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Chapter 2

Social Movements and the Working Class in Africa

This chapter seeks to establish the analytical framework that will be utilized in the more empirical chapters that follow. Drawing on some of the most important analyses of social movements within and outside the continent, it explores how a social movement approach can shed new light on the nature of popular struggles and resistance to state power, social and economic injustice, and exploitation in Africa. It critiques the ways in which popular movements have been understood—and misunderstood—by analysts of postcolonial African politics and society. Finally, it seeks to locate the role of social movements in broader movements for political change in Africa, and more widely, against the worst manifestations of neoliberal capitalism and for a deeper democracy and greater social justice—ultimately raising, in the words of the anticapitalist movement, the possibility of another world.

Conceptualizing social movements

The idea of understanding societal and political change through the prism of social movements is not a new one, but it has been applied more commonly to Western society than to Africa, and is generally linked to the development of modern nation-states. What do we understand by “social movements”? In much of the scholarship, social movements are perceived as a series of largely unconnected and distinct campaigns, civil society organizations (CSOs), and pressure groups.1 In contrast, we see social movements as both a unified and differentiated totality. While there are distinct “movements” and different and competing layers within social movements, these continually interact, connect, and conflict. Social movements may start out with distinct and limited goals but be drawn into broader struggles that change societies. We see working-class politics as an important component in social movements both internationally and in Africa. In this chapter, and the book more generally, we explore the historical and contemporary development of a politics that derives from the working class and the wider African urban and rural poor. At the same time, we understand and explore the serious constraints on the development of such a politics within social movements, specifically an unpromising political and economic structural context. Our “social movements” approach stresses the agency of the popular classes’ subalterns in shaping their own future, while not in any sense neglecting or playing down the powerful structural factors which militate against their capacity to do so.

In the early nineteenth century, a qualitatively new form of protest movement developed in Europe. Charles Tilly demonstrates how, with urbanization, industrialization, mass literacy, the extension of the franchise, and the development of states ostensibly committed for the first time to the improvement of their peoples, new social movements mobilized in relation to both that commitment and to grievances that arose from the rapid processes of social change that were taking place. Through a range of tactics focused on displaying their numbers, such as demonstrations, petitioning, and protests, these new social movements, which claimed to speak for some or all of the people, asserted themselves towards the new states. These were not generally movements that aimed to overthrow or replace the new states or their rulers, but rather to influence their policies or practices. Although social movements did sometimes find themselves in conflictual or confrontational relationships with rulers, modern political systems were supposedly characterized by their capacity to incorporate dissenting movements and enable them to influence policy. Social movements should, according to Tilly, therefore be understood as part of the panoply of the modern state, with its burgeoning democratic spaces and opportunities.2

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels provided a broader concept of social movements. They used the concept to describe revolutions, trade unionism, the struggle for suffrage, resistance to imperial occupation, and the emergence of alternative and utopian projects and ideas. These processes of revolt and protest could be conceptualized as a single totality that included the working classes, but also “plebs,” the “poor,” and others engaged in the “social question”—that is, the struggles and lived experiences of the exploited and the oppressed in their entirety. “Social movement” thus described an entire space of political and social contestation involving trade unionism, labor politics, national independence, and “localized” forms of oppression. Marx and Engels privileged the politics of the working class as holding the potential to solve the social question by challenging capitalist exploitation, but they saw class struggle as only one element of a differentiated social movement.3

Marx and Engels were in this respect consistent in their support of any group that fought oppression, including in what they regarded as feudal or “backward” societies. Both wrote extensively on the revolt of indigenous communities against imperial and national oppression. Their support for struggles in India is typical. During the Indian Revolt of 1857, Marx praised the “great revolt” and Engels wrote at length on the military tactics that the insurgents might use to defeat the British.4 This resistance to colonialism was “celebrated in the same lyrical cadences as they would deploy in celebrating the Parisian communards.”5 The struggle in India and the emancipation of the English working class, for example, were therefore both part of the “social movement in general.”

It should already be clear from analyses of such movements that the social forces that existed within them, the ideas and activities they generated, and the outcomes they brought about varied enormously. This clearly demonstrated that social movements were and are inherently heterogeneous and contradictory, tending to incorporate a number of movements or elements as part of a differentiated totality. Similarly, social movements contain differentiated potentials. A number of theorists have argued that because such movements are inherently contradictory, they are unable to develop an ideology that would unite their varying strands. Colin Barker argues that groups within social movements are misguided if they seek to substitute their understandings for those of the entire movement. Rather, Barker reminds us, social movements are a muddle of competing and shifting layers and tendencies, working occasionally in harmony, often in striking opposition.6

Jeff Goodwin’s comparative analysis of revolutionary movements complements these arguments. He states that social movements are not the actions of classes, but coalitions, and that it is these coalitions that drive change and comprise new systems of government. Radical change in society is, Goodwin suggests, commonly achieved by coalitions of social interests rather than distinct classes. Any such coalition, however, involves cooperation and compromise between different interest groups, depending on the structural context in which they arise. The question of which interests come to dominate any such movement and which see their interests as subordinated is central to understanding the degree or type of social change they achieve. Goodwin argues that the success of any movement will be, in part, dependent on political ideas and that it “simply may not possess the sufficient leverage or ‘hegemony’ . . . that is necessary to take advantage of (or create its own) political opportunities.”7 This is particularly germane to the study of social movements in Africa: for example, when analyzing the influence of the popular classes in broader nationalist or pro-democracy coalitions (see chapter 3).

