Andrea Purdeková, Making Ubumwe. Power, State and Camps in Rwanda’s Unity-Building Project (New York: Berghahn, 2015).
“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodernism as incredulity towards metanarratives” Jean-François Lyotard, The Post-Modern Condition
For a small African country with no extractive resources of note and without much geopolitical importance, Rwanda has attracted more than its share of media attention and scholarly research in the last twenty years. Much of this is, of course, attributable to the 1994 genocide in which 800,000 Rwandans perished between April and July of that year. An impressive literature has emerged to narrate both the macro-history of the mass killing as well as to explore crucial sub-dimensions, ranging from the involvement of the Church in the massacres to the calamitous roles played by Paris and Washington in enabling the killings to continue to the psychological effects of apocalyptic violence on perpetrators and survivors. But the horrors of 1994 are not the only subject drawing academicians to Rwanda. The vastly ambitious state-building project that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) has undertaken since taking power as the genocide drew to a close is a source of as much polemical debate as it is of theoretically consequential inquiry.
Andrea Purdeková offers an overdue anatomy of the policies the RPF has pursued to overcome the seemingly unbridgeable societal cleavages after mass violence. What kind of vision of togetherness did the inheritors of the genocidal state formulate? How have they tried to restructure that very state and its citizens in a bid to overcome social fragmentation? And what instruments were identified by the Front as essential to exorcise the demons of ethnic divisionism and lethal political competition? Organising her book around the central theme of “Ubumwe” (Unity), Purdeková is less interested in answers to these questions as a way of gaging the success of the RPF government for purposes of donor policy evaluation, than because of what they reveal about the nature of politics itself in Rwanda.
Her core argument is that unity, as a discourse “with a political life of its own”, has both aided state transformation and enabled the RPF to tighten its hold on the Rwandan polity. The shrewd deployment of notions like oneness and Rwandanness/Rwandanicity are, Making Ubumwe posits, not just platitudes to which all should subscribe as part of a more harmonious RPF-led nationalism but mask deeply partisan choices about societal transformation and the social and political trajectories open to ordinary Rwandans. Echoing James Ferguson’s famous dissection of the language of development, Purdeková claims that the effectiveness of ubumwe lies precisely in its superficially incontestable appearance: who could possibly be against unifying all Rwandans after the most intimate of genocides? This depoliticisation of fundamental choices about who is to be included and excluded of the ‘unified’ polity, on whose terms and with which options to appeal, resist and/or negotiate, is heavily scrutinised in the book. By deconstructing the unity-building project of the RPF, she attempts to “trace power” and the multifarious ways in which it manifests itself, even in what James Scott referred to as “hidden transcripts” of those on the receiving end of top-down social engineering.
Purdeková’s approach to examining these immaterial dimensions of power in Rwanda is strongly influenced by post-modernism and critical theory; she relies on the growing body of work under the umbrella of the anthropology of the state, which seeks to deconstruct Leviathan and sketch out the multiplicities of interface between state institutions and state officials on the one hand and the state’s subjects on the other hand. Such a perspective can be rewarding in that it helps observers descend from the ethereal realms of idealist theory into the actual lived experiences of ordinary humans. It allows Purdeková to explore the often paradoxical ways in which different population groups and individuals understand and respond to state policies enacted by individual officials, who have their own biases, agendas and subjectivities that refract abstract “RPF” agendas. Such a fine-grained analysis has the potential to decisively move beyond widespread caricatures of Rwanda under RPF supremo Paul Kagame as either a “slowly democratising developmental state” (as infatuated aid officials conveniently assert) or as a “totalitarian” moloch where no resistance is possible.
And indeed, Making Ubumwe is at its best in long sections where Purdeková immerses the reader in the mundane aspects of RPF nation-building. Her discussion of quotidian activities in the RPF’s Ingando re-education camps – the regimented meals of which the composition never changes, the feelings of affinity produced by collective singing and the confused answers of participants when asked what Ingando actually is – in chapter 8 stands out, but she provides valuable detail too on the ironies of umuganda communal work and on how supposedly self-organised RPF student clubs seek to translate the project of societal transformation into everyday reality at the village level. The most trenchant sections of Making Ubumwe thereby highlight both a Rwanda obsessed with public performances and the inevitable Potemkin villages, but also the extraordinary lengths to which the RPF goes to make the state’s presence felt in almost every detail of Rwandan citizens’ lives.
However, if Making Ubumwe embodies some of the major strengths of the theoretical edifice of which it is a child, it unfortunately also falls into some of its traps. At least in the opinion of this reviewer, the book could have benefited from a better balancing between the historical-empirical sections and the analytical-conceptual discussion. While many publications on Rwanda err too much towards the former, Purdeková is prone to launching into sweeping generalisations, without bringing enough concrete evidence or historical illustrations to the table. One or two statements by anonymous informants thus become the subject of several pages of theorising, leaving the reader somewhat miffed as to the confident tone adopted by the author. This is all the more pertinent because, although almost all of the primary evidence in Making Ubumwe was collected in a fascinating (but highly specific) seven month time period between 2008 and 2009, the author applies her labels and impressions to the whole of the RPF state-building and unity-crafting project- i.e. from the nineties to the present day. Despite an excellent methodological section in the book of more than 20 pages, greater self-awareness of the limitations of the material under review would have been helpful.
Moreover, the book’s emphasis on Foucault’s “instrument effects” – looking at the actual effects of power, regardless of stated policy objectives – is a potentially rewarding strategy, but it can also blind the researcher to key dimensions of the subjects and objects of her study. The tendency to see “power” and its effects everywhere but to fail to comprehensively examine the specific causes of those effects and the broader politico-historical and ideological context is a recurrent weakness of research in this tradition. As Marshall Sahlins warned in his classic critique: “Max Weber, criticizing certain utilitarian explanations of religious phenomena, observed that just because an institution may be relevant to the economy does not mean it is economically determined. But following Gramsci and Foucault, the current neo-functionalism of power seems even more complete: as if everything that could be relevant to power were power.” The circular, totalizing logic of power in such an approach allows little space for contingency, actual political change or meaningful historical rupture.
In Making Ubumwe, we do not learn how Ingando, the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission or even the RPF itself and its revolutionary project changed over time and what internal politics produced particular outcomes. Discussion of the colonial state or the Habyarimana regime and the path of dependency they created for contemporary and future statist projects is absent, as are the legacies of actual betrayal by outside forces and the teachings of Marxist-Leninism and Nyerere that heavily influenced the RPF (and its penchant for control, camps and transformation). The odd paragraph here and there about the RPF’s past as a guerrilla movement can hardly count as much needed examination of where its controversial policies originated, let alone represent a nuanced discussion of why some choices, institutions and individuals were prioritized over others.
These weaker points are a pity because throughout the book Purdeková shows herself to be an incisive observer of social dynamics, displaying detailed knowledge of cultural norms and ambiguities, without resorting to the careless essentialism of many other authors’ characterisations of Rwandan culture. The primary evidence put forward by Making Ubumwe is a fascinating reminder of the RPF’s veritable obsession with legitimation and the deep insecurities – “l’équilibre de la peur” as one informant aptly termed it – that surround its outlook on Rwanda and its own hegemony. But rather than pointing to the vacuity of metanarratives (cf. Lyotard), it actually stimulates the appetite for a more cogent linking of micro-level entropy and macro-level theory and struggle.
