If its not fixed, we didn’t break it

June 14, 2016

By Graham Harrison

Business as usual

Mainstream understandings of capitalism share a faith that it can be stripped of its crisis tendency through the right policies, politics, and regulations. To sustain this faith, there is often a focus on moments when, it is claimed, everything was working well. There are three main candidates for capitalism’s belle époque: the late Nineteenth Century’s ‘golden years’; the post-Second World War social democracy; the post-Cold War ‘end of history’. Each of these serves as a basis to imagine how capitalism might become permanently stable and socially-just, generating questions like ‘what went wrong’ or ‘how can we retrieve a model or strategy from this period to address crisis now?’ But, placed in a longer history of capitalism, each of these decades of contentedness (no longer than that) was based on exceptional circumstances, not problems solved. Furthermore, unless one considers it valid to exclude the majority of the world’s population, none of these ‘never had it so good’ interludes was in any way universally ‘good’. Each happy portrait is framed by national, racialised and gendered exclusions so obvious that one can only understand the reminiscences for happier times as no less problematic than the occasionally-reported Russian nostalgia for Stalin or the grey-bearded Mozambican farmers I spoke to who said things were better when the Portuguese ruled.

Lamentations for a better time when capitalism worked are, then, both empirically shaky and selective, ways of dreaming that the system can be made to work for everyone and then wondering what’s going wrong. A more balanced and inclusive way of seeing capitalism’s history is that it is intrinsically crisis-prone and that any ‘righting’ of this tendency is a partial and momentary success, a lapse. Crisis is permanent.

This point is only sharpened if one telescopes towards our neoliberal age. Neoliberalism was born in crisis and has reproduced itself through repeated crises, localised in particular countries or expressed through different processes. Plummeting growth, currency crash, massive indebtedness, burst asset bubbles, exposed scandals of systemic corruption and theft in the midst of privatisation, sudden changes in global commodity prices… these are the devices of an insistent reallocation of property, wealth and power towards ruling elites, national and transnational.

Troubled times

The historiography of global capitalism is one of crises, strewn unevenly over territories, generating forms of precariousness, inequality and poverty. Crisis also generates piques of militarism, imperialism, and war. This creates a historiography of profound anxiety in which it is difficult to get a sense of progress that might reassure us in troubled times or more ambitiously provide legitimating narratives about capitalism as a way of life. What political story can we tell about global capitalism’s political forms since the late Eighteenth Century? Unless, again, we resort to speculative and idealistic forms of analysis, the most we can say is that capitalism has been intertwined with the attempted universalization of the modern sovereign nation-state and that this institutional set-up has afforded stability, security, and some legitimate authority for citizens in some countries for some of the time. We can also say that it has generated massive amounts of growth and productivity that have led to very uneven improvements in people’s material well-being and left many others no better off or worse off.

This is the most we can say without taking flight from the evidence, and even this is a stretch. Even allowing for intervals of stability requires heavy work of provincialism, the narration of capitalism in Europe as typical, as the ideal-type of capitalism, its ‘norm’. This was hardly the case in other parts of the world, least of all in Africa. One response to those who explain crisis in Africa as ‘too little’, the ‘wrong kind’, or an ‘incomplete’ capitalism, one is increasingly tempted to say: show me where it works properly?

In a sense Africa shows the world a future capitalism, one in which the social relations of production are far more extensively defined by contingency, violence, struggle, fraud, unfree labour, environmental pillage, and the politics of organised chaos. None of these features of social life are ‘African’; they are certainly capitalist and they are also global, albeit unevenly distributed in their intensity. It is a dark schadenfreude for those who study Africa’s generation of structural adjustment to find that many explanations for Africa’s ‘dysfunction’ are now right in the mainstream of analyses of mainstream globalisation: tax evasion, fraud, unfree labour, ‘underclasses’, falling risk or credit ratings, balance of payments crises, excessive debt.

Whilst post-colonial theorists continue to talk of Eurocentrism, capitalism Africanises the world, or certainly considerable parts of it. Dilapidated public services, the rise of ‘the precariat’, ghettoization and securitised wealth are the landscapes of the West as well. This ‘Africanisation’ works in a secondary fashion as well, commonly allocating suffering to those racialised as ‘black’, often underpinned by governments increasingly bold and vicious in their demonization of ‘race’.

Destructive politics?

If we telescope in again to think of the new millennium, then, we will likely be seized by a rather intense sense of anxiety: an age currently bookended by the war on terror and the global economic crisis. An age in which state sovereignty is no longer a working assumption of international politics. A world in which we live every day in the midst of a global climatic process whose effects are highly likely to be massive and irrevocable. We are locked into a global politics in which there is a relentless drive for growth above all else. Transnational corporations incrementally dominate politics both nationally and internationally.

This is not misanthropy or dystopian end-of-times stuff. It is simply a recognition of the broad features of our world. It makes more sense to characterise capitalism’s global history as something like a lurching from one crisis to another than it does to say we live in an age of liberal democracy, making poverty history, a new world order, green shoots of recovery, sustainable growth, or any of the ideological zeitgeists that bubble up (and often quickly down) from the media and many public intellectuals.

The entire burden of history suggests that you cannot fix capitalism’s crisis tendencies. And, it seems that the kinds of ideas and institutions that might ‘suture’ them or manage them in some fashion are difficult to identify. All states – in very varied ways – are in part globally-captured by transnational regulations and the influence of international companies. The discourses of governance are depleted of robust ideas of inclusive commonwealth and citizenship of the kind that led to the sliver of hope that capitalism could be managed by national government in other times. In the UK, we have a government that borders on the self-satirising, so deeply elitist, endeared to wealth, and contemptuous of poverty it has become.

Nevertheless, governments around the world readily recognise that there are crises. Their solutions generally revolve around a supine combination of the resourcing and light regulation of finance and investment, and populisms that easily slip into racism and xenophobia. Where unorthodox strategies emerge, they are besieged and often problematic in all sorts of ways as one can see in the ‘pink tide’ of some South American states. The emergence of ‘Corbynomics’ in the UK presents a radical departure from orthodox policy-making but in detail it looks like a strategy that would fit within many moderate Labour administrations of the past. At present, nothing in the world looks like a potential political adversary to capitalism.

Perhaps, then, an argument that is reasonably attuned to our times but deeply unsatisfactory in almost every other respect is that we should start to think about destruction. The political economy of capitalism and crisis is more likely to be broken than it is to be fixed, although it would be disingenuous to suppose that this makes the former likely or easy to imagine.

This is a scary prospect. For all of the obvious inequality, crazy combinations of overwork and unemployment, insecurity, state collapse, environmental disaster and so on, a great many people all over the world have some skin in the game. And, notions of economic growth offer powerful aesthetics of aspiration to millions more people. Capitalism has generated unprecedented processes of poverty reduction, although these are processes too eagerly celebrated and exaggerated. Capitalism is as resilient as it is unstable. It is not going anywhere fast and we have very little idea of what a world without it would look like. Perhaps capitalism’s demise and the kind of world that succeeds it might only be thinkable once the process of breaking it down is under way. Perverse as it seems, as long as there is crisis, there is hope.

Graham Harrison is Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield and is on the editorial board of the Review of African Political Economy.

Featured Photograph: Banner at the 2012 Republican National Convention depicts Martin Luther King, Jr.

Burkina Faso’s Second Uprising

ROAPE

June 7, 2016

By Leo Zeilig

In October 2014 the ‘insurrection populaire’ – as it is known in Burkina Faso –unseated the twenty-seven year old regime of Blaise Compaoré, the President involved in the assassination of the radical leader of the Burkinabé revolution, Thomas Sankara in 1987. A transitional government was put in place to oversee the transfer of power to a new government in 2015. But by September, Burkina Faso was once again shaken by profound forces: the coup attempt on 16 September 2015 by security forces and the subsequent popular resistance to it by the population. Based on interviews conducted in March and April 2016, in the capital, Ouagadougou, his blog will look at the events that took place in Burkina Faso during and immediately after the coup attempt last year.

In 2015 Burkina Faso was moving towards elections that had been scheduled for 11 October when a coup was launched by members of the Régiment de sécurité présidentiel (RSP) – the Presidential Security Regiment. The RSP was a ‘private’ army of approximately 1200 heavily armed and trained men created by the former president Compaoré and charged with looking after the security of the ruling political elite. The coup leader was General Gilbert Diendéré, head of the RSP and a loyalist to the former regime. Partly an expression of the exclusion of the Compaoré elite by the transitional government in elections scheduled for October, officially the coup leaders sought to correct what they saw as problematic political imbalance inside the transition.

On the evening of 16 September it was clear that the Conseil national de transition (National Council of the Transition), charged with preparing the country for elections in October, was under attack. Leading members of the transition were arrested, including President Michel Kafando, and the Prime Minister, Yacouba Isaac Zida. Coup leader Diendéré declared that the coup was suspending elections and ‘restoring order’. Very quickly the streets of Ouagadougou were occupied by the RSP in armoured vehicles.

The coup represented more than a quibble about the conduct of the next elections. The message was clear: the popular insurrection that had overturned the old government and sent its president of 27 years into exile would not be tolerated by the remnants of the old guard. The young must stay away from the streets, the poor must once again learn their place, i.e. the powerful must be resume their control of the state.

Already by 25 September the coup has been defeated by and the RSP dissolved by the government of the transition, that had taken its place again at the head of the state. Soldiers of the former Praetorian Guard were forced to return to barracks or face the consequences. The coup leaders had either been arrested, were in ‘hiding’ in foreign compounds – Diendéré sought temporary refuge in the Vatican embassy (the Vatican Apostolic Nunciature in Ouagadougou) – or had faded into the undergrowth of Burkina society.

Organising the resistance

The trade unions were a vital element in the success of the resistance to the coup. Major unions organised in the Unite d’action syndicale (United Union Action) called for an unlimited general strike as soon as the coup took place on 16 September. By the end of the month, despite maintaining the strike in order to secure other workplace and social demands, the UAS declared victory, ‘The strong mobilization of workers in all sectors, the strong popular resistance led mainly by young people through the barriers erected in the provinces and barricades throughout the city of Ouagadougou against the putsch, surprised the coup and quickly defeated their project.’

The resistance was also marked by the militancy of the young, many unemployed, who had built the barricades and defended neighbourhoods in the capital from the RSP and supporters of the old regime. The picture was the same across the country.

Graffiti from the protests in 2014. Ouagadougou, March 2016. Photograph: Leo Zeilig

In western city of Bobo Dioulasso, as elsewhere in the provinces, protests against the coup had the tacit sympathy of the army and police, who made no attempt to prevent the demonstrations. Even in the historical bastion of the RSP, the town of Pô in the South, the watchword was the general strike. ‘In the streets of Pô,’ reported the city’s mayor Henry Koubizara, ‘the population has risen as one to the union’s call for a general strike. Shops are closed, the market is closed, there is no economic activity. People are mobilized, they are doing sit-ins.’

Though the mobilisation was led, in part, by trade unions, action in September was called by the many organisations that had a stake in and supported the transition. These groups – including Le Balai Citoyen (The Citizen’s Broom) – had helped to coalesce opposition to the Compaoré regime and played an important role in the protests and transition actions the previous year. Furthermore there was a general call to resist from leaders of the transition, now in hiding. Prominent among these was Cherif Sy, president of the Conseil national de transition, who soon became the ‘underground’ voice of the resistance. Finally, though many radio stations where forced off the air during the days of the coup, others managed to continue broadcasting’ fresh reports. Radio 108 – known as ‘Radio Resistance’ – which was run, principally, as a loudhailer for Sy.

The struggle on the streets

Neighbourhoods across the capital built barricades, following instructions from the transition government but also acting on their own initiative. Tires, rubble, rubbish were dragged across dusty roads, alleyways and major thoroughfares to prevent the RSP from moving freely around the city. One effective technique, widely used during the resistance, was described to me by Bamouni Bertrand Leonce, a forty-five year old militant of the 2014 uprising, who lives in Ouagadougou: ‘to stop the tanks and armoured vehicles of the RSP we attached large cables from one side of the street to another, fastening the ends to lampposts or walls. When the RSP tried to get through, voila, they would be slice in two. We prepared bottles of petrol, with small, torn pieces of cloth which we would light and then throw at the RSP – or those young enough to throw them would.’ Other methods of resistance – such as using scooters to block streets, or encourage neighbourhoods to come out in protest – were adapted and used to good effect. Barricades built in the capital were mobile, so often young militants could control who was allowed to pass, this helped keep to maintain support for the protests ensuring some degree of movement and activity across the city.

Victory

The result of this second massive display of popular mobilisation in less than a year meant the coup quickly fell away. Arguably, the strike was at the centre of mobilisation, even if the uprising cannot be reduced to the strike. Notably, after the coup had been broken and as the RSP was being dismantled, the general strike continued. Yet in the streets, controlling the barricades, launching audacious assaults (such as petrol bomb attacks on armoured troop carriers) on the RSP for days, were the young who had mobilised for the insurrection the previous year. So the defeat of the coup was not a result of a diplomatic triumph linked to the mediating activities carried out by the UN, the African Union and ECOWAS.

The aftermath of the coup: the elections

In the aftermath of the coup, with the liberation of the leaders of the transition, elections were rescheduled for 29 November. The party, Mouvement du Peuple pour le Progres (Movement of the People for Progress) and their candidate Roch Marc Kaboré won the election that took place without major incident, securing victory in the first round. Kaboré himself was a prominent figure of the Compaoré days and emerged as the revolution’s ultimate paradox. However, he had spent years estranged from the regime and was now regarded as an opponent of the old power.

Campaign poster for Roch Marc Kaboré from the November 2015 election. Photograph: Leo Zeilig

Still why did a movement of such popular power which had managed to overturn one of continents most deeply entrenched regimes – a dictatorship despite the veneer of democracy – allow prominent members of the old regime, a recycled elite, to step back into power? What is it about the political economy of Burkina Faso that shapes political action and enables such a political outcome?

