Revolution 2.0: Thomas Sankara and the Social Media Generation

October 31, 2017

By Heike Becker

Burkina Faso is a fascinating example of how a long history of socio-political mobilization, the resurgence of interest in a murdered former revolutionary leader, and the digital connections of the social media age have recently coalesced in a successful revolution.

Long-time strongman Blaise Compaoré was overthrown in late October 2014, when hundreds of thousands, predominantly young Burkinabé participated in mass protests in the capital Ouagadougou and the country’s other centres. Almost a year later, in another upsurge of popular mobilization they came out on to the streets again; with massive acts of civil disobedience the popular resistance of September 2015 magnificently defended the new democracy against an attempted military coup.

The young Burkinabé activists at the forefront of the protests have dubbed the events ‘Revolution 2.0’. They did so for two good reasons: on the one hand, they referred to the digital connection of the protestors, journalists and opposition politicians who live-tweeted their way through the chain of events. But the tag also captured the mobilization as a second coming, finding its inspiration through a massive resurgence of interest in Thomas Sankara. Burkina Faso’s former president from 1983 until his murder in October 1987, never entirely ceased to be an inspiration for radical aims and hopes. Frequently he has been called the ‘African Che Guevara’. Yet Sankara’s image, his words, his legacy really became alive again with the massive mobilization of Burkina Faso’s youth from 2013 onwards.

Burkina Faso is one of the poorest African countries; its urbanization rate is still low at 31% (2017), and only 2.15 million Burkinabé (out of a total population of 18.9 million) are active web users today. More than three quarters of those who access the Internet do so through their smart phones, only 20 per cent have access to computer devices. In 2013-2015 these numbers were even much lower; nonetheless the hashtags #Burkina and #Lwili served to provide significant connections.

Popular movements such as Le Balai Citoyen (the ‘Citizen’s Broom’), founded by musician-activists Serge Bambara (known as the rapper ‘Smockey’) and Sams’K Le Jah, who plays reggae, mobilized through concerts, mass meetings and social media. During the frenzied days of street battles, at the Parliament building, on the Place de la Revolution, and elsewhere in 2014, those with smartphones, even though only a minority among the hundreds of thousands of protestors, tweeted events and information, which became a significant part of a remarkably flexible strategy of moving street blockades. Facebook, the most popular social media in the country, was used extensively for organising. While the Compaoré regime shut down sms services (but not the internet), cellphones – even if not internet-enabled – played an important role as transmitters of another, older media form: radio. Independent radio stations played popular rap and reggae songs celebrating Sankara’s life and ideas, and during the insurrection itself broadcast strategic instructions and information.

Burkina Faso in 2014 was no ‘Facebook revolution’. However, social media played an important role in connecting activists from the popular movements, opposition politicians, trade union leaders, and journalists. They shared what was happening on the streets. Twitter images were particularly significant also in joining ‘Revolution 2.0’ with the Burkinabé diaspora in neighbouring West African countries, elsewhere on the continent, and in countries of the ‘Global North’. They also reached influential international media. The President’s attempt to change the country’s Constitution and create a ‘presidency for life’ was increasingly isolated locally and internationally. Digital social media can be credited, in part, for the fact that the 2014 uprising succeeded to bring down the unpopular regime. Opposition leaders and human rights groups had been denouncing the Compaoré regime for years, however earlier waves of fierce protests in the late 1990s, and again in 2011 had stood no chance; they were crushed brutally.

With reference to the uprisings in North Africa that had brought down long-term strongmen there and in other parts of the Arab world, observers have described the Burkinabé insurrection as an ‘African spring’. Indeed, #AfricanSpring was another virulent hashtag although less actively used than #Lwili, named for the traditional fabrics worn in Burkina Faso. The local woven garments had also been intensely promoted by Thomas Sankara during his presidency in the 1980s as part of the project to promote economic self-reliance.

Sankara spoke out strongly, and to the face of powerful Western leaders against repayment of African debts. Under him, Burkina Faso embarked on child immunisation campaigns, and a large-scale campaign to fight desertification. Quite unusual for his time, Sankara promoted women in high positions and banned female circumcision; he is remembered for a powerful speech in which he pronounced that the revolution could not triumph without the emancipation of women. The young leader, attractive in his signature red beret, personally incorruptible, and a keen soccer player and guitarist, took on vested interests internationally and locally, which – as some have pointed out – led to a dangerous situation and eventually his murder and the coup led by his former associate Blaise Compaoré.

Today, Sankara’s message and example are finding enthusiastic admiration among young Africans in Burkina Faso, and beyond. From Burkina Faso, Senegal and The Gambia in the West, to South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe in the southern parts of the continent a social media generation has taken to the streets with their posts and tweets and cellphone videos, with their blogs and rap music. They are deeply angry at the postcolonial condition and austerity, at unreformed global racism and corrupt, authoritarian postcolonial elites; they share a great desire for democracy and social justice. In the 21st century young Africans with their smartphones are, arguably, at the forefront of an alternative globalisation from the south.

Heike Becker writes about the intersection of culture and postcolonial politics with a focus on memory politics, popular culture and social movements, some of her work can be found here. Heike is a regular contributor to www.roape.net.

Photographs: Featured photograph is a portrait of Sankara painted on the wall of François Compaoré’s mansion, the economic adviser to the deposed president. The mansion was raided and occupied during the revolution in 2014, it is still held by revolutionary youth (Leo Zeilig, March 2016). The first image in the text is a souvenir DVD of the revolution sold on the streets of the capital Ouagadougou (Heike Becker, December 2014). The second image is a burnt car outside the Assemblée nationale in Ouagadougou, the parliament building was burnt to the ground at the end of October 2014 (Heike Becker, December 2014).

Kenya’s Incredible Election

ROAPE

October 25, 2017

By Nic Cheeseman, Gabrielle Lynch and Justin Willis

What makes a credible election? As Kenya lurches deeper into political crisis over presidential polls scheduled for October 26, this is a pressing question. The last few weeks have been a political roller-coaster, with repeated, unexpected, shifts and turns; even those close to leading political figures have found it hard to keep up with events – and with the tactics and demands of the main protagonists. When a majority judgment by the Supreme Court annulled the first attempt at a poll on 8 August and ordered fresh elections, the incumbent president, Uhuru Kenyatta, turned his anger not on the electoral commission – whose ‘irregularities and illegalities’ led to the judgment – but on the court itself, whose members he denounced as ‘know-alls’. Now Kenyatta himself has taken a case to the Supreme Court, seeking to force Raila Odinga, his principal opponent, to take part in the coming election – because Odinga has said he will boycott the poll, even though he himself brought the case which led to the first election being annulled.

Why is Kenyatta now so keen on the fresh election, and why is Odinga reluctant? Kenyatta had been declared the winner of the 8 August poll, in which his Jubilee party also won a majority of multiple lower-level elections. He has not shown much enthusiasm for the electoral commission’s subsequent efforts to introduce changes that will make the fresh presidential poll more credible; and one electoral commissioner recently resigned in dramatic circumstances, alleging that necessary reforms are being stymied by political interference. Instead Kenyatta has been campaigning hard, and insists he is confident of victory. He would, he claims, romp home in an election without Odinga – there are other, minor candidates in the race, but they will attract very few votes. Kenyatta wants the legitimacy, international and local, that would come from an election in which he defeats Odinga – though it seems he will push ahead with the election anyway if Odinga refuses to stand.

Flouting established parliamentary practice, Kenyatta’s party has rushed through changes in election law that would make it harder for the court to overturn another result; but the president has held off from assenting to these, seeking to use this as leverage to force Odinga to participate. Odinga, meanwhile, has declared that the changes in procedure are not enough, that he was the real winner in August – and that he would be cheated of victory again in a new poll. He insists that he is not reluctant to face the electorate – but will only do so after comprehensive reforms. In turn, Odinga called for the elections to be postponed – a position that has also been supported by a number of local and international civil society organisations. At the same time, he has called for periodic demonstrations against the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) and scheduled polls, and last week told his supporters to wait for his direction on the eve of the scheduled polls as to the plan for collective action.

Behind the calculations – and the posturing – of the two men lies a keen awareness of the realities of Kenya’s electoral politics. Kenya’s politics are ethnic – but not just ethnic. Kenyatta’s support is strongest in central Kenya – and in the Rift Valley, the home area of his deputy, William Ruto. Odinga commands overwhelming support in Nyanza, in the west. But many Kenyans live outside these core strongholds; and even in the strongholds, voters are not simply supporting their candidate out of blind ethnic loyalty. This is also a politics of clientelism; people vote for candidates who will reward, and safeguard the interests of themselves and their community. Clientelism is not everything; the debate over Kenya’s new constitution – which was approved by a clear majority in a 2010 referendum – showed a popular enthusiasm for accountable, devolved government – and Odinga has clearly positioned himself as an advocate for more devolution. But voting on policy grounds against an incumbent, and a perceived likely winner, is a risk for the individual voter, and their community – incumbency is a powerful force in these circumstances.

NASA’s Mashujaa Day (Hero’s Day) rally in Kisumu, 20 October. Raila Odinga arriving (Gabrielle Lynch, 20 October, 2017).

The line between government and state is far from clear, and the president and ruling party have much greater campaign resources. Those resources fund giant rallies and campaign paraphernalia, and also allow the small-scale, ubiquitous gift-giving through which candidates demonstrate their generosity to win the support of voters. In the run-up to the August elections, Kenyatta and Jubilee made determined and effective use of this advantage. Since those polls, they have continued to do so; and Kenyatta’s advantage has been multiplied, as all the lower-level candidates who won seats have strong motivations to campaign for him. If they fail to show enthusiasm, or even worse, if he were to lose, they would lose the patronage that they need to deliver to their local constituents. Many local politicians and former Odinga allies from swing areas – outside the strongholds of the two rivals – have also defected to Kenyatta’s side. That is not simply the result of self-interest (though that often plays a part); it is also because many believe their constituents want them to be on the side of the incumbent government, because that is the most likely route to reward. Kenyatta wants an election because he is the incumbent, and this politics works for him; whether the electoral commission can deliver a problem-free process is a secondary issue for him. For him, a credible election is one with a high turnout and a clear result.

Odinga hailed the Supreme Court decision as a victory. He also argued that it proved the truth of his claim that he had been the real winner. In fact, it fell short of that; the full judgment offered no opinion on how many votes had been cast for each candidate. The election was annulled because the electoral commission failed to follow its own processes, and the law, in the process of tallying and transmitting of results: for the court, a credible election is defined by process. If this was a victory, it was one which handed Odinga a problem; his resources – and those of his supporters at lower levels – had been exhausted by the first campaign. Up against an intransigent government and a chaotic electoral commission, his rhetoric has naturally focused on demands for dramatic changes in the electoral commission, but is underpinned by the fact that the realities of political clientelism place him at a significant disadvantage. For Odinga, a credible election would not only require certain electoral reforms, but also the elimination – or at last, the significant reduction – of the advantages of incumbency: something that Kenyatta will not allow. Whatever the electoral commission do to improve their performance, it seems impossible that this will happen before the election on 26 October – and so Odinga has denounced any poll on that day as not credible.

Meanwhile, others look on. International observers, and diplomats, were wrong-footed by the events after August 8. The relatively smooth polling process distracted attention from the developing fiasco around tallying and transmission. While, in the absence of conclusive evidence that Kenyatta benefitted from the flaws in procedure, few anticipated the decision of the Supreme Court, which went against the legal precedent set during Odinga’s unsuccessful electoral petition in 2013 – when the Supreme Court ruled that, while there were significant procedural problems, the petitioners had not shown that they were systematically in favour of a particular candidate and had changed the overall outcome.

Kenyatta and Odinga have each accused ‘western powers’ of favouring the other. But it seems rather that the governments that have long considered themselves to be allies of Kenya – in relationships that have been close, but also sometimes tense and problematic – are desperate for an election that will reduce the sense of political crisis in Kenya: that is what credible elections would mean for them. But it is by no means clear that polls held on October 26 would meet that criterion. Unable to agree on what a credible election would look like, Kenya is perilously close to holding a presidential poll that satisfies no one.

Nic Cheeseman is Professor of Democracy and International Development at Birmingham University. Gabrielle Lynch is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Warwick and Chair of ROAPE. Justin Willis is Professor of Modern African History at the University of Durham.

Featured Photograph: NASA’s Mashujaa Day (Hero’s Day) rally in Kisumu, 20 October. Raila Odinga speaking to crowds (Gabrielle Lynch, 20 October, 2017).

