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AFRICA

African Socialisms, Colonial Disasters, and Glimmers of Hope

Independent Africa was divided into two camps from 1960 to 1963: the Casablanca group (Egypt, Morocco, Guinea, Ghana, and Mali), who considered that the independence “granted” by the colonizers had not settled the question of liberation, and the Monrovia group (the other countries) that accepted their situation, described by the former as neocolonialist. African countries are united in the Organization of African Unity (OAU), created in 1963 on the initiative of Haile Selassie. All countries of independent Africa belonged to the Non-Aligned Movement, founded in Bandung in 1955. The spirit of the Bandung Conference had a wide enough resonance to attract not only the African peoples, but also the ruling classes and governments.

Having personally been involved in the continent’s intellectual and political life from that era and even before, I believe that the overview I am going to offer to the reader in the following pages might help in better understanding the vicissitudes of Africa’s attempts to overcome the burdens of colonialism.

The new Africa is fragile precisely because of the miserable heritage of this colonialism. Most African societies are threatened with disintegration, and several of them are now quite far along in this terrible process. The dominant narrative on the subject attributes responsibility for this state of affairs to the “insufficient maturity” of these societies, with the implication that they were decolonized too quickly. As a result, the true cause of the tragedy is ignored: the market. The market itself always works as a centrifugal, disintegrating force. It is only when it is regulated by the state that it ceases to be so. In economies as fragile as those that Africa inherited from the colonial period, this disintegration effect is even more devastating than elsewhere. Here there is no productive system worthy of the name. The market does not create such a system; it has never done so anywhere. It is the state—acting as an instrument of society and of the social compromises that characterize it at each stage of its evolution, including the capitalist stage—that is responsible for creating a productive system consistent with social development. In the absence of this, the market forces quite simply exploit the scattered fragments of a system that cannot offer any resistance since it does not exist as such. Compradorization is the social, political, and ideological form through which this absence of a state is expressed. There is not “too much state” in Africa; there is only a bad comprador administration that is not even a real state. In ideological terms, this situation results in the triumph of individual interests or those of clans and their patronage systems, the absence of a sense of solidarity (class or national), and the restriction of political struggle to vulgar opportunist practices—which in turn depoliticize the people and retard the formation of responsible citizens, an essential condition for democratization.

Neocolonialism, then, develops only on the basis of permanent crisis. It is itself in permanent crisis. That is why different movements have continually challenged it, in various times and places. Even if these movements have not attained the consistency and strength necessary to form an effective and viable alternative—as has been the case up to now—they nonetheless prefigure the requirements for a better future. That is why the waves of what I call national populist (rather than socialist) responses continually follow one another in Africa. The first of these waves—Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, Modibo Keita’s Mali, Guinea, the Congo—had barely run out of steam before a new attempt was made in West Africa, Benin, then Burkina Faso, while a rebirth began, perhaps, in Ghana and Mali, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Madagascar in East Africa, then southern Africa. I closely followed all these attempts to construct an alternative to neocolonialism in crisis.

Has this been a failure on the part of Africa? No. We should say that it is a failure of capitalism, which is unable to offer Africa anything acceptable. Today, the Bandung era has come to an end, and the impasse is more desperate than ever. The frontal attack on the peasantry promoted by the WTO’s liberalization project has only accelerated the transformation of the continent into a world of abandoned rural areas and overcrowded urban slums. The inevitable consequence is the rising migration pressure—the new “boat peoples”—while the Europeans persist in not wanting to recognize their overwhelming responsibility.

I shall offer in what follows a sequential picture of the experiences of African socialism and, in contrast, an overview of the miracles without a future, the neocolonial quagmires and disasters.

THE EXPERIENCES OF AFRICAN SOCIALISM

I lived through my second experience of Bandung in Mali (and supplemented this with visits to Nkrumah’s Ghana and Ahmed Sékou Touré’s Guinea). I reviewed this in the first volume of these memoirs. I shall not then return to this stage of the story. The following pages deal only with Mali after Modibo Keita and Ghana after Kwame Nkrumah.

Mali after Modibo

The IDEP had organized one of its seminars in Bamako in 1972. This was an important event since we discussed both the experience of Modibo’s government and the policies implemented after his fall in 1968, without making any concessions in criticizing either the past or the Moussa Traoré government. The seminar took place in the famous motel of that era, a rudimentary establishment near the old airport on the banks of the Niger. At the request of our partners, we (willingly) held additional lectures every evening, attended by most of the old and new leadership.