There is, then, a permanent contest between ideas and arguments within social movements. The outcome of such contests depends on both the actual and potential actions of the political and social forces in a particular social movement. The social movement is therefore the field in which struggle takes place and political hegemony is constantly contested. Implicit in the study of social movements are two questions: What is the potential for different, more radical projects to emerge? Could their outcome have been different from that which occurred? Unless analysts ask these questions, we can grasp little sense of the evolution of social movements or the import of their actual achievements. It also necessitates an open approach to the study of social movements that adopts a broad perspective as to what is and is not a “social movement,” rather than a strict definition that seeks to identify in advance what is and is not an authentic movement “of the people.”

Clearly, such a conceptualization rejects a narrow definition of social movements based on a functionalist model of pressure group politics, which enable the state to make limited policy reforms in response to specific demands by legitimate political actors. “Social movements” is a broader and less normative concept than liberal concepts of “civil society” or the more institutional notion of “interest groups,” both of which assume (tacitly or overtly) the desirability of containing conflict within existing political frameworks. Scholarship that limits social movement analysis to particular campaigns for (for example) civil rights, democratization, or peace needlessly limits its own capacity to understand both the broader context and the underlying nature of typically disparate and contradictory social movements. For example, while the civil rights movement in the United States originated largely as a respectable, non-violent movement located primarily in southern Black churches, it developed through student politics and organizations via the anti–Vietnam War movement, eventually incorporating a significant rise in trade union militancy in the late 1960s and 1970s.8 Central to these developments was a constant debate within the civil rights movement around a range of general and specific questions and issues. Such debates and movement trajectories need to be understood in their totality so as to analyze particular outcomes and whether they might have turned out differently.

Social movements, it should be understood, can manifest themselves in overt institutional and organizational forms—but they commonly take more amorphous and temporary forms, for example protest movements which coalesce briefly around a particular issue or initiative before dissolving into wider society. They may, of course, involve both such tendencies. Studying such movements therefore requires an understanding of social movements as relationships. As E. P. Thompson reminds us: “Like any other relationship it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomise its structure. . . . The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context.”9 The conclusion is clear: if we are conscious of the contested, disparate, and contradictory nature of the “social movement in general,” it becomes possible to identify the potential for more radical liberatory tendencies implicit (and sometimes explicit) in the social movements we analyze and study. We do not argue that all social movements evolve towards revolutionary transformation, but that only by understanding social movements as a differentiated and contested totality can we see the conflicts and potentials within them that can lead to revolutionary change.

Social movements are inevitably authors of their own construction, within pre-existing limitations. Intention and agency are not, however, simply at the mercy of determining “structural” forces. The core of social movement action is more complex and nuanced. As Barker has observed, certain revolutionary situations are concluded with the reassertion of existing power, others end in a stalemate, and some may actually become revolutions. Nevertheless, whatever the conclusion—retreat, stalemate, or revolution—it will have come about through conscious and organized effort.10

An important area of investigation is therefore the circumstances in which the aims and achievements of particular social movements are restricted to partial reforms by existing states, and where these develop into more radical transformative demands. In what circumstances do such movements evolve beyond the reformist aims of elites and develop the capacity for radical change? An essential, but by no means determining, factor in the capacity of social movements to envisage and develop emancipatory alternatives is the agency and intention of the classes operating inside these movements. How do particular social forces achieve political hegemony within the social movement? In the case of sub-Saharan Africa, we argue that the failure to develop and assert effective political alternatives to dominant nationalist and neoliberal ideas has helped to determine the shape, form, politics, and outcomes of the social movements studied in this book. Various circumstances have constrained the ability of these movements to realize radical or deeper change, but among them is the nature of the ideological tools available to and wielded by classes within social movements.

Movements may contain many contradictory intentions, but in certain situations, the common class membership of (at least some of) the movement’s participants confers a unifying material interest that leads them to organize together, provide united intent, and lead the broader movement to articulate an emancipatory alternative. What it is about classes, and not other groupings, that allows them to play this kind of role in a broader movement? It is not simply a matter of shared material interests, but rather that some classes, by virtue of their position in the production process, can lead a fight that can potentially reorganize the social relations of production (the ways in which a society organizes to meet its needs), thereby laying the basis to reconstitute society’s whole structure—including non-class relations such as family, caste, sectarian, or communal relations. These classes thus have the capacity, rooted in production relations, to attract allies for a broad struggle over all the conditions of subordination that make up the broad social question. However, a class can fail to live up to its potential in this regard, because the social and political context may prevent it from discovering what role(s) it can play. In that sense, the actual role that a class plays in a given movement is not structurally determined.

Therefore, we wish in particular to reject any attempt to identify social movements which are (and are not) authentically representative of “the people” or of a particular class: such a tendency is redolent of older structurally determined positions which prescribed to the working class or the “peasantry” a role in a preconceived revolutionary movement. Equally, we reject any attempts, fashionable though they are in social movement scholarship, to limit the potentialities of social movements to specific reforms and campaigns. It is evident that there is no such thing as a pre-formed radical social movement that is authentically “of the people.” In practice, such movements exist along a spectrum that reflects their origins, sources of funding, links to particular nation-states, ideological bases, and divergent social forces. While they may reflect or articulate in some way the aspirations of some of the poor and help structure and shape the potential of social movements, their capacity to do this should be assessed through empirical research—as we seek to do in this volume.

Transformative moments in African history

Although social movement authors such as Goodwin do not write directly about Africa, their concerns and assertions have direct relevance to the continent. Goodwin, like most other observers, sees revolutionary struggles on the wane. Today the battles are more modest ones for democratization. Accordingly, social movements remain an active feature of the modern world, but their role is limited to Tilly’s notions of pressure group influence within an otherwise relatively stable liberal democracy. Whether this is true or untrue in the Western world, the evidence presented in chapters 4, 5, and 6 demonstrates the continuing instability of liberal democracies in Africa and, in particular, that efforts by elites (both indigenous and Western) to achieve their vision of liberal democracy have often involved authoritarian initiatives that have themselves generated opposition from below. Such opposition is by no means limited to demands for particular policy reforms, but challenges the very assumptions on which those societies have been based.

