events on the African continent after 1945 is limited. The empirical base of the current state of research looks like a patchwork rug – with more holes than cloth. Only a handful of African states have actually been the subject of a case study on this issue and most of these works, if not all, have focused on German diplomacy. Usually Africa ‘policy’ is how this focus is referred to and it is dominated by one thesis. It covers the dominant role of the ‘Hallstein doctrine’ and the West German – East German contradiction in German foreign policies of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s but it neglects the roles of other–interests in German foreign policies, especially economic and geostrategic. In this blogpost for roape.net I am calling this thesis, as well as the whole discourse on German foreign policies/diplomacies, into question.
In 1949 two German states appeared on the world scene. The Federal Republic of Germany, bound to the West, and the German Democratic Republic, bound to the East. As both of its governments claimed to speak for the German people and the German nation, a ‘German-German’ contradiction arose, most notably manifesting itself in their domestic and cultural policies and public diplomacies. In 1955 a West German government delegation travelled to Moscow to restore diplomatic relations. As the West German government feared a similar approach by the GDR, Secretary of State Walter Hallstein declared the establishment of the ‘Hallstein doctrine’. The doctrine stated that recognizing the existence of the GDR and establishing diplomatic relations with it would be seen as an unfriendly act by the FRG, leading to negative consequences for foreign states. It was replaced by the more moderate ‘Scheel doctrine’ in 1969 and finally abrogated in 1973 when the German-German Basic Treaty became law. East Germany established a congenial doctrine in 1967 as well – the ‘Ulbricht doctrine’ – after West Germany’s new eastern policy had led to diplomatic relations with Romania. But be that as it may, in the end, it is the Hallstein doctrine that remains in Germany’s cultural memory.
In both German states politicians used the doctrine to gain political ground. West German politicians utilised it as an official reason why it was necessary to maintain an embassy in nearly every state of the world and East German politicians used it as an explanation that they could present to the East German public and the world why it wasn’t diplomatically present everywhere, namely the hostile attitude of the respective other German state. In the West and in the East historians and political scientists established the doctrine as the main thesis on contemporary German foreign policies. The Hallstein doctrine became the catchphrase of every study on German foreign relations between 1945 and 1972 – in several cases even lasting until 1989. The possibility of the existence of any other interests were never really pursued.
This is quite curious. After World War Two both German states developed quite well – in the context of their respective camps. West Germany went through the famous Wirtschaftswunder, its ‘economic miracle’, and East Germany – even though it never narrowed the gap on its capitalist brother state – also experienced strong economic development. However, no one ever connected the dots and tried to analyse the German countries’ foreign policies in context of their trade and economic policies. This is what I have tried to do.
A New Perspective on German Activities in Africa – the case of the Congo crisis
Yet a glimpse on the German involvement in the Congo crisis shows that national economic and international geostrategic interests dominated German activities. In July 1960, just days after Belgium Congo had become the Republic of Congo (Congo-Léopoldville), the crisis began. Already in the early spring of 1960, Congolese political parties had split up into two different camps. The regionalists, who wanted to decentralize power as they were only strong in their heartlands, and the nationalists, who wanted to centralize power as they had voters in each province of the country. As a result of the first national elections, Patrice Lumumba, leader of the centralistic Mouvement National Congolaise (MNC), became Prime Minister and formed a central government. Joseph Kasavubu, leader of the ethnic Association des Bakongo pour l’Unification, l’expansion et de la Défense de la Langue Kikongo (ABAKO) became President.
In July 1960 the conflict erupted, catalysed by Belgium, several other Western states and international companies which tried to use the conflict to pursue their own economic and geo-strategic interests. On July 5, the Congolese army mutinied when their Belgian officers told them that, even though independent, everything would stay the same in the Congo. Lumumba calmed the situation but on July 11 the state of Katanga proclaimed its independence and in August South-Kasai also broke away. The Congolese army intervened, leading to an actual clash between the regional forces and the central authority. Soon the Congolese government in Léopoldville was affected as well. Kasavubu started to disapprove of Lumumba’s policies openly. The conflict ended with a coup led by Colonel Joseph Mobutu in September. The elected government was annulled and Lumumba as well as several of his party colleagues were arrested.