I regularly saw former leaders Mamadou Gologo and Madeira Keita after their release from prison. From time to time, Keita came to Dakar for medical treatment and contacted me on each of these occasions. Although he was the type of person who forgot nothing and learned little, I always enjoyed our conversations immensely. He was a man of remarkable honesty and courage, endowed with great warmth. He never forgot his old friends. His death pained me a lot. He is the uncle of Ibrahima Keita, one of the leaders of the youth revolt against the dictatorship, who became prime minister in the Konaré government. One day, Ibrahima said to me, in the presence of Madeira: “My uncle asks me why I am not a member of the Union Soudanaise, but rather a supporter of ADEMA” (the new democratic movement); “I believe he thinks that the Union Soudanaise genes are indestructible!” Beyond the older generation, I became acquainted with the new generation of militants from ADEMA, CNID, and the feminist movement (Aminata Traoré), and with many other youth who were mobilized during this time. This generation was certainly more promising than the “young cadres” of the first wave from the early 1960s, whom I criticized rather severely, on the whole. Amadou Toumani Touré, who was the astute and open democratic-minded soldier who oversaw a remarkable transition and who received me after the fall of Moussa Traoré, convinced me that the “Marxist” education given to the army during the Modibo era, despite all of its outrageous dogmatic simplifications, had some good effects, since it produced a military corps that did not behave with the usual savagery found in most Third World armies. I saw Amadou Toumani Touré again behind the scenes in Cairo on the occasion of the Euro-African Summit in 2000. He developed a coherent viewpoint on security questions, conscious both of the ravages of the depoliticization resulting from the neoliberal social disaster, and the dangers of the imperialists using this situation. He believed that geostrategy and geopolitics are dimensions of reality that we are always wrong to ignore. That is also my view.

The victory won by the Malian people, which succeeded through its courage alone, without external support—on the contrary, the Western powers lined up behind the dictator, despite their “democratic” pretensions—had, naturally, aroused the enthusiasm of the working classes and even the majority of the middle classes and intellectuals. We expected, among other things, that the new president, Alpha Konaré, would listen to the strong democratic movement that had mobilized the Malian people and begin a new style of leadership and management in the country. These hopes were disappointed. Beyond the possible responsibility of individuals, I attribute the failure to the overwhelming force the world system brought to bear on Bamako’s choices, compelling unconditional submission to the neoliberal diktat. Once more, the combination of democracy and neoliberal choices produced only social disaster and, in the end, turned out to be essentially anti-democratic. The crisis that hit Argentina in 2002 is the most convincing and dazzling example of this. The social disaster is visible to the naked eye. When I visited Bamako for the African Social Forum in January 2002, I saw that it had become a miserable metropolis, its center devastated by widespread “informal” employment, which is the only means of survival that capitalism now offers to people.

Nevertheless, there are glimmers of hope on the horizon that foreshadow the appearance of new struggles in the future. The birth of a peasant movement independent from the government and opportunist “parties” is a change that would have been difficult to imagine ten years ago. “Control” of the peasantry by national liberation movements and the subsequent state administrations was widespread in Africa, and appeared unshakeable. In all the Francophone countries of West Africa—and particularly in Burkina Faso (which was behind this change, the heritage of Thomas Sankara), Senegal, and Mali—the peasantry began its emancipation from this supervision. In Mali, the first peasant strike—refusing to cultivate cotton—forced negotiations on the government and foreign capital (French, in this case), which controls the “cotton sector” and imposes its conditions, including paltry prices.

The organization of a session of the Social Forum in Bamako in 2006 confirmed my hopes. The enthusiastic support of all the popular forces that have again emerged in Mali guaranteed the success of the undertaking. Here I would like to extend a sincere thank-you to all the militants of the Comité Malien and to Aminata Traoré. The Bamako Appeal, which came out of this session, opens new horizons for the development of a worldwide movement to challenge the imperialist liberal order. Africa has once again found its place in the globalization of struggles for an alternative.

Sahelistan: Whose Interests Does This Project Serve?