It is evidently true, of course, that not every protest (in Africa or elsewhere) is a social movement, and not every social movement is a revolution-in-waiting. A useful way of interpreting the periods of social movement radicalization and direct action examined in chapter 3 is as “protest cycles,” which can be regarded as successive periods of intensified (and less intense) struggle. Sidney Tarrow sees protest cycles as periods of intensified conflict across society, operating as “crucibles” in which a “repertoire” of collective action can expand.11 Protest cycles pull in new layers of society which have not been active before, or reenergize those battered by earlier experiences of defeat. New organizations emerge, or older ones are regenerated by activists and new members. It is within the cycle of protest that new forms of organizing society emerge, and fresh organizations, movements, and parties develop. The central experience of these protest cycles is the transformation in people’s ideas of what is possible. Old authorities are questioned, new forms of decision-making emerge, and fresh layers of younger activists are drawn into a widening repertoire of mass action.12 New movements then interact with established political forces (parties, for example, or more formally constituted civil society organizations) and, as noted above, often form coalitions of interests to bring about change of a greater or lesser extent. Understanding these cycles—and how they have unfolded in practice in recent sub-Saharan African history—requires understanding that such coalitions, in which the participation of classes is an element, contain within themselves an ongoing battle for political hegemony between competing social forces, the outcome of which is never certain and which depends on (among other factors): the extent of mass involvement in their activities and organizations; the openness of their internal debates; and the permanent contest for hegemony between different forces. Social movements have the potential in such circumstances to construct, from their struggles, new institutions and democratic practices that can become the basis for alternative forms of power. Their capacity to do this, however, depends on the extent to which popular and working-class forces are able to challenge elites, who will generally seek a more limited level of social transformation.

In Africa, the leadership of the struggles for independence and post-independence political movements has of course not generally rested in the hands of the working class or popular forces. Other groups assumed control, leading, frustrating, and in some cases subverting the potential militancy of these movements. This reality illustrated a twin problem. One was the inherent limitation of nationalist politics that sought freedom from colonial tyranny, but that limited political change to the establishment of nation-states inherently constrained by the preexisting domination of the globe by powerful Western states and the forces of the global economy they largely controlled. The second problem was the weaknesses of the African working class, its organizations, leadership, and (more recently) its damaging reconfiguration on the anvil of economic liberalization.

This book identifies three major cycles of protest in recent African history, when social movements played a vital role in challenging injustice and exploitation and raised the possibility of radical social change. The first was the movement for political independence in post–World War II Africa, which led to the establishment of new nation-states across most of the continent by the 1960s. The second was triggered by the first wave of structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF and World Bank but often implemented “voluntarily” by African governments from the late 1970s onwards. By the late 1980s, this wave developed into a third protest cycle across the continent that was more explicitly oppositional, pulling in new and old social forces alike. The third wave, which extended into the late 1990s, broadened economic grievances into political ones and can be credited with the most thorough political transformation of the continent since the 1960s independence movements. The first and third wave of protests contained within them the potential for revolutionary change, involving a process in which mass movements overthrow an old power (rather than seizing existing state machinery) and implement democratic institutions that have the potential to become the foundations of a new society.13 We explore the dynamics of each of these cycles of protest in much greater detail in chapter 3.

The cage of independence: Nationalism and social movements

The popular struggle for African independence, often understood as unified movements to establish self-rule of nation-states, consisted in fact of diverse social forces that achieved temporary unity under the banner of nationalism, but that also had particular social and economic aims their supporters believed could be realized through the achievement of an independent nation-state. African elites had long appealed for colonial reforms that would deliver improvements for the tiny minority of “educated” or “civilized” Africans, with little success. Only with the emergence of mass African movements in the post–World War II period was the capacity of colonial authorities to govern their territories effectively undermined to the point that the process of substantial reform, ultimately leading to self-rule, could begin. The popular expression of economic and social grievances, particularly in the forms of strike action and rural unrest, was crucial in accelerating the process of decolonization in virtually every African colony.

This was widely recognized during the nationalist period itself. Thomas Hodgkin, in his famous book of 1956, made the point that the very term “African nationalism” “tends to conceal the ‘mixed-up’ character of African political movements. . . . Most of these various types of organisation possessed links, formal or informal, with one another. Many of them were not concerned, overtly or primarily, with achieving national independence or stimulating a sense of . . . nationhood.”14 However, there has ever since been a tendency to see such movements as essentially “parochial” in relation to the wider aim of the nation-state. This, as Frederick Cooper has argued, distracted attention from the full extent and significance of these popular mobilizations, which were primarily anti-colonial, rather than essentially nationalist in character:

It is tempting to read the history of the period from 1945 to 1960 as the inevitable triumph of nationalism and to see each social movement taking place within a colony—be it by peasants, women, by workers, or by religious groups—as another piece to be integrated into the coming together of a nation. What is lost in such a reading are the ways in which different groups within colonies mobilized for concrete ends. . . . Whether such efforts fed into the attempts of nationalist parties to build anti-colonial coalitions needs to be investigated, not assumed.15

What is most important to stress here, however, is that this period of mass nationalism depended on the belief among large sections of the African population that achieving independence would lead in short order to the improvement of their material conditions and measures to address their grievances. Nationalist politicians made promises to their supporters that implied a transformative post-independence project. In the Congo, for example, Asse Lilombo remembers independence as “a big feast, a party of liberation. We had been liberated from slavery. The women were dressed up. There was goat and beer. The party lasted days. . . . We would be responsible for ourselves. We would manage our country ourselves.”16 Notwithstanding the extent to which these promises were dismissed by outside observers as “unrealistic,” they crucially informed the positions adopted by social movements in the run-up to and in the aftermath of the transition to self-rule. Postcolonial labor and independent social movements needed to be suppressed and incorporated precisely because they articulated relatively transformational understandings of independence—and therefore posed a threat to the unity of nationalist parties after they took control of their respective states.