We can list some of the relevant issues here: There are fundamental weaknesses of the Burkina Faso’s economy – extractive, export based, low industrialisation – that have remained largely unchanged since independence. The country’s poverty, the extreme suffering of its people, remains staggering: in the United Nations lists Burkina Faso at 183rd of 187 countries in terms of human development. There are enormous income differentiation; while 46 percent live below the poverty line, one in ten of the population own half of the country’s riches.

Almost 92 percent of the labour force in 2014 was employed in agricultural labour, in subsistence farming, and cotton cultivation; statistics largely unchanged since Sankara’s radical experiments at pro-poor development in the early 1980s. Agricultural work contributed 30 percent to GDP in 2012. In other words, there is very weak industrialisation – thus low levels of proletarianisation – combined with a large agricultural workforce. The recent boom in mining has not altered this set up. However, arguably these figures disguise significant changes in Burkinabé society, so urbanisation has grown as rural poverty drives more people into towns and cities and the political impact of the country’s small working class – employed in mining, the civil service and teaching – is entirely disproportionate to its size.

The successive waves of protest and uprisings in Burkina Faso have been against both the brutality of the former regime and the immediate manifestations of the continually exploitative relationships, both between the country and the capitalist system, and between the country’s highly unequal economic and political classes. Reductions of basic living standards and encroachments on the lives and liberties of the Burkinabé people have been continually resisted, and in 2014/5 – and for particular reasons – acts of great resistance have coalesced into more coherent movements for change that linked the struggle for economic and social transformation to the need for effective political accountability and representation. This has been broadly successful (i.e, there were democratic elections at the end of 2015 that led to the election of a new government), even if there have not been alternate voices and forces – of sufficient strength – to challenge the continued presence of a compromised political class.

Thomas Sankara’s influence

The events described here were inspired by the example of Thomas Sankara, the incorruptible leader of the radical government between 1983 and 1987, even if many of those involved had been born after his murder in 1987. His name tumbled from the lips of activists, or self-defined revolutionaries. For a generation born after his assassination and who were the agents of the recent uprisings who knew only the rule of Compaoré regime, he remained a figure of vital inspiration.

Sankara’s brief period at the helm of the state saw a poor, marginal country attempt autonomous development, endeavour to delink itself from exploitative international capitalism and undertake radical pro-poor reforms. Yet the autocratic tendencies in Sankara’s reforms were also the ‘revolutions’ weakest areas, the vulnerable and dangerous underbelly – in this respect the Sankara years worked against more broad-based popular involvement and initiative. His relationship with autonomous trade unions and independent strike action was authoritarian.

Burkina Faso’s recent, astonishing rebellions, strikes and revolution, complete the real and popular content that was absent, or at best stifled and sometimes repressed during Sankara’s years as a radical reformer. This raises questions: How can we marry the centrally organised project of Sankara’s reforms, its focus on national self-sufficiency – the attempt to break with the structure and logic of global capitalism – with the popular mobilisations we have seen in the strikes, resistance and insurrection in Burkina Faso from 2011-2015?

Would Sankara even have approved of such popular initiative and involvement outside the control of his ‘revolution’ (i.e top down politics)? The Burkinabé insurrection and uprising, present a challenge to the continent: how to marry the popular uprisings, insurrections and resistance with popular and radical political organisation.

Leo Zeilig is a ROAPE editor and the coordinator of www.roape.net

ROAPE has covered events in Burkina Faso for years, including the Burkinabé revolution in the 1980s. See Victoria Brittain’s article from 1985 from our archive and Lila Chouli’s Briefings on the transitional government is available to readers of roape.net who register and log-in to our members area on the website.

Appeal to Friends of the Nyerere Resource Centre

ROAPE

June 5, 2016

By Issa Shivji, Director, Nyerere Resource Centre (NRC) and Idris Kikula, Vice Chancellor, University of Dodoma & Member, Steering Committee, NRC.

Since 2012 three colleagues – Issa Shivji, Saida Yahya-Othman and Ng’wanza Kamata – all former or current academics of the University of Dar es Salaam, have been conducting research in a project of writing a comprehensive and authoritative biography of Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere. As you all know, the existing biographies are either outdated, do not cover the whole of Mwalimu’s lifetime, or are not analytical and comprehensive.

The three researchers were fortunate to interest the Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH) to fund the research. During the course of the research, spanning over four years, the researchers have collected enormous archival and secondary material and conducted over 100 interviews which exist in both audio and transcript form. From the inception of the project, it was the intention of the biographers that the biography ought not to be the be-all and end-all of the project. They wanted, and COSTECH agreed, that one, the material collected be archived and made available to future generations of researchers, and, two, the Archives become a focal point around which discussions and debates be developed on Mwalimu’s ideas, thus giving them life and countering the tendency to museumise the man and fossilise his ideas. Hence the establishment of the Nyerere Resource Centre imaginatively called in Kiswahili Kavazi la Mwalimu Nyerere, which has given the Centre its unique identity.

COSTECH has provided the infrastructure including the Centre’s office and the Documentation and Reading Room. Kavazi was formally launched by the former president of Tanzania, Mr. Benjamin William Mkapa on 18^th March 2015 in a two-day event. The event included a photo exhibition, the delivery of the First Nyerere Dialogue Lecture by Professor Adebayo Olukoshi and a round-table discussion with the former Prime Minister Mr. Cleopa Msuya. During the year, Kavazi organised a night of poems when a booklet of Mwalimu’s poems was launched. It also conducted a full time seven-day course on ‘The Political Economy of Natural Resources’. Dr. Ng’wanza Kamata delivered the second Nyerere Dialogue Lecture, now published under the tantalizing title: Mwalimu Nyerere: Pan-Africanist Nationalist or Nationalist Pan-African? Another title published by the Centre is a collection of four short essays in Kiswahili called Uanazuoni wa Mwalimu (The Intellectual in Mwalimu).

Apart from the invaluable support offered by COSTECH, the activities of Kavazi are also funded by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation of Germany. But it is the wish of the founders, with which we are sure you would all agree, that Kavazi become self-sustaining, both to maintain its independence, but more importantly, to uphold Mwalimu’s ideal of self-reliance. Thus we have also established an NRC Endowment Fund (EF), to which the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) of Tanzania made the first contribution of TShs 100 million. The second contribution, which we are very proud of, was made from the bequest of our late friend and comrade Lionel Cliffe. Lionel passed on just two months after we had a wonderful interview with him at his home in Sheffield.

Now we are earnestly writing to you as admirers and friends of Mwalimu,and as members of the post-independence generation who grew up under Mwalimu, to contribute whatever you can to the Endowment Fund. We consider you ‘Friends of Kavazi la Mwalimu Nyerere’ and believe you will not let us down.

Please make your contribution to:

ACCOUNT NAME: NYERERE RESOURCE CENTRE
ACCOUNT NUMBER: 0150440190100
BANK: CRDB BANK PLC
ADDRESS: P.O Box 268, Oysterbay Branch, Azikiwe Street, Dar es Salaam
BRANCH: OYSTERBAY BRANCH
BRANCH CODE: 3397
SWIFT CODE: CORUTZTZ
DENOMINATION: TZS

Please notify us on kavazi.nrc@gmail.com when you make your contribution.

Full address of beneficiary: Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH), P.O.BOX 4302, Ali Hassan Mwinyi Road- Kijitonyama (Sayansi), COSTECH Building, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Emails.kavazi.nrc@gmail.com, Director’s email: issashivji@gmail.com Assistant’s email: ghappiness2@gmail.com ☎: +255 22 2927540

Alternatives to Neoliberalism

ROAPE

May 31, 2016

By Adefolarin A. Olamilekan

Pradella Lucia and Thomas Marois (eds) Polarising Development: Alternatives to Neoliberalism and the Crisis (London: Pluto Press, 2015)

This book is the result of a collaborative research project to try and clarify a Marxist inspired approach to understanding recent developments across the globe, as an alternative to what has been termed ‘new developmentalist studies’.

The book covers both developments in international capitalism, for example the crisis of 2008, and a range of other challenges to the current economic disorder. The editors recognise that ‘despite being forcefully challenged, neo-liberalism has proven remarkably resilient’. Since its first practical implementation, as part of the brutal US backed Pinochet dictatorship in Chile from 1973, ‘Neo-liberalism has entailed processes of contested socio-economic transformation.’ It has included an increased level of exploitation and higher inequality, for workers and other popular classes, but also increased oppression for women and various ethnic groups.

Guiding themes for the book include a recognition that ‘alternatives must be sought in every day and actually existing struggles’ together with ‘a refusal to accept nation-states as self-contained units of analysis’ and that any alternatives for progressive change must be achieved from below ‘through working and popular class agency.’

Although new developmentalists provide an alternative to the dominant paradigm of neo-liberalism, they ‘ignore the exploitative nature of capitalist production relations’ and so ‘set aside capitalism’s inherent tendency towards social polarisation.’ They also uphold ‘an idealised understanding of the state… that can moderate capitalist development for the overall ‘social good’ and rely ‘on methodologically nationalist assumptions’ which ‘point to the national development successes of East Asia, and more recently China, as the dehistoricised, decontextualized and discrete development models seemingly transferable to all developing countries’, as a result, the ‘new developmentalists underestimate imperialist relations and capitalism’s tendency towards uneven and combined developments.’

In contrast, the editors of this book recognise a range of concrete strategies and principles which they share with the various authors who write in the volume. This includes the importance of worker-led resistances achieving gains through collective mobilisations, a socialist feminist approach which recognises ‘the need to fight for renewed public services to alleviate the unequal burdens women face day in and day out… the struggle to substantively democratise the public sector’ and for a collective struggle for social and environmental justice.

However, despite largely following a classical Marxist analysis, we consider that the second chapter, by Lucia Pradella, one of the editors, is marred by her references to ‘dependent countries’, ‘unequal exchange between nations’ and ‘the periphery’ to refer to the Global South. In contrast, another chapter by her fellow editor, Thomas Marois, emphasises the importance of the democratic and social control of banking and financial institutions and states clearly that the ‘South is inextricably linked to patterns of global accumulation and to the reproduction of global capitalism.’

The terms used by Lucia suggest her support for dependency theory. This economic theory, popular in the 1970s, considers that the industrial countries are exploiting the countries of the Global South through the unequal mechanisms of international trade. Dependency also includes the wider notions of unequal and exploitative relations between the economic centres of global development and ‘peripheral’ countries.

These ideas flourished in the 1970s when they were originally developed by authors such as Paul Baran and André Gunder Frank. Dependency subsequently gained widespread acceptance though the writings of authors such as Samir Amin and Immanuel Wallerstein. As one authors in this volume makes clear these ideas are ‘still a reference for scholars, policy makers, and social and political movements in Latin America.’

Many readers may consider that dependency and related ideas are part of the Marxist heritage. However, we see these theories as a distortion of the Marxist notion of the global exploitation of a universal working class. In this respect, dependency theory is a significant move away from the core Marxist ideas of exploitation by those who control the means of production (factories, workshops, mines etc) and employ labour power. As such, dependency and related ideas provide a theoretical underpinning for Afro-nationalist ideas. These suggest that Africans of all classes should unite against the exploitation they suffer by the industrial countries of the (predominately) north.

In this volume, Benjamin Selwyn provides a good summary of the differences between strategies of state-led national development (which shares common assumptions with dependency theory and nationalism more generally) and the political economy of labour (or Marxism). As he points out, state-led development falls into ‘the contradiction where the elite minority advocate the repression and exploitation of the majority in the name of the latter’s benefits.’ Many socialists see national state-led development, with significant areas of the economy under state control, as the only viable way to bring economic development to the Global South and so the first stage towards socialism. But as Selwyn argues, contemporary China illustrates the clash between state-led development and its ‘industrialisation … based upon intense exploitation and repression of its vast industrial working class as source of business profits.’

Going back to the writings by Karl Marx, Selwyn argues that workers and peasants in the South should collectively resist their exploitation and not rely on an elusive ‘trickle-down effect.’ He could have gone further to point out that neo-liberalism has led to a huge increase in inequality within countries like Brazil, Nigeria and South Africa. National development in these countries has meant the economic development of a local elite rather than an improvement in the living standards of the majority of the population.

Andreas Malm considers climate change, arguing that ‘on a global scale, the CO2 explosion is running its course towards biospheric meltdown.’ Increasing emissions of climate change gases mean that average world temperatures are likely to increase by more than four degrees within the next 50 years. It will require, as Malm argues, a mass movement to avoid this disaster. It is only such a movement, with the working class at its heart that has the potential power to stop global warming and the material interest to do so. Capitalists will continue to profit from fossil fuel exploitation as long as they can, unless there is a counter-hegemonic movement that can block them.

ROAPE member, Baba Aye, writes in the book that Africa has seen significant economic development since independence. Nigeria, for example, has experienced sustained economic growth of 6 – 7 percent a year over the last decade. The majority of the population are now urban based and ‘nodes of industrialisation now exist alongside localities with poor productive capacities.’ However, the majority of the population still live in abject poverty and their lives often remain nasty, brutish, and short. There is, Baba Aye writes, an undercurrent of the ideas of state-led development or Keynesianism in the new administration of Buhari in Nigeria. This ‘project’ seeks to use state resources from reduced elite corruption to significantly increase the budgets for education and health and to introduce a minimal social wage for the poorest 25 million.

Yet the organized working class and the wider poors are still knocking at the door. Most dramatically with the Egyptian revolt and overthrow of Mubarak in early 2011, but also with the 2012 Marikana massacre in South Africa and the January 2012 uprising in Nigeria. These are just the high points, Baba Aye argues, of a mass strike wave that is continuing to reverberate across the continent.