In January 1961, after Lumumba and his comrades attempted to flee the capital, he and two of his colleagues were shot in Katanga by Belgian forces working with the breakaway government in Katanga. In the meanwhile, many of his supporters and former cabinet members had flown to the heartland of the Mouvement National Congolaise-Lumumba (MNC-L) in the North East of the country. They organised themselves in the region’s capital Stanleyville, where they proclaimed a second Congolese state. It existed until autumn 1961, when the governments of Léopoldville and Stanleyville reached an agreement to reunite. But the Lumumbists had been tricked. In the following months they were persecuted and faced reprisals. Many went underground or flew into the neighbouring Republic of Congo (Congo-Brazzaville) where they established a rebel movement. In 1964, they started a second uprising in and around Stanleyville and were able to conquer half the country.
In the meantime, the ‘independent state’ of Katanga was able to raise enough mercenaries to build up an effective army which was able to offer resistance against the army of the Congo until 1963. Only the intervention of the United Nations forced Katanga’s reunification with the Congo. South Kasai was easier to handle. It was already reunited with the Congo in 1962. To summarize the Congo Crisis was both an international conflict of constitutional, political, and economic power, and an external conflict of decolonization, the Cold War, and foreign economic interests – the latter being something that the two German states had a lively interest in.
In February 1960, when the famous conference Table ronde belgo-congolaise in Brussels – on which the decolonization of Belgium Congo was discussed – ended, Lumumba and two comrades, were invited to the FRG. In exchange for a written concession to keep the MNC on a pro-western course, support was promised and several offices for the MNC in West Germany were suggested in order to foster German-Congolese economic relations.
In the meantime, in the GDR, Antoine Gizenga, who in July 1960 would become Lumumba’s Vice Prime Minister, had already crossed the German-German border in Berlin in December 1959 to ask the East German government for support and the opportunity to open a Congolese exile government in its capital in case the Table ronde should fail. Even though some in East Berlin saw the country’s independence as another step towards world revolution, it was the Congo’s richness of minerals which became a major issue widely discussed by East Germany’s leadership.
In July 1960, just some days after the Congo had become independent, West Germany switched sides and started to support the anti-Lumumbist movement. Lumumba had given his first official dinner for the West German ambassador and some of his closest German friends, followed by a press conference solely for West German journalists. During these events he and Gizenga had presented their plans for the future: to centralize the government, regional governments should be shut down and replaced by so-called governors, selected by Lumumba himself. As a centralized state was not in the interest of the West and West Germany, the opposition party ABAKO became West Germany’s new favourite. It stood for a strong regionalism and a continuation of the country’s federal constitution. Lumumba and the MNC were its intractable opponents. The FRG supported the opposition by indirectly financing credits and initializing one of its biggest covert operations in Africa. The West German intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst was instructed by the chancellery to start ‘Operation Liane’. Over the next decade, about 23 million DM – respectively about 5 to 6 million U.S. dollars – were invested in the printing company Imprimerie Concordia. Financially and technically well equipped, this company soon attained a press monopoly, allowing it direct intervention into Congolese media. Its main objective was to weaken the Lumumbist movement. It had an unparalleled position, not only controlling Congolese media reports but also bribing journalists, editors and politicians as well as security and military officials.
Meanwhile East Berlin continued to develop plans for an extensive East German-Congolese cooperation. It was discussed sending hundreds of East German experts to help industrialize the country, educate its population, open its markets to East German products while extracting Congolese resources for East German industry not to mention exploiting its gold and coltan mines and its diamond fields.
