Climate Emergency in Africa – Mozambique & COP28

November 28, 2023

As COP28 draws near, Aisse Feldheim and Emilinah Namaganda reflect on how Mozambique – which holds the third largest natural gas reserves in Africa – negotiated its interests at COP27 in Egypt last year. There is ever-growing controversy at the COP meetings around the role of natural gas in the global energy transition. While some pre-existing alliances were fracturing, Mozambique has forged new alliances in its pursuit for continued extraction of natural gas.

By Aisse Feldheim and Emilinah Namaganda

The annual United Nations Conference of Parties on Climate Change (COP) is the leading global forum for multilateral discussion of the climate change problem and potential solutions. At the twenty-seventh COP which was held in November 2022 in Sharm el-Sheik in Egypt, the role of natural gas in the global energy transition was one of the key issues discussed. Various scholars, non-government organisations, and some governments asserted that an urgent transition from fossil fuels, like natural gas, to renewable energy sources is critical for countries to mitigate climate change and its consequences. However, gas-rich African countries like Mozambique which also grapple with energy poverty and limited industrialisation were ambivalent about a rapid transition. In this blogpost, we use the case of Mozambique to explore how these gas-rich countries are negotiating their multifaceted interests to tackle energy poverty, advance industrialisation, and respond to climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Mozambique’s complicated interest in gas

Between 2010 and 2013, massive volumes of natural gas, amounting more than 180 trillion cubic feet were discovered in Mozambique. The country, located in the south eastern part of Africa, grapples with broadscale energy poverty, low levels of industrialisation, and low national income. To illustrate, only 20 per cent of the population in Cabo Delgado, the north eastern province where the gas reserves are located, has access to electricity. Hence, both the government and the citizenry anticipated the massive gas discoveries to alleviate the limited access to clean energy in Cabo Delgado, and other existing socio-economic challenges in the province and Mozambique at large. Indeed, in the years following the discoveries in Cabo Delgado, the granting of gas extraction licenses and the implementation of capital gains taxes increased government revenue. The government announced plans to invest this income in long-term economic diversification and enhanced provision of public services. In fact, it used the Mozambique gas development project to showcase its progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

**Mozambique located in south eastern Africa, and Cabo Delgado Province (specially Palma District) in the country’s northern region which host the largest natural gas reserves.**

However, Mozambique’s vision of gas-fuelled development has been complicated by the vested interests of some national elites who seek to secure private and political benefits from the gas revenue windfalls. According to José Jaime Macuane‘s analysis, the historical and current distribution of power within the country’s political system is contingent upon access to financial resources among competing ruling factions. As a result, Macuane suggests that the ruling political party FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front) is inclined to prioritize short-term economic gains from gas extraction projects over long term economic development. This can be observed, for example, in the favourable contractual conditions – such as exemptions from tax payments – which are granted to the consortia of multinational corporations which are developing the gas project (including Total, ENI, and ExxonMobil).

Furthermore, in Cabo Delgado, natural gas has not yet facilitated transformative change. First, the liquefied natural gas (LNG) is principally developed for export with limited linkages to the local economy. Second, construction of onshore LNG infrastructure has been accompanied by a contested displacement process in which over 10.000 people lost their homes and livelihoods. Scholars argue that the recent insurrection in Cabo Delgado, which by October 2022 had led to approximately 4000 deaths and more than one million people displaced, was partly fuelled by population discontent over the distribution of actual and potential benefits from natural gas and other resource extraction in the province. In March 2021, a combination of the insurrection and the Covid-19 pandemic led to suspension of onshore gas development. Hence, the socio-economic and political implications of gas development complicate Mozambique’s interest to extract the resource.

Another issue which complicates gas development in the country are the impacts and the solutions to the climate emergency. In terms of fatalities and economic losses from climate change-related impacts, Mozambique is among the most severely affected countries. In 2019, the devastating cyclones Idai and Kenneth resulted in the deaths of more than 700 people and the destruction of 240,000 houses across the country. Mozambique is expected to face increased extreme weather events such as cyclones, floods, droughts, and more frequent heatwaves in the future under business-as-usual scenarios where global fossil fuel combustion continues unmitigated. For this reason, despite meagre contribution to the climate change problem, some national and foreign activists propose that the country should not contribute to continued fossil fuel development by extracting its gas resources. Such debates worldwide around an urgent energy transition may also make it challenging for the country to attract and maintain financing for its gas development projects.

In sum, the interest to tackle energy poverty, advance industrialisation, and respond to climate change mitigation and adaptation make gas development in Mozambique a complicated endeavour, a predicament shared with other gas-rich African countries such as Nigeria. Hence, during COP27, the promotion of gas-fuelled development by Mozambique and other African governments emerged as a prominent theme.

Extraction of Fossil fuels

Mozambique participated at COP27 with 115 delegates led by president Filipe Nyusi. The country’s dual interests to extract natural gas for its socio-economic and political needs, but also to adapt to the changing climate and related impacts, were evident in some of the key negotiation groups through which its interests were articulated at the conference. The Group of 77 (G77) plus China and the African Group of Negotiators (AGN) are insightful examples.

Mozambique is a member of the G77+China which now comprises 135 members and is the largest coalition in climate change negotiations. The group was founded in 1964 and includes almost all low- and middle-income countries, plus China. Member states like Mozambique and subgroups, such as the Arab nations, advocate for a different configuration of the energy transition in the developing world, which constitutes further utilisation of fossil fuels for economic development in the short to medium-term. This argument is based on the principle of “Common but Differentiated Responsibility” (CBDR) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The principle states that countries’ mitigation efforts should reflect their different responsibilities for greenhouse gas emissions and their varying economic capabilities to reduce them. It remains relevant to understanding the political position of the Mozambican government and other fossil fuel-rich African nations to continue utilising fossil fuels for their development, given their historically and currently low contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and their limited financial capacity to invest in mitigation efforts.

During the conference, at a plenary session titled “Mozambique in the Driving Seat of Southern Africa Energy Transition”, the Mozambican president and the president of the African Development Bank (AFDB) asserted the vital role of natural gas in Africa’s energy transition. The AfDB and the African Union (AU) generally supported the position of Mozambique and other fossil fuel-rich African countries to utilise their resources for economic development. Shortly before COP27, the AU published a “Common Position on Energy Access and Just Energy Transition”. The body emphasised the goal to utilise both “renewable and non-renewable energy” resources to address the persistent energy poverty and socio-economic challenges on the continent. In brief, backed by these continental African bodies, Mozambique’s position on natural gas exploitation echoed that of some G77+China sub-groups like the Arab States.

However, there were other sub-groups such as the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), specifically members like Vanuatu and Tuvalu, which argued against continued gas development through other alliances such as the “Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance“. These countries contended that continued gas development would lock many countries in a high carbon pathway, exacerbating global climate change. Therefore, the G77 did not articulate a common position on the energy transition or the extraction of natural gas. This is not surprising considering the vast and heterogenous character of the negotiation group. Even the Group of African Negotiators (AGN) did not adopt continued gas development as their negotiation stance.

Although continental African bodies such as the AfDB and the AU can contribute to the discussions at the COP, they participate as observer organisations. The shared position of African countries in climate change negotiations is articulated by the AGN, which was established in 1995, and is a sub-group of the G77+China. The AGN focused on negotiations around adaptation and climate finance as a less controversial and potentially more successful stance for COP27. This stance aligned with the more-shared interest within the G77+China to demand for financing from industrialised countries which have historically contributed the most to greenhouse gas emissions, to support low-income countries which are now most vulnerable to climate change-related hazards (see related discussions on the loss and damage fund). Considering the AGN’s position together with that of Mozambique and the AU on natural gas clarifies the predicament of fossil fuel-rich African countries to balance their development ambitions with climate change adaptation and mitigation initiatives. Indeed, although promoting the role of natural gas for development was a visible COP27 objective for Mozambique, president Nyusi also underscored the “search for funding for climate and energy innovation agendas” as a critical goal for his government at the conference. Hence, Mozambique utilised established, albeit fractured, alliances such as the G77+China and the AGN to bargain for its multifaceted interests to tackle energy poverty, pursue economic development, and adapt to climate change. The country also sought new alliances to further these interests, particularly the more contested one of continued natural gas exploitation.

Natural gas as a global bridge fuel

One of Mozambique’s new alliances to further gas extraction is the “Gas Exporting Countries Forum” (GECF), which the country joined in 2022. Founded in 2001, GECF constitutes large gas-producing countries worldwide, such as Russia and Qatar, and advocates for the continued importance of natural gas for sustainable development. Before COP27, the group postulated natural gas as the “perfect solution” for achieving the triple goals of energy security, affordability, and sustainability. The GECF is not directly involved in the COP. However, the group identifies the COP as a “great opportunity to make a case for gas in the energy transition”, and its members have voiced this position in the conference for many years. For instance, many Arab states which promote further use of fossil fuels in developing nations are also members of the GECF. What makes this alliance particularly relevant at the previous and forthcoming COP28 is the overlap between the COP presidency and its members; Egypt (COP27) and the United Arab Emirates (COP 28). This overlap makes the pro-gas position more salient, albeit with matching contestation.

Moreover, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Europe’s search for new gas suppliers, natural gas in and beyond the GECF countries has attracted broader interest from governments worldwide and less opposition at the COP. The first shipment of LNG from Mozambique’s Eni-operated offshore gas fields set course for Europe during the final discussion in Sharm el Sheikh. Furthermore, a range of bilateral and private investment agreements for natural gas extraction in African countries like Egypt and Tanzania, for export to international markets were also made during the conference. In the end, the final resolution of COP27 focused on the phase out of coal energy and did not mention other fossil fuels, like natural gas. Rather, unclearly defined “low-emission energy” was proposed as the way forward, a vagueness which is open to further utilisation of gas. Therefore, gas-rich countries like Mozambique may be able to forge new alliances to facilitate their exploitation of the resource.

Turning the gaze to COP 28

Despite the omnipresent impacts of the climate crisis and the growing opposition to continued fossil fuel extraction by environmental advocates, the need for electrification and industrialization remains critical in resource-rich African nations, setting the stage for fierce debates at the COP28 on the role of natural gas in the energy transition. The persistence of the Russia-Ukraine war and Europe’s search for alternative sources of natural gas also implies that fossil fuel-poor countries may also be torn on the question of continued natural gas extraction. Gas development in Africa remains subjugated to worldwide energy needs, hence these geopolitical dynamics significantly influence development of the resource on the continent. Among actors from gas-rich African countries like Mozambique, the contradiction between the export-oriented nature of gas extraction, led by multinational corporations and national elites, and the socio-economic realities in producing areas such as Cabo Delgado will continue to be a source of divided opinions.

Given the fact that COP28 will be held in another GECF country and will be headed by a former employee of the natural gas sector, the relevance of gas as a bridge fuel for the global energy transition will remain central to the COP discussion. Therefore, it remains important to keep track of how negotiating groups such as the G77+China will position themselves on this matter, considering the increasingly diverging positions of their member countries in this regard. A key question is: along what lines might new alliances form? And what will be the social, economic, political, and environmental implications of pre-existing and new alliances for natural gas development in fossil-fuel rich African countries like Mozambique?

Climate policy and fossil fuel-rich African nations

By examining the case of Mozambique, this blogpost reflected on the complex aspirations that surround the extraction of natural gas from Africa amid the climate crisis. On one hand, gas-rich African countries seek to utilise the resource to address persisting energy poverty, low industrialisation, and other socio-economic challenges on the continent. However, existing cases of natural gas development in Mozambique and other African countries have not contributed significantly to such aims. Gas development has rather been focused on exports, with massive benefits to the extracting multinationals and some national elites, and less benefits to national economies and the communities in the resource-rich areas like Cabo Delgado. In the backdrop of these political-economic dynamics, it is unlikely that future (or continued) development of the resource will substantially improve the socio-economic situations in the countries and especially in the resource-bearing regions. Therefore, within the gas-rich countries, governments will need to convince the civil society – some of whom are increasingly contesting gas development – that different socio-economic outcomes can be envisioned.

On the other hand, gas-rich African countries like Mozambique are especially vulnerable to climate change-related hazards and seek to contribute to climate change adaptation and mitigation. Therefore, the countries are keen to attract finance for relevant initiatives such as the construction of resilient infrastructure in the communities which are prone to cyclones. As a result, during their engagements in climate policy forums like the COPs, the countries seek to balance their multifaceted interests to pursue natural gas exploitation and to respond to the climate change problem. By reflecting on some of the pre-existing (e.g., the G77+China and the AGN) and new (e.g., the GECF) alliances through which Mozambique articulated its interests at COP27, we see the complexity facing fossil-fuel rich African countries to navigate economic development, political interests, and global decarbonization ambitions.

Aisse Feldheim is pursuing his Master’s in Sustainable Development, with a focus on International Development Studies, at Utrecht University. As a research assistant for the InFront-project, he delves into the complex interconnections between the burgeoning natural gas frontier in Cabo Delgado and global climate governance.

Emilinah Namaganda is a PhD Candidate in the International Development Studies group of the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She researches on the socio-economic, environmental, and governance implications of an expanding frontier of energy transition-related resource extractivism in Mozambique.

Featured photograph: President Filipe Nyusi and AfDB president, Akinwumi Adesina, at COP27 on Mozambique’s role in the Southern Africa Energy Transition.

Capitalism, war and plunder in the Horn of Africa

ROAPE

November 23, 2023

Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton write about the spectacular growth in livestock exports from the Horn of Africa to the urbanising Gulf states, and argue that neoliberalism has transformed the former reciprocity between ‘farmers’ and ‘herders’ into a relation of permanent war. Based on their article in ROAPE – freely available to read below – they argue that the crisis in the Horn is rooted in how the wealth of its peoples is being internationally plundered.

By Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton

As civil war rages in Sudan, arrangements for December’s COP28 meeting in Dubai have gathered momentum. If there is a link between these events, it is not climate change. More to the point, prior to the Covid pandemic, Sudan and Somalia were together supplying 90% of the animal protein consumed in the otherwise chronically food-insecure Gulf States. While undoubtedly an underestimate, at its peak this export trade was worth $1.4 billion a year. A remarkable economic feat for two poor, war-devastated countries. Indeed, since the 1970s, Horn livestock exports, predominantly sheep, have increased in concert with the rapid urbanisation of the Gulf. These trade figures, however, belie a deepening crisis among Sudan and Somalia’s agro-pastoral communities. Concealed behind the data is the spread of what can be called ‘militarised ranching’ in these countries. Through this practice, a violent transnational extractive economy links the Horn and the Gulf States. The phantasmagorial fossil-urbanisation of the latter has been at the expense of a widening cycle of destructive immiseration in the former. A toxic embrace that looks set to deepen.

There are many reasons why the social and ecological devastation underlying the livestock trade remains hidden. In liberalism’s parallel universe there is a predilection, albeit selective, to interpret raw violence in terms of its transgression of human rights and the creation of humanitarian disasters. Violence is understood in terms of its moral and social effects. For example, as creating dilemmas and moral challenges that typically foreground practical and political issues relating to rights, humanitarian need and the responsibility to protect. This view tends to conceal that, for capitalism, war and warlike violence is an active and essential economic relation. Since the 1970s, the Horn of Africa has been gripped by end-to-end extractive civil wars. The liberal default presents this permanent war as a series of essentially ‘natural’ humanitarian disasters. The violent de-development of first Somalia, and now Sudan, are without question unalloyed tragedies. The liberal default, however, obscures the active process behind the rising livestock exports and the deepening chaos, displacement and human suffering we witness.

