Plundering from Inside and Out

June 26, 2018

By Remi Adekoya

First and foremost, Lee Wengraf’s Extracting Profit provides a breathtakingly detailed account and analysis of some of the major socioeconomic ills that have been plaguing Africa for centuries. Amongst the host of issues she tackles, arguably the most consequential are mass poverty in African societies, their indefensible economic inequalities and the steady plundering of the continent’s resources, starting from the slave-trade era up till the present-day.

With a focus on how the extractive industries operate in Africa, she shows the negative political, economic, social and environmental impact of the carting away of Africa’s mineral and natural wealth by any means necessary for the past five hundred years. The book deploys tools of Marxist class analysis to offer interesting insights into the internal and external structural environment and policies that have made this plunder and the consequent poverty it has left in its wake possible.

Importantly, Wengraf also deconstructs the myth of the so-called ‘Africa Rising’ years showing how the overwhelming majority of wealth created during that period of rapid macro-economic growth flowed to the ruling classes and their cronies rather than to African societies as a whole. In fact, poverty levels in nations like Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and a poster-boy for the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative, actually rose during that period!

According to Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics, as at 2004, which is considered more or less the beginning of the ‘Africa Rising’ years, 54.7% of the country’s citizens lived in poverty. By 2016, that figure had risen to a whopping 67.1%. How anyone could claim a continent was rising when the poverty rate in its biggest economy was expanding as rapidly as it was beats the imagination.

Wengraf also rightly rubbishes the ridiculous claim made by the African Development Bank at the time that ‘one in three Africans’ was now middle-class. This was announced following the ridiculous calculation that anyone spending between $2-$20 a day could be categorized as ‘middle-class.’ The idea someone living on $3, $4 or even $5 a day in a continent where consumer goods even as basic as food can sometimes be more expensive than in Europe, is middle-class, is so preposterous I find it difficult to comment and it is certainly good riddance that the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative has died a natural death and is no longer taken seriously by thinking people both on the continent and outside it. Wengraf’s book also does very well in highlighting the economic and military rivalry between China and the US in Africa and the consequences this rivalry has had on policies and economic structures on the ground.

However, as someone who grew up in Nigeria and experienced first-hand the awful effects of poor governance and corruption, not just at the highest levels of government, among the political one percenters, but at the lowest levels of government, namely the local government level where funds earmarked for roads, schools and hospitals are often simply stolen, I think the book does a disservice by de-emphasizing these issues, downplaying African agency and involvement in them and suggesting their scale is being exaggerated by hypocritical and moralizing Westerners.

While the Western officials and institutions doing the ‘finger-wagging’ at African leaders that Wengraf writes of may indeed be very hypocritical and moralizing, that should not distract from the fact that Africa’s resources, quite significant in countries such as Nigeria and others, have been gleefully plundered by its political and bureaucratic classes from the highest levels to the lowest levels ever since independence. These Africans plundering the continent have not waited for orders from the West to do their looting but have happily taken it upon themselves to rob their fellow Africans. And, like I mentioned earlier, this does not just apply to those at the highest echelons of government but also to those at grassroots level local government politics as well.

For instance, when I was growing up in 1990s Nigeria, the road in front of my parents’ home was unpaved despite the fact we lived in what was considered a middle-class neighbourhood in the country’s commercial capital of Lagos. That road still remains unpaved today. Why? Well, as it happens, a few years ago after countless visits, letters and petitions to the local authority governing the area my parents lived in, the residents were finally informed that in fact funds had been allocated to the local government to pave the road in four different budget years. However, every single time, some person or group of persons working within the local government had simply pocketed the money! And so, the road remains unpaved.

This is just a tiny example of the real-life consequences of corruption and poor administration at all levels of government that people face in Nigeria every single day. People die because hospitals are poorly-equipped and under-staffed and this is often, not always, but often, due to corruption and poor governance more than anything else. Money allocated to buy medical equipment is simply stolen. The same goes for schools, universities and every other sphere in which the state is the main investor. Read the social media feeds of people in Kenya, Zimbabwe or Uganda, and they will often complain of exactly the same problems in their countries.

Without a change in the mind-set of those running the continent, no true change or revolution is possible for any systemic change would, in practical life, simply mean the replacement of one set of looters by another, only this time holding up different slogans. Change in Africa must start from change in attitudes to power. We cannot simply imply Africans have no agency and are helpless in the face of Western imperialist structures. If that is the case, then what exactly is the point of this whole independence thing anyway?

However, irrespective of these elements I disagreed with in her book, I think Lee Wengraf’s Extracting Profit is an absolute treasure-trove of facts and figures about Africa and its extractive industries and a very informative read for anyone generally interested in the socioeconomics of Africa past, present and future.

Remi Adekoya is the former political editor of the Warsaw Business Journal. He has provided socio-political commentary and analysis for BBC, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Stratfor, Geopolitical Intelligence Services and Radio France International among others. Remi is currently finishing his PhD research in politics at the University of Sheffield and is a member of ROAPE’s editorial working group. His twitter handle is @RemiAdekoya1

Featured Photograph: A giant diamond pit in Gauteng, South Africa. The mine is 190 metre deep and covers 32 hectares (18 May, 2011).

Mutual Profiting: Unpicking the Harvey-Smith Debate

ROAPE

June 21, 2018

By Esteban Mora

The entire debate between David Harvey and John Smith on roape.net on whether East Asia and the Pacific (including China) or the Triad (US, EU and Japan) is ‘draining’ the other is based on several misconceptions. The debate is based on Paul Baran and dependency theories, which postulate a correlative profiting of the ‘central’ countries over the ‘peripheral’ ones. This means there is a ‘drain of value’ from South to North, and just as companies in the North augment their profits, they ensure that companies in the South diminish their own. In simpler terms there is a correlative movement between rising profits in the North and falling profits in the South. So, this is what they look for in the relationship between BRICS or East Asia and the Western Triad, a relationship where there is a ‘drain’ or a flow of value from one region to the other. But these notions are not entirely accurate, and hence the terms of the debate

For example, the rate of profit is higher in the South thanks to a less developed organic composition and cheap constant capital (something pointed out by Ernest Mandel), which means a higher rate of profit not only for international companies operating in the South, but for the local Southern bourgeoisie as well. The mass of profits might be significantly inferior, but not its rate. The same mechanism which is seized by companies in the North in profiting from the South, is used as well by the local and weaker bourgeoisie.

Another example is the export sector. The export sector in the South acquires dollars (or any other dominant currency as means of payment, depending on the region and the trading partners, etc), and this means they have acquired an overvalued currency in nominal and exchange market terms, which gives them an advantage over sectors dealing with the local currency. Not only that, but fluctuations in this currency (for example, the dollar) now affect not only the companies in the North, but the local bourgeoisie whose assets are now in dollars and who have greater purchasing power because of that. So once more the same mechanism which produces or increases profits or even gives advantages to countries in the North, also gives advantages to the local bourgeoisie in the South.

These examples contradict the notion of a correlative movement between rising profits and diminishing profits which is supposedly ‘ingrained’ in the very relationship of dependency between ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ countries. In addition, not only is the notion of ‘dependency’ based on Ricardian assumptions (measuring value as price, and so measuring value in absolute terms or in terms of mass, and not relatively), but it seems to be extremely partial in its understanding of the world market. I am not denying there is a ‘draining’, or unequal exchange (which is not the same in Raúl Prebish as it is in Arghiri Emmanuel, two prominent pioneers of dependency theory and unequal exchange), but that imperialism cannot be reduce to these phenomena.

What does this mean? It means you do not have to look only for an inversion between ‘drained’ countries and countries who ‘drain’ the others, but also a relationship of mutual profiting between an international bourgeoise which in no way makes the Triad ‘dependent’ on East Asia. Dependency theories are partial and cannot be said to summarize the totality of relationships which can be encountered in the international market, nor the operations of imperialism.

Of course, the Triad has an upper hand financially, but nobody can overlook the fact that East Asia and the Pacific is producing more value added in industry (as well as being the biggest producer of high tech in the world in terms of value added), and has larger capital formation than the Triad, or has more capital good exports than the Triad. All of these elements of capitalist production were dominated by the Triad just a few decades ago, and they were considered marks of their imperialistic character over the world market. Increasingly they are being taken over by East Asia. Instead of looking for a relationship that involves ‘draining’ as a marker of imperialism or not or seeing the Triad on the verge of becoming ‘dependent’ on East Asia, we must also look for relationships which are beneficial for all bourgeoisie – whether they are from a large central state in the United States, the UK or Japan, or a smaller capitalistic partner like the ones in the South (in this respect, Harvey is also mistaken in looking for such ‘draining’). We have to go back to the notion from Lenin’s Imperialism where ‘central’ states and ‘peripheral’ states are all ‘agents of financial capital’, and not simply the ‘central’ ones that operate against the ‘peripheral’ ones. This contradicts the ‘three worlds theory’ on which dependency is based (and seems to inform much of the context of the debate on imperialism on roape.net) and makes us look at international economic phenomena, instead of national or regionalist frameworks.

We also need to make a small correction. Smith argues that this study reveals not only financial returns, but also FDI, portfolio investments and repatriated profits. But it is only from tax heavens, not the whole world market. If we go to the data for world corporate profits or FDI, etc (see the report here), we realize the South or ‘emerging’ economies are not only profiting at almost the same level as the North in absolute terms (for example, the 10 biggest Chinese companies in the Fortune 500 have revenues for 2,11 trillion dollars, while the 10 biggest US companies in the same list have revenues for 2,22 trillion), but that this means a superior dominance in portfolio investments or dividends than the North in relative terms. The problem with focusing on absolute terms (as Smith does in his book Imperialism in the 21^st Century) is that you do not have the same purchasing power in the US as you do in China (means of production or raw materials do not cost the same in the US as in China, even if they have the same absolute mass of profits), and as Michael Roberts points out, there is no socially necessary value for the whole world, but only for specific societies. This means the absolute mass of profits can be bigger in companies in the North (for example, General Motors, as is pointed out by Smith), but that does not mean the same control over means of production, the same purchasing power, nor the same rate of profit (which is bigger in the South). This is why FDI, portfolio investments and profits in general are relatively superior in the South or emerging economies at the moment, as well as gross capital formation or value added for industry for East Asia. In addition, the nominal GDP, if considered equal to total profits (not corporate profits, but the totality of profits produced by a society before it is distribution into profit, interest and rent), is of course dominated by the South, specifically East Asia.

Besides what I have already said, we have to clearly state the limitations of dependency theory. Not only is it a Ricardian paradigm, but ‘three worlds theory’ disconnects nations and regions in the world market, when in reality, and beyond all mystifications, there are relationships of mutual profiting within a global financial bourgeoisie. Another perspective that considers this relationship is world-system theory, but it chief proponent Immanuel Wallerstein still divides the globe into the ‘three worlds view’.

Such ideas do not exist in the original theories of imperialism made by Nikolai Bukharin or Vladimir Lenin. For these writers all nation-states, whether bigger or smaller, were considered imperialists or agents of financial imperialist capital. The division into three worlds was inserted historically into Marxist frameworks by Alfred Sauvy, Frantz Fanon or Lin Piao, and dependency theory picked it up from there. But even if dependency is correct on the fact that underdevelopment persists, capital exports and multinational capitals are being socialized in every single nation-state in the world, which is precisely why East Asia now is dominant (specifically in productive terms).

In conclusion, we are witnessing a refutation of dependency, in the fact that capital has penetrated rural and urban life in the South, from agriculture to high tech industry. We are also seeing an inversion of positions between North and South which does not imply a new dependency of the North, something nobody in the study of emerging multinationals, BRICS or East Asia seems to be proposing. Instead of an inversion of dependency as Smith and others seem to be arguing on roape.net, we must look at other ways to understand the vital processes that we are witnessing.

Esteban Mora is a graduate student in Communications Science at the Universidad de Costa Rica, he has written three books, and writes a Marxist economics blog. He has written a detailed blogpost Colonialism and periphery: Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

Featured Photograph: Protest at the G20 Meltdown protest in London on 1 April 2009

A Self-Enriching Pact: Imperialism and the Global South

ROAPE

June 19, 2018

By Andy Higginbottom

Does the concept of imperialism explain major characteristics of the capitalist world in the 21st century? John Smith is right to insist that it does. Smith’s argument in the ROAPE exchange with Harvey makes three crucial points, that:

there is an ongoing and systemic transfer of value from the Global South (including China) to the global North
the basis or source of this international transfer is the super-exploitation of workers in the Global South
while capitalist super-exploitation of labour has been present since Marx’s time, it’s scope has expanded rapidly to include manufacturing in the last period, and this drives neo-liberal globalisation.

Harvey does not deny the second point completely, at least he recognises that labour super-exploitation occurs, but he does not accept that any rethinking of Marx is required to take account of it as a concept. Harvey’s argument is rather that super-exploitation should not be made too essentialist, nor can he agree the systemic determinations of the first and third points. In short, Harvey denies the categorical significance both of imperialism and of labour super-exploitation.

Selectivity of evidence

Smith’s important book Imperialism in the 21st Century proceeds from global patterns of value production and distribution, including a critical analysis of the very data available to us to identify those trends, in particular the distorting lens of the ‘GDP illusion’.[1] Both in the book and in response to Harvey, Smith assembles evidence of the massive and indeed increasing drain of value to the US, Europe and Japan from the Global South and challenges Harvey to substantiate his claim that this flow has been reversed.

In marked methodological contrast, so far Harvey’s response is absent of data and mostly rather anecdotal. But even these anecdotes are to be qualified under scrutiny. For example, Harvey writes: ‘A cursory look at land grabs all across Africa shows Chinese companies and wealth funds are way ahead of everyone else in their acquisitions. The two largest mineral companies operating in Zambia’s copper belt are Indian and Chinese.’

Taking indeed a cursory look at Zambia one finds that of the ‘big four’ copper mining companies, two are Canadian (Barrick and First Quantum), one is Swiss (Glencore) and one is owned by the Anglo-Indian conglomerate Vedanta. Chinese companies do run several smaller mines, but not one of these majors. China has been playing a distinct role in big infrastructure projects.

The sources of accumulated foreign direct investment stock in Zambia, as of mid-2016 are Canada 27.3%; the UK 20.3%; China 14.5%; Switzerland 12.9%. So, China’s stake is significant, but what slips past unmentioned in Harvey’s overview, is the greater stakes of Canada and the UK, two traditional Western imperialist mining powers. UNCTAD data confirms the rapid increase in Chinese mining FDI in Africa. But is that the only message we take from the following table?

Top Ten Countries of Mining FDI in Africa

Country of Origin	2010 $bn	2015 $ bn
United States	55	65
United Kingdom	47	58
France	52	54
China	13	35
South Africa	19	22
Italy	10	22
India	12	17
Singapore	20	16
Switzerland	12	14
Malaysia	17	12

The unstated big picture that the table indicates is the continuing pre-eminence of the US, UK and France, the three established powers in Africa. China is not yet ‘way ahead’ of Western imperialism, but is rapidly catching up and does threaten to soon begin to overtake them. Right now there is a whole industry of China watchers, but the point is in what context and against what competition does China rise?

Western imperialism is the unmarked legacy centre here. One hardly need add that the reality of the unmarked centre is that all such figures are routinely reported in US dollars, the de facto world currency. Where are the critical watchers of the continuing super-profits of the US, UK, France (Switzerland, Canada, Australia etc) whose banks and extractive corporations are still the main beneficiaries of the exploitation of the labour and natural resources of Africa, Asia and Latin America?

At the same time, the global mining industry is an index of China’s dramatic rise. PWC publish an annual report on the top 40 mining companies in the world. The two biggest companies ranked by market capitalisation are BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto Zinc, both UK/Australia bi-national corporations. There is just one Chinese company in the top 10, but it has 11 corporations arriving in the top 40. The report shows that China is moving from being the main source of demand, as it was in the last ‘super-cycle’, to anticipating the next cycle. At the bottom of the commodity cycle, Chinese companies have been buying up assets and are poised to take advantage of the next upswing, in other words to establish supply lines to manufacturing and become sellers as well as buyers of industrial minerals. This is a further challenge to the interests of the existing powers.

It was long ago pointed out by Kwame Nkrumah that mining corporations are a major agent of neo-colonialism. To what degree the growing incidence of Chinese corporations alters that exploitative relation in Africa is part of the even bigger discussion to which we now turn.

Sub-imperialism as neo-colonialism

On roape.net Patrick Bond highlights the emergence of sub-imperialism of the BRICS countries as a major phenomenon of the last period that has to be taken fully into account. We can agree this, but, as Walter Daum’s post argues, the emergence of the BRICS does not mark the demise of imperialism, rather it is evidence of a modified imperialism entering a new phase.

