Endangered Archives in Africa

November 22, 2016

The workshop ‘Endangered and Post-Colonial Archives in Eastern and Southern Africa’ (13-14 October 2016) was co-organised by British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) & Southern African Institute for Policy and Research (SAIPAR) with generous support from Journal of Southern African Studies (JSAS) Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE). Hosted by the Faith and Encounter Centre (FENZA), Lusaka, Zambia

By Tom Cunningham and Liah Yecalo-Tecle

On the 13 and 14 October scholars and archivists working in and on Africa came together in Lusaka, Zambia, for a workshop on the theme of “Endangered and Post-Colonial Archives in Eastern and Southern Africa.” The workshop was co-organised by the Southern African Institute for Policy and Research (SAIPAR) and the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA), and part-funded by the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) and the Journal of Southern African Studies (JSAS). We had two broad aims: to explore the challenges and realities of preserving “endangered” material in Eastern and Southern Africa, and to plan and discuss practical steps that could be taken now and for the future to preserve and promote endangered historical material in the region. It was fitting that our venue was the Faith and Encounter Centre, Zambia (FENZA), which had been founded (by missionary and historian Hugo Hinfelaar in 2007) for the purpose of housing and preserving the endangered archive of the White Fathers Catholic mission.

We interpreted the terms “endangered” and “post-colonial” broadly. A range of factors might endanger an archive, from political turbulence, to environmental factors, to the misplacing of a file by an archival assistant who perhaps had little or no training. The United National Independence Party (Zambia) archive was “endangered” not only because it was almost housed in a room above a take-away kitchen (where there would have been a risk of fire), it was also “endangered” by the people or groups who might wish to seize, steal, or destroy its politically sensitive contents. If the archive of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (Kenya) was an “endangered” archive because it was locked away and neglected in the dusty, draughty, attic of a church bell-tower, other archives were endangered because of the volume of researchers thumbing the paper pages. Indeed, material held in National Archives too could be “endangered”: the directors of the national archives of Malawi, Kenya, and Zambia gave us an insight to how they attempt to preserve, promote and digitise their archives in the face of financial and other constraints.

An archive could be “post-colonial” because it contains material from the post-Independence period. In our first round of discussions it was noted that it was often the case that this material, i.e. material of relatively recent origin, is more at risk of going missing or not being stored appropriately than the older material from the colonial and pre-colonial periods. This raised the question: how to preserve material with a very recent origin, in particular documents that are “born digital” such as email correspondence? But the “post-colonial” might equally denote the social, economic and political structures in which repositories of historical material are embedded. From Frances Mwangi of the Kenya National Archives, we heard of the managed destruction of sensitive colonial era files by the British government and the “migration” of others to the “secret” Foreign Office repository at Hanslope Park.

We also discussed how structures produced and relationships forged during the colonial period endure and how the post-colonial archives seeking to develop the skills of its staff or enhance its technological capacities manage their engagement with funding bodies and donors, such as the British Library and UNESCO, many of whom are based in former colonial metropoles.

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Rudo Karadzandima, National Archives of Zimbabwe

After opening with an introductory presentation by co-organiser Jessica Achberger, day one was dedicated to “the archivists.” Each pursued their own specific theme but their talks also provided a picture of the state of archives in their respective countries. We heard from Rudo Karadzandima, from the National Archives of Zimbabwe; Paul Lihoma the Director of the National Archives of Malawi; Claver Irakoze, from the Genocide Archive of Rwanda; Chileshe Musukuma and Boniface Siambusu, the Director of the National Archives of Zambia; and Francis Mwangi, the Director of the National Archives of Kenya. Ingiahedi Mduma, from the Tanzania Ministry of Information, Culture and Sports presented on government policy on archives in Tanzania and Liah Yecalo-Tecle, a graduate intern at the British Institute in Eastern Africa, reported on the Research and Documentation Centre in Asamara, the “de facto” national archives of Eritrea.

General points that emerged were as follows: Physical buildings and storage conditions matter greatly when it comes to protecting archive material. Indeed, the 1965 Act of Parliament that established the Kenya National archives and Documentation Service, Frances Mwangi informed us, gave it responsibility “for proper housing, control and preservation of all public records and public archives.” Among the many threats posed to archival material in Eastern and Southern Africa are environmental and climatic factors: heat, dust, and dampness can result in the destruction of important material. The challenge to ensure that materials are held in adequate storage spaces with controlled temperatures and humidity is particularly pronounced if budgets are limited. Claver Irakoze showed the enormity of this challenge: 63 million pages of material was produced by the Gacaca courts alone in the aftermath of the genocide and the Genocide of Rwanda Archive is now responsible for their storage and preservation.

Digitisation is a technique of preservation as much as a mode of dissemination. But once digitised, archives are put under pressure – often by foreign researchers – to make documents available online. We discussed the practical challenges facing archives in the era of digitisation: If a national archive would normally be accessible to approved researchers for a fee, should it not also be digitised and made available online? But how would researchers be approved through an online system? And how would an online system be able to differentiate between citizens and non-citizens? “Outside” expertise and foreign funding bodies (such as the EU, UNESCO and the British Library) often end up playing a crucial but, as Marja Hinfelaar pointed out, not unproblematic, role in collecting, preserving, and digitising archival material.

Archives are not only concerned with paper documents and there are specific challenges that face the collection and preservation of oral histories and visual and audio sources. Over 4,000 recorded interviews are held in the oral history collection at the National Archives of Zimbabwe, and nearly 2,500 of these have been produced since 2003 as part of a range of projects led by the National Archive to “capture a fading memory” (to borrow the title of one). The Research and Documentation Centre in Eritrea has 8,000 audio-cassettes of oral histories that date back to the early 1970s. 22,000 images and films have been digitised by the Malawi National Archives. In addition to the 379 original testimonies, the Genocide Archive of Rwanda has produced 43 filmed interviews and 32 short documentary films.

Collecting and preserving this material requires specific technologies and skills, which need to be constantly updated. Acts of “intentional destruction” can endanger archival material. Archives can be targeted during times of war, violence, and political turbulence. We got a strong sense of the politics of archives, especially from Claver Irakoze and Frances Mwangi who showed how during the Rwandan Genocide and the British decolonization of Kenya respectively, politically sensitive documents were stolen or destroyed. Chileshe Musukuma and Boniface Siambusu informed us that in recent weeks, the physical archive of the political party, the United National Independence Party (Zambia) (digitized by Giacomo Macola and Marja Hinfelaar in 2007) has mysteriously closed down and been moved to an unknown location. The National Archive of Malawi has supported projects to identify and preserve the archives of political parties and organisations but, as Brian Raftopolous pointed out, state or government involvement in helping with the archives of political parties can be deeply problematic. Meanwhile, Joost Fontein, challenged the notion that archiving should be equated with “cultural heritage.”

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Tom Molony, University of Edinburgh

The morning session of the second day consisted of presentations from “the historians.” In the first panel we heard from Tom Cunningham (PhD student at the Centre of African Studies University of Edinburgh) on his and Thomas Molony’s recent British Library-funded “endangered archives project” at the archive of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa in Nairobi; Marja Hinfelaar (Director of Research and Programs at SAIPAR) on post-colonial archives in Zambia; and Gerald Chikozho Mazarire (Midlands State University) on the “Aluka Struggles for Freedom” project.

The preservation projects described by Tom, Marja, and Gerald all operated on different scales (the small church archive, the national archive, the creation of a transnational online archive) but each of the papers touched on the theme of “Historians as Archivists” (to borrow Marja’s title). In the discussion we noted how, in post-colonial Africa, often it is the private research interests of individual historians that leads to an archive being identified, preserved or digitised. This can lead to the creation of digital archives that reflect the research interests of one individual. It also raises the broader question: who has the right and responsibility to preserve and promote particular ‘endangered archives’ – historians, universities, governments? Meanwhile, the ‘Aluka: Struggles for Freedom’ project (which saw a huge volume of material from across Southern Africa digitised and then made available online, through Jstor.org) provided ample material for a wider discussion about the ethics of accessing and disseminating archive material online.

This was followed by a series of presentations from post-doctoral researchers and PhD students from the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein. First, we “navigated the South Africa National Archive” with Cornelius Muller. Then Miranda Simabwachi spoke about preservation practices in Zambia. Duncan Money discussed transnational history and the practical and theoretical issues that surround the African historian’s use of archives that are dispersed across the globe. George Bishi drew on his own experience (as a former archive assistant at the National Archives of Zimbabwe) to provide an account of the day-to-day processes of the archive from the point of view of researcher and archivist. Finally, Hyden Munene described the four Zambian archives he consulted when researching twentieth-century mining history.

These papers primarily concerned historians’ encounters with archives, a topic on which there is a growing body of critical literature (for example, Antoinette Burton (ed.) Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (2006)). We heard, for example, about the idiosyncrasies of particular archives, about unique or temperamental computer-search systems, unorthodox catalogues, and strange classification systems. The question of access returned: we discussed the wide variety of rules in operation for accessing particular archives (fees, institution affiliations, waiting times, the question of the researcher’s nationality); and we heard about how research into one country’s past (in this case Zambia’s), might require travelling not only to Lusaka but also locations as disparate as Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Amsterdam’s Institute of Social History, and the American Heritage Center in Wyoming. It was difficult to avoid the fact that even (or particularly) in the age of digital scholarship and global research, the question of uneven access to archives due to uneven research budgets will not go away.

Our concluding roundtable discussion focussed on practical next steps in light of the presentations. Four items were prominent. First, we discussed the possibility of producing a crowd-sourced database or website that would store and disseminate information about archives in (Southern and Eastern) Africa. The site would be a resource for researchers to identify archives and find such practical information as location, opening hours, key points of contact. Second, we discussed the possibility of producing a “Best (or Better) Practice” manual or guide for the digital preservation of endangered archives. Third, we discussed the possibility of future publications based on the presentations and discussions in the workshop. Fourth and finally, we discussed consolidating the community forged during our two days and connecting with already-existing networks. In particular we noted the potentially fruitful connection with Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Branch of the International Council of Archives (ESARBICA) and the possibility of entering a panel for the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA) at their next conference in October 2017.

Tom Cunningham is a historian at the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh primarily interested in ‘colonial’ Africa and the ways in which the history of everyday life can provide depth, detail, and nuance to abstract concepts such as ‘colonialism’, ‘modernity’ and ‘globalisation.’ Liah Yecalo-Tecle has worked on the state of endangered archives in Eritrea, exploring the successes and challenges of the Research and Documentation Centre in Asmara, Eritrea. She is a currently a researcher based in the UK with the Gill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Featured Photograph: Gerald Mazarire, Midland State University, Zimbabwe

Corbynism and Africa: Breaking from Imperialism?

ROAPE

November 16, 2016

By Hannah Cross

In Brexiting Britain, there are three main political forces: the Conservative rulers belong in the colonial past. They overestimate the country’s importance in Europe and the world, treat society and economy with reckless abandon and propagate hatred towards migrants, refugees and the ‘unpatriotic’ people who defend them, distracting from the abuses of austerity. They are likely to lose Scotland.

The second force is led by the right wing or ‘moderates’ of the Labour Party and other associates of Tony Blair’s regime, who hold financial power and influence over state apparatus and media. They represent the neoliberalism that progressively lost legitimacy and left behind the interests of working class communities and constituents who opposed military interventions. Immediately following the EU Referendum result on the 24 June 2016, an intense campaign of mass resignations, smears, a leadership challenge, legal battles, arbitrary rule changes and administrative suspensions of meetings and members failed to win power over the party and unseat Jeremy Corbyn, who had been elected as Labour leader in 2015.

