African Struggles Today

Social Movements Since Independence

Peter Dwyer, Leo Zeilig

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781608461202
• eBook ISBN: 9781608463084
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Three leading Africa scholars investigate the social forces driving the democratic transformation of postcolonial states across southern Africa. Extensive research and interviews with civil society organizers in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Zambia, Malawi, Namibia, and Swaziland inform this analysis of the challenges faced by non-governmental organizations in relating both to the attendant inequality of globalization and to grassroots struggles for social justice.

Peter Dwyer is a tutor in economics at Ruskin College in Oxford.

Leo Zeilig Lecturer at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.

Chapter 1

Introduction

This book is about the role of social movements in contemporary Africa. Its core argument is that social movements—popular movements of the working class, the poor, and other oppressed and marginalized sections of African society—have played a central role in shaping Africa’s contemporary history.1 In the twentieth century, social movements were central to challenging the material exploitations of Western imperialism and bringing an end to formal European control of the continent. Similarly, they resisted dictatorial and military rule in postcolonial Africa, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s paved the way for the return of democracy to much of the continent. In the last two decades, social movements have critiqued and resisted the imposition of economic liberalization across the continent by the international financial institutions and their allies among African rulers. Despite this extraordinary record, African social movements have not been the subject of systematic analysis. While there has been a considerable proliferation of modern history books on Africa, none focus on popular struggles.2 Although many individual case studies of particular movements have been carried out, the wider impact of those movements has often been neglected, with popular movements consigned to condescending footnotes in broader imposed narratives of the transfer of state power and the triumph of liberal democracy. It is the aim of this study to place social movements at the center of the analysis of postcolonial African political change, capturing both their exciting diversity and their capacity to unite as temporary “coalitions of the discontent” in periods of rapid social change. In such circumstances, they have the potential to play a leading role in progressive political and social change, as they did during the struggle for independence in the 1950s and early 1960s and again in the pro-democracy movements of the early 1990s.

The book is thus designed as a corrective to the tendency to see Africa’s postcolonial half-century as one dominated by political repression, economic decline, and ethnic conflict. Africans have constantly struggled in difficult circumstances to improve their lot, using collective forms of action to challenge unjust and unaccountable systems of political and economic power. This book documents many of those struggles during the post-1945 period in general, and those that took place in southern Africa in the 1990s and 2000s in particular. However, it is also acknowledged that these movements, formidable though they have been, have not ultimately coalesced into a sustained force for social change akin to the labor movements of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century western Europe, which permanently transformed the lives of that continent’s working class. Africans, in contrast, have seen their living standards decline and many of their societies deteriorate into political repression and, in some cases, virtual anarchy.

As well as celebrating the successes of these movements, much of the book therefore asks the implicit question “What went wrong?” If social protest has been at the heart of Africa’s politics, then why is much of the continent so resolutely undemocratic, authoritarian, and poor? How have vibrant movements of the sort analyzed here failed to develop into broader political forces for radical social and political change? Why have their achievements been so consistently hijacked by economic and political elites, both Western and indigenous? Answering this question certainly necessitates a critique of the politics of African nationalism and the nature of postcolonial African elites. It also requires a critical analysis of the politics and composition of social movements themselves. By addressing these concerns, it is the authors’ hope that this book will make a modest contribution to strengthening the activists and movements currently active on the continent

This analysis is rooted in the authors’ extensive research on the continent, particularly in southern and central Africa. It draws on dozens of interviews with social movement activists and a decade of observation and participation in the debates and activities of movements and organizations that are themselves grappling with many of the questions raised above. The resultant analysis shows the experience of African social movements to be varied, complex, and often contradictory. They have often sought to utilize the democratic “space” they have helped win, only to find their activities hampered by elected governments that replicate the authoritarianism of their predecessors. Their efforts to speak for the “masses” or the “people” are limited by the profound inequalities (of resources, power, and social capital) that pervade their structures. They seek to operate in a global context, but their local grievances are subordinated to the liberal agenda of Western civil society, even in parts of the anticapitalist movement (which is the focus of chapter 7). In portraying the difficult relationships between the African poor and working class and the organizations that seek to represent them, we reject both the tendency to reify these movements as authentically “of the people” and the equal tendency to reject such movements as the puppets of their Western funders. These issues are further elaborated in chapter 2.

