I like Harris' conclusions, and they reflect the arguments of a Harare
group, Afrodad (let me know if you want direct quotes/citations by Africans
calling for an end to debt AND aid). However, a different take is coming out
next month in Z Magazine (though it was drafted in early December, prior to
some important
African Social Forum developments last month). The Observer's false,
self-interested division between the West and African dictators is belied by
the name of its prior owner, Tiny Rowland -- leading to the obvious
question: hasn't Harris ever read Fanon?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ian Murray"
> Online commentary: The Observer's Paul Harris draws on his wide experience
of
> Africa to argue that blaming the continent's ills on colonialism or the
west
> simply allows the real culprits to evade responsibility.
Cultivating African anti-capitalism
When it comes to anti-capitalist resistance, the most
economically-marginalized sites are amongst the most interesting. Not
because the greatest number of militant activists are out in force--but
because the trials and tribulations they overcome along the way, and the
consciousness they express, teach us vital lessons about uneven capitalist
development.
Consider the African continent, where from Accra and Dakar in the West to
Lilongwe, Lusaka, Harare, Mbabane and Johannesburg in the South, growing
movements closely parallel the most sophisticated international protesters.
Their targets are the same--the World Bank, IMF, WTO, particularly venal
corporations and other purveyors of commodification and exploitation--but
because of conflicting legacies of African nationalism, the going is slower
and more careful.
Capitalism's legacy
These were, after all, also sites of intense, bloody resistance to previous
epochs of globalization. The British, French, Belgian, Portuguese, German,
Spanish, Italian and Afrikaner states which ran diverse colonies here during
most of the twentieth century--independence was mainly won during the
1960s--were amongst the most brutal in human history. In earlier centuries,
they accounted for tens of millions of slaves; in Southern Africa alone at
least two million civilian deaths during the last third of the century can
be traced to destabilization by the apartheid regime and allied forces,
including the US.
In the aftermath of formal independence, Cold War politics and patronage
battles broke out in and around many African states, between clients of the
United States and Soviet Union, with Cuba and China playing mixed roles.
Under the circumstances, Africa became a melting pot of war and organized
criminality--hence, an excellent platform for short-term capital
accumulation by extraction-oriented multinational corporations.
Resistance came in waves. The anti-colonial tribal-based uprisings of the
19th century were only suppressed by the Europeans' brutal military
superiority, ultimately requiring automatic weaponry. Twentieth century
settler-capitalism could only take hold through coercive mechanisms that
dragged Africans out of traditional modes of production into the mines,
fields and factories. Rural women had the added burden, then, of subsidizing
capitalism with an infrastructure that reproduced cheap labor, since
schools, medical insurance and pensions for urban families were largely
nonexistent.
Against superexploitation, Africa's rich, interrelated radical traditions
grew and intermingled. They included vibrant nationalist liberation
insurgencies, once-avowed 'Marxist-Leninist' political parties, mass
movements (sometimes peasant-based, sometimes emerging from degraded urban
ghettoes), and powerful unions. Religious protesters, women's groups,
students and youths also played catalytic roles that changed history in
given locales.
In the sense that the imperialist stage of capitalism was a logical outcome
of pressures building up in the early 20th century world system--as insisted
by socialists like Lenin and Luxemburg, and conceded by liberals like
Hobson--these were some of the most important anti-capitalist campaigns
ever.
For example, the 1885 meeting in Berlin that carved up Africa between the
main colonial powers reflected pressures directly related to the 1870s-90s
capitalist crises, particularly in the London and Paris financial centers.
The stock markets reacted as badly to news of, for example, Ndebele raids on
Cecil John Rhodes' mine surveyors in Zimbabwe, as modern brokers did to the
Zapatista uprising and failure of WTO negotiations in Seattle a century
later.