The third force, then, is resilient, based in the grassroots and serious about the democratic socialism of Labour’s remit. Momentum, the year-old social movement that led the campaign for Corbyn’s second leadership win in September 2016, has enlivened many of the multitude who had disengaged from party politics during the last Labour government as well as younger members who have grown up with precarity. Had they not turned up to Parliament Square in their thousands to defend Corbyn from the attempted coup, four days after the referendum result, it is unlikely he would have retained his position, citing his democratic mandate, against the no-confidence motions and public resignations of 172 MPs. Instead, shadow cabinet vacancies were filled with a small number of inexperienced MPs who impressed party members with their unpolished commitment and were more representative of class, gender and ethnicity.

The Left has moved beyond protest and has become a creative force in the political landscape with aims not only to restore the sharply retreating welfare state but also to challenge financial and corporate power, and radically change the role of labour in society. As alternative visions of society are constructed, new prospects also emerge for Britain’s relationship with Africa.

Corbyn’s consistent record of opposition to oppression and war by successive governments unites supporters around their concerns with British foreign policy. After the Chilcot report in July found there was no justification for the UK going to war in Iraq in March 2003, he apologised unreservedly for his party’s decision. This appeal to the victims and the four million Labour voters lost by Blair’s government would be mere rhetoric without Corbyn’s 33-year record as a Labour MP who regularly protested and picketed as part of a wider movement for social justice and had chaired the Stop the War coalition.

Of the British intervention in Libya in 2011, he argued that the effect had been to destroy the state and create in its place an arms bazaar:

A number of us pointed out in debates in the House at that time that if you simply destroyed the structure of the Libyan state, which is what happened, then you will end up with a series of warring factions … And the spread of arms which were given to the opponents of Gaddafi has then spread into Mali and many other places. So we’ve actually created an arms bazaar of in some cases relatively small scale arms, but nevertheless very powerful ones.

This position statement from the leader of the opposition sparks the possibility of a country that is no longer enamoured with the arms trade. Beyond this renowned stance against military interventions, there is also a record of opposition to other forms of domination in African countries. One photo used by Corbyn’s opponents to frame him as a protester and rebel, and by supporters to prove commitment to social change, shows him being arrested outside the South African embassy in July 1984, a time when the constant demonstrations that had peaked in 1982 were banned. He advocated for Congolese democracy and highlighted the on-going Western role in its conflict, as well as campaigning for the exposure of historic British military actions in Kenya in the 1950s and challenging ‘patronising comments about Africa and African people’ in the Ebola crisis.

The Conservatives instigated the EU Referendum and the Brexit campaign was dominated by the far right. Its success would, and did, hand power to them. Although Corbyn persuaded the majority of Labour voters to vote to remain in the EU, discrediting the pretext for the attempt to oust him, Corbyn’s and Momentum’s position was to ‘remain and reform’ or ‘remain with no illusions’. His ambivalent attitude towards the EU included regular criticism of the effects of its Common Agricultural Policy, arguing that:

The EU sugar regime is not justifiable in any moral or other sense. We are driving cane sugar producers in Africa and elsewhere out of business so that European sugar can be dumped on their markets.

This commitment to international solidarity and justice is shared across the movement. James Schneider, a founder and national organiser of Momentum, linked his work as a researcher and journalist in Africa with his transition from liberal to socialist democracy. He explained in an interview that his experiences in Nigeria:

… helped me to see through a dominant form of analysis in elite British politics, the kind that you find in the Economist, that tries to explain war, poverty and underdevelopment without actually engaging in the real historical context. Instead there are these stories that you can fall back on, North versus South, Christian versus Muslim, ancient ethnic rivalries, anything to prevent you from talking about capitalism, imperialism — the bigger picture, but also the real local context and complexities.

With this deep politicisation of the formerly reactionary, fragmented activities of the Left, Corbynites reject the calibration of policies towards opinion polls or to winning power by any means, and instead seek socialist alternatives to issues that Labour had previously led on or supported, like the scapegoating of migrants or privatisation of nationalised services. The Party has expanded to over half a million members, the largest ever number, and a door has opened to unprecedented democratic participation and rejection of the neoliberal consensus. A number of resigned MPs have now re-joined the shadow cabinet, who were not ideologically or materially opposed to Corbynism but instead doubted his leadership qualities.

Although this reconfigured Labour Party has forced u-turns on some of the most excessive austerity measures, it is now little more than a re-imagination of politics – but even the imagination was lacking two years ago and now is being advanced in a vast new political space supported by a burgeoning alternative media and the communication channels and local strategies necessary for transformation.

If, as I believe, ‘development’ and ‘expertise’ should be focused not just on the postcolonial countries of the south, but on those of the north that have yet to learn how to extricate their political economies from subjugation, immiseration and war, this movement shows there is a popular appetite for change and economic innovation. It seems unlikely that the old status quo of rising inequality and cronyism, thinly veiled under slick public relations and shallow conceptions of liberalism and rights, could win back the hundreds of thousands who are watching it come unspun.

This optimism is, however, just a silver lining on a dreadful cloud. A week before the EU referendum, Labour MP Jo Cox was brutally murdered by a man who called her a ‘traitor’ and had belonged to far right organisations including pro-apartheid, white supremacy and neo-Nazi groups. The government has given racism and xenophobia free reign, inciting primitive hatred and ignorance as lives are destroyed, the country is sold off and the profits kept in overseas tax havens. The near-future looks bleak and foreboding but there is a slow revolution and a unified, vibrant movement that will not capitulate to these antiquated divide and rule tactics.

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

Featured Photograph: Jeremy Corbyn at a campaigning event in London, August 2016 (Hannah Cross).

Capitalist Redux: the Scramble for Africa’s Workers

ROAPE

November 9, 2016

By Kate Meagher

I haven’t normally used the language of capitalism in my research on African informal economies – I’ve tended to stick to terms like ‘market economy’ or ‘market society’. This is not because I feel capitalism is not relevant, but because the conventional blueprints of capitalist analysis have not been well adapted to the processes of labour informalization, ethnic and religious networking, and hybrid governance on which my research has focused. It has taken me some years to piece together the dynamics at play, and to work out how this relates to capitalist processes. I have also found that capitalist terminology has tended to shut down discussion with those holding the reins of economic reforms. Moving beyond a dialogue of the deaf with mainstream economists and policy makers often requires packaging critical analysis in more neutral-sounding language.

But these days, capitalism seems to be back on the Africanist agenda for all concerned. Amid the jubilant refrain of Africa Rising, debates about the African middle class, industrial policy and the developmental state have redirected attention to wider processes of class formation and economic transformation that seemed until recently to have fallen out of fashion. A kinder, gentler neo-liberalism also seems to have discovered the tensions of rapid economic change, precipitating a new focus on unemployment, inequality and social policy. But the question to be asked here is: what do these apparent gestures to capitalist political economy add? Are these terms being rediscovered or remastered in the service of different agendas? As in earlier eras, the challenge of a renewed interest in the role of capitalism in Africa is to look beyond the leftist terminology in order to discern how it relates to what is actually happening on the ground, and in the global arena.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not disputing the value of capitalist analysis. It provides useful tools for tracking processes, connecting apparently disparate developments, and identifying the key social groups and points of friction. But as researchers, it is our job to keep up with how these dynamics change – in the face of new technologies, the disruption of class identities, new mechanisms of primitive accumulation, and the outsourcing of the state. Not that these development are unprecedented – after all, the industrial revolution that gave rise to Marx’s original insights was all about new technologies and the disruption of the known social order. The point is to focus on the tools and conceptual lenses afforded by capitalist analysis, without losing sight of the new configurations as the powerful and the powerless adjust their strategies. Key to deciphering the new directions of capitalism in Africa is not only to recognize points of contestation, resistance and unanticipated side effects, but to be equally conscious of the remarkable ability of the protagonists of capitalist penetration to adapt to and to capture old mechanisms of resistance. In this regard, I would like to focus on two of such elements that seem to me central to what capitalism is doing in contemporary Africa: class and economic transformation.

With regard to class, I would like to redirect attention to the working class. While Africa’s new middle class has generated considerable interest over the past few years, for my money the working class is where the real action is. The African middle class – now defined quite literally as the class in the middle between abject poverty and the well to do – is primarily defined in terms of consumption and the growing indebtedness necessary to maintain it. The African working class shifts our attention back to the question of production, and to the transformations wrought by deindustrialization, jobless growth and persistent poverty and informality, which I have explored with Laura Mann and Maxim Bolt in a recent special issue on globalization and African workers.

Two broad narratives have emerged from contemporary engagement with the fate of the working class in Africa. The first, which I’ll call the social protection narrative, has been articulated in James Ferguson’s recent book, Give a Man a Fish. Focusing on South Africa, Ferguson paints a picture of an African labour force cut adrift from capitalist development processes by the collapse in demand for their labour, leaving them to eke out a miserable living in the informal economy through a range of petty and semi-criminal activities. Their problem, according to Ferguson, is not capitalist exploitation, but the fact that they have become functionally irrelevant to global capitalism. The solution he and other have put forward revolve around social protection strategies based on cash transfers. With an average of 66% of Africa’s non-agricultural workers earning their livelihoods in the informal economy, devising some kind of basic livelihood guarantee is as critical to security concerns as it is to poverty alleviation.

The second perspective, which can be called the inclusive markets narrative, tells a contrasting story, often associated with C.K. Prahalad’s global bestseller, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Business schools pundits and the private sector’s new philanthrocapitalists celebrate Africa’s informal labour force as important players in economic prosperity and development. Far from being functionally irrelevant, Africa’s expanding informal economies are described as a demographic resource, a source of entrepreneurial potential, and a treasure trove of low-intensity economic opportunities. Instead of social protection, what is advocated is greater capitalist engagement with the entrepreneurial energies of Africa’s vast informal labour force. My recent article The Scramble for Africans examines the rise and some of the risks of this narrative.

How can these two contrasting narratives can be reconciled? Do African workers constitute an irrelevant labour force or new partners in capitalist expansion? The confusion derives from a failure to recognize the dramatic shifts in how labour is being accessed in contemporary Africa. While a huge share of African workers have become detached from agriculture and formal wage labour, this has not disconnected them from the global capitalist system. On the contrary, they are now linked to global production through a range of new connections such as subcontracting, seasonal and temporary agricultural employment, last-mile distribution systems reaching out to slums and rural areas, and labour brokers supplying unprotected workers to formal sector firms. These forms of precarious employment are not a sign of functional irrelevance, but of new cheaper forms of inclusion.

Where some see the structural obsolescence of African working classes, others see the rise of new forms of super-exploitation at the bottom of global commodity chains, BoP (Base of Pyramid) distribution networks, and ICT-enabled distance labour. A study of informalization in Kenya found that the biggest contributor to the informal economic expansion involved informal workers employed in formal sector firms. In South Africa, labour brokers – known officially as Temporary Employment Services – provide some 7% of jobs, but on terms that expand rather than reduce precarious employment. BoP initiatives spreading across South Africa, Kenya and Uganda employ a heady mix of philanthropy and corporate zeal to justify sending poor women and youth into slums and rural areas to distribute everything from pharmaceuticals to solar lanterns, largely on commission and without benefits. Even ICT-based employment is expanding informal as well as formal jobs as youth take on outsourced data work for multi-national corporations via on-line platforms. These types of crowdsourced IT labour, gaining ground among unemployed youth across Africa, represent low paid informal work that operates completely outside the reach of any form of collective rights. Expanding informality is not a sign of the irrelevance of African workers to global capitalism, but a source of new relevance in a capitalist race to the bottom of the pyramid.