The role of ideology

The ideology of nationalism was the domain of the intelligentsia and the middle-class leaders of these movements. These were in many cases the product of colonial metropolitan universities, colleges, and scholarships. They tended therefore to adopt an approach to governance that was not dissimilar to their colonial predecessors during the mid-twentieth century. State power, historically centralized in the position of the colonial governor, was now transferred to the president and his ruling party. The assumption of a national, technically conceived developmental project resulted in the denial of political autonomy for either opposition parties or social movements and created a continued reliance on foreign advisors. Constructing a nation and determining its identity and priorities ceased to be the task of a broad movement and became dominated by the nationalist party and, more particularly, its leader. These parties, particularly after the advent of one-party states, not only suppressed dissent but also retreated in most cases from their engagement with the wider population, particularly in rural areas. Simultaneously, Africa’s postcolonial rulers tacitly accepted the subordinate position of their countries in the international economic and political system and thereby effectively ruled out support for any project that would seek to alter the global system of Western-driven capitalism that had rendered the continent poor and undeveloped in the first place.

For many new African leaders, the most relevant model of national development was the Soviet Union, a country that had transformed itself in a few decades from a backwater of underdevelopment into an industrial superpower of global importance. Kwame Nkrumah stated: “In a little over thirty years [it] has built up an industrial machine so strong and advanced as to be able to launch the Sputnik. . . . I pose it as an example for Africa.”17 The Stalinist model of state-capitalist development reigned supreme in the minds of this new ruling class: all that was necessary was to lay one’s hands on the levers of state power. The developmental model promoted by the Comintern that was so influential across the “Third World” was also rooted in a two-stage transition to socialism, effectively postponing any political formulation that would directly address class contradictions within African societies.18

Other leaders adopted versions of “African socialism” supposedly rooted in the “unity” of pre-colonial African society, something which served to deny the expression of diverse or localized demands. In either case, national independence and development was the primary task; all questions of social transformation had to be postponed. In reality, this not only hampered social movements’ capacity to address their immediate concerns, it also placed in the hands of their new rulers the right to determine the pace and direction with which such social questions were addressed. In such a national context, the rights or aspirations of any particular section of society could thereby be dismissed as “sectional” or “parochial.”

While labor movements in a number of countries were able to resist their total incorporation into the nationalist project, their biggest problem was their inability to generate intellectual or ideological alternatives to the developmentalist-Stalinist framework that dominated nationalist thinking. In this context, trade unions sometimes adopted syndicalist or economistic approaches, rejecting nationalist or new state ideologies by arguing that their role was “non-political.” This unfortunately dovetailed with the (in our view, incorrect) accusation that organized workers represented, in an African context, a “labor aristocracy” whose selfish defense of its privileges came at the expense of other, particularly rural, sections of society.19 The curtailment of multi-party democracy during the first decade of independence as the logical extension of unified nationalism in the postcolonial context also prevented the emergence of new political parties that might represent particular social classes or forces. More generally, however, African social movements tended not to develop their own independent intellectual explanations of their own subordination.

Helpful insight into the postcolonial reality was, however, provided by Frantz Fanon. Writing in the period when the first wave of newly independent states were asserting themselves, Fanon, himself a leading figure in the Algerian revolutionary movement, was among the first to see the dangers of a “nationalist consciousness.”20 He identified how the national bourgeoisie—the nationalist elites and intelligentsia—evolved after independence into the very exploiting class that it had supplanted: it became “a sort of little caste, avid and voracious . . . only too glad to accept the dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it.”21 Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth grasped the predicament that independence presented to the movements and leadership of national liberation. Postcolonial power was caught between an enfeebled national bourgeoisie and the global limitations imposed on any newly developing nation in the modern world. In this context, it was inevitable that these new national bourgeoisies would act to suppress those in their own societies whose demands could not be met within the existing economic and political system. Fanon, like many thinkers of his time, was influenced by Maoist interpretations of socialism and by the successful revolution in Cuba, which emphasized the central role of the peasantry in revolutionary struggle. Fanon accepted the widespread argument that the organized African working class had been effectively “bought off” with the profits of imperialist exploitation, and that revolutionary action against the new African ruling classes would only come from the poorest African rural masses.

Further insight into the failures of independence came from national liberation leaders whose fight for self-rule was frustrated by settler colonialism. As they observed the realities of actually existing independence in other African countries, some analyzed the pitfalls of nationalism and developed political positions that sought to repeat their mistakes. Amílcar Cabral, who led the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde against Portuguese colonial rule, initially focused his political activity on Guinea’s urbanized coastal areas. This changed in 1959, however, when a group of strikers were shot at the Pijiguiti docks in the port of Bissau. Like Fanon, Cabral’s orientation then shifted to the countryside and agitation amongst the peasantry. During the struggle for independence, he sought to establish “organs of popular power,” local organizations providing health and education services that would demonstrate the link between the seizure of political power and material improvements in the lives of ordinary Africans.22

Like Fanon, Cabral was dismissive of “African socialism” and its characterization of a static and classless Africa, believing that cultural change occurred in the process of revolutionary struggle. He argued for the preeminence of class over ethnicity; although his party organized primarily among the peasantry, Cabral believed this movement would eventually combine with the country’s small urban working class. Cabral also thought the revolution would require what he termed an “ideal proletariat,” which he saw as constituted of the radical elements of the petit bourgeoisie. They would help create unity between the oppressed classes and combat ethnic divisions. Out of the specificity of the anti-imperialist struggle, Cabral developed a critical analysis of a new African culture, fulfilling the “historical personality of the people.”23 This was what Cabral meant by his much-misinterpreted slogan “return to the source”—not a return to tradition, but a critical engagement with African history.