There is in any case a strong differentiation within the BRICS grouping: between the former socialist giants Russia and China that are respectively actual and potential global powers on the one hand; compared with Brazil, South Africa and, despite its tremendous size, even India on the other. Big capital in the latter countries is not fully independent of the West, as a general pattern it works in alliance with Western capital, as the junior partner. These joint relations have various forms, but the key point is of an alliance to the advantage of both parties. One aspect of this is a reconfiguration of location to London as a financial centre. Some of the stronger extractive companies have moved their corporate HQs from their main country of operations to London, where they get better terms in the capital markets, and the protection of the UK state for their global operations. South Africa allowed its corporate big-hitters, the beneficiaries of apartheid, to migrate to London in the late 1990s. Vedanta has followed that trend. Vedanta is no longer simply an Indian corporation, it is bi-national between the UK and India. With its roots in the fortune of Anil Agarwal, and still over 60% owned by him, Vedanta is listed on the London Stock Exchange. This is a pattern of big capital based on super-exploitation that has emerged in the Global South, seeking to consolidate its position and scope through a partnership with finance and the state in the imperialist centre.

It is important to remember the concept of sub-imperialism that Ruy Mauro Marini developed concerning Brazil, and which Bond extends more generally, has two sides to it. Sub-imperialist states are situated in a singular condition in the international hierarchy of nation states. As sub-imperialist states they are in a mid-level location that is constrained by rules set in the interests of more powerful states, whilst as sub-imperialist states they have some capacity to impose on their regional neighbours. What this means in terms of international economic exploitation is a pattern where value is transferred into the sub-imperialist capitals, mostly from ‘their’ region, at the same time as it flows out of these countries to the imperialist North (or West as you prefer). Sub-imperialism is still based on the super-exploitation of those at the bottom, with a more refined division of the super-profits up the chain.

Imperialism in the 21st century does not for the most part rule directly through colonial means, but indirectly through an alliance with national elites who have captured their national state and thrown their lot into voluntary, self-enriching pact with the global system. Neo-colonialism is such a well known endemic condition in Africa and across the Global South that it is surprising that Bond should lose sight of it in his analysis. Concerning corruption in Africa Bond writes:

the sleight of hand here is the ability of local elites – not just Western or BRICS corporations – to accumulate offshore in places like Mauritius (the African continent’s leading hot money centre). This part of the outflow is not a function of ‘imperialism’ but local greed and higher profits gained by an unpatriotic bourgeoisie who can hold funds offshore (even idle), instead of investing in African economies whose currencies are often rapidly declining in value.

The point is relational, that the neo-colonial form of imperialism is an alliance of interests with two parties involved, but what underpins the locally sourced elite corruption is indeed a function of imperialism’s ultimate control over the destiny of African nations. Militarily, ever since Patrice Lumumba, the imperialist powers have intervened forcefully to make sure that it is the greedy and unpatriotic who rule. Economically, it is imperialist relations that determine that African currencies decline in value, it is imperialist corporations that are sucking out Africa’s wealth. Local oligarchs salt away their gains in the imperialist centres. If imperialism could be wished away by putting scare quotes around it, we would all have a simple job indeed!

Sub-imperialism does not mean the end of imperialism, rather it is a mutation out of neo-colonial capitalism and continues to demonstrate many of its features, with a further internalisation and class differentiation along pro and anti-imperialist lines.

Labour super-exploitation as cost reduction

Let us now turn to the theory of labour super-exploitation. Labour super-exploitation as a specific dimension of surplus-value further accentuates the distinction that Marx established between the cost of labour-power to the capitalist and its unique use-value as the source of surplus-value. Capital can increase surplus-value by reducing the cost of labour-power, the price it pays for labour-power of a given quality; this decreases the necessary labour time required to produce the equivalent value of ‘paid labour’, and increases the ‘unpaid labour’ that capital expropriates. By reducing the cost of labour-power, capital expropriates an extra surplus-value at the worker’s expense, the worker is even more exploited than hitherto. This dimension of increased exploitation by lowering wages (or even no wages at all) holds in combination with the other dimensions determining surplus-value, specifically the extent of labour time, its intensity and labour’s productivity. As I argue elsewhere, and building on the breakthrough in this field by Marini and other authors, labour super-exploitation requires a further elaboration of Marx’s concept of surplus-value beyond absolute surplus-value and relative-surplus value. [2]

To explain the paradigmatic Foxconn/Apple case, where surplus-value is produced in one part of the world and realised in another, we need to fill in one more gap in the theory, and that is to explain the difference between a commodity’s cost of production and its full value. Marx examines this distinction, but not until Volume 3 of Capital, where he explains the relation between the production of surplus-value and its realisation as profit. In the surface reality of capitalism, a commodity’s value appears not as itself but in the modified form of cost of production plus profit, this is indeed what capitalism knows of itself. But capitalism cannot explain, nor does it need to, that the source of profit is surplus-value extracted from the workers. Marx’s explanation is founded on the change in form, from surplus-value as essence into profit as appearance. The capitalist only sees profit, yet behind profit there must be surplus-value. As already noted, Marx did not integrate labour super-exploitation into his theory of surplus-value in Volume 1, but the need to do so is even more pronounced in Volume 3 when we consider this change of form from surplus-value to profit, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The extra surplus-value becomes super-profits that are either retained by a group of capitals that enjoy more favoured access to cheap labour, or spread to raise the general rate of profit.

John Smith and several authors have analysed the relations involved in Foxconn/Apple, as does David Harvey, who seems to converge with our analysis when in his book Seventeen Contradictions he points out the difference between the location of surplus-value production and its realisation as profit:

By exerting immense pressure on the capitalist producers, the merchant capitalists and the financiers, for example, can reduce the return to the direct producers to the smallest of margins while racking up major profits for themselves. This is how Walmart and Apple operate in China, for example. In this case not only does realisation occur in a different sector, it also occurs across the ocean in another country (creating a geographical transfer of wealth of considerable significance) (2015, p. 84).

Indeed so. But then how does this explanation fit with Harvey’s reverse transfer thesis?

Walter Daum comments wittily, ‘Hm, a transfer of wealth from East to West? In the same book, as John has already noted, [Harvey] argues that the transfer has been reversed: “The flow of wealth from East to West that had prevailed for some two centuries was reversed and China increasingly became the dynamic centre of a global capitalism as the West, after the financial crash of 2008, lost much of its momentum.” Is this David Harvey’s Eighteenth Contradiction?’[3]

We put the two ingredients of labour super-exploitation and profit realisation together and we get a theoretical explosion. The price at which Foxconn sells on to Apple allows both capitals to make a profit, but Apple’s buying price is set at the cost of production plus a significantly lower profit for Foxconn. This means that the extra surplus-value produced by the workers in China is realised as super-profits by Apple rather than by Foxconn, by virtue of the wide discrepancy between its buying price and its selling price. Labour super-exploitation is hidden in plain sight, in the terms of commodity exchange. Apple’s role compared to Foxconn in this relation is similar (not the same) as that of the landowner vis a vis the tenant farmer in Marx’s theory of ground rent. Ownership of the Apple technology and brand is an expression of monopoly within the law of value.[4]

Combine conditions of labour super-exploitation with high labour productivity and you have arrived at the gates of capitalist heaven, since both together really puts the cheap into cheap commodities. This combination is however deadly for the super-exploited work force, as in Foxconn, and often relies on gendered oppression in many sectors.

This general pattern has a further twist in the extractive industries. In extractive capitalism labour productivity is enhanced by capital’s appropriation of any particular condition found in nature that gives a high yield in use-values against effort expended, copper deposits for example. Under imperialist social relations cost reduction goes one step further, and does not cover the social and ‘external’ costs of the destruction of the environment. This now lethal cocktail is more than ‘accumulation by dispossession’, Harvey’s much overworked phrase. Access to the land and its conversion into means of production is at first obtained by dispossession, as in clearing off the local inhabitants from their territory, and then by combined super-exploitation in order to generate a high rate of surplus-value and realise it as profit. Framing extractive imperialism as dispossession carries a truth but its one-sided. Dispossession sets up the pre-conditions of extractive accumulation but does not alone explain the internal condition that generates super-profits from the realisation of extra surplus-value produced by the workers.

Capitalist accumulation by super-exploitation is the premature exhaustion of all forms of life; the life-giving energies of human workers and the life-giving energies that capitalism draws from nature, that it will never replenish.

The limits of Harvey

Harvey is coming to the end of his Marx cycle. He points out that with the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it the traditional communist parties, Marxist thought has survived predominantly in academia. One can only add, with the distortions that entails. In my view Harvey’s lasting contribution is as a Marxist informed geographer, rather than in critical political economy. Notwithstanding his contribution as a communicator and educator, and his celebrity as ‘the world’s leading expert on Karl Marx’, nonetheless Harvey is an unreliable guide to Capital.

Harvey jokes of a disease called ‘volumeoneitis’, whose afflicted believe that studying the first book is enough to grasp Marx’s theory, and he rightly argues it isn’t. He emphasises the need to study all three volumes of Capital to get a holistic view from Marx. But then he does not follow his own advice, and especially he has little helpful to say on the first half of Volume 3, Parts One to Three. As a geographer Harvey does foreground Part Six of Volume 3 and Marx’s theory of rent, but overall he draws his main lines of interpretation of the totality of the system from Volume 2, rather than Volume 3.

Indeed, Harvey suffers from the rarer but growing disease of ‘volumetwoitis’. Linked to this is his shorthand that Volume 1 is about production of commodity values, Volume 2 is about realisation and Volume 3 about distribution. This framing is only partially correct, for it misses the vital point that Marx completes his explanation of realisation, the realisation of surplus value as profit, in parts One to Three of Volume 3, culminating in the formation of the general rate of profit and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Only once Marx establishes the laws of profit does he then move the analysis on to profit’s distribution as interest, merchant’s profit and rent, that is, from Part Four onwards. Harvey’s rendering of Capital downplays the significance of Marx’s general, systemic laws of profit that demonstrate the capitalist mode of production’s inevitable tendency to crisis.

Harvey theorises capitalism as process as distinct from capital as social relation, whereas Marx’s methodology combines both aspects that become expressed in laws of motion. In Capital contradictory internal relations become articulated as systemic laws of motion that point clearly to the inevitability of systemic crisis. Even before we get to Lenin, Harvey cavils against determinacy in Marx. There are many expressions of this in Harvey’s work: his preferred definition from Marx that capital is ‘value in motion’ rather than capital as ‘self-expanding value’; his misrepresentation of Marx’s explanation of relative surplus-value, a key concept in Volume 1;[5] his aversion to the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline; his preference for Volume 2 over Volume 3; the continued emphasis on surplus capital, and so on.

But the revealing denouement of Harvey’s mistaken approach comes with his presentation of the capitalist mode of production as a circuit, an analogy with the hydrological cycle – water vaporises off the sea, forms clouds that rain, becomes rivers and returns – so the circuit of capital passes through production, realisation and distribution, and so on. The crunch comes next when Harvey asks the question ‘where does the energy come from to propel the system onwards?’ In the hydrological cycle the answer is the Sun, the Sun’s rays of energy. Next he asks, what is the source of energy coming into the circuit of capital? Pause there, what answer would you give?

Would you not expect the answer be labour, or perhaps labour in combination with nature, as the energy source? Is it not from there, from inside the box labelled ‘production of commodities’, that labour’s living energy creates the new value that animates the entire system? Whether it be enslaved on the colonial plantation, loading at the docks, slogging away in the assembly plant, cleaning toilets or laying bricks – labour animates the system. The even more deeply hidden source of energy into the system is the unpaid and socially unrecognised caring labour, almost entirely performed by women, that contributes to the reproduction of labour power. Yet Harvey’s answer mentions none of these, and is nothing short of jaw dropping. For him the new energy comes into the system from three places, capital in production, capital in realisation and capital in distribution. Not from labour at all.[6]

This then is the reductio ad absurdum of Harvey’s position: his prioritisation of capitalist process over capitalist social relations; his not seeing the agency of capital as anything other than an inversion, that its social power through accumulated money is entirely derivative from the expropriation of labour. The denial of imperialism is not only a denial of labour super-exploitation, in the end it is a denial of labour itself.

For a rejuvenated Marxism, for anti-imperialism

Finally, we come to agency. Harvey’s latest contribution was a ‘commentary’, more like a ‘correction’, to the Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik’s articulation of drain theory.[7] These authors critique both Luxemburg and Lenin’s theories of imperialism, and emphasise that imperialism is an ‘abiding relationship under capitalism’ (p. 87). From their perspective capitalism has always been imperialist. Indian drain theory has a long tradition from the days of British colonisation.[8] Critical social science in Latin America and Africa has produced similar theories that correspond to the conditions of colonial capitalism and its aftermath. It is not only Marxists who recognise colonialism as exploitation, and that its legacy persists in India’s relations with the world economy. But since we are particularly interested in Marxist theoretical elaboration of drain theory, there is a risk that these voices will be drowned out.

Can the subaltern Marxist speak against imperialism? Even discussing imperialism as formative of contemporary capitalism invites the irritation of the world’s leading expert on Marx. After explaining the impact of British colonial and imperialist thought on India, Radha S’Souza concluded that ‘we cannot use capitalist knowledge to build socialism, or imperialist knowledge to exercise self-determination.’ David Harvey responded with ‘you could resolve all those questions without changing the capitalist dynamic’, and asks ‘what does it mean to be anti-capitalist?’ [9]

This brings us to the question of where the power of imperialism resides and where resistance to it is coming from in the 21st century. The Third World War has already begun, in the form of structural violence and proxy wars against the oppressed in the ‘third world’, their significance largely unnoticed by the doyens of euro-centric Marxism.

One exception to the rule of ‘unnoticed’ was the Marikana Massacre, the police shooting dead 34 striking miners, whose awful televised presence made it an immediate world event, entering into global consciousness. Thomas Piketty opens his book with the massacre. But, pace Piketty’s explanation, Marikana was about structurally exploitative social relations than cannot be understood through his limiting lens of inequality. The migrant labour system, the condition of racialised and gendered labour super-exploitation bedevils platinum mining as much as gold and diamond mining before it. As I know fellow activist Patrick Bond agrees, the massacre hinged on the toxic collusion between the ANC leadership, the police and the UK based Lonmin corporation.[10] After the massacre, one of its principal perpetrators Cyril Ramaphosa was protected by Farlam at the official enquiry and has since risen to the presidency, from which executive position he now appeals for more foreign investment. If the Marikana Massacre and its aftermath are not evidence of continuing neo-colonial imperialism, what is?

The platinum mineworkers returned to strike action, and their struggle continues. As does the struggle of black students, against colonial education and neoliberal fees.[11] As does the struggle of the Amadiba Crisis Committee, fighting the destruction of their way of life by a coast stripping Australian corporation MRC.[12] As do the struggles of Abahlali baseMjondolo[13] and the Cape Town based Housing Assembly [14] for the most elementary, decent housing. The people in all of these struggles are facing criminalisation and assassination, yet they continue their fight for dignity. Theirs is the energy of humanity.

As further demonstration of the structural and ongoing neo-colonial violence that is normalised as business as usual, in Colombia since the signing of the ‘peace agreement’ in November 2016 the state’s dirty war has led to 150,000 people being forcibly displaced and over 200 social movement and environmental activists have been assassinated.[15] Yet here again real mass mobilisation continues, as evidenced by the three week long general strike of Afro descendant Colombians in Buenaventura in May/June 2017, literally a life or death struggle for half a million people to have a public hospital in their port city.[16]

As for proxy wars, it was the US and UK as imperialist military powers who were the principal architects of the genocidal massacre of 70,000 and more Eelam Tamils in 2009, not China despite its economic strength and self-serving support for the murderous Sri Lankan regime.[17] The Eelam Tamils have the grave misfortune of seeking independence at a strategic location for the playing out of inter-imperialist rivalries, right by the crossing of the world’s major sea lanes in the Indian Ocean. The US and UK need a unitary Sri Lankan state, and especially Trincomalee harbour, as an integral part of their 21st century geo-strategy, the so-called ‘pivot to Asia’. Whether Obama or Trump or Clinton, the US is showing every sign it will use naval force to block the consolidation of China as an independent global actor. Such is the geography of imperialism.

Let us take one last example from the same part of the world, the popular uprising in Thoothukudi, Tamil Naadu against Vedanta subsidiary Sterlite copper, that planned to double production at its copper smelting plant that already produces 40% of India’s copper.[18] The nearby communities have suffered the smelter’s contamination for years and decided enough is enough. They mobilised action to demand the District Collector (designated as the revenue collector for the British in colonial times) block the expansion. The police shot thirteen protestors dead in what looks like targeted assassinations, followed up with mass detentions and torture.[19] One heartening aspect of a dreadful situation is the immediate response of Tamils in the diaspora, the Foil Vedanta campaign and others mounting strong protests in London. The London solidarity effort adds important leverage to the heart of the struggle, the mass movement in India.