Professor Harry Verhoeven teaches at the School of Foreign Service in Qatar, Georgetown University. He is also an Associate Member of the Department of Politics and International Relations of the University of Oxford where he completed his doctorate and was a postdoctoral fellow. He was founder of the the Oxford University China-Africa Network (OUCAN) in 2008-2009 and remains a Co-Convenor of OUCAN. From October 2016 onwards, he is a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University. Outside academia, he has worked in Northern Uganda, Sudan, India and Democratic Republic of Congo.
Featured photograph: Roadside impression, Kigali 2013 (Hansueli Krapf).
In this issue of his project on Popular Protest, Social Movements and Class Struggle in Africa David Seddon continues to provide an analysis of the situation in the two countries considered in no. 5 – Zimbabwe and the DRC – after significant protests against the current regime (or Robert Mugabe and Joseph Kabila) took place over the last two months, albeit with rather different dynamics and rather different implications in the two cases.
By David Seddon
It was reported by Al Jazeera, on Thursday 25 August 2016, that the previous day:
Zimbabwean police (had) used tear gas, water cannons and batons to disperse an opposition rally protesting against police brutality in the capital Harare. More than 200 supporters, mostly youths, of the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), took to the streets on Wednesday. Many protesters were reported to have been injured, but police spokeswoman Charity Charamba said she had no information on that. Riot police blocked streets around the MDC headquarters and used water cannon against some youths in downtown Harare. Some protesters threw back tear gas canisters, as well as rocks, towards the police, who fired more tear gas outside the MDC offices. The demonstrators marched through the streets of the capital denouncing the police for beating up protesters and called on President Robert Mugabe to step down, accusing him of running a dictatorship.
The rally came two days before a planned march by all opposition parties to try to force Mugabe to implement electoral reforms before a general election in 2018. Chinoputsa, the MDC Youth Assembly secretary-general, said police had refused to sanction the march, saying that it would degenerate into violence. The police routinely deny charges of brutality and instead accuse the opposition of using “hooligans” during protests to attack officers. A trauma clinic in Harare last month compiled a list of cases of people who had been caught up in a police crackdown during anti-government protests. The MDC’s leader Morgan Tsvangirai and former vice president, Joice Mujuru, were expected to lead Friday’s march.
Home Affairs Minister Ignatious Chombo warned that the government would clamp down heavily on what it termed ‘Western-sponsored’ protests seeking regime change. All was set, however, by the evening of Thursday 25 August for an opposition march the next day in Harare city centre, to press for comprehensive electoral reforms before the 2018 general polls, despite attempts by the police initially to confine the protest to the outskirts of Harare central business district. The police had claimed that the protesters would disrupt human and road traffic.
But chairman of the National Electoral Reform Agenda (NERA) legal team, Douglas Mwonzora, said it was surprising that police were concerned about an expected 150,000 people for the march when Zanu-PF had held its so-called one million man march in the city a few months ago. As a result, Mwonzora said, they had approached the courts to make sure police do not interfere with their march. The move to seek court backing came a day after police violently put down another march by opposition youths, firing tear gas and water cannon and beating them as they staged a protest against police brutality. High Court judge, Hlekani Mwayera, eventually ordered the police and government ‘not to interfere, obstruct or stop the march’ and Chief Superintendent Newbert Saunyama, the police officer commanding Harare Central district, agreed that the parties could go ahead with their demonstration to hand over the petition to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC).
‘We view this as victory for democracy’, said Douglas Mwonzora after the court ruling; ‘the demonstration is going ahead [although] we know the police have already tear-gassed the venue’. Didymus Mutasa of the Zimbabwe People First party, Convener of the 18 political parties involved under the NERA, also told journalists that the march to ZEC would go ahead as planned. Mutasa, who was flanked by some NERA principals, former Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai of MDC-T and Jacob Ngarivhume of Transform Zimbabwe, said the march would culminate with the handing of the petition to ZEC and an address by NERA leaders at the electoral body’s headquarters.
He explained that opposition political parties were worried that the ZEC is failing in its constitutional mandate to register voters and administer elections. They also accuse it of bias in favor of the ruling Zanu-PF. They felt that there was ‘a crisis of legitimacy’ at the centre of the current national problems facing Zimbabwe, hence the demand for electoral reforms and a clear road map to the next election. Mutasa said the parties want the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to support Zimbabweans in their demand for free and fair elections.
On 27 August, the Mail & Guardian Africa reported that:
Zimbabwean police on Friday fired tear gas at opposition leaders and hundreds of demonstrators as a protest against President Robert Mugabe descended into one of the worst outbreaks of violence in two decades. Opposition head Morgan Tsvangirai and former vice president Joice Mujuru fled the rally in their cars while protesters ran for cover as police firing tear gas and water cannons broke up the core of the demonstration. Clashes then spread through the streets of Harare as riot police fought running battles with protesters who hurled rocks at officers, set tyres ablaze and burned a popular market to the ground, in some of the worst unrest since food riots in 1998. ‘Mugabe’s rule must end now, that old man has failed us’, said one protester, before throwing a rock at a taxi.
The stay-away ‘strike’ proved quite effective. Alex Magaisa reported, after the event, that
… the events of the last week, starting with the citizens’ protests in Beit Bridge through to the mass stay-away of Wednesday, are a seminal moment, in the sense that they demonstrate, for the first time in a long period, a re-awakening of the citizens and a demonstration of their capacity to assert themselves in their capacity as ordinary citizens, not as followers of political parties or organised civil society.
For too long, Zimbabweans have appeared to be a docile lot, with an extraordinary capacity to absorb the worst excesses of the Zimbabwean regime without as much as a whimper. Why do Zimbabweans not act? Why are they so comfortable and silent in the face of government excesses and failures? … This week demonstrated that Zimbabwean citizens have the capacity to take expressive action against the excesses of the regime.
On 1 September, recognising the possibility that the demonstrations could get out of hand, the government imposed a ban on protests in the country’s capital Harare. The ban, which was introduced under the Public Order and Security Act and was to last for a period of two weeks, was announced the day before opposition parties were due to hold their second anti-government demonstration (on 2 September 2016) and in the light of an escalation in protests over the previous month over stalled electoral reforms and the declining economy. Less than a week later, on 7 September, the BBC reported that High Court judge Priscilla Chigumba had ruled that the two-week ban on protests was illegal; she also said that the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law was important to democracy.
Stan Zvorwadza, one of the activists who challenged the ban, told the BBC he welcomed the verdict, adding that he and demonstrators wanted to protest peacefully about the mismanagement of the country. He also hailed Chigumba’s ruling as ‘a brave judgement’, coming days after President Mugabe had condemned the previous court ruling allowing the anti-government protest at the end of August, a demonstration that (as we have seen) turned violent when police ignored the Court order and clashed with demonstrators. Mugabe had suggested that, in that case, the judges had showed a reckless disregard for peace, and warned that they should not dare to be negligent when making future decisions. The president has recently warned protesters there would be no Zimbabwean uprising similar to the ‘Arab Spring’.
