Inside the Battle of Algiers: An Evening with Zohra Drif

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.)

Gender and Politics in Africa: an Interview with Marjorie Mbilinyi

ROAPE

August 24, 2017

Struggles over gender inequity have often been lost or buried in accounts of the fight against political exploitation and oppression in Africa. A parallel history of contestation over gender relations is here exposed through the life of one remarkable scholar and activist, Marjorie Mbilinyi. ROAPE’s Janet Bujra discusses the life and politics of a fighter for gender and class equality on the continent. The interview is a powerful and critical account of fifty years of campaigning against patriarchal oppression on many fronts in Tanzania, in which Mbilinyi has herself been at the forefront. She traces the legitimisation of feminism as a means to understand and a way to organise for and with women. This is not a feminism lifted from Europe or the US, but one generated in response to Tanzanian and African realities. As a teacher, analyst and organiser, Marjorie Mbilinyi has inspired a generation to question patriarchy and to set up groups to study and fight against it collectively, and to do so in tandem with struggles against class oppression, neoliberalism and imperialism. In this growing movement she identifies and describes resistance not only from men in power but also from those who position themselves on the radical Left.

Marjorie and I were colleagues and became close friends from the early 1970s, when I taught on the pathbreaking East African Society and Environment course at the University of Dar es Salaam (a team-taught introduction to radical political economy). We later worked together on a research project into the impact of the AIDS crisis on gender relations and have maintained our friendship and political dialogue up to the present.

Your life in Tanzania has been one of gender and Left activism and you have made major contributions, working collectively with others. What motivated you initially towards such objectives? As someone born in the USA, did your politics precede your move to Tanzania, or were they generated by events and conditions in Tanzania?

I would say both: my politics preceded my move to Tanzania in a general sense, but events – both personal and public – galvanized my activism. From adolescent years I was committed to challenging inequality and injustice, propelled in part by personal struggles at family level. Later, exposure to the women’s movement literature of the 1960s provided me with the tools to understand and name patriarchal structures of oppression in the family.

As a member of the ‘sixties generation’, I was actively engaged in the civil rights movement in the early 1960s in and out of Cornell University where I did my first degree [1961-1965]. Participation in the voter registration drive in Fayette County, Tennessee, in 1964 as part of a Cornell University students group was a landmark, providing me with first hand exposure to community led activism and the intricacies of ‘outsider’ participation.

Arriving in Tanzania at the end of 1966 to join my husband to be, Simon Mbilinyi, after completing my MA in Education Psychology at Stanford University, I was caught up in the excitement of the debates over Socialism and Self Reliance on and off campus. As a young wife/mother, and academic at University of Dar es Salaam [1968-2003] I was forced to confront the challenges and struggles of patriarchy in the family and on campus, as well as in the general community, while also actively engaged with others in efforts to implement socialist principles, transformative pedagogy and participatory action research. My position, as an American born European/white female married to a Tanzanian, complicated these struggles.

In 1967 I made a conscious decision to become a Tanzanian citizen. Our family adopted Kiswahili as the family language, and sought in every way possible to provide our children with a ‘local’ Tanzanian upbringing, feeling at home and belonging in their father’s culture, community and extended family, and building strong bonds with their grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins and non-kin family/friends. Fluency in Kiswahili was also a must for anyone seeking to participate in the social transformations taking place at that time.

Why do I dwell at length on language and culture issues? We had observed the harm caused by identity issues among a few Tanzanian friends of mixed racial heritage, who were born in the colonial period, usually of European/white fathers and African mothers. Some were separated from their mothers and maternal community, and sent to boarding schools for African children of middle-class aspiring parents. The mixed children had their own dormitory room, clothing, and food to eat, and were taught ‘proper’ European manners and table etiquette, and they wore shoes!

My husband Simon and I have been fortunate to have four remarkable children, three girls and one boy: NnaliTausi (1967), AninaMlelwa (1969), LyungaiFilela (1973) and Mhelema Michael (1979 -1980). We lost Mhelema at the tender age of one year and three months, following one of several bouts of severe high temperature and infection during his lifetime. At the same time, we have been blessed by the birth of four grandchildren, who are our hope and inspiration.

Within two months of Nnali’s birth, I was employed on a full-time basis in the University’s Department of Education and had to find an ayah/nanny to help take care of my child. On 1 January 1968, Mwamvua Saidi entered our household and family and remains part of us to this day, as mama mlezi. Mwamvua, or Mama Shija, played a major part in helping to socialise our children – and me — and ground us in Tanzanian culture. She also ‘freed’ me to be able to devote time to my work as a university lecturer and researcher, to my PhD studies at UDSM from 1968 through 1972, and increasingly, to my engagement in the women’s/feminist movement. Mwamvua was also balancing work and being a wife/mother/family. She had five children, four boys and one girl, spaced very closely to our own children. Soon she and her family were able to move into our compound, and our children grew up together, becoming part of our extended family.

The famous feminist slogan, ‘the personal is political’, had special resonance for me as a young wife/mother and academic/activist, trying to cope with the often conflicting demands of patriarchal society and at the same time ‘belong’ to my new community. Friendship with likeminded women and the sisterhood we developed as part of a feminist movement for change became a major source of inspiration, hope and support, as well as the overall progressive group of scholars and their families both on and off university campus. My family [nuclear and extended] became another, and the two ‘worlds’ often coalesced in joint activities – Sundays at the beach with children and friends; drop in visits, rotating dinner and dance parties in one another’s homes.

These were also formative years for the university at many different levels: a shift from largely expatriate and European staff to Tanzanian and African; struggles over ideology between the dominant imperial bourgeois position, a pan-Africanist Marxist vision, and transformative feminism which challenged both; struggles over structures and ways of decision making between the inherited top-down bureaucratic structure and alternative democratic systems; and conflicts over the relationship between the university, the state and the people. Women/gender struggles were situated within each of these struggles and also helped to shape them.

Can you describe the heady political atmosphere at the university in the early 1970s? What kind of debates took place and between whom? What part did you play in university politics?

The University was an exciting place to be in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There were debates on the role of the University in building socialism and self reliance, involving lecturers and students as well as participants from ‘town’. This included advocacy of curriculum reform and structural transformation of the University itself, enhancing the voice and power of lecturers and students vis a vis the administration. The Common courses (East African Society and Environment and Development Studies) were designed to expose all students, regardless of their subject specialisation and career choice, to an understanding of Tanzanian/socialist ideology, history and political economy. In the Department of Education, we created a joint foundation first year course [Psychology and Sociology of Education] to enable future teachers/researchers/school administrators to better understand and engage with the challenges of implementing the state’s Education for Self-Reliance policy at school/college and classroom level. My particular interest was in the promotion and practice of transformative pedagogy at University as well as in other education institutions, in order to promote creativity, critical thinking, problem posing and democracy in the classroom.

Efforts to democratise the University led to periodic confrontations with the University administration. I was involved with fellow lecturers in mobilising support for students’ autonomy and defending the student organisation leader at that time, Simon Akivaga, when he was seized by police forces and eventually expelled to Kenya, his home country. I also joined forces with other women lecturers and administrators in challenging sex discrimination at the university, and in society as a whole.

UDSM had a rich seminar culture; nearly every arts, humanities and social science department organised weekly seminars involving both lecturers and students (undergraduate and graduate) in often heated debates on academic and political issues combined. Through these fora, scholars launched preliminary research reports and/research proposals for discussion and feedback. Some succeeded to draw a substantial number of ‘town’ people as well, providing space for a cross-exchange of views with government and political leaders, intellectuals [on/off campus] and increasingly, civil society activists. Most of my writing was presented in one of these seminars, and several became controversial. The progressive left at the university was dominated by dogmatic Marxists who had no conception of, nor tolerance for, the notion of (class/gender/race) intersectionality. They demanded a ‘purist’ static class analysis that could not grapple with the grey areas of structural change and power relations/struggles in post-colonial Tanzania. My critical analyses of race and gender were labelled diversionary in studies of colonial education and agriculture policies. My painstaking study of different forms of peasant differentiation in contemporary Tanzania, using Lenin’s methodology in his study of Rural Capitalism in Russia to examine the results of numerous empirical studies, was also denounced as ‘petty bourgeois thought’.

The seminars were exciting, but the discourse was brutal, personalised and macho. Participants focused on finding weaknesses in a paper and were only satisfied when they could thrash it to pieces. I remember the day in the mid-1970s when Deborah Bryceson and I presented our seminal paper on women’s involvement in peasant production and reproduction in Tanzania! A notable historian denounced the analysis, saying ‘you are dividing the masses!’ In my experience, the greatest resistance to gender/feminist analysis came from the Marxists – or from the right, from bourgeois nationalists who talked about how good things were ‘back home in the village where my mother is very happy’. Until today, many land rights activists repeat the same Marxist line, blind to the way in which social relations in peasant economies are constructed by gender, age and class relations, and women bear the brunt of government anti-peasant policies and lead the popular resistance against local plunder by mining, agriculture and tourist corporations.