But what kinds of globalized resistance can be retraced? Anti-slavery was
amongst the most important international solidarity movements ever. Later,
an attempt was made by Marcus Garvey to relocate African-Americans to
Liberia. African nationalist movements exiled in London and Paris
established even greater Pan-Africanist visions, as well as solidarity
relations with Northern critics of colonialism, apartheid and racism.
The combined anti-colonial/imperialist phase, from the 1960s through the
liberation of South Africa in 1994, gave leftists and anti-racists (from
militants like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael to church-basement
activists) inspiration--although as Che Guevara found out during a hellish
year (1965) organizing and occasionally fighting in what was then Mobutu's
Zaire, not all peasant societies proved ripe for the struggle.
Names of that era's leading African revolutionary writers and thinkers--Ake,
Amin, Biko, Cabral, Fanon, First, Lumumba, Machel, Nabudere, Nkrumah,
Nyerere, Odinga, Onimode, Rodney, Sankara, Shivji--still grace political
reading lists and book clubs ranging from the world's great universities to
political clubs deep in African shantytowns.
As predicted especially by Frantz Fanon, terrible disappointments
accompanied virtually all the transitions from colonialism to neocolonialism
in Africa. This is crucial to point out at a time when blame-the-victim
analysis of what the Economist magazine has termed 'the hopeless continent'
is rampant.
Africa's worst socio-economic problems are better considered as deep-rooted
manifestations of a peripheral capitalism manipulated at will by imperialist
powers, accompanied by the rise of complicit local ruling elites. Three sets
of closely-related problems can be identified, associated with what Fanon
described as 'false decolonization'.
First, colonialism's artificial borders, racism and ideological control,
ethnic divide-and-rule strategies, land acquisition, labor control,
suppression of competition from indigenous sources, military conflict
(independence struggles) and replacement by African nationalism together
guaranteed a future of distorted economics and failed states;
Second, for women, pre-colonial patrilineal systems evolved into colonial
forms of inequality (e.g., minority status and legal guardianship) which
often persisted and evolved as post-colonial forms of structured oppression
(e.g., market-related brideprice).
Third, political continuities from past to present include unreformed state
structures, international political and cultural relations with colonial
powers, and especially class alliances involving compradorism (local
sell-outs working in league with international oppressors).
The economic structure of Africa's neocolonial societies was relatively
homogenous, suffering from international commodity price fluctuations, an
overdose of foreign debt and 'dependency'. That structure resulted in uneven
formal working-class organization across the continent, resulting
periodically in strikes in especially the mining and railway industries.
But at the point of production, the forces of law and order were invariably
stronger and treacherous. Racism often flared worst just prior to
independence, as settlers held on to privileges with sophisticated state
repressive capacity, much of which carried over after majority rule was won.
So the post-colonial state was quickly harnessed for neocolonial duty. This
allowed, in turn, Africa to continue expanding exports notwithstanding
terribly unfair terms of trade (the difference between prices paid for
exports in relation to prices paid for imports).
The peak of demand for Africa's raw materials, before synthetic substitutes
were invented, was during World War II. From the mid 1970s, terms of trade
worsened dramatically, in part because of export-oriented policies which
most African countries were compelled to adopt once they experienced debt
crisis.
The prices of primary commodities (other than fuels) have risen and fallen
according to a deeper rhythm. Exporters of primary commodities, for example,
have fared particularly badly when financiers have been most powerful. The
cycle began with falling commodity prices (1973), rising foreign debt
(1970s), dramatic increases in interest rates (1979), a desperate
intensification of exports which lowered prices yet further (1980s), and in
some cases outright bankruptcy.
This process impoverished nearly the entire non-industrialized Third World,
with occasional, erratic exceptions in oil-producing regions. For Africa,
the trend to declining terms of trade was especially devastating because of
the continent's extraordinary dependence upon a few export commodities.
Export-led growth strategies pursued since the 1970s by virtually all Third
World countries meant that Africa's market share also shrunk drastically.