Struggles like Marikana, Buenaventura and Thoothukudi are the real movement context of John Smith’s challenge to David Harvey. The debate confirms the urgent need for a rejuvenated Marxism that contributes to the renewal of anti-imperialism, with our special responsibility of doing so in the global North.

Can euro-centric Marxism continue to deny the fact capitalist imperialism is systemic plunder of the working class in the Global South? What indeed does it mean to be anti-capitalist, if not at the same time being anti-imperialist? If it does not aid the fight against imperialism what is Marxism worth? Capitalist imperialism has to be fought in theory and practice. Wherever imperialism exists, sooner or later the empire strikes back. These are values that also need to be transferred from South to North, and not before time.

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

Featured Photograph: Marines stand guard outside a destroyed Panamanian Defense Force building during the first day of Operation Just Cause, on 20 December, 1989.

References

[1] See John Smith, Imperialism in the 21st century Monthly Review Press, 2015 Chapters 6 and 9; and John Smith ‘The GDP Illusion: Value Added versus Value Capture’ Monthly Review, July 2012

[2] Andy Higginbottom ‘Structure and Essence in Capital and the Stages of Capitalism’ in Journal of Australian Political Economy No 70, 2012; 251-270

[3] Personal communication, 15 June 2018

[4] Torkill Lauesen and Zac Cope give a good explanation in ‘Imperialism and the Transformation of Values into Prices’ Monthly Review July-August 2015 67(3) ; 54-67

[5] Harvey summarises Marx’s position as “Machines are a source of relative surplus-value but not of value” David Harvey, A Companion To Marx’s ‘Capital’, 2010, p169. This is just nonsensical, arrived at by snipping sentences out of context. The underlying point is that capital uses machines as a ‘source’ of relative surplus-value only because by doing so labour is rendered more productive and the individual labour time taken to produce a given commodity produced is less than the socially necessary labour time. Workers’ labour creates value and relative surplus-value, using machines to do so.

[6] ‘Visualizing Capital’ with Professor David Harvey from minute 22 onwards

[7] Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism, 2017 Columbia University Press.

[8] For a recent reminder see Shashi Tharoor Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, 2017 Chapter 1.

[9] Radha D’Souza Industrialism, Law, Science and Imperialism, 2015 minute 22:14 and David Harvey Speech at Network AQ Conference II, 2015 minute 18:45

[10] A term coined by Dali Mpofu. See Dali Mpofu, Mpati Qofa and Reghana Tulk Heads of Agreement On Behalf Of Injured And Arrested Persons, 2014

For a review of the literature, see Andy Higginbottom The Marikana Massacre in South Africa: the Results of Toxic Collusion, 2018

[15] Stephen Gill, ‘Are Colombia’s social leaders facing another extermination?’ Colombia Reports 22 February 2018

[16] See Seb Ordóñez and Patrick Kane Colombian strike: ‘To live with dignity, our people don’t give up’ 31 May 2017

‘The “military response” of the Government to Buenaventura: 300 wounded, 10 with firearms’ 5 June 2017

[17] See Bremen Human Rights Association and Permanent Peoples Tribunal on Sri Lanka.

[18] Vedanta Resources, A Great Diversified Story – Mining Indaba presentation, 7 February 2017 p. 19

[19] NDTV “No Warning”: Witnesses Describe How Police Shot Anti-Sterlite Protesters 29 May 2018

Being Made Poor: Economic Development in Nigeria

ROAPE

June 14, 2018

Abiodun Olamosu reviews the classic 1975 book, Economic Development of Nigeria: The Socialist Alternative by Ola Oni and Bade Onimode which will soon be republished. Oni and Onimode wrote about the underdevelopment of Nigeria and how the country and its people were made poor. They also provided a programme for the country’s development which included the disengagement from international capitalism, the introduction of democratic planning, public ownership and control of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Olamosu provides a critical introduction to the book. In 1975 ROAPE published the address made by the authors on the publication of the Economic Development of Nigeria, which can be accessed from our archives here.

By Abiodun Olamosu

Ola Oni and Bade Onimode, Economic Development of Nigeria: The Socialist Alternative (Nigerian Academy of Arts, Sciences, and Technology, 1975).

Economic Development of Nigeria: The Socialist Alternative, originally published in 1975, was perhaps the first political economy treatise with a socialist perspective to emanate from Nigeria. This book is soon to be re-published by Option Books and Information Services in Nigeria. Economic Development of Nigeria was not only a pioneering work on Nigerian political economy, but also served as an economic programme to defend the best interests of working people. At the time the poor were being attacked by both the ruling elite and scholars from the faculties of social sciences in Nigerian universities. The latter came forward to present right-wing solutions for the country after the Civil War of 1967-70.

The authors of Economic Development of Nigeria were two notable socialists and teachers of economics at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. They had backgrounds in the radical traditions of the London School of Economics and University of London College, Ibadan (now University of Ibadan) where they received their training in economics (the address made by the authors on the publication of the Economic Development of Nigeria can be accessed here).

The new edition is expected to be timely as it is coming at a time that capitalism has created more problems than it can solve in the present era of neoliberalism. At its inception, the Economic Development of Nigeria set out to unravel the underdevelopment of the Nigerian economy by foreign capitalists while suggesting a socialist path of development to solve the economic problems identified in the study.

There have been significant changes since the Economic Development of Nigeria: the Socialist Alternative was written and published in 1975. For instance, the economy of Nigeria has experienced significant growth in the last four decades without impacting positively on the lives of ordinary working people. The economy is also no longer under foreign domination, but under the control of the indigenous capitalists and the ruling elite. In 1973, a couple of years before publication, Nigeria joined the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to maximise its gains in oil exploration and this helped its oil to be sold at a higher price. As a result, over the decade of the 1970s, Nigeria earned huge wealth from oil, to the extent that one of the military heads of state, General Yakubu Gowon, declared that ‘money is not the problem: of Nigeria, but how to spend it.’ With oil, corruption has become prevalent. As Olukoye Ransome-Kuti revealed, between October 1979 and December 1983 during the second republic, over US$200 billion was realised from oil sales as revenue but there was little to show for this. The prevailing state of inequality could account for why Aliko Dangote, a Nigerian and the richest person in Africa is worth about US$15 billion in assets (net), while the minimum wage in Nigeria remains less than US$20 per month.

The economic importance of Nigeria in Africa cannot be overemphasised. It has the largest economy in sub-Saharan Africa and a huge population that dwarfs any other country in the region. In addition, its role as a semi-imperialist state in the region makes it imperative that any analysis of the Nigerian economy also includes a wider analysis of sub-Saharan Africa.

Central to the discussion by Oni and Onimode was the issue of foreign domination of an economy largely influenced by capitalist interests. This, according to them, started from the colonial period, spanning about a century. The authors therefore canvassed for the taking over of the neo-colonial economy from foreign capitalists as a way of addressing the problem.

Oni and Onimode went on to state that the huge wealth realised from oil was spent on frivolities for the elite in the face of the enormous challenges of economic well-being facing the poor masses. The authors also condemned the Nigerian government for not being enterprising enough to capitalise the oil and gas sector in order to be able to generate more wealth. Instead the government allowed the foreign oil majors free rein to dominate the sector, the major source of the country’s foreign exchange earnings and government revenues.

In pursuing the same line of argument, Oni and Onimode identified five ways that the foreign multinational corporations short-changed the Nigerian economy and carried out its exploitation. These included the repatriation of profits and dividends, interest, contractor finance and supplier credit, service charges and rents. In addressing such problems, the authors canvassed for a policy shift towards greater economic relations with Russia, China, etc that they believed were socialist economies.

The authors argued that social inequality was a form of waste which should be eschewed in the interests of the poor. Other forms of economic waste that they identified included unemployment, underemployment, capitalist competitive rivalry as with advertising, corruption, destruction and misallocation of resources by poor economic planning.

Oni and Onimode described the economic planning in place as neo-colonial and argued that the social infrastructures provided by the instrumentality of such planning worked to serve the business interest of the capitalists, imperialists and investors at the expense of the poor. In the opinion of the authors, this form of economic planning was responsible for why successive national plans did not capture the needs of the poor as they had little or no provision for social welfare – employment, education, health, rural communities or housing.

In reaction to the prognosis of Nigeria’s economic planning, Oni and Onimode proffered an alternative socialist economic plan. This they defined as a strategy for the establishment of a non-exploitative society with the full liberation of everyone to enjoy the fruits of their labour. The characteristics of such planning as explained by the two authors included disengagement from international capitalism, the introduction of democratic planning, public ownership and control of the means of production, distribution and exchange and comprehensive physical planning. This planning, they argued, should emphasise the needs of the mass of the people rather than serving an exploitative profit motive. The focus and target of such socialist economic planning, according to Oni and Onimode, should be towards enhancing economic development and the well-being of working people. This should include full employment with living wages, free education at all levels, equalisation of educational opportunities, mass education, acquisition of skills in terms of the introduction and application of science and technology, better working conditions, cultural decolonisation and the provision of social infrastructures – water, electricity, transport, medical and educational facilities.

In showing how varied the resources available to the economy were, Oni and Onimode identified different types of natural resources in which the country had a comparative advantage. These include ferrous and non-ferrous, metals, petroleum, natural gas, arable land, thickly wooded forests, huge rivers, prodigious fisheries, crops and animal husbandry. The authors therefore canvassed for a major national programme that would bring science and technology to the masses who as the direct producers of the wealth of the country could harness and develop the available resources to their full capacity.

Oni and Onimode also touched on the inefficiency associated with the public utility corporations of the 1970s. The problem was said to hinge on poor planning, management and the capitalist economic environment rather than being due to any inherent short-comings of public enterprises.

The argument of Ola Oni and Bade Onimode on the underdeveloped state of industrialisation was that this could be traced to the deliberate colonial policy that strongly discouraged industrial development. In contrast, only the first stage of processing primary products and the last stage of assembling manufactured goods was introduced. This was why, according to the authors, the issue of acquiring technology in advancing the cause of industrialisation in the country had not been addressed.

The authors identified various ways that agriculture had been neglected. This explained the plight of the poor farmers. Typical of this problem was the colonial orientation in agricultural policy that placed a premium on growing cash crops rather than food crops for the local market. This policy continued even after the end of colonial rule and had its attendant consequences as highlighted in the Economic Development of Nigeria.

Oni and Onimode also showed how the involvement of multinational corporations led to the domination of commercial activities. These institutions, according to the authors, controlled the entire commercial system of import and export of goods and services together with other sectors including insurance, banking and shipping services and other forms of transportation.

In taking a concrete step against such foreign domination, the programme of action canvassed by Oni and Onimode was for the state to take over all wholesale trade. They also canvassed for the replacement of the role of the foreign multi-national companies by indigenous small business owners organised in cooperatives. These would then control and manage the import-export business.

Oni and Onimode drew a parallel between socio-economic regulation and socio-economic reform meant to ameliorate the system to avoid crisis and achieve economic stability and by extension political stability. Key to such reforms and regulations according to the authors was the Keynesian economic recipe that involved state intervention to drive the economy. Other types of regulations identified include fiscal and monetary policies, price control, income regulation and control of foreign trade. Comprehensive state planning was seen as a way of addressing problems associated with socio-economic regulation that regularly surfaced. The book then goes on to discuss in detail the foreign control of the economy and indigenisation.

The starting point of the authors’ analysis of foreign domination of the Nigerian economy has been overtaken by events. Most of the economy is now in the hands of Nigerians. This is in contrast with the position in the 1970s when over 80 per cent of the formal economy was owned and controlled by foreign companies. This process started as early as the 1970s with the government policy of indigenisation. Yet the result was an indigenisation of capitalism rather than its replacement. This did not resolve the fundamental contradictions and crises of capitalist Nigeria.

Despite the high level of indigenisation, the dominant oil and gas sector is still responsible for most of the country’s foreign exchange earnings and government revenues, yet it predominantly remains in the hands of foreigners. This is due to the technical skills and huge capital outlays that are required. But also, the fact that the local ruling elite still handsomely benefit from the sector.

Since the book was first published, successive governments have paid lip service to the issue of diversifying the economy. Though the ideas of the ruling elite on the question of diversification are also problematic as this is restricted to going back to the old ways of practising and exploiting agriculture. There is no programme for the diversification of the oil and gas sector. No more than 30 percent of production is refined with the remainder sold as crude oil, a form of raw material.

The authors promotion of economic planning is flawed. Economic planning may be desirable to address the basic needs and interests of working people, but its actualisation in a class divided society like Nigeria will largely depend on the balance of forces between the different classes. This is why more often than not the best economic plans turn out to be a mirage for working people. It is also not enough to have what the authors referred to as alternative socialist economic planning that is undertaken by experts from above. Their approach to the alternative socialist programme outlined throughout the Economic Development of Nigeria exposes their sympathy towards the former USSR, China and other so-called communist states. This shows a contradiction inherent in their analysis. In one breath, they canvassed for democratic control and management of the economy, including economic planning, but on the other they show-cased the USSR and China as examples of what they hoped to achieve.

However, the best way to achieve welfare programmes or better living standards for working people is for them to pursue the cause of socialism from below. This aims to win power into their own hands through their own collective actions. This strategy sees that reforms are only granted under the threat of revolt.

In addition, the role of state intervention in the economy must be understood in a historical perspective. So, state capitalist intervention was introduced during the Second World War under colonial rule, and saw the state playing a key role in the commanding heights of the economy. This was to strengthen the economy by providing employment while expanding public infrastructures like road, rail and ports. Such intervention could hardly last. As soon as the situation normalised after the war capitalists were tempted to continue in their old way of economic competitive rivalry and reduced state intervention. In such circumstances, economic planning, as envisaged by Oni and Onimode, was hardly practical.

Oni and Onimode claim that it was a deliberate colonial policy to discourage industrial development. Looking to multi-national corporations or foreign donors for foreign direct investment (FDI) has caused more harm than good – industrial development has remains elusive. The effect of this is that since the 1970s more money has left Africa (as looted funds transferred to western bank accounts and the repatriation of profits) than has come into the continent as donor aid or FDI.

The authors are correct to see the neglect experienced in the area of agriculture that was previously the mainstay of the economy before oil. Agriculture should be systematically linked with industry in order to achieve maximum benefits for both sides. Investment in agriculture could also alleviate the key problem of unemployment and underemployment. In fact, agriculture has suffered in the same manner as local manufacturing by the introduction of free trade, allowing cheap exports to stifle local development.

As we have seen the indigenisation of commercial activities has not improved the situation. This is a clear indication that the problem was not that of the dichotomy between foreign and indigenous capitalists, but fundamentally the problem of capitalism. A programme that canvasses for the nationalisation of the economy under workers’ control, planning and management would be a more practical solution.

On the issue of socio-economic regulation and reforms, it is only by understanding the ideological dimension of such reforms and their class nature that they can be properly understood. As Oni and Onimode explained in Economic Development of Nigeria, the regulation of workers’ wages unilaterally by the government through commissions was forced down the throat of workers and their organisations. In contrast, the government failed to regulate the prices of goods services, rents etc. The reason for this disparity in implementation is class conditioned.

Reform and regulation are not designed to favour the poor. They are meant to persuade the victims of the system to retain faith in the organisation of society while the real beneficiaries of the reforms and regulations are the elite. This is why socialists today should have no illusion that reform and regulation can permanently change society to the benefit of the poor majority.

More often than not reform is a product of pressure from below, especially when the overall situation is not favourable for the ruling class. Under more favourable situations, the capitalist class dictate the pace of reform in their own interests. This is what we have experienced over the last three decades or so, under the regime of neoliberalism. Governments have gradually reduced the tax burden for the rich (by reducing the rate of corporation tax and providing other ‘incentives’) while the same governments have reduced expenditure on health and education and often introduced fees, either directly or indirectly.

A recent report from Oxfam confirms these trends for the Nigerian economy. Annual economic growth averaged over seven percent in the 2000s, and yet Nigeria is one of the few African countries where both the number and the share of people living below the national poverty line over that period increased.

Government policies implemented under neoliberalism include privatisation, commercialisation and liberalisation of the economy. In the 1980s the Nigerian government was advised by the IMF/World Bank to cut spending on education, health and public transportation. This brought an end to government intervention in business and public utility corporations as was the case during the ‘Keynesian period’ in the 1940s-1970s. The huge inequality brought about between the poor and the rich as a result of these policies necessitated a corresponding reform in the form of a debt package which was meant to be extended to individuals and the state. The repercussion of the crisis resulting from such debt accumulation has been enormous.