But the Congo crisis thwarted these plans. As we have seen in September 1960 Kasavubu declared Lumumba ‘deposed’. Lumumba countered by arguing that only parliament could depose him and parliament had not. Kasavubu ordered Mobutu, to arrest Lumumba. However, Lumumba was unconfident what to do next and so his enemies finally took the initiative. Lumumba and some of his party colleagues were arrested. Representatives and delegations of the socialist camp had to leave the country. Lumumba’s remaining companions had to flee to Stanleyville taking possession of central treasury resources. With this money, they were able to bribe Congolese soldiers stationed at Stanleyville for several months. The Lumumbists became a military power.
Yet, Lumumba’s arrest at the end of 1960 put a spoke in the East German wheel, though only temporarily. The East had always favoured Vice Prime Minister Antoine Gizenga and parties like the Parti Solidaire Africaine, the Parti du Peuple, the Centre de Regroupement Africain and the Alliance de Bayanzi, whose leaders already in spring 1960 had planned to found a united socialist Congolese party. They supported Gizenga when he flew to Stanleyville and founded a new Congolese Republic, declaring himself Prime Minister. The East including the GDR, started to support the new republic by sending relief supplies via Egypt and the Sudan. East Germany was even asked to print counterfeit notes and the country’s new currency, as the government’s cash funds ran short. But East Berlin asked to get paid for this act of solidarity in advance – an impossible demand for the Stanleyville government. At least East Germany – after several Congolese requests – acknowledged the new republic as a state and in August 1961 even opened an embassy in Stanleyville. Though at that time, Gizenga already had started talks with the new Prime Minister in the capital Léopoldville, Cyrille Adoula. Both governments wanted to reunite, Gizenga not least because his government had run out of money. A mutiny of his troops seemed possible. So Gizenga and Adoula signed a pact. Unity was re-established and the East German embassy had to shut down.
In the meantime, West German companies were highly commercially active in the secessionist Congolese province of Katanga which had been at war with the Congolese central government since August 1960. In 1962 West German industry imported nine percent of its copper and 33 percent of its Cobalt from Katanga via Belgium. There are East German documents and Katanga press releases that even indicate that Deutsche Bank bought about 40 percent of the stocks of Katanga’s largest company, the Union Minières du Haute Katanga.
These are just some examples of German activities during the Congo crisis, but they already show quite clearly that national economic and sometimes even international geo-strategic interests dominated German activities–across both states.
Follow the Money …
Whereas geo-strategic interventions are sometimes hard to find, economic interests are even more often hidden – for various reasons. Studies usually base their economic information on official statistics which often only present a fragmented view of economic transactions. This applies especially to German trade. East German goods often were passed on as part of the German-German trade. They were relabelled as West German products and then went through West German ports to reach their destinations. East Germany also imported African goods via West Germany and the latter didn’t hesitate to trade with Africa via East Germany and several other European states as well. Statistics usually don’t take this transfer via third countries into account and, therefore, present a false picture of German trade – usually simply focusing on Europe.
Another reason for the ‘hidden’ nature of economic interests lies in the confidential character of companies’ investments which usually form an integral part of their business models. Furthermore, investments are decreasingly made by producing companies – to stimulate real economy processes – and increasingly by banks and private investors to stow money away at a safe haven – at a secure investment opportunity – during a financial crisis.
The German case is a powerful example of these processes. Between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s a first small wave of West German investments in Central Africa can be identified. During the Wirtschaftswunder period in the FRG foreign investments flooded the West German money market as its economy seemed to become stronger and stronger. Bonn started to fear an overheating of the West German economy. The solution they found was a cash outflow towards investment projects in the ‘Third World’. In the 1970s, a second, much larger cash outflow took place as the gold parity of the U.S. dollar was cancelled. This led to a financial crisis during which dollar owners tried to win peace in European currencies. They flooded the European money markets. Europe’s answer was to channel redundant money into investment projects in the ‘Third World’ – again also towards the Central African region. The biggest one of these was the German lead multinational investment consortium Association Internationale de l’Industrialisation du Nord-Est du Zaïre with a liquidity of around two billion DM – respectively 830 million dollars.