These social movements will determine the struggle, for example, in Nigeria where a new reformist government is facing economic pressures to make the poor pay for the declining price of oil exports. There are proposals to reduce the already pitiful minimum wage and remove the fuel subsidy. The outcome of these struggles depends, as in the past, on whether the trade union leaders are yet again able to lead a wider social movement. This will be needed to reduce the fantastic inequality within Nigeria, but also the real and terrible unevenness that exists between West Africa and Europe.

This book is far from the finished product, but raises a wide range of issues which should be discussed and researched in greater detail. The editors have successfully brought together a wide range of scholars, broadly working within a radical and often Marxist tradition. Many of the authors are creatively adapting the traditional tools to the current challenges of global inequalities within as much as between countries, to tackle issues such as climate change and the changing nature of imperialist competition. The global reach and non-sectarian approach of the authors provide an accessible introduction to the continued and creative power of Marxist analysis, when wielded in an open and inclusive direction.

The imperative of development for the working and other poor peoples should be emancipatory, many of the authors demand. Liberation from want is essential to this. With the great increases in global wealth now available, no human being should lack the basics of modern life. But development cannot also be reduced to ‘stomach infrastructure’ – emancipation entails freedom fought for, won and defended as an integral part of development, by working people.

Our pathway to such emancipatory development must include demands such as: ‘No to privatization!’, ‘No to deregulation!’, ‘No to commodification!’, ‘Yes to payment of salaries regularly’, ‘For free qualitative and compulsory education and quality health for all!’. With demands such as these we must build social movements from below to challenge the capitalist state, in its various configurations. This volume will help to clarify many of the challenges we face.

Adefolarin A. Olamilekan is development researcher based in Abuja, Nigeria.

Armed with Theory: Nigerian Marxism

ROAPE

May 26, 2016

By Adam Mayer

As I write this entry, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) just backtracked on a planned general strike against the removal of the fuel subsidy. For readers from Northern national economies, the importance of the fuel subsidy – which allowed for consumer fuel prices to be kept at around N100 [$0.50] – N50 [$0.25] less than the market rate – perhaps seems an unusual reason to call for a general strike in the first place. Nonetheless, if carried through with, this would have been the third such general strike (after 2003 and 2012) that centred on the removal of this vital government subsidy – with a long list of minor strikes before, after and in between. What is crucial is the fact that the national minimum wage is around $90/month, and 70% of people are not in formal employment and thus not eligible even for that sum. Primary school teachers – in formal employment – or wheelbarrow men and market women – not in formal employment – all need to commute to their workplaces – and their commute is never covered by an employer. Thus the removal of the fuel subsidy will increase an average worker’s cost of living by around 25-30% with no real compensation beyond promises — a major drawback! Factional struggles nipped this nationwide strike in the bud – nonetheless the NLC is very far from a spent force.

The NLC’s labour organizers draw on a rich and multifaceted tradition when they call for strikes. Neoliberal charlatans, media pundits and government officials may tell the Nigerian lorry driver, and the unemployed women and men in his compound that the removal of the fuel subsidy will allow for a reallocation of “precious government resources to worthy causes” such as schools, hospitals, nurseries and water towers, it is improbable that they would buy into this hegemonic babble. President Buhari, a man famous for his personal disdain for embezzlement, is at the same time also the man left in charge of a neo-colonial political economy. His credentials in fighting Maitatsine – as Mohammed Marwa was known, Marwa was a radical Islamic preacher, who attracted considerable support in the 1970s – as military head of government in the early 1980s, or Boko Haram as president since 2015 do not make him a progressive. Muhammadu Buhai was elected in 2015, promising to fight endemic corruption and the advances of Boko Haram.

The reason why the NLC can (most of the time) stand up to incredible pressures by the forces of hegemony are manifold – but I am convinced that they include the works of the icons of Nigerian Marxist thought that the NLC is heir to.

Foremost Nigeria expert John Campbell, in the very last words of his famous Nigeria on the Brink visualizes the appearance of a Fidel Castro in Nigeria. He does not elaborate on this, and provides no groundwork for the reader on radical left wing forces in the country. Naija – local speak for Nigerian – Marxists may be forgotten in the West, but are not forgotten by feminists, labour organizers, and democratic human rights activists in the country. When I first encountered the theoretical works that were written by Nigerian Marxists, I was immediately taken by their sophistication, wit, and complexity. So struck I wrote a book on them as there was no reference material, no reader, and only very few (and very academic) articles buried in 1980s peer reviewed journals – I thought this situation needed remedy. My book (researched at the American University in Nigeria from 2010 to 2013) put forth the thesis that in Nigeria, Marxist thought has since the 1940s developed to a very large degree. It grew out of, and helped to a great extent, the country’s labour movement, its feminist movement, its academic historiography, social thought, and political economy; and it has been the mainstay of party politics in the case of illegal Marxist party formations, legal anti-feudalist forces, and the NGO sector. Long gone are the days when Marxism meant imported pamphlets and a rootless foreign ideology: Nigeria has produced Marxist thinkers of importance in most fields of political and human inquiry, and Marxism has pollinated a noticeable segment of Nigerian fiction. I argue in my book that Naija Marxisms have been, and still are, the single most important alternative framework that Nigerians have used in their quest to make sense of the world that surrounds them. It is a dazzling antidote to hegemonic neo-liberal platitudes.

The best Nigerian author on neo-liberalism is a Gramscian thinker, Usman Tar – who is a ROAPE Contributing Editor and worked on the journal for a number of years – the Nigerian Guardian’s former columnist is a formidable Trotskyite author, Edwin Madunagu, Eskor Toyo focussed on Maoism’s take on land ownership – a very relevant inquiry in Nigeria where feudal land law is valid today. When it comes to feminism, class based approaches have informed even professedly non-Marxist strands of thought. Women writers such as Ifeoma Okoye are conscious Marxists (see her The Fourth World). Neither has all this been unrelated to the NLC. Hassan Sunmonu – its former head – published together with Bade Onimode, the leading Nigerian political economist in the 1980s and Usman Tar, on the fate of the NLC in the 1990s, and the unions were the single strongest pro-democracy force under the dictator Sani Abacha.

I propose in my work that we stop ignoring this intellectual tradition and recognize it as more than esoteric politics and academic scribbling – it is all part and parcel of African philosophy, African political thought, African achievement in the social sciences, as well as a tool for organizers. The fact that many of Naija Marxism’s authors, even feminist socialists, did not disavow Lenin, will not change this. I am proposing a new way of looking at entire schools of thought and their value in Nigeria. Nigerian Marxist tomes have disappeared from public libraries in Nigeria and in the UK, even when they had been published by Zed or New Beacon Books in the 1980s. The new NGO paradigm, although fed to a large extent by former and actual Marxists, also diverted attention away from resistance, to charity, and while today’s radicals acknowledge even their Leninist predecessors, some are afraid of being labelled as – hard core – Marxists. My work, after brief introductions on Nigeria, traces the historical trajectories that leftist movements had gone through since the 1940s in the country. This is something that has not been done in similar detail. Then I go on to expose the international context of Nigerian Marxism, from South African Communists to the UK, the USSR and Ghana. In my core chapters, I examine the thoughts of Mokwugo Okoye, Ikenna Nzimiro, Eskor Toyo, Edwin Madunagu, Yusufu Bala Usman, Niyi Oniororo, Bade Onimode, Adebayo Olukoshi, Okwudiba Nnoli, the Nigerian circle of the Review of African Political Economy, Bene Madunagu, and Molara Ogundipe-Leslie. In my last and analytical chapter, I examine the question what unites these thinkers, and also deal with their theoretical and practical relevance on a broadly Lukacsian basis.

Following Usman, I argue that Marxist analyses have provided the single most relevant explanation for the appearance of radical Islam in the country, along with brilliant and succinct analyses of how Nigeria’s neo-colonial economy works. I argue that the most important enemy of radical emancipation has been the sector of foreign corporations – more powerful than the decrepit colonial state of the forties, or the inept and prebendal federal government of ‘flag independence’ even today. Even more importantly, on the basis of Nigerian Marxisms, I posit that corporate rule, religious – and sometimes relatively recent – patriarchy, criminal governance and feudalism have formed a package and that they have been, and still are, fought, with the help of ideologies that derived their most important impetus from Marxism.

While I admire the authors I discuss, I do not think that my work is akin to “The Lives of the Saints.” Some of these authors have been more subtle than others – with especially Oniororo shocking the reader with blunt and surprising statements, but then again, he was rumoured to have studied in North Korea – and I think it is important to provide criticism, which sheds light on the strengths and weaknesses of their respective systems of thought. At the same time, I am convinced that all of them merit discussion (even Oniororo). Only Claude Ake has had a full monograph devoted to his oeuvre, others have been dealt with briefly in articles. While not a microanalysis of every one of their works, rather my own take aims to focus on their most relevant, most brilliant, and most entertaining opuses. All this in the honest hope that this serves those that it aims to serve most: the working men and women of Nigeria, and also their organizations and causes such as the fight for a living wage, the fight for a decent commute, proper meals, and a life that allows for growth, progress, and community – instead of the barbaric political economy of today.

My comrades in Abuja and Benin City, especially Drew Povey and myself, have also started a Scribd site, easily accessible wherever there is Internet, to share Nigerian Marxist originals for free (visit the site here). On the site Eddie Madunagu, Eskor Toyo, Bene Madunagu, Segun Sango, and others may be read in the original. We welcome readers and also further submissions to our site.

Adam Mayer is the author of Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria published by Pluto Press, released in July 2016.

Africa’s Turn to Industrialize?

ROAPE

May 24, 2016

ROAPE’s Laura Mann discusses a recent workshop held at the London School of Economics on 3 May, which brought together leading economic geographers and political economists to discuss new prospects for industrialization and transformation in African countries in light of shifts in the global economy.

Industrial Policy is back! At least under new names. Given the term’s toxic association among neo-classical economists in institutions like the WTO and World Bank, new words are apparently needed: ‘productive sector policies’ and ‘territorial innovation networks’. Nevertheless, there is hope that policy space is widening for African policy-makers to more strategically engage with global trade and economic growth.

First, the story goes, there are economic reasons to be hopeful. Owing to rising costs of production in China and South Asia, economists such as Justin Lin have argued that there are opportunities for African economies to attract manufacturing jobs from Asia and use these flows to industrialize, upgrade and transform their domestic economies. Second, there are demographic reasons. Populations in most regions of the world are getting older and less fertile while population growth is still increasing in many African countries. African consumer markets are becoming increasingly lucrative and ‘interesting’ to domestic and multinational business interests alike. In the past decade, astute readers will have observed the efforts of firms such as Unilever and Massmart (the international section of Walmart) and financial intermediaries such as Mastercard and Visa eying African markets, conducting research into ‘middle class’ shopping habits and seeking to develop digital payment systems, regional supply chains and distribution networks. Domestic supermarket chains within African countries like Nakumat and Priceright are also moving into regional markets and trying to claim some retail space from informal actors. In other words, it is being said that there is scope for local demand to drive industrialization and upgrading. Third, there are political reasons for hope. The examples of Asian developmental states and the ongoing economic crisis within advanced economies have provided intellectual credence to political economists calling for more interventionist policy-making from African governments. Such authority has been enforced by the physical and political presence of Asian actors on the continent as development actors, providing the funds and infrastructure for such ambitions to be realised while dulling the sting of the conditionality of older developmental actors.

Given these ‘global shifts’, the International Development department and the Africa Centre at LSE decided to organize a day-long workshop on African Industrialization on 3 May. Led by Shamel Azmeh along with Kate Meagher, Pritish Behuria and myself, we invited a number of leading economic geographers and political economists to debate and discuss whether such hope is justified or misplaced, and importantly, whom will benefit if industrial jobs do come en-masse to African shores. In my summary, I focus on three aspects of discussions.

First of all, we may all need a bit of a reality check when it comes to the economic and demographic reasons for hope. Rhys Jenkins led the assault in setting out what he believes are the key fallacies of the ‘Lin Thesis’. He argued that with the exceptions of Ethiopia and Tanzania, labour productivity is still lower and wages are still higher in African countries than in other emerging economies. Additionally, he pointed out that labour costs are not the main determinant of foreign investment. Other inputs like electricity and transports are equally important – as well levels of political stability and the presence of stable labour control regimes. For these reasons, if off-shoring does occur from China, such opportunities may either flow to lower costs sites within China or to countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia and Bangladesh (Ethiopia and Tanzania do however, provide interesting counter-examples!). Most Chinese FDI into African economies is still flowing into extractive industries, infrastructure and into market-seeking activities (not efficiency seeking). Lastly, Jenkins highlighted the risk of mechanization and indeed, China has been investing heavily into robotics in recent years. It may be that old pathways to industrialization may narrow and close if automation develops apace.

However, other avenues of industrialization are emerging. Christopher Cramer drew attention to the increasing level of sophistication and technological innovation within global agricultural value chains. For example, great effort (and work!) goes into documenting the organic and fair trade credentials of South African blueberries and in transporting them from South African farms into refrigerated trucks and planes, and then into the nicely branded punnets of Tescos. All of this sophistication opens doors of value capture for domestic firms within African economies able to put in the right kinds of laws, incentives and institutions to build up domestic businesses and enforce reciprocal benefits from multinational players. Domestic markets are also becoming promising avenues for domestic accumulation and transformation. Christina Wolf spoke of the opportunities for local manufacturing to ride on the wave of Chinese infrastructural investment in Angola. Because of the high tariff environment, she described how multinational firms are increasingly creating domestic production units to serve rising consumer demand. However, she also highlighted the fact that transformation driven by domestic demand requires maintaining broad based purchasing power. In this sense, demands for wage moderation to attract opportunities within export oriented industries may conflict with efforts to boost production from domestic consumption.