This brings us, very briefly, to the second dimension of capitalist revival in Africa: economic transformation. If African workers are being adversely incorporated into global capitalism, is this in the service of future growth and accumulation that may lead to better times? What transformation strategies are being pursued here, who is making the decisions, and who captures the gains? Here again, things seem to be changing. After years of development programmes geared to bypassing African states deemed irretrievably weak, predatory and corrupt, developmental states seem to be popping up all over the continent, in Botswana, Rwanda, Ethiopia, even Ghana. Exciting new books on African industrialization are rekindling faith in the prospects for economic transformation that were all but extinguished in the long dark years of the lost decades. But more questions need to be asked about the kind of transformation that is taking place. New patterns of industrialization, based on FDI and integration into global value chains, are giving rise to a highly fragmented industrial structure. Local production organized around linkages between agriculture and industry are being replaced by new types of industrial strategies that prioritize exports of primary products and low value added activities, and imports of what the so-called middle classes eat and use. New models of infrastructure focused on transport corridors are laying the groundwork. Transport corridors are springing up across the continent, prioritizing seamless connection of neighbouring countries’ production zones to coastal ports and the global economy, while side-lining efforts to provide synergistic linkages between raw materials, manufacturing and markets within national territories.

The welcome return to investment in industry and infrastructure is taking shape around the interests of foreign direct investment. This brings with it the anomalies of extraverted technology choices that are capital rather than labour-intensive in a continent plagued by capital shortage and high unemployment; extroverted production systems focused on exports rather than the home market; extroverted demand structures driven by imported consumer tastes; and extroverted financial arrangements dependent on aid, FDI and bond issues, instead of domestic savings, trade taxes and primary commodity royalties. We are told that the latter are bad and market distorting, but more questions need to be asked about whose markets are being distorted. The forms of economic transformation emerging from this kind of industrialization involve little productive integration within or among African countries, either between sectors or even with their own labour force, foregoing the sorts of economic synergies that chart a path out of dependence and precarity. Where labour linkages with the global economy are being informalized, and modes of economic transformation are increasingly fragmented and extroverted, we need to do more than document the good news of Africa Rising, or the risks of recent downturns; we need to ask more questions about who is capturing the gains of Africa’s renewed engagement with global capitalism.

Kate Meagher teaches in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She writes about the informal economy and non-state governance in Africa and has carried out extensive empirical and theoretical research on cross-border trading systems and regional integration, the urban informal sector, rural non-farm activities, small-enterprise clusters, and informal enterprise associations, and has engaged in fieldwork in Nigeria, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Featured Photograph: Cash Store in Khayelitsha, Cape Town

Namibia, Genocide and Germany: Reinhart Kössler interview

ROAPE

November 1, 2016

For ROAPE Heike Becker spoke to the celebrated German scholar-activist of Namibia Reinhart Kössler about his intellectual and political engagement in national liberation on the continent.

Firstly, can you tell roape.net about your intellectual and political involvement with African nationalisms and national liberation movements? How did it start? What were your inspirations and motivations at the time? What are your current interests?

When I entered Heidelberg university to study sociology and social anthropology in 1967, my choice of subject was strongly influenced by a concern for general Third World issues. In 1965/66, I had spent a year as a highschool exchange student in Youngstown, Ohio. Apart from forthcoming hospitality, I became appalled by the many identity and race based divisions I was more or less directly asked to follow. In a way, this experience was complemented by discussions I enjoyed with other exchange students, particularly from Brazil, who related some of the situation in their home countries. I also experienced first stirrings of resistance against the Vietnam War in what you may call a US backwater. When I returned to West Germany, it was clear for me that I should shelve my earlier plans to study archaeology. Something had to be done, and I wanted to contribute; this was of course a somewhat naïve idea of scholarship. One further push was the fatal shooting by police, of the student Benno Ohnesorg during a demonstration against the presence of the then Shah of Iran in Berlin on June 2, 1967. This became a clarion call for many of my generation, which also sent me to the streets for one of my first vigils.

In Heidelberg I got involved almost instantaneously in the emerging student movement. Confrontations ranged over a wide array of issues and so did our study of the theory of imperialism, or reading Rosa Luxemburg on the mass strike. Remember: Paris in May ’68 was literally next door – these were exciting times! In spring 1969, I took part in an awareness raising campaign about the liberation struggles in what then still figured as the Portuguese Colonies in Africa. On that occasion, I also made connections, sort of, with some Portuguese and Mozambican comrades. A little more than a year later, this apparent sideline of the Heidelberg student movement erupted into a major turning point. The World Bank, whose president was then Robert McNamara, held a conference in a classy hotel in the very centre of Heidelberg – just imagine that today! One prominent participant was Erhard Eppler, then Minister of Economic Cooperation, and arguably the most progressive person ever to have held that post. However, we held McNamara – who of course as a former Secretary of Defence, was seen as one of the masterminds of the Vietnam War- along with Eppler, above all [as] responsible for planning at this venue the Cabora Bassa Dam, now known as Cahora Bassa. We perceived that as a huge project of counterinsurgency, involving large scale removals of the local population, and the settlement of huge numbers of settlers from metropolitan Portugal. Our demonstration under the slogan “Eppler is planning with his dam, here a new Vietnam!” was banned by the police, but it took place, nonetheless, to the front of the Heidelberger Hof. It became the most militant demonstration to date in Heidelberg, and the state government of Baden-Württemberg responded by banning the local SDS, the last surviving chapter of the formerly national radical student organisation.

All of this was very influential for me politically and intellectually, but did not generate an immediate, sustained interest in Africa. This happened only in 1979 when I landed my first formal job as Executive Secretary of the Information Centre on Southern Africa (ISSA) in Bonn. ISSA had been created as a Centre for counter-information, serving the broad anti-Apartheid movement. Among other tasks, I edited a monthly magazine, and ran a small publishing venture, where I was responsible for both editing and salesmanship. I delved into the relevant issues, did a lot of journalistic writing, and was helped in all that by the fair amount of material that was streaming into ISSA’s little office, or could be found in its archives. It was tremendous to observe the amount of work and energy that came out of these shabby little offices, which were run by grossly underpaid staff, in Bonn, in London; in Amsterdam the situation was a little better …

Then, at the end of 1979, I got a university appointment, but remained with ISSA as a board member and frequent contributor. I still am. At the Institute of Sociology in Münster, where I was employed, I continued to pursue African issues, but these really started only to take centre stage from 1991 onwards and resulted in a number of projects, mainly in Namibia.

For now, I have realised that after the publication of my book, Namibia and Germany: in 2015, I cannot steer free any time soon from the issues. In particular there has to be a proper German apology for the 1904-08 genocide, committed in what was then the German colony of South West Africa, and consequent reparations to the affected communities. This is an obvious case for activist scholarship.

Were West German scholars and solidarity activists like yourself connected with activists elsewhere in Western Europe?

As long as I can remember, there were lots of links with like-minded individuals and projects across Western Europe as well as the US and partly also Japan, apart from relations with Third World countries, largely represented in Europe by students from these regions. I myself have not belonged to a political organisation since 1972, so links tended to be rather on an individual level, and unfortunately, I was not always able to sustain them over a long period of time, so there were a lot of breaks and shifts.

An important contact was established late in 1976 with ROAPE, at the time, the acronym was still RAPE. It involved a bit of adventure. A colleague, Werner Biermann, and myself had come up with the idea of a radical Third World quarterly in German, and so we decided to find out about role models and attend the editorial conference of ROAPE. To share cost, we took along an Eritrean colleague, who however had not cleared transit through Netherlands, Belgium and France, or entry into Britain. After an arduous journey, we made our way to Dover, only to be detained there. Eventually, us Germans were, reluctantly, allowed to proceed, but our friend was taken back across the Channel. The meeting was very interesting and fruitful, with people like Doris Burgess, Ruth First, Peter Lawrence, Colin Stoneman and last [but] not least Lionel Cliffe in attendance. Lionel was very thin at the time, since he had just got out of prison in Zambia. The main topic was the situation in Zimbabwe, which remained important for my contacts with the group, including a seminar held in Leeds in summer 1980 to assess the recently won independence.

Apart from your own involvement you have also carried out research on the solidarity movement in West Germany, as it were. Can you describe who came together and how they campaigned for solidarity with Southern Africa?

An important strand of the solidarity movement came out of the student movement, where Third World solidarity was once important, though by no means the only component. But there were others. They included, with considerable overlap, church people, partly from missionary societies once these had turned, quite fundamentally, towards a critique of colonialism by the late 1960s. There were also development aid workers who had returned from stints abroad; groups in the unions, particularly the youth organisations; also civil society groups like Amnesty International. During the 1970s, the various student parties of communist pretensions, the Maoist “K-groups”, and also the re-established German Communist Party, the DKP, which was close to the East German government, played prominent roles, both by engaging in spectacular action like “arming a ZANLA detachment up to their teeth”, and by their pervasive sectarianism. This had been a serious problem for my predecessor at ISSA, where we tried to work with the entire range of solidarity groups. There was repeatedly a need to moderate between the broad Anti-Apartheid Movement, the AAB, and a group called the Organisationskomitee, OK, which was close to some of the K-groups. When I took over in January 1979, the K-groups were already dissolving. Many of their activists who had engaged in Third World issues continued work in the Green party or in structures of the Protestant Church.

Apart from OK, which relied on sections of the Maoist left, AAB was the most important and largest group. It was formed on the initiative of people who came from the various strands I just mentioned. One important core was Mainzer Arbeitskreis Südliches Afrika, MAKSA, which had been formed by a group of Protestant pastors and their wives who had spent some years in South Africa and Namibia. Most of them at some point had been expelled by the Apartheid regime. Besides opposing Apartheid more generally, these people also opposed the collaboration of the German Protestant church with the Apartheid regime, and in this sense, they still stick to their guns even today, now that they are octogenarians. Soon after AAB had been formed, it entered into a close working relationship with ISSA, although the relationship had its own problems. AAB insisted throughout the 1980s to closely reflect the positions of ANC and SWAPO, whereas ISSA took a broader view and during the later 1970s tried to reflect a greater range of groups in Southern Africa, while trying to take a more critical stance in their solidarity, even while unquestionably supporting the mass struggles of the 1980s.

One particularly painful instance concerned the so-called SWAPO spy drama, which cost many activists their lives. What had been happening was fully realised only once survivors made their appearance in Windhoek in mid-1989, during the run-up to the independence elections. Even then, responses by supporters remained divided and there was considerable controversy at the time. So the more considered, critical efforts actually failed.

Did the specific situation of Germany being divided between the major blocs of the cold war era impact on the solidarity activism?