To understand these investments, where they come from and went to, gives important clues into the background of a foreign power’s engagement in the Central African region. This is especially important, if these powers described their behaviour as ‘selfless’ and ‘principled’ as was usually the case with the FRG and the GDR.
The Economic View – a new perspective on the German contribution to modern global history
The role the two German states played in the world after 1945 is still underestimated, not least owing to the Hallstein doctrine and the German-German contradiction. This prism of understanding dominates our thinking on German economic or geostrategic interests in the world after 1945. Both German states were, sometimes more, sometimes less, involved in the events of decolonization and the Cold War in Africa and the rest of the ‘Third World.’ In the Central African region, they played a role in all major conflicts; not just the Congo crisis, but in the Angolan colonial war, in the Angolan crisis, in the uprising of the Union des populations du Cameroun in Cameroon and in the Chadian fight against the Front de Libération Nationale du Tchad.
To ignore this involvement leaves important parts of the puzzle of global history unsolved. It therefore can be reasonably productive to look beyond the typical powerhouses of Washington, Moscow, Peking, Paris or London. Bonn and East Berlin can also be useful in filling out the blank spaces on the map of world history. But this is only possible if historians, researchers and activists start to accept that German interests didn’t stop at German borders and that these interests were mostly of economic origin – on both sides of the Berlin wall.
Torben Gülstorff is a freelance historian. In 2016 he completed his PhD in contemporary history and has worked on the history of West and East German activities in Africa after 1945. He supports the still ongoing UN investigation into the death of former UN General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld as a researcher.
Featured Photograph: An example of a 10 francs note showing Patrice Lumumba drawn in the GDR, possibly by an employee of the Foreign Office or one of the ‘Wertpapierdruckerei Leipzig.’ (Political Archive of the Foreign Office (PA AA), section Ministry for Foreign Affairs (MfAA), A 17295, Folder 2, Fiche 2, p. 197).
In an interview conducted in 2003, ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig spoke to Nelson Chamisa. Chamisa was then the National Youth Chairperson of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) In the early 2000s, the MDC was a very different organization, founded by a mass movement, with a large working-class membership many in the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). For a time, the MDC seemed on the verge of toppling the ruling ZANU-PF, in elections and on the streets. Now leader of the MDC, Chamisa promises his supporters victory in the elections and resistance if he does not win. In 2003 he was a 25-year-old organizer of a mass party, who, in this interview, reflects on his own activism as a student militant, his hope for socialist change and life as a Member of Parliament.
Leo: Can you tell me about yourself and the position that you hold in Zimbabwe?
Nelson: Currently I hold quite a number of positions. Of course, the first one is I am a Member of Parliament for a constituency in Zimbabwe called Kwadzana and I am also the National Youth Chairperson in the MDC, ever since the inception of the party in 1999. I was elected in an inaugural congress in 2000 as the Youth Chairperson. I have been a student leader as Secretary General of the Zimbabwe National Students Union (ZINASU) from 1998-2000. I was also the Student Representative Council president for Harare polytechnic 1998-9 and also 1999-2000. I served two terms of office. I had to leave my position when the party was fully fledged. It was no longer possible for me to balance activities as a political activist and my activities as a student activist.
Leo: Can you describe your background, so where you came from. Your family and how you came politically active?
Nelson: I always been active as a young man, although starting at very low levels at school. In primary school I was active on those microcosmic issues about how you get ball-point pens distributed, how you improve your relationship with the teachers, preventing them from beating you and disciplining you and all those things. But I think that I started to be really active in a representative capacity at my secondary school which was in Masvingo province. For my A levels at Victoria High I was then active in the debating club on national issues. We actually managed to be political at that level, headmasters expect you to accept everything as gospel, but we became critical and we did not accept the patronizing attitudes that were typical in High School. I then went to polytechnic where I started my radical activism.