Second, we may need new paradigms. Previously, economic geographers have used frameworks such as Global Value Chains (GVC) and Global Production Networks (GPN) to understand how lead firms within Northern economies control the governance of global distributed value chains. However, given the increasingly vertically specialized nature of GVCs and the fact that lead firms are investing in their own regional supply and distribution networks within African countries, economic geographers may need new paradigms and policy-makers new kinds of industrial policy. Raphael Kaplinsky called for attention not on sectoral policies but on building cross-sectoral capabilities, and not on ‘deepening’ industrial capabilities but on thinning out and specializing.

The workshop was also interesting for bringing together economic geographers and political economists. One major criticism of economic geography approaches like GVCs and GPNs is that they tend to underplay the role of domestic political incentives and conflict in inhibiting more strategic policy choices. While the interests of ‘global capital’ undoubtedly play a role in narrowing policy space, we shouldn’t neglect business-state relations within African countries. Policy-making has to be politically viable and some industrial policy measures may simply be too politically costly if they threaten entrenched interests. A growing number of scholars has tried to move the discussion away from the problem of ‘neopatrimonial politics’ towards better understanding how particular distributions of power and the presence of particular kinds of political incentives might either motivate power-holders towards growth or make it unlikely that they will do so. Helpfully, scholars such as Mariana Mazzucato, Fred Block and Linda Weiss have also conducted research looking at the kinds of business-state relations that shape innovation and growth within the US economy. All of this research calls for more pragmatic approaches to patrimonialism and corruption within African business. Such discussions caused Kaplinsky to remark that at the end of apartheid, South Africa’s comparative advantage lay in knowledge intensive industries, and yet narrowly focusing on these would have simply been politically inviable. We must therefore ask hard questions about both how industrial policy can be framed in ways that promote economic enfranchisement as well as being clear about when targeted support for privileged actors is being received so that it can be accompanied by a frank discussion of economic redistribution.

Third, (and I am sure I don’t need to tell readers of the ROAPE blog), we need to pay very close attention to whom benefits from increased global and regional trade flows. So much research has demonstrated the very mixed record of fair trade in improving the lives of workers. So much so that Christopher Cramer suggested that fair trade and organic certification might be better described as ‘ethical rents’. Whether or not such rents go towards social upgrading and increasing the productivity and learning of domestic producers depends very much on the institutional structure of the value chain and power relations within the local political economy. Stephanie Barrientos similarly suggested that we need to disaggregate categories of workers in African economies in order to better understand the impact of specific policies or trade shifts (wage labour, ‘own account’ groups and unpaid and unfree labour). She also described the importance of looking at gender relations within employment. For example, she described how the shifting of production away from Sweet Cayenne pineapples to the Super sweetMD2 pineapples in Ghana had the effect of social upgrading for wage labourers but social downgrading for smallholders. In some ways, this was a classic Gibbon and Ponte ‘Trading Down’ story: the shift turned land-owners into wage labourers – but it also had the unexpected effect of raising the earnings of women as wage labourers (and unpaid labourers) were predominantly women. As countries like Rwanda seek to promote gender empowerment, it is necessary to think strategically about how different policies may affect women, who are often in more precarious positions than their male counterparts on farms and factory floors.

The third session of the day focused specifically on who may benefit from the deepening of globally-connected digital infrastructure within African economies. Padraig Carmody described how ICTs can promote Outward and Inward GPN couplings. He described how furniture manufacturers in Tanzania and South Africa had used ICTs to import cheaper furniture from Asian economies. In effect trade liberalization combined with digital connectivity turned manufacturing groups into trading groups – economic downgrading! In other words, we should not assume that ICTs will boost production and trade potential; they also enable opportunities for greater importation (something Jana Kleibert and I also discussed in relation to the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector in Kenya). Similarly, Gianluca Iazzolino gave an ethnographic account of the roll-out of the financial ecosystem around the flower farms of Naivasha. He described how the key purpose of cashless payment system seemed to be geared towards re-orienting salaried workers away from informal retail into formal retail environments like supermarkets. In his view, ‘cash stickiness’ should be understood as a kind of agency against this formalization trend.

So in summary, the opportunities that bigger global shifts and technological developments present for African economies are not automatic but require strategic policy choices that take account of both the position of African economies within specific globally and regionally spread value chains and attention as to how such policies interface with domestic political economies and the needs of particular workers. Due to the success of the event, we may try to organize a follow-up workshop next year. Personally, I think it would be great to have a similar kind of event around the topic of domestic African capitalists. If you have ideas or suggestions, please get in touch!

Laura Mann is a member of ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group and a sociologist whose research focuses on the political economy of markets and new information and communication technologies in Africa. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Featured Photograph: Sugar Refinery, Natal, South Africa 1911

Playing with Fire: Art in Troubled Times

ROAPE

May 19, 2016

By Mandisa Malinga

In February 2016, during a protest against the lack of accommodation for students from poor backgrounds at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, students and members of the #RhodesMustFall movement set alight paintings considered to be ‘colonial artwork’. Among these paintings removed from the walls of some residences at the university, were also the paintings of black anti-apartheid artist, Richard Baholo. The burning of Baholo’s artwork prompted many critics of the #RhodesMustFall movement to question the thoughtfulness of the student protests during which universities’ property and buildings were also destroyed.

In a conversation with Faith Pienaar, Project Manager at the Transformation Office at Stellenbosch University, anti-apartheid activist and judge Albie Sachs reflects on the meaning of art in troubled post-apartheid South Africa. This conversation, held on 3 March 2016 and hosted by the Studies in Transformation and Historical Trauma department at Stellenbosch University, came at an interesting time, where art has taken on various meanings and has become central to the struggle for transformation among students at universities.

AlbieS

In his conversation with Faith, Sachs discusses the meaning of violence and the destruction of buildings and art during student protests. He particularly makes reference to the ways in which the works of Fanon have been quoted by students engaged in violent protests, pointing to the different contexts in which Fanon wrote his work and that within which the students find themselves. Furthermore, he talks about the different ways in which protesting is approached by the current generation in comparison to previous generations. In talking about the thoughtfulness of protests by earlier generations, Albie Sachs suggests that the ways in which students have approached protesting requires much deeper thinking about not only the ‘how’, but also the implications of acts such as destroying university property.

This is an interesting intergenerational conversation between both Faith and Sachs as it interrogates the nature of the ‘revolutionary struggle’, how it is understood and responded to by students and revolutionaries across generations.

In response to Faith’s question about whether the approach taken in 1994 to building and ‘reconciling’ the country was the right path, whether it validated the hurt and pain and promoted healing, Sachs mentions that the process of negotiations pre-1994 and that of developing the constitution was not as easy as it is often thought to have been. Though challenging, the process of developing the constitution, according to Sachs, gives students the right to protest and speak out against a lack of transformation, however, what it does not give people is the “right to go and destroy the very corridors of learning that students want to be opened.” For more on this conversation please see the video of the conversation below.

Mandisa Malinga is a part-time research assistant in the Studies in Transformation and Historical Trauma department at Stellenbosch University. She recently completed her PhD in Psychology which explored constructions of fatherhood among precariously employed African men in South Africa.

Pan-African Challenges: Radical Political Economy

ROAPE

May 16, 2016

ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig talks to Yao Graham about radical political economy in Africa, structural transformation and the legacy of neo-liberalism. In the short video clip we include below Graham speaks about the struggle for social justice and radical change in Ghana. Graham is the co-ordinator of Third World Network in Accra and the Africa Editor of ROAPE.

So could you first tell me briefly about who you are and briefly about your political background and development?

My name is Yao Graham, a Ghanaian by birth. I was in secondary school in St. Augustine’s College the city of Cape Coast the late 1960s and early 1970s at the time when there were a number of very important things taking place globally. Some of my earliest recollections were my involvement around anti-apartheid activism in Ghana, discussions about pan-Africanism, reading books by radical African-Americans. I was profoundly affected reading Malcolm X’s biography. The school allowed us to charge subscriptions for magazines to our bills and I ordered Africa Journal and Newsweek which provided information about many things going on at the time – the Vietnam War, national liberation struggles across Africa; there were things happening around us.

But, in terms of direct political engagement, coming in contact with a friend’s uncle a student at the University of Cape Coast who was president of the National Union of Ghana Students (NUGS) was important. I was around 15 and through him a group of us met the leadership of the National Union of Ghana Students at the time. We took to spending time at the Cape Vars campus. They were beginning to re-establish Kwame Nkrumah’s legitimacy, because around that time the soldiers who had overthrown Nkrumah, and their civilian collaborators who succeeded them sought to erase Nkrumah from history. His works, images were banned. You’d be imprisoned if you were found with Nkrumah’s photo or writings. So we spent a lot of time with these guys. We were fascinated by their activism and their ideas; that was a very profound influence. We brought some of that activism to our school, initially in the students’ representative council. We began to even take part in some NUGs events. I remember three of us going to a National Assembly of Students and demanding that NUGS take on board the concerns of secondary school students. At this time we were prefects in St. Augustine’s, elected by the students. We reached out to prefects in other schools in Cape Coast about the formation of a national association of secondary school students. We did not succeed.

My years at the University of Ghana was in the period of some of the most intense student activism in Ghana’s post-colonial history. The military regime at the time faced a lot of student activism, initially against brutalities by soldiers then demands for it to go as economic conditions this transformed into a broad front movement against its attempts to entrench itself in power. So University led to a deepening of my activist engagements. I studied for a law degree and did not formally study political science or philosophy but I began to read political theory and philosophy. I was very interested in these. I began to read Marx, and radical literature generally, a fairly eclectic wave of books about anti-racism, anti-imperialist volumes on the Middle East, etc. so a fairly eclectic, intellectual formation.

By my late university years, I could say that I’d definitely become oriented towards a kind of Marxist politics. The first Marxist study cells were emerging on the campus. The embryonic foundations of what would emerge as the Marxist influenced political left which came to prominence in Ghana of the 1980s and 1990s were laid founded in the student movement of that period.

And this is the mid-seventies?

Yeah, this is mid to late seventies. This was a very important period in my formation.

Can you talk briefly about what your first involvement in ROAPE was?

I knew about the journal. I’d been reading after I came to England as a student in 1979, but my first direct involvement with ROAPE was in 1984. When I was invited from Ghana to speak at a ROAPE conference at Keele University, a conference on the world crisis and food security in Africa. I had suspended my PhD studies at the Warwick University and was in Ghana working as a full time political activist, in the Rawlings government and the New Democratic Movement (NDM). The upheavals unleashed by the Rawlings led coup of December 31 1981 and the regime’s initial anti-imperialism had attracted intense interest and I was invited to present a paper at the conference. At this time I was a leading member of the NDM also involved in the national leadership of the Defence Committees set-up by the Jerry Rawlings’ government. I presented my paper at the conference and subsequently wrote a piece for the journal on Ghana.

The Keele conference was a very lively experience, let me put it that way. By this time Rawlings relationship with his closest allies on the Ghanaian Left had started fracturing and a number of them who were in exile in the UK came to ROAPE conference and caused an uproar about my presence. This reflected the deepening rifts within the sections of the left who had supported the PNDC regime. These ex-comrades were in the crowd when I spoke in the plenary session and generated a huge uproar. Such was the heat that the organisers put on an emergency side meeting on Ghana. This was packed out and marked by sharp debates.

And the reason for the uproar was because you were being too critical?

No, I was being denounced as a traitor for continuing to work in the Rawlings government by those who were now in exile, who felt that the project of the revolution [as they described the seizure of power by Rawlings on 31 December, 1981 – LZ] had been betrayed. This was an important point of difference within the Ghanaian Left. Some of never thought it was a revolution rather something that offered possibilities for progressive work. So our expectations of the Rawlings regime were a lot less exaggerated. Our analysis of the twist and turns of the new government were different from those who thought it was a revolution. Such analysis is important, if you thought the coup d’état had been or ushered in a revolution then, of course, the revolution had failed. However if you didn’t think it was a revolution, but a coup d’état regime which had created some space for the progressive politics to operate, then you could continue to try and do your best in that space. My paper to the ROAPE conference reflected this standpoint.

The invitation from ROAPE was important for me, also, because it forced me to put down on paper my analysis of the context of Rawlings’ return to power and some of the features of the unfolding situation. In a situation of some fluidity and intensive day and night activism the pause to reflect and write the paper for the ROAPE conference was useful. So that was my first involvement in that way with ROAPE.

Brilliant and you were obviously aware of the journal before that?

Yes, I’d been reading it as part of my work as a student at Warwick and I met some of the editors involved in it at various political events in Britain in that period.

How would you assess the role of the journal? Did you regard it as a companion in some of struggles you were involved in?

I must confess that during the time that I was back in Ghana in the 1980s, during that seven year period, occasionally, you came across ROAPE but during that time I didn’t have much of an engagement with ROAPE, but when I came back to do England in 1989 to my complete PhD thesis it was something I returned to reading.

And, looking back at the history of the journal and your direct involvement in it from 1984 and then afterwards in the UK in the 1990s, how would you assess the contribution that ROAPE has made?

The invitation to me as an activist in Ghana to come to speak at the Keele conference in 1984 points to a recognition of the importance of that kind of dialogue, bringing activists into the space that the journal was creating. For me, as an activist it got me to work through my analysis of the context within in which I was working. Subsequently, I read ROAPE mainly, as a general analysis which offered ideas and, also, information about what was happening across the continent. I wouldn’t say that it occupied a particular place, because I was reading a lot of things and, also, during the period that I was working as an activist, I must confess that I was more in interested in reading about the experiences of people in building organisations; what happens in struggles; what people did to reform economies and so on and so forth, in a way that would help me with the work I was directly involved in. That kind of theoretical and analytical writing was very important to me at the time. Occasionally I read articles that touched on my concerns at the time. So there were those kinds of moments when I saw the value of the journal, but it was one of an array of publications that I looked at; and for a long period of the 1980s, when I was in Ghana, I didn’t have access to it at all.

