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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 chapter 3.

Social movements and NGOism

In the last twenty years, the capacity of the postcolonial state to ensure the interests of this elite and to manage the demands of the wider populace has been seriously weakened by the impact of economic liberalization. In this context, a plethora of civil society organizations (CSOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), have emerged to fill the gaps created by the negative impact of structural adjustment and neoliberalism on state-provided social services, often using the language of “empowerment” and “community participation.” The general result has been the massive distortion of social resistance by the introduction of “donor syndrome,” the distribution of donor money to activist groups and NGOs.

This phenomenon is linked to the political disillusionment of the left in the 1980s and 1990s. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc led many radically minded civil society activists to retreat from the notion of a confrontation with global capitalism, and to turn instead to single-issue campaigns and substitute the voluntarist provision of welfare services for demands on the state. This explains the proclivity of single-issue campaigns among NGO activists, who saw new possibilities of “empowering” communities through donor funds. In this context, NGO approaches and donor funding ingratiated themselves into some of the social movements and campaigns that we describe in the book. As John Bomba, a Zimbabwean activist, commented, NGO funds can “disarm the movement that was emerging from the ground and shift people’s focus from the real battles to some very fantastical arenas.”16

Indeed, one of the underlying tensions within the social movements analyzed in this book is that between an activist orientation and a tendency towards NGO-ization and a focus on the provision of welfare-oriented services that might otherwise be provided by the state. We do not, however, dismiss any organization engaged in service provision as an NGO that can easily be counterposed to more activist-oriented social movements. Rather, social movements exist on a spectrum of orientations; any single movement may contain diverse (and even contradictory) elements of bureaucratization and activism. This issue is explored in more detail in chapter 2.

The structure of this book

While this is a study of social movements, it is based on the authors’ understanding that no history is complete if its focus is solely on the movements from below. As subsequent chapters will show, the relationship between popular politics, organizations, and leadership is extremely complex, involving a dialectical connection that draws forces together in particular times and places. Central to this analysis, therefore, is the relationship between classes and movements, and the tensions between leadership and organizations that shape social change. This requires both the assertion of the agency of the poor and the detailed empirical investigation of the politics of both “below” and “above.” Yet this interaction does not take place in a vacuum that can be freshly made by each generation. Agency is constrained (and facilitated) by structures that are inherited or born into. Karl Marx’s well-known but still relevant axiom suggests that humans make “their own history, but do not make it just as they please, they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”17 These un-chosen circumstances are not simply the existing institutions, government systems, and the judiciary, but also the experiences of previous struggles and movement and the successes, defeats, and memories of political action transmitted from the past.

These concerns, which form the backbone of our study, demand a direct connection with real events. These theoretical issues describe a relationship between movements, levels of political action, and leadership that operate within directly encountered circumstances. Any relationship can only be examined in its movement and development, as it evolves through the course of events. In Thompson’s words, “like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomize its structure . . . the relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context.”18 In this context, we seek to elaborate the particular way in which we understand the social movement concept and how we apply it to complex African realities in chapter 2.

Chapter 3 sets out the historical background to more recent struggles. In our view, it is necessary to examine the history of protest and resistance over the last six decades—as manifested in strikes, marches, demonstrations, and riots—if we are to understand and be able to explain the process of struggle and popular politics in Africa, both to celebrate its successes and to understand its failures and limitations. While the primary focus of the book is the most recent period of protest and political action since the democratic revolutions of the early 1990s, our story properly starts in 1945. As already indicated, the awakening of national consciousness in the third quarter of the twentieth century was not a singular event, but one which enabled—despite the ultimate success of nationalist leadership and the consequent limits placed on social reforms—the economic and social grievances of ordinary Africans to be articulated. The promise of “independence” was not simply one in which European rulers were replaced with indigenous ones. For most involved, it implicitly or explicitly necessitated a radical reorganization of the political and economic order in ways that would improve the political rights and living standards of the mass of ordinary Africans. The process of decolonization involved a dialectical interaction of forces in which the nationalist leadership often promoted struggle by the colonial poor while also seeking to direct and constrain them. Despite these efforts, however, the overthrow of colonialism continued to carry expectations of transformative change for the wider populace. Asse Lilombo, a Congolese activist, depicts what decolonization in 1960 meant to him: “It was not only a party of independence; it was a party of liberation.”19

When such transformation did not occur in the years after formal independence, social movements engaged in activities designed to ensure that their dreams of a more just and equal society were realized. Although independent labor and civil organizations were repressed and incorporated during the rise of one-party states and military regimes, grassroots activists continued to challenge the betrayal of their dreams of independence, albeit in deeply problematic circumstances.

Most African countries emerged from colonialism with their economies dependent on the export of one or two primary products. Independent African countries could grow, and even promote certain reforms, as long as there was a steady market and price for their commodities. The postwar boom, which established a seemingly permanent international consensus in support of state-led models of development, began to break up in the late 1960s. By the mid-1970s, commodity prices were collapsing and pulling into the vortex those newly independent states that had a precarious dependence on cotton, groundnuts, copper, or a number of other primary products. The crisis of postwar Keynesian capitalism, the rise in oil prices, the collapse in commodity prices, and the debt crisis that followed destroyed the state-led developmental project implemented by postcolonial African regimes. By the late 1970s, the global economic downturn had radically altered the terrain of grassroots contestation. Increasing international competition compelled many African rulers to enforce budgetary restraints, call for austerity, and eventually abolish what were now deplored as “restrictive” protectionist practices.