The Earth Shook and Crumbled

ROAPE

October 24, 2017

Review of The Fall (produced by Baxter Theatre Centre, South Africa).

Royal Court, London.

By Colin Fancy

Radical Theatre from South Africa has a longstanding and hugely respected reputation. Plays like Woza Albert!, Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island were some of the most influential plays in the late 20th century.

Plays from Apartheid-era South Africa told stories of struggle that those of us living in the West could empathise with and solidarize with. They entertained and educated us about that struggle.

The Fall, produced by Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre Centre, is of that illustrious and inspirational traditional. Yet it’s also very different.

The Fall is about a struggle in South African which, though only in 2015-16, has already had an impact in the West – witness the campaign to tear down the racist Confederate statues in USA. But even more than that influence, The Fall is about struggles that we are fighting simultaneously alongside our activist sisters and brothers in South Africa.

The Fall tells the tale of the student activists, or cadres as they refer to each other throughout, who came together to bring down the statue of Cecil Rhodes which stood until 2015 at the University of Cape Town campus. That’s the part of the story which is well known – less so is the agitation and debate that was necessary to reach that bold act of de-colonisation.

The play has been created and performed by the class of 2015 graduate actors, some of whom had been involved or affected by the campaign. The actors perform in a classic Empty Space stage but they fill it with foot-stomping, handclapping, singing, and passionate personal testimony and scenes still hot from the struggle less than two years ago.

The show starts with them clapping, stamping, dancing and singing as they re-enact the storming of the university building. Woven into this theatrical fabric the students begin narrating, “We were pushing each other, sweating and singing, not knowing what would happen next. Fuck, man, it was historic! Finally black students at UCT felt confident to speak about the traumas we face on this campus.”

“I’ve never seen so many people with such fire.”

“It was bloody hot inside the foyer and it didn’t help that management switched off the fucking aircon system.”

Anyone who’s been involved in student occupations and struggles will recognise the pace, intensity and passion of the political debate amongst the rapidly radicalised agitators. As the students verbally chip away at the existence of the statue and all that it represents, they grow in experience, in knowledge and in stature to become a new generation of history makers.

Bringing down the statue of Rhodes is expressed by the activists as the next step in “the fall of every colonial icon in this country, one by one.” The icon represents the colonial system that the students have to live and learn in, though they are the first generation born after the fall of apartheid. Interestingly apartheid is barely mentioned in the play. They may be living after apartheid but from the way racism and other forms of oppression weigh heavily in their lives far too much of the divisions of the old continue into the present day.

The statue of Rhodes is at the centre of the play, but it is only comes into focus mid-point into the story. After their iconoclastic act the cadres are both empowered by their achievement and conscious that much more is wrong with their lives, their life opportunities, South African society and indeed the world. This is where the similarities and parallels with struggles elsewhere really come to the fore.

The students’ acknowledgement that there are multiple oppressions appears to stop the movement in its track and threatens to fragment it. As once character says, “You see, now that Rhodes had fallen, all the problems that the movement had been pushing aside began to come back into focus…The issue of gender had been simmering throughout the occupation and now that the statue was gone, so tensions began to boil over.”

Also the issues of sexuality, non-binary rights, class exploitation and others come to the forefront.

Non-binary student, Cahya, says, “Every time we have these discussions about gender you cishet men and women make it all about you, and the rest of us are sitting here – suffocating… Our mission statement clearly states that we are an intersectional movement!”

As Marx said, it is necessary for people to throw off the muck of ages as part of the revolutionary process of changing the world.

The play shows these issues were neither ignored for the sake of ‘unity’ or allowed to divide the movement but instead, they are debated and fought over, sometimes fiercely. It is a great lesson for everyone who wishes ‘the left should stop arguing amongst themselves’ or thinks, ‘why do people bring these divisions to the movement?’ The debates portrayed are about overcoming divisions in society that will adversely affect the movement if they are not addressed.

The staff on campus have supported the students in their struggle and the students recognise the workers are suffering – especially since their work has been outsourced (as elsewhere in the neo-liberalist world). The workers conditions have deteriorated and exploitation has increased. Crucially the students make common cause with the workers as captured in the play’s dedication, “We dedicate this to all the students and workers who marched for free, decolonial education.”

The final words go to Qhawekazi, as she finishes the play, with a commitment to continuing the struggle: “We used to be people. We used to dream about a future where we didn’t need to protest anymore… my soul is tired, but the reasons I came the first time won’t let me leave. They won’t let me live a normal life.”

Colin Fancy is a London-based activist, writer and teacher. He is one of the editors of the RS21 website.

Rwanda’s Green Revolution

ROAPE

October 18, 2017

By An Ansoms, Giuseppe Cioffo, Neil Dawson, Sam Desiere, Chris Huggins, Margot Leegwater, Jude Murison, Aymar Nyenyezi, Johanna Treidl, Julie Vandamme

A ‘green’ revolution in Africa

The Rwandan government – supported by major international donors – has high ambitions to modernise and professionalise the agrarian and land sector to turn Rwanda from subsistence farming into a ‘modern’ and ‘developed’ country. Its reform fits into a broader call to implement a Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It is believed that formalisation of land tenure, investment in modern inputs, and commercialization will drive increased production of selected marketable crops, which will be profitable for smallholders if they are integrated into commercial commodity chains. This, in turn, is expected to lead to increased national food security, exports and growth at the national scale (see Knickel et al. 2009).

Key policy dimension of agrarian and land policies

However, several studies in SSA have shown that there are considerable negative impacts of the Green Revolution policy for significant sections of the rural population, especially poorer socio-economic groups, and more vulnerable farmers. This blogpost focuses upon three key policy dimensions in Rwanda’s agrarian and land sector modernisation: land registration, the Crop Intensification Policy (CIP) and cooperatives. It combines the findings of nine researchers who have done in-depth, qualitative research on the impact of Rwanda’s rural modernisation policies. By combining their findings, these studies cover a broad variety of settings and regions, reaching a fairly broad geographical scale, as the map suggests.

This map indicates the locations of research

The authors did not cover entire districts but locations in districts highlighted in this map.

The use of statistics in Rwanda

In and outside Rwanda, statistics validate the government’s claim of increased agricultural productivity and poverty reduction as they are viewed as a major instrument in policy design, implementation and evaluation (see Ansoms et al. 2017). However, we argue that they do not adequately capture the impact and success of Rwandan agricultural and poverty-reduction policies. ‘The problem is not a lack of data availability – the GoR undertook significant and laudable efforts to make their datasets publicly available – but rather that different data sources contradict each other and there is no way of telling which dataset is more reliable’ (Desiere et al. 2016, 10).

Poverty increase: 2010/11 – 2013/14

On the basis of thorough analyses of statistical data, we claim:

Yields probably increased over the period of the implementation of the agricultural reforms, but less than what the most optimistic but least reliable data source (FAO statistics) suggests (see Desiere et al. 2016).

Poverty decreased significantly over the 2005/6 – 2010/11 period but with seasonal effects playing a partial role (see Ansoms et al. 2017; McKay and Verpoorten 2016).

Inflation over the 2010/11 – 2013/14 period was probably much higher (around 30%) than the assumed 16.7% (see Desiere, 2017).

Under this assumption, poverty did not decrease significantly over the 2010/11 – 2013/14 period, but remained constant (see Desiere, 2017).

A nuanced view upon rural development

The modernisation and professionalization of the agricultural sector are often presented as key drivers of developmental progress. The government has taken a highly interventionist stance in the agricultural sector (as in the economy more generally). It has pushed farmers into obligatory formal land registration to enhance investment in the agricultural sector and reduce land conflicts. In combining our data, we focus on three key policy dimensions:

Land registration: Despite land registration, land conflicts are still widespread and often concern parcels that have already been officially registered. Because people often do not report the transactions of officially registered land, particularly not in the case of small land plots, new land conflicts are likely to arise. In addition, farmers are worried about the ways in which a land register allows authorities to ‘govern’ land rights, as an updated register is a very efficient tool for authorities to push farmers into centrally-organised modern farming systems or to exclude those who resist from access to land.

Crop Intensification Programme (CIP): The Crop Intensification Programme started in 2007 and entails 1) land use consolidation; (2) sale of fertilisers and improved seeds; (3) provision of proximity extension services; and (4) improvement of post-harvesting handling and storage. It aims to transform Rwanda’s family-farming into a professionalised sector, and is oriented towards the sale of target crops rather than home consumption. However, on the basis of our evidence, we argue that the CIP is a model that is too simple and rigid as it operates in a complex and variable human, climatic and agro-ecological context. It has often proved to be counter-productive in terms of food and tenure security for the poorest households and other vulnerable groups.

Cooperatives: It is through cooperatives that CIP crops are brought to the market and they are key structures in the organisation of the new agrarian model. Not only do they allow for a more coordinated agrarian approach with its emphasis on scale-effects in collective, more efficient, production schemes, they are also instruments in a top-down state-controlled governance model. At the level of implementation, several gaps facilitate the structural exclusion of poorer socio-economic groups, and more vulnerable farmers. This will continue as long as the heterogeneous socio-economic background of farmers is not taken into account. Top-down approaches tend to lead to a financial burden, to production schemes, and to opaque management structures which undermine the cooperatives’ claim for inclusiveness.

Exclusion of poor and vulnerable groups

Our data suggest that for many small-scale farmers the aforementioned policies lead to increased land-tenure and food insecurity, tensions and the exclusion of vulnerable groups. Furthermore, there is limited space for policy transgression and advocacy by CSOs because of the rigid top-down character of Rwanda’s governance system.

Moving beyond the Rwandan case

This blogpost also tries to add a layer of complexity to the assessment of the Rwandan agricultural modernization effort and provides three important insights (that extend beyond the Rwandan case):

Large-scale statistics overlook in-depth realities: Empirical evidence derived from both statistical analysis and micro-level qualitative research problematizes the overreliance upon state-generated national-level statistical analysis. Not only does this information source risk being misleading in case of shaky methodologies, but it is inherently designed to overlook and simplify the complex details of social reality (see Dawson 2015).

Generation of statistics has a normative dimension: National-level statistics are instrumentalized by governance structures to make reality legible. The creation of statistical information is not only a descriptive activity, but a highly normative one: it narrates reality, and in doing so, it shapes it in conformance with the vision held by the central observer.

Top-down approach is blind to unexpected patterns: This ‘panoptical view’ (Scott 1998) is, because of its central and typifying nature, blind to dynamics that do not fit into expected patterns of behaviour, economic activity or interests. This risks creating vicious cycles in which the evaluation and re-formulation of state policy does not benefit from grassroots feedback and from the social responses to their requirements. The transgression of strict policy implementation guidelines and rules are signifiers of such distance between centrally-planned policies and real local life, but the top-down approach of Rwanda policy-making makes it so that they are rarely acknowledged beyond the local context.

As an overall conclusion, the authors plead for a more nuanced, in-depth and multi-faceted research approach in order to understand the distance between centrally-planned policies and the realities of rural livelihoods.

Prof. An Ansoms (Université catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) has over 15 years of experience on natural resource conflicts and challenges for rural development in the Great Lakes Region of Africa.

Giuseppe Cioffo, MA (Université catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) is involved in research on agricultural modernization in Rwanda and is a Program and Policy Officer at the European network for Central Africa (EurAc).

Dr Neil Dawson (University of East Anglia, UK) is a specialist in poverty, wellbeing and environmental justice research among rural populations in developing countries and is a member of The Global Environmental Justice Group that studies linkages between social justice and environmental change.

Dr Sam Desiere (Ghent University, Belgium) is an expert in statistics and has focused on data quality of household surveys in developing countries, including Rwanda and Burundi

Prof. Chris Huggins (University of Ottawa, Canada) is a researcher, lecturer, and trainer with more than 15 years of experience on land and natural resources rights in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly the political economy of land and agricultural reform.

Dr Margot Leegwater (Université catholique de Louvan-la-Neuve, Belgium) has done research on land-related policies and how these affect social relations in Rwanda.

Dr Jude Murison (University of Antwerp, Belgium) has conducted extensive field research in developing countries, especially in Rwanda and Uganda, focusing on human rights, health, international business, judicial politics, rural development, agricultural production, and migration.

Dr Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka (Université catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) has expertise on land grabbing by local elites and issues of power and resistance in relation to access to natural resources in the Great Lakes Region of Africa.