The main thesis of Ola Oni and Bade Onimode’s book was that the Nigerian economy was at the mercy of colonial capitalism in terms of control and domination by foreign capitalists and other interests and such a pattern continued in post-colonial Nigeria. This was the case in the varied sectors of commerce, trading, agriculture, industrialisation and oil and gas. The Nigerian working people were at the receiving end of such socio-economic relationships as their living and working conditions deteriorated and unemployment increased. Any attempts at regulation and reform were geared towards sustaining the system of capitalism. Economic Development of Nigeria also argued that by virtue of the country’s abundant human and natural resources Nigeria could not be said to be poor, yet the economic system has resulted in most them having been made poor. For this reason, the authors argued for the total transformation of the economic system.

The new edition of Economic Development of Nigeria will surely serve a useful purpose for new readers despite changes that have taken place in the nature of Nigerian capitalism since it was written. The book still provides a vital account of the economic history of Nigeria up to the mid-1970s. This book is highly recommended to students of economics, labour economics, political economy, economic history, activists and those interested to know how the Nigerian economy developed and the possibility of a radical alternative future.

Abiodun Olamosu is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Social Policy and Labour Research (SOPLAR), in Lagos, Nigeria. As a long-standing socialist and activist he was interviewed on roape.net.

Featured Photograph: Market in Lagos, Nigeria (3 May, 2005)

Rwanda’s Contested Model: Economic Rents, Development and Stability

ROAPE

June 12, 2018

By Dónal Ring

Rwanda is commonly accepted as one of today’s developmental states. Throughout the still-ongoing reconciliation after the 1994 genocide, economic growth, poverty rates, health and education have seen impressive improvements, particularly so for a small landlocked country with few natural resources. But this has been challenged by an on-going debate on the ROAPE blog. Two specific claims have been made – that the GDP figures have been fudged since 2005 and that government disguised a poverty increase between 2011-2014 as a decrease through a misleading poverty line change. This blog will argue that Rwanda’s development model leaves some risks for its sustainability.

One post by the anonymous authors alleged that GDP figures had been manipulated, using a discrepancy between consumption figures by national account statistics (NAS) and household surveys (HHS) as evidence. This looks plausible, but the claim rests on shaky foundations; there is little basis for thinking that such a discrepancy is evidence of wrong-doing. Martin Ravallion is quoted as saying that NAS growth rate should be an unbiased predictor of HHS rate. But this is based on all regions excluding Central Asia and Eastern Europe and after disaggregating by region the relationship between HHS and NAS is especially poor in Sub-Saharan Africa. Ken Simler in 2008 also shows sub-Saharan Africa as particularly unreliable, with nearly half of countries showing a 30% discrepancy. Many factors explain the difference, as both methods have different methodologies and coverage. HHS tends to underestimate income and expenditure; NAS is expected to be biased upwards as an economy develops because of the method of accounting for the informal sector; and a rapidly growing NGO sector is captured in NAS but not HHS data. The blog on Rwanda’s GDP growth ‘myth’ shows a declining HHS/NAS ratio, from 1.08 to 0.65. This trend is consistent and expected with strong growth. For example, between 1985-1994 HHS/NAS fell from 0.80 to 0.67 in Botswana, when it enjoyed an average annual GDP growth of 16% (data from worldbank.org (2018a), formula from Bea.gov (2018)).

So, there is actually a great deal of evidence of a healthy economy beyond the usual indicators. Tax revenues have been steadily increasing at an annual average of 19.5% from 2000-2015 (stats.oecd.org, 2018) and growth is one of the strongest predictors of increased revenue (Drummond et al. 2012, Pessino and Fenochietto 2010). Of course, it may not have been the driver in this case, but all other known determinants are positive for the economy and include high trade and investment in education, and low inflation, share of agriculture in GDP, gini coefficient and corruption. The ROAPE blog also presented evidence of an ailing economy, but this was at Rwanda’s weakest point. The current account deficit, capital flows and GDP growth have all improved since. The downturn at the time was caused by a wider fall in commodity prices, a crisis which spread throughout the entire region and does not suggest mismanagement. The trend for GNI per capita is below – Rwanda performed slightly better than the region as a whole (see worldbank.org, 2018b).

The previous ROAPE blog, following Filip Reyntjens, alleges the poverty line was changed between EICV3 and EICV4 to present a misleading reduction. A statistical analysis showed that poverty increased when the line was constant across both surveys. In a further ROAPE blog Sam Desiere followed-up by calculating the poverty change in a different manner, and found increased poverty assuming high inflation. The evidence seems strong, and the case is not as clear as for GDP. But there is reason to doubt the veracity of the claims. Firstly, all attempts in the ROAPE debate (the anonymous authors, Desiere and Reyntjens) are based on the assumption that in order to compare trends in poverty all methodologies and definitions must be constant. However, this is not the expert advice. Assessing poverty through time is difficult and it is well-recognized that if the poverty line and consumption basket were kept constant, rates would then be incomparable due to changing consumption and socioeconomic patterns. It might be wrong for the government to present a decrease based on different poverty lines, but it is not rigorous either to present increases based on unchanging methodologies and baskets (worldbank.org, 2018c) Secondly, the price index was the Laspeyres index. This is known to over-estimate inflation and is therefore expected to show exaggerated poverty increases or muted decreases (see Gibson, 2018). These analyses may well reach the same conclusion, but the finding is not robust if they depend on high inflation without strong justification. The authors state that the choice of price index does not change their conclusions – in this case releasing results for other indices would strengthen their argument.

The original analyses are somewhat inconclusive, so it is important to look more broadly at indicators of Rwandan development, particularly given the expansive claims made by the authors in the debate – that ‘the donor darling’ is being exposed, that any strong growth fizzled out long ago and the economy will soon crash, that much of the improvements are cosmetic or that Joseph Mobutu’s Zaire is the best analogue. This has been done for health, education and social indicators by Lee Crawfurd in 2018 and there is no point replicating the work – it sufficient here to say that on almost every indicator progress is in a positive direction. To briefly supplement, between EICV 3-4 households with at least one savings account increased 36.1%-54.1%, waged farm workers increased 9.8%-11.4% and percentage of waged non-farm workers increased 16.8%-19.6%. These are not all donor-funded, and is it worth pointing out that Rwanda has the fifth-highest statistical capacity score across the continent (worldbank.org, 2018d).

The question is whether Rwanda is an authoritarian regime that fabricates statistics to gloss over abuses, or whether it is an authoritarian regime that does in fact achieve development for its citizens. The weight of evidence is still strongly in favour of the latter. Even if it were the case that some statistics are not reliable, they would have to be some way off before we’d have good grounds to abandon this conclusion. However, this is not cause for untrammeled optimism. The development model of Rwanda which some have called ‘developmental neopatrimonialism’ comes with risks and costs. So, what are some of these sustainability risks?

In order to understand the risks, it is important to know the model. Neopatrimonialism is a vertical client-patron system where patrons, typically a strong party or individual, will use state resources to win the loyalty of clients. It is often thought to be a hindrance to development in sub-Saharan Africa as it fosters corruption, with rulers typically using their power to distribute economic rents for short-term and personal gains. But, there have been cases where this system of rule becomes beneficial to the development of the state. In Tim Kelsall’s framework, developmental neopatrimonialism occurs when the powerful individual or party manages economic rents in a centralized fashion to enhance long-term development and stability, rather than for short-term gains. Rents are used to invest in areas such as health and education, and an attempt is made to re-orient the economy away from rents and towards productive sectors. David Booth and Frederick Golooba-Mutebi argued in 2012 that Rwanda follows this pattern. Corruption in Rwanda is rare and severely punished and it scores highly on ease of business rankings (World Bank and IFC, 2010). The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) has significant control over the private sector through a number of investment groups but predominantly a holding company called Crystal Ventures Ltd (CVL), formerly Tri-Star Investments, and uses this to finance strategic sectors in the economy. The RPF owns 100 per cent of the equity and the board is nominated by the party. Profits are either taken as tax, or accrue as dividends to the RPF, and none has been used by RPF members for personal enrichment. The rationale behind these investment groups has been to address the strategic needs of the country while also investing in new sectors through a subsidiary company, and then to exit the sector once the company was becoming profitable (Behuria 2015).

There is good evidence that this strategy has boosted growth, including numerous success stories of RPF-owned companies. One example is the growth of the tourism industry. Prime Holdings (another RPF-owned group) invested in hotels, two prominent ones being the Kigali International and the Kivu Sun Hotel. After successful performance, these were privatized and were bought by the Serena Group, now owned by the Aga Khan fund (Behuria 2015). Between 2001-2012 the tourism sector, after prioritisation by the government, attracted the highest investment of any sector. In 2012 tourism accounted for 6.4% of all employment and revenues rose from $12mn to $282mn from 1996-2013. Other examples where this strategy was successful include telecoms (Namata 2015), pyrethrum, road construction and property management, usually with CVL as a ‘first-mover’ in the sector. In 2014 CVL had a 50% stake in 12 often sector-leading companies.

But the risks are clear. Rwanda is not the only case of developmental neopatrimonialism. Booth and Golooba-Mutebi identified other examples in Africa of sustained growth under this model, of Cote d’Ivoire from 1960-1975 under Houphouët-Boigny, Kenya from 1965-1975 under Kenyatta, and Malawi from 1964-1978 under Banda. In each of these cases the model did not lead to continued growth, stability and poverty reduction. Kelsall attributes this to either losing tight centralized control of rents as in Côte d’Ivoire, where after 1975 resources were spent on inefficient and corrupt parastatal organizations or maintaining tight control but foregoing a long-term developmental focus as under Daniel Arup Moi in Kenya after 1980. In each case, the developmental state was initially held together through the will of a small number of people, meaning the developmental status was lost when conditions changed. And this is a real threat in Rwanda, because much of the discipline and tight control is driven by Kagame personally, including crackdowns against corruption and politicians benefiting from CVL. For example, in 2000 then-president Bizimungu complained about what he saw as excessive discipline before being removed by Kagame. This shows how easily the regime could have gone in a different direction and can still do so. If Kagame were to leave office to a less scrupulous figure the system of RPF-owned holding companies could provide an ideal vehicle for corruption and self-enrichment. As yet, it seems there is no suitable successor at all.

Rwanda’s success since the genocide in terms of economic growth, poverty reduction and improved living conditions are almost certainly real, and much is attributable to strong discipline and good management. The evidence needed to back the strong claims of serious manipulation is not currently forthcoming, although recommendations to scrutinise data are welcome. But the regime faces risks. There will come a time when these past few decades will be judged by the future they prepared – and unless the political situation is handled well, it may suffer the fate of being seen as a lost opportunity.

Dónal Ring is a post-graduate in Development Practice at Trinity College Dublin – University College Dublin. He has previously written for and edited a range of publications and is currently a Graduate Fellow at the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi.

Featured Photograph: Households work together to rebuild a home compound in Rwanda (17 May, 2012).

References

Bea.gov. (2018). How is average annual growth calculated?. [online] Available at: https://www.bea.gov/faq/index.cfm?faq_id=463 [Accessed 21 May 2018].

Behuria, P., 2015. Between party capitalism and market reforms–understanding sector differences in Rwanda. The Journal of Modern African Studies, 53(3), pp.415-450.

Booth, D. and Golooba-Mutebi, F., 2012. Developmental patrimonialism? The case of Rwanda. African Affairs, 111(444), pp.379-403.

Crawfurd, L. (2018). The Continuing Saga of Rwandan Poverty Data. [online] Rovingbandit.com. Available at: http://www.rovingbandit.com/2017/06/the-continuing-saga-of-rwandan-poverty.html [Accessed 21 May 2018].

Drummond, P., Daal, W., Srivastava, N. and Oliveira, L., 2012. Mobilizing revenue in Sub-Saharan Africa: empirical norms and key determinants.

Gibson, J. (2018). A Guide to Using Prices in Poverty Analysis. [online] Siteresources.worldbank.org. Available at: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPA/Resources/429966-1092778639630/Prices_in_Poverty_Analysis_FINAL.pdf [Accessed 21 May 2018].

Kelsall, T., 2011. Rethinking the Relationship between Neo‐patrimonialism and Economic Development in Africa. IDS bulletin, 42(2), pp.76-87.

Namata, B. (2015). RPF-affiliated Telco to list on Rwandan Bourse. The East African, 14 April

Pessino, C. and Fenochietto, R., 2010. Determining countries’ tax effort.

Ravallion, M., 2003. Measuring aggregate welfare in developing countries: How well do national accounts and surveys agree?. Review of Economics and Statistics, 85(3), pp.645-652.

Reyntjens, F., 2015. Reduction of poverty and inequality, the Rwandan way. And the aid community loves it (No. 16). Universiteit Antwerpen, Institute of Development Policy (IOB).

Simler, K. (2008). A Note on Discrepancies in Consumption Measured from Household Surveys vs. National Accounts. [online] Siteresources.worldbank.org. Available at: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPA/Resources/429966-1092778639630/Consumption_NAS_HH.pdf [Accessed 21 May 2018].

Stats.oecd.org. (2018). Details of Public Revenues – Rwanda. [online] Available at: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=REVRWA [Accessed 21 May 2018].

worldbank.org. (2018a). Botswana | Data. [online] Available at: https://data.worldbank.org/country/Botswana [Accessed 21 May 2018].

worldbank.org. (2018b). GNI per capita, Atlas method (current US$) | Data. [online] Available at: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.CD?end=2016&locations=RW-ZG&start=1962 [Accessed 21 May 2018].

worldbank.org. (2018c). Comparing Poverty Over Time: Problems and Treatments. [online] Available at: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPA/Resources/429966-1092778639630/Comparing_Poverty_Over_Time.pdf [Accessed 21 May 2018].

worldbank.org. (2018d). Statistical Capacity score (Overall average) | Data. [online] Available at: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IQ.SCI.OVRL?view=chart&year_high_desc=true [Accessed 21 May 2018].

World Bank and IFC 2010. Doing Business 2011: Making a difference for entrepreneurs. Washington, DC: World Bank and International Finance Corporation (IFC).

African Knowledges and Alternative Futures

ROAPE

June 7, 2018

By Amber Murrey and Edith Phaswana

The Toyin Falola @65 Conference brought together scholars from across the African continent and the world from 29 to 31 January 2018 under the theme, ‘African Knowledges and Alternative Futures.’ Our focus reflected on the long struggle for epistemic justice on the continent while centring and recognizing Falola’s important role in the project. This was a unique conference in terms of its structure, content, as well as the diversity of intellectuals that it attracted.

University of Ibadan

The venue for our coming together was the University of Ibadan (UI) – significant not only because Falola was born in the city in 1953 but also because UI is Nigeria’s oldest and most respected public university. UI was founded in 1932 as the first public university in Nigeria. At the time, it was an affiliate of University College London in the United Kingdom. Built in 1948 and completed in the 1960s, UI was the first university built in British-occupied West Africa.

Early colonial universities, Toyin Falola explains, were at the centre of colonial power dynamics and political struggles in Africa. Falola writes that these universities were ‘created to meet the needs of those Europeans who envisaged a permanent homeland in Africa… The universities were seen as concessions made after the Second World War, a strategy of pacifying restless Africans and of ensuring that decolonization was controlled at a pace set by Europeans’ (2018: 608). These universities were also spatially and geographically significant.

At the conference, Oluwabunmi Fayiga traced the ideological symbolism of architectural materials in the British design in the construction of UI. In the colonial context, the design and production of spaces like UI was rich with colonial symbolism, in this case the association of certain materials with poverty and other materials with modernity/civilization. Fayiga’s discussion focused on the ways in which two British colonial architects, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, employed a conscious ‘social decision-making’ to promote the use of concrete and corrugated steel in Nigerian architecture. These ‘permanent’ materials were associated with the colonial power. All the while, bamboo roofing and the use of mud as building material was deemed ‘unrefined.’ Fry and Drew’s preferences for certain materials were regarded as ‘modern choices’ despite their inappropriateness for local ecologies and social settings. Colonial architecture, Fayiga argued, is a domain through which we might trace colonial arrogance and the resistances to it.

Honoring Professor Falola

This event was differently structured. Not just by the energy of governmental leaders delivering extended speeches in honor of Professor Falola, but also through an active and conscious attention on the part of the organizers and participants to collectively celebrate the intellectual lifetime of Professor Falola, who has been an influential powerhouse across the disciplines in the study of Africa.