One must keep in mind that in contrast to the Scandinavian countries, but also to some others in Western Europe, the solidarity movement in Germany was always clearly opposed to the state. This came out especially around the issue of nuclear cooperation with South Africa. The enormously dedicated research of a small group of activists, many of them based in West Germany, unearthed proof of these deals, and the stiff denial of the Schmidt government was shamed once the official facts emerged in 1994. I would venture to say, however, that apart from adherents of the DKP, the existence of East Germany was of minor importance to the activists. Only very few ventured to East Berlin to visit missions of national liberal movements, or such. On the other hand, the structures close to the DKP were clearly nurtured by the GDR.

How did Germany’s past colonial rule over Namibia feature in the West German solidarity movement? Did it feature at all?

Seen from the vantage point of today’s postcolonial concerns and initiatives, one is struck by the very small role Germany’s colonial past played at the time. The facts were certainly known, but they were not addressed in any consistent way. Of course, the Federal Government was criticised for maintaining a consulate in Windhoek, or for sending commissions to administer end-of-school exams at the German high school. Yet this was related to the illegality of South African occupation of Namibia, rather than to the legacy of German colonialism.

Namibia’s independence coincided with the end of the cold war. Did this, among solidarity activists, change expectations for post-independence developments, as compared to earlier when Zimbabwe or Mozambique gained independence?

I feel this is difficult to assess. Some of us had already analysed the performance of ‘liberation movements in power’ for some years and had realised the chasm that existed between the dreams of some Western intellectuals and the reality on the ground. Of course, this did not mean that one presaged the pervasive triumph of neoliberalism right on November 9, 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall. For the great majority of those in the solidarity movement, in particular members of AAB, things look differently. Membership of AAB rose steeply during the late 1980s, only to plummet [almost] as swiftly after 1990. Obviously many of these people felt that there was a job well done, and they could shift their commitment to other issues or maybe have some rest. This was precisely what we at ISSA tried to counter, arguing for the need to continue our critical solidarity by closely monitoring liberation movements in power. Obviously this had little effect as far as the erosion of the broader movement was concerned, except that ISSA and its journal still exist today, while AAB found its demise some 20 years ago.

Many of us who used to support the liberation struggles in southern Africa have been disturbed by the forms of social and political rule reproduced by national liberation movements in power. What do you think have been reasons for that?

Well, Third World liberation struggles – not just those in Southern Africa – tended to become something of a foil on which people on the left, who did not see a realistic chance for their aspirations to come true at home, projected their frustrated dreams and hopes. This attitude may have been understandable, but it was obviously deeply flawed. One might even say, this was a specific, well-meaning kind of Orientalism. Once people awoke to reality, despondency and cynicism were likely responses. It seems that attempts to reach an understanding of ‘liberation movements in power’, in my case, since about 1980, were not effective in changing this.

In more mundane terms, there has been a tendency, at least in the West German solidarity movement, to shift attention to other countries and regions rather quickly. Thus, after 1975, few people would concern themselves any more with Indochina, thereby of course ignoring what was happening there. Concerning Southern Africa, probably more people were aware of the crises and needs in SWAPO’s camps in Angola, than seriously cared about the fates of ‘socialism’ there, of the modalities of political rule, or even human rights.

As you have pointed out, national liberation movements were regarded as the most radical form of fight against colonialism, and imbued with high hopes for overcoming colonial legacies. With decades of liberation movements in power this hope has certainly lost its shine. You suggest that, beyond evaluating the hegemonic governing practices of national liberation movements in power in the dominant party states, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia, which has been done by Roger Southall and, for Namibia specifically, Henning Melber, and others, we need to rethink, more profoundly, nationalism as legitimising postcolonial modes of rule. Can you elaborate on this?

In important ways, the 20^th century has been marked by ideas and projects of emancipation and liberation veering towards nationalism – not exclusively but in decisive ways in the processes of anti-colonial movements and decolonisation. Amilcar Cabral noted that such nationalist movements were marked by suspending or even by denying social cleavages within the nation. Cabral stated explicitly that such cleavages would break up once again after independence had been attained, and dubbed this as the return of the erstwhile colonised into history. The practices of post-colonial governments of various shades tend however, up to the present, to continue laying claim to national unity and cohesion and [to] deny social conflict. In this way, social conflict is to a large extent de-legitimised and its articulation has been framed as a criminal act in a number of cases. Still, the claims of the nation have their substantive basis. Let’s just think of the quest for security, which relates to what people may hope for, such as protection for a state’s citizens in foreign countries. Also some state-sponsored solidarity which was present in the, now often defunct, welfare state; think of rudimentary forms of social security such as old age pensions in Southern Africa. Then there is the provision of infrastructure, education, and the like. All this may appear quite fictitious from today’s African vantage point, but it forms the substantive basis of what people expect from the nation state. Just think of the linkage between ‘democracy’ and ‘development’ that became apparent in many democracy movements in Africa during the 1990s. We can say, where the state proves unable to deliver on such promises and expectations, it will be delegitimised in the short or medium run.

Over the past twenty-five years you have spent a lot of time in Namibia. Can you tell us a bit about the situation there in the early 1990s, the immediate post-independence years?

There is little doubt that, upon the attainment of independence and during the years immediately following it, hopes were running high. At the same time, the brokered transition stood for continuity, above all in everything relating to the socio-economic structure. Compared to today, there was less cynicism, less concern with ethnicity, and more civic commitment. How the opportunities of this situation were lost is an important question. There were factors working towards demobilisation of civil society, but there was also the concern of SWAPO in government to let bygones be bygones and get on with their own goals. Apparently this has not resulted in overcoming the structural constraints that must be considered the legacy of apartheid, above all extreme social inequality, which is still patterned predominantly along racial lines.

In Namibia, SWAPO has claimed to embody anticolonial and postcolonial nationalist politics; even the United Nations declared it the sole legitimate and authentic representative of the Namibian people. As your research on memories and anticolonial struggles of southern and central Namibian communities has shown, this hegemonic declaration of legitimate nationalism still has problematic consequences. Can you say a bit more on the underlying contradictions?

The basic issue may be phrased in how to operationalise the standard slogan of ‘unity in diversity’. To date, SWAPO does not seem prepared to acknowledge the very diverse trajectories and experiences of different Namibian regions under colonialism. Only the central and southern regions were subjected to settler colonialism while the northern regions did not experience land dispossession, even though the migrant labour system impacted enormously on social structure and basic features, such as gender-related division of labour, or the standard male biography. Again, ‘native reserves’ in the Centre and South meant very close surveillance and constant meddling into even petty affairs of residents, while indirect rule in the northern regions was invasive at points, but this could not compare to the situation in the zone of settler colonialism. The genocide committed by the German colonial power in 1904-1908 lies at the root of these experiences, mainly of the Ovaherero and Nama, but certainly felt as well by Damara and San. Recognition of such difference has been slow and uneven and is not evident, in particular, in the current negotiations with Germany about the consequences of the genocide. The Namibian government’s stance of claiming to be the sole representative of the nation is grounded in the formal legal position, but ignores the specific situation of Namibia as a whole and of the victim communities – Ovaherero and Nama in the first place. The Namibian government’s stance here reflects a rather rough and unsophisticated idea of national unity.

Reinhart Kössler’s new book, Namibia and Germany: Negotiating the Past looks at the decades of German denial of the genocide of the Ovaherero and Nama, which was committed by the German colonial army in 1904-1908 during the war against the people of central and southern Namibia. Talks are under way now between official German and Namibian delegations over three steps: acknowledgment, apology, reparations. The German government has already indicated their unwillingness to pay reparations. In Namibia, representatives of the communities directly affected claim their inclusion in the negotiations. Kössler’s book examines German-Namibian relations, from the violent colonial relationship, and its consequences for a racist ideology, which prepared the ground for the genocide, through to the legacies of colonialism and genocide in the postcolonial setting.

Heike Becker is Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape, where she directs research and teaching on multiculturalism and diversity. Heike is a regular contributor to roape.net.

Workshop Report: Capitalist Society

ROAPE

October 26, 2016

Following ROAPE’s roundtable on ‘African capitalist society’ at the ASAUK in September, roape.net brings together summaries of the presentations submitted by the speakers and chairs. The workshop coordinator, Jörg Wiegratz, will be editing a series of blog pieces on the topic which will appear on roape.net over the coming months. ROAPE will also be publishing Briefings and Debates on the same subject in our journal. You can find details of the call for pieces by clicking here and the original workshop here. We ask those interested in writing pieces to get in touch: j.wiegratz@leeds.ac.uk.

Kate Meagher welcomed the increasing focus on capitalism in Africa because it directs our attention to wider political-economic processes rather than focusing on fragmented issues without a sense of underlying dynamics. But she argued that understanding Africa’s engagement with contemporary capitalism requires an engagement with the ways in which relations that do not appear to be capitalist are being harnessed in the service of capitalism. The new focus on class rather than ethnicity is particularly interesting in this regard. The fascination among scholars with Africa’s expanding middle class has distracted attention from the more critical question of what is happening to the working class in the context of jobless growth and persistent poverty and informality. She took issue with the argument in James Ferguson’s recent book that African workers have become functionally irrelevant to global capitalism. The view of African workers as a surplus population abandoned by capitalism fails to recognize the dramatic shifts in how labour is being accessed in the contemporary global economy. While formal jobs are scarce, Africa’s large informal workforce continues to be linked into national and global productive systems as informal subcontractors, seasonal and temporary agricultural labour, last-mile distribution agents and precarious workers supplied by labour brokers. Far from casting African workers out of the capitalist system, the widespread informalization and precarization of work across Africa is giving rise to new ways of integrating African workers into global and national capitalist systems, but on more precarious terms, Meagher noted.

Stefan Ouma shared two main observations. First, he reckoned that the panel’s framing (“almost all African societies can be considered as capitalist societies”) stands in stark contrast with the assessment of two towering figures in African studies, John Saul and Colin Leys, in a 1999 piece in The Monthly Review, where they argued that “after 80 years of colonial rule and almost four decades of independence, in most of it [sub-Saharan Africa] there is some capital but not a lot of capitalism. The predominant social relations are still not capitalist, nor is the prevailing logic of production.” This contrast reminded Ouma of a similar economic framing of the continent. For instance, in 2000, Africa was regarded a “hopeless continent” by the Economist; more recently it was all about “Africa Rising”. What we can take from this swift shift in framings, he argued, is that we have to critically investigate the ontological, epistemological and theoretical premises on which framings of the world are based. Second, Ouma asked what a call for studying ‘capitalism in Africa’ or ‘African capitalist society’ is actually all about? Is it a call for studying capital, capitalism, capitalisms, or capitalists? Or does it maybe encourage us to avoid such ‘capitalocentric’ framings altogether, after various postcolonial literatures have highlighted the Eurocentrism of certain categories of historical and economic inquiry.

Accordingly, the latter often fails to account for the vast variety of situated economic subjectivities, positionalities, practices, organizational forms and relations that populate the world, only some of which are capitalist. In the end Ouma made a case for an approach that is concerned with the means and mechanisms through which distinct socialities are being made rather than assuming that African capitalist societies simply exist. Often, much more goes into projects of society-and economy-making in Africa (and elsewhere) than just capitalism. His blog piece on this website goes into more detail.