Johanna Treidl, MA (University of Cologne, Germany) is conducting research into the social and cultural dimensions of wetlands in Rwanda, with a focus on gender and food security.

Dr Julie Vandamme (Université catholique de Louvan-la-Neuve, Belgium) has studied agricultural innovation in Rwanda, in particular with regard to banana cultivation.

Featured Photograph: Farmers working in agriculture in Rwanda, January 2007

Notes

Dawson, N. 2015. “Bringing context to poverty in rural Rwanda: added value and challenges ofmixed methods approaches.” In Mixed Methods Research in Poverty and Vulnerability, edited by K. Roelen, and L. Camfield. Basingstoke/ New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Desiere, S., L. Staelens, and M. D’Haese 2016. “When the Data Source Writes the Conclusion: Evaluating Agricultural Policies.” The Journal of Development Studies 52 (9): 1372–87.

Huggins, C. 2014. “‘Control Grabbing’ and small-scale agricultural intensification: emerging patterns of state-facilitated ‘agricultural investment’ in Rwanda.” Journal of Peasant Studies 41 (3): 365-384.

Huggins, C. 2014b. Restrictions on Land Use Rights in Rwanda: Understanding the ‘Bundle of Land Rights’ in Context. Focus on Land in Africa (FOLA) Brief.

McKay, A., and M. Verpoorten. 2016. “Growth, Poverty Reduction and Inequality. In Growth and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by C. Arndt, A. McKay and F. Tarp, Chapter 6. doi:10. 1093/acprof:oso/9780198744795.001.0001.

Rwanda Initiative for Sustainable Development (RISD). 2013. Securing Land Rights Project: A Working Paper on Land Tenure Regularization in Rwanda. Kigali: RISD.

Scott, J. 1998. Seeing Like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Have and London: Yale University Press.

ROAPE Editorial: Neoliberalism, Labour Power and Democracy

ROAPE

October 11, 2017

Every quarter the Review of African Political Economy’s quarterly journal is published by Taylor and Francis, roape.net posts an extract from the editorial. In the context of a widespread revolt against neo-liberalism, including Jeremy Corbyn’s re-energised Labour Party, Hannah Cross writes about the ‘neoliberal invasion of Africa’ and an issue that addresses the ‘attacks on gender relations and rights, workers and standards of living.’ This extract of the editorial is taken from Vol. 44, Issue 153 of ROAPE, available here.

By Hannah Cross

Labour will take robust action to end the self-regulation of [UK] Department for International Development private contractors, establishing and enforcing new rules to ensure aid is used to reduce poverty for the many, not to increase profits for the few.

… The current global tax system is deeply unjust. Africa’s economies alone lose more than £46 billion annually through corruption and tax evasion – more than 10 times what they receive in aid. Labour will act decisively on tax havens, introducing strict standards of transparency for crown dependencies and overseas territories, including a public register of owners, directors, major shareholders and beneficial owners for all companies and trusts. (Labour Party 2017, 122)

Not only promising to maintain aid commitments and international agreements, the above development policies and others in the UK’s Labour Party manifesto reflect its core aims to dismantle the rigged economic system, expand public ownership and strengthen workers’ rights. They expose the international development for the few that has persisted in the shadow of Thatcher’s reign, through Tony Blair’s pro-privatisation ‘New Labour’ regime, and which is now being pushed to extremes. More than a departure from neoliberalism, the stakes are even higher in the prospect of a disjuncture from British imperialism (Cross 2016). Meanwhile, the Conservative government projects the fantasy of returning to its heights in a post-Brexit world. The International Development Secretary Priti Patel aims to use aid money to secure post-Brexit free trade deals that would drive down prices, remove tariffs, and cut regulation whilst increasing the private share of development aid (Global Justice Now 2016). Her party aims to ‘create millions of jobs in countries across the developing world’, a punishing prospect when the collaborating International Trade Secretary Liam Fox has repeatedly undermined workers’ rights and claims they are unsustainable for business (Stone 2016).

Prime Minister Theresa May called the UK’s snap election on 8 June 2017 on the calculation that she would destroy the opposition to her party’s austerity programme and grandiose ‘Empire 2.0’ Brexit vision, backed by a plutocratic national media that promotes xenophobic nationalism and apathy. Yet the mass mobilisation of the Labour campaign offered unprecedented hope of an alternative when it significantly weakened her government and left her clinging to power. It prevailed both over a media almost unanimously presenting leader Jeremy Corbyn as ‘unelectable’ at best, a supporter of terrorism at worst, and over the stubborn adherents of neoliberalism in his party.

A major theme in this collection of articles, neoliberalism is a political project orchestrated by the capitalist class in the 1970s. It originates in the aim to suppress the power of labour by opening up global competitiveness between workers, empowering finance capital, and crushing jobs with privatisation, deregulation and technological change. Think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation followed up with the ideological front, eventually infiltrating universities (David Harvey in Jacobin 2016). The neoliberal construct of ‘governance’ is hostile to politics, ‘meshing [the] political and business lexicons through which neoliberal reason is disseminated’ and reducing people to ‘self-investing and responsibilised human capital [in] the project of a growing economy’ (Brown 2015, 70). As a consequence, for Brown, Marx’s depiction of capitalism as ‘vampire-like, exploitative, alienating, inegalitarian, duplicitous, profit-driven, compulsively expanding, fetishistic, desacralising of every precious value, relation and endeavour’ is inadequate to the damage neoliberal rationality has wrought to democracy as well as the economy (Brown 2015, 111).

Yet the transnational capitalist class can no longer unite in this runaway project. The International Monetary Fund and international organisations attempt to moderate the neoliberal programme of austerity in the increasingly rogue US and UK governments, while liberal international institutions that buffered the neoliberal invasion in Africa and elsewhere can no longer reconcile themselves with the attacks on gender relations and rights, workers and standards of living (Giugliano 2015; Bretton Woods Project 2017). Regionalism is also breaking down its unity as the USA’s geopolitical power declines along with the other ‘triad’ countries in Western Europe and Japan. The power of financial oligarchies in their political systems is fragile in the periphery because it does not accommodate political regimes of popular legitimacy (Amin 2016) Insights from Odinga and Dobler in the current issue (Vol. 44, Issue 153) of the Review show respectively how the USA is weakened by dependency on uncertain allies, and how, on the other hand, globalised liberalism in its erosion of regulatory power has opened up countries to the reproduction of comprador class dynamics by non-Western powers.

As Brown (2015) has explained so eloquently how neoliberalism is ‘undoing the demos’, now the demos is undoing neoliberalism in the countries that pioneered it. Its ideology has been fundamentally challenged by popular socialist campaigns that gained the majority of youth votes in US, French and UK elections (Blake 2016 Anderson 2017; Seymour 2017). Its hegemony is fatally eroded at the core. As a result, it can no longer be stabilised without recourse to increasingly authoritarian tactics, which disrupts the complicity of its bureaucratic upholders. Bereft ‘centrists’ might find comfort in Emmanuel Macron’s victory over the far right in France, but there lacks a more positive argument of support for the tactical election of a former investment banker who promotes 1990s-style ‘modernisation’ and entrepreneurship to be found in the dismantling of welfare and collective bargaining rights for workers (Halimi 2017, 2). This ‘third-way’ politics championed by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton has left much to grieve for – a world of cheap labour competitiveness and war, with more than 65 million forcibly displaced people and persistent deaths at sea, those caused by the disasters of deregulation and privatisation, not to mention the environmental consequences of unfettered growth. The violent ideologies of Islamic extremism and fascism have found support in communities that have been betrayed, impoverished, disempowered and patronised by self-styled liberal ‘experts’, while capitalist interests benefit from and sponsor these cultural interpretations of social and economic division. This regression was inevitable, not something that can be controlled with better management, and the remaining promoters of neoliberalism appear increasingly outdated and driven by narrow self-interest rather than rationality.

David Harvey, however, warns that ‘most anti-neoliberalism fails to deal with the macro-problems of endless compound growth – ecological, political and economic problems. So I would rather be talking about anti-capitalism’ (Jacobin 2016). As distasteful as neoliberalism has become socially and culturally, the shock rise of Jeremy Corbyn’s popularity in the UK, to become its most popular leader soon after the election, has emerged in an equally shocking, but absolutely necessary, class framing of political struggle. ‘For the many not the few’ was a sufficiently simple message to rapidly shift political consciousness beyond the committed left, rendering the elite capture of social movements, such as that found in the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign of 2005, unimaginable. The election campaign defied the pluralism and compromise often expounded in radical forms of democracy, instead promoting the substantive class narrative that destroys neoliberal logic, with impetus from newly empowered working class politicians and minority groups. The irony of its radicalism is that it is a moderate vision of democratic socialism to counter the neoliberal revolution that shifted the capitalist world order to new extremes and totality. It does not depart entirely from capitalism but does open up the space to conceive of a different world beyond capitalism – one that no longer accepts the hierarchical ordering of ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries or assumes Western elites’ superiority of knowledge and interpretation, and instead remakes it according to material realities and the knowledge found in local resistance and global struggle, where the intellectual action is. As veteran activist Angela Davis (2017) argues: ‘we always use as our standard, those who are at the centre of the structures we want to dismantle.’ In dismantling these fraudulent structures, it is time to pursue a different standard by reimagining citizenship, work and democracy from a renewed socialist perspective …

Contributions in the current Issue 153 of The Review show neoliberal carnage and forms of resistance in Africa. The logic of the former is one of ‘shared sacrifice’ by whole communities, the demand that people suffer slashed jobs, pay, benefits and services, ‘with no immediate returns to those who sacrifice or are sacrificed … [for the] restoration of economic and state fiscal “health”’ (Brown 2015, 216). In this model of development, Lauren Maclean’s article examines the expansion of non-state providers of social welfare, showing how they produce new inequalities of access, complex barriers to accountability towards citizens, and the long-term erosion of state capacity. Labour migrancy is another outcome of this ‘shared sacrifice’. Based on a collaboration with ROAPE founding editor Lionel Cliffe (whose take on the political events of the past year would have been a delight to discuss), the next article comparatively examines the political economy of migration and labour mobility in West and Southern Africa. It includes analysis of Samir Amin’s regionalisation of Africa and the mechanisms of cheap labour, suggesting agenda and methods for approaching contemporary patterns.

The next two articles explore trade unionism in Africa, particularly in South Africa. Nick Bernards analyses the interaction between the International Labour Organisation and trade unions, assessing the ‘tripartite fantasy’ of formal institutions through which government mediates between workers and employers. Within the global rise of neoliberalism, their capacity to advance workers’ interests is restricted and deviations from the depoliticised and non-radical ideal are seen as a ‘moral failing’. David Dickinson’s article than examines casual workers’ organisation in the South African Post Office in a form of ‘insurgent unionism’ that is understood in the context of structural violence within a vastly unequal society.

The final two articles focus on the role of outside powers – the USA and China – in African politics. Sobukwe Odinga examines US-Ethiopian intelligence cooperation, revealing how Ethiopia has leveraged the liaison for its regional objectives and enabled the Meles administration to evade criticisms or sanctions for its increasingly autocratic politics. Gregor Dobler examines how China’s new role in Africa influences local lives, social and political relations, finding that this cooperation widens the rifts between the elites and the people. He highlights the importance of the political and technical regulation capacity of the state for determining international actors’ role in its political economy.

For the full editorial click here. Roape.net readers can access Briefings and Debates in the journal by registering and logging on here.

Hannah Cross is author of Migrants, Borders and Global Capitalism: West African labour mobility and EU borders, Routledge 2013. She is a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Westminster, and an editor of ROAPE.

References

Anderson, P. 2017. “The Centre Can Hold: The French Spring.” New Left Review 105, May–June

Amin, S. 2016. “The Election of Donald Trump.” Monthly Review, November 30

Blake, A. 2016. “More Young People Voted for Bernie Sanders Than Trump or Clinton Combined – By a Lot.” Washington Post, June 20

Bretton Woods Project. 2017. “IMF and World Bank Labour Policies Criticised by UN Expert.” April 6. Accessed June 27, 2017.

Brown, W. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zed Books.

Cross, H. 2016. “Corbynism and Africa: Breaking from Imperialism?” Review of African Political Economy online blog, November. Accessed June 27, 2017.

Davis, A. 2017. “Angela Davis in Conversation.” Women of the World Festival, Southbank Centre, March 11. Accessed June 28, 2017.