Meanwhile, willing bankers promoted corruption and capital flight--in the
DRC, for example, Mobutu sese Seko was thought to be illegitimately worth
US$5 billion by the time of his 1996 overthrow. The cost of imported oil
rose dramatically in 1973 and 1979, and markets for raw materials stagnated
and declined, requiring a short-term substitute for foreign-currency
revenues in the form of loans.
During the first part of the 1980s, the World Bank and IMF took over as
creditors to ensure that African countries repaid Northern commercial bank
loans, in exchange for power over virtually all aspects of public policy in
African countries. This resulted, uniformly, in austere macroeconomic
policies which emphasized liberalization, export orientation and an end to
social subsidies.
But incoming funds continued to decline, and by 1984, net financial resource
transfers to the Third World were negative for the first time, as countries
spent more on interest payments than they gained in new loans. By the end of
the decade, the net South-North transfer had reached $50 billion a year,
which reflected the success of financiers in shifting the repayment burden
to not only Northern taxpayers but also to Third World citizens.
Developing countries found that by 2000 they still had more than $2 trillion
in foreign debt to repay (up from $1.3 trillion during the early 1980s when
the debt crisis broke out and $1.4 trillion in 1990). Each year during the
late 1990s, African countries paid $162 billion more than they received in
new loans, up from $60 billion in 1990. There was little hope of balancing
accounts by attracting inflows of foreign direct investment.
Another crucial issue was the militarization of the continent associated,
initially, with colonial resistance to change, and then to neocolonial power
plays that inexorably resulted from partial transitions. Thanks in part to
Cold War machinations and lubrication provided by arms dealers, many African
countries witnessed extraordinary social, civil and regional conflicts
ranging from genocide to attempted coups. In sum, debt, trade, investment,
wars and more recent scourges like HIV/AIDS--exacerbated by the refusal of
pharmaceutical corporations to sell medicines at affordable prices--all
compel Africans to fight for peace and justice locally, by invoking
continental and international anti-capitalist themes.
Anti-capitalism in Africa today
What are popular organizations actively involved in these issues arguing and
doing? Much can be gleaned from specific social struggles associated with
local campaigns. Many such campaigns centrally involve labor. An occasional
catalyst for regime change during the colonial era was the mass strike.
During the 1980s-90s, these intensified. Organized workers and the urban
poor invoked the 'stayaway' periodically against undemocratic regimes, as
well as 'IMF Riots' against the lifting of subsidies on vital inputs like
staple foodstuffs and transport. During the early 1990s, these strikes and
riots resulted in dozens of overthrows of governments--but without ideology
and solid organization of oppressed people, the parties that replaced the
ruling elite simply kept the systems of oppression intact.
Just as interesting are specific struggles that draw to the world's
attention local injustices. For example, in mid-2000, when the US EximBank
offered $1 billion in loans for African countries to import anti-retroviral
drugs to combat HIV/AIDS, Africans involved in grassroots advocacy
(especially South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign) recommended that their
nation-states reject the advice, and instead import parallel, generic drugs
at as little as 5% of the US corporate price from countries like Thailand,
India and Brazil.
The fight against Big Pharma was one of the most important in recent
anti-capitalist history, for it forced the South African government and
World Health Organization to reluctantly confront the power of patent
protections in the World Trade Organization. That fight did not end, because
Pretoria's rulers appear ambivalent about keeping five million mainly
unemployed poor people alive (their stance is regularly labeled 'genocide'
by serious observers).
International allies like AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and
Medicins sans Frontiers assist Africa's courageous campaigners to the point
that South Africa's 'undertaker-in-chief', the mercurial president Thabo
Mbeki, reportedly claimed in desperation in late 2000 that the Treatment
Action Campaign was part of a CIA plot.
Another emblematic struggle with greater implications than are immediately
visible is the grassroots campaign by Jubilee debt activists for the return
of Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha's billions in looted funds, hoarded in
Swiss and London banks. Early success has helped to break open Swiss secrecy
(following similar campaigns over fifteen years waged by citizens' groups
and governments in the Philippines and Haiti in relation to the Duvallier
and Marcos hoards).