This was in March 1998, when I got to the polytechnic, conditions there were quite appalling, and I found that students had no freedom to make their own decisions, to represent themselves and to articulate their own issues about academic freedom and the autonomy of tertiary education within the broad framework of governance. So, we said that should not be the case, and we sort of rekindled activism. I felt we needed to reinvigorate the student movement and we managed to do that. We then engaged in joint activities under the umbrella of ZINASU on anti-privatisation demonstration and anti-corruption demonstrations in 1998, which led to the closure of the polytechnic and the University of Zimbabwe (UZ).
You have already touched on it, but can you talk about the motivation for those closures?
Definitely there was a question of the payout and corruption in the corridors of government. But the most important historical event that motivated us to say, ‘It is possible for a student movement to make a difference in a country’ is what had happened in Jakarta in Indonesia [the Indonesian revolution in 1998 which eventually led to the resignation of President Suharto]. It played a very critical role – the Indonesian revolution, it was possible there it could also be in Harare. Most of the songs we were singing had do with Suharto being overthrown.
Can you remember any of the songs?
Of course, I can sing one of them. [He starts to sing] ‘Suharto aenda nengoro yemoto, Kana uchienda kuenda tanga wadhingura Mugabe.’ Meaning to say that, Mugabe has been overthrown, it is possible to remove Mugabe. If you want us to progress let us remove Mugabe because if we remove Mugabe all our problems will be solved. So, the motivation was to say that as students we were becoming the vanguard of the struggle. You must know that students usually have this microcosmic approach to issues, they deal with campus issues, like payouts, questions of freedom in higher learning but on this one we were trying to nationalise the student agenda, to be of consequence to a broader body politics in the country. We managed to make an impact, literally business was bought to a standstill during all of these demos. The closure of these institutions played a pivotal role in ensuring that the agenda and message that students were communicating was received by everyone across the country and we were very happy. Of course, the closure of institutions showed us that there were problems of students linking and connecting to broader issues, it was also a process of students learning to play a national political role.
Ideologically how did you describe yourself, define yourself at this time?
We believed in socialism, big time. We were socialists. I think it would be unfair and a distortion of history for any activists to talk about student activism without mentioning socialism and International Socialist Organisation (ISO). I was a member of ISO and quite an active member. ISO is a very significant chapter in the history of student activism. Most of our comrade and most of those before us Tendai Biti – who is now an MP – as a student activist, Learnmore Jongwe, Sikhala, Brian Kagoro, Hopewell Gumbo, myself we were all very active in ISO and our politics was motivated by that kind of radicalism. Especially at the polytechnic, we even had a branch and it gave us the motivation and helped develop us politically – ‘this is how we should take our struggle forward.’ Those debates were very important for us, because they focused us on bread and butter issues and on questions of privatization and politics. It emanated from our understanding of education as a right from a socialist perspective. But my heart bleeds if you look at the situation now, those things have just died down, we need to rekindle that kind of spirit. Because it has molded some of us in the hope that it would change the whole of society.
You came from a movement that had been anti-privatization, that was informed by the ideas of socialism – inspired by the lessons of Indonesia and revolution. The movement you wanted to create was equally radical and for the poor. Is that how you envisaged it?
Yes definitely. It was a poor people’s movement. These are the people who were suffering, workers who are poor saying, ‘It is now the time.’ And it was the period of radicalisation that was the motivation for us…
Once the MDC was formed on 11 September 1999, there was incredible support for the new party. In 2000 you had the referendum vote and then in June the election. It must have been an incredible period?
We just felt that finally people were beginning to understand. In fact, it was a rude awaking for Mugabe, we gave him a warning that he was finished. In June we got 57 seats, under conditions of violence and intimidation. I was now active full-time in politics [see Peter Alexander’s account of the historic 2000 elections].
Briefly can you tell me what were you saying to students at the time? Obviously, it was mobilization for payouts, but what about broader politics?