Giugliano, F. 2015. “IMF Paper Warns Low-risk Governments against Needless Austerity.” Financial Times, June 2

Global Justice Now. 2016. “Dreaming of Empire? UK Foreign Policy Post-Brexit.” November. London: Global Justice Now. Accessed June 26, 2017.

Halimi, S. 2017. “Unprecedented Politics: Decades of Practice at Tactical Voting May Keep the Far Right Out, but at the Price of a Business as usual Neoliberal for President.” Le Monde Diplomatique, April, translated by George Miller

Jacobin. 2016. “Neoliberalism Is a Political Project: An Interview with David Harvey.” July 23, Brooklyn, NY

Labour Party (UK). 2017. For the Many, Not the Few. The Labour Party Manifesto 2017. London: The Labour Party

Seymour, R. 2017. “Where We Go from Here.” Novara Media, June 11.

Stone, J. 2016. “The New International Development Secretary Wanted to Scrap What is Now Her Department.” Independent, July 14.

Popular Protest & Class Struggle in Africa – Part 10

ROAPE

October 6, 2017

By David Seddon

Last issue, David Seddon reviewed the recent political history of Niger, where President Mahamadou Issoufou had – as an exception to most African presidents – recently announced that he would not amend the constitution to allow him to seek a third term after his second and final mandate ends in 2021. In this issue, he considers the case of Togo, where popular protests broke out in August 2017 against President Faure Gnassingbé, whose father Etienne Eyadéma Gnassingbé, was (until his death in 2005) the longest serving president in Africa.

Togo achieved independence from France in on 27 April 1960. In the first presidential elections in 1961, Sylvanus Olympio gained 100 per cent of the votes as the opposition boycotted the elections. On 9 April 1961 the Constitution of the Togolese Republic was adopted, according to which the supreme legislative body was the National Assembly of Togo. Olympio tried to reduce Togo’s dependence on France by establishing closer relations with the United States, Great Britain and Germany.

In December 1961, several leading figures in the opposition were accused of plotting an anti-government coup. They were arrested and detained, and opposition parties were dissolved by decree. In January 1963, Olympio was assassinated by a group of soldiers under the direction of Sergeant Etienne Eyadéma Gnassingbé, and a state of emergency was declared. The military handed over power to an interim government led by Nicolas Grunitzky. In May 1963, Grunitzky was elected President of the Republic. The new leadership reversed Olympio’s foreign policy and pursued closer relations with France. Internally, his tried to reduce the differences and tensions between north and south, to promulgate a new constitution (1963) and introduce a multiparty system.

Exactly four years later, on 13 January 1967, Eyadéma Gnassingbé overthrew Grunitzky in a bloodless coup and assumed the presidency. He created the Rally of the Togolese People party, banned the activities of all other political parties and formally introduced a one-party system in November 1969. He was re-elected in 1979 and 1986. In 1983, a privatization programme was launched and in 1991 – as in so many other African countries at the time – other political parties were allowed to operate again, but with considerable informal restrictions. Efforts at ‘economic reform’, undertaken with support from the World Bank and the IMF, led to private and public sector strikes, and popular protest throughout 1992 and 1993. The devaluation of the currency by 50 per cent in January 1994, designed to provide an important impetus to renewed structural adjustment, generated considerable political turmoil and economic development remained limited.

The Economy

This was, in part, because prices of Togo’s major exports – phosphates and agricultural commodities (coffee, cocoa, cotton and groundnuts) – remained relatively low over the next decade (depressed cocoa prices led to a 1 per cent drop in GDP in 1998), and in part because of the lack of electricity, as Togo produces only about a third of its needs and imports the remainder from Ghana and Nigeria, which constrained the development of the industrial sector, including cement production.

Togo has the fourth largest phosphate deposits in the world, producing around 2 million tons per year (and generating 34 per cent of GDP in 2012). Since the mid-90s, however, there has been a decline in the mining industry and reduction in export earnings due to falling phosphate prices on world markets and increasing foreign competition. While export earnings are high relative to most other countries in Africa (owing to the exploitation of its phosphate deposits and its relatively developed agricultural export sector), the standard of living of most Togolese is not.

The bulk of the population (65 per cent) remains rural and relies heavily on subsistence farming of crops like cassava, maize, millet and rice and on livestock production. Agriculture generated 28 per cent of GDP in 2012 and employed about half of the working population in 2010. Togo is one of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) with an average per capita GDP of $491 (average for all LDCs is $1,436) and an economic vulnerability index of 33.6 (average for all LDCs is 41.4).

Recent Political Developments

Eyadema Gnassingbé died suddenly of a heart attack on 5 February 2005. At the time of his death, he was the longest-serving leader in modern African history, after having been president for 38 years.

Under the Togolese Constitution, the President of the Parliament, Fambaré Ouattara Natchaba, should have become President of the country, pending a new presidential election to be called within sixty days. Natchaba was out of the country, returning on an Air France plane from Paris. The Togolese army (known as the Forces Armées Togolaises (FAT) or Togolese Armed Forces) closed the borders, forcing the plane to land in nearby Benin. With an artificially created power vacuum, the Togolese Parliament voted to remove the constitutional clause that would have required an election within sixty days, and declared that Eyadema’s son, Faure Gnassingbé, would inherit the presidency and hold office for the rest of his father’s term. Faure was sworn in on 7 February 2005, despite international criticism of the succession.

The African Union described the takeover as a military coup d’état. There was also disapproval from the United Nations. Within Togo, opposition to the takeover took the form of uprisings in many cities and towns, mainly in the southern part of the country. In the town of Aného, a general civilian uprising followed by a large-scale massacre by government troops went largely unreported. It was estimated by some sources as many as 500 people died in the government crackdown against opposition protests. In response, Faure Gnassingbé agreed to hold elections and on 25 February, he resigned as president, but soon afterward accepted the nomination to run for the office. On 24 April 2005, he was elected President of Togo, receiving over 60 per cent of the vote according to official results.

His main rival in the race had been Emmanuel Bob-Akitani from the Union des Forces du Changement (UFC) or Union of Forces for Change. Parliament designated Deputy President, Bonfoh Abbass, as interim president until the inauguration. On 3 May 2005, Faure Gnassingbé was sworn in as the new president. The European Union suspended aid to Togo in support of the opposition claims, unlike the African Union and the United States which declared the vote ‘reasonably fair’. The Nigerian president and Chair of the African Union (AU), Olusẹgun Ọbasanjọ, sought to negotiate between the incumbent government and the opposition to establish a coalition government, but Gnassinbgé rejected the AU Commission appointment of former Zambian president, Kenneth Kaunda, as special AU envoy to Togo. In June 2005, however, he nominated opposition leader Edem Kodjo as the prime minister.

In October 2007, after several postponements, elections were eventually held under proportional representation. This allowed the less populated north to have as many MPs as the more populated south. The president-backed party Rally of the Togolese People (RPT) won an outright majority, with the UFC coming second and the other parties managing very limited representation. Again, vote rigging accusations were leveled at the RPT. Despite the presence of an EU observer mission, there were canceled ballots and illegal voting took place, mainly in RPT strongholds. The election was, however, declared fair by the international community and praised as ‘a model’, with little intimidation or violence, for the first time since a multiparty system was reinstated. On 3 December 2007, Komlan Mally of the RPT was appointed to prime minister succeeding Agboyibor. However, on 5 September 2008, after only 10 months in office, Mally resigned.

Faure Gnassingbé won re-election in the March 2010 presidential election, taking 61% of the vote against Jean-Pierre Fabre from the UFC, who had been backed by an opposition coalition called FRAC (Republican Front for Change). Though the March 2010 election was largely peaceful, electoral observers noted ‘procedural errors’ and technical problems, and the opposition did not recognize the results claiming that irregularities had affected the outcome.

Periodic protests followed the election. On 11 April 2010, for example, it was reported by All Africa that 4,000 opposition activists had taken to the streets of the capital, Lomé, to protest the re-election of Faure Gnassingbé in the March polls. The demonstrations, organised by the main opposition coalition Republican Front for Change (FRAC) and which had become weekly events, ended peacefully, and in May, long-time opposition leader Gilchrist Olympio announced that he would enter into a power-sharing deal with the government, a coalition arrangement which provides the UFC with eight ministerial posts.

In June 2012, government electoral reforms prompted protesters supporting the coalition of opposition parties to take to the streets once again for several days. The protesters sought a return to the 1992 constitution that would re-establish presidential term limits and reverse changes made to voting rules. Dozens were arrested. A prominent opposition leader and former prime minister, Agbeyome Kodjo, who led some of the protests, was also briefly detained. On 14 July, security forces raided the home of one of the movement’s leaders, Jean Pierre Fabre, leader of the National Alliance for Change party (ANC). The officers fired teargas and injured some of the occupants. Four of the officers involved in the raid were formally reprimanded, according to the Ministry of Security, but Fabre’s ANC called on its supporters to protest: ‘the population needs to mobilise to defeat this regime, which does not respect the constitution and human rights’, Fabre told AFP. Following this, several thousands of anti-government demonstrators rallied in Togo’s capital to protest what they said was a crackdown on the opposition movement. The demonstration ended more or less peacefully.

July 2012 also saw the surprise resignation of the prime minister, Gilbert Houngbo, and the rest of the government. Reuters reported that the president’s office had claimed that they resigned voluntarily ‘to broaden the leadership ahead of the next parliamentary elections’, which were to be held in October. According to an official statement issued by the president’s office, it was considered ‘important that all representative movements in Togo’s society are involved in public office in this new period in preparation for the parliamentary elections’. The statement, published by government daily newspaper Togo-Presse, added that the president would now hold talks with all those interested in joining the government. Days later, the commerce minister, Kwesi Ahoomey-Zunu, was named to lead the new government.

Legislative polls were planned for October, but no date had been given yet, and opposition groups said more time was needed install measures to guarantee a clean vote. Opposition-led protests and strikes demanding electoral reform effectively delayed the process, and, after being rescheduled for 24 March 2013, the parliamentary elections were postponed again, first to 21 July 2013 and then to 25 July 2013. Some members of the opposition sought a postponement in order to see electoral reforms take effect prior to the elections, while others sought the repeal of the changes as improperly introduced. Amongst the latter was the controversial alleged gerrymandering of constituency borders to favour the ruling Union for the Republic (UNIR), led by President Faure Gnassingbé, and the 10-seat increase in the number of members of the National Assembly from 81 to 91.

Although the government banned street demonstrations in commercial areas during the elections – which were eventually held on 25 July 2013 – citing an inability to maintain security and public order, protest organizers from opposition and civil society groups pledged to carry out protests and denounced what they termed an attempt to stifle criticism. In the event, the ruling Union for the Republic (UNIR) won 62 of the 91 seats in the new enlarged National Assembly in what was considered to be a landslide. The opposition Union of Forces for Change (UFC) suffered heavy losses (down to 3 seats from 27), and a new grouping, the Save Togo Collective, secured 19 seats to become the main opposition party in the National Assembly.

Protests termed ‘Let’s Save Togo’ were planned for 21–23 August. On the first day, several thousand protesters commenced a march in Lomé‘s Be neighbourhood and then headed to the commercial district of Deckon, where 100 police officers were deployed. There was then a dispute as to whether the protest march would end in Deckon for a rally or proceed further; eventually, the protesters were dispersed using tear gas 10 minutes after the march commenced.

When the National Assembly began its new term at the beginning of September, Dama Dramani, a UNIR deputy, was elected as President of the National Assembly. Opposition MPs boycotted the vote as UNIR was unwilling to give them the posts of first and second vice-president in the Bureau of the National Assembly; consequently UNIR deputies were elected to all of the 11 posts in the Bureau – another landslide victory for the ruling party.

On 25 April 2015, over 2 million Togolese took part in the third presidential election since the death of Eyadema Gnassingbé in 2005. The election was held in the face of considerable public opposition to a third term for the president. There had been more demonstrations demanding a return to the 1992 Constitution, which limited the presidential term of office to two only, and just before the elections, teachers and health care workers went on strike, demanding better pay and working conditions. Some of these were violently repressed, creating an ugly mood in the country. Some observers even considered it possible that Togo would go the same way as Burkina Faso, where the long-ruling Blair Compaoré had been forced to resign from office after protestors called for his departure in late 2014 (discussed in previous issues, nos. 2, 3 and 4 of this project).