Furthermore, Jesse Ovadia explained that in his recent work, he follows Samir Amin in referring to African states as peripherally capitalist in the sense that they are a part of the capitalist system but do not have predominantly capitalist social relations of production. He further argued that as part of a larger shift centred on oil production in the Gulf of Guinea, elites are adopting new strategies of accumulation. In order to continue appropriating rents from petroleum, they are choosing to invest in capitalist production, though still relying on privileged access to the state to identify and capture rent in the most effective ways. Accordingly, these new methods of elite accumulation can be regarded as part of a larger shift in social relations of production, potentially leading to wider structural transformation. Whether this plays out will depend on how long the phase of low oil prices continues. Ovadia explained that some scholars have read his argument as similar to Bill Warren’s support for global capitalism and his unorthodox analysis of imperialism. However, Ovadia made the point that he is primarily attempting to explain an observable phenomenon in African petro-states since from the early 2000s and how it alters the limits of the possible capitalist development. Moreover, Ovadia made a point in support of certain forms of state intervention to nurture industrialization and structural transformation in respective African countries which should lead to a rise in the standard of living for the majority of Africans. Finally, he expressed the view that the development of capitalist social relations in Africa can produce both positive and/or negative outcomes, i.e. is creating (uneven) development and underdevelopment depending on the bottom-up response from civil society to a top-down elite-led transformation. In making this argument, he use ‘civil society’ not as it is commonly used as a synonym for ‘non-governmental organization’, but rather in a more Gramscian sense as a terrain of struggle. Such struggle will inevitably be what makes capitalism in Africa more or less developmental for ordinary citizens. Therefore, for Ovadia, we should be asking ourselves what role we can play and how we can support progressive movements for structural change in Africa regardless of whether they seek to build capitalism up or tear it down. These three interventions were followed by a lively debate with the conference delegates in the audience, and closing remarks by the chairs.

Peter Lawrence noted that ROAPE had devoted a whole issue to Capitalism in Africa (No. 8, which can be accessed here) which makes for instructive re-reading almost 40 years later. Then the debate was about the expansion of capitalism through the instrument of the multinational corporation either in conjunction with a local ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie’, as Issa Shivji termed the Tanzanian ruling class, or in cooperation with a Latin American style ‘comprador bourgeoisie’. Others saw the development of a national capitalist class through the expansion of petty commodity producers and big farmers. The complexity of class relations was also brought out in one article which showed that people could at the same time have different positions in the structure of class relations – both farmers employing labour and farm workers being employed by larger farmers, for instance. Multinationals have now developed into global corporation and in many cases, North and South, have captured the state.

Jörg Wiegratz observed that there is something particular about African studies and scholarly debates about certain themes related to economy, society and the state on the continent and that is the significant impact of research funding by Western donors and governments on academic activities, i.e. academic agendas, analyses, theory building etc. This could be one of the reasons why some of the more mainstream analyses (on aspects of economic and social development, politics, political economy, poverty, or conflict) seem so devoid when it comes to bringing capitalism more directly into focus. Capitalism as an analytical category was/is largely absent in a number of key research projects and writings that have shaped African studies and African development debates during the last 20 years or so. This has arguably weakened the understanding and discussions about a number of societal phenomena in Africa. Wiegratz suggested we need to use innovative analytical frameworks that seem to have hardly been applied in African studies, such as the Capital as Power (such analysis is applied in an important 2013 edited collection). This could enrich analyses and debates about crucial political economy matters in African countries, and help challenge mainstream approaches. Finally, both chairs thanked the panel and the many other participants who contributed to a stimulating discussion about approaches to studying and understanding capitalism in Africa.

The coordinator of the workshop, Jörg Wiegratz, is a lecturer in Political Economy of Global Development at the University of Leeds, School of Politics and International Studies. He works on the political economy and moral economy of neoliberalism, with a particular focus on the topics of moral change, economic fraud and anti-fraud measures. He is a member of the Editorial Working Group of ROAPE.

Featured photograph: The flag of US Capitalism

Capitalism in Africa – A Critique of Critical Political Economy

ROAPE

October 19, 2016

A few months ago, ROAPE’s Jörg Wiegratz (Leeds) invited fellow scientists to reflect on the state of (i) scholarship on capitalism in Africa and (ii) capitalism in Africa. This initiative resulted in a ROAPE roundtable on African capitalist society at the ASAUK 2016 in Cambridge, with Kate Meagher (LSE), Stefan Ouma (Frankfurt) and Jesse Ovadia (Windsor) as speakers, and Jörg Wiegratz and Peter Lawrence (Keele) as chairs. In the forthcoming weeks, we will publish on this website a report about the session (including some video footage), as well as a series of blogs by some of our speakers and also scholars such as Horman Chitonge (Cape Town) and Carlos Oya (SOAS) who were invited to the roundtable but in the end could not make it. We also plan a series of Briefings and Debates in the hard copy of the journal on the same topic. We will begin our debate with a piece by Stefan Ouma. Anyone who wants to contribute to the debate, via blog and/or Briefings piece, please write to j.wiegratz@leeds.ac.uk. We hope and expect that the debate carries on into 2017 and beyond.

By Stefan Ouma

At a time when ‘Africa’ is heralded as the last frontier of capitalism, and when scholars try to make sense of our troubled times through the notion of The Capitalocene, it seems timely to engage with ‘capitalism in Africa’. While this debate is not new per se, the historical context is very different from the 1970s and 1980s – the heydays of scholarly debates on this topic. Thus, I was delighted when I was asked to contribute to a roundtable on “African Capitalist Society” organised by Jörg Wiegratz of the Review of African Political Economy, however I would have felt more at ease with a less holistic framing of the subject matter. Talking in plural terms would have been a good start. So what can we gain by “linking a particular topic – that the mainstream somewhat de-links from the capitalism theme – more directly to the capitalism theme”, as the organizers ask?

Taking capitalism seriously as an analytical category, a historically distinct (yet globalized) sociospatial formation, and a lived praxis reminds us first and foremost about the materiality of economic life. It helps us to bring back ‘nature’ as the source of human production and reproduction into analytical focus, as well as questions of surplus distribution, social differentiation, and class struggle. Finally, it helps us to resocialize both society and economy by focusing on the dynamics and mechanisms of accumulation instead of merely thinking in depoliticized ways about ‘society’ or ‘the economy’. It is important for our own survival to take capitalism seriously and understand it, in Africa and elsewhere.

While capitalism is often imagined as an abstract machine whose “dominance is guaranteed by a logic of profitability, a telos of expansion, an imperative of accumulation, a structure of ownership and control, or some other quality of feature […]” (Gibson‐Graham 2006 [1996]: 15), I am much more at ease with analyses that are grounded in solid fieldwork, and which unpack the mechanisms and processes through which capitalist relations are enacted in specific contexts (rather than assuming that they exist apriori or that they take some universal, transhistorical shape).

My recent book Assembling Export Markets – The Making and Unmaking of Global Food Connections in West Africa adopted such an approach. Rather than treating capitalism as an abstract machine which functions according to a set of discrete laws that conveniently direct our analytical gaze, I treated it as something that requires explanation. Instead of assuming capitalist commodity chains simply to exist, I was looking at how capitalist world market connections are being assembled in practice in Ghana’s horticulture sector. In other words, I was interested in the “generative powers of capitalism and the inequalities these powers create […]. the […] means and mechanisms—the very processes of generation— through which systems and socialities are made” (Bear et al. 2015). From such a perspective, the remaking of economic subjectivities, nature, economic encounters and orders must move to the forefront of analysis. Working on two case studies where export firms set up supply chain arrangements with farmers in northern and southern Ghana, I showed that capitalism is always locally engaged; establishing commodity relations is often a contested process; nature sometimes cannot simply be turned into a resource; marketization often clashes or is complexly intertwined with other geographically and socio-technical situated ways of performing ‘the economy; and that projects of economy-making often have unintended side effects that may bounce back in incalculable ways.

I can think of a number of phenomena that are yet to be subjected to such a generative analysis ‘in Africa’, including transport and logistics, the financialization of households (e.g. via M-Pesa) and firms (through stock market listings or venture capital and private equity entries), prosperity gospel, the rise of the middle classes, the global land rush, and capitalist subjectivities and moralities (especially against the backdrop that capitalism has never been very welcome as an official ideology among postcolonial policy makers, even in pro-capitalist countries such as Kenya). These phenomena make it imperative to engage with economic dynamics in African political economies that are co-shaped or even driven by capitalist logics. It does not mean, however, that these phenomena can be reduced to capitalism or they can be couched into neat territorial boxes, as the panel’s framing “African capitalist society” suggests. Often, these are products of the articulation of a variety of economic, social and material structures, relations and practices, both local and global.

But there are also a few other “limits of using capitalism as an analytical frame in the context of Africa”, as the organizers of the panel rightly suspect (and I pointed out in my book). Critical political economy accounts often show a disregard for other theoretical approaches because they are said to lack revolutionary potential or fail to understand the basic laws of capitalism; they tend to privilege abstract theory over empirical work or, worse, already know about the world before any real research has happened (after all, Marx already said everything!); and, probably most importantly, they tend to universalize insights and concepts derived from particular historical contexts and apply them comfortably to other places. All this also applies to much of the older work on ‘capitalism in Africa’, but even more recent work is not exempt from this ontological and epistemological practice. Can we, however, really make a call for studying ‘capitalism in Africa’ or ‘African capitalist society’ in a context where the original sin of capitalism, primitive accumulation, has not yet taken its full toll and land is often not treated as a full commodity? Where economic exchanges are often still about much more than simply money and commodities, and impersonal encounters, and rather entangled into complex webs of interpersonal relationships? Where labor has not just been just ‘set free’ and moved into industries, because there are so few? Anyway, who cares? Why not just try to understand African political economies in terms of the way they operate rather than qualifying them against some standard definition of ‘capitalism’?

My argument is not meant to do away with ‘capitalism’, or to deny the blasted landscapes and human exploitation it often leaves behind. Taking ‘capitalism’ seriously can indeed help rematerialize and repoliticize economic relations, positionalities and subjectivities as well as dynamics of accumulation that mainstream thinking usually obscures by using phrases such as ‘the market economy’ or ‘economic development’ (actually the whole Africa Rising narrative was built on an insufficient understanding of capitalism). However, any perspective on ‘capitalism in Africa’ that operates with linear, territorial, singular or transhistorical notions of ‘capitalism’ falls into the trap of universalism. It can be doubted whether the rise of the middle classes in Africa follows the historical paths of North America Europe or parts of Asia; whether Africa will become the new manufacturing frontier as industrial capital is searching for ever cheaper sources of labor (as some scholars envision in line with the ‘flying geese model’); whether the city and the countryside will become ordered (and disentangled) in the way as happened elsewhere; and whether accumulation for accumulation’s sake will become sooner or later an existential feature of much of economic life in Africa.

At the same time, we cannot deny the universal aspirations of the commodity form, money/finance and capitalist rationalities. Yet, ‘Africa’ is not a passive bystander in this project of universalization or doomed to mere convergence. As the Comaroff’s recently put it, “African modernity, in sum, has always had its own trajectories, giving moral and material shape to everyday life. It has yielded diverse yet distinctive means with which to make sense of the world and to act upon it, to fashion social relations, commodities, and forms of value appropriate to contemporary circumstances—not least those sown by the uneven impact of capitalism, first colonial, then international, then global” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2013: 18). We could even go further and say that the metabolic and social future of (global) capitalism will be probably decided in Africa (Mbembe 2016) and African actors will have a say in all of this. While the world has historically taken many things (and people treated as things) from the continent to engineer its economic system, it may take a few other ‘things’ (or better: concepts, practical philosophies, and modes of existence) from the very same region to overcome the very same system. It is not naive romanticism to claim that African societies have a lot to offer to the world, not just cheap commodities. However, it needs a solid politics of the future (Mbembe 2013) to make visible these invisiblized potentialities in a world where economic mimicry (of either the West or Asian success stories) is often the only recipe that African policy-makers seem to have.