On 9 September riot police fired tear gas to break up the first anti-government protest in Harare since the courts overturned a ban on street marches. Hardlife Mudzingwa, spokesman for Tajamuka, a youth protest movement, said police blocked about 30 demonstrators, singing and marching peacefully marching towards parliament in the capital. “We refused to back down and when they realised we were not stopping, they fired tear gas”, he said. Several protesters suffered minor injuries, he said.
On 17 September, it was reported by enca.com that:
a planned mass demonstration against Zimbabwe’s veteran President Robert Mugabe failed to kick off in the capital Harare… as riot police patrolled the streets to enforce a protest ban. A coalition of opposition parties under the banner of the National Electoral Reform Agenda (NERA) had planned country-wide demonstrations demanding reform ahead of the 2018 election, when 92-year-old Mugabe plans to stand again. But a month-long protest ban and a heavy police presence saw the event fizzle out before it started, with just small groups of activists demonstrating in the surburbs.
…In the second city of Bulawayo, close to a thousand protesters staged a peaceful march on Saturday after a high court ruling gave them permission to take to the streets. Police stood by with armoured vehicles and water cannons. “All we are demanding is that we want a free, fair and credible election,” MDC deputy president Thokozani Khupe told the crowd. “We are drawing a line in the sand and we are saying never again will we allow an election to be held where elections will be rigged.
Democratic Republic of Congo
In the meanwhile, in the DRC, it was reported on 27 July 2016 by David Hurrell for Opinion.red24.com that travel disruption was reported in Kinshasa, especially along Boulevard Lumumba, as tens of thousands of supporters awaited the arrival at N’Djili airport of Etienne Tshisekedi, veteran leader of the opposition Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS), who has spent the past two years in Belgium. On his arrival, supporters accompanied him to the UDPS headquarters in the Limete municipality of Kinshasa. Hurrell remarked that that:
Pro- and anti-government protests are expected in major urban areas throughout the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the coming days. On 29 July, a large demonstration in support of the president, Joseph Kabila, is scheduled at the Stade Tata Raphael in Kinshasa. On 31 July, large rallies are expected at the Stade des Martyrs in Kinshasa, and at the Grande Place Tshombe in Lubumbashi, by the opposition coalition known as the Rally or ‘Rassemblement’.
On 20 August 2016, the DRC’s main opposition alliance rejected talks with the Kabila government regarding the delayed November presidential election, and called for a general strike on 23 August. The political opposition also vowed to conduct other large-scale actions across the country prior to 19 September – the date when the President is constitutionally required to call for elections (90 days before the end of his term). The call to strike represents a significant escalation in opposition action, following the return of UDPS leader, Étienne Tshisekedi, to the DRC. In an e-mailed public statement, Tshisekedi stated that the ‘necessary requirements for holding a dialogue’ had yet to be met by the government, and called on citizens to ‘mobilise as a single man’ and observe a general strike.
The opposition’s decision was a significant blow to the African Union mediator, Edem Kodjo, who had planned to host opening talks with all domestic political parties on 23 August to help reach an agreement on the scheduling of the elections. Kodjo – a former Togolese Prime Minister (1994-1996, 2005-2006) – has drawn considerable criticism from opposition politicians who view him as a Kabila apologist, and there have been numerous calls for his resignation; Martin Fayulu – the leader of the Commitment for Citizenship and Development party and a member of the opposition coalition – has been particularly vocal in his disapproval of Kodjo.
Although Kabila has yet to comment publically on his political future, all signs point to him attempting to cling to power indefinitely. Back in May 2016, the Constitutional Court – in an idiosyncratic interpretation of Article 70 of the 2005 Constitution – ruled that Kabila could stay in power beyond the end of his second and final mandate if the November 2016 elections did not take place. On 20 August 2016, the President of the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI), Corneille Nangana, stated that the ongoing revision of the national voter registry – a process that began in March 2016 – would not be likely to be completed before July 2017, providing further confirmation that the election will not take place as scheduled. Kabila himself stated earlier in August that a revised election timetable would only be published once a new voter registry is compiled. Additionally, according to Reuters, the government has also stated its desire to hold local and provincial elections before the presidential poll, and some observers have estimated that the latter will not occur until 2018 or 2019.
In a bid to ease political tensions ahead of a proposed ‘national dialogue’, the Kabila regime announced pardons on 19 August for 24 individuals incarcerated for their criticisms of the President. The detained politicians and democracy activists are viewed as political prisoners by domestic and international observers, and the government clearly hopes that its latest move will soften recent criticisms over its highly suspect human rights record. Opposition leader Joseph Olengankhoy has called on the government to extend a pardon to Moïse Katumbi, the leading presidential candidate who was sentenced in June in absentia (he is in South Africa) to three years in prison for alleged real estate fraud.
This latest attempt by the Kabila government to reconcile their public image follows on the heels of a surprise announcement by the head of state on 22 July, in which the president issued a number of pardons to a number of prisoners. Included amongst this number were six members of the youth activist group Struggle for Change (Lucha) who were arrested in February 2016 and sentenced to six months in prison as they prepared to participate in the ‘Ville Morte’ (Dead City) general strike. Key figures in the struggle for democracy, however – like Jean-Marie Kalonji and Christopher Ngoyi – remain in custody, without access to legal representation.
One motive for the apparent ‘softening’ of the regime’s approach to the political opposition is undoubtedly the hope of creating the impression abroad that it is not an authoritarian state and complies with the demands of international observers for democracy and the rule of law, thereby avoiding further expressions of disapproval and sanctions. While unilateral sanctions imposed by the US will likely have little impact without the support of the EU and the UN, they nonetheless represent a further reputational blow to the increasingly authoritarian Kabila regime. A second motive behind the ‘softened’ approach is to bring the political opposition to the negotiating table. The Kabila government has continuously expressed its desire to engage constructively with political, civil society and religious institutions and, by complying with opposition requests to free ‘political prisoners’, it is indicating its wish to move towards a ‘national dialogue’ in the near future.
Despite these efforts, on the part of the regime, to create a more agreeable political atmosphere, the opposition parties began a nationwide strike on 23 August, as promised, to protest against what they see as President Kabila’s attempts to cling to power past the end of his constitutional term in December 2016. The opposition called on all citizens to remain at home in an attempt to highlight their disapproval of the government’s underhanded tactics to allow Kabila to retain power indefinitely.
Generally, the strike was geographically patchy and seemed unable to translate what is generally believed to be widespread popular support for the opposition into effective action. It certainly failed to live up to expectations set by a similar one-day general strike held a year and a half previously in February 2015. That strike – dubbed ‘Ville Morte’ (Dead City) – was hailed as a success after it shut down most businesses in Kinshasa. On this occasion also, Kinshasa (a traditionally anti-Kabila region) was effectively shut down – according to local sources and photographic evidence, the roads in Kinshasa were conspicuously quiet, while shops were closed in the city’s surrounding districts, particularly in opposition strongholds like Limete, where the police force used tear gas to disperse protestors who had gathered and erected barricades near the UDPS party headquarters.