My repeated visits to Bamako beginning in 2005 allowed me to follow with my own eyes the continual deterioration in the social conditions of the Malian people, subjected by the Western powers, Europe and France in particular, to an austerity regime more severe than what was imposed under Moussa Traoré’s dictatorship. The cuts in an already pitiful budget ended in the abandonment of the northern part of the country. In these conditions, the conquest of democracy lost its meaning, opening the way to the rise of political Islam, financed by the Gulf countries. Respectable intellectuals, whom I had known as fighters for democracy and progress, passed over to Wahhabism. I discussed all that with my numerous Malian friends, the marvelous Aminata Traoré, always available to facilitate my visits, Issaka Bagayogo, Mamadou Goita, and Assétou Samaké, as well as the leadership of the political parties that had honored me by inviting me to their grand commemorative celebration on the 1960–65 Malian Plan. I continued these discussions with my friends from Niger, Abdou Ibro in particular. My growing unease was reinforced even further when the Malian army was chased out of the north in 2013 by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, which did not surprise me.

I then immediately drafted the following text. Welcomed by some, violently rejected (occasionally with insults) not only by those who had joined the Islamic opposition (not surprising), but also by others who went no further than the simple principle that the French intervention served Paris’s colonial interests. I was not unaware of this. Yet these critics ignored the impact of the Sahelistan project and acted as if this project only challenged French colonial interests. In short, they ignored the fact that the success of this project would quite simply lead to the destruction of Mali on the model of Somalia.

I reproduce this text here.

De Gaulle had entertained the idea of a “Grand French Sahara.” But the tenacity of the Algerian FLN and the radicalization of Mali under the Union Soudanaise of Modibo Keita put an end to the project for good in 1962–63. Today, the Sahelistan project is not French—even if Nicolas Sarkozy did come to support it. It is a plan formulated by a loose nexus of political Islamist groups and benefits from the possibly favorable view of the United States, followed by its European Union lieutenants.

“Islamic” Sahelistan would allow for the creation of a large state covering a good part of the Sahara found in Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Algeria, an area endowed with important mineral resources: uranium, oil, and gas. These resources would not be available mainly to France, but primarily to the dominant powers of the triad (the United States, Europe, and Japan). This “kingdom,” modeled on Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates, could easily buy the support of its scattered population, and its emirs could transform the fraction of the rent left to them into vast personal fortunes. The Gulf remains, for the triad powers, the model of the best ally/useful servant, in spite of the fiercely archaic nature of its social system, based in part on slavery. The established governments in Sahelistan would refrain from supporting acts of terrorism on their territory, without necessarily refraining from possibly supporting them elsewhere. France, which had succeeded in preserving out of its abandoned “Grand Sahara” project control over Niger and its uranium resources, would have only a secondary place in Sahelistan. The Algerian government showed that it understood the aim quite well. It knows that the formation of a Sahelistan aims to include southern Algeria and not just northern Mali.

I wish and hope that the Sahara war will be won, that the Islamists are eradicated in the region (Mali and Algeria in particular), and Mali’s territorial integrity restored. This victory is the necessary but far from sufficient condition for a future reconstruction of the Malian state and society. This war will be long and its outcome uncertain. Reconstruction of the Malian army is entirely feasible. Modibo’s Mali had succeeded in building a competent army that was devoted to the nation, sufficient to deter aggressors like the Islamists of AQIM today. This army was systematically destroyed by Moussa Traoré’s dictatorship and his successors did not reconstruct it. But since the Malian people are quite aware that their country has the obligation to be armed, reconstruction of its army would benefit from favorable public opinion. The obstacle is financial. To recruit and equip thousands of soldiers is not currently within the means of the country, and neither will other African states or the UN agree to compensate for this lack of means. Not much can be expected from the countries of the ECOWAS. The Praetorian Guards in most of these countries are an army in name only. Certainly, Nigeria has numerous, well-equipped forces, but unfortunately not very disciplined, to say the least. Most of its senior officers have no other objective than to pillage the regions targeted for intervention. Senegal also has a competent and disciplined military force, but it is small, on the scale of the country. Farther afield in Africa, Angola and South Africa could provide effective support, but their geographic distance, and maybe other considerations, might dissuade them from running the risk of any commitment.