Initially scheduled for 15 April 2015, the election was postponed by ten days at the recommendation of John Dramani Mahama, President of Ghana and acting chair of the ECOWAS organization, given the tense situation. Provisional results by the National Independent Election Commission declared Gnassingbé the winner with about 59 per cent of the vote, whilst Fabre, the leader of the ANC and main opposition contender, received 35 per cent. Fabre called the results ‘a crime against national sovereignty’, saying he considered himself the new president. The UN, the African Union, ECOWAS and the National Consultation of Civil Society (a Togolese NGO funded by the European Union) pronounced the elections to have been free and transparent. On 3 May, the Constitutional Court validated the official results and proclaimed Gnassingbé president for the next five years. Fabre refused to file appeals to the Court, arguing that the institution was subservient to the ruling party. Gnassingbé was sworn in for his third term on 4 May 2015, thereby extending his tenure until at least 2020. Official reports put the turnout at 61 per cent of registered voters, which gave Gnassingbé a solid if not overwhelming victory.

Recent Popular Protest

Things remained generally quiet until recently, in August 2017, when anti-government protests broke out in response to renewed calls for the introduction of presidential term limits. Faure Gnassingbé has now been head of state for over a decade, since 2005 when he took over from his father Gnassingbé Eyadema, who seized power in a coup in 1967, seven years after independence. The Gnassingbé dynasty has been in power for 50 years.

Parliament voted recently in favour of a proposed change to the constitution to introduce a two-term limit ahead of the next presidential election in 2020. But the opposition boycotted the vote, claiming that the proposal was in fact a ruse by the government to make itself look reform-minded and at the same time allow President Gnassingbé to stay in power until 2030. A similar constitutional reform draft bill was rejected two years ago. Some opposition politicians want the president to step down immediately, and none of them want him to be able to stand in 2020. They say he is already in his third term, since he took over from his father in 2005 and was re-elected in 2010 and 2015, and want to revert to the 1992 Constitution which states that ‘under no circumstances may anyone serve more than two terms’. The opposition is now supported by the majority of the bishops, as well as by large numbers of protestors.

Demonstrations have so far been largely peaceful – although there have been clashes with the police and a certain amount of street violence – but the scale has been unprecedented, with organisers claiming that as many as 800,000 people – out of a total population of about 7 million – took to the streets on 19 August 2017, all across the country and not just (as usual) in Lomé.

This is what makes the current wave of protests different from before. For many years, the south of the country was seen as anti-government; but the Gnassingbé family drew all the support it needed from the north, where they come from. This time, however, some of the biggest demonstrations have taken place in cities like Sokodé in the centre-north (where two people were killed according to official sources and seven according to the opposition), and in Dapaong and Mango in the north. Also, a new opposition figurehead, Tikpi Atchadam, leader of the National Panafrican Party (PNP), hails from the north.

The government responded to the popular unrest by cutting off all mobile 3G data to try and prevent people from using social media to mobilise. It also called for its own supporters to demonstrate. In addition, it accused Atchadam of links to Islamist radicals, but has not produced any evidence to support its allegations. This seems not to have been effective.

On 7 September, Al Jazeera reported that ‘hundreds of thousands of opposition supporters have reportedly taken to the streets in several cities across Togo to call for constitutional reform, despite an apparent government concession to their demands. Aime Adi, head of Amnesty International in the West African country, told AFP news agency ‘at least 100,000’ were demonstrating in the capital, Lomé, with similar demonstrations taking place in some 10 other cities. For his part, opposition party leader Jean-Pierre Fabre had called the demonstrations ‘unprecedented’ and estimated (perhaps somewhat overenthusiastically) that ‘more than one million people’ were on the streets of Lomé. Al Jazeera noted that ‘the figures could not be independently verified by Al Jazeera’.

On 12 September 2017, it was reported that the National Assembly had suspended its session for the summer break with opposition members objecting to the lack of any discussion on constitutional reforms, despite promises that this would be addressed. Opposition MPs want a discussion on re-instating the country’s 1992 Constitution – as has been demanded on several previous occasions, to no good effect. This would mean presidential terms limited to two, and two rounds of voting to enable the opposition to re-unite in the second round behind one candidate. Meanwhile, the popular protests continued, with reports of a number of people killed and more injured.

On 20 September, Africa News reported that internet connection had been intermittent in Togo hours ahead of another planned demonstration over the following days for the reinstatement of the 1992 constitution. Bandwidth was reduced and WhatsApp was totally blocked across the country, creating difficulties in accessing the internet, according to Togolese journalist Emmanuel Agbenonwossi. In the meanwhile, protestors clashed with security forces in several towns, including the north. Reuters reported that a 9-year-old boy was shot in the head and killed in Mango, according to Francois Patuel, of Amnesty International, citing local sources including family members. This was confirmed by Security Minister, Damehame Yark, but he blamed the opposition and the protestors. There were also demonstrations in the northern city of Bafilo between protesters and Gnassingbé loyalists, injuring several, according to opposition leader Jean-Pierre Fabre at the end of a peaceful march in Lomé.

The news, as of late September, was that President Gnassingbé had chaired a cabinet meeting which saw ministers approve plans for a bill about restrictions on terms in office and changes to the voting system. ‘This bill to modify the Constitution concerns specifically the limitations of mandates and voting procedures’, said the government statement, referring to article 59 of the Constitution. What is not clear, in particular, is whether the bill would be retrospective in effect, which would mean Gnassingbé could not stand in 2020, or would apply for the future, giving him the possibility of at least one more and possibly even two further terms of office.

David Seddon (criticalfaculty1@hotmail.co.uk) is a researcher and political activist who has written extensively on social movements, class struggles and political transitions across the developing world.

Featured Photograph: Demonstration in Lomé on 29 November, 2013.

Inside the Battle of Algiers: An Evening with Zohra Drif

ROAPE

September 26, 2017

By Sarah Grey

It has been 60 years since Zohra Drif set a basket loaded with a bomb under the counter at the busy Milk Bar in French-colonized Algiers, an act (later immortalized in Gilles Pontecorvo’s 1967 film Battle of Algiers) that set off the intense, violent period of 1956 and 1957 known as the Battle of Algiers. In 2017, now an elder stateswoman in independent Algeria, Mme. Drif says, “I will never apologize.”

Drif spoke to a packed room at Georgetown University’s Mortara Center for International Studies in Washington, DC, on September 19, and the circumstances surrounding her showed clearly the shift in Americans’ framing of the Algerian independence struggle. The occasion was the launch of an English translation of Mme. Drif’s account of the revolution: Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter (available in paperback and ebook formats from Just World Books in the US and from Amazon in the UK). This writer had the honor of serving as the book’s editor; its translator, Andrew Farrand, sat at Drif’s side as her interpreter for the event. To her right sat Georgetown African Studies professor Lahra Smith and Ambassador Joan Polaschik, who recently finished serving as the US ambassador to Algeria and is currently Principal Deputy Secretary of State for Near East Affairs. Proceeds from the book sales went to the Just World Education Foundation, a US-based nonprofit dedicated to justice and equality in the Middle East.

Drif spent the revolution as a bombiste, living in hiding in the Casbah with a band of National Liberation Front (FLN) revolutionaries including Ali La Pointe and Yacef “El Kho” Saâdi. She was caught by the French in 1957 and spent five years in prison; she was condemned to death, but was released upon the victory of the revolution. She later married Rabah Bitat, another legendary militant whom she met in prison. The book tells the story of her joining the FLN and their combat in the mazelike streets of the Casbah up to her imprisonment, with a narrative that reads like a thriller yet never sacrifices its political and moral clarity.

Zohra Drif speaks in Washington about her memoir Inside the Battle of Algiers, next to her is the translator Andrew Farrand

Mme. Drif, now in her eighties, explained in her brief opening remarks that young Algerians often approached her in the street to ask why she and other revolutionary figures had not shared their stories with them. This surprised her; she’d assumed that they were learning the details of their country’s liberation struggle in school. When she actually read a current textbook, however, she was appalled at “how minimal and insufficient the telling of this history really was.” Many of her comrades who had died in the war had been nearly forgotten; others were now passing away in relative anonymity, their heroic deeds unknown to the generations that benefited from them.

“I felt I had a duty to our population,” she said, “to tell this story as simply and clearly as possible.” The book, published in French, was well received in Algeria, but few details of the liberation struggle have been available to Anglophones, even as debates rage in the English-speaking world about armed self-defense and the justifiability of revolutionary violence. The English edition of Inside the Battle of Algiers aims to change that.

On the panel, Smith gave a thoughtful analysis of the book’s gender politics, noting the many ways revolutionary Muslim women broke tradition for the sake of the cause and the deep solidarity among women that threads through Drif’s life’s story, from the early political education she received from older women at the hammam baths to the Casbah sisters who hid her, lying to the French paratroopers and risking their lives to protect her. Smith noted that the repercussions of women’s solidarity and participation during the revolution have had a profound effect on Algerian society today, and Drif emphatically agreed: “Women are complete citizens” in Algeria, she said, “with the same duties and rights as men, including the same obligation to contribute to our development.”

Ambassador Polaschik gave the State Department’s view, noting that Algerians today still remember John F. Kennedy’s support as a senator for Algerian independence. Official US–Algeria relations soured after the revolution, as Algeria looked east to the Soviet Union for inspiration and support, Polaschik noted, though she did not discuss the inspiration many US social movements, most notably the Black Panther Party, took from Algeria; instead, she contended that the US and Algeria, both founded in anticolonial revolution, share a deep love for freedom and independence.

Polaschik also lauded Algeria’s counterterrorism efforts against Da’esh and Al Qaeda. This is, of course, a loaded topic in a forum dealing with a story of revolutionary terrorism; the United States has long blurred the lines between “terrorists” and “freedom fighters” in ways that benefit its own colonial efforts and political agenda, and in the book’s foreword, United Nations diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi (who went to law school with Drif) is careful to separate the FLN and ALN from the likes of today’s Islamists.

That tension also came up in the audience discussion, when a representative of the Journal of Palestine Studies noted that Palestinian American activist Rasmea Odeh was, as we spoke, being deported from the United States as a “terrorist” for her participation as a bomber in the Palestinian struggle in 1969. She noted that the Algerian revolution has always been a source of inspiration for Palestinians; what, she wondered, did Drif think of the gap between her own warm welcome from the State Department and Odeh’s treatment?

Zohra Drif and Sarah Grey after the launch of Drif’s Inside the Battle of Algiers with translator Andrew Farrand and Just World Books publisher Helena Cobban

Up to this point, Drif had been relatively quiet: a gracious and charming speaker who modestly insisted that the credit belonged to all of her comrades. This question, however, roused the political activist Zohra Drif, who sat up in her chair and gestured as she spoke clearly and forcefully: “The Palestinian problem is also our problem.” As for the War on Terror, she said, “Really it is about Palestine. How can Palestinians fight but with the means they have at their disposal? If we’d had tanks and airplanes, we would have gladly used them, as the Palestinians would, and we would have called any destruction ‘collateral damage’ just as Israel does. But because they use what they have available to them, it is considered an act of terror. Only a people can create their own liberation. We must not apologize for this.”

She went on to describe another incident that spurred her to write her memoir. She attended a conference in Marseilles, she said, put on jointly by a French and an Algerian newspaper to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the war’s end. “I went,” she said, “because I thought perhaps some Algerians had turned the page too quickly. I wanted to pose some truthful and fundamental questions to the French participants. I was surprised, shocked, when I understood that I had been brought there to condemn the combat in Algeria. They wanted me to say, ‘Our cause may have been just, but our methods were reprehensible.’ Our methods—they were talking about me, about bombing! I will never apologize for using the only means available to us to free Algeria.”

Drif expands upon this point in the book, writing of her liberal critics’ distaste for violence that “a deep sense of honor and attachment to this greatest of values—freedom—would prohibit any dignified and honorable person from engaging in such question games if he or she has never lived in the cynically abject and unfair conditions” of colonial occupation under which Algeria had suffered for 126 years:

That was why, knowing the stakes full well in our hearts and souls, Samia [Lahkdari] and I made the choice to become “volunteers for death” . . . Perhaps the reader of today expects me to regret having placed bombs in places frequented by European civilians. I do not. To do so would be to obscure the central problem of settler colonialism by trying to pass off the European civilians of the day for (at best) mere tourists visiting Algeria or (at worst) the “natural” inheritors of our land in place of its legitimate children. I will not adopt this position because I hate lies and their corollary, revisionism, whatever they are and wherever they come from.