Stefan Ouma is an economic geographer by training. He works at Goethe University, Frankfurt. He is interested in the socialities, materialities, and practicalities of global economic connections, first and foremost in the realm of agricultural commodity chains, standard-setting networks, global logistics, and more recently, agri-focused financial investments. His research combines interests in global political economy with the ambition to explore these macro issues in the minutiae of everyday economic life.

Feature photograph: Frank Vincentz

References

Bear, L., Ho, K. & Tsing, Anna, Yanagisako, Sylvia (2015) Gens: A Feminist Manifesto for the Study of Capitalism. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/652-gens-a-feminist-manifesto-for-the-study-of-capitalism. Accessed 4/9/2015.

Comaroff, J. & Comaroff, J. (2013) Writing Theory from the South: The Global Order from an African Perspective. The World Financial Review. September-October, 17–20.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006 [1996]) The End of Capitalism as We Knew It, 2nd Edition. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Mbembe, A. (2016) Africa in The New Century. http://africasacountry.com/2016/06/africa-in-the-new-century/. Accessed 18/09/2016.

Mbembe, A. (2013) Africa and the Future. Interview by Thomas Blaser. http://africasacountry.com/2013/11/africa-and-the-future-an-interview-with-achille-mbembe/ . Accessed 01/10/2016).

Ouma, S. (2015) Assembling Export Markets: The Making and Unmaking of Global Food Connections in West Africa. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, U.K.

Nigeria’s Chattering Classes: Poverty and Denial in Africa

ROAPE

October 14, 2016

By Remi Adekoya

During a recent trip spent travelling across Nigeria, a banker friend of mine advised me to “keep things positive” if I ever shared my observations in “western media”. I pointed out Nigeria is currently in dire economic straits; many civil servants haven’t received a salary this year, pensions are going unpaid, people are struggling to feed their families and children are actually starving to death in the country’s north-east. “Writing about it won’t help those people. And you know negative western media stories on Africa only make these white folk and others look down on us,” my friend replied. Over the years, I’ve heard similar sentiments expressed by numerous middle- and upper-class Nigerians. In fact, it is an attitude I’ve observed amongst better-off Africans in general.

When it comes to western media coverage of Africa, the continent’s privileged classes are usually more concerned with the perceptions created than with the realities depicted. They find images of suffering Africans annoying because these “perpetuate negative stereotypes” by “portraying Africa as a poor and backward continent.” The actual suffering being depicted rarely elicits as much outrage as the fact it is being exposed for the world to see.

Meanwhile, whenever I chatted with regular Nigerians, once they heard I’m a journalist (in Europe), they’d say something like: “Make sure people over there know we are suffering here,” or “Let them know how bad things are in Nigeria, someone needs to talk to our government.” The last worry on their mind was how Nigeria’s image might suffer in the process.

It is middle-class intellectuals and the political or business elite who love to complain about how Africa is “misrepresented” in western media, not the poor and oppressed who are the subject of that reporting. But the privileged classes resent seeing Africa’s widespread poverty on display. Instead, they demand “balanced media coverage”. That sounds perfectly reasonable, but what exactly do they mean?

For instance, 62.6% of Nigerians currently live in poverty, compared to 27.2% in 1980. Yet for some Nigerians, “balanced media coverage” amounts to talking up the latest individual success story as evidence “not all Africans are poor and suffering” and that the country is “making progress”. But what kind of progress sees the percentage of people living in poverty more than double since 1980? It is countries like China, India or Brazil who have reduced poverty levels significantly in recent decades that have the right to speak of progress, yet some Nigerians will insist media show the “positives” in a country where poverty has ballooned in the same period.

A 2015 Pew Research survey revealed sub-Saharan Africa as a whole has made the least progress among all developing regions toward reducing extreme poverty since 1990. The percentage of people living on less than $1.25 a day in the region currently stands at 41%, more than twice as high as any other region in the world (Southern Asia comes next at 17%). Of course, inconvenient statistics can always be brushed aside.

In 2014 the World Bank reported that Nigeria had the third highest number of poor people in the world. The then president Goodluck Jonathan bristled at the suggestion, saying: “If you talk about ownership of private jets, Nigeria will be among the first 10 countries, yet they are saying that Nigeria is among the five poorest countries.” Furthermore he pointed out Aliko Dangote, a Nigerian businessman, “was recently classified among the 25 richest people in the world”. Wasn’t this proof Nigerian poverty is grossly exaggerated?

Jonathan’s ludicrous response aptly illustrates the prevalent attitude within the privileged classes. It is a combination of denial bordering on the delusional coupled with a post-colonial complex – emotional responses which attempt to shout down unpleasant statistics and imply that whenever the western world talks of African poverty, the aim is to paint the continent in a bad light.

A recent favourite is to question the veracity of poverty statistics on Africa. I’ve had heated debates with well-educated Africans who, when confronted with the unflattering numbers, reply: “But how exactly did they come about those statistics? Why is the poverty line calculated in dollars and not in local currencies?” The problem is not in asking critical questions, the problem is they are being asked in a tone suggesting the poverty figures are being exaggerated on purpose.

What makes Jonathan’s response to the World Bank figures particularly fascinating is that he was born into poverty himself, as were many others in Nigeria’s political elite. While campaigning for president in 2011, Jonathan won much sympathy among Nigeria’s overwhelmingly-poor electorate by recalling how, as a child, he used to walk to school barefoot because his parents couldn’t afford shoes. Thanks to this, he was affectionately dubbed the “shoeless president.” This begs the question why someone with real-life experience of Nigerian poverty would try to downplay it with such absurd arguments.

The answer lies in the psychological roots underlying the irritation of Africa’s better-off at Western coverage of the continent. It is the privileged classes who come into contact with foreigners in international settings. They are the ones who attend global conferences, send their children to western universities and conduct business abroad. They understandably want to be treated as equals by those they encounter in such settings. So they get peeved when they see news stories on starving children or violence in Africa because they know this helps shape the manner in which their countries and – more importantly – they themselves will be perceived abroad. Images of African poverty affect their personal image, hence they resent them.

Then there is the irritation stemming from the knowledge that the constant reports about violence, famine or dysfunctional governments, however well-intentioned, help nurture the racist-colonialist narrative that Africans are generally incapable of efficient self-rule. This is at once extremely frustrating and worrisome, especially for well-educated Africans who, as individuals, feel no less capable than their European or Asian counterparts. Yet the tragic news never seems to end.

I’ve experienced such feelings, and they are not easy to deal with. They force you to grapple with some uncomfortable questions to which there are no easy answers. For instance, why is it that half a century after independence, one is hard put to name an indisputable African success story (save perhaps 2-million strong Botswana which has been under de-facto one-party rule since independence)? Such disturbing realities can easily make one overly defensive in reactions to outside portrayals of Africa. The defensive-aggressive posture is a coping mechanism.

It is also a very deliberate tactic employed to make white people back down from asking tough questions about Africa. In private, educated Africans readily admit to each other that Africa has by and large been a messy failure, bar the odd pocket of prosperity and stability. But when the white man is listening, we mustn’t admit this, because – so the logic goes – that would be tantamount to acknowledging that those who claimed we are an inferior people were right all along. That must never happen. So, even though the reality of the vast majority of Africans is a miserable existence under corrupt, inefficient and oppressive regimes, the articulate classes prefer to put up a front in a misguided effort at defending the “dignity” of the black race in the court of world opinion. Of course, in order to sound reasonable, whenever Africa’s problems are pointed out, the privileged classes rarely deny them outright, instead they will respond with answers like: “Yes, we know we have many challenges, but…”

After the “but” usually comes a long list of all the possibilities and potential mentioned in association with Africa over the years, even though the continent as a whole is no closer to realizing that potential today than it was half-a-century ago. Furthermore, deep down, many educated Africans have long stopped really believing all the much-vaunted potential is ever going to be realized. It’s mostly a charade to keep face in front of the white man. I know the “Yes, we have many challenges, but….” line well enough as it used to be my standard response whenever white people asked annoying questions I didn’t want to answer like: “So how is life for people in Nigeria?”

In the effort not to be called out on Africa’s reality, the privileged classes, most particularly intellectuals and other cultural elites, regularly employ a form of verbal tyranny to shut down debate by throwing emotionally-charged accusations of “racism” and “stereotyping” at anyone who suggests there is a fundamental problem with the way Africa is doing things. This tactic has the dual advantage of putting whites on the defensive as well as rallying other Africans to join in repelling such “racist” assertions. Any Africans who challenge this tactic will promptly be referred to as “brainwashed” by the white man, or even worse, as sell-outs who in an effort to reap the rewards of pandering to white prejudice, are condoning “ahistorical” arguments which ignore the legacies of slavery, colonialism and institutionalized racism.

Fact is, this highly emotive discursive strategy will continue to be a crowd-pleaser in Africa for a while to come precisely because slavery, colonialism and institutionalized racism were very real phenomena not so terribly long ago. Moreover, there are a significant number of mostly well-meaning influential white liberals in Western media and academia, who, feeling an instinctive solidarity with disadvantaged groups, often jump in to aid the African elites trying to “counter racist narratives and stereotypes.” They also habitually employ the: “Yes, Africa has its challenges, but…..” line. Due to the disproportional influence of Western media and academia in global discourse, these white liberals are de-facto the most important allies Africa’s privileged classes have in their battles to shut down or shout down uncomfortable debate about Africa. Question is, who is all this helping?

It is certainly not helping the hundreds of millions of impoverished Africans who are not invited to talk about their lives at international conferences on poverty. Instead, they are supposedly represented by their well-fed more articulate countrymen who, more often than not, feel impelled to blah blah the world about how things are not that bad in Africa “despite what Western media tries to portray.”

Africa’s privileged classes, especially us intellectuals, must liberate ourselves from the shackles of our post-colonial complexes which limit what we think we are allowed to say about Africa in front of a foreign audience. Our discourse must be with the world of today, not the world of the 1800s. It’s like we are constantly shadow-boxing the ghosts of Cecil Rhodes, Lord Lugard and other die-hard colonialists. As a result, we have erected discursive barriers to protect our egos, forgetting what poverty and oppression is doing to the egos of our fellow Africans.

Some will argue African writers who talk about the “negatives” in Africa in foreign media discourage much-needed foreign investment from venturing there, de-facto helping perpetuate the cycle of poverty. Everyone else talks up their country’s brand to woo investors, why should we be any different, I often hear. While this sounds like a reasonable argument, it is somewhat ridiculous to pretend the musings of African intellectuals could discourage foreign investors from going to Africa if the numbers add up for them. Besides, while it may be the role of governments to put a positive spin on their countries in the international arena, that is most certainly not the role of the intellectuals who are there to question, criticize, irritate, prod and push society forward as best they can. Most importantly, the role of the [progressive] intellectual is to articulate the pain of the majority who are never handed the microphone. The lives of the many must be more important than the emotional comfort of the few.