In some other towns also, elsewhere in the country, like Matadi and Bukavu, the action seemed quite effective, although in Goma, where youths blocked a road in the Katindo district with rocks and burning tyres, businesses appeared to operate as usual. There was little evidence, however, of a strike in DRC’s second city, Lubumbashi; and in the southern mining hubs of Kolwezi (Lualaba Province) and Lubumbashi (Haut-Katanga Province) commercial activity was unaffected by the strike, as was activity in the northeast commercial hub of Beni (North Kivu Province).
The political opposition appeared to have opted to organise mass strikes as they are a safer demonstration tactic than street marches, and this form of protest is more difficult for the government or security forces to repress or counteract. The safety and security of participants and party leaders is paramount in a state where the excessive use of force and arbitrary detentions are commonplace. Yet, a strike is only as effective as the ability of citizens to participate and while the political opposition is garnering considerable popular support, ordinary citizens do not have the financial capacity to maintain a prolonged – or even – it now appears – a one-day strike. Given the much-anticipated return of Étienne Tshisekedi after a two-year absence and the rapturous welcome he received, it was expected that the political opposition’s fight for democracy would receive a considerable boost.
Specifically, it was expected that Tshisekedi’s return would rally people to the streets after opposition protests over the last year failed to attract significant numbers. Such a poor start to the united opposition’s first major campaign against the Kabila regime was undoubtedly disappointing, particularly as the deadline for the end of the President’s mandate is fast approaching. But those who wrote off the capacity of the opposition to mobilise their supporters, were surprised when, less than a month after the ‘Ville Morte’ stay-at-home strike, mass protest broke out again on the streets of Kinshasa, and some other cities.
On 20 September 2016, Human Rights Watch reported that security forces had killed more than three dozen people in the latest bout of protests. According to Ida Sawyer, the Africa researcher for the New York-based human rights group, HRW had ‘credible reports’ that at least 37 people had lost their lives during two days of violent demonstrations.
The fighting broke out in Kinshasa on Monday 19 September as thousands of opposition supporters marched against President Kabila and his bid to extend his term. There were demonstrations also in Goma in the east of the country. Interior Minister Evariste Boshab earlier said a total of 17 people including three policemen had died in the violence. He also referred to the protests as ‘an uprising’. However, other sources reported much higher figures and close to 200 people are believed to have been arrested.
Meanwhile, the UN called for restraint amid deadly clashes between security forces and protesters. Spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Rupert Colville, told a news briefing in Geneva on Tuesday 20 September that the international body was ‘deeply worried’ by the latest round of violence. “We have received reports of excessive use of force by some elements of the security forces as well as reports that some demonstrators resorted to violence yesterday. We call on all sides to show restraint and we urge the authorities to ensure that existing national and international standards on the appropriate use of force are fully respected by all security personnel. We call for a credible and impartial investigation to bring those responsible of human rights violations and criminal acts to justice, and we stand ready to support such an inquiry,” Colville said. He added that the violence underlined the urgent need for dialogue on the electoral process in the country.
David Seddon (criticalfaculty1@hotmail.co.uk) is a researcher and political activist who has written extensively on social movements, class struggles and political transitions across the developing world.
Words that think (for us) are terms so rich in meaning, so versatile in usage, so widely deployed that their presence in any utterance is enough to give sense to it. And that happens even when such utterances may be devoid of meaning. These words, which in fact are concepts, have precise meanings in the social sciences and help researchers lend descriptive, analytical and interpretive sense to the phenomena they study. However, when these words are used in general public discourse, or uncritically by researchers, they take up the job of thinking for those who use them. Capitalism is one such word. Others are “democracy”, “human rights”, “good governance”, “market economy”, etc. As a matter of fact, any concept in the social sciences that can be used not only to describe phenomena, but also to explain them has the potential to function as a word that thinks (for us).
Now, in response to ROAPE’s invitation to contribute to the debate on “Capitalism in Africa” I would like to suggest one way of taking up the challenge. Instead of discussing whether “Capitalism” as such is a valid concept or a useful description of social phenomena I want to suggest that it might be equally useful to consider the issues entailed by such a debate in terms of a broader challenge faced by researchers of Africa. The challenge consists in sorting out the much larger issue concerning how concepts developed in very specific times and places under very specific circumstances can be usefully deployed in other temporal and spatial settings. “Capitalism in Africa” is not only about whether the economic circumstances of the continent are consistent with the semantic and analytical field implied by “capitalism” as a concept in political economy. It is also about how to make social science concepts work well when they cross borders.
This is not an easy task. This is so because when the vocabulary of the social sciences crosses borders it suffers a black-boxing effect. Here I draw on the work of Bruno Latour who uses the notion of black-boxes to describe how science conceals the processes through which it produces technology. As he writes in the glossary to his 1999 book Pandora’s Hope, “[T]he way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become.” This is precisely the aspect of black-boxing that I find useful in thinking about the challenge of making social science concepts work across borders. The black-boxing effect replaces original thinking and lets concepts do the job for us. I suggest that this effect occurs on three levels, all of which bear on the challenge of engaging with Capitalism in Africa. When social scientists do their work, i.e. apply concepts to make sense of social phenomena, they do so against the background of a complex network of economic, ideological and perhaps even cultural givens. The knowledge produced under such circumstances may be better understood as an artefact of a history of academic controversies, hostilities and competition.
The first level is to be seen at the intersection of the claims of the Enlightenment and Europe’s historical relationship with Africa. This is marked by the assumption that scientific knowledge is by definition universally valid because it applies objective concepts. By extension, what we know about Europe is consistent with what we can know about the world. Within the context of the social sciences which rely on empirical generalisations it is easy to assume that the conceptual apparatus developed at this very crucial moment in Europe’s history provides an adequate framework to render other parts of the world intelligible.
Enter capitalism. While the term describes a very specific way of organizing economic life that conferred an advantage to the part of the world where it first came into fruition, capitalism has also come to stand for inexorable and necessary transformation. The existence of the concept withdraws legitimacy to any attempt at account for processes of social transformation that cannot be reduced to a reaction to, or pursuit of capitalism. This is not to say that capitalism may not matter. Rather, the issue is that the existence of the concept makes Capitalism ubiquitous in the social scientist’s imagination and prevents him or her from looking for ways of making sense of Africa that may downplay the importance of Capitalism. It is not uncommon, in conferences or book reviews, to be rebuked for failing to consider the role of capital in whatever one may be interested in accounting for.
The second level consists in positing the present condition of European society as the purposeful outcome of socially engineered processes of change. This is of course amplified by the teleological nature of Marxism, arguably the best and most coherent account of Capitalism. Just as Capitalism is perceived as a necessary and inevitable stage in the unfolding of history owing to materialist laws of evolution it is also assumed that knowledge of such laws yields useful insights into what hampers the evolution of other societies. In this sense, then, while political economy approaches to the study of Africa have helped researchers produce a very deep and solid understanding of African social phenomena – Walter Rodney’s seminal work on underdevelopment (1983) or Samir Amin’s even more wide ranging work on delinking (1990) are particularly good examples – they may also have led some of us to lose sight of the contingent nature of historical outcomes and made us hostage to a teleological view of human history that does not do justice to Africa. My book on the Taming of Fate (2016) looks at risk and disasters, but my theoretical focus is precisely on the role which uncertainty should play in our accounts of Africa. I argue implicitly against the danger of reproducing the teleology implied by Capitalism on account of the concept’s tendency to be more determinate than the historical processes which produced it in the first place.