In contrast to the university macho culture, I adopted an alternative style of discourse in my postgraduate seminars, whereby participants were expected to identify positive aspects and strengths of research proposals and essays, first, and then provide constructive criticism of weaknesses and gaps. The focus was on the text or narrative in question, and not the person. The women’s studies groups and feminist organisations I have been associated with have adopted a similar position, creating an alternative ‘safe’ space and style of discourse, described below, in order to encourage women, youth and other marginalised people to share their work and to learn to welcome helpful constructive criticism.

To what extent was there gender awareness and politics on the campus at that time? What was the gender composition of the student body and staff? Compared to the lives of women beyond the campus, did women students enjoy a degree of gender equality?

The University was organised according to male bias principles, with blatant sex discrimination in terms of service for staff, and in practices of their recruitment, employment and promotion, as shared in my article, “Gender Struggles at the University of Dar es Salaam: A Personal Herstory”. Women lecturers and administration staff, including myself, organised ourselves informally to fight against sex discrimination in the early 1970s, galvanized by a blatant case of discrimination; thus began my involvement in collective struggles for women’s rights.

The composition of university staff became increasingly Tanzanian and/or East African during the 1970s and 1980s. Many of us participated in campus activism which centred around the struggle for socialism and against capitalism and imperialism, in general, and colonialism and apartheid which remained in several neighbouring countries and in the south. We also joined together as members and leaders of the University of Dar es Salaam Academic Staff Assembly (UDASA) in the 1980s to struggle for more democracy at the hill [as the university is known], with more voice from academics in making basic decisions, as well as for more substantive change in curriculum. Immediately however, the issue of sex discrimination at the university emerged as a problem and eventually a source of division. The major struggle emerged over efforts by women staff to organise ourselves through UDASA to denounce sex discrimination in employment, promotions, recruitment, etc and to demand change.

Nearly all women academics joined the women’s caucus within UDASA, and collectively carried out a quick survey to establish the number of women and men at different levels of employment within the university; the gender breakdowns in terms of student enrolment at undergraduate, MA and PhD level; and in leadership posts as heads of departments, deans and directors, and the top administration. We also investigated staff views about the causes of the problems and what to do about it. People documented the extent of sexual harassment of women staff and students, for example, and the lack of any serious strategy to deal with it.

A joint report was prepared collectively and presented at a special meeting of UDASA in Nkrumah Hall and aroused a major and intense debate. What was alarming and bitter for me was that the most furious rejection of the paper and of our demands for gender equity and equality came from progressive leftists! They took the position that the women’s caucus was dividing academic staff unity in the struggle against university bureaucracy and for academic rights; and that sex discrimination was a secondary contradiction!

Nevertheless, this organising activity helped to catalyse the setting up of a Gender Sensitisation unit [now Gender Studies] under the Chief Administrative Officer. The unit develops and implements gender sensitisation sessions for students and top management on an annual basis.

Another major area of discrimination which women faced, and which led to male biased research and a deformed curriculum for all students, was gender stereotyping in curriculum and research. There were no formal courses on ‘women’s studies’ or ‘gender studies’ let alone ‘feminist studies’ in those days, with the welcome early exception of a second year option course in Development Studies on ‘women’s liberation’. [An informal group of staff and non-staff feminists, including myself, developed and taught the course syllabus, and compiled appropriate readings, largely from unpublished papers]. Gender mainstreaming was carried out by many women and men staff to insert gender/women’s issues into course syllabi. Moreover, in Fine Arts, lecturers and drama groups created positive and active imagery of women who acted on their own behalf and were not simply victims. Students were also encouraged to research on gender issues in undergraduate and postgraduate essays as well as independent research and MA and PHD dissertations.

One way to validate gender/feminist studies was to compile an annotated bibliography of all the research reports and analytical essays written about women and/or gender issues in Tanzania, especially those written by Tanzanians themselves. Ophelia Mascarenhas and I prepared a bibliography on Women and Development for the African Centre for Research on Women at United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), Addis Ababa, in the late 1970s. We shared the first cyclostyled version of this bibliography with participants in the Bureau of Resource Assessment and Land Use Planning (BRALUP) Workshop on Women and Development in 1979 as part of a process of celebration, validation and knowledge generation. Many of the authors cited in this work were participants; the Workshop represented a major contribution towards the recognition of women and gender studies as a valid area of analysis and research. Ophelia and I later expanded the number of items in the bibliography with more in-depth annotations, and wrote a substantive essay which focused specifically on the resistances and struggles of Tanzanian women against patriarchy and capitalism during the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial period. Women in Tanzania ((Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1983) deliberately challenged the usual western feminist view of African women as being powerless victims, or the bourgeois nationalist view that the concept of gender equity was a foreign importation, or the Marxist view that it was possible to separate gender and class struggles in the world of marginalised women.

Eventually and largely through the struggles of women academics and students, specific ‘gender’ courses were established in many social science related curriculum during the 1980s and 1990s. A good example is the MA optional course on Gender Issues and Socio-economic Development which we created in the Institute of Development Studies, and which I coordinated and taught until my retirement in 2003. This led later to a full-fledged Masters degree programme on gender and development.

As with other feminist initiatives, these efforts faced immediate resistance and backlash from fellow lecturers. Postgraduate students were told that women/gender-related dissertation themes were ‘not academic’, fellow lecturers were told that their research reports were irrelevant to Tanzanian realities and were influenced by foreign ideology. Vocal women students and lecturers who challenged the status quo faced a backlash. Many women, including myself, decided to organise ourselves in groups so as to provide solidarity and moral support, and enhance our power and capacity to make changes at curriculum and institutional level. Most notable for me were the Institute of Development Studies-Women Study Group [IDSWSG], which later gave birth to the Women Research and Documentation Project [WRDP] and the Tanzania Gender Network Programme [TGNP].

Please tell me more about how you engaged with gender/class issues in research and analysis on and off the University of Dar es Salaam campus. In your research and activism you use the concept of ‘animation’ – can you describe what this meant in practice and what kind of issues it was used to address?

My focus of research and analysis has been on gender and agrarian issues, beginning with studies of education in rural areas in the 1960s and 1970s; through analyses of changing gender and class relations in the rural economy based on participatory research in West Bagamoyo District (1980) and Rungwe District (1985-1990); rural food security in the context of the policy shift from public support for small family producers during the 1970s and early 1980s to free market policies with a growing emphasis on large-scale production in 1980s to the present. At the same time, I have been actively involved in creating advocacy and activist organistions, again on and off campus.

My initial terrain of engagement was in the field of education, and specifically teacher training at the UDSM. My first research experience at UDSM was survey research on parental decision-making about enrolment of girls and boys to primary school, based on field work in Tanga and Mwanza Rural Districts. This study helped to challenge stereotyped notions about ‘coastal’ and Islamic bias against girls’ education, and highlighted the significance of household income differentials in determining girls’ chances of going to school compared to boys. This led to the publication of my first book entitled The Education of Girls in Tanzania (Institute of Education, University of Dar es Salaam, 1969) and my PhD on the Decision to Educate in Rural Tanzania. It was also the first and last time I relied entirely on research assistants for field research. I have been actively involved in participatory action research ever since usually as part of research teams.

While in the Education Department I coordinated and participated in the Secondary School Research Project during the 1970s, using participatory research methods and partnering student teachers and myself with role modelteachers to observe each other’s teaching methods and classroom interaction, with a focus on gender relations. A joint report on our findings was presented to teachers in participating secondary schools and widely endorsed, and included the teachers’ recommendation that they be allowed to organise themselves in an independent teachers’ union. Although the Ministry of Education closed down the project in retaliation, the Tanzanian Teachers Association was formed not long afterwards.

Linking academic work and activism, several researchers outside as well as within the university embraced and further strengthened the concept of participatory action research, or animation, in the late 1970s, and eventually formed the Tanzanian Participatory Research Network, a forerunner of the African Participatory Research Network. Animation is predicated on the understanding that women and men who are exploited and oppressed are active knowers of the situation and many of its causes. Animators or facilitators use a variety of participatory methods, including codification pictures, case studies and drama, to provoke the oppressed to assess their/our situation, analyse the major causes and act to make change happen.