The view from below

Our orientation in this book is toward social forces that frequently lie hidden in the official historical accounts that dominate both academic studies and the media. We seek to understand historical and political change in a way that reflects the aspirations, grievances, and worldview of the majority of the African people. Social change, we argue, is created in the popular resistance of which social movements are increasingly an important element. This approach to a “politics from below” is of course not particularly original, nor particular to Africa. The model of political transformation in this book is developed from an approach to historical writing forged in the 1950s and 1960s. E. P. Thompson’s famous study The Making of the English Working Class wrote consciously “against the weight of prevailing orthodoxies” which “tend to obscure the agency of working people, the degree to which they contributed by conscious efforts, to the making of history. . . . Only the successful . . . are remembered. The blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves are forgotten.”3

History from below is not a new phenomenon in Africa. This approach to Africa’s past, present, and future was popularized in the annual History Workshop at South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand. Drawing on the work of Thompson, these studies emphasized the importance of the agency of the “poors” and stressed the vibrancy of the experiences of popular classes.4 In the 1970s, pioneering labor studies were carried out across the continent, employing an empirical “change from below” perspective to shed light on the consciousness of workers in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Zambia, among other countries.5 Some more recent studies of Zimbabwe have continued this pioneering work.6 More generally, however, there has been a shift away from agency-oriented studies of social movements; political change in Africa tends to be interpreted primarily in terms of the machinations of elites and their interactions with international institutions. Politics is reduced to “governance” and social movements to “civil society.” The “masses,” in such analyses, are passive electoral fodder, easily manipulated by appeals to narrow ethnic solidarities and/or the trickle down of neo-patrimonial recompense.

This book is, then, an attempt to restore the agency of social movements to the center of democratic transformation and change on the continent. It is a sustained attempt against forgetting, for example, the general strikes that gave birth to mass nationalist politics in Senegal and Zimbabwe, or the demonstrations more than forty years later by students at the University of Lubumbashi that helped to trigger the “democratic transition” and the period of Congo’s “second revolution.”7 These histories are told against a frequently hostile and seemingly unbending social world. The ideological tools (organizations, initiatives, and leadership) that social movements used in the democratic transitions were one of the ways they were able to exercise agency and achieve successful transformation.

Ideological tools

These ideas are linked explicitly to central concerns of this book. It should be clear that the “activism” to which we refer is not simply a topic of research, but an important element in social and economic transformation. Political change without the intervention of ideological and social struggle (political activism) can lead to stagnation or worse: “the common ruin of struggling classes.”8 Therefore to make and remake history requires, in Chris Harman’s words, a social group with “its own ideas, its own organization and eventually its own . . . leadership. Where its most determined elements managed to create such things, the new society took root. Where it failed . . . stagnation and decay were the result.”9

Harman stressed in 2004 the centrality of political and ideological structures in the historical process: “Economic development never took place on its own, in a vacuum. It was carried forward by human beings, living in certain societies whose political and ideological structures had an impact on their actions.”10 In turn, these structures were the products of a confrontation between social groups.

Social transformation is therefore propelled by ideological and political conflict between rival social groups, not simply economics. The resolution of these conflicts “is never resolved in advance, but depends upon initiative, organization, and leadership,”11 the raw material through which human beings are able to make history, but not on a level playing field (or in a vacuum). We do not choose the circumstances in which these struggles take place.12

Historical progress proceeds in these unchosen circumstances. Samir Amin argued in 1990 that it was the economic backwardness of western Europe that gave it an advantage in the development of capitalism. Other Eurasian and African societies had experienced similar developments in production, but these were ultimately suffocated by existing state structures. The Chinese empire—the most economically advanced in the “Middle Ages”—was able to block these developments, while in the least advanced areas of western Europe the social forces unleashed by these changes could break down the old superstructures.13 The capacity to “break down” old institutions was not simply a matter of economics, but crucially of politics and ideology. It was not only a question of struggling against the economic control by old social groups but also the prevailing worldview. Where the social forces associated to the new forms of production were unsuccessful, or too closely connected to the old states and institutions, “they were defeated and the old orders hung on for a few more centuries until the battleships and cheap goods of Europe’s capitalists brought it tumbling down.”14

In the democratic transitions examined in this book a multitude of organizations and “social groups” generated their own programs and ideas for the “transition,” but the “initiative, organization, and leadership” that came to dominate these movements hailed from NGOs, now-excluded members of the previous ruling class, and trade union bureaucrats who saw no alternative to liberalization and the free market agenda of the Washington consensus. Though there were individuals, trade unionists, militants, and occasionally organizations that tried to drive the movements to the left, these were ultimately unable to lead and grow sufficiently to counter the politics and “ideological tools” of a recycled elite. For much of the continent’s recent history, that politics has been dominated by a hegemonic nationalism, linked inextricably to the interests and parties of a particular social group but claiming to speak for the whole of society.