Primarily involving sheep, militarised ranching is a social and environmentally destructive mode of production. It is necessarily expansive, land-hungry, livelihood destroying and population displacing. Sustained violence, livestock exports have attracted little outside attention despite being at the core of the Horn’s political economy. In a region once dominated by agro-pastoral subsistence economies, changes in the ownership, rearing and export of livestock reaches down into the social bedrock. Violent land clearances, livestock theft and armed grazing have devastated life-chances over vast swathes of territory to a greater extent than any other form of commodification. These changes embody the terror of the Gulf’s expanding food frontier and the human tragedy of not only Somalia and Sudan, but conjecturally, a growing number of contiguous countries as well.

The old agro-pastoral economies of Somalia and Sudan can, at the risk of simplification, be heuristically divided into mobile ‘herders’ and sedentary ‘farmers’. Historically, the long-distance seasonal transhumance of herders was negotiated with farmers to maximise use of crop residues and allow for the barter and sale of livestock, milk, crops, handicrafts and services between these groups. While friction could develop when, for example, animals strayed into fields or livestock were stolen, there were compensatory processes to maintain a mutually beneficial system of exchange between sedentary and semi-nomadic communities. Indeed, such reciprocity lay at the heart of rural self-sufficiency.

During the last decades of the twentieth-century, the shift from subsistence to commercial modes of production among farmers and herders was intensifying conflicts over water and land as desertification drove herders further south. While often characterised as ‘Bantu versus Somali’ or ‘African versus Arab’ in the case of Sudan, these increasingly heavily armed exchanges were in reality two historically complementary modes of rural self-reliance being confronted with the emergence of fossil capitals’ inexorable demand for meat in the post-1973 urbanisation, construction and population explosions in the Gulf States. Booming economies that opened new opportunities for livestock traders and their military patrons, fixers and owners of the major ports along the Red Sea coast.

By the 1980s, the monetisation of the economy, together with the decay of collective forms of agricultural production, had propelled the agronomic practices of small farmers into a period of change and intensification. Especially, into ecologically unsustainable time and labour-saving practices. For example, shortened rotations, increased mono-cropping and water table depleting irrigation. Among herders, similar monetising pressures were compounded by the loss of rangeland and water rights due to the spread of mechanised agriculture schemes and, in places, the settlement of river banks by farmers. Similar to the intensification of subsistence farming, there was a compensatory shift from ecologically balanced livestock management towards more commercial, that is, export-oriented, forms of herd composition. That is, a growing focus on relatively fast maturing sheep.

In Somalia and Sudan, there is a long history of denying ‘Bantu’ and ‘African’ farmers respectively any civil or political rights. The deepening social civil war in both countries has thrown up competing ownership claims, exclusionary practices and even assertions of race superiority. For the winners, those being dispossessed, displaced and killed are newcomers, interlopers or apostates that have no rights anyway. The resulting de-development has created a modern living-hell where life can hardly become cheaper, more disposable or further exposed to new forms of bondage and slavery.

By the time of the NGO invasion of the Horn in the mid-1980s, a neoliberal mode of primitive accumulation had emerged. Having much wider implications, the inner secret of this hyper-destructive form of accumulation was to transform the earlier reciprocity between farmers and herders into a relation of permanent war. A social civil war which humanitarians have self-servingly normalised as an inevitable outcome of scarcity, ignorance and environmental stress.

Based on the principle of buying cheap and selling dear, there is an historical affinity between merchant capital and raw violence. Merchants extract tradable wealth at the lowest possible cost. Unchecked, this can include theft, extortion and bribery. In the Horn, military and militia violence has been the main means of inducing and shaping the social civil war between farmers and herders into a lethal extractive economy. It is no accident that, time and again, imperial powers have legitimised what are little more than armed gangsters when seeking to negotiate ‘peace’ or ‘reconstruct’ a so-called failed state. In terms of maintaining the Gulf’s violent food frontier, they are hand in glove.

Separated by a decade or so, the social civil war in Somalia and the protracted genocide in Darfur marked the consolidation of a new militarised mechanism for acquiring, herding and grazing livestock, especially sheep. Initially conducted through camel and horse mounted militias from the respective marginalised herders of both countries, this violence quickly converted profits from selling on animals stolen from politically disqualified farmers, into fleets of motorbikes and Toyota ‘technicals,’ that is, pick-ups mounted with heavy machine guns, to facilitate rapid and far-reaching land clearances. These bloody clearances have freed up the land and mechanised borehole water supplies that have facilitated the expansion of coercive sheep ranching.

Over the last three or four decades, besides helping sustain the urbanisation of the Gulf, militarised ranching has created millions of displaced and permanently dispossessed people. Apart from swelling the burgeoning ranks of the migrant-dependent international shadow and gig economies, those remaining struggle to survive through non-remunerative agricultural labour, the informal urban economy, sporadic NGO electronic-transfers of token (non-dependency creating) amounts of cash and occasional in-kind handouts during periods of officially declared ‘drought’ and ‘famine’. Many are housed in internationally financed but ill-protected IDP and refugee camps. As the respective experience of banana and gum Arabic production in Somalia and Sudan suggests, these centres of concentration are better understood as bonded-labour camps.

Rather than underdevelopment, mindless kleptocrats or climate change, the crisis in the Horn of Africa is rooted in how the wealth of its peoples is being internationally plundered. Unfortunately, this crisis looks set to deepen. As Sudan fragments, any checks on a violent transnational mercantilism that a unitary state may have afforded have disappeared. At the same time, the Gulf is embarking on a new round of fossil-urbanisation. At the end of the day, people still need to be fed.

For the authors’ full dataset please click here.

Mark Duffield works on the political philosophy of permanent emergency, including, the datafication of the current global crisis, the expansion of remote management systems and the growing antagonism between ‘connectivity’ and ‘circulation’. Nicholas Stockton describes himself as a recovering aid worker, now in semi-retirement.

Featured Photograph: Livestock export in Berbera, Somaliland (Axmed Siciid Maxamed, 8 September 2021).

Why Palestine is a feminist and an anti-colonial issue

ROAPE

November 21, 2023

Rama Salla Dieng explains that the current genocide in Palestine is a feminist and reproductive justice issue. The ultimate goal of Israel – and the Western powers that support this settler colonial and Apartheid state – is to render impossible the social and societal reproduction of Palestinians, and eventually to lead them to their physical death.

By Rama Salla Dieng

I am writing this short commentary to bear witness of the ethnic cleansing that is going on since 7 October. As I write this short text, over 13000 including 5000 children have been killed by Israel in Palestine (Gaza and the West Bank), many thousand people are missing under the rubbles and as many have been displaced from their homes. Twelve-hundred people have been reported to have been killed in Israel by Hamas, and over 200 people have been abducted by Hamas.

It is important to historicise the current genocide which many observers and Palestinians themselves have called the second Nakba. The People of Palestine have survived and continuously resisted seven decades of occupation and violations of their basic rights. Their genocide has taken many forms: occupation, waves of land and sea grabs, dispossession, expropriation, displacement, assassinations, sexual violence. The genocide we are witnessing did not start today. This violence has been going on for 41 days…and 75 years. And it has continued because of the many green lights, or lack of reactions to the countless acts of violence that the Israeli apartheid state has inflicted for decades. But most importantly, the spree of violence started with hate speeches and with the slow and insidious dehumanisation of Palestinians through the routinisation of their deaths. A social death. Countless, faceless scores of fatalities, wounded, jailed, and displaced civilians have over the decades been buried under seconds-long reporting at the radio or on TV, paragraph-long accounting of loss of lives in newspapers.

If we have learnt one thing from the genocide in Rwanda, it is that every genocide, every project of ethnic cleansing starts with the dehumanisation of the target social groups. Social death is the first step to a group’s physical annihilation. The concept of ‘social death’ was first coined by Horace Orlando Patterson in 1985, and it is no coincidence that Patterson’s book is a comparative study of Slavery and Social Death. Nine years after that book, the Rwanda genocide took place, but it did not start in 1994, it started long before, when the Belgian colonisers started measuring skulls and ethnicising them, and later when the Hutu-dominated government started by calling the target Tutsi groups ‘Inyenzi’ or ‘cockroaches’ to signify that they lacked humanity, that they believed them not to be worthy of life. Later, after reading Gilbert Gatore’s The Past Ahead, Jean Hatzfeld’s Season of Machetes, Boubacar Boris Diop’ s Murambi, the Book of Bones and Scholastique Mukasonga’s Cockroaches, we promised with the International Tribunal Court for Rwanda, and the Gacaca courts that ‘never again’, would we let such atrocities be committed, at least ‘not in our names’.

But I want us to understand that what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank of Palestine is (and always was) the next step by the Israeli state in the project of murder of Palestinians. It is but the next step of a carefully planned and executed land and sea grab by social death under the cover of the right of self-defence. When has self-defence ever meant the systematic ethnic cleansing of civilians? When has one group’s right to existence meant a death sentence for another social group?

I want us to be clear on the fact that the current militarised genocide is a political issue, is a feminist issue, is a reproductive justice issue, is an economic issue, is an environmental justice issue, is an agrarian justice issue, is an ethical issue, is a sovereignty issue.

It is a war on Palestine’s societal and social reproduction.

In a 2011 article, SOAS feminist political economist Shirin Rai and her co-authors describe such condition of loss, without any future plan for replenishment that might remedy it as Social Reproduction through Depletion. The use of forbidden and brutal weapons of mass destruction, including white phosphorus on civilianpopulations, the destruction of hospitals and vital infrastructures such as roads, water tanks, electricity, and means of transportation, the pollution of natural resources, and livestock and the poisoning of crops is a clear indication of the intent to dispossess permanently Palestinians across age, religion, and class status of their means of production.

The objective of the settler colonial state of Israel is clear: it is the depletion of those engaged in social reproduction through starving the labour force to prevent them from meeting their necessary calorie intake, through burning social infrastructures so their basic needs for food and energy, housing, health and safety, hygiene (including sanitary pads for women and girls, and care services for the sick and the pregnant), are unmet. The objective is also carried out through destroying and poisoning nature, through destroying universities and mosques and places of community assembly. Israel is attempting to kill the Palestinian spirit and hijack the reproduction of their social cultural capital – Palestinians are reputed to be the World’s most ‘educated refugees’.

The ultimate goal of Israel – and the Western powers that support this settler colonial and Apartheid state – is to render impossible the social and societal reproduction of Palestinians, and eventually to lead them to their physical death. This is but one of the many faces of fascism and racist, settler colonialist capitalism. We must neither be silent nor think it is happening in a remote faraway land. At the same time, we are calling for an absolute ceasefire, the return of Israeli hostages, we should also seek reparations for the loss of lives and damage to nature as well as a complete reform of the current international governance architecture. We cannot trust our future to powers we don’t trust as they have shown us whose interests they represent, and whose lives matter to them.

What Israel is committing in Palestine should be a wake-up call to all the countries in the Global South and across the world. What is happening to Palestine, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, will determine our common future, the fruits of our anti-colonial struggles, and our ultimate sovereignty.

Therefore, I would like to conclude by sharing this powerful message in the form of a tweet from Issa Shijvi on 1 November 2023:

Voices of the world

Say it loud

Say it clear

‘We shan’t tolerate

Another genocide on our planet

There’re no ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’

There’s no balance between genocidaires & victims

There is no equivalence between Occupiers and occupied.

Ceasefire immediately

End settler colonialism!’

Rama Salla Dieng is a Senegalese writer, academic and activist. She is currently a Lecturer in African and International Development at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh. Rama is also a feminist activist who has collaborated with several feminist organisations on agrarian change, gender and development, and social reproduction. Rama has written this text in a personal capacity.

Featured Photograph: Protest for the Palestinians of Gaza against the brutal attack by Israel in January 2009, Melbourne (John Englart, 18 January 2009).

Some important texts and petitions:

All Out for Palestine Toolkit

Palestinian BDS Committee Boycott list

Agrarian South Network

Collective of Agrarian Scholar Activists from the South

African Feminisms

South Feminist Futures

A Collective Statement Calling on the University of Edinburgh to Protect Speech on Palestine, Address the Intimidation on Campus, and Cut University Links to Violence.

The three-stage process through which African resource sovereignty was ceded to foreign mining corporations

ROAPE

November 16, 2023

In the 1960s, newly independent African governments asserted sovereignty over their metal and mineral resources, in a reversal of their prior colonial exploitation by European mining corporations. In this excerpt from his new book Disrupted Development in the Congo: The Fragile Foundations of the African Mining Consensus, Ben Radley shows how transnational corporations have once again become the dominant force assuming ownership and management of industrial mining projects. Radley argues this latest reversal has taken place through a three-stage process grounded in a misguided reading of African economic stagnation from the mid-1970s onwards. Recent mining code revisions in several countries have been heralded by some as marking a new era of resource nationalism. Yet the new codes remain a far cry from the earlier period of resource sovereignty. The first three chapters of the book can be downloaded for free here.

Stage one: Blame the African state

The first wave of political independence in Africa, beginning in the mid-1950s, ushered in a period of resource sovereignty, including the pursuit of African socialism in several countries. This was based on the recognition that during the colonial period, Africa’s natural resources had been exploited by European mining corporations to the benefit of the colonizing countries. For these resources to serve the interest of African countries, economies, and peoples, it was held that external control and ownership had to be reduced. Buoyed by the long commodity boom of the 1950s, and the spirit of events such as the 1955 Bandung Conference and the 1958 All African People’s Conference, there was a general commitment by newly independent African governments to wrest the control and management of their natural resource wealth back from the hands of their former colonizers.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the first step was taken under the presidency of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu with the Bakajika Law of June 1966. This law was an explicit attack on the contentious 1960 Belgian law giving colonial Congolese corporations Belgian nationality just a few weeks before Independence. It required all foreign-based companies whose main activities were in the DRC to establish their headquarters in the DRC by the end of the year.

The government failed to reach an agreement on the nationality of the largest, Belgian-owned colonial mining subsidiary, Union minière de Haut Katanga. So, on 31 December 1966, the Mobutu administration announced its decision to expropriate the firm and transfer its assets to a new company, Société générale Congolaise des minerais (Gécamines), which was to eventually become 100 per cent state-owned. The policy of increasing state participation in the productive economy continued in other sectors. By 1970, the Congolese public sector controlled 40 per cent of national value added.

Efforts elsewhere were similarly ambitious, such as Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambian-led initiative of the Intergovernmental Council of Copper Exporting Countries (CIPEC) and Julius Nyerere’s nationalist ban on extractives, ‘aimed at keeping resources in the soil until the nation could develop the productive forces to manage extractives for national development’. Early results were impressive. In the DRC and Zambia, copper production increased steadily between 1960 and 1974—across the inaugural years of CIPEC—from around 300,000 to 500,000 tonnes and 500,000 to 700,000 tonnes, respectively.

In the DRC, greater sovereign control of value added contributed to a tripling of state revenue from $190 million in 1967 to $630 million in 1970, based in part on a 50 percent profit tax in the mining sector. A national health system numbering 500,000 employees was established, seen as a model for primary health care in the global South. The education system was nationalized, achieving 92 per cent primary school enrolment and increased access to the secondary and tertiary sectors.

The period culminated in May 1974 with the United Nations adoption of a Declaration and Programme of Action on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order. This declaration and programme ‘set out principles for equality between nations, including sovereignty over natural resources and an equitable relationship between the producers and consumers of raw materials’. Rather than usher in a new international economic order, however, the period during which this declaration was signed was to prove a stark reminder of the solidity of the old order.

The declaration was inaugurated at a time when the oil price was beginning to rise and demand for African exports beginning to diminish due to recession in the global North, leading to a decrease in commodity prices. In the DRC and Zambia, the copper price crashed from $1.40 per pound in April 1974 to $0.53 per pound in early 1975 and stagnated thereafter. Around the same time, from 1973 to 1977, the cost of oil imports quadrupled. Coupled with rising inflation globally during this period, the effect of these price shifts on government revenue would have been even greater in real terms. In addition, as African government loan repayments became due, interest rates on the loans began to rise as the United States sought to control inflation through monetary policy.