Mali’s reconstruction can only be done by the Malians themselves. Still it would be desirable to help them rather than erect barriers that would make such reconstruction impossible. French colonial ambitions—to make Mali a client state like several others in the region—certainly motivate some of the administrators in Paris responsible for Malian policy. Françafrique still has its mouthpieces. But they are not a real danger, let alone a major one. A reconstructed Mali will also quickly affirm—or reaffirm—its independence. However, a Mali wrecked by reactionary political Islam would before long be unable to find an honorable place on the regional and world scene. As with Somalia, it would end up being erased from the list of sovereign states worthy of the name.

During the Modibo era, Mali had made economic and social progress, asserted its independence, and achieved some success in uniting its diverse ethnic groups. The Union Soudanaise had succeeded in uniting in one nation the Bambara from the south, the Bozo fishers, the Songhai peasants, and the Ikelan (Bella) of the Niger Valley from Mopti to Ansongo (it is forgotten today that the majority of the inhabitants found in northern Mali are not Tuaregs), and had even made the Tuaregs accept the emancipation of their Ikelan (Bella) serfs. It remains the case that for lack of means—and lack of will after Modibo’s fall—successive governments in Bamako have abandoned development projects in the north of the country. Some of the Tuareg demands are, consequently, perfectly justified. Algiers has demonstrated a clear understanding of the situation. It recommends making a distinction in the ranks of the rebellion between the Tuaregs (now marginalized), with whom discussions should take place, and the jihadists who have come from elsewhere, often quite racist in regard to the “blacks.” The limitations in Mali’s achievements under Modibo, but also the hostility of the Western powers (and France in particular), lie behind the project’s failure and the ultimate success of Moussa Traoré’s odious coup d’état (supported to the end by Paris). That dictatorship bears the responsibility for the decomposition of Malian society, its pauperization, and its helplessness. The powerful revolt of the Malian people succeeded, at the price of tens of thousands of victims, in overthrowing the dictatorship. It gave rise to great hopes for the country’s rebirth. These hopes were disappointed. Why?

Since the fall of Moussa Traoré, the Malian people have benefited from unequaled democratic freedoms. Yet that seems to have served no purpose: there have been hundreds of phantom parties with no program, impotent elected members of parliament, and widespread corruption. Analysts who are not always free from racist prejudices have been quick to conclude that these people (like Africans in general) are not ready for democracy! It is left unacknowledged that the victory of the Malian people coincided with the “neoliberal” offensive that imposed on this extremely fragile country a form of lumpen-development advocated by the World Bank and supported by Europe and France. The result was social and economic regression and unlimited pauperization. It is these policies that bear the major responsibility for the failure of democracy, now discredited. This involution has created, here as elsewhere, favorable terrain for the rising influence of reactionary political Islam (financed by the Gulf), not only in the north, captured subsequently by AQIM, but also in Bamako.

The resulting decay of the Malian state lies behind the crisis that led to the destitution of President Amani Toumani Touré, to Amadou Sanogo’s reckless coup d’état, and then to putting Mali under the supervision of the ECOWAS, which “nominated” a “provisional”—so-called transitional—president. The ECOWAS president is the Ivorian president, Alassane Ouattara, who is nothing more than a functionary of the IMF and the French Ministry of Cooperation. It is this transitional president, whose legitimacy is close to zero in the eyes of Malians, who called for French intervention. Above all, Mali’s reconstruction now requires the pure and simple rejection of liberal “solutions” that really lie behind all its problems. On this fundamental point, Paris’s ideas are the same as those current in Washington, London, and Berlin. The concept of “development aid” coming out of Paris does not go beyond dominant liberal platitudes.

Ghana After Nkrumah

After Nkrumah’s fall, I had only passed through Accra several times. But my colleague Kwame Amoa, assistant director of the IDEP, frequently visited the country. He regularly had contacts with the two popular movements that, during the 1970s, created conditions favorable for the army’s intervention, under Jerry Rawlings’s leadership. I deliberately say “intervention” and not “coup d’état.” The army movement here worked with the two avant-garde popular movements. Certainly, problems arose between the two branches of the movement that rejected the business-friendly compradorism of the civilian and military regimes that succeeded one another from 1966 to 1980.