Animation creates a creative and dynamic space in which the class/ethnic/gender differences between ‘researchers’ and/or middle-class activists and members of the marginalised exploited class of, in this case, women, are recognised and challenged. Illiterate working women become teachers, and together we create new knowledge and plan strategies of action. In the case of ‘real’ participatory action research, the activist researchers participate in and/or follow up the action of their grassroots partners. The results of the knowledge so produced are immediately shared with participants in the animation research and others in the community, including village government leaders, and later, district leaders, and so on [or it could be with teachers and school heads; factory management, etc], in order to receive critical feedback and plan together how to move forward. Creative use is made of alternative forms of communications and media, especially local forms of song, dance, poetry, drama, and art work, as well as interactive videos.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was actively involved in two off-campus participatory action research programmes which became milestones for animation in Tanzania, the Christian Council of Tanzania’s Vocational Education Project and the Jipemoyo Research programme discussed below. Jipemoyo was hosted by the Tanzanian Government’s Ministry of Culture with Finnish support, with two co-directors, the late Odhiambo Anacleti and Prof Marja Lisa Swantz during the late 1970s and 1980s. Based in West Bagamoyo District, Jipemoyo worked with pastoralists [Waparakuyu] and cultivators [Wakwere] in ‘ujamaa’ (socialist) villages near Lugoba trading centre; I participated in regular meetings to reflect on the varied research experiences, and carried out field research for a short time [one month] in a very poor village called Diozile, following on the heels of another researcher [Asseny Muro]. We both focused our respective studies on changing gender relations at household and community level in the cultivating community. I remember being struck by the high level of political awareness among village women and youth, who actively challenged corrupt village government leaders and demanded change. I also learned more about the changing but still empowering aspects of matrilineal society and the intricacies of polygamous life.

Regional and district authorities in West Bagamoyo were unsettled by the way in which community activists organised themselves, provided articulate and informed critique of dysfunctional policies and corrupt leadership, and won the attention of a broad audience beyond the local level. This led to a backlash, but the lessons learned by the Jipemoyo experience informed later participatory action research and organising activities.

Animation work has provided me with invaluable learning experiences, helped to ground me locally, and strengthened my understanding and knowledge about the interlinkage between patriarchy and neo-liberal globalisation. . In the world of a peasant woman, there is no question that gender, class and imperialism are integrally linked together: she confronts and resists these relationships on a daily basis. In the same vein, providing students in a secondary school – and their teachers – with the opportunity to reflect on their different realities and design alternative ways of learning not only produces new knowledge, it also contributes to immediate change in and out of the classroom.

Personal life histories became one avenue to explore changes and struggles through the subjective life experience of individual women (and men).In 1985 I devoted a sabbatical to analysing changes that took place in class, race and gender relations in Rungwe during the colonial and immediate post-colonial period. In the 1940s and 1950s, more than one fourth of young Nyakyusa men worked as migrant labourers in the Copperbelt of then Northern Rhodesia or the gold mines of South Africa – I wanted to find out what happened to the women. In depth interviews were carried out with several elderly women and men in Rungwe, as well as archival research at the ‘Rungwe mission’ at Tukuyu, Rhodes House, Oxford University; the National Archives of the UK at Kew; and Tanzanian National Archives. It was exciting to discover all the fuss caused by rebellious ‘runaway wives’ in Rungwe, according to reports by male district commissioners, the Native Affairs Commissioner, managers of copper mines, and ‘native chiefs’ in the archives and then to go find out what older women and men had to say about it. Oral history confirmed the fact that large numbers of Rungwe women ran away from forced marriages and joined their ‘brothers’ in the migration to the Copperbelt. Alliances were formed between colonial officers, mining management and local ‘chiefs’ to bring the unruly women home! These and other stories confirmed the fact that ‘the personal is political’; and that ‘custom and tradition’ were inventions of the colonisers and their local male allies.

In colonial Rungwe, the Moravian Church provided an emancipatory space for many women who struggled to overcome the patriarchal oppression and discrimination they experienced at home. Women could become elders, and travel from one village to another for days on end with their male colleagues. Yet both the Moravian and the Lutheran church practiced racist and sexist policies in the colonial days and refused to ordain African ministers for many years. Discriminatory wage structures were found in mission schools, hospitals as well as the church, with different wages for African and Europeans, and within each racial category, women were paid the least – if they were paid at all.

An elderly woman named Rebeka Kalindile became my teacher, mentor, mother and partner in countless debates over patriarchy and colonialism at this time. Together we compiled her life story in an animation process, focusing on those events and happenings which Rebeka believed were most significant. Rebeka forced me to interrogate my own strategies of resistance; one of her favourite slogans was ‘you have to be clever’ [‘lazima uwe mjanja’], imbibing classical conceptions of resistance by slaves as well as women. [1]

I presented the results of my Rungwe studies in my Professorial Lecture of 1985, later published as Big Slavery, Agribusiness and the Crisis in Women’s Employment in Tanzania (Dar Es Salaam University Press, 1991). Big Slavery explores the interaction between patriarchy and capitalism through the histories of women’s resistances in the private and public domain during the colonial and post-colonial period.

In 1998, a group of four university researchers – Bertha Koda, Claude Mung’ongo, Timothy Nyoni and myself – began the Rural Food Security Policy and Development Group, otherwise known as KIHACHA, which was situated within IDS and guided by a national advisory committee consisting of leaders from four activist civil society organisations. During 1998 through 2002 we carried out intensive animation work in Ngorongoro, Shinyanga and later Njombe Rural Districts, inviting peasant women and men to assess the situation of food security in their local context, analyse the basic causes and decide on concrete actions to improve if not radically transform the situation. Feedback sessions were held at village, district and national level where village activists helped to explain the findings to government officials and NGO leaders, and argued on behalf of the recommendations and demands which they had generated in the animation process.

KIHACHA participants agreed on one core campaign slogan, ‘haki ya chakula, ardhi na demokrasia’ [the right to food, land and democracy] through intensive discussion in each of the nine participating villages. KIHACHA produced a powerful set of campaign messages using colourful popular leaflets, posters, t-shirts, song and a drama – the last two items produced by one of our most accomplished theatre groups, Parapanda in close consultation with the research team. E & D Limited, the only woman-owned publishing house in Tanzania, designed and copublished all of our leaflets, posters and publications, including Food is Politics (KIHACHA, IDS, University of Dar es Salaam, 2002). HakiElimu leaders helped design the cartoons used and supervised the work of the artists. In other words, KIHACHA pulled together and depended upon the creative talent, expertise and commitment of a wide array of individuals and organisations.

An informal loose coalition was also created almost spontaneously around 2000 called the KIHACHA Network, consisting of more than 30 grassroots groups and national NGOs. The network helped plan the KIHACHA campaign which was launched to the wide public in 2002, and voluntarily disseminated the campaign materials throughout the country, using their own partners at local level. Working closely with the media, videos capturing the images and voices of women and men grassroots activists were shown on national news, denouncing the devastating impact of both patriarchy and globalisation/neo-liberalism.

As a scholar activist, your contribution to the establishment and support of collective organising in civil society is well known. Which organisations have, in your experience, made a substantial impact, even if short lived, in the struggle to enhance equity and social justice? Who was involved and what was your role in them?

I have been actively involved in several exciting advocacy groups, including Kuleana (Mwanza), HakiElimu, Institute of Development Studies (IDS) Women Study Group, Women’s Research and Documentation Project (WRDP) and TGNP Mtandao [formerly known as Tanzania Gender Networking Programme]. With other organisations, TGNP Mtandao also created and hosted the Feminist Activist Coalition, FemAct. Let me focus on IDSWSG, WRDP and TGNP Mtandao.

As shown above, the university was a hostile place for any woman who was critical about sexism and wanted to change things. Some of us were desperate to learn more about what causes such intense patriarchal structures and attitudes and behaviour, so as to change them. Out of that desire for space to learn more together, came the seeds of what became the IDS Women Study Group. A small group of women [Tanzanian and non-Tanzanian] began to meet together informally in our homes as a study group in 1978. We read top feminist literature from Europe, North America and Asia; and began to concentrate on writings by African feminists. By 1980 our group had expanded and we decided to seek a base in IDS, becoming one of the first IDS Study Groups, along with two others on rural development and workers.

IDS-WSG grew rapidly to 30 members and met on a weekly basis, with no funding of any kind. The majority were not working at the university, a very important point in our later struggles, and many were not ‘academics’; two thirds were Tanzanian. From the start, we worked collectively, with an elected leadership structure; I was elected as the first Convenor. We decided to carry out our own research on ‘the women’s question’, and began to prepare proposals for fundraising, working collectively according to themes such as women peasants; women in the media; women and education. The separate research proposals were compiled into one organisational proposal, to which we added basic costs to facilitate the development of a documentation centre; as well as a four wheel drive vehicle to support the research work. We successfully negotiated for a grant from Ford Foundation. Just as we were about to receive the money and the car in 1982, the all-male IDS management team intervened and claimed that all such resources belonged to the institute! They directed that the research funds go to the Institute’s Research and Publications Committee which would decide how to allocate them!