Previously rising mining production levels stagnated or dropped, growth slowed, and debt grew across the continent, reducing the foreign exchange available to purchase the imports needed to further industrialization. Between 1980 and 1988, 25 African countries rescheduled their debts 105 times. In the DRC, copper and cobalt exports decreased sharply, eventually collapsing by the early 1990s.

Of course, external shocks were not the sole cause of the reversal. Internal dynamics had a critical role to play. In the DRC, external shocks unmasked the failures and limitations of Mobutu’s nation state-building project. Nationalization measures undertaken in 1973 and 1974 to provide an emerging politico-commercial class of senior state bureaucrats with access to productive capital—known as Zairianization—were poorly planned and implemented and went badly awry. Agriculture had been neglected, receiving less than 1 per cent of state expenditure from 1968 to 1972, and the Congolese manufacturing sector was in decline.

Yet, a consideration of the impact of external shocks, alongside recognition of the progress made by newly independent African governments in the short time frame up until this juncture, was largely missing from influential analyses of the 1980s seeking to understand the causes of African economic stagnation from the mid-1970s onwards.

Instead, misguided African state intervention and government corruption were put forward as primary causal explanations, to the exclusion of other factors. Championed largely by Africanists based in North American universities (such as Robert Bates and Eliot Berg, the latter the author of the World Bank’s 1981 report Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Plan for Action), this line of thinking was immediately embraced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

The main entrance to the former social club of Société minière des Grands Lacs, a Belgian mining firm that operated in eastern DRC from 1923 to 1976. Copyright Ben Radley, 2017.

In the DRC, World Bank reports from the 1980s show how ingrained this view was at the time. In one, the Bank argued that the country’s economic decline was due to ‘a long series of inadequate economic and financial decisions. Nothing in the past decade has had a more lasting and devastating effect on the economy than the Zairianization and Nationalization measures of 1973 and 1974.’

There is no doubting that the ill-conceived nationalization policies of the 1970s held a share of the responsibility for the DRC’s economic difficulties during this period. Yet, such factors ought to be weighed in consideration with the impact of external shocks— which began for the DRC with the copper price crash in 1974—and the achievements made by the Mobutu administration up until this point. Such a weighting exercise is absent from both reports.

Offering a regional perspective, the seminal work of Mkandawire and Soludo on the causes of the mid-1970s decline in African economic performance is worth citing at length:

Our intention here is not to rationalize, let alone ignore the infamous mismanagement of economies by African governments. Rather, the point is to emphasize that successful adjustment will be elusive unless Africaʼs vulnerability to external factors is recognised. Such a recognition will serve in rethinking the form and content of Africaʼs structural transformation. Failure to account for such factors, even as one corrects for internal policy errors, can frustrate attempts at change and condemn them to involuntary reversal.

By downplaying the external and foregrounding the internal, the result is an analysis and diagnosis that lays the blame firmly on the state management and ownership structures underpinning national developmentalist ambitions in the 1960s and early 1970s, to the exclusion of external shocks and trends in the global economy.

With governments across the global South in debt distress, and with little or no access to international capital markets during this period, the IMF and the Bank grew significantly in influence, formulating a neoliberal set of now infamous policies that came to be known as the Washington Consensus. The policy doctrine of privatization, liberalization, and deregulation was implemented across Africa by World Bank and IMF-financed structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). Crucially, most SAPs had a focus on increasing primary commodity exports, but this time around—to correct for the perceived failures of the recent past—under new management.

Stage two: Liberalize and privatize

It was in this neoliberal political and ideological context that, as Hormeku-Ajei and Goetz have summarized, ‘the World Bank told African governments to abandon any notion to use mineral resources to serve social priorities or developmental priorities and give up the running and management of minerals and mineral wealth to transnational companies’. Between 1980 and 2021, the Bank provided $1.1 billion in mining sector grants and loans to fifteen of the continent’s seventeen mineral-rich, low-income countries (LICs) (Table 1).

Table 1 African LIC metal and mineral wealth

Insignificant or modest	High
Benin, Burundi, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan	Burkina Faso, Central African Republic (CAR), Chad, DRC, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda

Sources: Author classification based on the World Bank’s fiscal year 2020 country classifications by income level, US Geological Survey country reports, and The Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining Knowledge Sharing Archive.

Prior to the rise of China as an alternative source of resource-linked finance, and with many African countries still unable to access international capital markets, the Bank was able to exert significant influence through these grants and loans to implement its strategic vision for how mining should be organized and managed, as laid out in its 1992 Strategy for African Mining report:

The private sector should take the lead. Private investors should own and operate mines…. Existing state mining companies should be privatized at the earliest opportunity to improve productivity of the operations and to give a clear signal to investors with respect to the governmentʼs intention to follow a private-sector-based strategy.

In the DRC, staff from the Bank worked in close collaboration with a Congolese committee on the drafting of the mining law. Blaming mining-sector decline on poor governance under the Mobutu administration, the eventual 2002 Mining Code moved to privatize state-owned mining enterprises and attract fresh foreign direct investment (FDI) by offering a generously liberal fiscal regime, including tax holidays and exemptions and low royalty rates. This included the eventual privatization of the country’s two largest SOEs, the copper producer Gécamines and the diamond producer Société minière de Bakwanga.

Three decades on, the underlying logic of the Bank’s African mining strategy continues to hold. In 2021, the Bank had ongoing mining reform programmes in the seven mineral-rich, African LICs of Niger ($100 million), Guinea ($65 million), Mozambique ($50 million), Mali ($40 million), Sierra Leone ($20 million), Togo ($15 million), and the Central African Republic ($10 million). Each programme was focused, in whole or in part, on institutional and regulatory change within a general framework giving overall priority to capital-intensive, foreign-owned mining.

With the regulatory framework overhauled, foreign investment was unleashed to seek out fresh opportunities. Mining exploration in Africa increased from 4 per cent of total mineral exploration expenditure worldwide in 1991 to 17.5 per cent in 1998, and overall mining investment in Africa doubled between 1990 and 1997. The start of a commodity supercycle in 1999 gave fresh impetus to this activity. In 2004, the $15 billion invested in mining in Africa represented 15 per cent of the total of mining investment worldwide, up from 5 per cent in the mid-1980s and putting the region third globally, behind Latin America and Oceania. From 2002 to 2012, a period spanning most of the supercycle, mineral exploration spending in Africa rose by more than 700 per cent, reaching $3.1 billion in 2012.

In 2007, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) noted that:

the sweeping changes in African mining policy in the 1980s and 1990s were aimed at attracting FDI and increasing exports, in which they have been successful. Total FDI inflows into African least-developed countries rose fourfold from an annual average of $1.7 billion in the 1990s to $6.8 billion in 2000 to 2005…the bulk of which was directed to mineral extractive industries.

In the DRC, FDI inflows focused almost exclusively on mining, increasing by a factor of seventeen between 2002 and 2012, from $188 million to $3.3 billion. Across the same period, FDI stocks rose from $907 million to $22.5 billion or from 10 per cent to 59 per cent of gross domestic product.

An industrial gold mine looking out over the hills of Luhwindja in South Kivu Province of the eastern DRC. Copyright Ben Radley, 2016.

Looking at the aggregate level of inward FDI flows to the group of 17 mineral-rich, African LICs from 1970 to 2019 confirms this picture. Total FDI inflows to the group were low and stable during the 1970s and 1980s, at an annual average of just $0.2 billion, increasing only slightly to $0.6 billion in the 1990s. Hereafter, they grew to an annual average of $3.9 billion in the 2000s and $13.9 billion in the 2010s.

At the country level, FDI inflows have grown significantly across all 17 countries from this group, with the sole exception of Eritrea. While countries such as Madagascar, Guinea, Mali, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Togo, and Burkina Faso received the lowest levels of foreign investment across the group, they have nonetheless experienced pronounced increases in these flows since the turn of the century, much of which has been mineral-seeking. And as highlighted earlier, it is in several of these lower-placed countries that, in 2021, the World Bank had active mining sector liberalization and privatization programmes.

The dramatic increase in FDI growth since the 1990s has altered the composition of these economies, which have become increasingly dependent upon FDI as a source of development financing, and this level of dependence is greater today relative to other country groups and regions.

Stage three: Criminalize African miners

One final stage was required before transnational mining corporations could move front and centre. This involved dealing with the on-the-ground reality that, for many incoming transnationals, their prized deposits were already occupied by African miners involved in a wide range of labour-intensive forms of mining. Most commonly associated with gold and diamonds, labour-intensive African mining is also involved in the production of silver, copper, cobalt, tin, tantalum, iron ore, aluminium, tungsten, wolframite, phosphates, precious and semi-precious stones, and rare earth minerals, among others. Globally, labour-intensive mining has been estimated to contribute up to 30 per cent of total cobalt production, 25 per cent for tin, tantalum, and diamonds, 20 per cent for gold, and 80 per cent for sapphires.

Labour-intensive African mining has grown significantly since the 1980s to directly employ millions of workers across the continent, driven by three factors. First, the crisis of African agriculture has led to an increasingly important role for off-farm employment. Second, the decline of state-led national developmentalism and the collapse of welfare provisioning under the weight of structural adjustment during the 1980s exerted significant strain on the productive and reproductive capacity of rural African households. Third, rising commodity prices, especially during the supercycle of 1999–2012, pulled people towards the sector, where there were often higher wages and profits to be made than locally available alternatives.

Despite the sector’s importance to rural employment, African miners have typically been cast by the World Bank, African governments, and parts of the scholarly literature as ‘primitive’, ‘basic’, ‘inefficient’, ‘rudimentary’, and ‘unproductive’ (in contrast to the ‘efficient’, ‘modern’, ‘complex’, and ‘productive’ mining corporation). As a result, labour-intensive African mining has been peripheral to mining development strategies on the continent. Criminalized by policy frameworks unless they submit to a set of procedurally complex, bureaucratically burdensome, and financially costly demands to formalize their activities, and cast as illegally encroaching on a concession once it has been assigned to a corporation, African miners have time and time again been forcibly displaced from their sites to make way for the construction of corporate-led industrial mines. Often financed by the incoming corporations themselves, and echoing violent colonial practices of the past, displacement has frequently taken place as government military-led ‘sweeps’.

In 2017, 70,000 miners were displaced by Ugandan military and police in Mubende to make way for a Canadian-listed mining corporation. Speaking to local media shortly after the displacement, Edwards Katto, a Director at the Ugandan Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development, said:

Those people [Ugandan miners] still joking should style up. Now, I’m not only a director [in the Ministry] but also a commander of the Minerals Protection Unit of the Uganda Police Force. So, those illegal miners still behaving like those in Mubende [who were evicted], they should pack and vacate the mines, otherwise, my police force will them help to pack.

This statement speaks well to the general regard held for African miners within the process of capital-intensive, foreign-owned mining (re)industrialization. These dynamics recall Marx’s description of primitive accumulation, or Harvey’s (2004: 74) reconceptualization of this as a continuous process of accumulation by dispossession, involving ‘the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations, conversion of various forms of property rights into exclusive private property rights, [and] suppression of rights to the commons’. Forcibly displaced and removed from the best deposits, African miners are restricted to working in less productive areas.

With the African state framed as corrupt and mismanaged, and African miners as inefficient and unproductive criminals, the path was cleared for the en masse arrival of transnational mining corporations, across a far wider group of countries than was the case during the colonial period (when most mineral deposits remained unknown to foreign capital, particularly in West Africa). From Glencore and Pengxin in the DRC and Emirates Global Aluminium in Guineau, to Cluff Minerals and Etruscan Resources in Burkina Faso and Shandong Iron in Sierra Leone, to AngloGold Ashanti and Acacia Mining in Tanzania and Rio Tinto in Madagascar – the list goes on – foreign corporations dominate today’s landscape.

Recent mining code and policy revisions led by African governments such as Tanzania, the DRC, Sierra Leone, and Malawi have begun to push back against this dominance, taking inspiration from the Africa Mining Vision, a framework developed by the African Union in 2009 to deepen the linkages between foreign-owned mining and national economies and strengthen government capacity to negotiate with and leverage developmental benefits from foreign mining corporations.

The mining industry, mainstream media, and some scholarship has been quick to herald these revisions as marking a new era of resource nationalism. As a Bloomberg article proclaimed in 2019, ‘The fight between miners and African governments is just getting started’. Changes to date are yet, however, to provide a fundamental challenge to the dominant model of capital-intensive, foreign-owned mining industrialization on the continent. They remain a far cry from the earlier period of 1960s and 1970s resource sovereignty to which the discourse on resource nationalism alludes.

Ben Radley (@RadleyBen) is a Lecturer in International Development at the University of Bath. His research interests relate to the political economy of economic transformation in Africa, with a focus on resource-based industrialisation, green transitions, and labour dynamics. He’s a member of the Editorial Working Group for ROAPE, and an affiliated member of the Centre of Mining Research at the Catholic University of Bukavu, DR Congo.

You can order Disrupted Development in the Congo here, or download the first three chapters for free here.

Featured image: Front and back cover of Disrupted Development in the Congo: The Fragile Foundations of the African Mining Consensus.

Palestine’s challenge to Africa

ROAPE

November 13, 2023

Yusuf Serunkuma writes that Israeli’s occupation and murder of Palestinians in Gaza today is the British in Kenya, India, and Zimbabwe, Germany in Namibia, the French in Algeria, and the Americans in Vietnam. The on-going slaughter of Palestinians ought to wake us up to the urgent search for a home-grown language upon which to set our dreams. Notions such a democracy, or the so-called Universal Declaration of Human Rights, have been exposed, once again, as a sham and a lie, revealing nothing but western self-interest –which captures neither our realty nor aspirations.

By Yusuf Serunkuma

There are many lessons to take from the ongoing settler colonial violence in Palestine. One of these lessons—especially for the African intelligentsia and political elite—is the reiteration that the analytical anchors and conceptual tools we often deploy in understanding our political-economic reality—and setting our aspirations—are nothing but distractions from the reality of the limitlessness of the extractive colonial machinery.

Once again, it has been profoundly demonstrated that the current frames and language games in which we negotiate our politics and economics are distractions from the raw power and violence of the superpowers: concepts such as democracy, human rights, international law, and private property. These are terms through which we have continued to discuss and imagine Africa’s postcolonial present, and aspire for a “brighter future” but each has been exposed as hollow, as Israel continues to pound Palestinians—people from whom they have slowly, steadily, violently, grabbed land for the last 75 years, and run a system of apartheid for decades.

What we are witnessing in Palestine – in both Gaza and the West Bank – is a more contemporary replay of colonialism and its manifestations: apartheid, violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Indeed, Jewish economic theorist, Karl Marx was right: historical events are bound to happen twice (Maybe, more times, actually!) The first time as tragedy, and the second time as farce. But this second (and subsequent) time—as theorist Herbert Marcuse added—is often more frightening than the first.

Israel in Palestine today is the British in Kenya, India, Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), and several parts of the colonised world. Israel is the Germans in Namibia, the Boers and British in South Africa, the French in Algeria and Haiti, the Belgians in Congo-Zaire, or the Portuguese and Spanish in Latin America. There was no social media then to relay these crimes in record time, but as scattered and censored records show, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder were the order of the day.

Even supposedly negative terms such as “fake news”, autocracy, and Africa’s “monsters” that are commonly used to describe the supposed failings of African leadership have, once again, been exposed as useful and more valuable terms to the western world, yet meaningless at the same time. Ironically, these terms—fake news, autocracy, violence, racism, dichotomies such as “us” and “them”—are on full display as the absolute ingredients of Euro-American moral locus and domination: “We are more important than them”, “Our violence against them is justified, theirs against us is just evil.”