A historian by training, Toyin Falola’s work transcends disciplinary boundaries, appealing to scholars across different backgrounds and disciplines. The author of some 300 books, chapters, and articles, Falola has also supervised several dozens of graduate students, some of whom were present at the conference. He is the coordinator for the highly subscribed e-group USA-Africa Dialogue and is well known within African Studies for his conference and workshop organizing. Falola has been at the forefront of charting a path for African intellectuals and validating humanizing accounts of African history.

Drawing from Falola, Loui Njodzevan Wirnkar Ngah spoke of the need to break the ‘trend of negativity in African historiography.’ This, he argued, requires a new redefinition of African historiography. Such papers delivered sought to do justice to Falola’s impressive and often ground-breaking work.

From Pan-Africanism to Poverty to Decolonization

Comprised of nearly 300 papers, the conference was impressive in its breadth and interdisciplinarity. Unifying topics including critical expressions of identity, dignity, colonial critique as well as grounded discussions of political and socio-economic paths forward. Specific papers considered historical and contemporary challenges to Nigerian publishers; doctoral training programs on the continent as important places for supporting and cultivating strong doctoral candidates, ‘alternative futures’ such as epistemologies based on Islam, Yoruba, Thomas Sankara’s political thought and decolonial thought, the role of the intellectual and more.

Some scholars argued that ‘the canon’ should be eradicated because it inherently reaffirms boundaries. Others considered the ways in which contemporary Pan-Africanism makes meaningful contributions to African problems. Some argued that Pan-Africanism must deal with capitalism. Others argued for a ‘new breed of African capitalism… one that is regulated and productive.’

Yoruba does not have a word for poverty, Tunde Decker informed the audience. The sense of ‘being a victim of poverty’ does not hold true in Yoruba. Rather, inée connotes a lack that signals a miscommunication between the individual and deity. To resolve inée, a person needs to strengthen that communication by going to an Ifa priest. Also related to poverty is the concept of ori, or the force that is chosen in the spiritual realm. In this way, it is thought that a person might have chosen an ori that does not allow them to live a good life. If a person has a disconnect with the ancestors, this disconnect might manifest itself within the material world through a lack. What was not considered was how the inée might, inadvertently, bolster neoliberal capitalism through an individualization of lack.

Innocent Moyo’s work on decolonizing borders generated powerful audience responses. Borders are political institutions and the heightened securitization of borders is in tension with moves to create regional integration in Africa. Moyo asserted the importance of race for projects to ‘decolonize borders,’ this is because, on the continent, borders often operate through and are constitutive of ‘anti-blackness.’ His talk generated considerable debate about the ‘practicality’ of a decolonized border system. Although his argument was not that borders themselves be altogether eradicated but that the practices of bordering be decolonized.

The Intellectual in Africa

Professor Chris BN Ogbogbo, President of the Historical Society of Nigeria, remarked in his keynote address, ‘The academic’s primary role must be to move students to be knowledge producers.’ He argued that scholars must necessarily become activists against the backdrop of the failure of mainstream intellectuals to provide grounded and politically relevant ideas.

The role of the intellectual in Africa has likewise been a centrepiece in Falola’s work. Falola writes,

How Africans, either at home or abroad, will acquire autonomy and control the production of knowledge about their continent will ultimately depend on the possibility of a positive political and economic transformation of Africa. The marginality of African studies and Africans’ feeling of irrelevance in Western institutions reflect the marginality of the continent in world affairs. If Africa lacks the resources to sponsor research and publish, to retain excellent scholars and build viable universities, it will be hard to overcome intellectual domination by outsiders who have their own agenda, interests, and priorities. (Falola 2018: 710)

Ogbogbo argued that, at the core of Africa’s development challenges, is the manner in which knowledge is produced, disseminated and consumed in Africa – including for what purpose and reasons. He lashed out at academics for what he referred to as the ‘think tank of the post-colonial state in Africa,’ for failing to provide ideas to ‘unshackle’ people and societies from persistent capitalist crisis in the continent.

Yet there was perhaps insufficient recognition of the inability of our states to use evidence-based information to make decisions and implement policies in such discussion. Africa is, after all, home to CODESRIA, a productive research organization in the social sciences that spans more than forty-years of successfully generating and circulating African knowledges. But the question is also how many African governments make concerted efforts to or are even willing to draw from such knowledge in public policy making.

A special panel was convened by the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute in South Africa under the theme ‘African Knowledges, Epistemologies and Leadership’. Within the context of the coloniality of knowledge in which epistemic perspectives are informed by Euro-centrism, Samuel Oloruntoba asserted the need for ‘thought liberation.’ An aspect of this liberation involved the deliberate use of Pan-Africanism in a paradigm of global anti-Africanism.

Edith Phaswana spoke of the need for an Afro-decolonial curriculum at universities that draws from Afro-centered and decolonizing epistemologies. Drawing from Pedro Tabensky and Sally Matthews’ Being at Home, she spoke of the importance of African students finding a home in a university space that is usually alienating in terms of its knowledge and ways of knowing. ‘We are all products of Westernized universities —even if we have gone through university systems located on the African continent… We are all disciplined by the different disciplines we subscribe to,’ she reminded the audience.

Similarly, Falola writes,

As a historical reality, Africa was integrated into an international system on terms defined by the West. African intellectuals cannot escape the reality of this integration. Neither can they escape the fact that the ideology that drives scholarship is controlled by the West and that what African scholars have done is primarily to respond…In spite of the success of many notable African intellectuals and the creation of centers of learning in the continent, ‘the Western academy remains the unique source of validation for the African scholar.’ There is a dependence on Western languages and Western-derived theories and concepts… (Falola 2018: 682).

Phaswana’s work in South Africa seeks to bridge Afrocentricity and decolonial thought to assert an Afro-decoloniality by carefully selecting knowledge that seeks to ‘advance humanity’ in ways that offer possibilities to learn from each other and discarding those that are demeaning, infuriating, marginalising and harmful to humanity. She argued that Africa is unapologetically a legitimate site of knowledge production, and Africans are also credible producers of knowledge about Africa and the world.

In her powerful keynote address, Professor Gloria Emeagwali articulated a ‘Toyin Falola framework for knowledge cultivation’: a model of knowing based on methodological plurality that draws on trial and error, is founded on diverse ecologies (including a ‘bias toward nature’), respect for ancestral wisdom, and commitments to holism and non-linear trajectories. This framework, she asserted, must connect with anti-racist scholarships.

Professor Emeagwali called on young scholars to take seriously the legacy of Africa. This is a legacy which must be preserved, improved on, and sustained for prosperity. She argued that this legacy is a bequest from ancestral wisdom, inspiration, and scientific experimentation. For her, Falola is a role model through his outstanding work, she urged the younger generation to replicate it transcontinentally.

Africa Beyond Africa

While sessions at the conference emphasized the importance of African knowledges for African futures, it is important not to lose sight of the importance of African knowledges for people and struggles outside of the continent. Our discussions at the conference should also be relevant for students in Cuba, Mexico, the Netherlands and beyond.

Falola asserts,

…Africans need not construct a cage for themselves, that Africans have to receive and use the ideas from all parts of the world, that African cultures and customs have to be refined to cope with the forces of modernity and change…Africans [must] transform ideas, create new paths, review their histories, and meet the challenges that transformation will pose (Falola 2018: 710)

Amber Murrey is a decolonial political geographer with research interests in political ecology, resistance studies, and resource sovereignty. She is the editor of ‘A Certain Amount of Madness’: The Life, Politics and Legacy of Thomas Sankara (2018) and teaches in the Department of Sociology at The American University in Cairo, Egypt. She tweets @AmberMurrey. Her participation at this conference was sponsored by an AUC Faculty Conference Grant.

Edith Phaswana (PhD) teaches Public Policy for Africa’s Development at the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute – University of South Africa. Her research interests centre around Africa’s Renewal focussing on educational transformation, youth and development, youth leadership, Pan-Africanism and Decoloniality. She also served as former Deputy Chairperson of the South African Development Studies Association (SADSA).

References

Falola, Toyin (2018) The Toyin Falola Reader: On African Culture, Nationalism, Development and Epistemologies. Austin, TX: Pan-African University Press.

Tabensky, Pedro Alexis and Matthews, Sally, eds. (2015) Being at Home: Race, Institutional Culture and Transformation at South African Higher Education Institutions. Durban: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

The Landscape of Struggle: Student Resistance in Burkina Faso

ROAPE

June 5, 2018

By Bettina Engels

Lila Chouli, Le contre-pouvoir étudiant au Burkina Faso (Paris, Fondation Gabriel Péri, 2018)

Students are an important political force in many sub-Saharan African states. Particularly when the industrial sector is relatively small, and as a consequence, organized labour is rather weak, movements of university and high school students, together with labour unions in the public sector in general and education in particular, are often central actors in struggles for democratic and social rights. Burkina Faso is a case in point. Since formal independence in 1960, the landscape of social struggles in the country is characterised, as in many other African states, by a strong student movement, whose claims and aims are far from being limited to educational policy but have addressed the very political and economic system itself.

Lila Chouli traces the history of Burkina Faso’s student movement and its core organisations: the Union Générale des Etudiants Burkinabé (UGEB), the general student union for the country as a whole, and Association Nationale des Etudiants Burkinabé (ANEB), UGEB’s branch at the University of Ouagadougou. Chouli demonstrates how the movements development is closely entangled with the general political struggles in the country; how organised students have positioned themselves in opposition to the state and ruling elites, and thus have faced and still face severe repression.

The Burkinabé student movement, as many other social movements in the country and in other states previously colonised by France, initially developed under the influence of the French Communist party and its related organisations and follows a Marxist orientation. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Parti Communiste Révolutionnaire Voltaïque (PCRV) has emerged on top of internal conflicts among Burkina Faso’s communist groups. Indeed, the student movement was involved in the establishment of the party in 1978. Those social movement organizations and labour unions that follow a joint political-ideological line are closely interconnected; overlaps in personnel among the student, youth, human rights and labour movement are commonplace. This is demonstrated clearly in Lila Chouli’s analysis. Hand in hand with other organisations, organised students were significantly involved in the mass mobilisations from 2011 onwards, that would eventually led to the turnover of Burkina Faso’s long-standing President Blaise Compaoré in October 2014, and in the popular resistance against the coup d’état in September 2015

Outstandingly informed and based on primary sources, Lila Chouli traces the intensive struggles by Burkinabé students in the 1990s, a period when activists were frequently ‘disappeared’ or killed. The first and probably best-known case was the murder of Dabo Boukary in May 1990. Until today, UGEB and ANEB demand the circumstances of his killing to be investigated and those responsible for it to be convicted. Though the student movement, since then, has achieved many things—for instance, the creation of the ‘Aide FONER’ (Fonds National pour l’Éducation et la Recherche, National Fund for Education and Research), a refundable grant for undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students.

Since massive protests in 1996-1997 student demands have remained largely the same: The expansion of state grants, the improvement in quality and reduction in costs for canteen meals and student housing, and of public transport to the campus, the improvement in teaching and learning conditions, e.g. especially access and condition of lecture rooms and finally the guarantee of democratic rights – freedom of assembly, of association, and of expression – for student organisations. With regard to the terrible living and studying conditions that the overwhelming majority of Burkinabé students face, this is hardly astonishing. But once again, protests expand to address the impacts of ‘structural adjustment’ policies that have been promoted by the international financial institutions, for example the doubling of enrolment fees in 2002.

This is Lila Chouli’s third book, alongside numerous articles, on social struggles in Burkina Faso, after her first volume Chronique sur le mouvement social de 2011 published in 2012 and Le Boom minier au Burkina Faso in 2014. Tragically, Lila is no longer with us. The author, born in Northern France in 1977 into a Franco-Algerian family, died in 2016. The foundation Gabriel-Pér’, a leftist think tank established on the initiative of the French Communist Party, has published this book posthumously. Lila Chouli was not able to write the concluding remarks herself, instead, Laurent Ouedraogo, a long-standing activist of the student and youth movement himself took on the task to write a afterword. The book was put together by her friend and comrade Pascal Bianchini who wrote the preface.

It is a very special book—not only because there is hardly any other such detailed, insightful, and thoroughly researched study on an African student movement. Very few external observers have an understanding of the dynamics and motivations of social movements in Burkina Faso as Lila Chouli. Lila never saw herself as a one-sided researcher, journalist, or activist; her works were rather shaped by her being convinced that these are in no way activities that could be separated from one another—and that, accordingly, a self-designation as ‘activist scholar’ hardly made any sense to her.

The book features a precise analysis on the basis of profound and encompassing research. Once again, Lila Chouli has demonstrated that such an analysis and a distinct ‘self-positioning’ go hand-in-hand. In this sense, the book launch that took place at the University of Ouagadougou in late April 2018, organised by UGEB together with the largest and most important Burkinabé human rights organisation (the Mouvement burkinabè des droits de l’Homme et des peoples, MBDHP), was a tribute to an outstanding internationalist. With Lila Chouli, social movements in Burkina Faso have lost a distinguished comrade.

Bettina Engels is a political scientist at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, bettina.engels@fu-berlin.de

Bibliography of Lila Chouli’s work

‘The popular uprising in Burkina Faso and the Transition’ in Review of African Political Economy, 2015, Vol. 42, No. 144, pp. 325 –333.

‘L’insurrection populaire et la Transition au Burkina Faso’ in Review of African Political Economy, 2015, Vol. 42, No. 143, pp. 148 –155.

(Lila’s Briefings are available to readers of roape.net who register and log-in to our members area on the website)

‘Sur l’insurrection populaire au Burkina Faso’ in Ndongo Samba Sylla (ed) Développements politiques récents en Afrique de l’Ouest Dakar, Fondation Rosa Luxembourg & Editions Plume, 2015, pp. 41-56.

Le boom minier au Burkina Faso. Témoignages des victimes de l’exploitation minière, Fondation Gabriel Peri, 2014.

‘Les mouvements sociaux et la recherche d’alternatives au Burkina Faso’ in Ndongo Samba Sylla (ed), Les mouvements sociaux en Afrique de l’Ouest, L’Harmattan & Fondation Rosa Luxemburg, 2014, pp. 239-275.

Popular Protests, Military Mutinies and Workers Struggles (pamphlet), Leo Zeilig (translation)

Burkina Faso 2011, Chronique d’un mouvement social, Lyon, Tahin Party, 2012.

‘Peoples’ Revolts in Burkina Faso’ in Firoze Manji and Sokari Ekine (eds), African Awakening: The Emerging Revolutions, Fahamu Books, Oxford, 2011, pp. 131-146.

‘Popular protests in Burkina Faso’ in Pambazuka News, n°183, April 2011

‘Harnessing students of Ouagadougou campus: on the crisis of June 2008’, in Journal of Higher Education in Africa, CODESRIA, n°3, 2009, pp. 1-28 [in French, ‘La domestication des étudiants du campus de Ouagadougou: Sur la crise de Juin 2008’]

‘Neoliberalism in the higher education of Burkina Faso’ in Revue Savoir / Agir, n°10, December 2009, pp. 119-127 [in French, ‘Le néolibéralisme dans l’enseignement supérieur burkinabé’]

Africa’s 1968: Protests and Uprisings Across the Continent

ROAPE

May 31, 2018

By Heike Becker and David Seddon

‘Global 1968’

Fifty years ago, in May 1968, what started as a localized student protest against proposed reforms in higher education at the Nanterre campus of the University of Paris became a major upsurge of popular protest that, at its height, mobilised millions of students and intellectuals, workers and trade unionists, as well as Communist and Socialist Party members, in revolt against the Gaullist state overseen by Prime Minister Georges Pompidou and President Charles de Gaulle. It rocked France for two months during May and June 1968, and had an impact across Europe and North America, and beyond.

In a piece on ‘why 1968 still matters’, Peter Taafe wrote recently in ‘Socialism Today’ (Taafe 2018) both on the global context of the French revolt and also on some of the events that took place across the world in that year. He argues that the ‘events’ in France were one aspect of ‘a year of revolution… and to a lesser extent counter-revolution throughout the world’. Yet he does not mention in his ‘overview’ of popular protest among students and workers much about Africa; yet there too, 1968 was a year of political turmoil.

In the days before social media – which played a significant role in the mobilization of protests during the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011 and during recent mobilizations across Africa – news of the ‘events’ in France often took some time to reach Africa. But this was not always the case, however. African students in Europe and on the African sub-continent were in contact with each other and were therefore aware of what was happening elsewhere (see, Plaut 2011); news of the ‘events’ in Paris certainly reached the French-speaking public in West and Central Africa very fast. It seems striking, therefore, that even those discussions of the 1968 ‘events’ that have emphasised their international or ‘global’ nature have failed by and large to discuss the extent to which popular protest and conflict in Africa that year – and indeed throughout the 1960s – had both their own internal dynamics and yet were also linked closely with wider international events and developments.