A clear case of male domination, oppression and appropriation, this was exactly what happened to the women cooperatives which we had studied in ujamaa villages, and now it was happening to us! The group members refused to accept the hijacking of their proposal, and asked the funder to retain the funds until we could access them ourselves. The original IDS-WSG members moved out of the institute and formed an entirely new organisation which was registered independently as the Women’s Research and Documentation Project, WRDP, in 1983. WRDP members went on to conduct research, organise a series of workshops with government and civil society leaders to share the results of their analysis, and established the Women’s Research and Documentation Centre in the ground floor of the university library, one of the top collections on gender/feminist issues in the nation at that time. For many years WRDP was a leading critical voice on behalf of women’s issues, and helped to lead Tanzanian women NGOs to the Women’s World Forum in Nairobi in 1985.

During the 1980s and 1990s several other women focused organisations were set up at the university, focusing on science and technology; and on education. The scientists succeeded to get a change in university student recruitment; with affirmative action to provide pre-first year courses in sciences and mathematics for young women, initiatives later institutionalised within and by the university.

The Kikundi cha Akina Mama Mlimani (KAMM: Women at University Campus) was an entirely different kind of group which concentrated on improving the welfare of women, children and their families at the university in a practical way. Begun in 1989, one of their major achievements was the setting up of a community library at the UDASA club on the hill which had a strong children’s collection. KAMM also organised other children’s activities for the campus community, such as film shows, sports, and art lessons. Numbering some 20 women, the members of the group lived at the hill; they were not all staff. This provides a creative example of alternative ways of organising.[2]

In 1992 and 1993, a group of about ten women and men came together with me as coordinator to facilitate a triple A process of reflection and planning for the leaders of top women/gender civil society organisations, in preparation for their participation in the Women’s Decade meeting in Beijing in 1995. With the support of the Royal Netherlands Embassy and the NGO SNV, more than 30 women activists shared their experiences and strategies of organising for the promotion of women’s rights and gender equity at the national and district levels in three workshops, and planned concrete strategies of action for the future. The combination of rigorous feminist theory and animation methodology led to a high level of analysis and participation, and fostered enthusiastic networking among ourselves and with East African organisations who participated in the 1993 regional preparatory meeting in Kampala.

The results of this analysis and planning were edited by TGNP and published as the first Gender Profile of Tanzania in 1993. More important, however, was the demand by participating NGOs that a new networking organisation be established by the facilitation committee. In 1993 the Tanzania Gender Networking Programme (TGNP) was established as a membership organisation by the original committee members. We moved into our own office in town, and I became the first Executive Director [then called Coordinator], on leave from the University for three years [1994-1996].

From the start, we were committed to a struggle against patriarchy and neo-liberal globalisation which focused on gender, class and imperial/race relationships and their transformation. Eventually we named this transformative feminism. We also were committed to retaining and strengthening a collective process and culture of decision making, drawing on the experience several of us had had in WRDP, which was based on group centred leadership rather than the usual leader centred group. The continued reliance on animation and collective decision-making enabled TGNP to sustain itself and grow in spite of many challenges. We adopted concrete activist strategies from the start, along with gender mainstreaming, which enabled TGNP and its partners in the Feminist Activist Coalition (FemAct) to reach out to the wider public on many issues and have our views noted, and in some cases, acted upon. This provided members and staff with a support group and a base for feminist activist work which helped to keep us grounded locally while acting at all levels.[3]

TGNP Mtandao adopted multiple strategies, including training and consciousness-raising using animation approaches; knowledge generation, dissemination and information through participatory action research, multi media platforms and policy analysis; advocacy work on strategic issues with strategic government sectors/departments, local government authorities, and members of Parliament; and media engagement at all levels. Of particular importance is the Intensive Movement Building Cycle, combining participatory action research, support for local knowledge centres and linkages with investigative journalists. Community activists have succeeded to raise gender/class issues with government and non-government leaders, including the commercial private sector, and through wide media coverage, their demands have been met in many cases. In the process, women and youth leaders in particular have strengthened their negotiation and advocacy skills, as well as their understanding of macro-economic policy, structures and systems.[4]

I remained an active member of TGNP Mtandao after returning to my employment at the University of Dar es Salaam. In 2003, I retired from academia and became the ‘Principal Policy Analyst’ at TGNP for ten years [2004-2014], devoting much of my time to mentoring younger scholar activists in policy and budget analysis and participatory action research. During its now 24 years of activism, TGNP Mtandao has become one of the most outspoken and visible advocates for gender equity, social justice and women’s empowerment in Tanzania and Africa, challenging both patriarchy and capitalist globalisation.

Notes

[1]Marjorie Mbilinyi”I’d have been a Man! Politics and the Labour Process in producing Personal Narratives’ in Personal narratives Group (eds) Interpreting Women’s Lives (Indiana University Press, 1989) and Marjorie Mbilinyi and Rebeka Kalindile “Grassroot Struggles for Women’s Advancement: the story of RebekaKalindile” in Bertha Koda and Magdalena NgaizaedsThe Unsung Heroines (Dar es Salaam, DUP for WRDP Publications 1991).

[2]See my chapter, “Transformative Education and the Strengthening of Civil Society” in Haroub Othman (ed) Reflections on Leadership in Africa (Dar es Salaam, IDS/UDSM, 2000).

[3]See Marjorie Mbilinyi, Mary Rusimbi, Chachage S L Chachage & DemereKitunga (eds)Activist Voices: Feminist Struggles for an Alternative World (Dar es Salaam, TGNP & E&D Limited, 2003

[4] See Marjorie Mbilinyi “Transformative Feminism in Tanzania: Animation and Grassroots Women’s Struggles For Land and Livelihoods” in Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements: Knowledge, Power and Social Change, ed Rawwida Baksh and Wendy Harcourt, New York: Oxford University Press (2015) and Marjorie Mbilinyi and Gloria Shechambo “Experiences in Transformative Feminist Movement Building at the Grassroots Level in Tanzania” in Akosua Adomako Ampofo, Cheryl R Rodriguez & Dzodzi Tsikata eds Transatlantic Feminisms: Women and Gender Studies in Africa and the African Diaspora (Lexington, 2015).

Living a Committed Life: A Tribute to Abdul Raufu Mustapha

ROAPE

August 22, 2017

By Jibrin Ibrahim

Abdul Raufu Mustapha, who died on 8 August 2017, was a Professor of African Politics at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. Raufu was a towering presence in African academic networks and will be remembered as a sterling scholar and a committed comrade who devoted his life to leaving the world better than he found it. For Raufu, the purpose of life was the construction of a better society and he had a clear idea of what such a society meant – more equality, more opportunities for all, access to qualitative and critical education and above all, catering for the needs of all members of society. What was important about his life was that he always believed that a better society was possible and we all have a role in bringing it about. In other words, his life was about our agency in constructing a better society.

Background

Raufu was born in Aba, Eastern Nigeria on 24 July 1954 and was the ninth of 19 siblings, all of whom are still alive. His father, who is also still alive, is Ishola Mustapha from Ilorin, a retired foreman and mechanic at Niger Motors and United Africa Company (UAC) while his mother, Rabia Mustapha, was a trader. He started his education at St. Michael’s Primary School, Aba and finished at Fagge Primary School in Kano before going to Federal Government College Sokoto. After A-Levels at Ilorin, he proceeded to Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria where he emerged as the best student in political science in 1977 and the best graduate student of political science that sat for the 1979 examinations. Having lived and schooled in Aba, Kano, Sokoto, Zaria and Ilorin, Raufu was fluent in Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba languages and felt at home in all parts of the country. Nigeria, for him, was his extended family.

Family

Raufu had the good fortune of being married to a friend and intellectual soul mate, Kate Meagher, originally from Canada. They met in Sheffield in 1988 and married in Toronto in 1990. Dr. Meagher, a sociologist who taught for six years at the Institute for Agricultural Research of Ahmadu Bello University, is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of International Development of the London School of Economics. They had two children, Asma’u Ajoke Laide Meagher Mustapha, born 1993, and Yahaya Oluseyi Mustapha, born 1995. Family for Raufu was however not just the nuclear one, but also his vast extended family and the larger Nigerian and African family.

Friendship

Raufu had exceptional social skills that enabled him to maintain and sustain a vast array of friends, many from his days in primary and secondary schools. He devoted a lot of the one resource he had very little of, time, to contact his friends, visit them, socialize, stay in touch with the evolution of their lives and families, and to generally sustain his rich network of friendship. He included time for his friends in his numerous travels, going out of his way to visit friends and maintain relationships. His kindness, charm, humour and cheerful banter made it easy for his friends to appreciate his value and contributions to their lives.

Scholarship

Raufu is best known for his scholarship. After his masters at Ahmadu Bello University, he did his PhD in Politics at Oxford, under the supervision of Gavin Williams. After his long sojourn as a lecturer in Ahmadu Bello University, he transferred his services to Oxford University where he worked for the rest of his life. He was a committed scholar and was well versed in multi-disciplinary approaches and methodologies. He had a formidable presence in African academic networks and was a valuable member of CODESRIA, the organisation that hosts the African social science community. He was a member of their Scientific Committee and recently participated in the internal review of their Intellectual Agenda. Raufu was always available and keen to provide insights into the state of Africa’s social sciences and its future in a changing global context. Over the past two years, he invested time and resources to seek the support of the Dangote Foundation to establish a scholarship scheme.