Cabral did not therefore regard nationhood as equivalent to liberation: “We accept the principle that the liberation struggle is a revolution and that it does not finish at the moment when the national flag is raised and the national anthem played.”24 Yet his criticisms of independent African states conceal a more general tension in the politics of nationalist Third Worldism (the idea that the central division in the world was between developed countries and the “Third World,” or developing, bloc). The question “What is to be done with the state after independence?”—the fundamental question for Cabral and the key to Fanon’s “curse of independence”—was acknowledged but never satisfactorily answered by those who identified the limitations of the “flag independence” of the 1950s and 1960s. As Cabral wrote before he was murdered by the Portuguese in 1973, the year before Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau finally achieved independence: “The problem of the nature of the state created after independence is perhaps the secret of the failure of African independence.”25

How does this relate to the social movements described in this book? Fanon’s critique and the practice advocated by Cabral were important attempts to grapple with the realities of the postcolonial world and the challenge of constructing emancipatory alternatives that could challenge the failures of independence. The social movements celebrated in this book do not display Patrick Chabal’s “illusions of civil society,” but are in fact real movements that demonstrate the vibrancy of a politics from below.26 However, they certainly do illustrate the tensions and contradictions inherent in social movements. Nevertheless, the traditions of radical political alternatives on the continent are important to study, because they raised and sought to address questions that are still of fundamental importance to African social movement activists today.

Global downturn, globalization, and resistance

By the time Cabral issued his warning about the nature of the African state, the assumptions underlying state-led developmental nationalism were being undermined by the onset of the global recession of the mid-1970s. The recession, which affected the world unevenly, was most severe in the recently independent countries of the Third World. The sudden rise in the price of oil hit most African economies hard, as did the collapse of international commodity prices. Most of sub-Saharan Africa was, as a legacy of colonialism, economically dependent on the export of raw materials, cash crops, and the production of single minerals. The price of such goods was determined by Western institutions such as the London Metal Exchange, and the collapse in the value of commodities devastated the earning power of many African states. For example, the collapse in the price of copper halved the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Zambia in the space of a few years. This decisively exposed national developmentalism as largely dependent on international factors beyond the control of supposedly sovereign African states. Many governments dealt with this problem by short-term borrowing, creating the long-term debt burden that, notwithstanding the real achievements of the Jubilee movement, is still with us today.

The period saw a major shift to what we describe today as neo­liberalism. For governments and policy makers, neoliberalism was an important ideological challenge to the supremacy of the state in decision-making. Many now argued that “the time had come for the state to play a less important role in shaping the economy, that the private sector should play a very much larger part in economic policy-making, and that the market should be left to operate as freely as possible.”27 The move toward neoliberalism affected every corner of the continent. Even in South Africa, the continent’s largest economy, P. W. Botha took over from John Vorster as leader of the ruling National Party in September 1978, promising to revitalize the free-market economy and transfer resources from the state to the private sector. He pushed through policies to reduce the colossal state spending that had grown by an average of 10 percent per year between 1973 and 1976.

From the late 1970s onwards, indebted African states were no longer in a position to borrow commercially and were forced on the mercies of the IMF, World Bank, and Western governments. Donors used increasingly severe conditions on loans to impose economic reforms on African governments. In particular, governments seeking to borrow money were forced to remove price controls on basic foodstuffs, a measure which disproportionately affected the growing urban population—the millions of poor Africans who had migrated to the cities in the decade after independence. As detailed in chapter 3, the removal of these controls prompted a series of revolts in the late 1970s and early 1980s against donor-imposed increases in basic food prices.

These protests brought the urban African poor onto the streets, often informally led by the working classes; street protests were often supplemented by strike action, sometimes organized by trade union leaders but more usually initiated by rank-and-file union members or shop stewards. These were not simply revolts of the “urban crowd”; in Zambia, for example, local union officials on the Copperbelt helped shape the direction of the uprisings in 1986, reflecting the verbal criticisms by national union leaders of the removal of subsidies. The protestors looted state-owned stores, but also targeted government and ruling party offices.28 This wave of revolts, initially relatively disorganized, began to germinate ideas of more organized resistance towards incumbent regimes (leading, for example, to the overthrow of Sudanese President Nimeiri in 1985) and notions of social justice deployed against the regimes’ complicity with IMF loan conditions.

Some analysts nevertheless referred to such actions as “desperate IMF riots” taking place in “wretched Third World cities,” suggesting an absence of organization, politics, and democratic traditions.29 Others unhelpfully contrasted “workers’ struggles” with “populist forms of socio-political movement.”30 A few years later, others claimed that the distinct weaknesses of African civil society made it impossible for it to lead the type of movements that had transformed Eastern Europe in 1989. Chabal argued at the time that there was little “scope in contemporary Africa for the type of civil society that, as happened in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, could play a decisive role in the substantive transformation of the political system.”31 The tendency to label these events “IMF riots,” “food riots,” or illustrative of the “illusions of civil society” significantly understates the extent of social movement coordination and organization involved.

The organizers of such protests, through their actions, gained a clearer sense of the very limited sovereignty of their countries, which were peripheral to the global economy and dependent on international factors. This had real consequences for social movement strategies. Activists were increasingly aware that their actions and protests needed to be directed toward both national governments and the international bodies that significantly influenced government policies. African movements, it can be argued, thus experienced globalization and the need to respond to it at an earlier stage than their Western counterparts. From this time, trade unions, church groups, and women’s organizations sought to strengthen their coordination with international counterparts, both in Africa and more widely. In the repressive context of one-party states and military regimes, there were significant restrictions on the practicality of such linkages. Nevertheless, the failure of the national development model had significant consequences: it led to the reversal of the limited social and economic gains of postcolonial states, increasing popular unrest against African governments, and it exposed the hollowness of the supposed hegemonic authority of those states, encouraging popular debate regarding the link between economic justice and political accountability. The internationalization of protest movements and the complex relationship between social movements, states, and international organizations is explored further in chapter 7.