The third and final level conflates procedural knowledge with propositional knowledge. In other words, the conceptual apparatus of the social sciences becomes a normative vocabulary setting out how the social world should be by assuming that we know everything there is to be known about that same social world. To put it differently, knowledge production is not guided by the need to discover new facts, which is what propositional knowledge is about. Rather, it is an exercise in finding out how reality can be aligned with our concepts. When this is the case, the ability of researchers to render Africa intelligible is constrained. This is not because Africa is different in any essential way or, for that matter, because the concepts are “European”. Rather, the constraints emerge because the black-boxing effect that produced the vocabularies on the basis of which we seek to render Africa intelligible reduce knowledge production to the level of a mere exercise in procedural ability. To use Noam Chomsky’s helpful terminology, we are confronted with the tension between competence and performance. Procedural ability tests the researcher’s ability to apply and the object’s ability to conform to the normative content of concepts. What makes Capitalism problematic on this score is that it becomes a description of what should be, or of what it should not be. It becomes a word of abuse, or praise, that reduces the pursuit of knowledge to a search for ideological certainty, not conceptual understanding.
There is another way of looking at the same problem. In The Theft of History (2006) Jack Goody addresses pretty much the same problems with reference to the idea that Europe’s copyright claims over certain concepts and institutions amount to stealing history from others. This may overstate the case. Indeed, it is not so much that Europe has stolen history. Rather, it has forced upon the world ways of describing it which render invisible other possible worlds. Words that think (for us) taken particular histories for granted and confer upon the conceptual apparatus of the social sciences the normative legitimacy to conflate European contingent outcomes with historical inevitability. The Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu has made some useful comments on these issues in connection with his concern with cultural universals (1990). His most basic claim is that the existence of cultural universals is the basic premise upon which the possibility of intercultural communication and understanding rests. As he perceptively argues, “In truth, the ability to perceive the untranslatability of an expression from one language into another is a mark of linguistic understanding more profound than the ability to do routine translation. The second ability involves merely moving from the one language into the other, whereas the first involves stepping above both on to a meta-platform, so to speak, an ability that has not seemed to come easily to some students of ‘other cultures’. Untranslatability, then, can be a problem, but it does not necessarily argue unintelligibility”. Wiredu’s faith in intelligibility rests on his belief that the claim to understand something is equivalent to the ability to grasp “the conditions under which it is true to say that [a] concept holds”.
I guess that I am grappling here with the notion of translation and its implications when researchers try to apply any concept, really. Again, the challenge of development, the emergence of the BRICS, the resource boom and attendant bursts of the babbles which some claim that the boom creates as well as the perennially new aid architectures enveloping the African continent may make it urgent for researchers to ask the big C question. Is it good old Capitalism in new clothes, or an endogenous “African” version? Does it tell us anything new about Capitalism as we know it? These are probably important questions, but I for one would any time of day prefer grappling with the more methodologically challenging question concerning what it means to render Africa intelligible using words that think. To the extent that as I have tried to show such words may make it difficult for us to see beyond them or past their blind spots I would claim we may not yet be ready to engage in the kind of discussion which the debate on Capitalism requires us to undertake. Like I argue in the chapter “Before we Start” (2016), studying Africa is about getting ready to study Africa. The same should apply to debates about Capitalism in Africa: how do we start talking about the big C at all?
Elísio Macamo is Professor of African Studies at the University of Basel (Switzerland) where he is both the Director of the Centre for African Studies and Head of the Social Sciences Department.
Notes
Amin, S. 1990, Delinking – Towards a Polycentric World. Zed Books. London.
Goody, J. 2006, The Theft of History. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
Latour, B. 1999, Pandora’s Hope – Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard University Press. Cambridge.
Macamo, E. 2016, The Taming of Fate – Approaching Risk from a Social Action Perspective – Case Studies from Southern Mozambique. CODESRIA. Dakar.
Macamo, E. 2016, “Before we start: science and power in the constitution of Africa” in Maano Ramutsindela, Giorgio Miescher, Melanie Boehi (eds.), The Politics of Nature and Science in Southern Africa. Basler Afrika Bibliographien. Basel.
Rodney, W. 1983, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications. London.
Wiredu, K. 1990, “Are there Cultural Universals?” in P.H. Coetzee and A.P.J. Roux (eds.), The African Philosophy Reader. Routledge. London.
Ghanaian activist and socialist Explo Nani-Kofi describes his involvement in a period of radicalisation in Ghana in the 1970s and 1980s. The period found its figurehead in the charismatic leadership of Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings. In face of widespread discontent Rawlings attempted a coup d’état on 15 May 1979, against the military government led by General Fred Akuffo. The coup failed and Rawlings was arrested and imprisoned. He began to speak in the language of the left and attracted the interest and support of Ghanaian socialists and radicals. On 4 June, Rawlings was broken out of jail by soldiers sympathetic to his politics, he then led a rebellion of the military and civilians against Akuffo. The Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) was established under his leadership, promising to clean-up Ghana of corruption and injustice. The AFRC organized an election in September 1979 which was won by Hilla Limann of the People’s National Party (PNP). The civilian administration quickly ran into difficulties, of its own making. In 1981, after a strike wave paralysed the country, the government declared that in the event of further action all strikers would be arrested. The strike movement helped precipitate the collapse of the Limann administration. It was clear that the new democratic government was unable to fulfil its promises of real change across Ghanaian society. On 31 December 1981 Rawlings, with soldiers and the support of some left parties, launched a second coup and overthrew the Limann government. The Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) was set-up with Rawlings as Chairman. Before long the possibility of radical change in Ghana gave way to repression of his left-wing allies, and a gradual retreat from the promises of pro-poor transformation. After several years, left-wing opponents were imprisoned and at the same time the regime became a test case for structural adjustment. Rawlings oversaw the introduction of the Economic Recovery Programme and called for ‘austerity and sacrifice’. By 1987 Rawlings the revolutionary became the darling of the IMF and the World Bank. In this ROAPE interview Nani-Kofi explains what some of the experiences were for activists on the ground.
Can you first of all tell me briefly who you are and your political background in Ghana?
I am Explo Nani-Kofi and at present the Director of Kilombo Centre for Civil Society and African Self-Determination which is a research, education and advocacy institution, which I have been developing as a social justice practitioner and grass root organiser. Through that I coordinate the International Conference on Africa, Africa and Social Justice every September in Peki, Ghana. I come from Peki and was born in Anfoega, both in the Volta Region of Ghana. When I was a child, relatives, family friends and neighbours were officials in Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) so I grew up in an atmosphere of CPP influence.