For Raufu, scholarship was the scientific expression of the political values of the researcher. The promotion of social change on the basis of scientific and critical thought through the pursuit of a progressive agenda that prioritises the interests of ordinary people was central to his research. At the same time, he addressed the challenges to social cohesion posed by identity politics – ethnicity and religion identity in particular. In all of his work, he promoted democratic culture, its values, principles and practices.

In 2008, he co-edited Gulliver’s Troubles: Nigeria’s Foreign Policy After the Cold War; and edited Conflicts and Security in West Africa in 2013. He served on the Boards of journals, newspapers, and research centres, including the Review of African Political Economy, Premium Times in Abuja, and the Development Research and Projects Centre in Kano.

Raufu is very much the product of the radical politics that characterised Ahmadu Bello University during the 1970s and 1980s. He was also a leading cadre of the radical movement and two examples of the role he played are worth citing – the Movement for a Progressive Nigeria and the Zaria Group.

Radicalism

Throughout his undergraduate days in Ahmadu Bello University – 1974-1977, Raufu was one of the leaders of the Movement for Progressive Nigeria (MPN), the incarnation of the radical Marxist philosophy and praxis that marked the period. Radicalism for Raufu meant breaking the bond between imperialism and the Nigerian (African) State as a precondition for emancipating the people from oppression and exploitation. Central to this approach was understanding imperialism as a world system with tentacles in the economy, trade, ideology and politics of affected societies. Throughout the period, he worked tirelessly organizing Marxist study cells, identifying comrades who could be recruited and trained and above all, linking the activities of the MPN to the key questions of the time – combating apartheid and the racist regimes of Southern Africa, promoting the just struggles of the Palestinian people, organizing against military dictatorship at home and activating links between the student and trade union movements.

Under his leadership, the MPN became a formidable force in the University that was able to influence the leadership of the student union and the radical agenda that characterised political life on campus and across campuses, as he also linked up with other radical organisations in other institutions. A considerable part of his time, energy and intellect during his student days were devoted to these issues, which are not reflected in his CV. Raufu also invested considerable talent and commitment to ensuring that good new leadership emerged, which could sustain the movement after his graduation. Immediately after his National Youth Service Programme in Kano, he returned to the university as a graduate assistant to continue the struggle.

Zaria Group

Upon graduation, Raufu transited to the Zaria Group, the Marxist Movement composed of lecturers and intellectuals that provided leadership for radical thought and praxis as well as linkages to the larger Nigerian, African and international struggles. The Zaria Group was not the only leftist group in the university. There was another group of radicals that was to later align with the left-wing Peoples Redemption Party that pursued Aminu Kano’s pro-talakawa (common peoples’) struggles. It was a period of intense factionalism and Raufu devoted his time, energy and skills to promoting the “correct” Marxist-Leninist understanding of the problematic. That story has still not been told but with more members of the Zaria Group transiting to the next world, it will be useful to tell that story.

One of the occasions to deepen the internal debate among progressives was the Karl Marx Centenary Anniversary Conference, jointly organised by the various strands of Marxists and Progressives in Zaria in 1983. Raufu presented a thoughtful and incisive critique of the People’s Redemption Party experience [the PRP, formed in the late 1970s, was a party of the progressive left and had considerable support], entitled “Critical Notes on the National Question: Practical Politics and the People’s Redemption Party.” It was a major contribution that provided room to revive the debate on the contending pathways to progressive change.

Constructing the Nation

Raufu’s most important commitment involved addressing the challenges to social cohesion posed by identities – ethnicity and religion in particular. One of his most important research interests was ethnicity and the national question. He took the task of constructing and stabilizing Nigerian federalism seriously throughout his career, and invested his skills in producing a better understanding of ethnicity in Nigeria’s political system. In 1986, he published “The National Question and Radical Politics in Nigeria” in a special issue on Nigeria in the Review of African Political Economy [all of Raufu’s article can be accessed for free by logging on/registering here]. He also extended this commitment to improving our understanding of the Boko Haram insurgency.

Understanding Boko Haram

Some of Raufu’s most important works were carried out over the past five years and were devoted to promoting a scientific understanding of the Boko Haram insurgency and seeking pathways to peace. Over the period, he has worked with around twenty younger researchers from Nigeria, Niger and Europe, producing a corpus of seminal work that is empirically based and theoretically sound. The work addresses Muslim identities, Islamic movements and Muslim-Christian relations. The researchers have closely examined the factors that promoted Islamist radicalization, the paths that have emerged and the reasons that made Borno the ground zero of the insurgency. They have also examined the research question: why Islamist radicalization occurred in Northern Nigeria but not in Southern Niger, which has the same sociological, religious, geographic, linguistic and cultural characteristics.

The research has so far resulted in two important edited volumes: Sects and Social Disorder: Muslim Identities and Conflict in Northern Nigeria”, published in 2014; and Creed and Grievance: Muslim-Christian Relations and Conflict Resolution in Northern Nigeria, to be published in January 2018. The projects on Boko Haram have also produced many policy papers that have been made available for the use of government and its security agencies as well as the community of scholars.

Raufu’s burning desire over the past few years was the imperative of understanding the insurgency so that we could begin the difficult process of addressing the core issues of poverty, inequality and the crumbling social order, all of which have wreaked havoc on Nigerian society and are dismantling the nation. Ultimately, his concern was the construction of a peaceful united country with a progressive social system that would address the needs of all its citizens. His numerous, relations, friends and comrades will continue to miss Raufu.

Jibrin Ibrahim is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Democracy and Development in Abuja, Nigeria

Voting for the Devil you Know: Kenya’s 2017 election

ROAPE

August 14, 2017

By Nic Cheeseman, Gabrielle Lynch and Justin Willis

On 11 August 2017, Kenya’s Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) announced Uhuru Kenyatta of the Jubilee Party (JP) the winner of the presidential election held on 8 August, with 54.2 percent of the popular vote and turnout of almost 80 percent of registered voters. Kenyatta’s re-election has been disputed by opposition leader, Raila Odinga, and the National Super Alliance (NASA), who – in the days following the polls – made a series of allegations, some of them apparently mutually contradictory. This included claims that the vote transmission system was hacked and, separately, that the “real” results leaked to the opposition by an IEBC insider placed Odinga ahead of Kenyatta. Shortly before the final results were announced, the NASA chairman then led a walk-out of their party agents from the national tallying centre, while the chief agent, James Orengo, declared that NASA would not go to court to challenge the result, but seek other “constitutional means” – which seemed to leave street protest as their only option. Most recently, on Sunday 13 August, Odinga called on people not to go to work until a further statement was made on Tuesday 15 August, while Orengo called for people to prepare for mass action.

Prior to the election, many opposition politicians and supporters had been confident of their victory. Principal opposition leaders and parties had come together behind a single presidential flagbearer, and campaigned on a populist ticket that included a promise to address historical injustice and socio-economic marginalisation, create jobs, and lower prices. In contrast, the ruling JP called upon Kenyans to elect them for a second term on their claimed track record of security provision and economic development, and promise to create more jobs. The election also took place in a difficult socio-economic context. This included high food prices, a shortage of maize flour or unga (the national staple), rampant corruption, high un- and under-employment (especially amongst the youth), an increase in extra-judicial killings, and a cold war between the government and prominent human rights organisations, which called into question the governments ability to provide security and development. For many in the opposition, the dire economic situation, combined with the newfound unity of the opposition, Odinga’s record of struggle, and NASA’s populist campaign, was reason enough to believe that the NASA wave would be unstoppable.

NASA supporters waiting for Canaan at Uhuru Park rally (Nic Cheeseman, July 2017)

However, while Kenyatta’s margin of victory is bigger than most had expected, it is by no means implausible. A number of opinion polls had put Kenyatta slightly ahead in the final weeks of the campaign, and the results are closely in line with a sample parallel vote tally conducted by a group of domestic observers – the Elections Observation Group (ELOG) – which projected a Kenyatta victory of 54.0 percent with a margin of error of +/- 1.9 percent.

Critically, Kenya’s results management process had been designed to remove any element of suspicion, and to defuse allegations of rigging through transparency. All of the relevant forms, from polling stations and constituencies, were to be posted online and available for public scrutiny. However, at the time of writing, this had not yet happened, so the exact results cannot be verified. Nevertheless, no hard evidence has yet been provided to counter the fact that the opposition failed to achieve the political tsunami they had predicted at any level of the elections in which Kenyans voted for six separate levels of representation. Instead, JP managed to make significant inroads into several NASA strongholds, securing a majority in both the National Assembly and Senate; while JP or JP-leaning candidates won 28 of 47 gubernatorial races.