Democracy and new social movements

The link between economic grievances of the type discussed above and the need for a return to democratic political systems grew increasingly urgent in the late 1980s. Whereas earlier economic protests had often avoided questioning the political legitimacy of African regimes, now the right of those regimes to govern came more strongly under question, as different social forces converged around the linked questions of economic and political rights. Previously distinct groups struggling against sectionally specific cuts began to identify a commonality in the diverse protests. Student movements played a particular role in this regard. Previously privileged student bodies experienced drastic reductions in their living standards and the quality of their education as IMF-imposed public sector spending cuts threatened the very survival of higher education in many African countries. Student bodies, no longer an isolated elite, now linked their activism to wider social change.32

As chapter 3 details, between 1990 and 1994, popular protest movements and strikes brought down more than thirty African regimes, with multi-party elections held for the first time in a generation. This period saw the convergence of social movements, frequently drawn together by the organizing strength and militancy of organized labor. As one observer remarked shortly after this period, trade unions “sought not simply to protect the work-place interests of their members but have endeavoured to bring about a restructuring of the political system.”33 This was arguably the most important show of collective and organizational power in the history of the continent’s social movements, in general, and of trade unions in particular.

There were nevertheless significant problems with the opposition movements that emerged and the processes of democratic transition they initiated. As David Harvey identifies, these movements were galvanized by resistance to structural adjustment or the neoliberal counterrevolution.34 Despite this, the solutions put forward by trade union–led movements were general and amorphous, speaking ubiquitously of “change”: for example, in French, changement politique; in Senegalese Wolof, sopi; and in Zimbabwean Shona, chinja. Such slogans helped pull together the disparate cords of opposition forces, but they did not express the widespread demand for economic and social redress that provided much of the popular impetus for “change.”

As the movements converged and grew into powerful opposition forces, other changes of global significance were taking place. The East European revolutions in 1989–90 brought a paradoxical wave of hope and despair. They showed that one-party states could be toppled by popular democratic movements from below, but also that “communism” no longer constituted a meaningful political alternative to global capitalism.35 A generation of students, trade union militants, and intellectuals across the world and in Africa lost their ideological moorings.36 Thus, the struggles fought on the continent against both repressive one-party regimes and the IMF and World Bank policies they had implemented failed to construct programmatic alternatives. The street demand for “change” could easily become a useful but vacuous basis for middle class–dominated opposition movements to gain or regain power amid the disarray or absence of radical alternatives. New governments were elected and, in the context of the enduring debt burden, usually followed the same policy prescriptions dictated by international agencies. We explore the impact of such policies, and social movement responses to them, in the remainder of this volume. It will suffice to state here that, amid the brief international hegemony of neoliberalism in the 1990s, social movements in general and trade unions in particular failed to articulate any ideological alternative to such policies. Their capacity to respond effectively to new waves of economic liberalization was hampered both by this and by the significant decline in trade union membership and formal-sector employment that was the result of the implementation of these policies.

This supposed “end of history” ended with the emergence of the international antiglobalization movement, its birth marked by the “Battle of Seattle” against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in November 1999.37 This movement attempted to express an alternative global politics, often simply by stating that an “alternative” was possible. It had impressive advocates and a diversity of political ideas.38 It developed unevenly in the global north, achieving its high points in regional mobilizations against international organizations and in bringing activists together at World Social Forums. In Africa, however, “anticapitalism” was both more deeply rooted—in long-standing revolts against international agencies and national governments—and less developed, in the sense that there was less explicit emphasis on politics and a lack of political ideas that could be labeled anticapitalist. The antiglobalization movement nevertheless provided a great opportunity for African social movements: a new way of constructing alternatives to neoliberalism and a new form of international activism that, in stressing local agency and diversity, was a step forward from the restrictive Stalinism and state capitalism (presented as “African socialism”) that most Africans had previously experienced. However, as chapter 7 will explore, this “movement of movements” contained its own contradictions, hierarchies, and inequalities, especially from an African perspective.

Modernism and postmodernism in African scholarship

There are many reasons why an alternative politics struggled to emerge even after Seattle and particularly in Africa. The capacity of social movements to develop independent analysis and a critique of the IFIs and national development models was crippled both by the retreat of the left internationally and by the intellectual predominance of postmodernism. If neoliberalism was the policy prescription of restructuring in the developing world, postmodernism was its philosophical bedfellow. While the shift away from more structural and deterministic approaches to the role of class in society practiced in the 1970s (for example, the “labor aristocracy” argument or the reification of the peasantry as the predetermined vanguard class) was a positive development, there evolved a tendency (which is still significant today) to focus instead on “multiple identities,” claiming ethnic, youth, and religious identities as categories for analysis without seeking to situate them in a wider political economy.39

The effects of postmodernism and the consequent reduction in class-based analysis thoroughly permeated research on African social realities. Recent academic writing on Africa has stressed that political movements cannot fit into the “narrow” constraints of class, stressing in its place such multiple identities. This focus on “identity,” “indeterminacy,” “complexity,” and “performance,” in which the “discourse” or “symbolism” of social movements becomes the primary frame of analysis, leads inexorably to neglecting the content of those movements.40 Much writing in this area, indeed, eschews any interest in or commitment to progressive political and social change.41 There is, in the use of the term “postcolony” and the (in many ways sensible) rejection of earlier projects of “modernization” and “development,” a widespread skepticism about any attempt to improve the lives of ordinary Africans through progressive politics.42 As Graham Harrison summarizes, “attention is paid . . . to the ways in which social power is constructed rather than structured. Here, African states are seen as decentralised forms of authority which permeate local social relations, producing an almost subterranean power which is not invested in formal state institutions as much as constructed by local élites and chieftaincies.”43