Understanding the faces of nationalism

Historically, nationalism tends to be the chosen ideology (and the state the central political focus) of members of a specific social group seeking to govern a politically defined nation. The political manifestation of this social group is often embodied in the leadership of the dominant hegemonic organization that provides intellectual and moral leadership in a national liberation movement and expresses particular material interests. However, leaders of a national movement do not always recognize themselves as a specific social group, expressing themselves instead as a national liberation movement speaking for all the people.

Colonial oppression, by subjugating people on a racialized basis, had the unintended consequence of uniting the subjugated peoples within particular colonial territories. The broad political objective of national liberation movements was therefore to secure the independence of their “country” from foreign domination—“national oppression.” Revolutionary national liberation movements were composed of different social groups temporarily united under the banner of national liberation. Indeed, the term “movement” implies an amalgam of groups—political, economic, social, and cultural—working more or less collectively to bring about the goal of national liberation. While such movements develop in differing contexts, it is still possible to identify common characteristics they embody. One of these is that there is usually a group of people—often sharing similar material interests—in “leadership” positions with a specific, if not fixed, political strategy that, although seldom unchallenged, becomes hegemonic and leads a movement that strategically draws on different social groups. Consequently, it is important to interrogate the character of national liberation by defining nationalism as a particular set of ideas and by examining how, as a distinct political ideology, nationalism expresses particular material interests.

It is worth examining these arguments in more detail. Colonial oppression creates material incentives for resistance among all members of the oppressed nationality, but it also violates the particular material interests of various classes and strata in different ways. The material injuries that are experienced by all members of the oppressed nationality may actually constitute a relatively narrow band of common grievances against the colonial occupiers, while the most consistent and most particularly felt oppression—and thereby the oppression that motivates the sharpest resistance—may be particular to each social class or stratum.

For example, peasants may experience grievances against colonial landlords that can be successfully articulated within a “national” framework, but also against local landlords which cannot—as they did in India, where Gandhi approved rent strikes against the British landlords but not their Indian equivalents, the zamindars. Both classes, peasant and landlord, may be anti-colonial, but for different reasons. The unity of people who share a common enemy is essentially a “negative” quality—they both seek to remove the colonial regime, but disagree on what they would want from a successor regime. Therefore, we could say that classes diverge on their positive social goals.15 Through such divergences, the “material basis” for a national liberation movement is thus fragmented into multiple material bases, which need to be fully analyzed if such movements are to be adequately understood.

Nationalists generally fail, unsurprisingly, to interrogate the material and historical bases of their own movements. Nationalists do not deny that other conflicts or forms of oppression exist, but maintain that they are secondary to the shared identity of all the peoples of a nation, irrespective of their gender, religion, and so on. The implication is that nationalism has no specific material and social basis. Nationalism, especially non-Western nationalism, is popularly understood as an essentially “natural” response by oppressed peoples to their oppression by an external force, for example colonial settlers. The corollary is nationalism understood as a distinct political force, disconnected from any particular social group or specific material conditions.

The “nationalist project” in sub-Saharan Africa has been historically tied to the role played by what we term the “student-intelligentsia.” Often described as a petit bourgeoisie, at independence this class was without its own capital and sought national liberation and state power as a way of securing control of such capital. They presented themselves as above class antagonism, portrayed colonialism as the sole initiator of class divisions inherently foreign to African society, and developed political ideas—African socialism and African unity—that sought to justify the goal of a liberated nation, free of class division. Their project, however, was driven by their own interests, and they succeeded in constraining wider demands for political and economic transformation. In the period after independence the intelligentsia continued to play a leading role, often in the context of the political weaknesses of other social groups. A more detailed exploration of the postcolonial period is provided in chapte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• African Struggles Today
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Social Movements and the Working Class in Africa
• 3. An Epoch of Uprisings
• 4. Cracks in the Monolith
• 5. Social Movements after the Transition
• 6. Frustrated Transitions
• 7. Social Forums and the World Social Forum in Africa
• 8. Conclusion
• List of Acronyms
• Notes