How did JP manage to do so well despite the socio-economic context? The answer lies both in the shortcomings of the opposition’s campaign and in the strategy adopted by the JP.

First, while the multiple parties of the NASA alliance agreed on a single presidential candidate, in many places they contested against each other at the local level. By contrast, Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto had converted their two party coalition from 2013 – the Jubilee Alliance – into the JP, integrating a number of other smaller outfits along the way. This had the advantage of generating a more efficient campaign with a common slate of candidates. As a result, local party structures and local aspirants for the members of county assembly (MCA), member of parliament (MP), senate, women’s representative, and governorship, and their networks were all effectively harnessed to campaign for Kenyatta’s re-election, and vice versa.

In addition to building a more effective political vehicle, the JP invested heavily in its strongholds and potential swing areas, but also did not neglect the strongholds of its opponents. In the latter, they seem to have made effective use of the localised campaigns of aspirant MCA’s who usually had little hope of winning, but perhaps sought other rewards for increasing the president’s vote in their own backyards.

Raila Odinga speaking at a rally in Narok County (Gabrielle Lynch, 28 June 2017)

The ruling party also reaped significant benefits from the power of incumbency as local administrators and officials helped to campaign for candidates at all levels, benefiting from the use of state resources, in direct contravention of the electoral rules and regulations. In this way, civil servants were openly drawn into the JP campaign, and government vehicles were used for it; while the principal Jubilee candidates evidently had ample money to spend.

However, even more important were local perceptions about who was best placed to foster economic stability and development. Politics in Kenya has a strong ethnic logic. Kenyatta and Ruto hail from Kenya’s largest and third largest communities respectively and, while many Kikuyu and Kalenjin were angry about the economy – and particularly about high food prices, insufficient jobs and corruption – many felt that their interests would be better catered for under the leadership of one of ‘their own’, rather than under the leadership of ‘other’ communities who might redistribute resources away from them and ‘their communities’.

Even outside of the Jubilee strongholds, the government ran a highly effective campaign that emphasised its achievements to date – such as local electrification and road projects – and which also questioned the opposition’s capacity and intentions. In this way, much was made of corruption in NASA-controlled county governments and also of the limited development records of leading NASA figures – all of whom had been in government at one point in time or another.

Finally, but far from least, an effective social media campaign cast Odinga as a dangerous individual who would divide Kenya and cause chaos. This message drew upon the history of the 2007 election when Odinga’s rejection of President Kibaki’s re-election triggered post-election violence, which led to the death of over 1,000 people and displacement of almost 700,000 others. Odinga may have inadvertently lent strength to this narrative through his decision to constantly challenge the integrity of the IEBC in the run-up to the election, and by his comments on land and other resources.

For example, in June 2017, Odinga hit the headlines for his statements to a British journalist that he would dismantle white-owned ranches in Laikipia County if elected; while at a rally in Kajiado he urged Maasai not to sell land to outsiders “who have come to invade” and to look forward to 8 August as the “third and final revolution”. Moreover, while Odinga argued that he had been misquoted with respect to Laikipia, he defended his comments in Kajiado. JP politicians were quick to criticise this rhetoric as hate speech and incitement, prompting heated debates on social media about what an Odinga victory would mean for those with land and property outside of their ‘home’ area. This was then interwoven with other controversial issues, such as Odinga’s stance on rent. For example, on the occasion of the presentation of his presidential nomination papers to the IEBC at the end of May, Odinga promised to lower the cost of living in 90 days if elected by targeting food prices and rent. Almost immediately, claims were made on social media that this constituted support for demands by rent-payers for lower rent and for a periodic refusal to pay rent; positions which have historically been associated with significant violence.

In this way, JP were able to use some of Odinga’s own statements to play into a long-running trope in which he is depicted as a harbinger of division and political instability. That JP were able to do this despite both of their principal leaders having been charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court prior to the 2013 election – with the cases later collapsing amidst claims of witness intimidation and bribery – demonstrates the extent to which this narrative has taken hold in pro-government strongholds. When seen in this light, the results leave Kenya’s opposition, and its supporters, in a difficult place.

NASA’s accusations of electoral malpractice resonate with many of their core supporters who understand them in the context of a history of election manipulation, and who bitterly resent what they see as the long political and economic dominance of central Kenya and the Rift Valley. However, a refusal to go to the Supreme Court and more explicit appeal for a general strike, and call for people to prepare for mass protests, is an extremely risky strategy.

First, it increases the potential for loss of life. A day after the results were announced, and in the absence of significant protest, the Kenya National Commission for Human Rights already estimated that 24 people had died from bullet wounds most likely inflicted by the security forces, and noted that they were seeking to verify additional deaths and injuries. This came amidst reports of security officers cordoning-off certain parts of Nairobi and Kisumu, and of beatings, shootings and rape – a heavy-handed response to limited protest, which reflects a culture of impunity, where many people (and particularly poor young men) are shot by police on a regular basis; the extent to which young residents of informal settlements have been cast as actual or potential criminals; and extensive security preparations ahead of the election in the wake of claims of inadequate preparation in 2007. Second, if NASA do refuse to go to court and attempt to mobilise mass action, any unrest that results will be used by Odinga’s rivals to further demonise his leadership and his coalition.

This reality means that NASA finds itself caught between a rock and a hard place. Having set out to undermine the credibility of the elections, their most hard-core supporters expect a strong response. Failing to deliver risks being perceived as weak, but taking on the might of the state would represent political suicide for Odinga and some of his closest allies, and would likely go hand-in-hand with a violent security lockdown of certain opposition strongholds. It therefore seems likely that for the millions who really believed that the election would bring political and economic transformation and lead them out of unemployment and high prices – as Odinga put it – into Canaan, the outcome of the election will be a deep disappointment whatever happens at this point. Thus, while the electoral process, and the results, currently look much more credible than any since 2002 in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary, they still leave the country deeply divided, and with an opposition weakened by electoral loss, and with diminished credibility beyond its core constituencies.

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: A rally in Narok County (Gabrielle Lynch, 4 August 2017)

Always a Rebel: the life of Ken Post

ROAPE

August 9, 2017

By David Seddon

Ken Post, 1935-2017, Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, died on 11 March 2017, on his 82^nd birthday. I did not know Ken well on a personal basis, as did many comrades but he was one of the major influences on my late-flowering radical years, first when I was a post-graduate student at the LSE and then a lecturer in African sociology and anthropology at SOAS, and subsequently through my own long years at the School of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia. I have read most of his published work and was fortunate to be able to share his ideas and experiences first-hand in various workshops and seminars over the years.

Born in 1935 in Chatham, Kent, into a working-class family (his father was a construction worker), Ken was very much a child of the post-war Welfare State. He went to a grammar school and won a state scholarship to Cambridge University, where he joined the Cambridge Footlights and the Cambridge Union (to become President). It was at Cambridge that he laid the foundations for his subsequent career as a researcher, university teacher and political activist – in all of which he was an effective agent provocateur and non-conformist – while all the while retaining the distinctive Estuary English accent of which he seemed quite proud.

It is said of him that, after reading on Marx’s theory of surplus value, he realized that it described his father’s world and therefore his family life, and decided he was a Marxist. He was undoubtedly very much influenced – as were so many of his generation, and mine – by the ‘events’ of 1968, and was indeed a self-declared Marxist. He never was, however, a card-carrying member of any particular party or tendency. He also never registered for a PhD. He was an inveterate maverick yet managed to have a long and largely successful academic career.

He taught in Nigeria, England, the USA, Jamaica and in the Netherlands, from 1969 until early retirement in 1990. His colleagues at the Institute of Social Studies remember him as ‘a remarkable teacher. Many former students will remember his famous lectures. Entering the classroom, he could ask the students what was on the agenda, then lecture for 45 minutes without notes’. I personally recall his ability both to enliven and to illuminate a seminar discussion, without pontificating but with a somewhat scary ability to command a vast range of diverse and usually relevant examples and experiences, drawn from his own research and from the work of others, and to combine these with an innovative theoretical twist into an original analysis. The last debates in which I remember Ken participating were in the long series of conferences on Alternative Futures and Popular Protest organized over the years by Colin Barker at Manchester University. At one of these, both Ken Post and Dorothy Thompson spoke; it was a memorable occasion.

His academic published work includes the outcome of his research on Nigeria, for which he is probably best known. This first came to my attention when teaching West African anthropology at SOAS in the early 1970s, and re-visited in later years when I was writing on African popular movements and class struggle. When the Centre of West African Studies was established at the University of Birmingham in 1963, its first director, John Fage, attracted a series of academic stars to build and share expertise on Africa. Ken Post had gained his academic credentials by writing a study of the Nigerian federal election of 1959, which were the prelude to independence; and he was hired. In its detailed analysis of constituency politics, this book remains unrivalled. Ken went on to publish a more concise volume with Penguin in 1964, which he entitled The New States of West Africa. This book sold many copies and attracted many doctoral and masters studies to Birmingham to work under Ken Post’s direction. He also published Structure and Conflict in Nigeria, 1960-1965 and The Price of Liberty: Personality and Politics in Colonial Nigeria.