The British government was particularly embarrassed by its regulators'
nodding and winking at the largest London banks, which laundered Abacha'
s--and no doubt many other tyrants'--dirty money without qualms. This
follows well-publicized Nigerian activist attacks on oil companies which in
Ogoniland and other parts of the Delta continue to trash the environment and
people. Ken Saro Wiwa's Mossop movement had a subsequent boost, after Abacha
's 1995 execution of the fearless writer, when in mid-2002 Nigerian women
conducted sit-ins at the local oil complex offices of multinationals just
prior to the World Summit on Sustainable Development.
In addition, progressive local African groups and international allies have
critiqued specific World Bank projects, including the Chad-Cameroon oil
pipeline, the Lesotho Highlands Water Project which supplies Johannesburg
with water, and the Bujagali Dam at the headwaters of the Nile in Uganda.
Other growing campaigns that link African and international civil society
organizations include the environmental debt that the industrial North owes
the South, and the campaign to ban 'conflict-diamond' trade that has
contributed to civil war in Sierre Leone, the DRC and Angola.
In addition to various oil-related solidarity campaigns, particular
environmental justice struggles have linked South Africans with counterparts
elsewhere over dumping of toxics (e.g., mercury), compensation for asbestos,
anti-incinerator campaigns and air pollution. 'Corporate accountability' is
the overall demand but a much more radical politics lie behind the
international solidarity networks.
Likewise, movements against privatization of basic services--mainly water
and electricity--began in Accra and Johannesburg in 2000 and have attracted
great international support. Their influence is spawning similar campaigns
across Southern and West Africa. The Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee's
Operation Khanyisa ('Switch On') illegally reconnects people whose supplies
were cut because of poverty and rising prices associated with services
commercialization. Similar community-based protests in Durban and Cape Town
against disconnections, evictions and landlessness have won international
recognition.
African networks that build these campaigns are evolving continually, and
several are worth citing at this juncture. The 'Lusaka Declaration' was
signed in May 1999 by the leading African social movement and church
organizations working on debt. Dozens of Lusaka meeting participants
launched a process for drafting a mass-popular 'African People's Consensus'
to transcend the development orthodoxy of the Washington Consensus and the
slightly reformed Post-Washington Consensus, and to do so by building upon
similar regional meetings in Accra, Lome and Gauteng in 1998-99.
The African People's Consensus went to West Africa in December 2000, via the
'Dakar 2000' Coordinating Committee. This initiative took on momentum in a
Yaounde conference in January 2000. The Dakar summit was supported by groups
like the Association des Femmes Africaines pour la Recherche et le
Developpement as well as numerous West and Central African social movements
and NGOs.
Dakar 2000 is networked across the Third World through the International
South Group Network's well-respected Harare branch, and internationally
through the Paris-based Association pour la Taxation des Transactions
financieres pour l'Aide aux Cityens (Attac), and the Comittee pour l'
Annulation de la Dette du Tiers Monde in Brussels.
The Accra-based Africa Trade Network was similarly active in opposing the
United States free-trade legislation known as the Africa Growth and
Opportunity Act. Member organizations pledged in October 2000 to lobby their
governments to refuse entry into the deal, which provides a slight amount of
market access to those countries that Washington (this time, the US State
and Commerce Departments) deems economically responsible.
This follows similar work by the network to promote Africa-Caribbean-Pacific
unity in relation to Lome and European Union trade negotiations more
generally, and early critiques of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper
initiative of the IMF and Bank. The Trade and Development Network
secretariat NGO, Isodec, is also affiliated to the Penang-based Third World
Network, and has consistently been the most powerful African critic of the
WTO.