Jean-François Bayart is one of the most important representatives of these trends. His work rightly rejects analysis of Africa through models of development and dependency and opposes older structuralist categories that saw African people as the victims of extraneous forces beyond their control. In so doing, however, Bayart dispenses with useful universal frames of analysis, such as class, imperialism, and the state:44

The social groups involved in the invention of politics in Africa . . . have their own historicity, which should prevent them from being assimilated too hastily into categories evolving from Western experiences of inequality, even when they do qualify for the category of “social class.” Thus the working class in sub-Saharan Africa is run through with divisions from traditional societies, especially the cleavages between elders and juniors or between nobles and inferiors.45

Many poststructural studies describe important cultural processes and reveal the complexity and intricacies of locally constructed relations and social forms. It is certainly the case that the particular dynamics of class in African societies (as in all others) need to be properly researched and examined, not assumed; class has in practice always interacted with other categories and divisions in society that are equally worthy of analysis. However, it is equally important to avoid a different form of reductionism in which all societies are believed to be so culturally particular that no adequate comparative analysis can be made between human experience in Africa and elsewhere. The interaction between global structures and local African specificities is at the heart of the approach adopted to study social movements in this volume.

From a different perspective, Achille Mbembe utilizes diffuse and Foucaultian conceptions of power to analyze the complex “composite” nature of the postcolony.46 He demonstrates that the cultural expression of Cameroonian protest, in the forms of lampooning, “irony,” and the playing of games is performative, a theatrical event that ultimately enables the repetition of subordination; an unchallenged institutional structure leaves the people, having internalized the system they blame for their ills, to “protest its loyalty and confirm the existence of an undoubted institution.”47 Yet Mbembe’s analysis disregards the genuinely subversive power of such linguistic forms of protest. For example, Pascal Bianchini describes how students at the University of Dakar have created their own linguistic tools for describing their predicament: cartouchard is a term used by students to describe a student who has exhausted his or her chances (literally “cartridges”), forcing him or her to succeed in end-of-year exams or face expulsion from the university.48 Frequently, slogans are recast to ridicule dominant political and economic policies: in South Africa, the Growth and Employment and Redistribution Programme (GEAR) was widely referred to as “reverse GEAR.”49 In Cameroon, student activists at the University of Yaoundé adopt inventive and intentionally ironic nicknames such as Savimbi, Fidel Castro, and Thatcher50 as forms of cultural and linguistic resistance—commonly produced as part of the concrete experience of struggle, not as an alternative to it.

Class and social movements in Africa

Given our analysis, it is necessary to explore the particular meaning of class relations and their interaction with social movements in Africa. The emphasis of this study is on the diversity of social movement activism and organization on the continent. There is perhaps a tension between this and the authors’ assertion that the African urban working class has been central to the historical development of social movement activity on the continent. The question immediately arises as to how this class relates to labor organizations such as trade unions, particularly given the decline in formal-sector employment in many countries in the last two decades. Recent studies arising from or influenced by the anticapitalist movement have sought to replace the Marxist idea of working-class agency with alternative formations based on broader or less defined movements or coalitions for progressive or radical change.

This study’s account of how the African working class should be understood corresponds to what Hal Draper called “the main body of the proletariat plus those sections of the population whose life situations in society tend to be similar.”51 The reason for distinguishing between these two categories is that the distinct work situation of the proletariat (strictly, its relation to the means of production) tends to put it in a position to provide leadership to other allied social strata. This is because the work done by the proletariat provides a form of collective organization and puts in its hands economic levers that are crucial to the functioning of society.

Marx also described “the communal revolution as the representative of all classes of society not living upon foreign [alienated] labor”—in short, all those do not live by exploiting others.52 This corresponds closely to those we identify as the popular classes—a wide “African crowd” including the lumpenproletariat of the shantytowns, unemployed youth, elements of the new petit bourgeoisie, laid-off workers, and university students.

It is among these popular classes that the strictly defined working class, for the reasons already stated, has the potential to provide leadership. As Claire Ceruti and Leo Zeilig argued in 2007, “The dynamic reality of class struggle on the continent reveals a working class, albeit reformulated, playing a central role both in the movement for democratic change and in the narrowly defined ‘economic’ struggles that punctuate daily life on the continent.”53

Other studies of class in Africa also draw attention to this important distinction between the working class and its popular allies:

Let us consider the composition of these “popular forces” to which we allude in our discussion of class struggle in contemporary Africa. They may include not only the urban and rural working classes (consisting of those who have little or no control or ownership of the means of production and only their labor to sell, whether in the formal or the informal sector) but also other categories, including on the one hand those whom Marx referred to as “paupers” and on the other small peasants and tenant farmers, “independent” craftsmen and artisans, small retailers and petty commodity producers, and members of the “new petty bourgeoisie” (sometimes called “the new middle classes”) generally including the lower echelons of the public sector. Not only do these various social categories constitute, in effect, the relative surplus population . . . they often share a consciousness of their interdependency and common vulnerability.54

Such an analysis allows for a constantly shifting constellation of popular forces that nevertheless frequently relies on the organizational capacity and political hegemony of the more “classic” African working class. Of course this class has itself been transformed, along with the political economy of Africa, but transformation does not necessarily mean defeat or redundancy.55

E. P. Thompson makes a similar distinction that is rarely highlighted in accounts of his work: “Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.” But even here, where Thompson is talking about the subjective formation of class consciousness, he is quite clear about which “common experiences” he is discussing: “The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born—or enter involuntarily.”56 Without the reference to productive relations, there is no way to develop a stable notion of class—since, after all, people’s consciousness or loyalties may fluctuate drastically.