If you look at the origins of ROAPE from 1974 in that second wave of independence, from the critical…of which, to some extent, your political history is borne. You know, a radical movement that comes about on the back of the failure of the 1960s and 1970s; the hope of that first wave of independence. ROAPE was borne in that period, particularly with the struggles in Angola and Mozambique. It then goes on to analyse and to critique structural adjustment in the 1980s and 1990s. How successful has that project been, in your mind, in providing, to some extent, radical analysis of the Continent’s political economy through that period?

I think the critique of structural adjustment and the role of those who provided the critique was an extremely important contribution in period. Why? Because, first of all, the discussion of the failures of the immediate post-colonial period to the crisis of the 1970s was presented in the dominant narrative as a zero sum way, that whole period was a kind of blank slate, that it was all a waste of time. And, yet, during that period there was important support for other national liberation movements to grow on the Continent. Within that period, people had some experience of what the state could do, in terms of welfare, education, health and so on.

I think a journal like ROAPE was very important in providing a critique of the World Bank and the IMF, providing a counterpoint to these institutions with their very large machinery of propaganda. Academia in Africa was increasingly was taken over by the politics and machinery of structural adjustment and neo-liberalism, so to have a minority of scholars and intellectuals who continued to offer an alternative perspective was very important indeed, in terms of keeping a view that something else was possible And, for those of us who were engaged in struggling against structural adjustment on the ground, having the sense of that community was quite important.

Tell me how do you see the challenges today for a journal of radical political economy? What are the important issues that need to be tackled? What’s the orientation, the thinking that needs to take place, in a fairly limited way, that the journal could make a contribution? How do you see that taking place?

If you look at the contemporary world and the African situation, ever since the global crisis of 2008-2009, neo-liberalism has been repositioning itself to maintain its dominance, by absorbing critical discourses. The current one, of course, is to reduce everything to inequality, without going to the foundations in the political economy. In the African context this approach is expressed in the strength of the Africa Rising narrative, which also sees a celebration of an African middle class, the rise of a consuming class in Africa and an occasional nod to inequality. Yet it’s also becoming clear that the colonial bequest of raw material export dependence continues to determine the fate of Africa and its people in in the global economy. Today the Continent is more entrenched in that division of labour than it was in 1974, when the global crisis began to take hold.

So, in a certain sense, the political economy of neo-colonialism remains highly active. Africa remains very much locked in that, although the global configuration has changed. Today there’s a new discussion about the fact that the Africa needs to implement structural transformation to escape this dependence. But, within that seeming agreement, there are different ideological positions and I think it is quite important for journals like ROAPE to become part of that debate, because it involves an examination of the legacy and the consequences of more than thirty years of neo-liberal dominance. It’s an analysis of what growth represents in Africa. It’s an analysis critical of the so-called Africa Rising narrative.

But the other dimension that is also really important has to do with the fact that political liberalisation in the early 1990s was significant in opening up space for popular organisation and expression. But there’s a growing realisation that electoral politics, what I call the ‘electoral carrousel’, is not the sum of democratic politics. Increasingly we see protests which are about people’s living conditions, protests about rights, protests around the new frontiers of capital accumulation – whether it’s land grabs or the growing movement to privatise services. These are the new frontier for making money on the continent, whether it’s the so-called public/private partnerships that reach into areas which, historically, everybody would have agreed were the realm of public goods, these have now all become issues of public concern and struggle. And I think, again, these are issues that ROAPE, as a journal, needs to connect itself with, in terms of analysis and engagement.

Because, you see, ROAPE’s project in the 1970s was easier, because the National Liberation Movement in Africa was internationalised, in terms of the support that they had. England was an important staging post for representatives of the National Liberation Movements. It was an important place for such movements to be located in exile. So academics, who were interested in working in Africa, in supporting African struggles, actually had a community here that they could work with and a community through which they could link quite easily with similar communities on the African Continent. So, in a certain sense, there was a community that stretched from inside Africa to outside it around certain kinds of questions. Today, that community doesn’t exist in the same way.

But the point I’m making is that with the shrinking of the historic community of activists from the continent in the North, how the journal builds a community with people, the involvement of activists and scholars in Africa, is vital in ensuring that the ideals that drove the foundation of the journal continue to be pursued in different conditions. The important question is how do we work out that continuity in a new period? If we do not it can become quite easy for the journal to become just another peer-reviewed publication where an Africanist will publish papers on Africa, without really engaging in the continent beyond seeing it as a site where you collect data. But the founders of the journal were involved with the continent as a place where they were reflecting on and supporting struggles to build a certain kind of economy and society; and saw the journal as a place where certain ideals should be pursued. So Africa was a laboratory where they were participating with African people as activists for change – as opposed to a place you can simply write about us, where you interrogate the concepts through which society is analysed. This the danger and the challenge for ROAPE.

Could you talk briefly about the relationship, between academic analysis and activist engagement and how when you came here in 1984 on an invitation from ROAPE you spoke as an activist, but also as an analyst. Please talk today about that relationship between academic analysis and activist engagement. How do we create the spaces where that can take place?

I think the business of interpretation, of course, is fundamental to being able to have a correct appraisal of reality, so as to work effectively for change. If you characterise something as a revolution, as many saw the Rawlings coup in 1981, then you have certain expectations of it and you would engage in a certain kind of political practice. Now, if you are wrong in your characterisation, your political practice is likely to be wrong and the consequences could be pretty appalling. So the analytical function is quite important, but, for me, the key think is how do we continue to create a dynamic where, as much as possible, ROAPE, in terms of its work, continues in analysing society but also creates a community where what is being discussed is influenced by what people are engaged in struggling around. We also need to make sure that the analytical work that is reflected in the pages of ROAPE is more widely available for activists to use. I think that process is quite important.

I say this, also, because on a continent where today some the most influential analysts influencing the orientation of people are religious figures; Christian and Muslim. A progressive, political economy and materialist analysis, which tries to ground people in the here and now, as opposed to the afterlife, is imperative. In a climate of pretty desperate conditions for many religion has mobilised people across the continent, so we must offer analysis and perspectives which help people to engage with their material reality as agents, who can actually make meaningful change, rather than leave human misery to some spiritual force to resolve. In Ghana with the collapse of manufacturing large buildings – warehouses, factories – which have been abandoned in the industrial areas of the capital Accra have been bought up by charismatic Christian and turned them into huge prayer halls. Material production has been replaced by the enterprise of spiritual redemption, you can’t get a more poignant symbolism than that.

Where the working class used to be gathered, where people used to work, organise and discuss as unions and discussed their material conditions, where people earned an income are now prayer halls. Today, people gather in their thousands to listen to sermons about how, if you continue to be a good Christian and pay your tithes to the pastor something good will happen to you.

What an astonishing example. On that question on the role of analysis and political activism the journal in different ways – and it was a mixed bag and a very broad church when it was formed – but did see a pan-African project with socialism as a project for national governments, but also regional and continental transformation. Do you still see that as a feasible project for the continent?

Yes. This morning I got a WhatsApp from my colleague who had gone to a meeting on a continental free trade area organised by the Africa Union Commission and he wrote, “I’m sitting here, feeling like a dinosaur. Everybody here wants liberalisation, liberalisation and more liberalisation.” I think, given the current state of forces, there’s a substantial challenge of defensive action that is required against the still quite strong forces of neo-liberalism on the continent. Because, whilst there are protests, their organisation and the strength of progressive forces, the organisation of alternatives across the continent is not at a state where one can feasibly talk about socialism as a near term objective.

I think, however, in terms of the demands that people are making for an alternative, the agenda remains unchanged. But the near term challenge, the frontline challenge, must be a complete and coherent replacement of neo-liberalism in Africa. I think that also retains important pan-African challenges for us, because the old arguments that were made about the smallness of African countries, as economies, as markets, the need to unite forces behind our common hurdles remains extremely valid. The work that we do in Third World Network-Africa, on trade policy, on the structures and inequities of Africa’s role in the global economy, is important work for everyone across Africa, because the regional and the continental have become key sites of policy making and decision making.. So it is quite important that in the context of global capitalism to see the limits of small national markets, that we accepts the limits of national economies. Policy-makers are also interested in expanded geographies, for investment, for selling goods and services and so on. So there is a dynamic process where the supra-national is becoming a more and more important unit for political economic activity in Africa, we have to respond to this as activists and intellectuals.

So our response, the response of progressives…

Has to engage with the regional and the pan-African, within a global engagement.

As a final question, can you reflect on your work as Coordinator of Third World Network-Africa

Third World Network Africa was created by a group of us, who were previously associated in Ghanaian politics. We set it up as a policy research and advocacy organisation with a pan-African remit. We are very clear about the limits of NGO, as a vehicle for transformative, progressive work. However what we have done over the years is to pick issues which we think pertain to the nature of Africa’s role in the global economy; trade and investment, finance, development issues, which determine the way Africa is inserted in the global economy and then try and work around those issues from the perspective of the defence of popular interests as well as pushing for alternative policies that challenge the dominance of neo-liberalism. Have we been successful? To the extent that the organisation has gained a lot of credibility as contributing to a progressive African alternative perspective, influenced debates and in some cases influenced outcomes of struggles, to that extent I think we’ve been successful.

So in Ghana, where it has been possible to organise and mobilise, for example around mining issues and the interests of mining affected communities, we have at least significantly transformed the debate on mining in the country. On trade policy issues, in about twenty years of working with others across Africa, around the World Trade Organisation, the EU’s Economy Partnership Agreements, we have had an important influence and exerted pressures on the debates and key institutions. An NGO is not a political party, you need to find the methods that optimise the influence that such an organisational form can exert. And we’re fortunate to be based in Ghana, where the laws on NGO activities are pretty liberal. We’ve also been lucky over the years to have been able to raise money, from like-minded organisations and also foundations, who find our work useful. Yet such dependence on other organisations for our funding is also a serious constraint on what you can do.

Brilliant, thank you. I’m going to stop the interview there and then we can decide what we’re going to do…

For more on the issues discussed in this interview please refer to our archive. Yao Graham’s article, referred to above, can be accessed here and Ray Bush’s 1980’s article What Future for Ghana? is also available in our archive.

El Niño and Mozambique

ROAPE

May 12, 2016

By Gary Littlejohn

Last year witnessed one of the strongest El Niño events since the 18th century. It peaked in December 2015 and has now dissipated, although the resultant drought in parts of Africa continues with serious impacts on food security. The end of the El Niño event was unusual, in that it was linked to an apparent split in the warm water then hitting the Pacific coast of Central America. While the southern part then moved away from the coast of South America, the northern part moved up the coast to Alaska, where it produced record warm temperatures that were wrongly attributed to ‘climate change’ (anthropogenic global warming).

Now that it has subsided quite quickly, there are already some early indications of the opposite phenomenon (an incipient La Niña) but one should be cautious about predicting such an outcome at this very early stage. It is important to stress that the effects of the El Niño live on, especially in Africa in the form of serious food shortages. The hardest hit areas seem to be southern Africa and Ethiopia, but East Africa will doubtless be suffering too. Other effects include ‘coral bleaching’, which is a dying off of coral reefs when the temperature in the sea exceeds 26 Celsius, and this has happened on a large scale this year to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.

It is not known what triggers such events, and indeed their periodicity varies over time, but a recent academic study published only weeks ago (covering many geographic regions and recording times thousands of years apart, using dendrochronology and ice core samples) has shown that they are not connected to average global temperatures. It is for this reason that it is wrong to link an El Niño to ‘climate change’ although such a link seemed to be very strong for the years 1976-1998.

The name ‘El Niño’ (the Boy Child) was given to it by Peruvian fishermen who noticed that, roughly every six years at around Christmas, warm water hit the Pacific coast of Peru and disrupted the rich fishing grounds that depended on the nutrients carried to the surface by the cold Humboldt current flowing from southern Chile to northern Peru. After the major El Niño event of 1881-82, which caused a huge famine in India and China, as well as in Africa, a British colonial administrator in India noticed that such events seemed to coincide with a reversal of the normal pressure difference recorded by meteorological stations in Tahiti and in Darwin, Australia, and went to find out why. This switching back and forth in the air pressure became known as the ‘Southern Oscillation’ and so sometimes these events are referred to as ENSO events (El Niño Southern Oscillation) because it was eventually realised that they occur together.

An overview of the phenomenon was not achieved until the International Geophysical Year (1957) when satellite and other simultaneous global measurements enabled scientists to see the overall pattern of events. Further study showed that one of its many effects is to form an isotope of oxygen, Oxygen 18, in sea coral in the tropics. So from fossil coral it is now known that ENSO events have been happening for at least the last 250,000 years. That is much longer than anatomically modern humans have been around, and I would argue that the history of East Africa from the Eastern Cape of South Africa to Egypt should be reconsidered in the light of ENSO events. Economic and political changes often seem to be driven by ENSO events.

How an El Niño functions

Basically what happens is that a very warm column of extremely high pressure air develops on the Equator at Indonesia. The air pressure is so high that it actually pushes down the sea level, thereby generating underwater waves known as Kelvin waves. In principle, these Kelvin waves could radiate out in all directions, since high pressure areas (anticyclones), just like cyclones, are circular in shape and spiral in their dynamics. However, the topography of the relatively shallow ocean floor around Indonesia, coupled with the many islands, means that in practice the Kelvin waves travel to the East across the Pacific, drawing a surface wave behind them, so that the sea level rises on average by roughly half a metre at the front of the surface wave.