Amoa and I were then invited to meet Rawlings’s new team in 1981. Our main mission was to clean up the Treasury accounts, left in a state of total confusion by the chaos of the preceding regimes. The IMF and the World Bank used the situation, as always, to the advantage of the multinationals—the only institutions toward whom they feel any sense of responsibility. The IMF and the World Bank then presented the populist regime with an unpaid bill. They had never demanded any settlement of this supposed bill from their recently overthrown corrupt servants. This consisted of extravagant foreign debts. I had developed, as I have said, a certain competence in this area and always find pleasure in disentangling a confusing mass of details in situations of this kind. Amoa and I were able, with the assistance of numerous comrades on site, of course—notably P. V. Obeng, a sort of prime minister in the provisional government, and Kwesi Botchwey, subsequently named Minister of Finance—to produce a large report that, I believe, had its usefulness. It provided support for a considerable reduction in the claims of the IMF, the World Bank, and multinationals, and established their share of responsibility. These institutions had actively supported numerous bad projects that were behind the disaster. Their functionaries should also have known that these projects were the source of the misappropriation of funds that led to the gigantic fortunes of their friends in government. And if they had not seen anything amiss—as they wanted us to believe by presenting the naive face of being great destroyers of corruption—they should have been dismissed for gross incompetence. Of course, our work was not going to win us any friends in Washington!

But we were also given more directly political objectives. Could we contribute to a calmer exchange of views between the different parts of the movement? The grassroots organizations, the Committees for Defense of the Revolution and others, established and led by cadres, many of whom came out of local Maoist circles, were certainly not without roots or some resonance in the working classes. But they did not always have a coherent strategic vision, and the demands put forward here and there as priorities were sometimes conflicting, or “leftist.” There is no reason to be afraid of this. It is difficult to see how a genuine people’s movement would otherwise begin. Nevertheless, I am one of those who continue to believe that coordination and organization are essential if one wants to prevent a movement from stagnating, thereby preparing the conditions for a reactionary counteroffensive. Yet any such organization should promote democracy and actually practice it in its own affairs. This is never easy. It is even less so when it is necessary to work with a wing of the movement that holds critical positions in the government—here meaning Rawlings, his group (in particular, P.V. Obeng, head of the civil administration, Kojo Tsikata, a remarkable soldier, head of the secret services who also maintained political control over the army, and Emmanuel Hansen, the group’s ideologue), and his army. Rawlings, Obeng, Hansen, Tsikata, Amoa, and I held long discussions that convinced me that the Rawlings group belonged to a new generation that was much more aware than the earlier national liberation leaders of the minimal requirements of democracy, and more in touch with the expressed demands of the working classes. But they were also, as is often the case in English-speaking lands, limited by pragmatism. The central question dealt with which strategy to adopt, in relation to the Ghanaian bourgeoisie, both its corrupt comprador-bureaucratic wing (an enemy) and its active economic wing (the affluent planters, the merchants). Neutralize them? Integrate them into the system? What democratic forms should be constructed—multiple parties, grassroots movements, election procedures, organization of powers—to move forward and strengthen the real weight of the people while avoiding economic chaos?

Ghana does not lack leaders. At the University of Legon, the group that has since led debates at the Forum asked me to lecture and participate in debates, which I never refuse, and also carried out active functions in the movement’s internal discussions. There was a diversity of opinion that could have gradually evolved over time as the regime became stabilized around the center right in a difficult world and regional conjuncture, which should encourage some prudence in passing judgment. None of this precludes either a more consistent move to the left in the future or a return to compradorization in the service of dominant capitalism.

Congo-Brazzaville

Following the fall of the clown Fulbert Yulu in Brazzaville in 1963, comrades (as they called themselves) from the popular movements that lie behind the change invited me in 1968–69 to discuss their economic strategies. I then got to know this group of young radicals: the brothers Antoine and Joseph Van den Reysen (we have since developed a strong personal friendship), Ambroise Noumazalaye, Pascal Lissouba, Da Costa, Pierre Nzé, Aba Ganzion, Henri Lopez (who subsequently became assistant director general of UNESCO), Charles Ganao (a diplomat of the first order and defender of the collective interests of Africa in many international forums), and Ange Diaware (head of the youth militias, organizer of a resistance movement), who was subsequently murdered in atrocious circumstances. The analyses of Pierre Philippe Rey, at that time assigned by the ORSTOM, now the IRD, to Brazzaville, were also very useful to me.