This is the project of so-called international law. As Siba Grovogui has written, Europeans and Americans are the complete “sovereigns”, and there are some “quasi-sovereigns,” and then the lowest rung is composed of Africans. This means that the lives of the quasi sovereigns and “the Africans” are worthless. What seems like their property—their land and gas and marine resources—actually belong in the western world who are free to take them whenever we wish.

While I have written about Africa’s coup-democracy dilemma, to underscore the meaninglessness of these language games and power-plays, journalist Richard Medhurst gave us a compelling analysis about how the scramble for resources (in the form of the proposed Ben Gurion canal) is driving a ‘textbook case of genocide’ in Gaza.

As we witness raw power at an industrial scale—war crimes, genocide, clan cleansing, apartheid—unfolding on our television and smart-phone screens, I cannot imagine how useless and helpless decolonial scholars, democracy activists, and human rights enthusiasts, among others, find themselves. I know our silence is deafening. I cannot imagine the feeling of uselessness of these scholars and activists especially if one crafted an entire career imagining and pointing at the United States, or Western Europe (Germany, France, and the UK) as examples of these idealisms.

It should be an even more disturbing feeling for beneficiaries of western European “benevolence”—often in the form of project cash—to intellectualise and work to promote these idealisms. What once appeared to be true is now thrown out through the window. These idealisms are exactly and precisely, the ‘useful deception’ and liberal lullabies for Africa’s sprawling elite as their resources are quietly, methodically looted.

Our challenge

It is disappointing that years after colonialism, we have failed to reclaim the agency to define notions that capture our reality. Consider, for example, ‘Ubuntu’ among the Bantu people; ‘Xeer’ among the Somalis, or the ‘Ummah’ in the Islamic tradition. These and many other useful concepts and systems of African humanity—and equitable resource sharing and governance—remain secondary to the so-called Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a declaration, which is often shamelessly and selectively applied (and more often, completely discarded).

While these home-grown notions have attracted some scholarship (most memorably, Uganda’s Dani Nabudere, Jamaica’s Marcus Garvey), they have remained largely marginal as defining notions of Africa’s postcolonial present. We still talk about Africa’s knowledge systems, philosophical traditions, notions of governance and (herbal) medicine hypothetically—oftentimes, like beautiful museum pieces—without actually seeking to name them and integrate them into our daily political and economic ecosystems.

I often wonder why it is so absolutely necessary to change leaders periodically – the so-called hallmark of democracy – instead of developing an intellectual and political infrastructure that ensures leaderships actually work for the people. (By the way, despite being designed to benefit selfish interests, especially arms dealers and extractive capitalists, Europe and North America are run with non-changing structures. They may change presidents for the sake of public relations, but domestic and foreign policies remain unchanged). Consider this puzzle as another example: How does the Islamic tradition of ‘Ummah’ – feeling each other’s pain despite no blood connections, with people we may never meet – actually work?

What set of belief systems enable these connections and how can we harness some of them to ensure that our communities have different talking points – different from the so-called ‘democracy’-chanting chorus—about building humane futures and political systems. What does ‘Ubuntu’ mean for the economy? How does ‘Ubuntu’ translate into a justice system? How does Islam imagine economies and economics, a banking regime, insurance, etc?

Navigating conscription

As a student of David Scott—Conscripts of Modernity—I am fully aware that we are conscripts to this continuing exploitative colonial modernity, where the reach of our imagination is already circumscribed. We are products of the colonial school, which is bent on simply keeping us in bondage. And since we are in the weaker positions—militarily, financially—it might appear difficult to imagine ourselves dreaming and developing an entirely new language, and system of doing things.

While I appreciate these constraining limits, it is my sobering contention that we have even failed to exploit the limited space available to exercise our agency. Yet, there is still legroom in these small spaces. Consider for example, Rwanda’s decision to scrap all visa requirements for Africans entering Rwanda in 2018. Why haven’t all other countries followed the example? (It should be shameful that Europeans and Americans enjoy relatively free travel across the African continent, while fellow Africans are systematically hindered from journeying across their own continent).

While I understand ideas of nationalism and borders – often problematically articulated in the language of security – we ought to understand that it is our poverty (mostly, perpetrated by the western world) that makes borders appear absolutely necessary. Borders in Europe are only enforced for poor countries within and outside Europe but are generally absent in the European world. Have we not seen ‘EU Passports Only’ or ‘Europe Residents’ signposts at airports and other border crossings indicating easier entry and exit for fellow Europeans!

Dear Africans, if Iraq and Afghanistan have not opened our eyes, if the carpet bombing of Libya by Nato ‘for democracy’, Africa’s then richest and debt-free country, which effectively turned it into a slave market, has not woken us up, or if the coup against a democratically elected President of Egypt, Mohammad Morsi also didn’t open our eyes, then Palestine must now awaken us from our deep slumber.

The language of democracy, or the so-called Universal Declaration of Human Rights (without there being anything universal about them) is not only alien, but outrightly insufficient to capture our collective humanity. They use these claims explicitly and shamelessly for their interests – and we are stupidly beholden to them. Their so-called competitive democracy and multiparty politics will never answer our governance challenges unless we find a uniting thread—a common and resilient humanity that answers the question of why we need leadership in the first place. As we spend entire lifetimes building parties and competing against each other—to the point of killing each other for democracy—the coloniser is here exploiting these rifts for own benefit.

If we could learn anything from the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Palestine and the intent to commit genocide expressed by the highest-ranking Israelis officials, it is that so-called international law is simply raw financial and military power and control.

Palestine must now awaken us from our deep slumber!

A version of this blogpost appeared as “Palestine and Africa’s political-intellectual quagmire” in The Pan-African Review.

Yusuf Serunkuma is a regular contributor to roape.net and a columnist in Uganda’s newspapers, as well as a scholar and a playwright. In 2014, Fountain Publishers published his first play, The Snake Farmers and it was received with critical acclaim in Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda.

Featured Photograph: Protests in South Africa’s Durban against Israeli bombardment against Gaza (4 October, 2014).

Walter Rodney and Palestinian Liberation

ROAPE

November 10, 2023

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

During my visit to the Atlanta Archive last autumn, I noticed some scribbled notes on the back of Walter Rodney’s draft syllabus for his 1970-71 course on the Russian Revolution at the University of Dar Es Salaam. “September 12th, 1970”, read his handwriting, “Hijackings – T.W.A Boeing + Swissair DC 8 to Jordan”. The Afro-Guyanese historian was keeping up to date with a world event that became known as the Dawson’s Field hijackings. A week earlier, on the 6 September 1970, members of the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked four airliners, including a TWA flight from Frankfurt and a Swissair flight from Zurich, landing three out of the four planes in Dawson’s Field a remote airstrip in Jordan.

I soon discovered that Rodney had been gathering information for a more substantial piece when exploring the newspaper archive at the East Africana Collection at the University of Dar es Salaam in early 2023. On the page of The Standard, Tanzania’s largest English-language newspaper, I discovered two controversial articles that revealed Rodney’s full breadth of his internationalism and his uncompromising support for Palestinian liberation. On 5 and 6 November 1970, The Standard published Rodney’s article in defence of kidnappings and hijacking by guerrilla groups in Latin America and Palestinian freedom fighters in the Middle East: Revolutionary violence: An answer to oppression and Revolutionary action– way to justice.

Frene Ginwala with President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania in the newsroom of The Standard in Dar es Salaam in 1970 (Picture: Adarsh Nayar).

**The emergence of Ginwalla’s Standard as a platform for radical ideas**

It was surprising that Rodney published articles in favour of revolutionary violence. Only a year earlier, Rodney “thought he was going to be expelled from Tanzania” as his wife, Patricia told me. On 13 December 1969, he read a soul-crushing tirade against him in the government newspaper, The Nationalist, written by President Julius Nyerere himself. He did not anticipate such a reaction to the speech he delivered three days earlier at the Second Seminar of East and Central African Youth, which was published in the same paper. Speaking on the Ideology of the African Revolution, Rodney had called for the violent overthrow of African governments run by the petty-bourgeois class, which colluded with imperialism and betrayed the national liberation struggle. The African youth had listened to him with shining eyes. But Nyerere’s tirade deemed this assault on independent nations to be “completely unacceptable”. He replied with a threat to Rodney, implying that those who insist on advocating violence “will suffer the consequence of their indulgence.”

Although Rodney was chastised by Nyerere for preaching violence and overstepping his boundaries as a guest in Tanzania, he was not expelled. He remained a Marxist lecturer at the University of Dar Es Salam, where he wrote his famous How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in 1972. He retained much of his confidence in the ability of Nyerere’s socialist regime to improve the living standard of workers and peasants. Nevertheless, Nyerere’s editorial signalled to Rodney and the radical staff and students at the University of Dar es Salaam that The Nationalist would no longer figure as a platform for discussing radical ideas. However, in February 1970, Rodney and radicals around him witnessed a new platform emerge before them, through the nationalisation of The Standard.

Founded in 1930, the Tanganyika Standard thrived as a quintessential colonial newspaper. Unsurprisingly, it opposed TANU’s mobilisation against colonialism and its Africanisation policy in the wake of independence. When its ownership fell to the British Lonrho multinational in 1967, The Standard adopted a more approving tone of Nyerere’s rule. Owned and edited by European men, this colonial relic grabbed 80 per cent of its coverage from the London-based Reuters news agency and therefore imposed a pro-Western viewpoint on African Affairs.

On 5 February 1970, the president announced the nationalisation of The Standard newspaperand its sister publication The Sunday News. His decision to nationalise the paper stemmed from his desire for a newspaper that accurately represented Tanzania’s non-aligned Pan-Africanism on the global stage.At the same time, Nyerere justified the acquisition in nationalist terms, responding TANU cadre who wanted more Africanisation to promote Tanzanians. “We want Tanzanians to have control of this newspaper, and we want those Tanzanians to be responsible to the people”, he wrote in the first editorial of the nationalised newspaper. In truth, Nyerere had long delayed the nationalisation of The Standard because his underdeveloped nation lacked trained local journalists and editors to operate major newspapers. One solution for this lack of expertise was to hire African freedom fighters and left-wing visitors posted in Dar es Salaam.

The lack of experts to run the nationalised companies explained Nyerere’s astonishing decision to hire Frene Ginwalla (1932-2023), a Marxist South African Indian woman in her mid-thirties, as managing editor of The Standard. Ginwalla was both a member of the African National Congress and of the South African Communist Party. Her Indian heritage and gender coupled with her bossy self-assurance elicited hatred and jealousy from her employees. Nearly everything about her clashed with the parochialisms of Tanzanian society; where men frowned on women’s rights, Africans resented Asians as tools of colonialism, and TANU members often paid lip service to socialism. Dressed in a sari, Ginwalla ran The Standard with an iron fist, making her employees work round the clock. Turning the newspaper into a socialist platform, she replaced many conservative European editors with left-wing ones. She hired Richard Gott, a British reporter who documented Che Guevara’s visit to Africa in the mid-1960s. Then, she hired Philip Ochieng, a Kenyan radical columnist, who would remember The Standard “as the freest newspaper I had ever worked on.” Every morning, she hosted a two-hour socialist workshop where her staff read and discussed the works of Marx, Lenin, and Frantz Fanon.

With Ginwalla’s leadership, The Standard emerged as a respected socialist and anti-Western newspaper in the eyes of the Tanzanian left. It showed support for Nyerere and TANU that was “by no means servile to the government,” remarked author Martin Sturmer in his work on the Tanzanian media. “Not even Nyerere himself was entirely free of criticism”, he wrote. The Standard could afford to be critical because it had different priorities than The Nationalists, though their coverage overlapped. It projected the TANU’s non-alignment in international affairs, giving the party an air of openness to foreign observers. while The Nationalists served as a nation-building instrument. Whereas Nyerere and TANU encouraged debates in The Standard, they censured them in The Nationalist as they could jeopardise national unity behind the party.

Author photograph from the East Africana Collection at University of Dar es Salaam

In defence of left-wing terrorism and Palestinian liberation

Published on 5 and 6 November 1970, Rodney’s articles in The Standard pioneered a Marxist analysis of left-wing terrorism. He refused to look at kidnapping and hijacking in the Global South as isolated, immoral acts as the Western media did. He examined them as powerful answers to historical injustices. These methods stemmed, as he explained, from regions in which the Western bourgeoisie with their Latin-American and Arab counterparts subjected natural and human resources to crudest exploitation. He defended hijacking and kidnappings as weapons of weakness required in times of revolutionary retreat. They acted as a counterweight to anti-guerrilla warfare tactics and crackdown upheavals, frustrating Western powers.

On kidnappings, he wrote: “When we exchange our currency for money from the developed countries the rate of exchange is always unfavourable because they set the terms. But when comrades in Latin America exchange kidnapped diplomats for prisoners the rate of exchange is good.” Through his creative and witty use of the lexicon of unequal exchange theory, Rodney underlines that kidnappings can briefly overturn the power relations between the Western capitalist and the toilers of the Global South. A few lines beforehand, Rodney informs us that the abduction of the Belgian ambassador in Brazil in September 1969 led to the release of 15 political prisoners. The rate of exchange was thus favourable because the kidnappings saved the best revolutionaries.

Rodney’s comments resonate strongly today. They help us understand the rationale behind the recent actions of the Palestinian liberation movement. Hamas decided to take over two hundred Israeli military personnel and civilians’ hostage during its attack on Israeli soil on 7 October, which killed 1,400 people. Hamas offered to exchange its Israeli captives for the thousands of Palestinians in Israel among whom 160 are children and 530 have been incarcerated without trial. However, the negotiation led to nothing as Israel continued its campaign’s largest ever indiscriminate bombing of the Gaza Strip killing over 9,000 including many thousands of children.

In his second article, Rodney defended the hijackings carried out by the PFLP as “armed propaganda”. He argued hijackings raised the morale of the oppressed and ensured that a particular cause grabbed the international community’s attention. Among other things, his piece contained a praise for the young guerrilla Leila Khaled who led the several hijackings on behalf of the Front. In the manner of a dedicated feminist, Rodney described the 24-year-old “as an example of a woman liberated through struggle.” Rodney understood hijacking as a means for Palestinian guerrillas to reinstate the demand for a one-state solution which was being ignored by the West and opposed by Israel.

Presumably, a two-state solution would only create a weak Palestinian state – dependent on Israeli resources and living under the threat of a more powerful army. The hijackers, as Rodney explained, were not demanding the exclusion of Jewish immigrants. On the contrary, their solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict rested in the creation of one united secular society “based on the principle of socialism and equality”, he wrote.

Rodney was right to follow the PFLP’s opposition to a two-state solution. Thirty years after the Oslo Agreement of 1992 and in light of today’s onslaught on Gaza, it is safe to say that the emergence Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one remains an impossibility. A two-state solution would shy away from challenging the illegal existence of the Israeli settler state, which was based on the ethnic cleansing of 850,000 Palestinians in 1948. It would allow the existence of a racist colonial-settler state whose military would continue to be funded by the United States and Western imperialist interests in the Middle East. It would allow the existence of a heavily armed Israeli state that would act as a permanent threat to Palestinian sovereignty. Aside from his insistence on socialism, Rodney’s stance in favour of a one-state solution matches the words of one of the founders of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS), Omar Barghouti:

“Accepting the colonial settlers as equal citizens and full partners in building and developing a new shared society, free from all colonial subjugation and discrimination, as called for in the democratic state model, is the most magnanimous offer any indigenous population, oppressed for decades, can present to its oppressors”.

Rodney had something to get off the chest. He was annoyed that Tanzanians around him repeated the anti-terrorism propaganda in Western media. Hijackings appeared on the front pages of Newsweek and Time magazine in September 1970. His justifications for left-wing terrorism essentially intended to persuade Tanzanians not to impose conditions on their international solidarity with Palestinians. He wrote: “If we call ourselves ‘revolutionary’ in Tanzania, we cannot be out of sympathy with those who, because their objective condition is different, define their revolution differently.” His words meant that revolutionaries operating in very oppressive conditions had no choice but to use violence.