For most commentators and scholars, it was only events in the Global North that constituted ‘Global 1968’. None of the relevant overviews brings related events on the African continent to the fore. ‘What’, Becker has already asked (see the blogpost by Becker on roape.net here), ‘is the reason for the fact that in the current debates on ‘1968’ and its legacy on the African continent are almost never mentioned?’ Burleigh Hendrickson similarly remarked in 2012, ‘in spite of this global turn, many of these studies have reproduced Eurocentric narratives by focusing on actions in the transatlantic First World. Popular student and worker movements of the 1960s occurring in the Third World, including North Africa, have received far less attention’.

A Decade of Struggle Across Africa

In fact, the 1960s as a whole constituted an exceptional decade of popular protest across Africa. From 1960 onwards, in much of Africa, when so many former colonial territories gained their political independence, the various national liberation movements were transformed, in a complex and uneven fashion, into struggles against the widespread establishment of one-party states and the espousal by many new nationalist (often military) governments of various forms of authoritarian populism, as well as against neo-colonialism and post-colonial imperialism. In the southern parts of the continent, where White minority regimes still held power, the struggles against settler colonialism and apartheid were taken up afresh by a new generation.

In all of these struggles, students, as well as workers and the unemployed, socialist and communist political parties played a key role. But not only was ‘the 1960s’ a decade of struggle in many individual countries across the African continent, but the rise of radical protest was also ‘international’, in the sense that not only did these struggles take place at around the same time, in similar or comparable circumstances, but there were often direct links between protest in one country and protest in another, and there was also a movement of political activists across continents which served to stimulate and invigorate local struggles and to reinforce the inter-relationship between them all.

Even commentators who identify popular protest in the Congo, in Guinea, in Upper Volta and Senegal, and in Kenya and Ethiopia, fail to recognize some of the cases that we consider below, notably those in North Africa. Our own contribution can rectify this only to a certain extent, simply because there was too much happening in Africa in the 1960s to be able to cover it all in one article, so our approach is necessarily selective.

Case Studies: North Africa

Egypt

In Egypt, in the early 1950s, a military coup had displaced the British puppet king and led to the establishment of a regime under Gemal Abdel Nasser, which, while ‘speaking for the people’ (the peasants and workers) was hostile not only to the feudal landowners but also to any political opposition or any attempt to create independent trade unions to represent the working class directly. Egypt’s defeat by Israel in June 1967 led to a political as well as a military crisis and Nasser’s resignation as president. He returned after massive popular demonstrations in his support. But his credentials were damaged.

In February 1968, students and workers launched protests calling for political reforms. The first move was made by steel workers in Helwan (to the south of Cairo) protesting the military court’s lenient ruling in the case of the military aviation officers accused of negligence during the June war. They were joined on 21 February – which is Egyptian Student Day – by up to 100,000 students from major universities in Cairo and Alexandria. The Cairo uprising alone resulted in the death of two workers and the wounding of 77 citizens, as well as 146 police officers. Some 635 people were also arrested, and some vehicles and buildings were destroyed in the capital. The protest obliged Nasser to give a major speech in response, which, in the light of the June 1967 defeat, was exceptionally conciliatory.

Seen by some as the most significant public challenge to is regime since workers’ protests in March 1954, this popular movement forced Nasser to issue a manifesto promising the restoration of civil liberties, greater parliamentary independence from the executive, major structural changes, and a campaign to rid the government of corrupt elements. A public referendum approved the proposed measures in May 1968, and elections were held for the Supreme Executive Committee. Hailed at the time as signaling an important shift from political repression to liberalization, the manifesto and the promised measures would largely remain unfulfilled.

Further student unrest broke out in November 1968 following the announcement of a new education law. The uprising began with protests by high school students in the city of Mansoura. They were joined by university students and others, including peasants, and the next day, demonstrations resulted in clashes with the security forces which led to the death of three students and a farmer as well as the wounding of 32 protesters, nine police officers and 14 soldiers. News of the events in Mansoura reached Alexandria University, where leaders of the student movement from the engineering faculty launched massive protests and clashed with police forces, in which some 53 policemen and 30 students were injured.

The head of the Faculty of Engineering Student Union, Atef Al-Shater, and three of his colleagues were arrested. The governor of Alexandria tried to convince the students not to escalate the situation, but they held him inside the faculty and did not allow him to leave until Al-Shater and his colleagues were released. The national assembly discussed the problem of the new law the day after the governor of Alexandria was detained. On 25 November there was a strike by workers in Alexandria as well as large-scale demonstrations which ended in clashes with the police, resulting in 16 deaths.

Fifty public buses were smashed, along with 270 tram windshields, 116 traffic lights, 29 stalls, 11 shop windows and a number of other public transport and private vehicles and lampposts. A sit-in staged by the Faculty of Engineering ended without achieving any significant results because of the lack of food during the days of Ramadan and power outages suffered by the protestors, as well as the withdrawal of the union leader from the sit-in and the governor’s threat to evacuate the building by force. Those who were arrested during the sit-in were transferred to the courts for trial, but ultimately, no trials were held. After three months of being detained, the students were released but their leaders were sent for military service.

In the late 1960s, the Egyptian economy went from stagnation to the verge of collapse, political repression (particularly of the Muslim Brotherhood) increased and the first steps towards privatization and liberalization – that would be continued and accelerated under his successor Muhammad Anwar el-Sadat – were taken by Nasser, who then died in September 1970. Sadat was unpopular with the more radical students both because of his moves to liberalize the economy and to effectively reverse Nasser’s ‘Arab socialism’ in favour of a form of ‘neo-liberalism’ and also because he promised on more than one occasion that there would be ‘a final reckoning’ with Israel but did nothing to pursue such a policy. This led in 1972 to the outbreak of yet another uprising in the Egyptian universities.

Morocco

In Morocco, the national minister of education, Youssef Belabbès, published a decree in 1965 preventing young people above the age of 17 from attending in the second cycle of lycee (high school). In practice, this rule affected 60 per cent of students. Although at that time the Baccalauréat concerned only a few (1,500 per year) it became a rallying symbol which set off student unrest in Casablanca, Rabat, and other cities.

On March 22, thousands of students gathered on the soccer field at Lycée Mohammed-V in Casablanca. According to an eye-witness, there were almost 15,000 high school students present that morning. The goal of the assembly was to organize a peaceful march to demand the right to public higher education. Arriving at the street in front of the French cultural centre, the demonstration was brutally dispersed by the security forces who fired on the demonstrators. The students were thus compelled to retreat into the poorer neighbourhoods of the city, where they explained their grievances to local workers and the unemployed. They agreed to join up and meet again the following day.

On March 23, the students gathered again at the stadium of Lycée Mohammed-V. They were soon joined by their parents, workers, and the unemployed, as well as people coming from the bidonvilles (slums). This time, the assembly was not so peaceful. The advancing protesters vandalized stores, burned buses and cars, threw stones, and chanted slogans against the king. The response was swift and decisive: the army and the police were mobilized. Tanks were deployed for two days to quell the protestors, and General Mohamed Oufkir, the Minister of the Interior, had no hesitation in firing on the crowd from a helicopter. King Hassan II blamed the events on teachers and parents. He declared, in a message to the nation on March 30, 1965: “Allow me to tell you that there is no greater danger to the State than a so-called intellectual. It would have been better if you were all illiterate.”

After the events of March 23, the opportunity was taken to arrest suspected dissidents including communists and Iraqi teachers. In April, the king also tried to come to terms with the more radical political opposition, notably the UNFP (Union nationale des forces populaires). These discussions came to nothing and in June the king declared a state of emergency. The UNFP continued to criticize the regime and on 29 October 1965, its leader, Mehdi Ben Barka, was abducted and assassinated in Paris. Students in Casablanca mobilized for an anniversary demonstration on 23 March the following year, and many were arrested.

By 1968, although students in Morocco were certainly aware of what was happening in France, they were no longer inclined to rise up in protest against the regime. The state of emergency declared in June 1965 lasted until 1970. The ‘Years of Lead’ is the term used to describe a period of the rule of King Hassan II (mainly the 1960s through to the 1980s); a period marked by state violence against dissidents and democracy activists.

Tunisia

It is not clear to what extent the Egyptian and Moroccan students who were involved in protests in the 1960s were directly influenced by the ‘events’ of 1968 in Paris; the Moroccan protests preceded those in Paris by three years, while those in Egypt appear to have been a response to the specific circumstances of Egypt after the 1967 military defeat. In the case of Tunisia, however, there is little doubt that there were direct links between the student protests there and in France. Burleigh Hendrickson (2012) has made it clear, that, in his view, during the series of events surrounding the student protests of March 1968 at the University of Tunis, political activists across Tunisia and France forged communication networks or drew upon existing ones in order to further their political claims.

He argues that ties with the former metropole shaped students’ demands and that a strictly nationalist perspective of events is insufficient. In response to state repression, Tunisian activists shifted their struggle from global anti-imperialism towards the expansion of human rights at the national level. The networks between France and Tunisia proliferated over the course of 1968 and beyond as concrete realities shaped the direction of new claims. Furthermore, while certain aspects of the Tunisian movement were specific to the local context, it was also transnational for several reasons: 1) activists identified with international and anti-colonial causes such as Palestinian liberation and opposition to the Vietnam War; 2) actors and organizations involved in the protests frequently crossed national borders, especially those of Tunisia and France; and 3) the Tunisian and French states responded to specifically transnational activism with varying degrees of repression.

He argues that Tunisia’s post-colonial relationship with France established important Franco–Tunisian networks of students and intellectuals that took on new forms during and after the protests of March 1968. Just as imperial knowledge was constructed in a ‘web of empire’ in which the colonies acted as relays of knowledge transmission, transnational circuits of activists emerged in the postcolonial era to constitute ‘webs of resistance’. These networks of Tunisians moving between France and Tunisia and of French activists who had ties to Tunisia enabled the trans-nationalization of political activism—and often made it more difficult for states to contain. They provided access to information censored in Tunisia from the comparatively safe distance of the former metropole, and Paris became a meeting place for activists from other former colonies who were sympathetic to the Tunisian cause.

For Hendrickson, the ties – both hostile and friendly – that linked Tunisians with Paris and the French with Tunis are evidence of a wider global process of building networks of resistance that resonated well beyond the moment of ‘68 itself. Moreover, Bourguiba’s extreme reaction to the 1968 protests contributed to a shift in the nature of protesters’ claims, which was eventually manifested in the creation of the Tunisian League for Human Rights (Ligue Tunisienne des Droits de l’Homme) in 1976 and the establishment of the first Amnesty International section in Tunisia in 1981, in which 68’ers played an instrumental role. The state’s repression of activists fuelled unprecedented activism in the region, conducted initially from afar, making 1968 seminal in the development and articulation of opposition to a Tunisian single-party state. Tunisia’s place in the ‘global 1968’ thus goes far beyond the fact that it occurred simultaneously with other movements around the world.

Case Studies: Central Africa

African countries south of the Sahara also experienced student and broader popular protest during ‘Global 1968’. Although the protests took different forms, many involved mass mobilisation together with other sections of society, including workers and the unemployed. In some cases, the protests were successful, at least to some extent in provoking significant change; in other cases they were not. One of the most significant examples is that of Senegal, which has already been covered in Becker’s blogpost on roape.net.

The Congo

University students had been consistent and vocal critics of Joseph Mobutu’s regime since the early 1960s. During the first two years after Mobutu’s 1965 coup student groups supported his programme of nationalisation and Africanisation, the national student body Union Générale des étudients du congo (UGEC) – though cautious – took his radical rhetoric at face value. This relationship is easy to dismiss today, but as we have seen Mobutu was speaking from a radical script, condemning tribalism and calling for a new nationalism that would return the Congo to its African roots. The renaming of cities, town and provinces and later the insistence that European names be replaced by ‘authentic’ African ones was conformation to the student body of Mobutu’s sincerity. Mobutu also saw the co-option of the student body – and principally its main representative body the UGEC – as a key element in his control of potentially the most important opposition group in society. Taking the lead of the UGEC the new government even recognised Lumumba as a national hero.

The student movement was regarded as a vital element in Mobutu’s attempt to conquer civil society. Was the regime exaggerating the threat from students? The organisational and political coherence of student groups – in the national union and university affiliates – was far greater than other groups in civil society, a situation that was common in many sub-Saharan African countries after independence. Mobutu was desperate to control his unruly students, and to convince them of his national project.

However, the alliance did not last. The tension between the regime and students was graphically demonstrated on the 4 January 1968. When the vice-president of the United States Hubert H. Humphrey attempted to lay a bouquet of flowers at the Lumumba memorial in Kinshasa, students from Lovanium university who had turned up for the occasion pelted the vice-president with eggs and tomatoes. A UGEC communiqué stated that the protest had been called to prevent ‘a profanation by the same people who had yesterday done everything [so that] the great fighter for Congo’s and Africa’s freedom disappear[ed]’ (Nzongola-Ntalaja, 2002, p.177). The event caused the regime obvious embarrassment, but also clarified the reality of Mobutu’s fake anti-imperialism. The definitive rupture came later in 1968 when the regime banned the UGEC following the arrest of the president André N’Kanza-Dulumingu and student protests in Lubumbashi, Kinshasa and Kisangani.

Mobutu’s strategy of co-opting the student leadership of UGEC eventually won out. Apart from the national president N’Kanza-Dulumingu who refused co-option for years, other leaders caved in. The MPR would not tolerate an independent voice of student organisation, instead the ruling party created the Jeunesse du Mouvement populaire de la révolution (JMPR), whose leadership saw their political futures tied to a blind loyalty to the regime. The co-option by the regime of the now-banned UGEC did not however silence student activism. The next years were marked by violent demonstrations and strikes across the country. In 1969 sixty students from the University of Kinshasa were killed. In what was to become a familiar gesture of solidarity students in Lubumbashi marched through the city bare-footed and bare-chested in support of their fallen comrades in the capital almost two thousand miles away. Other universities came out in support, and hundreds of activists and student leaders were expelled.

Case Studies: East Africa

Ethiopia

From the very outset, in the kingdom of Ethiopia, the curriculum and other aspects of student life at the University College of Addis Ababa (founded in 1951) were strictly controlled; Emperor Haile Selassie was himself Chancellor and many members of the government sat on the ruling council of the University. Tight censorship was imposed on the student newspapers that began to appear in the late 1950s.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, the tight control of ideas and actions, unrest began to boil among the university students in the early 1960s. Students began their push for political and social change and participation subtly in the form of poetry. In 1962, at Student Day Ceremonies in May, students read poems that were charged with political commentary that criticized Selassie’s regime. After the readings, several students were suspended and many more warned not to meddle in politics, but this did not hinder the students from doing so.

Although the unrest was widespread in the early 1960’s, the students of Addis Ababa lacked any central leadership or a unifying cause. But disturbances in the forms of protests continued, causing the university to shut down in 1963. In 1964 and 1965 students held large demonstrations under the slogan ‘Land to the Tiller!’ which called for a redistribution of land from wealthy landlords to working class tenants. The students did not direct their protests at Emperor Selassie, but instead appealed to Parliament, which was in the midst of debating the polarizing question of land distribution. Students held demonstrations outside the Parliament building in 1965 in favor of redistribution, and their cause was bolstered from abroad, as nations like Sweden threatened to cut ties if reforms were not made.

Despite the protests and pressures from abroad, the regime did not budge on the issue and created a law banning student organizations, unions, and demonstrations. In 1966, the students added a new cause to their movement, demonstrating against the imprisonment of beggars in camps outside Addis Ababa. Their demonstrations led to small improvements in the camps’ facilities and treatment of the incarcerated. Enthused by their small victory, students reorganized their efforts in 1967, when the movement became more unified and cohesive. The student unions that were protesting various issues they had with the government joined into one organization, the University Students Union of Addis Ababa (USUAA) and focused on overthrowing the government. The University newspaper ‘News and Views’ was replaced by a much more politically charged publication called ‘The Struggle’. The student movement now had a single, unified voice.

A major issue that drove the movement was opposition to the large military presence that the USA had in Ethiopia at the time. The students saw the US as keeping Emperor Selassie in power and focused their actions on opposing Western influence in Ethiopia, and worldwide. In March 1968 students protested at a fashion show in protest of mini-skirts, a style that the students saw as un-Ethiopian. They organized a student boycott and picket lines and attempted to stage a large demonstration in the streets surrounding Addis Ababa. Police cracked down immediately, resulting in violent clashes, involving beating and some shooting of students and other protestors, and some fringe violence from students, including stoning buses and the US Embassy, and overturning cars.