The economic status of most Africans worsened significantly, but the attempts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to make Africans pay the price for a crisis that was not of their making led to a new wave of resistance, taking the concrete form of “food riots” that were in fact just the tip of an iceberg of social and economic discontent. These protests have been described as the “first wave” of resistance to structural adjustment: expressing early and unorganized (to a certain extent) fury at the devastating cuts and attacks to state provisions.20 When some apparently hegemonic African states proved vulnerable to such pressures, delaying and even reversing the economic reforms demanded by the international financial institutions (IFIs), popular resistance was emboldened and began to take a more proactive form in the 1980s. Economic discontent combined with political demands, finding expression in labor organizations, churches, and less organizationally specific expressions of protest. In the late 1980s and early 1990s a second wave of protests was born. Inspired in part by the political changes in Eastern Europe, Africa experienced a new political revolution. This wave was more explicitly and organizationally political. One-party states were swept away by popular movements often led by trade unions and national conferences, so that by the mid-1990s, most of the continent had returned to democratic forms of government. However, just as in the movement for independence thirty years earlier, the unity of the pro-democracy movements masked profound differences over the future orientation of the new political system. In the context of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, models which linked political liberalization to economic liberalization were hegemonic—and the ongoing debt crisis left African governments with little choice but to implement more radical versions of the economic liberalization programs that had helped generate the movements that led to the removal of their predecessors.

As already mentioned, the main focus of this book is the subsequent period of nearly two decades, up to the present day. Chapter 4 is devoted to the particular experience of social movements in South Africa. While the literature on South Africa is well developed, it is striking, in comparison, how little primary research has been carried out on the activities and perspectives of social movements in the rest of the continent. This study aims to help fill that gap. Chapter 5 examines the experience of social movements in countries that achieved at least a limited form of democracy by the 1990s, and chapter 6 looks at others that have experienced a relapse into dictatorship or, with the repression of pro-democracy movements, remain highly undemocratic systems. In these three chapters, we explore in detail the experiences of social movements and civil society organizations as they have sought to achieve goals of greater social and economic justice and more effective forms of political accountability and democracy. Each chapter is based on a detailed analysis of the situation of the countries under study, drawing on relevant literature and, in chapters 5 and 6, interviews with dozens of civil society organizers and social movement activists. Key themes in these chapters are relations between social movements and African states; the ways in which social movements have been able to resist the implementation of economic liberalization programs; the extent to which such civil society organizations are themselves representative of the masses they claim to speak for; and to what extent they are themselves subject to the influence of Western donor agencies and NGOs that have at times provided a significant part of their funding.

Chapter 7 explores the anticapitalist movement that hit the headlines after the November demonstrations at the Seattle World Trade Organization meeting in November 1999. This was, until the revolutions in North Africa (the “Arab Spring” that began in January 2011), the most important development in international “politics from below” in the last fifteen years. This movement of movements began to challenge the gross inequities of the neoliberal Western-dominated capitalism that has been largely hegemonic since the end of the Cold War. It also presented profound challenges to older left and radical analyses of the nature of capitalism, of how progressive change is to be achieved, and, in particular, the structures necessary to do so. In this context it was a courageous attempt to generate political alternatives, even if these efforts have not been successful. Still, a generation of activists have been inspired and educated politically through involvement in the anticapitalist movement. In its organizational form—the Social Forums held since 2001 on a global, national, and local basis—the anticapitalist movement has both challenged the inequities of the present world system and articulated a compelling vision that “another world is possible.”

African social movements have been active participants in this global anticapitalist movement. Its analysis of modern global capitalism’s capacity to undermine state sovereignty and commodify the “commons” resonates with Africans’ firsthand experience of imposed economic liberalization and choiceless democracies, as well as the continent’s long history of globalization in the forms of the Atlantic slave trade and forced integration into the empires of European powers. Many African activists have found in the anticapitalist movement not only established networks of campaigns, advocates, and comrades, but also an international framework that enables them to break from a purely national or local analysis. However, this chapter also suggests limits to the relevance of the anticapitalist movement to the African context. It details the experiences of Social Forums held in Africa and attended by the authors, focusing in particular on the World Social Forum held in Nairobi, Kenya, in January 2007. Drawing on personal experience as well as interviews with participants, the authors argue that the inequalities and contradictions inherent in the global anticapitalist movement find their clearest expression in the African context, where its inability to fully incorporate African experiences and analyses arises directly from the very structures of this apparently structureless movement.

The January 2011 revolutionary upsurge has, among many things, posed much more urgently some of the practical questions with which activists had begun to grapple in the Social Forum milieu; the “who are we, who are they, what can we do about it” questions that go to the heart of any of the discussions about strategy and tactics that swirl inside social movements. The answers cannot be prefigured in advance or through abstract contemplation but can be found only in the cut and thrust of movements in motion. Yet we believe that the movements and issues discussed here offer lessons from the sharp jostle of experience.

The book concludes in chapter 8 with a comparative analysis of the role of social movements in Africa, both historically and in the contemporary period. It identifies important lessons drawn from the findings of the study and suggests ways in which social movement approaches may strengthen the activities of civil society and non-governmental organizations on the continent as well as internationally. The revolutionary process that is still developing in North Africa and igniting movements in parts of the Middle East is testament to the continued vibrancy of social movements across the continent. Indeed, one of the primary reasons for writing this book was to insist that we cast our gaze on the continuing organic development of these movements that demand our attention, solidarity, and celebration. This book seeks to develop and deepen the search for political alternatives for those who want to see a world not dominated by neoliberalism, austerity, and underdevelopment.