In secondary school, I got involved in the Current Affairs Society and came across The Dawn, published by CPP Overseas, and Amanee published by Central Union of Ghana Students in Europe, which were Nkrumahist oriented publications which were being sent discretely into the country. All this was given as orientation when I was starting secondary school in 1975, when my teacher was the Marxist-oriented Mahama Bawa. I then founded and became President of the Students Movement for African Unity (SMAU) in my school, Mawuli Secondary School in Ho.
Having been in SMAU, when I entered university, I looked out for the SMAU branch. Initially there was a SMAU note on the notice board and when I followed it I was introduced to the Pan African Youth Movement (PANYMO) then led by Chris Buakri Atim. [1] Atim was the Acting President of the National Union of Ghana students (NUGS) and I ran errands for him to the other universities often circulating press statements. By the time of 31 December 1981 coup d’etat, I was the 1st National Vice President of NUGS.
Can you describe the atmosphere in Ghana at the time, in the 1970s and 1980s?
On 24 February 1966, the first post-independence government of Ghana was overthrown through a coup d’etat by police and army officers of Ghana with what has been shown now to have been influenced by western intelligence services. Ghana was then ruled by a military junta of the National Liberation Council (NLC). The NLC organised elections in 1969 which were won by Dr. K. A, Busia and Progress party (PP) which was the successor party to the United Party (UP) which was the Right-wing opposition to Kwame Nkrumah’s government. The Nkrumah regime was the 1st Republic so this became the 2nd Republic.
The 1970s started with the devaluation of the currency by 48% on 27 December 1971 after the Pan-African atmosphere created by Kwame Nkrumah’s government was disrupted by the introduction of the Aliens Compliance Order policy which expelled Africans from Nigeria, Mali, Niger and other countries who had been living in Ghana. Radical student movements brought up the question of the declaration of assets by the politicians of the 2nd Republic. In response to this situation the right wing government of Dr. Busia was overthrown by the Ghana Armed Forces. The military government was initially popular with its Operation Feed Yourself programme, a declaration was made that we will not pay imperialist imposed debts and we will support African liberation movements. Gradually, the military regime grew corrupt and institutionalised the bureaucratic structure in 1975 by dissolving the original council and replacing it with a council of military generals. The military regime tried to institutionalise its rule and stop any transfer to civilian constitutional rule with the campaign for the so-called Union Government. As the regime became corrupt, the student movement grew more radical.
Before 1976, the external wing of the Ghana students’ movement was led mostly by those who won scholarships to study outside during Kwame Nkrumah’s regime. In 1976, the external students’ movement (Central Union of Ghanaian Students in Europe) integrated with the students’ movement back home under the umbrella of the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) and adopted scientific socialism, which created a crisis as the students’ movement was a mass organisation of all students in a neo-colonial state and such a programme and commitment seemed inappropriate.
The students’ movement together with professional bodies mobilised against the military regime. The students of Ghana had a national demonstration against the military regime and its Union Government campaign on 13 May 1977 resulting in the closure of the universities. Since that day, the week including 13 May each year came to be celebrated as Aluta Week with demonstrations and other activities. The military regime had a referendum on its Union Government in 1978 and rigged the referendum results declaring that the population had endorsed it. Further opposition created a crisis in the military regime leading to a palace coup that year. In 1979, during the Aluta Week, a hitherto unknown Air Force Flight Lieutenant by the name J. J. Rawlings took advantage of Aluta Week and attempted a military uprising on 15 May 1979 which failed; he was arrested and together with others brought to trial.
How do you assess the legacy of Kwame Nkrumah?
Kwame Nkrumah rose to become the main leader of the struggle against classical colonialism since his return to the Gold Coast, as Ghana had been named by the colonial power, in 1947 upon invitation by United Gold Coast Convention. In 1949, he led a breakaway which constituted itself as the Convention People’s Party and became more rooted in the masses of the population and was also more radical in its demands for self-government. Another great plus of his legacy is that the party was national in character and not dominated by a particular ethnic group as has been a weakness of certain political parties and ‘nationalist’ movements in other parts of Africa. As the immediate post-independence government, the Nkrumah administration embarked on the construction of infrastructure, provision of social services to the population, developed an industrialisation programme and provided employment in a way that cannot be compared with any government since. Kwame Nkrumah’s commitment to African unity, liberation and self-determination raised his stature throughout the African continent and the African diaspora triggering a movement for revolutionary Pan-Africanism. He wrote books together that made an enduring contribution to revolutionary Pan-Africanist theory. All together this posed a threat to the efforts by the west to continue the neo-colonial control they had in Africa. As a result of this the CIA influenced his overthrow on 24 February 1966.
After his overthrow, the political class, including some who had worked with him, came to a consensus that lacked his vision, an ‘agreement’ I have referred to as the ‘24 February 1966 Consensus.’ A number of the leadership and activists of his party integrated with others who had fallen out with Kwame Nkrumah to constitute new political parties. Any form of resistance was patchy. Four people were tried for a plot to bring him back to power. There was a counter coup attempt on 17 April 1967 but it is still unclear whether it was linked to Nkrumah. The only political party which departed from this consensus and maintained a genuinely pan-African vision was the People’s Popular Party led by Dr Willie Kofi Lutterodt and Johnny F. S. Hansen. This party brought together CPP elements who refused to accept the 24 February coup as a fait accompli and a group of activists with links to internationalist socialist movement. [2] However, Nkrumah’s influence developed among a younger generation of activists within the youth and students. By 1981, there were so many organisations inspired, in one way or another, by Nkrumah’s legacy and politics.[3]
The conflict between Rawlings and these organisations during his rule from 1982 to 1992 led to a collapse of many of these organisations. In lieu of a movement, the dominant application of Nkrumah’s politics in Ghana today is to use reference to pro-Nkrumah politics to attack one of the main opposition parties as a group responsible for his overthrow. That has not helped in practice but has rather been a distraction that creates confusion about what the emergence of the two main political parties in 1992, despite their struggle for (and against) Nkrumah’s legacy. What determined the political divide in 1992 was the attempt to shore up neo-liberal tyranny of Rawlings regime against the struggle to open the democratic space to enable genuinely civilian rule. Rawlings regime succeeded in infiltrating the pro-Nkrumah movement by taking advantage of contacts they had with the left’s tragic flirting with Rawlings’ fake radicalism in the 1980s. In the process there are a number of people who were in pro-Nkrumah movements but became members or supporters of the neo-liberal New Patriotic Party that was founded in 1992; they saw the NPP as the only effective way to stop the military regime’s structure reorganising itself into a party under the umbrella of the National Democratic Congress also set up in 1992.
You were involved in the left movement in Ghana. How were you engaged?
I was involved in the Kwame Nkrumah Revolutionary Guards (KNRG) which emerged as a result of the People’s National Party, it was perceived as the successor party to Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party. The KNRG was formed by Nkrumahists (adherents Kwame Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanist and socialist-oriented vision of politics) who were disappointed in the PNP so decided to organise as Nkrumahists with the guidance of his revolutionary Pan-Africanism vision of socialist transformation. I also organised students and youth under the banner of the Students Movement for Africa Unity (SMAU) which I was a member of since my secondary school days. The KNRG organised events to mark Kwame Nkrumah’s birthday and memorials for his death and on those occasions reflected on and analysed the national and international situation and looked to advance the cause of socialism and Pan-Africanism. One important forum which brought together all left-wing forces was the Progressive Forum of 3 October 1981.