It is possible to maintain a dynamic view in which the working class is continually formed and reshaped along with its “penumbra” of other popular classes, all the while developing a unique consciousness and tradition rooted in its experiences of these changes. Indeed, this cross-sectional view is crucial to understanding the longitudinal and historical dynamics of interaction among all these popular forces.

It is of course true that many observers now see the possibility of the African working class achieving or leading emancipatory change—or limited social reform—as slight or even extinguished. Mike Davis’s study of the apparently fragmented and broken proletariat of the global south, Planet of Slums, raises germane questions about the role of class in a world transformed by “market reforms” since the 1970s.57 Davis charts the growth of urbanization without industrialization, indeed in a context of deindustrialization in many countries, coupled with falling agricultural productivity in rural areas. The political consequence is that, in the absence of a formally constituted proletariat, class struggle is replaced by “myriad acts of resistance” that emerge from a chaotic plurality of “charismatic churches and prophetic cults to ethnic militias, street gangs, neo-liberal NGOs and revolutionary social movements.”58 Davis is right about the culprits of the recent underdevelopment on the continent, but wrong about the working class. His argument presumes an earlier homogenous and self-conscious Western working class that, in the real slums of nineteenth-century Manchester or 1930s Chicago, was in practice always riven by divisions: respectable artisans versus the unskilled, men versus women, the employed versus the unemployed, white versus black. It is tempting to ask when, even at great moments of working-class action, there has ever been a “monolithic subject.” Indeed, our concept of the social movement in general refutes any notion of a single monolithic agency having existed in the past or arising in the future.59

Actual class reconfiguration, and how it has manifested itself in the “myriad acts of resistance” in the global south, does not, however, suggest a working class entirely dislodged from its historical agency. It is undoubtedly true that that a combination of rural and urban in the formation of the working class characterized the process of “proletarianization” in most parts of Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—from migrant labor in the mines of southern Africa in the 1900s to oil extraction and processing workers in the Niger Delta since the 1970s. Similarly, recent research on Soweto, a large South African township now incorporated into Johannesburg, suggests a community not of slums and shack dwellers, but rather of integrated communities of the formally employed, semi-employed, informally employed, and unemployed, commonly within the same household or neighborhood.60 As a consequence, household members may be simultaneously engaged in and supportive of conventional industrial action organized by trade unions and community-based service delivery protests initiated by social movements. There is, therefore, no division between labor-based struggles and “myriad acts of resistance”—they are in practice mutually reinforcing. Indeed, in South Africa, both types of actions have reached unprecedented levels in recent years (see chapter 4). There is, of course, the danger that, without progressive political leadership, working-class anger can become focused on the wrong enemy: for example, in the outburst of xenophobic violence in South Africa in 2008. Nevertheless, the potential cross-fertilization of these struggles—community and workplace—does not live only in the minds of activists, but expresses the real household, and wider community, political economy of contemporary urban South Africa.

As this volume makes clear, South Africa is in many respects different from much of the rest of the continent. Although we cannot easily generalize from the experience of Soweto, our own research suggests that a mix of formally and informally employed households in diverse urban spaces can also be found in cities and towns in much of the rest of the continent (though perhaps in different proportions). The picture of “complex coherence” resembles the shantytown (bidonville) evoked by Fanon, who saw such emerging areas as precisely the likely sources of radical social action. How should such contexts be understood?

Conclusion: The state of the African working class

An accurate characterization of Africa’s labor force must capture what has happened during the neoliberal period. During the last twenty years, capital has made great strides in labor productivity, both through introducing technology and through applying pressure on workers to speed up, work harder, and work more.

At the same time, African states have withdrawn support from small-scale agriculture and promoted cash crops that require concentrated capital and centralized landholdings. As a result, processes of primitive accumulation have either resumed or accelerated—far beyond the pace evident in the period of state capitalism. The immediate postcolonial state reforms in support of farmers (such as assistance with irrigation, credits and subsidies for seed and fertilizer, or direct tariff protection) constituted a political intervention that stemmed the flow of migration to the cities. The withdrawal of such support is a political intervention that goes beyond everyday economic processes. As a result, Africa has finally begun to experience the reduction of the active agricultural workforce that was central to the capitalist revolution in western Europe. The vast reserve army of urban migrants thus created, like its European predecessor, has not been easily absorbed into the urban workforce, but rather been “turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances.”61

In this respect, Mike Davis’s thesis in Planet of Slums is correct. Many of the urban unemployed created over the past thirty years cannot be counted as members of a reserve army, because they have never had a wage job and cannot expect ever to have one. On the other hand, this group is mixed together in the cities with the employed segment of the working class. The political consequences of this are vital for radical social movements. They may follow a lead from the working class, but in this the proletariat faces competition from other forces: from sectarian and communal organizations, from religious movements, and from the intelligentsia, among others.62

A further impediment to working-class leadership in Africa is that class power has been diluted. This has taken place not just because workers have lost their jobs, but also because of a flood of destitute urban residents whose presence in the cities and bidonvilles is a product of renewed primitive accumulation and neo­liberal stagnation.

Analyzing the particular role of social movements in African society requires an understanding of the very real effectiveness of such movements in bringing about progressive change on the continent and their limitations in sustaining and deepening those changes. The authors believe that social movements in general and working-class-influenced movements in particular have a vital role to play in bringing about the sorts of changes that would improve the lives of the vast majority of Africans and even enable them to wield significant power over societies whose trajectory has, for the most part, been determined by elites, both international and indigenous. However, it is therefore necessary to explain historically how social movements have influenced social change and why this influence has rarely translated into more effective and lasting transformations in African society. It is to this history that the book now turns.