The Kelvin waves dragging the warm sea surface behind them produce a temperature change at an angle underwater. In other words, some of the warm water is dragged down by the Kelvin waves and this produces an underwater temperature increase, with the boundary between the colder and warmer water behind being at an angle. This ‘thermal incline’ or ‘thermocline’ means that the sea heats up at depths not usually much affected by sunlight, as deep as 1,500 feet. It takes some months for this wave of warm water to hit the Pacific coast of the Americas, but it usually brings rain with it. Thus one tends to get damaging floods in the Americas. At times these rains can cross Central America, travel through the Caribbean and reinforce the Gulf Stream to cross the Atlantic and hit northern Europe. It only takes a comparatively slight modulation of this flow by the jet stream to move it from mainland Europe to the British Isles. That happened in the case of the latest very strong ENSO event, catching the UK government unprepared for the resulting floods.

This movement of warm water and air to the East across the Pacific reverses the normal wind pattern in the Pacific and Indian oceans. Normally such rain-bearing winds flow from East to West, that is, from the Americas past Australia and Indonesia to Africa, bringing the Monsoon to India and parts of China. In Mozambique the rainy season is normally from November to April. The mechanism producing the normal pattern is called the Inter-Tropical Converge Zone (ITCZ). What happens is that high pressure areas north and south of the Equator revolve in opposite directions, owing to the Coriolis Effect. So high pressure systems in the Northern hemisphere rotate in a clockwise direction, and anticlockwise in the Southern hemisphere. The opposite is true for cyclones. The Coriolis Effect also affects water going down the plughole in a sink or bath. (So some enterprising Kenyans probably still make money by showing tourists that water goes down the plughole in the opposite direction in sinks on either side of the Equator. The Coriolis Effect shows that the Equator as a physical phenomenon is about 100 metres wide.)

This Coriolis Effect means that at a certain time of the year, high pressure systems generate winds from opposite rotations that converge in the tropics to drive the rain-bearing winds from East to West: the ITCZ. ENSO events disrupt this normal pattern and drive the winds in the opposite direction, following the flow of warm water. The result in Eastern and Southern Africa is often drought. This basic picture can be complicated if the Indian Ocean is itself hot enough to generate some rain, thereby at times causing floods that paradoxically coincide with the more general drought in some East African countries, as happened in 1997-98 and in 2015.

A La Niña event is the opposite of an El Niño, that is, it is a stronger than normal flow of wet winds from the Pacific through the Indian Ocean, and thus brings rainfall well above normal for eastern Africa. On a couple of occasions that I can recall, there have been major cyclones in Mozambique not long after an El Niño event, in 1984 and in the year 2000.

Research on El Niño in Mozambique

Together with the Mozambican historian João Paulo Borges Coelho, I was a member of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) research team that studied the impacts in Mozambique of the El Niño of 1997-98. We worked together with INAM (Instituto Nacional de Meterologia) as the Mozambican team. The project covered 16 countries, with the African ones being Ethiopia, Kenya and Mozambique. It was funded through Ted Turner’s UNFIP foundation. The operational director was Dr. Michael Glantz of ESIG (Environmental Societal Impact Group) within NCAR (National Centre for Atmospheric Research) in Boulder, Colorado, USA. The team included the Head of Global Climate Change at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) HQ in Geneva, and a specialist who wrote a technical report on the way this particular ENSO event had developed.

It was possible to do this technical report and indeed to predict the 1997-98 El Niño because the US government had funded a series of buoys across the Pacific. It was prompted to do so by the large ENSO event of 1981-82 which had a big impact in the USA. These buoys which are located along the two Tropics (Capricorn and Cancer) are still in place and have sensors going down to a depth of 1,500 feet, with data being transmitted to satellites. The summary results of this UNEP study were published by the United Nations University in Tokyo: M. Glantz (2002) Once Burned, Twice Shy (2002). So because of these buoys spanning both Tropics from Indonesia to the Americas it had been known for months that an El Niño was coming in 2015. Indeed, surprisingly, an ENSO event started in 2014, but for some reason it petered out before it had developed fully. So I wonder if countries were forewarned about the ENSO event of 2015. It is possible that the ‘failure’ of the 2014 ENSO event may have dented confidence in such forecasts. One might charitably guess that this was why the UK government was unprepared, but I personally doubt that.

In the case of Mozambique, the 1997-98 forecast did not turn out as expected. Excellent preparations were made for drought and a resulting famine, but in fact the Indian Ocean was itself unusually hot and generated enough rain on its own to avoid this effect in Mozambique. During the project on the 1997-98 ENSO event, the overall team covering 16 countries included a meteorologist from Cuba because as indicated above it was known that strong El Niño events often cross Central America and affect the Caribbean and South America. One can see that this has also happened in 2015, with floods in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay. Even with a moderate El Niño, Europe can be affected, as was seen with the floods in Germany and Central Europe only about 7 or 8 years ago.

Meanwhile, various meteorologists are saying that the 2015 ENSO event was probably the strongest El Niño for a century. I have been looking closely at the global weather for months. In fact there is a website that I check out almost daily, because it shows ocean temperatures, land temperatures, pressure, winds at cloud level, the various jetstreams and other things. It was this website which showed that this El Niño effectively split into two not long after it peaked in December 2015, which is pretty unusual. So the rain that hit South America came from the southern part of the split in the warm water (El Niño) in the Pacific. Guided by the southern jet stream, the winds had carried the rain straight across the southern Andes into Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil. The northern part of the El Niño, which was smaller and less warm than the southern part, moved slightly north to California and then generated the floods that hit Texas and Lousiana. That all happened before the northern segment of the split El Niño moved on to Alaska, as described above.

Taking up the point that meteorologists in various countries are saying that this is probably the strongest El Niño for about a century, it should be said that accurate records do not go back before 1957, the International Geophysical Year, but for Mozambique there is a five-point classification from Moderate through to Very Strong El Niño events that goes back to 1850. Other research covering southern Africa as a whole goes from 1800 to 1992, and historical evidence for Mozambique shows that there was a strong EL Niño in 1791. From the classification on Mozambique starting in 1850, the two strong ones since 1957 are 1981-82, and 1997-98. The one that occurred in 2015 is definitely comparable to these two. As part of the UNEP research project that I was involved in, in 1999-2000, I obtained a historical description of famines since 1800 in Mozambique from a German historian who still lives there (Gerhard Liesegang). I then checked these against the list of El Niño events since 1850, and I found two things:

Firstly, in two-thirds of the cases where there was a Moderate Plus to a Very Strong El Niño, there was a drought in southern Mozambique.

Secondly, these droughts often correlated strongly with political unrest and dramatic political change, presumably driven by hunger. This included the rise to power of Shaka, such that the Zulu clan within the Nguni people meant that they were all called Zulu from then on (and various groups were sent north to bring back cattle and slaves – hence the District of Angonia in Mozambique’s Tete Province). It also includes the overthrow of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia and other notable historical events. I was unable to persuade my German colleague Liesegang to agree to a joint publication on this. So the details of that research were never published, although they formed part of the unpublished UNEP report on Mozambique.

On the basis of this historical research and the historical classification of ENSO events, it is evident that this 2015 El Niño now counts as one of the big 4 since 1850. They are: 1876-78; 1981-82; 1997-98 and 2015-16. In 1876-78, about 10 million people died of starvation in India, and about 13 million in China. There are no figures for East Africa but it must have been tens or hundreds of thousands. Those of you familiar with Mozambican history may recall the photographs in the book by Peter Vail & Landeg White.

With regard to the ENSO event of 1876-78, it might be argued that this famine was exacerbated by British colonial policies, including the reorganisation of agriculture in order to grow opium in what was then Bengal, as mentioned in an economic history of colonial and post-colonial India by the well-known economist Bhagwati. M. Davies makes a similar point about famines in India in his book Late Victorian Holocausts. Without in any way disputing that (and indeed Bhagwati makes it clear that there have been no such famines in India since the end of colonial rule) one must be careful about the timing of events here, especially with regard to opium. In any case, for East Africa and Mozambique, colonial rule did not at this time have much impact. For example, German colonial rule in Tanganyika did not really take hold until the late 1890s, and the ‘prazos’ in Mozambique (which might be described as small scale copies of the British East India Company, in that they were not formal colonial rule under the Portuguese government) did not have much agricultural impact in large swathes of Mozambique. Nevertheless, the death toll was evidently very high in eastern Africa, despite the difficulties in estimating total numbers.

Moving to the impact of the 2015 event, according to Mozambique News Reports and Clippings No. 315, edited by Joseph Hanlon, and dated 31st March 2016, “315, 366 people were affected by food insecurity as a result of the drought in southern and central Mozambique, the government spokesperson, Deputy Health Minister Mouzinho Saide, said Tuesday 29 Mar. But northern Mozambique faces the opposite problem. Saide said that floods in the north have affected 32,243 people, and have destroyed 4,991 houses and 109 schools. The drought means that Mozambique is facing a serious grain shortage. The country has always had to import most wheat and rice, but it has at least been self-sufficient in maize. This is no longer the case: Saide put this year’s grain deficit at 149,000 tonnes of maize, 267,000 tonnes of rice and 328,000 tonnes of wheat. (AIM 30 Mar).”

A spokesperson for NCAR in Boulder, Colorado, expressed surprised at the lack of serious flooding in Ethiopia, since that normally happens alongside droughts in other areas of Ethiopia during an El Niño event. However, I am less surprised, because that flooding depends on specific conditions in the Indian Ocean, and these do not apply over a wide area. Ethiopia at the moment has very serious food shortages, because despite the investment in agriculture there, the population has grown a great deal since the ENSO-related famines of 1977 and 1985.

There is an additional factor that suggests that Mozambique will often be able to cope better with famine than Ethiopia, other aspects being equal. This is that, as shown in the special issue on Mozambique of the Journal of Southern African Studies published in 1998, people in southern Mozambique are more willing to have recourse to ‘wild foods’ than elsewhere. The World Food Programme had long been slightly mystified by the survival rates during famines in southern Mozambique, as was explained to me when I was on a joint WFP/FAO Food and Crop Assessment Mission in March 1993. The answer came from fieldwork published in the JSAS special issue in 1998. I followed this up while on the 1997-98 EL Niño research project, and I asked an Ethiopian colleague about the range of wild foods eaten in Ethiopia during famines. He confirmed that owing to religious prohibitions from the Coptic Church, there were various wild foods that Ethiopians simply would not eat. This suggests that ceteris paribus, Ethiopians are probably more vulnerable to famines than people in Mozambique. Such an effect is probably dwarfed by the impact of commercial agriculture in Ethiopia, and I suspect that the impact of the latter may be similar to that of colonial agriculture in India.

Given the preoccupation in Europe with the migration from the Middle East and North Africa, the response to the 2015 ENSO event in terms of food aid to Africa has been muted.

A controversial discussion

It is worth recalling that some effects of ENSO events can be positive. For example, California has been suffering years of drought and it would have been a great relief if the 2015-16 event had brought sufficient rain to relieve that very damaging situation. Regrettably, the sudden splitting in two and rapid dissipation of the warm water meant that this did not happen, despite the flooding in Texas and Louisiana. More generally, the disruption to normal weather patterns is very damaging, and involves large numbers of fatalities. At least nowadays the death toll is nothing like that of 1876-78. I suspect that this is partly due to improved infrastructure and well-organised relief efforts. Yet the event of 1997-98, for example, cost at least $50 billion worldwide. Following the success of the US-funded buoys system in the Pacific, the US and EU funded a similar set of buoys along the Tropics in the Atlantic. So the US can ‘see’ what is coming on both sides, and Europe to some extent also benefits from that. Unless there is an adequate system of warning, similar to that with tsunami warnings, this may not be enough to further mitigate the impact of ENSO events.

While national meteorological offices can in principle check up on the ENSO Web pages of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at any time, the very fact that such events do not occur regularly means that this task can easily slip down the agenda of things to be monitored. A formal warning to all WMO-registered national meteorological services would probably serve as a well-timed wake-up call to set the disaster management procedures in motion. At the moment, countries vary considerably in their response capabilities, and this will doubtless continue, but lessons have already been learned from 1997-98 and they may need to be disseminated more effectively than publishing a single report. That dissemination could take place in disaster management training. In 2003 there was a disaster management course for ‘training of trainers’ (cascade training) at Africa University in Eastern Zimbabwe. That example should be more widely adopted.

Although it would be very costly, there should at least be some public debate about installing a set of buoys across the Indian Ocean, so that Africa and Asia could have better data. At the moment, a lot of meteorological data in the Indian Ocean is collected by commercial aviation and ships fitted with sensors, but this is inevitably spasmodic. Such a system of buoys would be of wider benefit in monitoring global weather and climate variability, as well as in providing data on when the Indian Ocean is going to generate floods during an El Niño. That aspect is not well understood. Proposing the installation of a costly system at a time of famine is bound to be controversial, but with improved understanding could come better pre-placement of infrastructure, including rescue equipment and food storage facilities. Since this problem has been around since the dawn of human existence, long-term thinking is probably in order. India and China could surely afford to fund such a system of buoys, and their populations and economies would benefit.

It is not known what triggers ENSO events, but it is known that they are not related to ‘climate change’. As indicated above, the incipient ENSO event of 2014 petered out before developing into a full-blown event. Establishing the causes of this could well be important. The ‘failure’ of this event to develop fully was predicted months ahead by the British physicist Piers Corbyn, and he gave a causal analysis of why he expected this to take place. Regrettably, this type of analysis is not being taken seriously by the meteorological and climatological establishment.

The reason for this is that they are still living in a Newtonian universe. They state explicitly in public interviews that the weather and climate are governed by gravity and thermodynamics. So electricity is relegated to a very minor secondary role, as when ice crystals rubbing against one another in a storm produce static electricity, which gives rise to lightning. While this undoubtedly happens, it is by no means the whole story, but it is the bigger picture that they fail to see. While they have known since 1995 about red sprites and blue jets (and they have known for even longer about noctilucent clouds) they do not seem to consider the implications. They have also known for about 20 years that lightning frequently strikes simultaneously at two different locations, often hundreds of miles apart, yet once again they do not fully consider the implications, and the necessity for studying the interaction between the weather and the Earth’s magnetosphere.