At eighty-three, Zohra Drif has lost none of her fire and passion. This was particularly evident in the enthusiasm of the Algerian American students in the audience, one of whom said her parents had told her, as “bedtime stories,” of Drif’s exploits in the Battle of Algiers. For all of us in the electric atmosphere of that room in Washington—American, Algerian, Palestinian, and others—Mme. Drif stands today as an example to the world of unflinching solidarity and courage under the direst of circumstances.

Sarah Grey is a writer and editor. She writes widely on language, politics, food and society from a socialist-feminist perspective. Her work on topics such as reproductive rights, environmental issues, political economy, parenting, and labour has been published in a range of publications, including Jacobin, Salvage, Truthout, Bitch, The Frisky, The Establishment, International Socialist Review, Monthly Review, MRZine. Selections of Sarah’s writing can be found on her website here.

Too Little, Too Late: Sirleaf’s Broken Promises to Liberian Women

ROAPE

September 13, 2017

By Robtel Neajai Pailey and Korto Reeves Williams

In a public statement in August, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf – Africa’s first woman elected head of state – vowed to campaign actively for female candidates running in presidential and legislative elections in October. While her pronouncement may appear praiseworthy, it is too little, too late.

In this year’s high-stakes elections – the country’s third since the end of a devastating 14-year armed conflict – only 163 out of 1,026 (16 percent) approved candidates are women, including one running for president in a crowded field of over 20 men. This represents only a marginal increase since 2005 and 2011, when women accounted for 14 percent (110/762) and 11 percent (104/909) of candidates, respectively.

During a meeting with 152 female contenders, Sirleaf lamented the abysmally low number of women in elected office. In 2005 when she triumphed over footballer-turned-politician George Weah in a duel for the presidency, only 13 women were elected to the national legislature. That number dropped to eight in 2011, when the president secured a second mandate to lead Liberia. There is a strong likelihood that fewer women will win seats come October 10.

This is as much Sirleaf’s doing as it is a reflection of Liberia’s acutely patriarchal political system. In the past 12 years, she has done next to nothing to position women favourably to win votes.

In 2009, when female politicians petitioned Sirleaf to support a woman in her party during a by-election to replace a deceased female senator, she campaigned instead for a man (the candidate Sirleaf supported eventually lost to a woman from the opposition).

Though a 2014 elections law amendment encourages political parties to increase their representation of women in leadership roles, Sirleaf’s own Unity Party ranks below smaller, less-prominent parties in fronting female candidates this year.

In high-level political appointments, Sirleaf has also failed women. Although she hired a few female technocrats for executive positions in previous years, only four of her 21 cabinet officials are women, with the strategic ministries of finance, public works, education and commerce led by relatively inexperienced and underqualified men.This is in part due to Sirleaf’s lukewarm response to a gender equity in politics bill similar to the ones that propelled women in Rwanda, Senegal and South Africa to high public office. When in 2010 the Liberian women’s legislative caucus sponsored an act mandating that women occupy at least 30 percent of political party leadership with a trust fund established to finance their electoral campaigns, Sirleaf did not actively support the proposed law and it was never ratified. When a less radical bill allotting five seats for women in special legislative constituencies was rejected as “unconstitutional” by largely male legislators this year, Sirleaf remained conspicuously silent.

Despite these glaring missteps, much has been touted about Sirleaf’s crusade for women’s empowerment before and after assuming the presidency, with a Nobel Peace Prize win in 2011 serving as the ultimate stamp of approval.

Sirleaf’s cheerleaders may have some, but not complete, cause to celebrate. Her administration has built or renovated hundreds of markets across the country for thousands of female informal traders called “market women” – the Liberian president’s largest voting constituency.

Sirleaf has also instituted policies to protect women and girls from male aggression – including the implementation of the most comprehensive anti-rape law in Africa, with the establishment of a fast-track special court to deal specifically with gender-based violence.

Despite the existence of the court, however, there remain gaps in access to justice for Liberian women and girls, including the lack of viable forensic facilities. Liberian authorities’ recent failure to swiftly investigate and prosecute the alleged rape of a 13-year-old girl by a sitting member of the national legislature is a clear example of the Sirleaf administration’s inability to address sexual violence. Liberia’s dual legal system – customary and statutory – has also presented significant challenges in implementing the rape law. Furthermore, a decade after the court was set up to expedite gender-based violence cases, it remains in the capital, Monrovia, and inaccessible to most women across the country.

Moreover, the person nominated by Sirleaf in May and approved by the legislator to head the court, Serena Garlawolu, has gone on record endorsing female genital mutilation(FGM), saying the practice “is not a violation of anyone’s rights culturally”. Liberian women’s rights activists petitioned to criminalise the harmful procedure, but the proposed ban was omitted from a recently passed Domestic Violence Act.

Femocracy

While Sirleaf’s record on socioeconomic empowerment of women remains contested, her record on enhancing the political stature of Liberian women is woefully inadequate. Her brand of femocracy – a term coined by Nigerian feminist scholar Amina Mama – has severely stifled women’s political participation.

Mama makes an important distinction between feminism and femocracy, arguing that while feminism attempts to shatter the political glass ceiling, femocracy deliberately keeps it intact. Her 1995 preoccupation with African first ladies as femocrats remains relevant now that Africa can boast of women presidents, including Sirleaf and former Malawian head of state Joyce Banda.

The over-glorification of Sirleaf as a feminist icon is particularly troubling since her 12-year presidency has actually served the interests of a small, elite group of women and men in politics and thus upheld long-standing patriarchal norms (pdf) in Liberia. This is particularly evident in Sirleaf’s defence of nepotism (she has appointed three of her sons to top government positions), failure in fighting corruption and continuous recycling of mostly male government officials. Other development challenges which have intersectional feminist linkages to women’s abilities to participate fully in politics at community and national levels have either been compromised or ignored, including the right to education for young women and girls free of sexual coercion and exploitation.

Having recently gone on record rejecting feminism as “extremism“, Sirleaf has publicly distanced herself from the very movement that got her elected in the first place. In her 2005 campaign, Sirleaf aggressively evoked her gender as an alternative to the previous throng of authoritarian and brutal male leaders. Twelve years later, the euphoria of electing Liberia’s first female head of state – twice – has completely lost its lustre.

Sirleaf and others like her have demonstrated that a woman’s assumption of the highest political office in a country does not inevitably result in gender equity. Her legacy on women’s political participation, in particular, is characterised by an individualistic approach that betrays the hard-fought gains made by women’s rights movements across the globe.

Though the international media machinery continues to hoist Sirleaf up as the matron of women’s rights, she is far less deserving of this title. That Liberia currently has no viable female presidential candidate is a glaring indictment of her two terms in office.

In a recent presidential debate, four male candidates presented very concerning responses to questions about how they would address gender-based violence in Liberia. If the first female president in Africa was not able to resolve this quagmire, we have little confidence that the bevy of men vying for the presidency will succeed.

If the current political landscape in Liberia is any indication of future trends, it may well be a century before we elect a female (or male) head of state who is truly committed to a feminist agenda.

Robtel Neajai Pailey is a Liberian academic, activist and author of the anti-corruption children’s book Gbagba. Korto Reeves Williams is a Liberian feminist and a strategic civil society leader in Liberia and the sub-region. A version of this blogpost appeared on Al Jazeera’s website.

Featured Photograph: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Hillary Rodham Clinton in Washington in 2009.

Overturning an Election: Kenya’s 2017 Poll

ROAPE

September 6, 2017

By Geoffrey Lugano

On 1 September 2017, the Supreme Court of Kenya, through a majority decision, annulled the 8 August election of Uhuru Kenyatta of the Jubilee Party (JP) as president. Kenyatta had been declared the winner of the August 2017 elections, with 54.17 percent of the popular vote. His closest challenger, Raila Odinga, of the National Super Alliance (NASA), had, according to the country’s Independent and Electoral Boundaries Commission (IEBC), garnered 44.9 percent. The Supreme Court’s decision was unprecedented, given that many expected Kenyatta’s election to be upheld, just as occurred when Odinga brought a petition against Kenyatta’s election in 2013. It was also the first time that a court in Africa had overturned a presidential election, and the third time that a presidential election had been overturned anywhere in the world. Several election observers, including the US based Carter Center, the European Union (EU), the Commonwealth, the African Union (AU), and the local Elections Observations Group (ELOG), had also been relatively positive about the elections in their preliminary statements. Several world leaders had sent congratulatory messages to Kenyatta and urged Kenyans to keep the peace.

While the JP celebrated their ‘win,’ Odinga disputed the results and claimed that the IEBC had rigged the elections in favour of Kenyatta. Suspicions were fuelled, among other things, by the fact that in the run up to the polls, Chris Msando, a senior IEBC expert, had been murdered, while NASA’s tallying centre was allegedly raided by security agencies and consultants who had flown in to help set up the centre were deported. Then, during the count, many polling stations failed to submit the results and a scan of the results (or forms 34A) through an electronic transmission system, with thousands of forms still missing by the time that NASA went to the Supreme Court.

Having declared that he would not take a petition to court, some of Odinga’s supporters opted for public demonstrations after the elections. The majority of them were drawn from Mathare and Kibera low-income settlements in Nairobi and Luo Nyanza Counties – Kisumu, Homa Bay, Migori and Siaya. In turn, the demonstrators were confronted by the police, some of whom used excessive force. The Kenya National Commission for Human Rights (KNCHR) estimated that at least 24 people were shot by the police, while others were beaten – including an infant who died from her injuries.

In annulling Kenyatta’s election, the Supreme Court found culpability on the part of the IEBC, but spared the JP from any blame in bungling the elections. The court is yet to release its full findings, which it promised to release within 21 days, but problems cited included irregularities around the electronic results transmission system. The court ruled that another round of the Presidential election should be conducted within the constitutional timeline of 60 days.

Against the backdrop of police brutality and the court’s findings of electoral malpractice, NASA’s support base has been consolidated like never before. The majority of supporters are united in victimhood, which is attributable to the excesses of the state, including manipulation of elections results. More specifically, the “Luo nation”, from which Odinga hails from, and where the police were strategically mobilized to suppress dissent, feel particularly victimized by the Kenyatta regime. At a recent burial ceremony in Kisumu before the Supreme Court ruling, the county’s Governor and a close Odinga confidant, Anyan’g Nyon’go, displayed a T-shirt printed “Luo Lives Matter.” The message gained traction among Kenyans, particularly NASA supporters in other parts of the country, who were sympathetic to the Luo agony and a sense of collective loss with the election results.

The claims of election malpractice has also kept the hopes of NASA supporters alive. Odinga argued that the long journey to Canaan (or liberation) was still on course during the court process, and the majority of his followers were cautiously optimistic about the possibilities of wrestling power from Kenyatta. The court’s outcome has revitalised Odinga’s chances of challenging Kenyatta’s second term in office.

With results annulled, Kenyans return not just to the polls but to the campaigns. So, what can the opposition learn from the first round if it not only wants to avoid malpractice, but also ensure that it further increases its share of the vote?

Perhaps, NASA’s leadership could take the opportunity to make changes to its campaign message. In the first round of elections, NASA’s presidential candidate, Odinga, premised his campaign on change, which was captured in the Swahili phrase, “Mambo Yabadilika” (‘things change’). While it is obvious that the unprecedent incidences of corruption, high costs of living, rising unemployment, insecurity and human rights violations require change, Odinga’s campaign slogan might have not persuaded many voters outside his strongholds. Let me illustrate.

The disbelief of many in NASA’s proclamation as the ‘alliance for change’ stemmed from several factors. After the 2013 elections, some NASA controlled counties had almost a similar share of allegations of corruption as the Jubilee Alliance counties. For example, Kilifi, Kisumu, Siaya, Kakamega, Homa-Bay, Migori and Nyamira, all aligned to NASA, did not escape accusations of corruption. Moreover, all of NASA’s leading figures – Raila Odinga, Kalonzo Musyoka, Moses Wetangula, Musalia Mudavadi and Isaac Rutto – have been named in some of the country’s infamous corruption scandals. Further denting the credibility of NASA’s agenda is the fact that, while Odinga has an unrivalled scorecard in the country’s democratization process, many questioned his performance – and that of other leading NASA figures – in government.