Last but not least, Rodney was aware of Nyerere and TANU’s support for the UN General Assembly resolution against hijacking in October 1970. He certainly knew Nyerere placed much of his faith in the United Nations, seeing it as a platform for mobilising support for the anti-colonial struggle in southern Africa. But this made TANU capable of sacrificing its commitment to support Palestinian Liberation and other Third World movements to appease Western powers. That’s why Rodney’s article singled out the hypocrisy of the UN alongside Britain and the United States for ignoring the boycott of arms to the Apartheid state in South Africa but finding time to conduct an emergency session on hijacking.

A thorn in Nyerere’s foreign policy

Defending the seemingly indefensible, Rodney had dropped a bombshell that reverberated throughout Tanzania and beyond. In reference to the UN resolution against hijacking by Palestinian activists, the Jamaican governmental paper, Weekly Gleaner, accused Rodney of “embarrassing yet another government” adding to his reputation as a troublemaker since his expulsion from Jamaica in 1968 for his Black Power activism. While Rodney’s controversial article went against Tanzanian foreign policy, it did not trigger a public response from TANU. Even if TANU had planned a response, it would have been eclipsed by what followed the next day. The British High Commissioner to Tanzania, Horace Philips, with the imprudence of a coloniser who forgot he was now among liberated people, wrote a long diatribe against Rodney’s article to the minister of Foreign Affairs..

“I find it disquieting that such an article compounding Dr Rodney’s support yesterday for the kidnapping of diplomats should find a place in the Government newspaper”, Philips wrote. The commissioner then pointed to Rodney’s position as a foreigner intruding in the affairs of the sovereign state. Unbeknownst to him, he was making the same mistake. Philips reminded the Minister that Rodney’s speech Ideology of the African Revolution had been “officially denounced” last year before sharing his expectation for similar repudiation. But Philips was angry at the general left-wing and Pro-Palestinian turn The Standard had taken after becoming a government newspaper. Referring to Rodney’s arguments in defence of Palestinian terrorism, he told the minister: “It is little comfort to know that the editor might dissociate herself from these.”

Unfortunately for Philips, the letter he sent to the Minister was intercepted. Now, in the hands of Tanzanians, it ignited the largest anti-British public outcry in a decade. On 8 November, the letter was ridiculed on the front page of The Sunday News. In a bout of fury, Ginwala answered Philips in her editorial, accusing Philips of “gross interference” in the internal affairs of Tanzania. “His action comes ill from a citizen of a country that has not hesitated to proclaim freedom of the press”, she wrote determined to humiliate the diplomat. Five days later, Ginwala’s editorial was followed by a flurry of letters defending Rodney and criticising Philips and British imperialism. Published under the title “U.K envoy under fire from our readers”, one of four letters read: “On Dr Rodney’s ‘foreignness’ Mr Philips should be the last to utter a word. Dr Rodney is an African whose ancestor was shot out of their homes, kidnapped and carried away with bestial brutality by members of Philip’s race.” A schoolgirl called for Philips’s kidnapping as punishment: “Take him [ Philips], to an ujamaa village, and make him dig for 48 hours nonstop before releasing him”, she wrote.

Rodney’s defence of the methods used by Palestinian freedom fighters had provoked a representative of imperialism in Tanzania and awakened a profound anti-British backlash among the people. It jeopardised the cordial relationship Nyerere’s Tanzania rebuilt with Britain when he broke diplomatic ties with the British over their support for Rhodesia’s illegal declaration of independence in 1965. Through his article in Ginwalla’s Standard in defence of activities of Palestinian Freedom Fighters, Rodney proposed an internationalism that served as a radical alternative to the opportunistic foreign policy persued by the Tanzanian state. Alas, a year after the publication of Rodney’s article, Ginwalla was dismissed by Nyerere and replaced with a Tanzanian loyal to the president. In April 1972,The Standard merged with The Nationalists to create the heavily state-controlled Daily News. Rodney was never published in the governmental newspaper again.

Rodney’s international support for Palestine nevertheless contains a valuable lesson for us: Palestinian resistance against Israeli state terror is justified irrespective of the means that are used. The violence of the oppressed Palestinians fighting against 75 years of colonial occupation cannot be compared to that of the oppressor nation, which is backed by American imperialism. His unwavering dedication to fighting on the side of the oppressed serves as a powerful inspiration for activists engaged in the struggle to Free Palestine today.

Chinedu Chukwudinma is a socialist activist and writer based in London. He writes on African politics, popular struggles, and the history of working-class resistance on the continent. Chinedu is a member of ROAPE’s editorial board, and an editor of roape.net.

Please click here to read the Chukwudinma’s A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney serialised on roape.net. To order Chinedu’s book, A Rebel’s Guide to Walter Rodney from the publisher, Bookmarks, click here.

Revolutionary movements in Africa – an untold story

ROAPE

November 2, 2023

While revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Europe, the United States and Latin America have been the subject of abundant literature, similar movements that emerged in Africa have received comparatively little attention. In an extract from their forthcoming book, the editors, Pascal Bianchini, Ndongo Sylla and Leo Zeilig shed new light on these political movements. They argue that Africa’s revolutionary left was extremely active in these years, and forms a vital part of global history.

By Pascal Bianchini, Ndongo Sylla and Leo Zeilig

The history of revolutionary left movements in Africa is largely ignored and disregarded among political scientists, historians and across the academic literature on Africa. Most of the existing literature consists of memoirs from former activists. However, most of the rank-and-file activists and even some of the leaders of these movements went to their graves without having an opportunity to tell their own stories.

The invisibility of the African revolutionary left in the existing literature contrasts with the situation prevailing on other continents, where we find a rich collection of books on the subject. In place of serious research on this issue, we find research and writing on related issues such as African revolutions and uprisings, invariably guerrilla warfare launched by liberation movements against colonial or neocolonial armies.[1] Other publications have focused on revolutionary regimes.[2] Still more research can be found on prominent figures, not to say tragic revolutionary heroes, such as Amílcar Cabral or Thomas Sankara who lost their lives in the struggle (and those like Patrice Lumumba who lost their lives at the start of independence). [3] Finally, some contributions have shed light on the relations developed between African activists and revolutionaries and the former state socialist countries and the attraction exerted by this model of socialism, and more recently on the relations between African liberation movements and Western communist parties.[4]

The obstacles to understanding the history of Africa’s revolutionary movements

In contrast to the rest of the world, where essays, monographs and histories have been written on radical left movements during their heyday, this is not the case for their African counterparts. [5] At first glance, the history of African revolutionary movements seems less epic. Compared to the Cuban revolution in Latin America or to the Vietnamese popular war that inspired revolutionary movements during the 1960s and 1970s, the African continent might appear unfavourable terrain for revolutionary struggles. [6]

Che Guevara, the most iconic figure of the 1960s, himself expressed reservations about the prospects of revolutionary victories in Africa. After his unsuccessful attempt in Congo, he wrote: ‘Africa had a long way to go before it achieved real revolutionary maturity.’[7]

However, many revolutionary movements around the world during the 1960s and the 1970s, even if they have been able to challenge the state, were finally defeated – for example, the Naxalites in India and the Tupamaros in Uruguay, not to mention the Black Panthers in the USA.[8] Yet their experience influenced revolutionaries from other countries. The idea of a ‘lack of maturity of the African people’ imbued with localist traditional values is still an underlying prejudice about the revolutionary perspectives in Africa among many commentators, though it is a terrible misconception, especially when it is expressed in general for a whole continent.

Moreover, the extraordinary anti-colonial struggles and the creation of new independent states occurred during the Cold War. Anti-colonial movements and radical organisations within these movements were considered by mainstream observers as Soviet proxies rather than independent actors. In this way, a well-known American commentator could write:

“The Soviet Union has supported nationalist development in Africa as part of its global strategy to create situations of instability and weakness within the Western world, to train and indoctrinate Communist leadership cadres with the expectation that by manipulating mass discontent and nationalist symbols they could seize power in African Soviet Republics, and, in general, to carry out Lenin’s dictum to attack the West through its dependent territories.”[9]

For several decades, the reference to Marxism in these liberation movements was still considered as fundamental, and according to this view, radical movements and politics could not survive the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.[10] However, such conceptions ignore the ability of African activists and intellectuals to embrace, create and adapt revolutionary doctrines for their own sake. The idea that activists and revolutionaries simply imported ready-made doctrines from a Marxist-Leninist blueprint is at best a narrow point of view, at worst a deeply patronising and colonial idea.

Of course, this position of principle must not lead us to ignore the numerous hurdles faced by left movements in Africa, whether from external or internal causes. During the twentieth century, the penetration of communist ideas in the contemporary sense of the word was linked to the establishment of colonial institutions and the labour force necessary for the colonial economy. Then, the major issue raised for the development of left-wing organisations (mainly communist) was the relationship with the emerging nationalist movements, though even when the colonial period came to an end, many areas remained out of reach for communist-inspired organisations.

If we go back to Karl Marx himself, we know that he was among the few European theorists of his generation who did not try to conceal his ‘debt’ to Africa, but celebrated such knowledge as foundational. Recent work by the Nigerian scholar Biko Agozino shows how people of African descent were central to the theory, practice and writings of Marx, including in Capital.[11] In addition to his major writings were the letters he wrote from Algeria at the end of his life, or more significantly, the articles on African-Americans during the Civil War in the United States.[12] Although it has been considered Eurocentric, his work was inspirational for many African-American and African thinkers, so that Marxist ideas have deeply influenced the ‘making of a Black radical tradition’.[13]

Even more unexpected, if we take a closer look at such an iconic figure as Cheikh Anta Diop, often associated with ‘Afro-centricity’, we note that his writings did not ignore Marxist analysis and that his own involvement in Senegalese politics with the Rassemblement national démocratique (National Democratic Rally) during the late 1970s occurred in relation with Marxist activists from the Parti Africain de l’Indépendance (PAI, African Independence Party) and from Maoist groups which joined the party he had created.[14]

In Africa, the ‘boom’ of Marxist revolutionary ideas occurred especially during the decades examined in this book. Later on, these ideas retreated from the continent, which can give the utterly false impression that it was mainly a Western fad. However, this ideological decline of Marxism is not unique to Africa, rather it was a more general and global phenomenon that goes beyond the scope of this introduction and volume.

A chronological framework for the history of the revolutionary left in Africa

In order to give an outline of the historical development of revolutionary movements in Africa, we propose a division into three periods. First, we identify pioneers who challenged triumphant colonialism in calling for Pan-Africanist solidarity (from London in 1900 to Manchester in 1944) and also for some of them in developing connections with Communist organisations during the interwar period, especially since the creation of the Soviet Union and the Third International. This early period of the revolutionary left embodied by activists often based in Europe, in the colonial metropolis, such as Lamine Senghor or Tiemoko Garang Kouyate for the French colonies or Wallace Johnson for the British colonies, is not within the scope of this book. However, these figures have been rediscovered and celebrated by the generations that followed, especially in the 1970s. The main debate for this generation was ‘Panafricanism or Communism?’, as suggested by a famous book written in the late 1950s as a reassessment of this period.[15] However, if tension has existed between the two orientations, they were not always in contradiction.[16]

We then identify a second period which is shorter and more difficult to delineate, during the late colonial era and the aftermath of the struggle for independent states. During this time, anti-colonial movements became more radicalised, especially when confronted with delaying tactics from colonial powers. In parallel, during this period, the influence of communist and progressive forces grew to the point that the centre of gravity shifted from the diaspora to African territories, even when they were not yet mass parties. At the same time, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the People’s Republic of China began to appear as attractive counter-models to Western capitalism.

Finally, we see in the 1960s and the 1970s a third wave of activism sweeping across Africa, as it did throughout the whole world, and the Global South. These ‘anti-systemic’ movements were not only directed against Western imperialist domination, but also against ‘bureaucratised’ states claiming to stand for socialism.[17] In Africa, this New Left developed during and after 1968 and jostled with the ‘old left’, still aligned with the USSR. Clandestine movements were burgeoning in every part of the continent, and a spirit of rebellion was challenging the political order.[18] This historical development has remained largely ignored for decades. However, recent publications have emphasised the role played during these years by certain ‘capitals of the revolution’ where emblematic revolutionary figures such as Che Guevara, Stokely Carmichael, Elridge Cleaver and others travelled or settled, for example in Algiers, Brazzaville, Conakry or Dar es Salaam.[19]

These countries became new bases or refuge sanctuaries for freedom fighters against the apartheid system, counter-insurgency campaigns and assassinations launched against the Black Power movement in the United States, Portuguese colonialism, and exiled nationalist activists and revolutionaries from struggles in Southern Africa. This solidarity frequently exposed these states to attacks from the South African or Portuguese armies or secret services which were waging a dirty war against their opponents, as was shown with the assassination of Eduardo Mondlane in Tanzania in 1969 and of Amílcar Cabral in Conakry in 1973.[20]

However, beside these ‘spectacular’ headline developments, less noticeable radical experiences are to be found in every African country. This book will shed light on these forgotten realities, with most of our chapters centred on this third revolutionary age.

Revolutionary Movements in Africa: An Untold Story is published by Pluto Press in December 2023 (to pre-order the book please click here).

Pascal Bianchini is a sociologist and independent researcher based in Senegal. Ndongo Samba Sylla is a Senegalese development economist and co-author of Africa’s Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story and author of The Fair Trade Scandal. Leo Zeilig is an editor of the Review of African Political Economy.

Featured Photograph: The mass of assembled strikers from Coronation Brick works, during the Durban Strikes in 1973 (David Hemson, David Hemson Collection, UCT Libraries) .

Notes

[1] Françoise Blum, Révolutions africaines: Congo-Brazzaville, Sénégal, Madagascar, années 1960–1970, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014; Willow J. Berridge, Civil Uprisings in Modern Sudan: The ‘Khartoum Springs’ of 1964 and 1985, London: Bloomsbury Press, 2015. Gérard Chaliand, Armed Struggle in Africa: With the Guerrillas in ‘Portuguese’ Guinea, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969; Basil Davidson, No Fist Is Big Enough to Hide the Sky: The Liberation of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, 1963–74, London: Zed Books, 1974.

[2] David Ottaway and Marina Ottaway, Afrocommunism, New York: Africana Publishing House, 1981.

[3] Patrick Chabal, Amilcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People’s War, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003. For a broader scope than Chabal’s views, see Antonio Tomas, Amílcar Cabral: The Life of a Reluctant Nationalist, London: Hurst, 2021. Bruno Jaffré, Biographie de Thomas Sankara: la patrie ou la mort …, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007; Ernest Harsch, Thomas Sankara: An African Revolutionary, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014.

[4] Maxim Matusevich, ‘Revisiting the Soviet Moment in Sub-Saharan Africa’, History Compass, 7(5), 2009, 1,259–1,268. Eric Burton and Constantin Katsakioris, ‘Africans and the Socialist World: Aspirations, Experiences, and Trajectories: An Introduction’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 54(3), 2021, 269–278. Françoise Blum, Marco Di Maggio, Gabriele Siracusano and Serge Wolikow (eds), Les partis communistes occidentaux et l’Afrique: une histoire mineure?, Paris: Hémisphères, 2021.

[5] For the United States, see Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, London: Verso, 2002, and for a synthetic view on the revolutionary left in Latin America, see Verónica Oikión, Solano Eduardo Rey and Tristán Martín López ávalos (eds), El Estudio de las Luchas Revolucionarias en América Latina (1959–1996), Estado de la Cuestión, Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacan, 2013.

[6] Two books in particular were bedtime reading for the generation of the 1960s: Che Guevara, Che Guevara on Guerrilla Warfare, New York: Praeger, 1961, and Nguyen Vo Giap, People’s War People’s Army: The Viet Cong Insurrection Manual for Underdeveloped Countries, New York: Praeger, 1962.