Along with the Harare NGO 'Seatini' (Southern and Eastern African Trade
Information Initiative), these were the major African players behind the
collapse of the proposed WTO Seattle Round, working both in the streets and
inside the official African delegation. South Africa attempted to cut a side
deal in the 'Green Room' deliberations of key countries, but Pretoria was
eventually shamed into accepting the Organization of African Unity
resolution that prevented insider-consensus on establishing a Seattle Round.
Finally, an example of a superb network in a subregion of Africa is the
Southern African Peoples Solidarity Network. Key participants include
leftist thinktanks, NGOs devoted to social movements, radicals from the
faith community especially in the Jubilee debt cancellation movement, trade
unions and the Gender and Trade Network.
Where will these initiatives coalesce? In January 2002, dozens of African
social movements met in Bamako, Mali, as the African Social Forum, in
preparation for the Porto Alegre World Social Forum. It was one of the first
substantial conferences since the era of liberation to combine progressive
NGOs and social movements from all parts of the continent, and was followed
by African Social Forum sessions in Johannesburg (August 2002) and Addis
Ababa (January 2003). African groups began networking more actively in 2002
when the neoliberal New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad) was
introduced by Mbeki and a handful of other African leaders.
The main point to make here, is not that these and other progressive African
movement networks (e.g., labor-related, health equity specialists, numerous
types of environmentalists, and so on) are advancing strong, mature,
ideological statements about the debt, trade and related economic oppression
they face. What is perhaps of greater interest is that instead of working
merely through NGO-type circuits, they are increasingly tying their work to
militant street action, as was evident at the Durban World Conference
Against Racism in August 2001 and the Johannesburg World Summit on
Sustainable Development a year later. Both cases involved militant
anti-capitalist and anti-Pretoria activism.
In other situations, however, instead of synthesizing with mass protest,
some local activities undertaken by grassroots groups too easily fall into
the trap of neoliberal economic policies. This was a logical corollary to
the global rise of civil society discourses, and was not unique to Africa by
any means.
The rise of Community-Based Organizations and associated development NGOs
closely corresponds with the desire of the international agencies to shrink
Third World states as part of the overall effort to lower the social wage.
The result is an ongoing conflict between technicist, apolitical development
interventions on the one hand, and the people-centered strategies (and
militant tactics) of mass-oriented social movements of the oppressed on the
other hand.
For this reason, there was a more rapid initial acceptance of NGOs and CBOs
within the broad configuration of forces that reproduce, however weakly,
African capitalism. Donors and reformist international NGOs could justify
more resource flows and international conferencing; African ruling elites
could appear more tolerant; neoliberal agencies could get on with the job of
shrinking African states, now supported by the mopping up role of NGOs which
more 'efficiently' rolled out the tattered safety net; and the NGO
petit-bourgeoisie garnered hard-currency salaries, 4x4 vehicles and a
certain degree of local prestige. These elements gave paternalistic African
rulers greater breathing space, and when NGOs became an occasional nuisance,
repressive legislation and registration processes usually did the trick.
Thus by 2000, African civil society outside the networks mentioned above had
mainly been civilized, tamed and channeled. In this context, geopolitical
maneuvres were solely between African capitals, Paris, Washington and
London, although another new player, Pretoria, would have to be accounted
for.
South Africa's subimperialist Nepad agenda consists of a few key components,
which progressive civil society organizations in Africa have repeatedly
expressed skepticism about:
. privatization, especially of infrastructure such as water, electricity,
telecoms and transport, will fail because of insufficient buying power of
African consumers;
. more insertion of Africa into the world economy will simply worsen
fast-declining terms of trade, given that African countries produce so many
cash crops and minerals whose global markets are glutted;
. multi-party elections are held, typically, between variants of neoliberal
parties, as in most countries, and cannot act as a veil for the lack of
participatory democracy required to give legitimacy to so many failing
African states;
. grand visions of information and communications technology are hopelessly
unrealistic considering the lack of simple reliable electricity across the
continent; and
. South Africa's self-mandate for peacekeeping gives no peace of mind, in
the wake of Pretoria's ongoing purchase of US$5 billion worth of offensive
weaponry and its unhappy record of regional military interventions.