Granted, Odinga’s democratic credentials are unmatched by the current crop of Kenyan political elites. Odinga is on record for fighting the dictatorial Daniel Toroitich arap Moi regime, which led to his incarceration for almost eight years. Moreover, he was instrumental in the 2002 National Rainbow Alliance Coalition’s (NARC) ‘revolutionary moment’ that ended 24 years of misrule under the autocratic Kenya Africa National Union (KANU) led by Moi. He is best remembered for declaring “Kibaki Tosha” – a Swahili phrase denoting the suitability of Kibaki for the country’s presidency. Furthermore, Odinga led NARC’s nationwide campaign while Kibaki was in a wheelchair after a nearly fatal road accident. Mwai Kibaki succeeded Moi as president in Kenya’s historic 2002 elections.

The fact that Odinga campaigned for the adoption of the 2010 constitution is also uncontested. Additionally, he has emerged as one of the proponents of devolution, which holds so much promise for Kenya’s transformation and the diffusion of ethnic tensions. Odinga’s claims to social democracy have also endeared him to the poor masses, whom he claims to represent in their quest for better living conditions and ‘Canaan.’ Finally, the current IEBC owes its reconstitution to Odinga, who led several demonstrations to replace its former commissioners who were accused of incompetence and corruption. Even so, Odinga’s 2017 campaign message did not resonate well with many outside of his strongholds.

In Kenya’s electoral cycle, political parties also conduct primaries under which they nominate candidates to face rivals in the general elections. There was glaring evidence that Odinga’s party, the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), together with its affiliate partners – Ford Kenya, Africa National Congress (ANC) and Wiper Democratic Movement (WDM) – conducted primaries which were bedevilled by chaos, allegations of favouritism and other non-democratic activities. These accusations dented Odinga’s democratic credentials outside his core support base, as NASA nominations seemed to be disorganized and dishonest, circulating the same crop of discredited politicians. So, the conduct of poor nominations also turned away some influential aspirants from NASA’s fold, thus denying them critical support, and the much-needed numbers in the country’s legislative agenda.

Given such problems, JP politicians, led by Kenyatta and William Ruto, argued that NASA had no moral authority to accuse them of corruption or proclaim fidelity to the principles of democratic governance. For their part, the JP campaign machinery focused on their development records, including roads expansion, increasing access to electricity, free maternity and increasing social security. The JP leadership also appealed to their core support base. The latter was salient in the vote rich Rift-Valley, which is inhabited by the Kalenjin, who appreciated Kenyatta’s promise to support Ruto – a member of the Kalenjin – for the presidency in 2022.

However, there is now an opportunity for NASA to rethink its message as Kenya heads once more into a new presidential election. In this respect, NASA will likely use the historical court ruling to frame its campaign.

Geoffrey Lugano is completing his Ph.D. at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, UK. He conducts research on Kenyan and Ugandan politics.

Featured Photograph: View of Jomo Kenyatta Statue and Parliament (Nairobi, 2005)

Did the Russian Revolution Matter for Africa? (Part I)

ROAPE

August 30, 2017

In the first of a two-part blogpost, Matt Swagler looks at the first years after the Russian revolution (1917-1935), he discusses the impact of the revolution on African liberation movements before World War II. In the second part he will consider the impact of the Soviet Union on African politics, development and activism in the decades after the war.

By Matt Swagler

[T]he vanguard of the Russian workers and the national minorities, now set free from imperial oppression, are thinking seriously about the fate of the oppressed classes, the suppressed national and racial minorities in the rest of Europe, Asia, Africa and America. They feel themselves kin in spirit to these people. They want to help make them free.

—Claude McKay, The Crisis, December 1923

The Russian Revolution as an Anti-Imperial Revolution

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a shocking event: elected councils of workers, soldiers, and peasants had taken state power—without great violence—in a major world empire. At the root of the revolution was opposition to the slaughter and privations caused by World War I. The war represented the explosion of the economic and imperial competition between European rivals that had fueled the colonization of Africa in the decades prior. Accordingly, Germany’s colonies were divided as spoils among the Allied victors. Great Britain, France, Belgium, South Africa, and Portugal all gained territory in Africa, ostensibly under the supervision of the League of Nations.

The Bolshevik-led revolutionary government in Russia, however, had already moved in the opposite direction, immediately renouncing all claims to the former territories of the Russian empire, and four months later, fulfilling its promise to negotiate an end to the war with Germany. Following the subsequent defeat of Germany, areas of the former Russian empire under German occupation, such as the Baltic states, became independent.

The Allied powers were openly hostile to the goals of the revolution, and sent troops to join the reactionary forces in Russia that pushed the country into a five-year civil war. Although ultimately victorious, Bolshevik leaders argued that unless similar revolutions were victorious elsewhere in the world, any attempts to establish a socialist society in Russia would be strangled by the economic and military strength of the major capitalist powers. With social unrest sweeping across war-torn Europe, the possibility of further revolutions was real.

A Global Movement Against Colonialism and Capitalism: The Comintern

In 1919, a congress was held in Moscow to create a new body, the Comintern, which aimed to coordinate organizations around the globe that were committed to revolutionary socialism and anti-imperialism.^[1] The following year, the Comintern congress agreed upon conditions for membership, one of which was directed at socialist organizations—who now called themselves Communists—operating within the imperial metropoles. Such parties had:

…the obligation of exposing the dodges of its ‘own’ imperialists in the colonies, of supporting every liberation movement in the colonies not only in words but in deeds, of demanding that their imperialist compatriots should be thrown out of the colonies, of cultivating in the hearts of the workers in their own country a truly fraternal relationship to the working population in the colonies and to the oppressed nations, and of carrying out systematic propaganda among their own country’s troops against any oppression of colonial peoples.

This position was rooted in an agreement that imperial rule was critical to the survival and growth of capitalism in the metropoles. Thus, the major capitalist powers in Europe (as well as the United States) could be thrown into crisis not only by revolutionary movements “at home,” but also by mass struggles in the colonies. As Vladimir Lenin wrote, in preparation for the 1920 Comintern congress: “Without control of the vast fields of exploitation in the colonies, the capitalist powers of Europe cannot maintain their existence for even a short time.”[2]

But should the Comintern adherents back all anti-colonial movements? While Lenin answered in the affirmative, the Indian Marxist M.N. Roy countered that such a position could lead to Communists giving cover to anti-colonial or nationalist leaders who were politically reactionary. Roy instead called for supporting worker and peasant movements in the colonies whose aims converged with socialist goals. Roy’s position was adopted by the 1920 congress, and became an important guide for Communists organizing in colonial territories—even if, in practice, the distinction between “reactionary” and “revolutionary” anti-colonial movements was not always so stark.

The early Comintern debates were ultimately crucial to the development of anti-colonial currents in Africa. By the end of World War I, European countries controlled most of the African continent and the initial wave of African uprisings against colonial conquest had been largely repressed.

But the war spurred new African resistance to increased taxation, forced labor, and the conscription of more than half a million Africans into colonial armies. Although often effective, this resistance was generally very localized and ephemeral—in part due to harsh repression. In 1917 the South African International Socialist League was the only revolutionary socialist organization on the continent.^[3] The League had opposed World War I and formed the first Black trade unions in the country, led by T.W. Thibedi, Johnny Gomas, and Hamilton Kraai.

But the Russian Revolution and the actions of the Comintern soon drew the attention of more Black intellectuals and workers from Africa and across the African diaspora. The revolution cemented the importance of Marxist ideas in debates about colonial and racial liberation for decades to follow. The Comintern called for complete independence for Africa—a position raised only by two other international organizations at the time: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Pan-African Congresses and Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Comintern leaders shared the Pan-African framework of these organizations, but uniquely posited that the fate of struggles to liberate Africa from colonial rule and struggles against capitalism in the imperial countries were integrally linked.

Communist Pan-Africanism: From Claude McKay to Lamine Senghor

The Comintern adopted a Pan-African perspective at its fourth congress in 1922. Two Black Marxists from the United States, Claude McKay and Otto Huiswoud, led the “Negro Commission” and Huiswoud likely drafted the “Thesis on the Negro Question” adopted by the congress delegates. The statement emphasized the centrality of colonialism and racism to the survival of capitalism, and therefore the critical need for the Communist movement to build links with Black struggles in the United States, the Caribbean, South America, and Africa. The Comintern also created a “Negro Bureau,” led by Huiswoud, to establish roots in sub-Saharan Africa and across the diaspora.

The Pan-African framework proposed by McKay and Huiswoud was partially a response to Du Bois’s and Garvey’s influence. But it equally fit with the Comintern’s established position that colonialism and racism were intertwined on an international scale so had to be fought on such a scale. Black Communists from the United States played the most crucial roles in developing Comintern strategies. But some, like Lovett Fort-Whiteman, sought to develop contacts with African student and worker representatives in the mid-1920s, with the goal of organizing a pan-African conference. Despite Comintern support for the project, such a gathering was not realized in the 1920s. But in 1927, a group of German Communists led the organizing for the founding congress of the League Against Imperialism and for Colonial Independence (LAI), which drew 170 delegates to Brussels, including a small group of African activists from France and South Africa. At the congress, Lamine Senghor, a Senegalese Communist living in France, delivered a particularly scathing critique of colonialism, the mistreatment of African soldiers after the war, and the horrors of the French “civilizing” mission in Africa.

Senghor’s himself had fought in the French army during the war on the battlefields of Europe. He had returned to France in 1921, and like many African veterans of the war, felt betrayed by the French government. Disabled African soldiers received a small fraction of metropolitan soldiers’ pensions, and the government hedged on many of their pledges to expand African soldiers’ political rights. Senghor joined both the French Communist Party (PCF), and a closely linked organization of radicals from the French colonies, the Union Intercoloniale (UIC), in 1924.^[4] Senghor soon began writing and speaking on behalf of the UIC and ran as a PCF candidate in Parisian municipal elections the following year.

However, Senghor and other Black PCF members often accused the party of paying too little attention to French colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa and ignoring Comintern behests to organize among Black workers. As a result, Senghor, alongside Caribbean Communists and another West African, Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, went on to form and lead the Comité de Défence de la Race Nègre (CDRN), and its successor organization, the Ligue de la Défence de la Race Nègre (LDRN). Both organizations were committed to ending French colonial rule and working for “the complete emancipation of the Negro race.”^[5] While the CDRN and LDRN’s leaders hailed from the PCF, they attempted to maintain the new organizations’ autonomy as they attracted hundreds of members in Paris and port cities across France. Through sympathetic African sailors, they were able to distribute their publications and establish contacts in West African ports cities, despite the banning of their newspaper in the colonies.

Yet even as Senghor and Kouyaté voiced their criticisms of the PCF, they remained open adherents of the Communist movement. As the historian iHakim Adi documents, in the 1920s, Black activists in the Communist parties of the United States, France, Great Britain, and South Africa often accused their national parties of insufficiently struggling against imperialism and anti-Black racism.^[6] In many cases, Black Communists brought their grievances directly to Comintern leaders, who took their complaints seriously and regularly chastised national Communist party leaders for their “white chauvinism.” At times, the efforts of Black Communists and Comintern officials did move parties like the PCF to focus more on sub-Saharan Africa. In 1929, the LDRN and the PCF launched a joint campaign in support of the Gbaya rebellion in the French colonies of central Africa, which had begun in response to forced labor. Thus, many Black and African Communists in the 1920s remained committed to the Comintern and to the importance of combating capitalism and imperialism in tandem. Speaking at the LAI congress in 1927, Senghor concluded:

The imperialist oppression which we call colonization at home and which here you term imperialism is one and the same thing. It all stems from capitalism….Therefore those who suffer under colonial oppression must join hands and stand side by side with those who suffer under the imperialism of the leading countries. Fight with the same weapons and destroy the scourge of the earth, world imperialism! It must be destroyed and replaced by an alliance of the free peoples. Then there will be no more slavery.^[7]

Senghor’s speech was picked up by newspapers internationally, including in the United States, and he was arrested and imprisoned upon his return to France. Although soon released, Senghor—who had been gassed during the war—succumbed to tuberculosis that same year.^[8] Despite his tragically short life, Senghor’s experiences were similar to many other Black radicals of the era whose engagement with the Communist movement was both deeply inspiring and often frustrating.

A New Pan-African Initiative: The ITUCNW

In 1928, the Comintern responded to the criticisms made by Black Communists about the work of their national parties by creating a new body: the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW). The ITUCNW’s explicit orientation toward Black workers was a response to the growing demographic and economic weight of the Black working class in the United States and South Africa, as well the outbreak of strikes in the Caribbean and West Africa after World War I. Although African trade unions were banned by colonial administrations at the time, strikes by miners, rails workers and others still broke out in present-day Senegal, Ghana, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and South Africa in the decade following the end of the war.