From June 1979 to September 1979, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), under the chairmanship of Flt. Lt. J. J. Rawlings which was a populist regime and reduced prices, executed military officers for supposed corruption and was very popular with the radical forces. This presented a very difficult situation for the successor civilian regime as the shops had been emptied The experience under the AFRC raised the expectations of the Ghanaian population which could not be met under civilian constitutional rule, conditions which were totally different from the populist military. The situation worked to the advantage of the Rawlings regime as people developed a sort of euphoria for the AFRC days and therefore Rawlings became increasingly popular.
There were a number of groups sympathetic to Rawlings – like June 4 Movement, New Democratic Movement, Movement On National Affairs, Pan African Youth Movement, People’s Revolutionary League of Ghana – the majority of these groups became sympathetic with Rawlings with only the Movement On National Affairs (MONAS) coming out openly against Rawlings. MONAS supported a call for a probe of the AFRC and also stressed the anti-communist statements of the AFRC as well as his attacks on Kwame Nkrumah and support for the overthrow of the Kwame Nkrumah regime. I was close with groups on both sides with some of my closest friends were in MONAS.[4]
You were involved in an initiative of setting up workers committees in the Volta region under the June 4 movement before the 31 December 1981 coup d’etat. Can you give us some personal background to these initiatives and explain what happened and what went wrong?
In August 1981, through a meeting involving the June 4 Movement, Pan African Youth Movement and Kwame Nkrumah Revolutionary Guards with the support of Prof Mawuse Dake a programme of Workers’ Committees was launched under my coordination.[5] These were decision-making and mobilisation committees of workers to raise consciousness and also to work as a group on political issues. These committees were political discussion groups, they organised community and work places , were involved in clean-up activities and also holiday classes for students as well as revision classes for those who had failed school certificate examinations and were resitting.
After the 31 December 1981 coup d’etat, the People’s and Workers Defence Committees were established as organs of popular power. Chris Atim, under whom I worked in the students’ movement, became a member of the ruling Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) and national coordinator of defence committees. He appointed me the Regional Coordinator of the defence committees in the Volta Region. A former editor of the NUGS, Zaya Yeebo, was appointed PNDC Secretary for Youth and Sports, I was also appointed the Regional Political Coordinator of the National Youth Organising Commission. Being responsible for the defence committees and the youth movement made me the main contact with mass organisations in the region.
With the help of the committees, we organised the Defence Committees as units of community and workplace decision making. They helped with the distribution of goods and services. They arranged to get implements for work on farms and equipment for fishers. They were also a forum for political discussion where national and international issues could be raised by ordinary people.
As this involved the political activity of a left-wing nature it was mainly based in bigger urban centres like Accra. Yet I made efforts to get experienced organisers from the capital city of Accra, to assist us in the Volta Region. I requested the release or secondment of cadres from the capital. It was in this respect that I worked with Kofi Gafatsi Normanyo and Kwame Adjimah from the National Secretariat of the Defence Committee in Accra, and the secondment of Austin Asamoa Tutu from his workplace, the Architectural and Engineering Services Company (AESC), to work with our regional secretariat of the Defence Committees.
However, the way we did things was different from how the bureaucracy wanted things to be done – our involvement directly radicalised the government. For example, when there was water shortage in the city, we didn’t see why we should have water where we stayed in student accommodation whilst ordinary people didn’t have water in town. So we opened our university accommodation for the ordinary people to come and draw water from the university. We tried to break down the barriers between ordinary people and political leaders.
Contradictions in the regime and with its support base became intolerable. It turned out that the PNDC Chairman, Rawlings, wanted to have a typical military junta and did not want to see genuine popular organs of power but to have them just as supporters to shore up the military junta. This and other issues led to a total breakdown and misunderstanding within the ruling council on 28 October 1982 and Rawlings felt that he and the two members of the council most active in the defence committees, Chris Atim and Alolga Akata Pore, had to go their separate ways but the exact details were not known to the public, including to organisers like me. After that conflict, Chris Atim addressed a public rally in Ho where I was based.
When there was a coup attempt to overthrow the PNDC on 23 November 1982 which failed, Rawlings took advantage of the situation to frame those he considered to be his enemies. In our naivety, many of us didn’t know that we had been declared enemies. So on 24 November, Rawlings descended on the official residence of the PNDC Secretary for Youth and Sports with a helicopter and a fully armed platoon of soldiers. I was there at the time. He insisted that all of us he found there kneel down in public with guns cocked at our heads. After that, he declared two of our colleagues – Nicholas Atampugre and Taata Ofosu – were under arrest and directed the soldiers to take them away to be detained. Later, on 7 December I was invited to a meeting at the barracks and when I got there I was arrested and told that the Army Commander has directed that Kwame Adjimah and I were to be arrested and detained by the military. With the division in the ruling council, things started taking regional and ethnic lines. My closeness with Chris Atim, who is from the North, was interpreted to mean that I was an obstacle to Rawlings being in control of his home region. It was felt that I had to be removed so that it would be easier for Rawlings to control his own region. This was a tragic ethnic turn by the regime.
At the time many saw Jerry Rawlings together with Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, in the north, as figures committed to radical transformation in Ghana. This was never your position. Can you explain why you took such a stance on Rawlings? How did you characterise him (as opposed to Sankara) at that time and now?
There are substantial differences between Rawlings and Sankara. Sankara was a visionary because he took theoretical study very seriously as a sympathiser of communist groups in Burkina Faso. This is why we can quote Sankara today on issues like third world debt, African self-determination etc. Sankara was also very clear about the anti-imperialist struggle. Rawlings didn’t have the discipline or the theoretical mind of Sankara. When Rawlings was recruited into the Free Africa Movement, he saw such study and discussions as a waste of time and rushed recklessly into an attempted uprising on 15 May 1979 which failed woefully and put the lives of all he was associated with in danger. He was a populist who incited the population without any clear vision of a way out. For those outside Ghana, who didn’t see his weaknesses, recent revelations that he received financial gifts from the corrupt Nigerian military tyrant, Sanni Abacha, expose Rawlings’ opportunist character. Facts which are available today show that Rawlings is an opportunist who had other frustrations with the military authorities. These included his financial problems as a result of spending too much money on drinks and his army book shows his difficulties in passing promotion examinations and even the inability to handle his household responsibilities that senior officers had to intervene in all these matters.
In this short interview recorded in September 2016 for roape.net Explo describes his activism in Ghana in the 1970s and 1980s.
After a very difficult period you travelled to Czechoslovakia in 1984 and then to London in 1989. Can you explain your experiences there? What did it teach you about the communist bloc? What were your impressions, experience of racism etc?
Having fallen out with the Rawlings government in 1982 I was in military detention until a military uprising and jail break on 19 June 1983 in which political detainees from three major prisons in Ghana and various military guard rooms managed to escape. I joined the military uprising and jail break. The military instructed that anybody who saw those of us escaping should shoot us on sight. Some of my comrades were caught and killed but I was able to escape to Togo by the end of June that year.