After a stint at the University of the West Indies – and a period of what Peter Waterman describes (in his ‘Dedication to Ken Post’ shortly before his death) as ‘stormy academic-political adventures’ – he returned to England. It seems that, although he identified himself with the Left and with the social movement he wrote about, he was expelled from Jamaica for his alleged ties to a Rastafari-linked movement. This seems particularly strange as he was generally no more inclined to join a party or movement than to identify himself with any particular Marxist academic tendency.

Arise Ye Starvelings, his magisterial study of ‘the Jamaican Labour Rebellion of 1938 and its Aftermath’, which was one outcome of his engagement with the West Indies is, in my view, a pioneering piece of historical sociology presented with all the sophistication of E P Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, albeit on a smaller scale. It gave me an insight into how such studies might be undertaken and reported. It was inspiring, both as regards the subject matter itself and the extraordinary richness of the material collected together and deployed to produce a riveting tale of courage and endurance, as well as an analysis of a colonial ‘labour rebellion’.

Ken was at the ISS in The Hague for over 20 years (1969 – 1990). He was regarded as a remarkable and unique colleague, always willing to give his views and input but also sharp and extremely precise in his critique. He apparently often addressed his students, sometimes to their dismay, as ‘comrade’; but was always generous of his time, his experience and his sharp mind. He continued to teach and research on Africa, and particularly on radical movements as Professor of Political Science, until his retirement. He also supported Peter Waterman, his colleague and friend, in producing and distributing the inimitable Libertarian-Marxist Newsletter of International Labour Studies throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s.

Ken Post was the author of numerous treaties and published more than a dozen books, many on the subject of Marxism. His last five books were on Marxist theory and the history of the international Communist movement; indeed, his last major book was on Regaining Marxism, a basic re-thinking of Marxism in the light of the failure of Third World revolutions, and the collapse of Communist states. He also produced a massive oeuvre on Revolution, Socialism and Nationalism in Vietnam (in five volumes). He was a critical proponent of Marxist economic theory; and proposed a reshaping of Marxist ideology in order to move beyond capitalism without reverting to a Utopian notion of communism.

His interests were, however, not only theoretical; he also wrote about workers and peasants, labour movements and political movements, as a historian as much as a sociologist, an economist or even a political economist. In addition to the trips he made for his research and teaching, Ken went on missions of various kinds to many countries throughout the world: Algeria, Zambia, Belgium, Finland, Sweden, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Burma, Cambodia (where he was one of the first westerners to visit after Pol Pot was driven out), North Korea (where he discussed Marxist theory for six weeks), Thailand, Ecuador, Guyana, Panama and Venezuela.

Last, but not least, he loved to read – and even write – science fiction. In retirement, he published one novel and worked on several others, including an ‘alternative history’ of Europe in which industrial capitalism never developed, leaving China (still ruled by emperors) as the leading world power. As Ken left his friends and colleagues – and his ‘alternative history’ -behind, the People’s Republic of China was beginning to develop its Belt and Road Initiative, a vast infrastructural programme to transform transport (by land and sea) and so economic and political relations between Asia and Europe. The world will not be the same.

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.

Anthropological Legacies and Human Futures

ROAPE

July 31, 2017

A Report on 14^th Biennal Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Milan, 20-23 July, 2016

By Jörg Wiegratz

The 14^th Biennal Conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) (Milan, 20-23 July 2016) was titled ‘Anthropological legacies and human futures’. The gathering took place against the background of a discipline that, like others faces a range of challenges concerning relevance and funding, amongst others. In the conference text, the organisers noted:

Anthropology has lived a time of change, innovation, and interdisciplinary dialogue, but has also struggled to define and establish its own research priorities against the tendency of other intellectual traditions to co-opt its contributions. Political agendas external to the discipline have often bent the broader significance of our findings, and other fields of knowledge have partly appropriated, partly trivialized as anecdotal information, the strengths of the anthropological approach to the study of humans: the ethnographic method. Anthropology treasures lessons learnt that enable the questioning of ‘evidence’ and the sensitive understanding of shifting realities. Its relentless contextualization of human experiences and institutional powers liberates the ability to envision and build new frameworks of civic coexistence. Its bottom-up gaze and long-term engagement with the rich diversity of ways to be human play a fundamental role in re-shaping and sharpening general concepts (i.e. gender, relativism, culture, tradition, and so on) by now widely employed, if often superficially, among media of all sorts. The interest of anthropology for the subjective navigation of broader social systems always carries with it an implicit cultural critique.

This is a good summary of what makes the discipline arguably so attractive, also for non-anthropologists (including political scientists and political economists such as this author) in search for learning, inspiration and collaborations. The conference had six broad themes: power, economy, kinship, religion, knowledge and forms of expression, and work. The selection of these themes and the focus of specific panels and papers (see below) indicate the relevance and usefulness of the conference for roape.net readers.

That said, the keynote lecture by Didier Fassin was on ‘The endurance of critique’. Again, it is useful to cite the lecture’s abstract at some length: ‘In a time when critique is considered by some to be running out of steam and is disqualified by others in the name of a triumphant positivism, anthropology may have to reclaim its various critical traditions, including that of self-critique, to apprehend a world in which weak social and political consensus too often serves to elude the tensions, contradictions and even aporia of contemporary society.’

Notably, one of the three plenaries was titled ‘Contemporary Capitalism and Unequal Society: Obscene Exchange, Complicity and Grassroots Responses’, with interventions on ‘Competition and equality or monopoly and privilege: two faces of capitalist accumulation, the case of Southern Europe’ (Susana Narotzky), ‘Life and debt in South Africa’ (Deborah James), and ‘Love, Marriage and Prostitution: the Libidinal Economy of Capitalism’ (Noam Yuran). The plenary text reads:

In discussing what constitutes contemporary capitalism Noam Yuran reviews the historical peculiarity of capitalism, often described as an economy where everything is up for sales. The full meaning of this commonplace is that things that are formally outside the market are suspected as hiding an obscene exchange. To explore this idea the paper will revisit Werner Sombart’s Luxury and Capitalism, which traces the origin of capitalism to the rise of illicit love and the luxury industry it propelled. He also examines why in contemporary cultural imagination prostitution is associated with finance. Through the analysis of ethnographies of Southern Europe, Susana Narotzky addresses major tensions within the political economy of capitalism. While mainstream neoliberal policy discourse points at enhancing competition, mostly through reducing regulation, the practices of large firms point to various privileged deals supported by political elites. The grassroots responses to this situation focus on recuperating regulatory practices, a return to an economic nationalism, or quasi-autarkic projects of an alternative community economy. This view does not preclude a general belief in the need to gain a competitive market edge. Deborah James deals with the South African context where sharp rises in indebtedness have accompanied the rapid financialization of the economy over the past two decades, debt factors in other socially important relationships and meanings in the everyday life of the family and household. Different obligations and imperatives balanced against, or converted into, one another are examined. She challenges the overly deterministic assumption that these sets of relationships, and the conversions between them, embody a monolithic framework, imposed from above by financial institutions which intrudes into people’s intimate relations and commitments. She suggests exploring the complicity of participants’ engagement with the ‘financialisation of daily life’ rather than seeing it as imposed on unwilling victims.

Roape.net readers might check the recent books of the presenters; At the Heart of the State: The Moral World of Institutions (Didier Fassin), Industry and Work in Contemporary Capitalism: Global Models, Local Lives? (Susana Narotzky as co-editor); Money from Nothing: Indebtedness and Aspiration in South Africa (Deborah James), What Money Wants: An Economy of Desire (Noam Yuran).