The ITUCNW was based in Europe, but was led by a series of Black Communists from the United States: James Ford, George Padmore, and Otto and Hermina Huiswoud.^[9] Along with another Black US Communist, William Patterson, they were the primary organizers of the First International Conference of Negro Workers in Hamburg in 1930. The conference ultimately drew seventeen delegates from West Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the United States. Attendance was hampered by the logistical challenges of bringing together delegates from across the world, particularly during the onset of the global economic depression. But in many cases, would-be participants were prohibited from travelling because of their political activities—as was the case with the African delegates from South Africa.

Perhaps more important than the conference itself were the extensive travels undertaken beforehand by Ford, Patterson, Padmore, and the Huiswoud’s as they tried to reach labor activists in Africa and across the African diaspora. In 1929, a labor activist in the capital city of The Gambia, E.F. Small, led a successful strike that resulted in the legalization of trade unions in the British colony. The strike had received extensive solidarity from Communist and Black activists in the UK and Patterson was able to meet with Small in London. Starting with Small’s contacts in West Africa, Padmore then travelled through Senegal, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Liberia, and the Gold Coast (Ghana) developing direct connections for the ITUCNW, its publications, and the Comintern.

From 1931 to 1933, Padmore was at the helm of the ITUCNW, tirelessly corresponding with contacts in Africa and the Caribbean and writing extensively on the struggles of Black workers across the world. During this time, the ITUCNW coordinated solidarity protests and media coverage in support of the Scottsboro Boys as well as a tour through Europe of the mother of two of the accused boys. The ITUCNW’s paper, The Negro Worker was distributed by sympathizers and Communists in West Africa and South Africa, often under conditions of illegality. However, Padmore’s work was cut short with the rise of the Nazi party and his expulsion from the ITUCNW’s base in Germany in 1933. In the aftermath, Padmore had a public falling out with the Comintern. The specific circumstances that led to Padmore’s break are complicated and disputed, but were undergirded by the changes that had taken place in the Comintern since the end of the 1920s.

After Stalin: The Re-Orientation of the Comintern and the Example of South Africa

By the late 1920s, the workers’ revolutions that had swept Europe and China following the Russian Revolution had gone down in defeat. The Soviet Union had been left isolated, just as the early leaders of the Comintern had feared.

By the end of the 1920s, the bureaucracy around Joseph Stalin had taken control of the Soviet state, and eliminated their opponents—most importantly that of Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Following Lenin’s death in early 1924, Nicolai Bukharin (head of the Comintern 1926–28) upended the basic principles that underlay the activities of the Comintern. Whereas Lenin and Trotsky had founded the Comintern on the premise that it was impossible to create a socialist society within the bounds of one country, Bukharin and Stalin adopted precisely the opposite position: that the Soviet Union could be an island of socialism in a sea of capitalism. Thus, from the mid-1920s onward, the Comintern’s activities became oriented on a) ousting Trotskyists and other oppositionists from the leadership of Communist parties around the globe and b) establishing a secure international diplomatic environment for the new Soviet ruling bureaucracy.

Bukharin’s and Stalin’s abandonment of the Comintern’s early principles pushed away activists like Padmore. These changes also had a profound impact on the fledgling Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA). Aside from the United States, the most intensive discussions in the Comintern about racism and Black liberation concerned South Africa. Despite the CPSA’s early roots in organizing Black workers, the party was initially focused on the struggles of white workers. Over the course of the 1920s this shifted, taking a lead from the Comintern’s 1922 “Thesis on the Negro Question” and the arguments of leading Black Communists in South Africa—as well as those from the US. During the 1920s, the Black working class was growing quickly in the mines and in the urban areas of South Africa. Many were pushed into wage labor because of the implementation of the Native Lands Act, whereby the majority of the indigenous population was only allowed to own or lease land in “Native Reserves”—which covered just 7 percent of the country’s land area. As a result, the number of Africans living in South African towns doubled in the period between 1921 and 1936.

In this context, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) quickly grew to become the first mass nationwide trade union for Black workers, and the Communist Party became closely involved, with two “Coloured” Communists, James La Guma and John Gomas, acting as leaders in both organizations. La Guma and other Communists were expelled from the ICU in 1926, but nevertheless continued to work with the growing African National Congress (ANC). By 1928, the CPSA had 1600 African members, composing a majority of the membership and an increasing share of the leadership, including the election of Albert Nzula as General Secretary in 1929.

It was in 1927–28, however, that a Comintern decision split the CPSA with dire results. Following a visit by La Guma to Moscow, Bukharin and the Comintern executive committee directed the CPSA to raise the demand of “an independent black South African Republic as a stage towards a Workers and Peasants’ Republic with full autonomy for all minorities.”^[10] The “Native” or “Black Republic” thesis was supported by Black US Communists in the Comintern, but was initially rejected by most Black and white CPSA leaders. Supporters claimed it would force the CPSA to address lingering “white chauvinism” and to refocus their organizing on the massive Black rural population resisting forced resettlement into the Native Reserves.^[11]

While some of the accusations directed at the CPSA leadership were accurate, the “Native Republic” thesis was controversial for understandable reasons. First, land theft through the Native Lands Act was driving much of the proletarianization of the African population by creating a landless population that found work in mines and urban areas. Thus, some South African Communists argued that the elimination of racial discrimination would be driven by the increasingly black-led working class fighting for a socialist revolution.

Moreover, the “Native Republic” was conceived as a “stage” of development that had to be achieved before socialism became possible. By the late 1920s, Soviet leaders increasingly dictated to Communists in Africa and other parts of the colonized world similar “two-stage” perspectives. The idea that South Africa (and other colonies) had to first pass through a period of capitalist development (albeit as a “Black-led republic”) ran directly counter to the positions laid out by Lenin and Trotsky at the earlier meetings of the Comintern.

In practice, the new line from Moscow resulted in Communists submitting to the leadership of more conservative nationalist organizations—as occurred in China in 1925–27 with disastrous results for the Chinese working class. In this context, the “Native Republic” thesis (although officially dropped by the Comintern in 1935) later became the basis for the CPSA’s long-running alliance with the ANC, under the banner of replacing apartheid with black majority rule in South Africa. Such a victory did occur when the first multiracial elections took place in 1994. But aside from a small population of Black elites who have benefited immensely from the transition, over the past twenty-three years, economic inequality along racial lines in South Africa has only grown deeper.

Whatever the long-term impact of the Comintern’s intervention in the CPSA in the late 1920s, its immediate impact was to plunge the party into factionalism. While on the one hand the CPSA was to put forth the slogan of a “Native Republic” as a first “stage” the Comintern leadership also pushed the party toward sectarianism, resulting in attempt to form their own Black trade unions. The project was a failure that isolated the CPSA from the ranks of the Black working class, despite their involvement in strikes and pass burning demonstrations in the early 1930s. A wave of expulsions of both Black and white leaders supported by the Comintern reduced the party membership in 1933 to roughly one-tenth of what it had been just five years prior.^[12] However, the decline of the party had other causes: South African Prime Minister J.B.M. Hertzog launched an anti-communist campaign in the late 1920s that linked “Bolshevism” to the increase in Black rebellions.[13] The resulting arrests and imprisonment of African Communist leaders also devastated the CPSA.

Ethiopia and the Opening of a New World War

Despite the degeneration of the Comintern, there were still important campaigns led by Communist movement activists on the continent in the 1930s. Nineteen thirty-five marked the beginning of World War II in Africa, with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. The brutal occupation, which eventually took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians, immediately provoked an international outcry. Communists from the US and Europe joined solidarity efforts alongside other Pan-African, anti-colonial, and anti-fascist activists, from Harlem to Accra. Dock workers in Cape Town and Durban refused to load ships with food destined for the Italian army. The action followed a CPSA appeal to Black port workers arguing that any blow to the Italian occupation in Ethiopia was also a blow to white rule in South Africa.

In the Gold Coast, I.T.A Wallace-Johnson and Bankole Awooner-Renner, Comintern adherents who had both studied in Moscow, created the West African Youth League (WAYL) in 1934. The year prior, Wallace-Johnson had organized a Scottsboro Boys solidarity committee in Accra. In 1935, the WAYL organized a rally of a thousand people in Accra against the invasion of Ethiopia; raised funds for Ethiopian resistance; and Wallace-Johnson challenged colonial laws and wrote copiously about the crimes of European colonialism, leading to his arrest and the passing of anti-Communist legislation in British West Africa.

The “Hands of Abyssinia” committees organized by Communists, much like the solidarity actions with the Scottsboro Boys, were important displays of the Communist movement’s ability to organize truly global campaigns on the basis of anti-racism and Pan-African solidarity in the 1930s. By this time, Garvey’s UNIA was in steep decline and the Pan-African Congresses were in suspension. Thus, for much of the interwar period, the Comintern represented the only truly international movement that was continually trying to link Black radicals in Africa to those in the African diaspora.^[14] Despite the challenges faced by Black Communists—whether state repression or the “white chauvinism” of their comrades—they played a critical role in raising the demand for African independence both on and off of the African continent.

Stalinism, Diplomacy and Imperialism

But by the mid-1930s, Stalin’s regime was entrenched. Anticipating the coming war with Germany, Stalin sought an alliance with the French and British governments in the name of combatting fascism. As the Comintern now served Stalin’s diplomatic needs, Communist parties in France and Great Britain, as well as in their empires, were directed to suppress demands for colonial independence so as to not affront the USSR’s would-be allies. In 1939, when Stalin feared that reconciliation with France and Great Britain was a lost cause, he abruptly signed a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany, throwing the Communist movement into crisis. Only when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941 did Stalin reverse positions again and joined the Allies. This time, the Comintern itself was disposed of entirely (1943), as a further gesture of reconciliation with the major capitalist powers that had once sought to destroy the Russian Revolution.[15]

The end of the Comintern and the absurd twists and turns of Stalin’s foreign policy during the 1930s caused many Black activists to abandon the Communist movement. Worse, some, like Lovett Fort-Whiteman and possibly Albert Nzula, fell victim to Stalin’s deadly purges of his opponents in the USSR.

But the eventual role of Communists and other Marxists in fighting fascism during World War II, and the subsequent popularity of left-wing parties immediately afterward, attracted the attention of a new generation of African radicals. As African anti-colonial movements grew in the decades following the war, Marxism, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Revolution would become even wider reference points on the African continent.

Matt Swagler is an activist and writer on African history and politics, he recently completed his PhD at Columbia University. Matt is active in Palestinian solidarity and socialist politics in New York.

Featured Photograph: Claude McKay speaking at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, Moscow in 1922.

Notes

^[1] This grouping was referred to as the Communist International or the Third International.

[2] Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919–1939 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2013). I am incredibly grateful for Adi’s work on this topic and refer to his research throughout this article, even if I do not share all of his conclusions.

^[3] In 1920, the Communist Party of Egypt became the second such party on the continent.

^[4] As Adi argues, the Union Intercoloniale was itself the product of Comintern pressures on the PCF to put greater attention on anti-colonial activity and work among those who hailed from parts of the French empire residing in France. See Adi, 206-7.

^[5] Quoted in Adi, 212

^[6] Adi points out that while party leaders in these countries were accused of “white chauvinism” it was also the case these newly formed Communist parties were still struggling to function as unified organizations during the early 1920s. Thus, it was not simply the case that there was a concerted effort to downplay the importance of anti-colonial and anti-racist work. The young Communist Parties struggled in many arenas.

^[7] Quoted in Adi, 212.

^[8] For more on Senghor and his associates see Adi, Chapter 6, as well the work of Brett Hayes Edwards, David Murphy, and Babacar M’Baye.

^[9] Although based in the US, Padmore hailed from Trinidad and Hermina Huiswoud was from British Guiana.

^[10] “Autonomy” was later replaced with “equal rights.”

^[11] Comintern leaders argued that the “Black peasantry” was the “moving force of the revolution.” See Adi, 72-74.

^[12] For more on this critique see the work of Baruch Hirson.

[13] See Nigel Worden, The Making of Modern South Africa (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 87.

^[14] As Adi argues, George Padmore would go on to use the connections he made when leading the ITUCNW in the 1930s to later build the 1945 Pan-African Congress.

[15] For more on the twists and turns of the late Comintern, see Duncan Hallas, The Comintern (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2008.)

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