[7] Che Guevara, The Congo Diary: Episodes of the Revolutionary War in Congo, Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2011.

[8] Prakash Singh, The Naxalite Movement in India, New Delhi: Rupa, 2006. Lindsey Churchill, Becoming the Tupamaros: Solidarity and Transnational Revolutionaries in Uruguay and the United States, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014.

[9] James S. Coleman,‘Contemporary Africa Trends and Issues’ , Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 298, 1955, 96.

[10] Allison Drew, ‘Comparing African Experiences of Communism’, in Norman Naimark, Silvio Pons and Sophie Quinn-Judge, The Cambridge History of Communism, Vol. II: The Socialist Camp and World Power, 1941–1960s, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, 519.

[11] Biko Agozino, ‘ The Africana Paradigm in Capital: The Debts of Karl Marx to People of African Descent’‘, Review of African Political Economy, 41(140), 2014, 172–184.

[12] Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1992.

[13] Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, London: Zed Books, 1983.

[14] Thierno Diop, ‘Cheikh Anta Diop et le matérialisme historique’, in Marxisme et critique de la modernité en Afrique, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2007, 145–175. Pascal Bianchini, ‘Cheikh Anta Diop et les marxistes au Sénégal: des relations ambivalentes entre démarcations et rapprochements, entre intégrations et scissions’,, Revue d’histoire contemporaine de l’Afrique, 4, forthcoming, 2023.

[15] George Padmore, Panafricanisme ou communisme? La prochaine lutte pour l’Afrique, Paris: Présence africaine, 1962.

[16] On this period and the relation between Pan-Africanism, Pan-Negrism and communism in the African diasporas, see: Philippe Dewitte, Les mouvements nègres en France, 1919–1939, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985; Jonathan Derrick, Africa’s ‘Agitators’: Militant Anti-Colonialism, London: Hurst, 2008; Hakim Adi, Panafricanism and Communism: The Communist International and the African Diaspora, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2013.

[17] Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘New Revolts against the System’‘, New Left Review, 18, 2002, 33–34.

[18] Heike Becker and David Seddon, ’Africa’s 1968: Protests and Uprisings across the Continent’.

[19] Elaine Mokhtefi, Algiers, Third World Capital: Black Panthers, Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, London: Verso, 2018. See Chapter 8. Amandla Thomas-Johnson, Becoming Kwame Ture, Cape Town: Chimurenganyana Series, 2020. George Roberts, Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam: African Liberation and the Global Cold War, 1961–1974, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. See also Chapters 12 and 13.

[20] George Roberts, ‘The Assassination of Eduardo Mondlane: Mozambican Revolutionaries in Dar es Salaam’, in Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam, 135–172. Peter Karibe Mendy, ‘The “Cancer of Betrayal”: The Assassination of Amílcar Cabral, 20 January 1973’, in Amílcar Cabral: A Nationalist and Pan-Africanist Revolutionary, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2019, 166–182.

Bobi Wine is no Fela, and Fela is no Bobi Wine: Comparing Africa’s Intellectuals

ROAPE

October 31, 2023

In this blog post, Yusuf Serunkuma draws a compelling comparison between Bobi Wine of Uganda and Fela Kuti of Nigeria, both of whom are recognized as among Africa’s most creative artists and courageous political activists for their resistance against dictatorship. Serunkuma emphasises that despite the possibility that Bobi Wine’s music and activism may have surpassed Fela Kuti’s, he remains underappreciated by Western observers.

By Yusuf Serunkuma

I was in graduate school exactly 10 years ago when I got introduced to Fela Anikulapo Kuti (1938-1997). As a country lad raised on local drums, storytelling music of the kandongokamu genre, Congolese Lingala and South African anti-apartheid music, I had never heard of the Nigerian Afro-beat maestro. Even when I learned about him, it was not much his musical talents but his unflinching activism and bravery that blew me off. It was Tejumola Olaniyan’s elegant writing and argumentation in Arrest the Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics powerfully introduced me to the legend. By then, I had started honing my activist antennae and had fallen in love with what could be called “rebel literature and art.” Okot p’ Bitek’s essays in Artiste the Ruler had made a wonderful impression on my restless self, as I tried to understand the ruins, and pains of eking an existence in a quintessential World Bank colonial-extractive outpost called Uganda. As a Ugandan reading Olaniyan’s magisterial book on Fela—and having come of age in the time of the singing trio in Bobi Wine, Jose Chameleon and Bebe Cool—I could not help but see Bobi Wine written all over the pages. Of the three Ugandan entertainers, only Bobi Wine had cut a distinguishable political identity in his artistry and public intellectualism—which eerily resembled Fela.

Similarities with Fela were so unmissable. Could Bobi Wine have been copy-pasting Fela? Check, for example, Bobi Wine’s Ghetto Republic—for which he had self-declared himself president— and Fela’s Kalakuta Republic! While the copy-pasting seemed obvious, Bobi Wine’s Ghetto Republic exuded an undeniable authentic lustre: He was born and raised in the slums of Kamwokya, and his entire crew—Fire Base Entertainment—were mostly residents of these slums. His brother, Fred Nyanzi, often saluted in Bobi Wine’s lyrics as ‘Chairman Nyanzi,’ was actually a local council chief in these ghettos, and his other brother, Eddy Yawe owned One Love recording studio inside the same ghetto. Undoubtedly, for his lyrical and musical genius, Bobi Wine had made the Kamwokya slums admirable to folks from posher neighbourhoods—such as fellow artiste, Navio with whom they collaborated to do the song ‘Badman from Kamwokya.’ This would make the ‘president’ label fitting and natural for Bobi Wine especially after his career kicked off fairly early. His entire packaging against his lived reality rendered him immense authenticity.

A staged play in honour of the Women of the Kalakuta republic, the home to the king of Afro beats Fela Kuti. (wiki commons)

When it came to the music itself, how could Bobi Wine craft a lyrical genius by just aping Fela?! It was not possible. I could imagine that many artists have tried to follow maestros of the past, but all they do is record a song or two before turning to something more natural to them. If Bobi Wine had really aped Fela all the while, then still, he was so good at it. But there seemed something peculiar, original, about Bobi Wine’s own craft. He had a long list of songs—so suited to the Ugandan context—that were direct commentaries and interventions on current affairs in the political-social milieu of the time, dating way back from the beginning of his career. The themes and subjects ranged from the excesses of politicians such as corruption and fakeness to matters of a sociological nature, such as gender, ageing, wasted youthfulness, hustling, and family roles and values. The list remains long and complex and spans a long period.

Sampling the most spectacular and most interventionist (from over 80 songs over a 15-year career) one cannot miss Mwekume featuring Wetherman who powerfully and skilfully tackled the scourge of HIV/AIDS in 2004 advising young people to wear condoms. This message was radical in its time. Then came Adam ne Kawa with Nubian Li done in 2005; and “Mama wa abaana, Taata wa abaana” with Juliana Kanyomozi — both done almost at the same time discussing domestic relations as the national parliament debated the controversial Domestic Relations Bill (DRB); and later doing Kiwaani in 2011, which is about fakery around Kampala, and Tugambire Ku Jenifer in 2012, which directly criticised the ways in which then newly appointed Kampala City Council Authority director, Jenifer Musisi overzealously went about “ modernising” Kampala, which terribly ruined the lives of ordinary folks who sketched an existence on the margins of city—and happened to be mostly road sidewalk vendors and owners of makeshift kiosks. Bobi Wine was challenging Kampala’s CEO, “For whom was her modernizing Kampala?” That this specific song—as happened to Kiwaani—would be temporarily banned from being played on radio and TV made his comparison to Fela Kuti even more appealing. I will not go into his later explicitly activist-political music, because this comes after my 2013 encounter and comparisons with Fela. But a recently completed Ph.D. dissertation at Makerere University by Jonathan Mugyenyi builds specifically on Bobi Wine’s music genius.

Suffice to emphasise that these songs are not mimicries of Fela, but were powerful for their lyrics, and unmistakeable danceable beats. You couldn’t miss Jamaican influences—not Nigerian—of legends from as Shabba Ranks, Chaka Demus and Pliers, which is discernible in their mimicry of Jamaican Patois, dance rhythms, and dance beats. But also, one quickly realises Bobi Wine also relies on Kandongokamu storytelling patterns—most famously of the didactic nature embodied by local legend, Paul Job Kafeero. In the midst of this excitement, in 2014, I published an essay in The Independent magazine turning Olaniyan’s title somewhat upside down: “Release More Music! Mr Ghetto President,” I cried out as I attempted to spell out the likeness between Fela and Bobi Wine, while cheering on Bobi Wine to stress, mostly, his political-activist potential.

People Power

Later on in life, Bobi Wine intensified and expanded his reach as an activist—and public intellectual—more powerfully with the People Power Movement. With catchy slogans such as “Get your national ID” and songs for defiance, “We were crafted to be broken, but left the pottery as one piece,” Bobi Wine remarkably conscientized and inspired millions of young Ugandans, to return to politics, which they had abandoned for a long time. (Seen to be exploiting the government call for Ugandans to process their IDs—as a way of encouraging young people into political consciousness and rebel activism—the NRM government considered putting the entire exercise on a halt, yet it had been promoting the exercise itself). When Bobi Wine fully joined politics—winning the by-election for Kyadondo North seat in Parliament—and later standing for president in the 2021 Ugandan election, for a scholar working retrospectively, Bobi Wine emerged from the shadows of Fela—if he hadn’t distinguished himself already—as an original, and independent artiste. But I could not shake off this nagging feeling that Bobi Wine may have fallen in love with Fela at the beginning of his career in the early 2000s. I sought him out for this piece and learned that although he had heard about Fela, he only fully came to appreciate his stature and started to admire him fully after a 2017 meeting with Fela’s close friend and then producer, Rikki Stein. Bobi Wine tells me:

“I had heard about Fela as that Nigerian artiste who had married many women all at once, was very stubborn, and was good at jazz. Only in 2017 did I fully come to know who Fela was. This happened when I met Rikki Stein who happened to have been a close friend of Fela. Rikki is also friends with the Kabaka and had come to Kampala to attend a Kabaka event. When I walked into the room and was welcomed with cheers and whistles, Rikki asked who I was. And when he learned I was Bob Wine, he had heard about me, he made sure we spoke on the sidelines of the event. He told me I was so like his late friend, Fela and challenged me to know more about this man. I have done so over the past years, listened to his music, read what has been written about him, and now fully understand his legendary stature. In fact, I was honoured to do his song, Sorrow, Tears and Blood, at the Freedom Concert in South Africa in 2020.”

Bobi Wine told me he didn’t like the personal profile he had heard about Fela before 2017. He had not been impressed by the man’s decision to marry so many women all at once. This detail had gone viral about Fela, and many Christian-raised folks didn’t like this bit. It is also important to note that as a young man, Bobi Wine was raised on kandongokamu music, which was still the most powerful genre on the local scene, and the commonest imports were Jamaican dance hall and Congolese Lingala music. Indeed, you cannot miss the fact that many artists emerging at this moment craved to sound like Jamaica’s stars in Chaka Demus and Pliers, Buju Bunton or Shaba Ranks among others. To this end, it is difficult to make the conclusion that Bobi Wine had picked immensely from Fela—because he actually knew little about the legend. Again, if he did, then he learned from the master and took the craft to another level. What is unmistakable is that the two legends lived in different times and responded to the call of their society in almost the same way. It would be meaningless to rank them, especially since they lived in different times, and the younger of the two must have picked inspiration from the other, but they ought to be studied closely, and independently.

Mr Luyimbazi Nalukoola talks with musician and politician Hon Kyagulanyi Ssentamu popularly known as Bobi Wine (wiki commons).

The usual agonies of framing Africa

It was in the process of being commissioned by a publisher in the Western world to write a piece about Bobi Wine for a series publication, “Music and politics,” that returned me to this question—this almost unnecessary comparison—about Bobi Wine being or not being Fela. Interested in writing about six artists from across the continent (including Burkina Faso, Guinea, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Uganda) each as seen through one song, I felt the editors had, quite problematically, straight-jacketed that these artists can be summarised into one of their songs, that, as they pitched the series, “changed the situation or is very representative of a politic period of the country.” I have no idea why he thought it could be one song—and not several songs—encapsulating every single artiste of some renown on the continent. Maybe it worked for some of the project subjects.

While I would struggle to agree to a lumping of all these artists—from six different countries—into a singular project, however generous the uniting embroidery could be, my knowledge of Bobi Wine, made my objections even more immediate. It would be a relic of a piece of writing. Not in his present time. Maybe possible five years ago, but not this time. I tried to explain to my commissioners that such a narrow framing would be unfair to a man of Bobi Wine’s stature. This man recently stood for the presidency (and sections of the country believe he won the election but was cheated out by the incumbent). Presently, Bobi Wine’s political party, the National Unity Platform (NUP) is the leading opposition political party in the country. At the risk of sounding nationalistic (about Bobi Wine), I do not know of any other artiste on the African continent with such a resume—present and past—who has commanded a similar profile as this man, as a master entertainer, but also used his clout and craft of popular culture to seek to challenge the status quo—as a public intellectual and presidential candidate. I felt it would be unfair to myself as a writer, and the subject itself to be contained in such a schema at this moment in time, considering also that the man is presently still politically active. I know, something could be written, but why was it suited for this moment to write about Bobi Wine backwards (like we were in the early 2010s?) And why bundle six artists across the continent into a singular narrative schema?

Noticing that my would-be editors had heard about Bobi Wine, but didn’t know the man fairly enough for better conceptualisation, in one phone call, I referenced a more familiar artiste, Fela Kuti, so as to drive my point home. I noted, “Bobi Wine, took Fela’s craft a notch higher.” My editor on the phone threw me a line that has finally provoked this writing, “of course, Bobi Wine is not Fela, but I understand what you are saying.” We then carried on with a couple of other things and ended the call. But I could not stop wondering what my editor meant when they chose to emphasise that Bobi Wine was not Fela. Of course, he is not. These are two different men. But you could not miss the ranking of greatness in the emphasis, where my would-be editors thought to make it clear that Fela ranked alone. What did they know that I did not know either about Fela or about Bobi Wine? In the dead of the night, I returned to my love affair with Olaniyan’s lively rendering of Fela Kuti, but also my sense of Bobi Wine.

The artists and their political economies

It is my contention that when writing about the subaltern world—after all the anti-stereotyping pushbacks—western scholarship and journalistic writing, in an effort to discard its orientalist ontology (although scattered fragments of orientalism have remained), has instead decided to follow an economic “initial sensibility”: it is not less the racist stereotyping that imbues the writing—this remains a common and settled denominator with Europe sticking to its universalizing claims—but rather histories and levels of integration into the global economy, and perceptions of poverty that drive the writing. In sum, whether it is writing about peoples and cultures, literature, talents or levels of innovations, or even seemingly benign things such as kinship relations and traditions, the writers from the Western world operate on an economic scale module. Something like the more economically advanced a space (country or region) is perceived to be, the more its abilities for progress, innovation, and making culture.

The scholarship is thus influenced, seasoned and pre-conditioned by the writers’ biases and knowledge of the subject’s interactions with the global north economies. For example, scholarship about art, culture, and innovations in South Africa tends to have fairer portrayals than the same items being studied in Malawi or Burundi. This is not to say that scholars enter into their research subjects with these sensibilities, but there seems plenty of room—unconsciously created—for South African inventions over Malawian ones, for Moroccan or Nigeria over Ugandan and Kenyan. Suffice to mention that these biases are not constructed in a vacuum but are constructed over a period. This is the reminder that Edward Said makes in 2003, reintroducing Orientalism, and how these narratives are sustained. Said noted that in the United States and Europe then (and nowadays), bookstores were “filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, Arab threat and the Muslim menace.” The effect is that this forms the worldview of Arabs and Muslims. The same could be said about our views of Africans and their poverty, and how in the midst of their poverty, they cannot fancy progress and culture—and the economic scale kicks in where the supposedly wealthier, the supposedly more respected and more fancied.