Nigeria, my country of birth and Africa’s most populous nation, remains its greatest potential. But the country’s privileged classes must first stop trying to downplay the extent of Nigerian poverty just because it makes us look bad. This is not just selfish, it is dangerous, for the poor are not going anywhere. Add to this a ballooning youth unemployment rate and the 350 million illicit handguns the UN says are circulating in the country, and you have a ticking time-bomb.

It’s time the well-off in society stopped trying to sugar-coat Nigeria’s harsh reality and expect the status quo to continue undisturbed. Otherwise, that reality could soon explode with a vengeance. By then, western media coverage would be the least of every Nigerian’s problems.

Remi Adekoya is the former political editor of the Warsaw Business Journal. He has provided socio-political commentary and analysis for BBC, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Stratfor, Geopolitical Intelligence Services and Radio France International among others. Remi is currently conducting PhD research in politics at the University of Sheffield. Twitter handle: @RemiAdekoya1

Feature photograph: Lagos, Broad Street 2007

Links

Civil servants not receiving salaries: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2016/05/bleak-may-day-26-states-workers-owed-salaries/

Children starving in north-east Nigeria: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-nigeria-security-msf-idUSKCN107135

62.6% of Nigerians currently living in poverty: http://www.ng.undp.org/content/nigeria/en/home/library/poverty/national-human-development-report-2016.html

Nigerian poverty figures from 1980: http://www.ng.undp.org/content/nigeria/en/home/library/poverty/national-human-development-report-2016.html

2015 Pew Research on poverty in sub-Saharan Africa: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/09/24/sub-saharan-africa-makes-progress-against-poverty-but-has-long-way-to-go/

World Bank figures on Nigeria having 3^rd highest number of poor people in the world: http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2014/04/10/ending-poverty-requires-more-than-growth-says-wbg

Jonathan response to Nigerian poverty figures: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2014/05/nigeria-poor-nation-says-jonathan/

Nigerian youth unemployment rate (some other reports have it much higher than this (at over 50%) and are closer to the truth, but these are formal figures so I used them: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/nigeria/youth-unemployment-rate

Illicit handguns circulating in Nigeria: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2016/08/nigeria-accounts-70-illicit-weapons-wafrica/

A shorter version of this piece was published in The Guardian on August 11, 2016.

African Women’s Struggles

ROAPE

October 12, 2016

ROAPE’s latest special issue focuses on the struggle of African women. ROAPE editor, Hannah Cross, introduces the special issue, its main themes and arguments. In the short video below Hannah speaks about the different papers in the issue.

By Hannah Cross

The idea for this special issue, led by Emmanuelle Bouilly and Ophélie Rillon, emerged out of a series of seminar talks on ‘Women, gender and collective action in Africa’ held at Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne between 2011 and 2013. As we write in the editorial of the issue, ‘Women’s movements and associations flourished throughout Africa from the 1980s under major socioeconomic and political transformations such as the democratisation of political regimes, the liberalisation of economies and the retreat of the state enforced by structural adjustment policies. International aid transformed and the development industry became more oriented to non-governmental and grassroots actors, while there was also impetus from the international women’s movement and the UN International Decade for Women.’

The issue presents a political economy analysis of women’s mobilisations ranging from ‘classical’ social movements to individual and collective forms of resistance and armed struggle. These include land movements in Morocco and Burundi; apartheid prisoners’ protests and more recent struggles against gender-based violence in South Africa; the development of female parliamentary representation in Algeria, Mauritania and Senegal; militancy in Nigeria’s oil insurgency; and mothers’ activities against clandestine emigration out of Senegal.

ROAPE’s Hannah Cross introduces ROAPE Vol. 43, No. 149: African women’s struggles in a gender perspective

These diverse forms of activism and mobilisation are not necessarily feminist or women-focused but are always a gendered social phenomenon to be understood in the context of gender relations. What has emerged, the editorial concludes, is ‘an equivocal portrait of women’s autonomy and agency in local and global contexts of inequalities’. This is because the empirical detail in the articles demands reflection on multiple oppressions – or intersectionality – whereby gender, age, class, racial/ethnic and other power relations interlock. In doing so, this collection offers a complex and conflicting understanding of women in African societies rather than the flat ‘heroine or victim’ characterisations behind an elite-led conception of gender ‘empowerment’ that obscures key relations of power. African women’s mobilisations are not new or externally driven. Their contemporary forms need careful analysis in their particularity vis-à-vis the state and international organisations and in the dynamic processes of (de-)politicisation, coalition-building and the globalist reframing of local demands.

This issue of the Review is equally situated in the context of protest movements from 2008 onwards in their local, national and global economic setting. The editors argue that from a gender perspective, these movements are not neutral. Beyond documenting women’s marginalisation by neoliberal globalisation, we therefore see the dialectical shaping of mobilisations and gender roles, adding a critical under-researched dimension to social movement theory. As we conclude in the editorial, ‘women’s movements appear profoundly hybridised, suffering from as much as instrumentalising liberal international concepts, financing, the arena of speaking, and methods of protest formulated elsewhere…Ultimately, the articles in this issue, engaging in the detailed description and analysis of various mobilisations of African women, encourage the restitution of the complex interplay of inequalities, and power relations, that shape their movements in specific historical, social and local contexts. They provide an equivocal portrait of women’s autonomy and agency in local and global contexts of inequalities.’

In sum, this special issue presents an important agenda for deepening our understanding of women’s mobilisations in Africa and elsewhere. It also urges attention to gender relations in the analysis of contestations over land, labour, political rights and other forms of protest.

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

Featured photograph: 23 October, 2012

From Brazil to Africa: Solidarity, Research and Business

ROAPE

October 5, 2016

By Marco Mondaini and Colin Darch

Over the last few years, some Brazilian universities have been trying to do something about what Jonuel Gonçalves called in 2004 “Brazil’s laughable contribution to knowledge about Africa”. José Rivair Macedo has pointed to the need for Brazilians to tear away the “labels and stereotypes that obscure their perceptions” of the continent’s realities. But such attempts to begin to take African studies seriously in Brazil do not make sense unless they are understood in a much broader context, one that depends on a grasp of some key – and broadly progressive – foreign policy decisions taken by Brazilian administrations since 2003.

However, with the overthrow in mid-2016 by “constitutional” means of the democratically-elected government of President Dilma Rousseff, there is a serious possibility that these changes may be reversed. The present threat to Brazil’s relations with Africa is manifested in the shameless opportunism of the new right-wing administration of President Michel Temer.

What exactly is it that is under threat? A potentially fertile intellectual dialogue has only just begun between Brazilian researchers and their colleagues in African countries. It is unarguably the outcome, in academic terms, of strategic shifts in Brazil’s foreign policy since 2003. These shifts have created space for the development of research on Africa and the broadening of research perspectives on Africa from a very narrow base. They have also broken down the barriers constructed over years of uncritical Brazilian acceptance of the epistemological viewpoints of European and North American specialists, and their imposed definitions of what the objectives of African research should be.

This is not to say that work in such historic centres of African research as the Centre of Afro-Oriental Studies in Salvador (founded in 1959 at the Federal University of Bahia), or the Centre of Afro-Asian Studies in Rio de Janeiro (originally established at Itamaraty under the Jânio Quadros presidency and later moved to Cândido Mendes University) can be discounted. But such units do not normally have full-time staff; their researchers carry full teaching loads in undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the faculties and departments, and their productivity is constantly under pressure.

The history of Brazil’s policies and attitudes towards Africa is marked by quite dramatic shifts and tactical manoeuvres. But undoubtedly the most significant moments in this bumpy narrative have taken place quite recently, during the years between 2003 and 2010, under the administrations of President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva. The Lula government pursued a foreign policy oriented towards the countries of the global south, originating in the reality that Brazil is itself part of the southern hemisphere. This is the fundamental policy position that has permeated and defined recent attempts in Brazil to develop a new academic approach towards African countries. Until the early 1960s, Brazilian foreign policy was generally defined by the country’s linguistic and cultural subservience to Portugal; since most African countries were not yet independent, there was no diplomacy and almost no academic interest in them either. But the radically independent foreign policy of Presidents Jânio Quadros and his successor João Goulart between 1961 and 1964 marked the (short-lived) beginning of change.

This was abruptly halted for two decades after 1964, when Brazil was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship. Nevertheless, in the late 1970s, General Ernesto Geisel’s policy of “responsible pragmatism” moved African policy several important steps forward. Diplomatic recognition was extended to more African countries, and relations were strengthened – at least partly in an attempt to ameliorate the impact of the oil crisis of 1973. An important factor in this shift between 1973 and 1975 was the end of what Brazilians nicknamed the “Portuguese embarrassment” – the retrograde colonial wars in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique.

Brazil moved quickly to recognise Angolan independence, within an hour of its proclamation – despite the Cold War, and while there was still fighting in Luanda. This was a milestone in the rapprochement with the former Portuguese colonies. Brazil happily accepted the legitimacy of Amílcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto and Samora Machel, and the Marxism of the liberation movements (the PAIGC, the MPLA and FRELIMO), demonstrating a significant weakening of the knee-jerk anti-communism that had earlier been the guiding foreign policy principle.

Although decolonization in Africa had influenced Brazilian post-war foreign policy, there were also serious constraints, even in the period of “independent foreign policy” between 1961 and 1964. The major domestic constraint was ongoing economic weakness, while the main external constraint was the aggressive anti-communism of the Cold War period.

In the event, the military coup of 1964 interrupted and silenced an emerging and culturally-determined discourse in Brazil’s approach to Africa. This only began to re-emerge under Geisel’s limited policy of “responsible pragmatism” in the 1970s. In April 1974, the Carnation Revolution in Portugal transformed relations with Lisbon, at exactly the same time as it became urgently necessary to find new markets for Brazilian exports and new sources of oil supply, in reaction to the 1973 crisis.

However, after the end of the “ditadura” in 1985, diplomatic relations between Brazil and African countries gradually cooled off. The lowest point was undoubtedly during the conservative administrations of Fernando Henrique Cardoso from 1995 to 2002. This was partly attributable to economic downturns in the southern hemisphere, but just as important was the Fernando Henrique government’s subordinate orientation towards the powerful countries of the northern hemisphere. For Fernando Henrique, it was enough that Brazil’s role in Africa consist of participation in a few peace-keeping missions and some technical cooperation projects. Under Luiz Felipe Lampreia, foreign minister from 1995 to 2001, it was said that Brazil had more impact on African countries in the corridors of the United Nations, than through its own independent activity. Lampreia’s African policy contrasted sharply – and unfavourably – with that of his successor, Celso Amorim, who had first served as foreign minister in 1993-1995 (under Itamar Franco) and returned between 2003 and 2010 under Lula.

Signs of African economic recovery, the entry of Chinese and Indian capital into the African region, and the resumption of Brazilian economic growth in the early part of this century together created a situation in which broad-based relations between Brazil and African countries improved significantly. The underlying approach was global and strategic: indeed, under the Lula administration, South-South cooperation was the central plank in a policy that claimed a more assertive role for Brazil in the international community. The country began to exercise leadership in key global forums dealing with such issues as hunger and climate change, to participate pro-actively in peace missions, to criticise the policy positions of some world powers, and to support calls for reform in the structuring of global international relations.