Protests continued into 1969 at the University College of Addis Ababa (USUAA) and spread to other colleges, universities, and even high schools. The USUAA drew up a list of ten demands on the government, distributing them widely in pamphlets and by word of mouth. These demands included the overturning of new school fees, the expulsion of the American Peace Corps from Ethiopia, an overhaul of the government and education system, and trials for police officers who had fired on students at peaceful demonstrations.

They also accused the government of mismanaging resources and criticized the state of education in Ethiopia. The movement snowballed among younger students until a large part of the school system had to be shut down due to massive demonstrations, school boycotts, and riots. When secondary schools attempted to reopen, students staged a sit-in in schools that resulted in 500 arrests and one death when police arrived to break up the action.

Haile Selassie tried hard to hide the massive unrest from international eyes, heavily censoring newspapers and publications. Finally, though, he made an appearance on television agreeing to discuss the demands with the students, but at the same time ‘The Struggle’ was banned. By the end of 1969, Selassie had made some concessions by firing his minister of education and pardoning some of those arrested earlier that year. However, these concessions were not enough to stop the student movement. Over the next few years, the government cracked down hard on the student movement, violently dispersing organized demonstrations.

Tanzania

Student activism has been common at the University of Dar es Salaam throughout its history and has played a part in its institutional development, as well as in helping shape the wider social and political agenda in Tanzania. As the country’s flagship university, it was always going to play an important role in Tanzania’s development, but there was a contradiction – here as in other African countries – between students as an educated cadre for the progressive transformation of economy and society on the one hand, and students as a privileged elite on the other.

Nyerere, like most other African leaders, had numerous confrontations with students through the late 1960s and 1970s as the government of Tanzania – rather as in Ghana – increasingly drew the University of Dar es Salaam and those it regarded as its privileged cadres into its initiatives for development, many of which were regarded by the students as blatant ‘top-down’ state intervention inimical to participatory democracy. The student demonstration that received the most support in 1968, was one held in Dar es Salaam in July to protest against an agreement recently signed by the government to receive American aid, thus highlighting the strong anti-imperialist, and specifically anti-American, attitude of many Tanzanian students during the Vietnam war.

Kenya

Student attitudes towards the USA were somewhat different in Kenya. As early as 1959, before Kenya attained independence on 12 December 1963, nationalist leader Tom Mboya had begun a programme, funded by Americans, of sending talented youth to the United States for higher education. British colonial officials opposed the programme. The next year Senator John F. Kennedy helped fund the programme, which is said to have trained some 70 per cent of the top leaders of the new nation, including the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, environmentalist Wangari Maathai.

The development of the University College of Nairobi from its origins as a technical college in the late 1950s took place in piecemeal fashion over several years. In 1968, however, hundreds of students from the University College marched through the streets of Nairobi, accompanied by a contingent of anti-riot police, to protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and eventually the president of the students’ union, Chibule wa Tsuma, handed over a strongly-worded memorandum to the Soviet Ambassador urging the withdrawal of troops from Czechoslovakia, and the release of Mr Dubcek and all of the other arrested political leaders.

In March the following year, students from the University College organised a demonstration to protest against the hanging of African nationalists in Rhodesia. One of those involved was arrested and convicted of ‘incitement to the defiance of lawful authority’ and ‘assaulting a police officer’, for having twice attempted to break a police cordon in front of the British High Commission and having exhorted other students to stage a ‘sit-down’, and also for having thrown a stone which hit a policeman.

Case Studies: South Africa

The 1960s are widely regarded as the decade in which mass protest in South Africa was effectively repressed and the leadership of the ANC and PAC either forced into exile or put on trial and imprisoned. It is true that the first years of the decade saw much opposition crushed by the apartheid state. But the 1960s in South Africa were, like the decade that preceded it and those that succeeded it, years in which the struggle continued, even if to some extent in more muted forms, in the universities both ‘black’ and ‘white’ and elsewhere, largely among the ‘black’ community but also among some sections of the ‘Asian’, ‘coloured’ and ‘white’ communities.

The demonstrations against the pass laws in Sharpeville and Langa in 1960 were brutally crushed. Shortly afterwards, the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan-African Congress (PAC) were banned under the Unlawful Organisations Act No 34 which provided for organisations ‘threatening public order or the safety of the public’ to be declared unlawful. Even the Liberal Party came under pressure, with 35 of its leading members arrested and detained at the Fort in Johannesburg and banning orders under the Suppression of Communism Act restricting the political activities of 41 leading members of the party for the next five years.

The imprisonment, execution, escape or departure into exile of so many opposition leaders and activists during 1964 undoubtedly had a negative impact on the ability of the opposition to maintain the same level of activity in the second half of the decade as it had during the early years of the 1960s. As Raymond Suttner commented in 2012, in his essay on the ‘long and difficult journey’ of the ANC at the time of its centenary, its initiatives under the rubric of the ‘armed struggle’ (through the ANC’s armed-wing MK) ‘were brought to a swift halt, first with the arrest of the national leaders… and then with the ‘mopping up’ of smaller units over the following two years’ (International Affairs, 88 (4):729). But it is not correct to suggest that protest and opposition to the apartheid regime died away entirely in the second half of the decade.

Suttner points out that while ‘until recently, historians record the period between the Rivonia Trial and the 1976 Soweto uprising as one of almost complete inactivity’, in reality ‘a substantial number of supporters and members remained outside prison’, many of whom formed underground units in both urban and rural areas, and continued the struggle, albeit on a significantly smaller scale. ‘In the meanwhile’, he suggests, ‘the gap left by the ANC in the public domain was partially filled by liberal organizations and the new vibrant self-assertion of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). There was also active support now from the international community and from ‘anti-apartheid movements’ in many parts of the world.

During these years students were regarded as a particularly dangerous source of protest against the apartheid regime, and further ‘segregation’ was seen as a method of control. On 1 January 1960, for example, the Minister of Bantu Education assumed control of the University of Fort Hare (already identified as a key source of resistance and rebellion) and all ‘black’ students (including Coloured and Indian) were prohibited from attending formerly ‘open universities’, particularly the Universities of Cape Town (UCT) and the Witwatersrand (Wits). Under the 1959 inappropriately named ‘Extension of University Education Act’, Fort Hare was transformed into an ethnic institution for Xhosa-speaking students, and a number of ethnic ‘bush colleges’ were founded for various racial and ethnic groups, including also the University of the Western Cape (UWC) for ‘Coloureds’ and the University of Durban-Westville (UDW) for ‘Indians’.

Notwithstanding these oppressive moves under the regime’s grand apartheid scheme, the latter part of the 1960s saw the emergence of opposition to apartheid among students and some university and college staff, as well as among other broadly liberal organizations. Student protests and reformations of the organised student movements were significant too. The developments need to be understood in respect to major student organisations of the time, particularly NUSAS (founded in 1924), the Afrikaanse Nationale Studentebond (ANSB) founded in 1933, and the South African Students Organisation (SASO), founded in 1968. After the establishment of the ANSB, students from Universities of Bloemfontein, Potchefstroom and Pretoria withdrew from NUSAS, followed at a later date by Stellenbosch. NUSAS was always vocal in its criticism of the apartheid regime of the National Party and backed the ANC in their campaign against repression, and adopted the Freedom Charter and involved its members in non-racial political projects in education, the arts and trade union spheres.

In the 1950s and 1960s NUSAS ideologically emphasised ‘multiracialism’, and ‘liberalism’ of the South African variant that claimed incompatibility between apartheid and capitalism. Even then, however, a small number of Marxists and members of the South African communist party were members of the student association. In the 1960s there were direct confrontations between government and the NUSAS leadership, which at some instances resulted in detention, banning, deportation and withdrawal of passports for the office-bearers. NUSAS President Jonty Driver, for instance, was detained in August and September 1964 without trial by the police and held in solitary confinement, possibly because of his suspected involvement in the African Resistance Movement (ARM), a small group of young white militants.

At the ‘black’ universities which had been established as apartheid institutions in the early 1960s small numbers of students joined NUSAS, and at some institutions of tertiary learning battles took place for permission to form autonomous Student Representative Councils (SRC) and to affiliate to NUSAS. An exception was the longer-established University of Fort Hare, where – in contrast – the SRC temporarily disaffiliated from NUSAS in 1952 because of frustration about racist tendencies within the student association. The Fort Hare students argued that they had not been too successful in their attempts to radicalise NUSAS. They also raised concerns of alleged racial slights.

They argued that that NUSAS, despite its multiracial membership, was essentially dominated and controlled by white students. This was what Steve Biko, a student at the all-black University of Natal Medical School (UNMS) had in mind when he expressed in his column, ‘I Write what I Like’, in the SASO Newsletter, his objection to ‘the intellectual arrogance of white people that makes them believe that white leadership is a sine qua non in this country and that whites are divinely appointed pace-setters in progress’ (Biko 1987: 24).

Biko was frustrated that NUSAS and other anti-apartheid groups were dominated by white liberals, rather than by the blacks who were most affected by apartheid. He believed that even when well-intentioned, white liberals failed to comprehend the black experience and often acted in a paternalistic manner. In 1968, he and others thus formed the South African Student Organisation (SASO), which for political reasons offered membership to students of all ‘black’ sections of the population, which included those assigned to the apartheid categories of ‘African’, ‘Coloured’ and ‘Indian’.

Biko and his associates believed that to avoid white domination, black people had to organise independently. Influenced by Frantz Fanon and the African-American Black Power movement, Biko and his compatriots developed Black Consciousness as SASO’s official ideology. The movement campaigned for an end to apartheid and the transition of South Africa toward universal suffrage and a socialist economy. It organised Black Community Programmes (BCPs) and focused on the psychological empowerment of black people. Biko believed that black people needed to rid themselves of any sense of racial inferiority, an idea he expressed by popularizing the slogan ‘black is beautiful’.

In the early years, the new all-black SASO was allowed space to grow at the black universities, in part because the government regarded the separate black student association and its emphasis on largely psychological-oriented black consciousness as quite compatible with the apartheid ideology. They were to learn very soon that SASO, and more generally the ‘black conscious movement’ that Biko promoted, posed a major threat to the regime. But by the time that SASO began to be more active in political campaigns, from about 1972-3 onwards, the organisation had established already firm structural roots, which made it difficult for the government to entirely suppress it despite brutal repression, best exemplified by the murder of Biko in 1977.

Despite their organisational split, white and black student activists of NUSAS and SASO continued working together. In the early 1970s, a new generation of white students also became active in increasingly radical politics. Radical anti-apartheid and increasingly ‘new-left’ white students organised campaigns to rediscover the history of resistance which had been hidden through the repressive climate of the 1960s. They then embarked on a massive campaign for the release of all political prisoners. At the University of Witwatersrand (Wits), they took the protest beyond the confines of the campus into the city of Johannesburg. Students engaged with the workers and labour conditions on the campuses and founded ‘wages commissions’. Radical students and a few younger academics became instrumental in laying the grounds for the new black trade unions that emerged in the 1970s.

In some instances, black and white students, and a few younger, radical academics, worked together in these new leftist politics. Radical academics were involved particularly in the efforts around strikes and the emergence of structures and ultimately new black labour unions in the first half of the 1970s. Of special significance was Richard (Rick) Turner, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Natal in Durban, who worked closely with Steve Biko. Their political cooperation and personal friendship played a significant role in the ‘Durban moment’, a massive wave of strikes in 1972-3, which is often regarded as the harbinger, if not the start, of the new wave of resistance that led to the Soweto uprising, the massive uprisings of the 1980s and eventually the demise of the regime. Like his friend and comrade Biko, Turner was assassinated by the apartheid state in 1978.

The Mafeje Affair

Apart from the significant organizational developments during that year, South Africa too had its 1968 moment of ‘transgressive’ student activism (J. Brown 2016). At the country’s oldest university, the University of Cape Town (UCT), Archie Mafeje, a black master’s graduate of UCT (cum laude) and by then in the process of completing his PhD at the University Cambridge, was appointed in 1968 to a senior lecturer position in social anthropology. The university offered him the job, but then, after government pressure by the apartheid regime, rescinded the offer.

The issue was discussed at the congress of NUSAS, which organized most of the UCT students at the time, and the idea emerged of a sit-in along the lines of the university occupations then taking place in the rest of the world. Some of those who were involved remember that the European protests (in Paris and elsewhere) were widely reported in South Africa and that students followed them with interest (Plaut 2011). So, when the university authorities failed to stand up against the government intervention in its hiring policies in August 1968, a mass meeting took place in the university’s grand Jameson Hall, normally the site of graduations and other academic events. After rousing speeches from student leaders, most of the one thousand–strong audience marched out, and about six hundred students occupied the university’s administration building.

Yet, for a brief moment in August 1968, South Africa had its taste of ‘1968’. Those involved remember the inspiration and solidarity they received from Paris and London. Beyond media connections, Rick Turner who had recently returned from his doctoral studies at the Sorbonne provided a personal link of lived experience (for a full account of the Mafeje affair read Becker’s account).

The events at UCT are hardly remembered today, few of the international debates on the 1968 movements take note of the protests against the university’s dismal attitude during what has become known as the ‘Mafeje affair’, nor is there much memory of these 1960s student protests in South Africa itself. For most observers, ‘student uprising’ in South Africa refers in the first place to the events commonly known as ‘Soweto 1976’ – which is generally regarded as the beginning of the country’s student protests.

Though the Soweto uprising was in the main focus due to the protests by school-going pupils and high school students, and not led by university students, it was connected to, and ideologically grew out of developments at South African universities, which started in 1968. Most prominently, of course, this included the Black Consciousness (BC) movement, commonly associated with Steve Biko and SASO.

Conclusion

Although a comprehensive discussion of ‘1968’ on the African continent is impossible here, the examples we have presented demonstrate that students, workers and often the unemployed urban poor revolted in different ways and in contexts different from than those that took place in the North American and Western European settings. However, even a selective survey like this, let alone a closer comparison, of the many uprisings in Africa’s 1968 shows the diversity of settings and forms of activism on the continent. Our survey also suggests that the 1960s were a crucial decade for popular protest and ‘revolt’ across Africa – as they were elsewhere across the world. Despite a few honourable exceptions the problems with the huge amount of literature that poured out of the social movements in the late 1960s and 1970s (and continues to) was its extraordinary eurocentrisism. As we have shown the decade was as important for activists and other groups in Africa as it was in Europe and North America. 1968 was a crucial year for student revolutionaries on the continent. In Senegal, in events that some have claimed predated the upheavals in France, students were central to the worst political crisis the President, Leopold Senghor, had faced since independence eight years previously. Forcing him to flee the capital and call in the French army to restore order, after only eight years of independence. The unfolding of these events and the fact that they took place at the same time and often in relation to protests in the Western centres of the ‘global movement’ indicate conclusively that Africa should not be left blank on the map of scholarship that seeks to understand ‘1968’ in a global perspective.

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.

David Seddon is a researcher and political activist who has written extensively on social movements, class struggles and political transitions across the developing world. He studied ‘food riots’ and protest in a ground-breaking study on North Africa and the Middle East Free Markets and Food Riots: the politics of global adjustment with his co-editor John Walton. Seddon also coordinates the roape.net series on Popular Protest and Class Struggle in Africa.

Featured Photograph: Egyptians pour into the streets on 9 and 10 June, shouting, ‘we shall fight’ in support of President Nasser, and against his resignation (June, 1967).

References

Bianchini, Pascal. 2002. “Le mouvement étudiant sénégalais: Un essai d’interpretation.” In La société sénégalaise entre le local et le global, ed. Momar Coumba Diop, 359–396. Paris: Karthala.

Biko, Steve. 1987. I write What I Like: Selected Writings by Steve Biko. London: Heinemann.

Brown, Julian. 2016. The road to Soweto: Resistance and the uprising of 16 June 2016. Johannesburg: Jacana.

Brown, Timothy Scott. 2013. West Germany and the global sixties: The anti-authoritarian revolt, 1962–1978. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carey, Elaine. 2016. “Mexico’s 1968 Olympic dream.” In Protests in the streets: 1968 across the globe, ed. Elaine Carey 91–119. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.

Frei, Norbert. 2017. 1968: Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. Munich: dtv. Kurlansky,

Hendrickson, Burleigh. 2017. ‘Finding Tunisia in the Global 1960s’, Monde(s) no.11 (1): 61-78. Presses universitaires de Rennes.

Luhanga, Matthew Laban. 2009. Courage for Change: re-engineering the University of Dar es Salaam. Dar es Salaam: University of Dar es Salaam.

Kurlansky, Mark. 2005. 1968: The year that rocked the world. London: Vintage.

Monaville, Pedro A.G. 2013. “Decolonizing the university: Postal politics, the student movement, and global 1968 in the Congo.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/102373.

Moss, Glenn. 2014. The New Radicals: A Generational Memoir of the 1970s. Johannesburg: Jacana Media.