I need to start this story from the beginning. As a player on the local political scene in Uganda—mostly as a loudmouthed analyst and scrawny columnist—I have become critical of Bobi Wine in the more recent past. I disapproved of his decision to join active politics (I felt he was better as the symbol of the People Power movement); I also disapproved of the decision to form the NUP political party, arguing it both instrumentalised and thereby killed People Power; and heavily faulted him for letting go of the many “revolutionary moments” that opened in the course of and immediately after the 2021 presidential election. But my criticism notwithstanding, I am fully persuaded by the man’s creative genius as an artist and entertainer, but also as a public intellectual. If he lived in a bigger economy—a more globally integrated one—he would attract incredible amounts of curiosity and study and would be winning global awards. Thus, when confronted with a framing, which I felt did not do enough justice to his artistry and political stature, I was confident in raising my objections. Unbeknownst to me this moment became one of reflection and learning, not about just how interesting but also understudied Bobi Wine’s artistic and political genius was, but appreciating and reflecting upon the reasons why some subjects are more studied, more appreciated, and elevated. This process reaffirmed the place and power of political economies in the ways in which we narrativize our world. The research/studied subject ought to be seated in a bigger economy for their genius to shine.

Hitherto persuaded that Bobi Wine—who is still musically and politically active—had already extended, if not superseded Fela’s remarkable genius, the editor’s reminder shocked me out of this arguably Ugandan-nationalist stupor. For some time, I couldn’t get my mind off the subject. Framing the puzzle differently, I asked the question: why do chroniclers, journalists, scholars, and editors from the Western world come to know more about one place than the other? My (again, arguably, nationalistic) bias was that not enough is known about Bobi Wine, especially his musically rendered activism. He has not done his craft in English, not staged shows to European audiences in the Western world; and neither does he have European production teams. Even when he became a remarkable politician, not enough has been written about him, with thorough research and in-depth study. (except that PhD cited above, and more recently, a National Geographic production, among others).

Comparatively, there is a great of scholarship and media coverage on South African and Nigerian artists, including folks with lighter talents. As I mulled over these contentions, the penny dropped: it is not the difference in the artistic and activist accomplishments of either man. It was not even necessarily that they lived in different times and inhabited different spaces. But rather the political economies in which these two men operated, which might speak to both their artistic quality and reach, but most importantly, their renown in the chronicles of history. It is about the writer, and less about the event/subject of the chronicle. To this end, it is my sobering contention that there is a close connection between the artiste, and the political economies (or their resources) of their countries, which thereby informs their renown and celebrity.

This contention operates at two levels—local and international—and encapsulates the challenges of knowledge production in a broader sense: (a) at the so-called international level, narrators/chroniclers are moved not just by the talents of their subjects, but by the economic/political interests and histories that unite the worlds of both the subject and the chronicler. In our world today, the closer in terms of resources one is to the Western world—which often constitutes the international space—the more genius and creativity will be spotlighted. And the reverse is true. It is akin to the ways the British media brands and promotes their athletes who happen to be fairly good, but within the larger pool, are comparatively of weaker talents. (b) at the local levels, chronicles and local historians are busy eking an existence, trying to find food and water, and have no time for studying and breaking down minute details about the accomplishments of their cultural producers. They are happy to harvest their cultural production but are unable to market them to the world. Perhaps it does not even matter at all. Native scholars find themselves conditioned to a position of “native informers,” (as Mahmood Mamdani ridiculed colleagues at Makerere University) when responding to questions set from outside.

Exactly because not many have the time and resources to indulge in questions about things they are gladly enjoying. To this end, these talents are buried away from the so-called international audience. Ironically, when these talents so painstakingly make the breakthrough—to the international scene—the comparisons with other more established folks are often difficult.

It is fair to say that Bobi Wine’s talents and accomplishments—whilst being inspired and enabled by his Ugandanness—have also been denied a shine for being this Ugandan. But how would the scholarship and media coverage be if he had lived and operated in an economy as big and globally integrated as Nigeria and lived the talents he continues to live: (a) a leading entertainer and public intellectual for over 15 years, (b) inspiring an entire generation with the People Power movement and (c) politician winning a parliamentary seat, starting a political party, standing for president—and almost winning. But also standing as the leader of the main opposition political party in the country. These are feats of great genius especially in a long-established autocracy. A number of his songs cannot be played on airwaves, and presently cannot stage a show in the country. He has been arrested several times, and almost got shot and killed by the state in the northern district of Arua in 2018. (The shooting instead claimed the life of his driver, Yasin Kawuma, who was seated in the co-drivers seat). He was under house arrest after the 2021 presidential election and got terribly battered through an election cycle including surviving a bomb attack. Revolutionary talents like Lucky Dube, Ken Saro Wiwa, Okot p’ Bitek, and Fela Kuti himself would be proud of this man had they met him.

Yusuf Serunkuma is a columnist in Uganda’s newspapers, a scholar, and a playwright. In 2014, Fountain Publishers published his first play, The Snake Farmers which was received with critical acclaim in Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda. He teaches decolonial studies/new colonialism and writes regularly for ROAPE.

Featured Photography: Bobi Wine campaigning with Ugandan flag (Wiki commons)

“God-fearing nations” – understanding the rise of homophobia and homophobic legislations in East Africa and beyond

ROAPE

October 26, 2023

Barbara Bompani takes aim at the dominant narrative that rising homophobia in Africa is the result of external actors, and in particular US conservative Christian groups. Drawing from more than a decade of research and analysis, she argues rising homophobia is not simply the result of external influence, but is shaped by the complex role religion has played in shaping new forms of nationalisms on the continent. What we are observing in several African countries, she contends, is the emergence of a new politics that threatens untold and profound harm to LGBT communities.

By Barbara Bompani

Learning from Uganda

After almost a decade away from the public eye, the Anti-Homosexuality Bill (AHB) reappeared in the Ugandan Parliament in early March 2023. Following parliamentary debate the Bill was voted for and passed to the President’s Office to be signed into law, opposed only by two members of the Ugandan Parliament. The new Bill was harsher than the earlier version that passed in December 2013 (‘a Christmas gift’ to the Christian community, as announced by the then speaker of Parliament Rebecca Kadaga), was signed into law by President Museveni in February 2014, and was ultimately nullified by the Constitutional Court in August of the same year.

The 2023 Bill added further criminal offenses including prosecution for ‘promoting homosexuality’, for anyone ‘supporting homosexuality’ (under such a large interpretative umbrella that even journalists writing non-critically about LGBT rights could be charged) punishable by up to 20 years in prison, and the recommending of the death penalty for certain same-sex acts. The Parliament passed it for a second and final time on 2 May with minor changes to align the Bill with Uganda’s Constitution and President Museveni signed it into law on the 29 May 2023, despite the dismay of the international community.

The Anti-homosexuality Act (AHA) 2023 emerged in a different climate from the 2013/4 attempt, benefiting from broader support from a network of national and international actors. While religious figures have always been behind the proposal and passage of the Bill, a decade ago mainly Ugandan Pentecostal-charismatic actors were at the forefront of this punitive legislation, inspired by their very public and vocal fight against what the majority of Pentecostal leaders consider the irreconcilable “a-moral LGBT community” (Bompani 2016). Along with Pentecostal premillennial visions of moral decay and their call to fight to ‘restore’ a moral Christian nation, prominent political figures were clearly associated with this Christian denomination, most notably the First Lady and Minister of Education, Janet Museveni, MP David Bahati (promoter of the very first Bill in 2009), and the then speaker of Parliament, Rebecca Kadaga.

However, with the AHA 2023 the situation is markedly different as high-profile religious leaders from all main religious groups publicly supported the legislation (see Anglican leaders and the Muslim minority), the act was promoted with funding from conservative US Christian groups, and support for more punitive anti-LGBT legislation was growing across other East African countries. Some even argue that this recent anti-LGBT campaign is fueled by Russia to push Global South countries away from the West. While Tweets of the Russian embassy in Kenya and fresh Russian attention on Africa (harking back to the Cold War) perhaps suggest this, for now these claims are not supported with evidence while Russia is deeply committed to other geopolitical causes.

The passing of the 2023 AHA highlights the multiplicity of actors, motivations, and narratives at work. It is apparent that most recent analyses and readings of the AHA place a strong emphasis on the ‘external actors’ with influence (financial and beyond) over President Museveni pushing for the passing of the law, with particular attention paid to the role played by US conservative Christian groups. Indeed, much media coverage and other analyses unpacked direct links between the re-tabling of the Bill with the renewed work of US conservative evangelical Christian networks, to which Pentecostals belong.

The promotion of the Bill even in its very first version in 2009 can be considered in part inspired by the US conservative Christian right mobilisation that emerged from a March 2009 conference entitled ‘Exposing the Homosexual Agenda’ organised in a hotel in Kampala by the Uganda based Family Life Network, the American pastor Scott Lively of Abiding Truth Ministries (then challenged by the LGBT Ugandan organisation SMUG in a lawsuit in Massachusetts) and the American Dan Schmierer of the ex-gay Exodus International (a Christian umbrella organisation that promoted the idea that gay people could change their sexual orientation).

The 2023 AHA has been depicted by many observers (academic, human rights activists and politicians) as the culmination of more than a decade of collaboration between Ugandan elite interest groups and US ultra-conservative groups. In particular, the US-registered non-profit Family Watch International, through Sharon Slater (a US citizen), brought together 150 ultra-conservative campaigners in Uganda, with the organisation apparently convening a private WhatsApp group including several Ugandan politicians (Wepukhulu in OpenDemocracy 2023). It is widely accepted that Family Watch International has, for a decade, been encouraging African politicians and religious and civic leaders to oppose comprehensive sexuality education across the continent (see for example on social media, Twitter, 10 April 2023).

LGBT people from Uganda parading at Pride in London 2016, 25 June 2016.

The US-registered Fellowship Foundation, also known as The Family in Uganda, is an active actor in the ‘National Prayer Breakfast’ which has frequently been defined as an ultra-conservative group. The same David Bahati leads the Thursday parliamentary Breakfast Prayer group modeled on the weekly prayer breakfasts that take place in US Congress and he has clear links to the The Family (along with the Ugandan Pastor Steven Langa of Family Life Network and other Ugandan religious and political leaders, including First Lady Janet Museveni). There has also been discussions around generous donations to conservative Ugandan groups from these organisations to support the promotion of anti-gender and anti-LGBT policies.

Ugandan Christian Nationalism

Although those connections and influences are relevant, it would be overly reductive to assume that such a complex, contested and symbolic legislation was primarily the result of US Christian conservative interference or the (still weak) influence of Russian foreign policy. Homosexuality was, after all, already punishable through the Ugandan Penal Code 1950. In a globalised world and through world religions such as Christianity, actions, ideas, people, and resources interact, coexist, and influence simultaneously at any given time. In recent analyses, for example, few blame Catholic organisations for promoting conservative interpretations of family values in the build up of the AHA 2023, although organisations such as CitizenGo, a movement of Catholic activists, undertake advocacy work for the promotion of family values in Uganda and across the continent. Similarly, little attention is paid to Ugandan conservative churches actively involved in so-called ‘crusades’ to implant Ugandan Pentecostal churches in other African (and beyond) countries (for example in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and South Africa), promoting their own values and morally inspired agendas in new places and contexts.

Drawing from more than a decade of analysis of the politicisation of sexuality in Uganda and beyond, I argue that posing the question ‘were US conservative Christian groups behind the Ugandan AHA 2023?’ is problematic, as it over emphasises the role of external actors in shaping Ugandan religion and politics. The AHA did not pass because a handful of US conservative groups funded or organised a series of events in the country, or because of intercontinental religious networks, or as a result of the existence of WhatsApp groups. It passed with wide support because of complex social changes taking place in the country that require careful unpacking and insight into social imaginaries, particularly in relation to dynamics of inequality and possibilities for the future.

Ugandan society is not at ease with the unmet promises of development brought in with the postcolonial (1962) and post-war(s) (1986) projects of progress. A heavily overseas development assistance-dependent country that struggles to flourish economically and meet the promises of development coupled with a gerontocratic political leadership aggressively controlling decision areas of power, leaves little space for imagining transformation or change. Preoccupations of a different and better future are real and material, especially among the very large Ugandan youth population, as data from a recent Afrobarometer survey attest.

In this context, since the beginning of the 21^st century, Conservative Ugandan Christian forces have influenced society, offering answers to social anxieties and proposing a vision of a better future through moral regeneration – something that political forces have not been able to deliver, especially to a very young, globally connected, dissatisfied population. Pentecostalism is an active religious expression that fights to establish itself in society and ensure that its own theological markers (among them the fight against homosexuality) are accepted and supported in society and protected by politics. This is true also in other contexts beyond Africa (see the US and Eastern Europe).

Ugandan Pentecostalism has been successful in ‘Pentecostalizing’ the socio-political sphere through its own active public action and connections with circles of power (Bompani, 2022); so much so that Pentecostal priorities became national priorities. In fact, if the AHA 2014 can be read as a legislation desired by Pentecostal forces, the AHA 2023 has been supported by Pentecostals but also by many other religious and non-religious groups that have embraced the Pentecostal idea that the Ugandan nation needs to regenerate from a moral point of view in order to build a better future. This change was possible because of Ugandan Pentecostal work in the everyday, in the community and in the public sphere where the formulation of a collective transformation of society through a moral regeneration of the nation are consistently reiterated and absorbed.

This moral Christian nationalism is the milieu that must be understood if we want to understand the emergence of broad-based support for anti-LGBT legislation. Understanding the emergence of this new moral Christian nationalism is necessary to understand growing anti-LGBT attitudes. The wide support that Ugandan society gives to the AHA can be understood as the slow convergence of Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal spheres of the imagination of a different future for the Ugandan nation.

Sexual anxieties that are close to Pentecostal conservative theological interpretations and readings of the Bible are in line with and encapsulate other sets of social anxieties and worries for the future are readily absorbed by non-Pentecostals. In moments of social pressure and change, with a lack of secure points of reference at a national as well as at an international level, sexuality and the body become intertwined with the idea of future through reproduction.

In many public narratives the imagining of the future increasingly belongs to ‘moral citizens’, with conservative Christian morality becoming capital for social differentiation between a regenerating nation versus corrupted (secular) Western countries depicted in those narratives as dangerously immoral. This increasingly feeds into a culture war with the West, a tension expressed by religious and non-religious politicians alike. We can see Christian nationalism operating as an influential political force in Uganda, and elsewhere in Africa.

Conditions for rising public homophobia

Through Pentecostal readings, the spiritual condition of the family determines the spiritual condition of everything else in society as the family represents the building block for the nation in its covenant with God. If families are healthy, then the nation will be. In Pentecostal narratives families (conceptualised as heterosexual families adopting traditional roles) are under attack by many forces, including LGBT rights, individualistic aspirations and pro-choice policies. The intense work of Ugandan Pentecostals brought these anxieties to the fore in national policies, resonating with important changes already happening to gender roles and family compositions in Uganda (Boyd, 2014). The family is constantly discussed in public and political spaces, including in the legal space in the build-up to the signing of the AHA. In 2013 a prominent Ugandan anti-LGBT pastor asked the Government to create a special body to protect the family and all issues concerning this institution (although this request remained formulated in very general and vague terms). According to Pastor Ssempa, ‘Issues of the family are more crucial than oil…[so] I propose that the Government also constitutes a department for the family called Uganda Family Authority’ (New Vision, 08 April 2013), a proposal that fell through as forces instead focused on the passing of the Anti-homosexuality Bill that year.