Brazilian policy towards Africa during Lula’s two terms in office, depended essentially on four key figures. These were Lula himself; the foreign minister Celso Amorim, already mentioned; Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães Neto, who was secretary-general in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (known as “Itamaraty”) between 2003 and 2009; and Marco Aurelio Garcia, a party functionary who acted as special advisor for international relations in the Presidency (he was sacked by Michel Temer a few weeks ago). Under these four, Brazilian international relations were guided by principles of international solidarity combined with a defence of Brazilian values and interests. This translated concretely into policies of what Amorim has called “non-indifference” and “humanism in foreign policy.” These changes under Amorim’s leadership – even though they were at least partly rhetorical – actually moved Brazil towards new alliances and a new international status.

Amorim sought to find ways in which the principle of defending the national interest could complement rather than contradict the principle of solidarity. Actually, successful examples of such complementarity are not hard to find – we cite the re-nationalization in 2006 of oil and gas resources in Bolivia by President Evo Morales; and the renegotiation of the treaty between Brazil and Paraguay governing the hydroelectric dam at Itaipu, in 2011.

Brazil’s new seriousness in its relations with African countries is demonstrated by a simple statistic. Fernando Henrique visited the continent only twice during his two terms. In his eight years in office, Lula visited African countries 33 times, and Celso Amorim 66 times. As we write, there are 37 Brazilian embassies in Africa; 19 of these were opened by the Lula government (the Temer administration is already moving to close some of them). Of course, this was not a policy driven entirely by altruism, or by a desire to solve local problems, despite Amorim’s oft-quoted maxim that “for every African problem there is a Brazilian solution.” The aim was also to expand Brazil’s diplomatic influence by supporting African political positions, and to facilitate the entry of large Brazilian companies into African markets in competition with their Chinese and Indian counterparts.

However cynically one regards the elements of commercial self-interest and, indeed, power politics in the formulation of Brazilian foreign policy, it remains broadly true that in the eight years of the Lula presidency, the emphasis on South-South cooperation in both Africa and Latin America had some beneficial results in Brazilian universities. Both CAPES (the federal agency for postgraduate education) and the CNPq (the national council for technological-scientific development) supported a range of measures. These included the granting of scholarships to African and Latin American students at both undergraduate and graduate levels in Brazil; a new programme, “CNPq ProÁfrica”, to fund research on Africa; and student interchanges with the universities of the Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa. Even more significant, two new universities were established. One, the Federal University of Luso-Afro-Brazilian Integration, known as UNILAB, is located in Redenção, in Ceará state, which was the first town in Brazil to free its slaves in 1883. The second is the Federal University of Latin American Integration (UNILA), in Foz do Iguaçu.

It is already clear, however, that the seizure of power – effectively a coup – by Michel Temer via the impeachment of President Dilma means a return to the discredited foreign policy of the pre-Lula period, in which Brazil accepted a subordinate role in the southern hemisphere in defence of US and European interests. With the imminent disappearance of a positive foreign policy oriented towards the global south, the future of African studies in Brazil appears very bleak indeed.

Professor Marco Mondaini is the coordinator of the Institute of African Studies at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife in Brasil. Colin Darch is a Visiting Professor at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco and the editor of www.mozambiquehistory.net.

Featured Photograph: Ex-President Lula with participants of the Brazil – Economic Community of West African States Summit in 2010.

African Workers in Europe

ROAPE

September 28, 2016

By Faisal Garba

The question of migrants – of how many to allow, from where, and on what basis – continues to dominate political debate in Europe. However, Africans have temporarily been displaced in this debate by Syrians and Eastern Europeans as the main threat to Fortress Europe and as the prime harbinger of danger to the integrity of Europe’s coveted borders, its prosperity, the safety of its women, and its general future. Amidst this shift of focus, where do Africans in Europe stand in the current frenzy of hate and fear mongering?

To be clear, attempts at entering Fortress Europe from Africa have not decreased, and the regular deaths that accompany such attempts continue. For the past 8 years I have been researching the working and living conditions of African migrant workers in Germany, and their place in the public sphere and popular imaginary. The research that informs this blog is mainly concerned with African workers in Germany, many of whom are undocumented, work by day, and organize inside and outside of unions and work councils. I argue that the roots of the current migrant question – military and financial imperialism – impoverish poor and working class people in Europe just as it does in Africa, the Middle East and other parts of the world. Using the case of Germany, the austerity economic arm-twisting that German political and economic elites exerts in Europe, especially on weaker (vassalized) European Union member states, creates an unsustainable economic and social arrangement inside Germany that is socially managed through a combination of zones of exclusion and the institutionalization of a wage race to the bottom, as a strategy for economic growth. The outcome is the further pauperization of the working poor and the denial of a space for civic engagement by migrants at a time of rising right-wing mobilization of mainstream German society.

My research provides a framework to plot the continuities and generalization of working class experience of work that were previously reserved for the periphery of global capitalism. I do this by reflecting on the Global South’s experience of a form of capitalist exploitation (now referred to as precarity) that has more recently become the feature of life in Western Europe. In keeping with the growing trend among the working class in Germany, many African workers in Germany work without contracts, the security of a predictable wage, protection against capricious employers or long-term security of any kind. Consequently, they exist outside of the state’s social capitalist arrangements, inhabiting an economic and social world which I designate ademocratic.

The ademocratic finds a formal breeding ground in the state’s delineation of people to whom and for whom it is not responsible, except in the negative sense of its duty to remove them from its borders. The relationship is transposed to the workplace or the very absence of one. Where a workplace exists, the ademocratic plays out at the level of workplace practices of legislated precarious work that ropes in those the state positively recognizes, but also those with whom it maintains a negative obligation. At the workplace, the ademocratic creates and acts through a set of bifurcated rules – one for the recognized and another for the unrecognized – both (rules) united in the prerogative of the employer to set work standards, wages, when to pay, if to pay at all, the amount of work, duration and the condition of termination.

Yau’Arme who lived in Italy for more than two decades before moving to Germany in search of better opportunities after losing his job to the financial crisis said, “The [German] government…has no assistance that it would give to you. They do not care; it is nothing to them. It does not worry them. So [even] if you go and form an organization to fight for your right I think it is very, very, difficult [to succeed].”

Accordingly, many African workers in Germany express a sense of estrangement from the society: they do not conceive of a future within German society although they live in it and are likely to continue doing so for a long time. Others insist on their social-membership-citizenship even where the law defines them otherwise. These contrasting visions dramatically played out at a function in Freiburg, a University town bordering France and Switzerland to the South of Germany on 6 March 2014. The occasion was Ghana’s 57^th independence anniversary. The older generation, hovering above 65 years of age, lamented their outsider status and ended with the affirmation that their estrangement will soon end when they relocate back to Ghana. A small vocal group of mainly young men in their early 40’s insisted that the talk of going back to Ghana is at best an illusion. Germany belongs to them as much as it belongs to anyone else, as one respondent explained, “We keep saying we will go back and every year we are here; we are not going anywhere, we will die here and our children will bury us here. This is our country too!”

The living and working conditions of most of the attendees at the anniversary is fairly representative of working class Africans in Germany. The concept of precarity accounts for a great deal of the many sided vulnerabilities that neoliberalism unleashes on them and other workers in Germany: unsure of the next day’s job, decreasing pensions for the old, and stagnant wages relative to cost of living. But the geographical delimitation that constitutes it, and limited attention to the historical entanglements of capitalisms, renders the concept of precarity limited in understanding the social location of the African workers in Germany.

By inverting the practice of understanding African realities by analogy (with Europe’s historical experience), we find that casualized, unprotected, unorganized, hazardous and insecure work was, and remains, the standard form of working class life and capitalist accumulation in Africa. In the case of Africa, it is partly due to the mode of incorporation of pre-capitalist forms of extra-economic forces that operated at the plantations, mines and other extractive sectors. Central to this historic precarity was a pool of reserve captive labour guaranteed by the absence of any meaningful employment. Helper and hand became the designation for these workers.

Drawing on prior attempts to understand the struggle of workers to become workers in the face of a regime of despotic labour arrangement that straddles customary and wage relations of domination, we can understand the unifying drive of generalized insecurity for marginal social groups under contemporary capitalism using the experience of the global south as a precursor. An entangled historical perspective requires foregrounding the centrality of experience in Africa as predicative of current developments in Europe. Here we have the proletarianization of previously unemployed African working class persons upon arrival in Germany and their absorption into a survivalist relation of production (and reproduction) – mediated by social and political exclusion.

The proletarianized Africans are pushed out of society by the incapacity of precarious work to socially incorporate them. The same is true within limits, for similarly located German workers. The routinely falsified assumption that low wages reduce unemployment and overtime leads to social redistribution creates fortresses that legitimize the ademocratic realm of super exploitative practices targeted at social layers engraved in survivalist forms of existence. This undermines the possibility of building a coalition of working people intent on forging a political community that is limited neither by origin, territoriality nor juridical citizenship.

What does all this mean for struggle and the creation of an alternative in a crisis-ridden Europe and beyond? How do African workers cope with the situation in Germany? An important building block in the construction of a new vision of sociality is dependent on the democratic incorporation of people who have been externalized to the realm of the ademocratic by production relations intrinsically tied to racial indignity in order to mystify class exploitation.

The centrality of cultural formations in creating a sense of commons is critical to the livelihood and social needs of African workers to survive the intolerable situations they are confronted with. African owned shops, churches and mosques serve as social facilities for securing elusive jobs, advice on workers council’s legalization and informal social welfare schemes and loans, but also accommodation and food. This flies in the face of widely held assumption that these spaces foster exclusive communities.

The communities actually serve as spaces for debates and engagements on the social and economic direction of German society and beyond. They serve as important nodes in a project of inclusive deliberate democracy in all spheres of life. One respondent commented,

I joined [the African Muslim Association] because all that they speak about relates to progress…You listen to preaching that you can benefit from someday or that you can pass on to others, and as a human being you also need others, so you have to be involved with people. You know, when you think getting involved [with others] will bring problem; it will also bring peace.

Similar sentiments were expressed by another respondent,

It [national association] helps in the sense that we see each other. We go and chat and forget about the pains we face in this country. Because if you are among Germans it is difficult to even get something to laugh about. But if you go there, you meet people from your country, you laugh and you eat something from your country.

Equally important is that the basis of membership in these communities – religion or nationality – undercut ethnic identities that could potentially breed exclusive communities. What one sees in these communities is the creation of novel forms of belongings that speak to the contingency of identity and its mutability along lines of livelihood and political identities.

Germany and Europe at large is under a cloud of uncertainty. Right-wing and crypto fascist groups are an increasingly mainstream phenomena. On the 13 March this year the right-wing anti-immigrant Alternative Für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) secured stunning electoral gains in state elections. In the Province of Saxony-Anhalt they secured 24% in the local elections.[1] Two weeks prior to this they had garnered 12% in Frankfurt, one of the most heterogeneous cities in Germany. The dangers are stark but so is the opportunity. These opportunities rest in the creation of a culture of political action and solidarity where working people find each other in struggle and in the process come to see how much they share in terms of aspirations and hopes.

Faisal Garba is affiliated to the Universities of Cape Town and the University of Freiburg. He is also a Post-Doctoral fellow in the Post-Growth Society at the University of Jena, Germany.

Featured photograph: Hunger strike of refugees in Berlin

Notes

[1] The AfD first contested an election in 2013 shortly after it was formed. It polled 4.7% of the votes in the 2013 federal elections. In 2014 it had 9.7% in the Saxony-Anhalt state elections. The 2016 performance is over a 100% improvement on their 2014 result.

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