By the late 1990s they knew that it was not possible for the movement to provide for them but that it required a broader transformation… we were fighting the struggle from very many angles, to go and get what we needed from the department of education and the government. So, we were fighting from within and from without.
As a militant during this period, as the movement was rising constantly, the transition to democracy and to an MDC government, did you feel this was imminent, that it was going to happen within months?
That was my feeling. Although it has been delayed, we feel that it is an inevitable end and we will have a government for the people that will look at the issues for the poor, and fight for them.
Can you speak a little about the period of the formation of the MDC? At this time, you were trying to push radical politics and discussion in the new party?
Look at those pictures [he points to the wall of his office, where there are photos]. That was on the 11 September, that one, when the party was formed. Yes, when we were forming the party, we did it as Marxists. Those were some of the demonstrations that we were on [he points to more photos]. This was during the campaign [another photograph on his desk]. I was elected unanimously, even in my absence I was not there. Because of my history as a student activist, people knew me. But surprisingly there was serious resistance from the leadership of the party who I think were being influenced by certain neo-liberal sectors in the country, to say these people are too radical, they are too young. But the very reason for forming the party was to create space for young people.
The argument against you standing was that you were a loose cannon, with this radical background.
Exactly.
You described yourself as believing in socialism, yet you found yourself in a party that was rapidly advocating the policies of economic adjustment and austerity that you had rejected in the 1990s and that the MDC had been established to fight against. How did this play out?
We had a bourgeoisie element who came into the party to try to hijack the process and they succeeded for a period – in 2001 – in terms of writing polices that deviated from our original plans. So, they were altering some of the policies for their own neo-liberal ends, but we have been fighting in the party to refocus. The economic documents that they produced were a kind of bourgeois celebration. I think we have been trying to work on that, we are almost like a salad bowl – all these pieces coming in – but those capitalist elements were becoming dominant.
Naturally when you have a rising movement and party, you tend to see people from the middle class come in with their very fancy ideas, who can defend their ideas in boardrooms and on the internet. Really poor people don’t have access to internet, don’t have access to debates at the level of the boardroom. So, the hijacking I am talking about saw the manipulation of what the party stands for in the outside world. It is part of the serious flaws of the movement.
For a time, you were influenced by the socialist lawyer and activist Munyaradzi Gwisai [Gwisai was a leading socialist in the MDC and MP for Highfield, a working-class constituency in Harare, he was expelled by the party in 2002 and stood in Highfield as an independent socialist later that year]. Can you tell me something about this?
It was very sad Gwisai was expelled from the party, it was a victory for the neo-liberal forces within the MDC, some of us who feel that Gwisai was correct, in fact I agree with comrade Gwisai in every aspect. In terms of the party what he would say in the party I would support him thoroughly. I did not support the decision of the executive to expel him, the revolution is beginning to devour its own children, especially the shinning stars of the struggle. Those who were the vanguards of the struggle. It is really sad. I hope that Gwisai will find a way back into the movement and I think this is the contradiction within the struggle. I found it difficult to campaign for our candidates in Highfield against Gwisai. I feel that Munyaradzi had deserved to win. I would have celebrated more if he had won. That is all I can say. It was unfortunate development. It is sad to be part of an executive which makes such a capitalist decision.
Can you reflect on your political journey and your motivations as an activist and now MP?
We formed this party to realise certain objectives, and those objectives have not been realised. It might not be the MDC which is ultimately going to fulfill these hopes, but we have started from somewhere, and the germ that we have started will ultimately be completed by some of us. This is what has been our thrust and this is what will continue to be our thrust. It was not started as a sectional project, rather a project for the poor and the poor should be finally rewarded in the project that they started. Not giving back to the bourgeoisie, not rewarding the fat-bellied politicians who hijack the cause of the downtrodden of our society. This is our project.
Nelson Chamisa is currently the MDC Alliance President and member of the House of Assembly for Kuwadzana, Harare.
Featured Photograph: Nelson Chamisa speaking on Worker’s Day in Zimbabwe (1 May, 2018)
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