In neighbouring Kenya in 2023 anti-LGBT sentiments began to rise with lawmakers pushing for tougher anti-LGBT legislation (an anti sodomy law is already present in the Kenyan Penal Code), with the focus of many debates revolving around the need to protect the ‘traditional’ heterosexual family from the dangers constituted by pro-choice, pro-gay and pro-liberal forces. New anti-LGBT legislation proposed in April 2023 is entitled the ‘Family Protection Act’, de facto a set of very tight measurements against LGBT communities with penalties ranging from a minimum of ten years in prison to the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” (defined as “engaging in homosexual acts with a minor or disabled person and transmitting a terminal disease through sexual means”), and a total ban on any activities “that promote homosexuality”, such as wearing flags or emblems of the LGBTQ community with repercussion for the growing LGBT communities of refugees and displaced people seeking UN High Commissioner for Refugees protection in Nairobi. The parallels with Uganda are striking.

A Pentecostal church in Mombasa, Kenya, 30 March 2010.

Meanwhile in Ghana, where homosexuality is already punishable with up to three years in jail, lawmakers have been debating an anti-LGBT Bill since August 2021 and in July 2023 the Supreme Court rejected an appeal moved by civil society organisations seeking to block the parliament to pass the Bill. This new Bill is framed around the idea of protecting the Ghanaian family from possible negative forces of change, reflected in the title ‘Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values’. If passed, this Bill would criminalise being transgender, same-sex relations and advocating for LGBTQ+ rights, as well as further reducing freedoms.

More recently in Ethiopia (where homosexuality is punishable by up to 15 years in prison or up to 25 years if an offender uses violence, intimidation, coercion or fraud), the Addis Ababa City Peace and Security Administration Bureau announced that it is “taking action” against venues where LGBT people were gathering, calling Ethiopians to report homosexual activists to the nearest police station, adding that “the office has announced that it will continue to take consistent measures”. Police raided several locations and across social media there is a growing campaign to humiliate and persecute Ethiopian LGBT individuals, highlighted as a threat to the Christian, moral fibre of the nation. There are indications that other African countries may follow this path.

Given developments within several Africa states, it is important to try to unpick the emerging perception of homosexuality as a threat to the national agenda of a country. While some studies have been conducted in the US, there are specificities related to the African state that require further investigation. In all of those cases mentioned above, there has been a growing domestic Pentecostal community that on the basis of their demographic prominence and/or links to political power, began to promote their own agenda, primarily focused on moral and family concerns. There is a political elite keen to support Pentecostal causes. In some instances, such as in Kenya, the political elite may already belong to Pentecostal cadres, as for example the Kenyan President William Ruto and his wife Rachel Ruto, as well as the Vice-president and his wife, who made Pentecostal agendas clearly central to their political call in making Kenya a ‘God-fearing country’.

In Uganda those personal connections may be less clear and more pragmatic. For example, president Museveni never professed to be a Pentecostal, but maintains strong interests and connections with the Pentecostal community as a hub of potential voters during increasingly more contested elections and diminishing popularity in addition to his personal links through the first lady Janet Museveni, a leading Pentecostal figure. In Ethiopia, where Pentecostalism is still a minority denomination, Abiy Ahmed, a Pentecostal, was appointed as Prime Minister in March 2018, ecstatically proclaimed by many Ethiopians as a new prophet who would save the country from disintegration.

It is also worth noting that Pentecostal support in any country would revert to any political ally embracing their cause for moralising the nation. Pentecostal support comes no matter their track records, political reputation or personal integrity, or their own religious beliefs. In short, the cause of promoting morality is stronger than any assessment of the moral status of the political candidate. There are social and economic conditions (high unemployment rates, dissatisfaction with the current status quo, a lack of trust in the capacity – moral and tangible – of the political elite to promote positive transformation) and large young populations that see their future jeopardized and seek ways to bring change in economically stagnant countries. Finally, this sense of dissatisfaction not only links to distrust in the political elite, but also to distrust of the West and its (failed?) promises of development and a better future.

In conclusion, it is important to recognise that the emergence of this identarian dichotomy (Us vs Them) is not simply the result of external influence, rather it is shaped by the complex role religion, for now conservative Christianity, has played in shaping new forms of nationalisms by pulling together religious, political, cultural and social realms in new ways in response to inter-generational unhappiness, development delayed, unmet expectations of change, and broken political promises. What we are observing in several African countries is the emergence of a complex, new politics that threatens untold and profound harm to LGBT communities (and possibly other communities as time passes) as agendas shift, and power waxes and wanes.

References

Bompani B. 2016 ‘For God and For My Country’: Pentecostal-charismatic Churches and the Framing of a New Political Discourse in Uganda’ in van Klinken A & Chitando E (eds) Public Religion and the Politics of Homosexuality in Africa, Surrey: Routledge [chapter 1].

Bompani B. 2022. ‘The memory of persecution is in our blood’: documenting loyalties, identities and motivations to political action in the Ugandan Pentecostal Movement’ in Journal of Modern African Studies vol 60, issue 4 (December), pp. 479-501.

Boyd L. 2014. ‘Ugandans born-again Christians and the moral politics of gender equality’ in Journal of Religion in Africa vol 44, issue 3-4, pp. 333-354.

New Vision, 08 April 2013 [print newspaper].

Wepukhulu K. S. (5 May 2023) ‘Calls for US anti-rights groups to face action over Uganda anti-gay law’ in OpenDemocracy: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/uganda-anti-gay-law-sharon-slater-tim-kreutter/ [accessed on Friday 18 August]

Barbara Bompani is a Reader in Africa and International Development at the Centre of African Studies (CAS), School of Social and Political Science, the University of Edinburgh, UK and Research Associate to the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Featured Photograph: Marching in solidarity with Uganda’s LGBTI community (19 April 2018)

Climate cynicism: fossil fuel growth in Africa

ROAPE

October 23, 2023

Kola Ibrahim argues that Africa is being tricked by global climate change politics, the same people who claim to be fighting climate change are the ones promoting fossil fuels. The reality is that Africa has become a new frontier for fossil fuel development. This is being carried out by global finance capital, multinational corporations, governments of developed economies, and worse still multilateral organizations that claim to be spearheading the funding for climate actions. Ibrahim exposes the reality of the green transition in Africa.

By Kola Ibrahim

While Africa is being conned by global climate change politics, the same people who claim to be fighting climate change are the ones promoting fossil fuels, globally and in particular, in Africa. Indeed, Africa has become a new frontier for fossil fuel development. This is being carried out by global finance capital, multinational corporations, governments of developed economies, and worse still multilateral organizations that claim to be spearheading the funding for climate actions. Of course, this is done with the active connivance of the African political elite and big business class, which serves as local junior partner.

While the Paris Agreement was reached in 2015 and put into effect in 2016, investments in oil, gas and coal development increased across Africa, especially between 2016 and 2021. A research report by a group of NGOs, found that there are 964 fossil fuel projects in Africa, 782 of which are currently in operation or were under construction (as at 2022), and 111 others approved. The report also noted that, out of over US$132 billion that was committed to 58 fossil fuel projects and 24 fossil fuel companies in Africa, 54.8% came from Global North countries (Australia, Europe, and North America), while 31.4% came from Asia (mainly China).

In fact, the top 10 of the 24 national financial institutions providing finance for fossil fuel development in Africa between 2016 and 2021 were located in China, the United States, Japan, Korea and the United Kingdom. These ten institutions were responsible for 94.6% (US$23.7 billion) of fossil fuel funding in Africa by national financial institutions. Also, 81.4% (US$16.8 billion) of the US$20.4 billion committed by private financial companies (banks and financial businesses) to 58 fossil fuel projects in Africa came from North American, European and Asian companies. Furthermore, 88.8% of over US$44.4 billion general financing of 24 biggest fossil fuel companies in Africa comes from European, American, Australian, and Asian multinational financial companies, with only 10.8% from African companies (mostly South African companies). Yet, between 2016 and 2019, G-20 public financial institutions and multilateral organizations only committed US$13 billion to investment in renewable energy in Africa.

Indeed, nine multilateral institutions committed US$4.8 billion to fossil fuel investment between 2016 and 2021, with the African Development Bank (AfDB), World Bank Group and Africa Ex-Im Bank contributing the lion share (63%). Interestingly, AfDB and World Bank currently have different programmes and projects on clean energy and climate mitigation and adaptation in Africa. Yet, they are committing more and more resources to fossil fuel. This underscores the reality that these institutions of global finance capital are serving the interests of global corporates whose main aim is to maximise profits at all costs. They are not prepared to commit much needed capital and resources to transition to clean and climate friendly energy and production systems. It is important to note that oil exploration financing in Africa increased from US$3.4 billion in 2020 to US$5.1 billion in 2022, while 18 out of 45 countries where oil and gas are being prospected are frontier-countries, i.e., countries where oil and gas in being produced for the first time.

Half of the 20 companies developing the largest oil and gas upstream projects (12.27 billion barrel of oil equivalent BBOE) are from China, Japan, United Kingdom, France, United States and Italy. These companies, together hold 6.56 BBOE, (53%). Even those projects being developed by African state-owned companies like Nigeria’s NLNG, Algeria’s Sonatrach, Libya’s NOC, Mozambique’s ENH and Ghana’s Springfield, are mostly jointly owned or have foreign debt, or equity funded. Between 2021 and 2022, new projects have been added which include the Tanzania LNG Liquefaction Project (US$30 billion), Rovuma (Mozambique) LNG Terminal Project (US$30 billion), Etan and Zabazaba (Nigeria) oil fields (US$13.5 billion), Algeria’s Berkine Basin Gas development (US$4 billion). Twenty-five percent of the TotalEnergies’ fossil fuel production in 2021 came from Africa, while its new discovery in Namibia has fossil fuel reserve of 3 billion. The French multinational, which has been branding itself as promoter of the energy transition, is adding 2.27 billion barrels of oil equivalent to its investment in Africa in the short term.

The increasing investment in fossil fuel will increase Africa’s carbon emission and raise the share of Africa’s contribution to global climate change. In 2021, Africa contributed 3.9% (1.45 billion tonnes of CO₂eq.) of global carbon dioxide emission from fossil fuels and industry. According to a report by a group of NGOs, if the largest upstream oil and gas projects worth 12.27 BBOE come on stream, it will add 4.54 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent (tCO₂eq); more than three-time Africa’s 2021 emissions. New coal projects are expected to add 105,000 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent. Furthermore, some seven million BBOE/day will be produced in Africa in 2025, which will add 3.01 million tCO₂ eq per day (or 1.08 billion tCO₂eq per year). It will subsequently increase global emission and make it difficult to reverse climate change and its terrible consequences. This is dangerous for Africa, which already is bearing disproportionate impacts of climate change, a situation that will become ultimately irreversible if the global temperature rises to 1.5⁰C or 2⁰C.

Besides, large scale oil exploration and production is associated with environmental degradation and pollution: the destruction of natural forests, air and ocean pollution and the displacement of indigenous people. Several reports have highlighted various impacts on health, livelihood and environment in Africa.

Moreover, the economic implication of fossil fuel production puts the continent on the road of another round of economic crises. This is because some of the oil and gas projects will turn oil producing Africa countries, whose main public revenues come from fossil fuel production to be more oil-wealth dependent. This will mean that the global transition to clean energy, even on the basis of the current slower scale, will lead to serious strain, if not collapse, of the economies of these countries. Seven African countries (Nigeria, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Algeria, Gabon, Libya and Republic of Congo), depend on oil and gas as source of revenue for between 35% to 82% of their governments’ revenues; while the oil and gas share of GDP of at least eight countries (Nigeria, Ghana, Republic of Congo, Algeria, Chad, Angola, Gabon and Libya) ranges between 10% to 64%. A fall in oil and gas price and demand will seriously affect their revenues and GDP. This will lead to a new debt burden, the introduction of austerity, and a social crisis. It will also make it difficult for them to exit the fossil economy. This will also impact on their ability to withstand and adapt to climate events, which are expected to amplify the climate emergency in the coming period.

Furthermore, oil and gas investments in Africa pose serious financial risks for the countries of the continent. Some of the finances for oil and gas projects are secured by national governments, especially those sponsored by governments themselves. Some of these projects have a tendency to be abandoned, especially when the crude oil price falls. This was witnessed during the Covid-19 period and led to a steep fall in crude oil and gas prices, and to fiscal and balance of payments problems for many oil exporting countries (lower revenues, higher debts, foreign exchange crisis, etc.). The Covid-19 economic crisis led to a downgrade of Africa’s oil and gas growth from a 32% increase to a 24% decrease. It also led to a capital loss of US$25 billion in the sector, as some of the projects on stream were cancelled or postponed.

A specific example is that of the Dangote oil refineries in Nigeria, conceived and started in 2013, expected to be completed in three years, but extended to 2023, and now not fully operational until 2025. The delay was occasioned by a series of global and local economic crises including two national economic recessions. The project cost increased from US$9 billion to US$20 billion and will possibly increase further in the coming years for the refineries to fully come on stream. Though partly funded locally by banks and Dangote businesses, the Nigerian government insured the projects and had to commit billions of dollars in public funds to support it, including a US$2.76 billion commitment as equity in the refinery (obviously to save the company from a liquidity problem). Yet the majority of Nigerians still pay heavily for fuel, while only about 54% of the population have access to the very unstable power supply. The state-owned refineries under the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) have been grounded owing to corruption, deliberate sabotage, and mismanagement and are only able to refine less than 10% of their installed capacity.

If the political pressure on climate change mounts on governments of developed economies, and compels a shift towards renewable energy, this will affect oil prices and lead to collapse of some, if not all, of the many oil and gas projects in Africa. This will have serious impact on finance of African countries, which include but are not limited to the loss of revenue, capital, the increasing cost of borrowing and debt overhang. About US$245 billion of gas investments on stream until 2030 are at risk of becoming stranded assets, even if minimal efforts are taken towards climate change. Even for projects that are not abandoned, an increased shift towards renewable energy may affect access to capital for such projects, which will lengthen their completion time and increase the size of loans incurred for them.

Beyond the financial and fiscal problems to be unleashed by the oil and gas projects and investments in Africa, is the adverse impact on the transition towards clean energy and climate stability. With increased oil investments, oil and gas producing countries are locked into the fossil economy. This will make a transition towards clean energy difficult. Given also that most of the oil and gas projects in Africa are owned and controlled by global energy corporations and financial institutions, with governments of developed economies and multilateral organizations playing key roles in securing these projects, it is expected that clean energy and climate action policies in Africa will be undermined and sabotaged.

The continuous investment in fossil fuel again knocks a big hole in the purported and much touted climate action commitments of developed economies, multilateral institutions representing global finance capital, and global multinational corporations. Their climate funding in Africa, is grossly inadequate. Yet, their commitment to fossil fuel remains strong. Therefore, it will be self-delusion to expect global finance capital, developed countries and their multilateral agencies, genuinely to play any serious role in climate sustainability in Africa. Rather, they will use climate change to exploit Africa’s resources even further, and plunge the countries of the continent into deeper debt and underdevelopment.

Further reading:

Isabelle Geuskens and Henrieke Butjin, Locked out of a just transition – fossil fuel financing in Africa (2002).

Bronwen Tucker and Nikki Reisch, The sky’s the limit – the case for a just energy transition from fossil fuel production in Africa (2021).

Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser, Green house gas emissions (2020).

Kola Ibrahim, an author and scholar-activist, is a public intellectual and climate justice researcher and campaigner. He can be reached at: kmarx4life@gmail.com.

This blogpost is an edited excerpt from Kola Ibrahim’s new book, Climate Imperialism in Africa (2023). A full review of Ibrahim’s book will appear in the forthcoming ROAPE climate emergency special issue.

Featured Photograph: An oil exploration rig waiting to be loaded onto a ship bound for Mozambique (5 August 2019).

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