Likewise in areas of economic reform, such as debt, financial flows and
foreign investment, Nepad offers only the status quo. Instead of promoting
debt cancellation, as do virtually all serious reformers, the Nepad strategy
is to 'support existing poverty reduction initiatives at the multilateral
level, such as the Comprehensive Development Framework of the World Bank and
the Poverty Reduction Strategy approach linked to the Highly Indebted Poor
Country debt relief initiative'. Only after trying these discredited
strategies, replete with neoliberal conditions such as further
privatization, would African leaders 'seek recourse' through Nepad.
Yet Malawi's 2002 famine occurred because the country's grain stocks were
sold following IMF advice to first repay commercial bankers, a telling
indicator of power relations--although one which has raised consciousness
and helped mobilize grassroots protests through the Malawi Economic Justice
Network. And in Zambia, the Bank and IMF continue to insist that the Poverty
Reduction Strategy Programme must include the privatization of the only bank
which offers black Zambians reasonable service, a mistake that has provided
leftist critics of neoliberalism a fresh organizing handle on a silver
platter.
Nepad's solution to the foreign investment drought is consistent with
international rhetoric about Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in
privatised infrastructure: 'Establish and nurture PPPs as well as grant
concessions towards the construction, development and maintenance of ports,
roads, railways and maritime transportation... With the assistance of
sector-specialized agencies, put in place policy and legislative frameworks
to encourage competition'.
However, most infrastructure is of a 'natural monopoly' type, for which
competition is unsuitable: roads and railroads, telephone landlines, water
and sewage reticulation systems, electricity transmission and distribution,
ports and the like. Nepad cannot make a case for competition in these areas.
There is, in contrast, an extremely strong case, based on public-good
features of infrastructure discussed in previous chapters, for state control
and non-profit operation. Most noticeably, privatization of infrastructure
usually prevents cross-subsidization to enhance affordability for poor
consumers.
In all these respects, Nepad's core arguments reflect residual
neoliberalism. Just as disturbing, the potentials for democracy, good
governance and genuine participation by civil society through Nepad appear
slim, particularly after an attempt by Mbeki to simply toss out political
criteria from a voluntary (hence already suspect) 'peer review mechanism'.
A succinct critique of Nepad was issued by an Accra meeting of the Council
for Development and Social Science Research in Africa (the continent's main
academic body) and Third World Network-Africa last April. To list just three
of the meeting's conclusions,
The most fundamental flaws of Nepad, which reproduce the central elements of
the World Bank's Can Africa Claim the Twenty-first Century? and the United
Nations Economic Commission for Africa's Compact for African Recovery,
include:
(a) the neoliberal economic policy framework at the heart of the plan, and
which repeats the structural adjustment policy packages of the preceding two
decades and overlooks the disastrous effects of those policies;
(b) the fact that in spite of its proclaimed recognition of the central role
of the African people to the plan, the African people have not played any
part in the conception, design and formulation of the Nepad;
(c) notwithstanding its stated concerns for social and gender equity, it
adopts the social and economic measures that have contributed to the
marginalization of women...
The result of such critiques has been to revitalize the search for an
African People's Consensus, as an 'alternative' program to Nepad. To that
end, the anti-capitalist movement in Africa is both old and new, with the
wisdom of patience borne of fighting colonial and imperial powers for three
centuries and, forty years ago, winning only token control of states--and
conversely, a freshness based on new conditions for intracontinental unity.
As a result, the movement is both militant and careful, because false steps
and excessive aggression are severely punished by more brutal dictators and
state security apparatuses than exist elsewhere.
These are some of the grounds for expressing solidarity with a movement that
has great momentum going into the World Social Forum, and whose
anti-capitalist cadres are as determined as those to be found anywhere.
(Bond's recent books include Against Global Apartheid, Unsustainable South
Africa and Fanon's Warning. He teaches at the University of the
Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.)