Nzongola-Ntalaja, George. 2002. A People’s History of the Congo. London, Zed Books.

Plaut, Martin. 2011. “How the 1968 revolution reached Cape Town.” MartinPlaut blog, 1 September. martinplaut.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/the-1968-revolution-reaches-cape-town.

Seddon, David. 2017. “Che Guevara in the Congo”, Jacobin, 4 April 2017 www.jacobinmag.com/2017/04/che-guevara-cuba-castro-congo-patrice-lumumba-colonialism.

Seddon, David. 2017-2018. RoAPE Project on ‘Popular Protest, Social Movements and Class Struggle in Africa’, RoAPE.net

Suttner, Raymond. 2012. “The African National Congress Centenary: a long and difficult journey”. International Affairs, 88 (4):729).

Taafe, Peter, ‘Why 1968 Still Matters’, Socialism Today, no. 218, May 2018, p. 11.

West, Michael, William Martin and Fanon Che Wilkins. 2009. From Toussaint to Tupac: the Black International since the Age of Revolution.

Zeilig, Leo. 2007. Revolt and protest: Student politics and activism in Sub-Saharan Africa. London: I.B. Tauris.

‘Power to the People’: the 1968 Revolt in Africa

ROAPE

May 29, 2018

By Heike Becker

Fifty years after student protests shook much of the Cold War world, in the ‘West’ and in the ‘East, ‘Global 1968’ has become the catchphrase to describe these profound generational revolts. West Berlin, Paris, and Berkeley spring to mind prominently, and most memorable behind what was then the Iron Curtain were the events of the Prague Spring. For most commentators and scholars, these events in the Global North appear to have constituted ‘Global 1968.’

At the beginning of the anniversary year, for instance, a recent publication by a German scholar of contemporary history, Norbert Frei, dubbed 1968: Youth Revolt and Global Protest made it to the front tables of major Berlin bookstores. Frei’s monograph includes chapters on Paris, and on the events in the United States, Germany, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom in ’The West,’ supplemented by a chapter on ‘Movements in the East,’ which discusses protest in Prague, Poland, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Frei mentions neither the events of the 1968 revolts in Africa, nor indeed those that had taken place in any part of the Global South. What then, I am wondering, is his concept of the global of the revolt?

Though obliterated in Frei’s monograph, Latin America gathers a little more attention with the 1968 events in Mexico City, which are occasionally mentioned in the discussion (see Carey 2016; Kurlansky 2005). In contrast, none of the relevant overviews brings related events on the African continent to the fore.

What may be the reason for the fact that in the current debates on 1968 and its legacy on the African continent are almost never mentioned? It certainly was not the case that nothing happened on the continent that matched the activism of the revolting generation elsewhere. In fact, students and workers in a range of African countries appear to have contributed to the global uprising with their own interpretations, from Senegal and South Africa to the Congo (see a full account of the continent’s revolt in 1968 by Becker and Seddon on roape.net), to mention just a few. Yet, those African revolts and protests have been forgotten in the global discourse of commemoration.

There is clearly a great need to look more closely at African events, trajectories, and meanings of 1968 activism. For a start, here are two vignettes of student protests that come to mind; both took place in 1968 on the continent. The first uprising happened in Dakar, the second in Cape Town.

Student-led protests: Dakar 1968

The majority of those celebrating and debating in the Global North may be surprised to hear that in May 1968, it was Senegal where a student-led revolt almost sent a government packing. In Dakar, students had been on strike from March 1968, initially criticizing the conditions in their university. From April 1968, they connected with broader concerns in the society, such as the high price of local staples, the fall in the standard of living, unemployment of graduates, and foreign domination of the domestic industry. In May, the Senegalese trade unions adopted the students’ slogans and joined the struggles. Leo Zeilig (2007: 182), who has studied the Senegalese protests in the wider context of African student movements, describes the events of Dakar 1968:

On demonstrations the crowd declared: ‘Power to the people: freedom for unions,’ ‘We want work and rice.’ The coalition of student and working-class demands culminated in the general strike that started on 31 May. Between 1 and 3 June ‘we had the impression that the government was vacant . . . ministers were confined to the administrative buildings . . . and the leaders of the party and state hid in their houses! . . .’

The government reacted to the strike by ordering the army onto the university campus, with instructions to shoot on sight. During a demonstration after these events, workers and students decided to march to the presidential palace, which was protected by the army. French troops openly intervened, occupying key installations in the town, the airport, the presidential palace and of course the French embassy. The university was closed, foreign students were sent home and thousands of students were arrested.

There has been some discussion among former activists and analysts about how far the events in Dakar were connected to those in Paris. Although it seems clear that they were certainly no distant ripples of the storm in the French metropole—and in fact, the students in Dakar had taken to the streets before those in Paris—authors like Zeilig maintain that they were indeed part of the global 1968 youth revolt.

UCT 1968 sit-in protest: marching from Jameson Hall to the Administration Block (photograph held by UCT Photograph and Clipping Collection—Special Collections, University of Cape Town Libraries, used with permission).

Today, the events that took place in Dakar between March and June 1968 are seldom debated as central foci of a global 1968 protest movement. This is ever-more surprising as the brutal crackdown on the uprising in Senegal sent ripples to Europe. In September 1968, thousands demonstrated against the ‘Peace Award of the German Publishers’ Guild’ to Senegalese President Léopold Senghor during the Frankfurt Book Fair. The protests were explicitly directed against both Senghor’s concept of Négritude said to ostensibly promote neocolonial development and the brutal crushing of the Senegalese opposition movements earlier that year (T. Brown 2013: 117–120).

Yet, the events in Dakar were related to Global 1968 and those in the country’s former colonial capital, Paris, in a more complex ways than suggested by those who claim that ‘the French events . . . found their way quickly to Dakar’ (T. Brown 2013: 118). The Senegalese movement not only began earlier, it was connected also to local histories of protest. In February 1961, 250 students had taken to the streets of Dakar to protest against the assassination of the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Analysts suggest that this was the moment when the Senegalese students shifted from an anticolonial orientation toward an anti-imperialist ideology (Bianchini 2002).

African uprisings in 1968 also need to be considered in the context of broader waves of student activism and rebellion on the continent. Again, events in the Congo were central to this as the assassination of Lumumba radicalized student politics with an impact on both the local, the African, and indeed the international (Global North) student movements. In West Germany, for instance, long before the massive protests against Senghor at the Frankfurt Book Fair, students had been marching in West Berlin against an official visit of Congolese President Moise Tschombé in December 1964, who was said to have been implicated in the murder of his predecessor, Patrice Lumumba. On the African continent, as elsewhere, student revolt took different forms in response to varying local, national, and regional conditions. Yet, the late 1960s saw protests in countries across Africa.

Student protests against apartheid: Cape Town 1968

South Africa too had its 1968 moment of transgressive student activism. At the country’s oldest university, the University of Cape Town (UCT), Archie Mafeje, a black master’s graduate of UCT and by then in the process of completing his PhD at the University of Cambridge, was appointed in 1968 to a senior lecturer position in social anthropology. The university offered him the job, but then, after government pressure by the Apartheid regime, rescinded the offer.

The issue was discussed at the congress of the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), which organized most of the UCT students at the time, and the idea emerged of a sit-in along the lines of the university occupations then taking place in the rest of the world. Some of those who were involved remember that the European protests were widely reported in South Africa and that students followed them with interest (Plaut 2011).

So, when the university authorities failed to stand up against the government intervention in its hiring policies in August 1968, a mass meeting took place in the university’s grand Jameson Hall, normally the site of graduations and other academic events. After rousing speeches from student leaders, most of the one thousand–strong audience marched out, and about six hundred students occupied the university’s administration building. The sit-in of students and some academic staff, as the action was called following the designation of similar forms of activism from Berkeley to West Berlin, resolved ‘to sit in this Administration Building until such time as the University Council has met to 1. Appoint Mafeje to University Staff. 2. Make a statement of policy to ensure that the future appointments be made solely on Academic grounds’ (BUZV UCT). While the form of activism was thus fairly radical, the language of the protest, with its emphasis on ‘academic freedom,’ remained within the limits of liberal opposition against the apartheid regime. Significant for the South African political and academic condition of the time is that most if not all of the student protesters belonged to the country’s white minority.

UCT 1968 sit-in protest: inside the occupied administration block (photograph held by UCT Photograph and Clipping Collection—Special Collections, University of Cape Town Libraries, used with permission).

Eventually, the occupiers—about 90 had stayed the course—gave up and left after one-and-a-half weeks. A white anthropologist was appointed in Mafeje’s place. South Africa’s oldest university had caved in to the demands of the apartheid policy regarding university education.

The 1968 ‘Mafeje affair’ must be understood as representative of the enforcement of apartheid policies in the academy. From 1959 onward, South African students had been admitted to universities along racial and ethnic lines—at UCT, which had been declared a white institution, black students were admitted only under exceptional circumstances and any non-white applicant aspiring to study at UCT had to apply for a special permit from the government. Although this law did not pertain to academic staff members, Mafeje’s appointment was prevented.

Yet, for a brief period in August 1968, South Africa had had its taste of 1968. Martin Plaut (2011), one of the occupiers, described this action of a section of South African white students:

Six hundred of us decided to participate in the occupation, determined not to leave until UCT reversed its decision. For ten days we held out, sleeping on the floors. Food was cooked communally—even by the men who, at that time, were largely ignorant of the workings of a kitchen. Plenty of wine and marijuana were consumed and virginities were lost, but on the whole it was a carefully managed protest, with a sign asking for rubbish to be removed and the areas being occupied to be kept clean. Messages of support flowed in from students in Paris and London and there was favourable coverage in the international media.

Perhaps the most important thing was that we discovered intellectual liberation. Alternative lectures were organised on the stairs. We got a newspaper up and running. In one fell swoop we had thrown off our mental shackles. At last we were not just some isolated racist outpost of empire, but part of an international student movement.

This conclusion was indeed significant: the student protesters felt that through their transgressive activism they had gained a sense of intellectual freedom and self-respect, which the academic institution, proud as UCT was and remains of its ‘liberal’ stance, had not been able to maintain.

The events in Dakar and Cape Town demonstrate examples of students on the African continent revolting in very different ways and contexts than those in the North American and Western European settings. The comparison of these two instances of the many uprising in Africa’s 1968 also shows the diversity of settings and forms of activism on the continent. The unfolding of those events and the fact that they were met with solidarity and related protests in the Western centres of the revolt highlight that Africa should not be left blank on the map of scholarship that seeks to understand 1968 in a global perspective.

An earlier version of this article was published on Heike Becker’s blog and on Focaal Blog. On 31 May roape.net will be publishing an extensive survey of the 1968 protest movement across Africa by ROAPE writers Heike Becker and David Seddon.

References

Brown, Julian. 2016. The road to Soweto: Resistance and the uprising of 16 June 2016. Johannesburg: Jacana.

Brown, Timothy Scott. 2013. West Germany and the global sixties: The anti-authoritarian revolt, 1962–1978. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

BUZV UCT. Photograph and Clipping Collection, University of Cape Town Libraries, Special Collections. “Academic Freedom—1968: Sit-in Protest.” mss_buz_acad_freedom_1968_sit_in.

Carey, Elaine. 2016. “Mexico’s 1968 Olympic dream.” In Protests in the streets: 1968 across the globe, ed. Elaine Carey 91–119. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.

Frei, Norbert. 2017. 1968: Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest. Munich: dtv.

Kurlansky, Mark. 2005. 1968: The year that rocked the world. London: Vintage.

Plaut, Martin. 2011. “How the 1968 revolution reached Cape Town.” MartinPlaut blog, 1 September. martinplaut.wordpress.com/2011/09/01/the-1968-revolution-reaches-cape-town.

Zeilig, Leo. 2007. Revolt and protest: Student politics and activism in Sub-Saharan Africa. London: I.B. Tauris.

Contradictions of Peripheral States

ROAPE

May 24, 2018

By Tamás Gerőcs

I was the only participant in the Dar es Salaam workshop organized by the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) from Eastern Europe. I am grateful that I could be there and despite the fact I did not know any of the participants in person before, I could still follow the debates and make my small contribution thanks to what I think is the global and historical perspective of the majority of issues that were raised. One debate was especially familiar to me because we used to have similar reflections on our socialist history in Hungary.

Much of the debate in Tanzania centred on the legacy of Julius Nyerere’s revolutionary government. My impression was that this legacy is celebrated among young activists in Tanzania who use Nyerere and his Arusha Declaration as the main historical reference point to which they want to return today when they imagine a revolutionary struggle that can transform social relations in a capitalist society. Yet this strong and positive memory on the Nyerere’s years surprised me.

In the context I am most familiar with in Eastern Europe, we usually tend to critically reflect on our socialist past. This is not just an abstract theoretical question, but all over the world the left needs to develop a social critique to the age of post-war developmentalism not only from a moral standpoint but also economically and socially in order to understand the origin and eruption of the neo-liberal reversal. The main question which we tend to ask in Eastern Europe is whether state socialism was a genuine attempt to delink our society from global capitalist forces or at least to withstand these forces as the state socialist ideology promised us. Or whether the state mediated a current mode of world-economic re-integration through which capitalist social relations were reproduced and modified. The question these debates in Eastern Europe focus on is whether the period between 1960s and 1980s was state socialism or state capitalism.

I think such a debate is necessary in relation to the experience of the national liberation movements in Africa too and especially on the role of the state that had emerged from the national struggles throughout Africa and in particular in Tanzania. I welcomed the debate on this issue when some of the comrades discussed the revolutionary potential of the Arusha Declaration and the state that was built upon its principles by Nyerere. Some of these arguments went as far as to admit that Nyerere’s state was capitalist in essence as it was either unable or unwilling to address questions surrounding class struggle. Instead it (re)produced what dependency and world-system scholars, including Samir Amin and Issa Shivji and many others called the “state bureaucratic bourgeoisie” which were embryonic forms of those oligarchs who later emerged in the neo-liberal transition.

This whole question goes back to the debates around the Russian Revolution, the other crucial topic which was discussed in the workshop. Later debates developed along these lines on the question of the Asiatic mode of production addressed by Maoist comrades in the 1960s and 1970s in China. These historical debates of the global left tended to reflect on the question whether the transition to socialism from non-capitalist social relations must include the temporary transformation to a form of petit-capitalist society or whether there is a leap forward from the colonial situation directly to socialism without any bourgeois ‘interruption’.

Other questions in these debates include whether socialism and capitalism must look the same everywhere, hence industrialization as the crucial means in an agrarian society to leap forward to socialism (some of these issues are being raised in the debates on capitalism in Africa on roape.net). Or as world-systems and dependency scholars argue, uneven and combined development encompasses many forms of capitalist social relations making capitalism a very complex global system in which non-capitalist modes of production and organizations of labour are constantly reproduced as was the case with slavery in the Americas or the second serfdom in Eastern Europe in the 19^th century still under the aegis of the emerging global capitalism. No surprise that these scholars suggest that even the Soviet socialist experiment which managed to undo private property relations and industrialize the Russian economy to an unprecedented degree was indeed a form of state capitalism transformed by the emergence of the post war international division of labor.

One conclusion is that neither industrialization, nor nationalization are revolutionary acts per se at least not for the cause of the proletariat. In fact, during systemic crises of capitalism the national bourgeoisie might even be compelled to nationalize industry in defense of its own interest as has been the case in many parts of Eastern Europe since 2009. The crucial question to be addressed in these debates and hopefully the next workshop in Johannesburg will be the nature of the popular socialization of the economy for which nationalization might be a necessary but certainly not sufficient requirement. Naturally, there are additional questions. What then does socialization of the means of production and the state mean and how shall it work? In order to revisit these question, and to develop a critical assessment of the socialist past, we must return to the legacy of the Arusha Declaration and the Russian revolution.

Questions on class relations were another important discussion at the workshop. Adequate class analysis is inevitable for any leftist initiative. We have to be very careful not to use rigid categories that do not apply to specific socio-historical circumstances. From a structuralist point of view, however, class relations are global relations as the production, distribution and circulation of (surplus) value are organized on a global scale. In peripheral countries, such as in East Africa and Eastern Europe citizens of a particular state might occupy distant global positions compared to each other while their class relations remain indirect in regard to their global class positions despite the geographical or cultural proximity in the state (see the discussion of Greece’s crisis on roape.net). This ‘structural heterogeneity’ makes these nations highly unintegrated and polarized which is one of the main contradictions of capitalist peripheral states.

Tamás Gerőcs is a political economist, currently employed as a Research Fellow at the Institute of World Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Featured Photograph: South African socialist Trevor Ngwane speaking at the workshop, behind him is a projected image of national liberation heroes.

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