Such an apparent failure is striking when it is widely known that the ‘solar wind’ can at times trigger the Auroras (Borealis and Australis). So electrical phenomena within the magnetosphere evidently do derive from the impact of the ‘solar wind’. The problem here is that the ‘solar wind’ is really an electrical current flowing out from the Sun to the edge of the solar system, but it is not thought of in those terms by mainstream astronomers and meteorologists. A stream of charged particles flowing from one place to another is an electric current. Yet astronomers do not think of it in those terms, because the do not think that electric currents can last for any distance in the vacuum of space. This error is a result of the fragmentation of physics, since astronomers are not taught about plasma physics. Astronomers think that they can explain this ‘solar wind’ flow as a product of the alleged thermonuclear reaction in the Sun, but that argument does not stand up to scrutiny. It cannot explain the acceleration of these particles after they leave the Sun, whereas treating it as an electrical discharge can do so.

So the Sun is not just supplying heat to the Earth: it is also supplying energy in the form of electricity. Among other effects, this affects the behaviour of the jet-streams near both Poles, and it was this phenomenon which Corbyn correctly used to forecast that the 2014 El Niño would not develop fully. It seems reasonable to guess that it is electricity which actually triggers an ENSO event in the first place, but to my knowledge no research has yet been done on this.

Examination of ice cores (covering thousands of years) from Greenland and Lake Vostok in Antarctica show that the Earth’s climate variability has a distinct pattern: it is a fractal pattern and is probably carried as a signal on the electrical current from the Sun. This pattern holds true even for very recent time series data after the year 2000. It is time for debates on ‘climate change’ to take account of the full range of phenomena that influence weather and climate.

Conclusion

It should be evident by now that the effects of an ENSO event can vary geographically even within a single country, and that such events themselves vary considerably over time. Even with a single event, the drought in southern Africa can last longer in some places than others. For example, the drought continued in Angola into 1993 when in the rest of southern Africa it had finished in 1992. That meant that it was difficult to persuade donors to fund famine relief for Angola at that time, although eventually such efforts were successful.

Yet the general pattern is clear and can be used for disaster mitigation. I have already mentioned food storage and other measures to promote food security. It is not at all out of place to mention the biblical story of Joseph in Egypt and the 7 fat years followed by 7 lean years. Whatever its historical basis (and Joseph was a genuine historical figure, as attested by coins in the Cairo Museum, who lived during the reign of the Hiksos, the ‘lords of the desert’) this story sounds like a description of a strong La Niña followed by a strong El Niño. Surely Africa has suffered long enough from this.

The situation is certainly not helped by the policies of the World Bank, especially the abolition of food marketing boards and the consequent loss of grain storage facilities. The disastrous effects of such policies have been well documented for Zimbabwe, which was once the bread basket of Southern Africa. Yet the experience of Zimbabwe is by no means unique. When I was in Mozambique in 1990, DfID was funding a specialist to train people in techniques for using cheap forms of grain storage in a manner that reduced losses to insect depredation. So the common sense of cheap and effective grain storage was well understood by technical experts. Mozambique at that time had a very effective National Directorate for the Prevention and Combat of Natural Disasters, which had coped pretty well with the effects of war as well as ENSO events. Yet such knowledge was discarded in favour of the already discredited neoliberal orthodoxy, a zombie theory that keeps coming back from the dead, with fatal consequences for the poor.

Gary Littlejohn was Briefings and Debates editor of the Review of African Political Economy from 2010 to 2015. He is the author of Secret Stockpiles: A review of disarmament efforts in Mozambique, Working Paper 21, Small Arms Survey, Geneva, October 2015.

In the Name of the People: Understanding Angola

ROAPE

May 10, 2016

ROAPE’s Leo Zeilig talks to Lara Pawson about Angola, the left, writing about Africa from Europe, and the long process of uncovering what happened across newly independent Angola after the vinte-sete de maio (27 May) in 1977. Today at ROAPE we see that our earlier approach to national liberation movements, before and after independence, occasionally meant that the review, its contributors and editors, supported profoundly undemocratic (even dictatorial) regimes as long as they spoke of radical transformation, signaled some sort of loyalty to ‘Marxism’ and were committed to a socialist future. ROAPE’s Graham Harrison has recently written on roape.net how we must move beyond the stultifying formality of cultural relativism and the universalisms of liberalism and social justice.

Firstly, could you please tell ROAPE about your interest, work, research on Africa? How did it start, what were your motivations, inspirations?

It started at the School of Oriental and African Studies, here in London. Other students influenced me greatly, including Harriot Beazley, John Game, Nick Hostettler, Didier Péclard, Miranda Pyne, Paru Raman and James Sanders. I was fortunate to have been taught by Sudipta Kaviraj and also Tom Young, however it was the historian, Shula Marks, who influenced me the most profoundly. Her books on class and race in South Africa were an important part of my education, as were the discussions we had as a class. With her support, I won a student bursary to do research in South Africa in 1992 for my undergraduate dissertation, which was a comparative analysis of ANC and National Party policies towards women and family. I interviewed women such as Mamphela Ramphele, Helen Suzman, Brigitte Mabandla and Frene Ginwala. I was so inexperienced, I dread to think what I actually asked them. In fact, on my way to meet Ginwala in Shell House, I got lost inside the building – I’d entered the high security lift by mistake – and I slammed into Joe Slovo: I wanted to apologise and tell him how great I thought I was, but I was so stunned I couldn’t speak.

As well as interviewing these political figures, I hitchhiked from Cape Town to Durban and back to Johannesburg. I met more extraordinary people – an ambulance driver from Soweto and, among others, a fat old racist from the Cape – who picked me up off the side of the road. We shared long conversations and I think these interactions played an important part in sparking my complete curiosity. Without a doubt, travelling and working alone, in a country in which Britain has behaved so appallingly, brought me up sharp. It made me think about my position as a white European who has gained so much from a miserable history of exploitation and violence. I think this experience was the kickstart to a long process of learning – about colonialism, racism, empire, privilege, eurocentrism and so on – a process which has steadily recalibrated my understanding of the world and my place within it. I came home quite a changed young woman.

You spent a lot of time in Angola, from the late 1990s. It was a moment of celebrated strong economic growth, but also dreadful repression. Can you explain what was taking place in the country at the time?

I arrived in Luanda for the first time in the summer of 1998, and stayed there as the BBC correspondent until December 2000. In fact, the celebrated economic growth you mention didn’t really start until after the war ended in April 2002. From 2003 to 2011, “growth” averaged 11 per cent and peaked at 20 per cent. I put growth into inverted commas because these are macro economic figures: for many Angolans, this so-called growth was not tangible. It was merely something spoken of by the government and the domestic and foreign media, and measured by financial institutions.

But when I first arrived in Angola in 1998, the price of oil was very low, just 9 US$ a barrel if I remember correctly. Prices started to tumble in November 1997 due, in large part I think, to overproduction globally. I remember when the price rose to 12 US$ and, over the months, to 21 US$. Over the years, as is fairly well documented, much of the money from Angola’s vast oil resources has “disappeared” into the pockets of the local elite and their families, into shell companies and offshore accounts often run by British, highly-educated lawyers and economists, as well as the international oil elite and all those ghastly men from Europe and the Middle East selling military hardware to Angola.

Over and above all this, of course, was the war, which had been raging on and off since 1975. Its final phase kicked off towards the end of 1998, within weeks of my arrival. Government airstrikes in the central highlands were ferocious. So was the ground offensive and the retaliatory bombings, ambushes and raids carried out by UNITA. The war alone, in my view, amounted to “dreadful repression”, as you rightly put it: hundreds of thousands of people were displaced, living in dreadful conditions in refugee camps and overcrowded shanty towns, dependent on food aid, medical aid and the generosity of friends and family. On top of that, the government was then, as it is now, intolerant of dissent, peaceful political opposition or even frank criticism. The few Angolans who dared demonstrate peacefully – often Angolans who were, themselves, demonstrating for peace – would be picked up by heavily-armed police in minutes. Those who wrote critically about the ruling MPLA party or the president himself were often locked up, as Rafael Marques found out in 1999 when he was sent to prison without trial for over a month for his piece, ‘The Dictator’s Lipstick’. Across the country, the atmosphere was characterised by oppression, paranoia and self-censorship. That said, it wasn’t all negative: there was also an active and vigorous movement for peace led by civil leaders, political figures, and the church. In the end, that movement failed, but its very existence, the discussions that took place, the debates about how to attain peace – they were valuable.

At a personal level, this initial two and a half year period in Angola was life-changing – and it was during this time that I learned about the vinte-sete de maio (27 May 1977). A small, courageous political party had organised a demonstration, a hunger strike in protest against a huge fuel price increase. A handful of men turned up to participate, and all of them were arrested. Over the following days, two more small protests took place, each one resulting in further arrests. What struck me at the time was not only the rarity of the demonstrations themselves, but the tiny number of people who were willing to be involved, as well as the absence of other journalists. When I asked my Angolan colleagues why this was, I was given a range of explanations, the most striking being that the last time there had been a significant protest, people were not just arrested, they were also killed. This reference to the 27 May, also known as the Nito Alves uprising, was really my introduction to the whole event. I finally began to understand more deeply Angola’s cultura do medo – its culture of fear. It was a defining moment in terms of my knowledge of Angola’s contemporary politics and also of the MPLA.

From your work in Angola you started research for In the Name of the People. How did this work begin?

It started several years after I’d initially left Angola at the end of 2000. I was back in London working at the BBC World Service. I had several conversations with a colleague, an Angolan, then head of the BBC Portuguese for Africa Service, João Van Dúnem. He told me about his brother, José, who had been executed in Luanda for his actions leading up to and on 27 May 1977. In fact, José Van Dúnem had worked alongside Nito Alves to lead the uprising, or attempted coup. João urged me to write a book. ‘But whatever you do,’ he said, ‘don’t write it like a human rights report. Write a book that people will read.’

In fact, the concept of the book – its style and tone – developed very slowly alongside the research. Initially, when I’d simply gone through my own collection of books on Angola, I was not at all sure how real the 27 May was. Where it was mentioned, it was so brief I questioned how much of ‘an event’ it really was. On the other hand, I knew from conversations with several Angolan friends that as far as they were concerned, it was extremely real – not simply the facts of what happened on the day itself, but the killings, detentions and torture over the following weeks and months.

Over time, I spoke to more and more Angolans, who were keen to help me dig up the story because they had lost a relative or close friend during the 27 May. I began to feel more confident after my interview with an Angolan woman living in Portugal, whose Portuguese husband had been escorted from their home in eastern Angola on the 27 May. She never saw him again. Hearing her horrific memories, and reading some of the paperwork concerning her husband’s disappearance – information from Portugal’s foreign ministry – I knew, then, that a book had to be written.

Later, in a London library, when I came across the MPLA Politburo’s 60-odd page published account of the 27 May, I knew I was on to something very important. [1] The silences in that text speak as much as what is there. It is an extraordinary document. In the library, I also came across more texts that covered the events of 1977 but, apart from one 1978 paper by the historian David Birmingham, none of them paid attention to the horrific purges that followed the 27 May. I was determined to correct that silence. I set out to speak to those who had been involved – survivors, perpetrators, political actors and observers. Archives, documents, papers and books can help us understand history to an extent, but what always intrigues me are the memories and lived experiences of individuals themselves.

For me, your book exposes a murderous regime and those who supported it. All of this is terrible, but then one realises that the massacre took place right at the start of Angola’s independence. It seems that there wasn’t a honeymoon, not even a consummation, but rather a bloody start to decades of bloody rule. How would you characterise the period, these heady years of Angola’s independence?

I’m not sure I would go as far as you have and say that “there wasn’t a honeymoon” at all. But even if that were my thinking, it would not be simply because of the 27 May and the increasingly authoritarian nature of the MPLA. We cannot forget that the country was at war in the weeks and months before independence was even declared on 11 November 1975, and it was at war immediately after. In this way, Angolans never enjoyed a honeymoon of independence.

It might be argued, however, that there was a certain honeymoon within the MPLA and among its supporters, especially once the opposition – first the FNLA, then UNITA which was supported by South African troops – had been beaten back thanks to the intervention of tens of thousands of highly trained and highly motivated Cuban troops. On 27 March 1976, the last of South Africa’s soldiers left Angola, defeated and humiliated. The UN Security Council called on Pretoria to reimburse Angola for war damages. This must have been an extraordinary and wonderful moment to have witnessed. Exactly fourteen months later, however, the 27 May uprising took place. This was an extraordinary and dreadful moment. David Birmingham has described it “the day freedom died in Angola”. I’d say that it was the day that the culture of fear – which had been the norm under Portugal’s fascistic dictatorship – now came to characterise MPLA rule as well. This is the great tragedy. I’d also like to borrow from John Saul, who wrote recently in a very generous review of my book, that what was taking place during these heady years was a “counterrevolution within the counterrevolution”.[2] I think this captures the period and what was taking place quite well, certainly in terms of the MPLA anyway.

Your book, controversially for some, challenges European Marxists, who rushed to support the regime, turning a blind-eye to what was actually occurring. The book was in part an expose of this sort of ‘radical’ Western support for third world regimes. Is this correct? How have some of these people reacted to your book?

When I set out with this book, my intention was not to expose anyone. It was to expose the truth, or, as I state at the end of the preface to the book, ‘to try to uncover the unwritten truth’ of the 27 May. Within that broad but ambitious goal, I wanted to do a number of other things: to understand how Angolans themselves, those outside the elite as much as within it, remember the 27 May; to explore the memory and enduring trauma of that event; and to try to understand how and why the massacre, which is such a huge part of the event of the 27 May, had been overlooked by western (especially British) leftists, who had written about this period of contemporary Angolan history and who had inspired my own engagement with the country. I’m talking about people like Basil Davidson, whose books had influenced me when I started out at SOAS, and Victoria Brittain, whose journalism inspired me to become a journalist.