Particular papers that were based on material from African countries included for instance: ‘Agricultural modernization and emotional attachment to land in a Rwandan village’ (Anna Berglund), ‘Equal land rights but not quite: women living in informal monogamous and polygamous unions in Rwanda’ (Ilaria Buscaglia), ‘The (com)promised land? Understanding women’s access to land between development discourses and local perspectives in Burkina Faso’ (Martina Cavicchioli), ‘Forensic anthropological endeavors, missing persons and the construction of genocide in Guatemala and Somaliland’ (Markus Hoehne, Shakira Bedoya Sanchez), ‘amaXhosa Maradona: negotiating past, present and future through soccer in a South African township’ (Tarminder Kaur), ‘Knowledge, power and land transformations in Northeast Madagascar’ (Jenni Mölkänen), ‘Property relations in peri-urban Ghana: the local face of global processes’ (Raluca Pernes), ‘Pre-Islamic and pre-Christian beliefs in Sub-Saharan Africa: impact on social and political institutions’ (Oleg Kavykin), ‘Portuguese “migrants” in Luanda: a post-colonial encounter?’ (Irène Dos Santos), ‘Postcolonial positions: conceptualizing the Portuguese migrants in Angola (Lisa Åkesson), ‘Angolan-Portuguese workplace relations in contemporary Luanda’ (Pétur Waldorff), ‘New XXI Century Portuguese immigration in Mozambique: transnationalism and postcolonial identities’ (Eugénio Pinto Santana), ‘French presence in contemporary Algeria: a postcolonial memory & practices’ (Giulia Fabbiano), Today’s missionaries: depoliticising and individualising women’s activism in post-2011 Egypt’ (Liina Mustonen), ‘Feeling vulnerable in the field: collaborative filmmaking in the Niger Delta and the contestation of ethnographic ideals’ (Julia Binter), ‘The moral economy of violence: examples from contemporary Egypt (2011-2015)’ (Perrine Lachenal), ‘Political-economic drivers of moral economies of fraud: the case of neoliberal Uganda’ (Jörg Wiegratz), ‘The resistances during the Ebola epidemics as an expression of mistrust’ (Abdoulaye Wotem Somparé), Platinum dreams (Dinah Rajak), ‘Property regimes and the qualities of resources: the labor of transparency and opacity in Angola’s mining industry’ (Filipe Calvao), ‘Making the individual in a Papua New Guinea oil economy’ (Emma Gilberthorpe), ‘Virtuous imperialism: African police cadets training in Portugal’ (Susana Durão’), ‘Policing reforms in Nigeria: views on Human Rights between theory and practice’ (Nina Müller), ‘Workshops as sites of knowledge transmission?’ (Tim Bunke), ‘Musicians’ debts in the South African recording industry’ (Tuulikki Pietilä), “It’s all about money”: urban-rural spaces and relations in Maputo, Mozambique’ (Inge Tvedten), ‘The politics of a just price: negotiating the price of a ‘tomato of one hundred’ and a ‘t-shirt of ten thousand’ in oil-boom Equatorial Guinea’ (Alba Valenciano Mañé), ‘“Yu sabi fᴐ tᴐk prays”: performing and navigating just prices in the streets of Makeni, northern Sierra Leone’ (Michael Bürge), ‘“Sometimes you need to be selfish”: kinship webs of the Kenyan middle class’ (Lena Kroeker), ‘Contemporary African migrants in the USA: cultural adaptations in megacities and towns compared’ (Veronica Usacheva).

Dr. Jörg Wiegratz is a lecturer in the Political Economy of Global Development at the University of Leeds and a member of the editorial board of ROAPE.

Sensing Nairobi: Exploring the City

ROAPE

July 31, 2017

In a review of an important recent exhibition in Nairobi, Kenya, Craig Halliday writes that ‘Sensing Nairobi’ (8-30 June, 2017) sought to capture, reflect and define Nairobi’s ambiguous urban landscape.

By Craig Halliday

How does one explore or present Kenya’s capital city of more than 3.5 million people? Given the metamorphosing nature of cities and how they become (re)defined by urban residents, who in turn are changed by the city, this is an ambitious endeavour; though one undertaken on by the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA). Their approach brought together a group of artists, critical thinkers and scholars in an endeavour to ‘make sense’ of Nairobi through the city’s sensorial registers; a relevant method given that one’s lived experience of the city, the interplay between people and their surroundings, is formed through multiple sensory modalities with and to urban environments. The enquiry culminated in the exhibition ‘Sensing Nairobi’, held at the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi, June 2017. This short blogpost reflects on a selection of works from ‘Sensing Nairobi’ in an exploration into the city.

Entering the exhibition, the viewer was immersed in a body of work titled ‘Demolition’, an installation of re-claimed roof tiles, a short film documenting salvage and demolition industries, and diary extracts from workers in these businesses. In addition, stand three sculptures by Meshack Oiro created from salvaged building materials. ‘Demolition’, a mixture of art and research, enquires how a city’s materiality affects people in different ways. The work prompts the viewer to contemplate the circulation and life of materials, their use and re-use, the built environment, acts of construction and destruction, the changing nature of physical space, and the different ways this alters perceptions and lived experiences of the city.

‘Demolition’ by Meshack Oiro

Moving through the exhibition hall you came to a small room containing the installation ‘Akili ni Nywele’ by Wambui Kamiru Collymore. Hair advertisements cover the wall and a television plays commercials marketing hair extensions as “the hair you deserve” which will instantly attract desirable men to you. The artist states that the use of hair extensions is “sign of success in urban areas” and is “a lifestyle choice for the modern Nairobi woman.” Though why is this? One explanation is the impact of urban social pressures, starting from childhood; something the artist references through the use of play dolls for young girls which perpetuate narrow beauty standards, furthered through the role of corporations and their marketing techniques.

‘Akili ni Nywele’ by Wambui Kamiru Collymore

The visual narrative of Nairobi is also explored in ‘ManPower’ by Neo Musangi. The work uses posters (frequently pasted across the city) offering to solve problems people face. These ‘services’ are advertised by intriguingly named Doctors, Herbalists, Professors and Astrologers – though their contact details are often the same. Like these posters, encountered through ones’ daily navigation of the city, ‘ManPower’ comments on visual narratives presented across the city and one challenges or passively accepts concepts of ambiguity, authenticity, what is real or fake?

‘ManPower’ by Neo Musangi

In a darkened corner, is the installation ‘Nightmare Chamber of The Powers That Be’ – created by Ralf Rafee. The work is a reaction to ‘City Cotton’ – an informal settlement destroyed by an armed gang, overseen by Kenyan Police. Approximately 100 photos depict City Cotton’s annihilation and eviction of residents. Strobe lights cause a degree of discomfort. As you enter this space the role of spectator shifts to participant. You are forced to push through the photographs. An act causing some to fall. Do you try and hang them back or choose to ignore them and push on? Visitors have covered the walls with their chosen text, imagery and marks; using chunks of charcoal that litter the floor. This performance can be seen as claiming a space, creating something new by leaving a mark or destroying something previously left. The space, like the city, is in a continual state of change and remaking. The work questions how urban space is not a ‘given’ but is rather created by the people who live in it.

The relation between people, environment and the marks left through this contact are also explored in the multi-layered paintings titled ‘Foot Prints’, by Elias Mung’ora. Though like the people from City Cotton, whose images hang by a thread, many of Nairobi’s resident’s experience of the city is one of risk and instability. There is a vulnerability to city life, one that is advanced by mass inequalities and disparate power relations. But if the city is created by those who live in it, then we all play a part in what it is and becomes. ‘Nightmare Chamber of The Powers That Be’ asks us to confront this discomforting reality; what we choose to see, who we ignore, what traces we leave and whose narratives are remembered.

‘Nightmare Chamber of The Powers That Be’ by Ralf Rafee

‘Foot Prints’ by Elias Mung’ora

A series of photographs and audio installation by James Muriuki visually presents Nairobi’s physical and spatial forms, through the substance of water – which relates to Nairobi’s historical formation. Established in 1899, Nairobi – whose name translates as a “place of cool waters” – was a lush green wetland with clear rivers. Muriuki’s series of photographs portray water scooped from different points of Nairobi River (some visibly polluted more so than others). A recording taken from these sites plays in the background. Similar to the river, Nairobi’s residents flow through the city; though like the unequal sites of pollution presented in this work Nairobi’s historical policies of segregation (racial and socio-economic) are also highlighted and it is these which continue to impact and shape city’s multiplicity of disparate spaces.

‘Untitled’ by James Muriuki

By navigating the exhibition (which includes work in the form of video, installation, photography, painting and sculpture – created by over fifteen contributors) you navigate Nairobi, or rather the pluralities of Nairobi; from everyday interactions with the city and its spaces, perceptions of beauty, colonial legacies, patterns of spatial use, ritual, power relations and the city’s materiality. Sensing Nairobi provides a unique range of insights into urban life through multi-sensual experiences of the city, and in doing this it widens our perception, enriching our registers of experience and understanding of Nairobi.

Craig Halliday is researching for a PhD in the role of visual art in Kenya’s democratisation. Prior to this Craig completed a MA in African Studies, MSc in International Development and has worked and lived in Kenya, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Zambia.

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Inside the Battle of Algiers: An Evening with Zohra Drif

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

Overturning an Election: Kenya’s 2017 Poll

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

Gender and Politics in Africa: an Interview with Marjorie Mbilinyi

Living a Committed Life: A Tribute to Abdul Raufu Mustapha

Voting for the Devil you Know: Kenya’s 2017 election

Always a Rebel: the life of Ken Post

Sensing Nairobi: Exploring the City

Decarbonization reproduces colonial inequalities

Oligarchy and the subversion of democracy – warnings from South Africa

The Day Rhodes Fell: Ten Years After

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