In 1982, I was awarded a scholarship by the International Union of Students (IUS) to study in Czechoslovakia but I didn’t take up the award. But once in exile, I appealed to the IUS to revive the award and they did. As I never wanted to leave Africa I didn’t even have travelling documents. I had to arrange an emergency Safe Conduct document to join the aeroplane to Czechoslovakia. As the Eastern European countries were sympathetic to the Rawlings regime they were unprepared to grant political asylum to opponents of the Rawlings regime. I lived in Czechoslovakia for one year without residence permit. Through the award, I went to Czechoslovakia in 1984 to study and completed my studies in 1989. I was admitted to a PhD programme but as I wasn’t sure of the post-1989 regime’s support for the IUS, I sought asylum in the UK where a number of my comrades were in exile.
Despite the official declarations and documents, the majority of people in Eastern Europe didn’t feel attached to the socialist governments, certainly not by the 1980s. The ruling class was very unpopular and treated with scorn as well as being totally alienated from the population at large. It had a negative effect on many of the foreign students as well. I was, therefore, not surprised when the experiment collapsed in 1989.
Briefly can you talk about your life in the UK, your political involvement and activism?
In the UK, I have been active in the left movement. Initially, we tried to organise the left opposition to Rawlings from London but the pressures of exile made London the centre for divisions in the Ghanaian Left. In 1991, a group editing the Revolutionary Banner published in the paper that Chris Atim and I were agents of the Rawlings’ regime in exile. as a way of trying to destroy us through a smear campaign. With the collapse of the Ghana left, I participated actively in the general left movement in UK. I was a member of the Stop the War Coalition Steering Committees for 5 years. I contested the Greater London Assembly Elections in 2008 on the left platform – Left List.
How have you maintained your involvement in African politics and movements?
In London, I was the Secretary of the Afrika United Action Front which was a coalition of Pan-Africanist organisations. I was also the coordinator of the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Lectures, the International Campaign to Un-ban Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party, IMF & World Bank Wanted for Fraud Campaign, Campaign Against Proxy War in Africa and the African Liberation Support Campaign Network. I also managed and edited a pan-Africanist journal known as the Kilombo Pan-African Community Journal. Through these roles I networked with others involved in African politics and movements.[6]
What are some of the principle challenges to a radical agenda and politics on the continent? What sort of projects are needed?
Until recently, a lot of the post-colonial world was looking to Latin America as a model to address the issue of neo-colonialism. Recent developments there give us further lessons, the importance of winning over and being rooted in the population at large and knowing that the capitalist class will always be on the offensive to stall efforts at social justice.
In Africa, liberation movements have either not been able to adjust to administering and managing or have been overwhelmed by the reality of the post-colonial state. The left or radical forces seem to have been cast to the margins and even those who were once major forces have become a shadow of their former selves.
I’ll often return to a definition between left and right by Emmanuel Hansen in his analysis of Ghana at the time of the 31 December 1981 coup d’etat where he wrote: “Among progressive groups and individuals there had for some time existed the idea that Ghana’s post-colonial problems were such that only a revolution could change them. What exactly this revolution was to imply has never been precisely articulated. There is, however, a consensus that it involves termination of the control of the local economy by foreign multinational companies, changes in the structure of production and production relations, changes in the class structure of control of the state, creation of political forms which would make the interests of the broad masses of people predominant and realisable and a programme which would initiate a process of improving the material conditions of the mass of the people. Those who broadly shared this position I would identify as belonging to the left. Those who entertained the opposite position that there was nothing basically wrong with the nature of the country’s structure of production or production relations or the nature of economic relations with Western capitalist countries or the structure of power, class relations or the nature of state power, and that only certain aspects of its functioning needed to be reformed. I would identify as the right.” I think Hansen is correct and I have long seen myself as being part of the ‘left’ in this definition.
Can you explain, through the long period of exile and hardships you faced in Ghana, Czechoslovakia and UK – witnessing as you did the murder of comrades – how you managed to survive? What forces in your life keep you going?
My father was imprisoned by the PNDC and my mother had traveled to the Republic of Togo when the PNDC took over with my younger siblings. In these difficulties I put the commitment to the cause above personal pain and I have never lost that internal driving force. When I fled into exile, my mother was with me, and when she was returning to Ghana, she told me that if she was arrested as a tactic of the regime to lure me back to Ghana, that I should never return and that she was prepared to die. My family’s support has strengthened me. My comrades who have been murdered haven’t done anything that I have not done, I was supposed to die with them. I think the only tribute I can pay to them is to continue on the path we were on before they were murdered. The other thing that keeps me going materially and psychologically is the unlimited generosity I have had from a number of compatriots. In addition to this, is the recognition I receive from comrades for my contribution to the development of the broad left In Ghana. All these strengthen my commitment.
Explo Nani-Kofi was born in Ghana where he started his activist as a socialist organizer for popular democracy. He coordinated the Campaign Against Proxy War in Africa and the IMF-World Bank Wanted For Fraud Campaign. He is Director of the Kilombo Centre for Civil Society and African Self-Determination, in Peki, Ghana and London, UK.
Notes
[1] Chris Bukari Atim later became co-plotter with J. J. Rawlings in the 31 December 1981 coup in Ghana and also a leading member of the ruling Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC).
[2] This party was banned and prevented from contesting the General Elections in 1969.
[3] These groups included the African Youth Brigade, African Youth Command, June 4 Movement, Kwame Nkrumah Revolutionary Guards, Kwame Nkrumah Youth League (formerly part of the People’s National Party Youth League), Movement On National Affairs, New Democratic Movement, Pan African Youth Movement, People’s Revolutionary League of Ghana, Socialist Revolutionary League of Ghana, Students Movement for African Unity each had an orientation close to Kwame Nkrumah’s vision.
[4] My closest friend and comrade was Kwasi Agbley and was the International Affairs Spokesman of MONAS and was arrested when the PNDC came into office and was imprisoned in the military detention cells and later the Nsawam Medium Security Prisons, the most notorious prison in Ghana for almost two years. We were both students of Mahama Bawa, who was the Secretary for the State Commission for Economic Cooperation under the PNDC. When the Left came into conflict with Rawlings, our teacher, Bawa, was in the Castle military detention cell and I was in military detention.
[5] Mawuse Dake was a progressive politician who was a Vice Presidential candidate of a political party in general elections in Ghana in 1979 called the Social Democratic Front (SDF) and became a minister in the PNDC regime but like most left-wing activists fell out with Rawlings.
[6] Most literature on the history of the left ignore the 1930s when the trade union movement started and the Communist International sponsored Negro Worker publication. During the period the West African Youth League led by I. T. A. Wallace Johnson emerged linked with the Communist International. Some UK based Ghanaians also joined the Socialist Party of Great Britain and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). It is difficult to say whether those involved became integrated with the CPP but there is evidence that some of the activists in the trade unions fell out with the CPP between 1952 and 1954.
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 AfricanPolitical 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.
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.”
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-Teclehas 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
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).
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.
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 20th 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.
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.
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.
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.
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