Inevitably, my quest took me into challenging territory, both personally and politically. In my book, as you know, I have chapters with two British Marxists, each known for their work on Angola: Michael Wolfers, who is no longer alive, and Brittain. Each of them responded very differently: Wolfers was fairly open and generous, whereas Brittain was defensive. Before Wolfers passed away, he emailed to say how much he disliked me and my work. I have not heard from Brittain, but I would imagine that she’s not much of a fan either. I think it’s a pity that she wasn’t more open. I empathise with her and others who had written about Angola during the Cold War period. I wanted to try and put myself in their shoes. At the beginning of my chapter with Brittain, I make this abundantly clear: ‘Had I been a journalist then, I probably would have taken the same line, and defended Neto’s leadership above all else.’ Whether I would have carried on doing that, right up to the present: I certainly hope not.

But to answer your question, I’ve had very little personal feedback from this particular generation of western Marxists. There’s been gossip, of course. Certain well-placed individuals have, allegedly, tried their best to stop my book from gaining too much attention. If true, it is a fairly sorry situation: to think there are still people out there – and I’m talking about people in London, Leo, not Luanda – who want to silence a fuller investigation into the 27 May! Who do they think they are?

Of course, more formal reactions from the friends, supporters and networks of this group have also come to my attention. Negative responses include Colin Darch, a librarian based in Cape Town, South Africa – I think he’s British by birth – who wrote a passionate review expressing his loathing for my book.[3] I’m not sure he’s ever been to Angola, but he writes with surly confidence about the country and reveals abundant admiration for Brittain, Paul Fauvet and others, including Basil Davidson, who failed to discuss the appalling depths of violence and the massacre that followed the 27 May. Interestingly, I received a number of emails from people – some friends, some strangers, all of them regular visitors to Angola – who were quite appalled by what Darch had written. It was quite gratifying, therefore, that the same journal chose to publish a lengthy interview between myself and Justin Pearce, who has been working in Angola on and off since 2000.[4]

The London Review of Books recently ran a review of six books on Angola, including In the Name of the People.[5] The author, Jeremy Harding, makes clear his dislike of certain parts of my book, focusing in particular on one of my two chapters with Wolfers, which intrigued me because he doesn’t discuss any of my chapters with Angolans. Despite our differences, Harding and I are making efforts to build a friendship: the way I see it, if Angolans can reach peace after decades of war, a couple of British writers should be able to shake hands, share a beer and engage each other in fair discussion. Another pretty negative review was published on this very website, written by Miles Larmer. He certainly was a Marxist, though I don’t know if he would still describe himself as such. He is not the same generation as this crowd we’ve been discussing, so I honestly don’t know what his connections are with them, if any.

But to be honest, the negative reactions are in the minority. The overwhelming response has been very positive indeed. For example, John Saul, a North American Marxist, who ROAPE readers are familiar with, thinks my book is ‘brilliant’. He has written a very complimentary review in the latest issue of ROAPE.[6] Another writer on the left, Keith Somerville, also wrote a very favourable review of the book for the Royal Africa Society.[7] In fact, In the Name of the People was nominated for the Royal Africa Society Book of the Year 2014. And then there’s you, Leo. You are obviously not of that generation that was in Angola in the 1970s and 1980s, but you are a Marxist with close connections to many of them. Like me, you have looked up to Brittain and, more significantly, Basil Davidson. Alas, Davidson was too unwell to be interviewed by the time my research was under way. But I think he would have had interesting things to say in response to my questions as to why, in his own work, he looked away from the important matter of the massacre.

What I have found very frustrating is that people like Darch have misrepresented my arguments, implying that I state that Davidson, among others, didn’t write at all about the 27 May. This is not what I say. Apart from Brittain – who does not mention this crucial event once in her book, Death of Dignity: Angola’s Civil War, despite the fact it covers the period – Davidson, Wolfson, Paul Fauvet and others did write about it, but only from the perspective of Agostinho Neto’s faction of the MPLA. They produced biased, one-sided accounts which simply reproduced the official state propaganda coming out of Luanda. They failed – or perhaps chose not – to listen to the other factions of the ruling party. And they did not write about the thousands of deaths which followed the uprising. This is the bit I find so hard to swallow. This is the bit that people such as Darch seem content to overlook, which I find very disturbing. Not only me, but many Angolans I know, including some who were raised within the MPLA ‘family’, find it disturbing too.

Perhaps I should mention that, when I was working on the book, there was a period when I considered packing it all in. I was so uneasy and depressed about what I was learning about the MPLA and the British left. In desperation, I rang a friend in Luanda, a widely respected Angolan journalist. I told him that I was really worried about the response of people like Victoria Brittain, among others. My friend erupted into laughter. He couldn’t believe that I could worry so much about those he described as ‘a bunch of has-beens’. ‘They are living in the past, Lara. They don’t matter. No one in Angola cares what they think. Just write your book. Do it for us.’ He carried on laughing.

So as well as uncovering the massacre the book also uncovers the contradictory relationship of a generation of (mostly) white radical intellectuals to apparently progressive and socialist regimes that emerged in the second wave of independence in Africa in the 1970s. What do these conclusions teach us about the continent, the view of it from the west and how we should relate towards its movements and projects?

Well, to start with, it’s taught me the dangers of generalising. I think that one of the mistakes that has been made is to assume that because you are familiar with the politics of, say, Mozambique, that you can assume a certain familiarity with Angola. There are a number of British leftists in particular who know quite a bit about South Africa’s politics of liberation and assume that they can transfer this knowledge onto Angola. This sort of approach is unwise. What I have learned is that the more I increase my knowledge of Angola, the more I realise I have to learn. But perhaps the biggest lesson I have taken away from my research for In the Name of the People is that the politics of left and right that shape so much of political action and discussion in western Europe and North America does not map easily onto Angola.

I think that one of the errors of some of my predecessors was to project their own political hopes and aspirations on to the country. As well as revealing a certain arrogance, this approach fails to account for other ways of being and acting in the world, ways that may not be immediately obvious to outsiders. In the case of Angola, I think that some of these Marxists overlooked more nuanced and complicating factors that fuzzy the water of simplistic notions of left and right. I’m thinking, here, of ideas of racial hierarchy, for example, which have been shaped profoundly by the politics, culture and history of ideas of assimilation introduced by the Portuguese, as well as the regional differences, the complex ideas of ethnicity, history, religion, class, village, nation and kingdom… the list goes on. I would strongly recommend reading Justin Pearce’s recent book, Political Identity and Conflict in Central Angola, 1975-2002, which, in my view, shows just how flawed our thinking on Angola has been, in terms of seeing the country as simply MPLA versus UNITA, Left versus Right, and so on and so forth. Pearce shows that this is not how Angolans understand things.

Of course, it is easier to say all of this in hindsight. But it has been disappointing to witness the lack of humility of those on the left, who, even today, refuse to admit that they may have got it wrong.

You were longlisted for The Orwell Prize 2015. What has been the reception of the book in the UK and Portugal? What have been the silences, who has and who has not engaged with the arguments you have made?

In the UK, it’s been pretty good. As well as The Orwell Prize longlisting, it also got shortlisted for the Bread & Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2015 and also for the Political Book Awards Debut Political Book of the Year 2015. And as I mentioned earlier, it was also nominated for the Royal Africa Society Book of the Year 2014. So I’ve been delighted. It’s also received a pile of extraordinary reviews from all sorts of people, all of which are listed on my website. I was particularly delighted to receive praise from the likes of Didier Péclard in Politique Africaine, Hassan Ghedi Santur in Warscapes, Phillip Rothwell in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cassie Werber in the Wall Street Journal, Delinda Collier in Africa is a Country and, really pleasing, Claudia Gastrow in The Salon, which is produced at the University of the Witwatersrand under Achille Mbembe’s editorial lead. All of this has been very warming indeed. I’ve also received correspondence from people in the UK who have read the book, including those who know nothing about Angola and who now want to know more as a direct result of reading the book. What more could a writer ask for? I’ve made new friends because of the book, as well as the inevitable enemies!

In Portugal, I had an appalling review in the newspaper Público written by a young male social scientist who, at the time of writing, I understand had never visited Angola in his life. He seemed to object to the fact I write in the first person and that – shock, horror! – I talk about my doubts and even my emotions. A true empiricist, he also seemed to be obsessed with the need for certainty and the pretence of the objective, authorial, third person. This is not an approach I admire.

Luckily, there have been many positive reactions from Portugal and other parts of Europe too. I have received numerous emails, Facebook messages, Twitter DMs and direct phone calls from all sorts of strangers, including a number of Angolans. An elderly man who went to school with President Dos Santos, was so overcome by my book, he rang me up and asked if he could travel to London to visit me. In his seventies, he came to stay at my home with his wife. We spent the weekend discussing Angola and the 27 May. He said he had waited all his life for a book to tell the truth about racism in Angola and about the 27 May. I was quite overwhelmed by his reaction. Hearing his stories was also upsetting. People have been through so much.

Others include those whose relatives were killed following the events that day. Many of them have written with their own stories, and to thank me for bringing this information into the public sphere. Young Angolan men, in particular, have written from different parts of the country, as well as from Portugal and elsewhere, to say that their families will still not discuss the 27 May and that my book has helped them to understand their history. Some have written to tell me very personal stories about how their relatives died. This has been a humbling experience. A young Angolan woman stood up at a public event I did in London and said she’d read the book and it captures perfectly the emotion and fear that the 27 May produces. Again, I was pretty overwhelmed – or perhaps reassured – by her response. It’s been very gratifying to meet so many Angolans who are prepared to accept the work of an outsider.

I recall a seminar with John Saul in May 2014 where he made polite criticism of your conclusions, regretting that you had not given an estimate of the numbers killed in the events your describe. Is this a reasonable criticism?

John Saul has been so supportive of my book, he’s the last person I’d want to contradict or criticise. And let’s be honest: he is not alone in making this point. However, there have been many others who believe, as I do, that my refusal to provide a figure for readers to take away with them is a sign of the book’s strength. After all, there is not a single incident of large-scale political violence in Angola whose numbers are not massively disputed. In the case of the 27 May, these numbers range from a few hundred, to a couple of thousand, to 25,000, to 50,000, all the way up to 90,000. I have no concrete evidence that could allow me to claim that I know how many were killed. If you were to force me, I’d probably lean cautiously to the lower end of the scale. As I state clearly at the end of the book, however, I have been inspired by Judith Butler’s work. In Frames of War: When is Life Grievable she observes that knowing how to count is ‘not the same as figuring out how and whether a life counts’.[8] This line of thinking marks my own reflections on the 27 May.

What I learned, while researching this terrible event, is that the ever-inflating estimate of the dead doesn’t actually change anything in real terms. I think our obsession with counting the dead – in Angola, in Northern Ireland, in Columbia, in New York, in Burma, etc – distracts us from the deeper traumas that shape our experiences of the world in which we live. For me, what is so interesting about the 27 May is the extent to which it has shaped the type of political engagement that takes place in the country. I would also like to add a note of caution to those who are so keen to come up with a concrete number: they should only do so if they have absolute proof. Otherwise, they are merely stoking rumour. I don’t see how that could possibly help anyone, least of all those who are still coming to terms with the deaths of their relatives and friends and comrades. To answer your question then: No, I don’t think it is a reasonable criticism. I think it is possibly even a little foolish.

Can you tell us about your continued involvement in Angola and Africa? What work are you doing at the moment? Has the book made it difficult for you to return to Angola?

I’m not keen to generalise about the continent of Africa. I have friends in different countries, but I miss my friends from Angola most of all. I haven’t been back for several years. I’ve been told I won’t get back in by one MPLA guy, a friend of mine. He says the party will never let me back in while Dos Santos is still at the helm. I’m not inclined to buy this idea. I simply haven’t tried to get a visa, less because of the book than money. Luanda is incredibly expensive. Flying to Angola costs a lot. At the moment, I simply don’t have the funds to make a trip. But I am sure, at some point, I will make a trip, to visit the people I know and love. Meanwhile, I am engaging with Angola in a more personal and private capacity. I am currently trying to work out ways to raise money for the families of the 17 young activists who have been sentenced to jail because of their determination to bring democracy to Angola. I want to do what I can to help them.

As for my work, I have a new book coming out this autumn, here in the UK. It is called This Is the Place to Be, and is published with CB editions. I am now working on a third book. More on that when I have worked out where it is going.

Notes

[1] Bureau Político do Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, Angola: A tentativa de golpe de estado de 27 de maio de 77 (Lisbon: Edições Avante!, 1977).

[2] Saul, John, Review of African Political Economy, Volume 43, Issue 147, 2016, pp 163-5

[3] Darch, Colin, South African Historical Journal, Volume 66, Issue 4, October 2014, pages 726-728.

[4] See Pearce, Justin, ‘Interview with Lara Pawson: On Writing In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre‘, South African Historical Journal, Volume 67, Issue 3, 2015; Pearce, Justin, Political Identity and Conflict in Central Angola 1975-2002, Cambridge University Press 2015

[5] Harding, Jeremy, ‘Apartheid’s Last Stand’, London Review of Books, Vol 38, No 6, 17 March 2016

[6] Saul, John, ‘In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre’, Review of African Political Economy, Volume 43, Issue 147, 2016

[7] Somerville, Keith, ‘Factions, fear and fighters – the story of Angola’s forgotten massacre’, African Arguments, 20 May 2014. Available online: http://africanarguments.org/2014/05/20/review-factions-fear-and-fighters-the-story-of-angolas-forgotten-massacre-by-keith-somerville/

[8] London: Verso, 87. p.xx

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