My first stay allowed me to get right to the heart of this country’s complicated political life, impossible to reduce either to the cliché of “tribalism,” so dear to many anthropologists and political scientists, or to the “class analyses” put forward by the various conflicting tendencies within the movement: trade unionists, activists from the revolutionary youth, intellectual leaders, and bureaucrats. I followed for numerous years the chaotic evolution of the Congolese movement and the country’s economy.²⁰

The IDEP then organized a good seminar in Brazzaville in 1974 at an important moment, characterized by the intensification of debates. What exactly should be done in the economic area? The temptation was strong to give way to the easy possibilities offered by income from the exploitation of oil resources to finance the growth of public administration, but also the development of education (in a country already well educated in 1960) and the improvement of social services. But the question then was how to complement this approach with a serious plan to increase agricultural production and a specific kind of industrialization, one that takes into account the extremely limited economic space of this demographically small, but geographically large country? The collective audience that the president granted to us revealed nothing except for the unfortunate impression of an appetite for unlimited power.

I subsequently visited this friendly country from time to time, despite its tragic political evolution. Pascal Lissouba, then prime minister, hoped that I could give him some proposals to, at the very least, make some minimal improvements in the management of the public sector. This was a pertinent question. I then had to make on-site visits to a group of ailing companies, from Fort Rousset and Makoua in the north, to Niari and Pointe Noire. I was given an all-terrain vehicle, a driver, and a guide. I was able to see the large equatorial primary forest, its gigantic trees and impenetrable undergrowth. It was beautiful, very beautiful, but terrifying. Along the road, when we stopped to eat, the Pygmies, who seemed to come from nowhere, immediately appeared and offered us the only product they had: monkeys. The guide, a good and jovial cook, grilled and sautéed them in a frying pan, then flambéed them—in the Parisian style, he said—with whisky. I also saw an incredible scene of Pygmies exploited by the Bantu planters. The Pygmies came to work—hard—for several days to harvest coffee and were paid in low-quality red wine, drunk in unlimited quantities from a cistern with a rubber hose. The Pygmies drank for one or two hours, after which, dead drunk, they slept on the ground, disappearing the next day into their great forest until the next harvest, a year later.

I realized after visiting the country how difficult it was to start any sort of agriculture in this underpopulated country. Farmers isolated in pockets of the forest could, at best, deliver to market only a few sacks of produce that they had to transport over hundreds of kilometers on terrible roads. Should the farmers be brought together? But they did not want to hear that. I also realized that the “industries” could hardly be designed and managed without taking into account all types of conditions specific to the country.

I was in Brazzaville, en route to Luanda, two days after the presidential election in which Lissouba was victorious. Lissouba, who met with me, had made a good impression. He spoke about democratization, surpassing ethnic divisions, and reconciliation with the militants of the PCT, who had just lost power. I had not been surprised by this defeat. Gradually, sustained by oil revenues, the state bureaucracy—in which the majority of intellectuals was integrated—had absorbed the so-called Marxist-Leninist party, suppressed the autonomy of working-class organizations, and massacred young rebels. The army had become an essential component of this rather ordinary form of authoritarian statism. All efforts to develop agricultural and industrial production were abandoned and replaced by simple social redistribution of oil revenues sufficient to ease popular discontent. The movement for democratization, which began in 1990 with all sorts of ambitions, waved the multiparty flag to begin the attack on the decrepit machinery of state power. But this was a farcical democratization that worked for dominant transnational capitalism through globalized neoliberalism. It would effectively put an end to the chance—as small as it was—for a renewal of the left and would liquidate the vestiges of statism and its vague desires for independence without threatening the interests of the multinational corporations. Such a democracy would combine perfectly with the compradorization of the local system. In these conditions, Lissouba’s election only emphasized the uncertainty of the future. Had he been elected to set up this farcical comprador democracy? Or had he been elected against this farce, whose real candidates—the horrible Paul Kaya, former lackey of Fulbert Yulu, and the disturbing Thystère Tchicaya, former member of the PCT, a convert to liberalism who proposed particularly violent repressive measures to settle all problems—had been soundly beaten when voters ultimately split their votes between Lissouba and the PCT? I personally hoped that the second hypothesis offered the correct explanation. I discussed all this with several former leaders of the PCT and received varying opinions. Subsequent history showed that Lissouba really intended nothing other than to assert his personal power and, for that purpose, to select the worst means: ethnic chauvinism, thereby preparing the most favorable conditions for violent confrontations on ethnic terms. He unreservedly accepted neoliberalism without discussion, but he believed he could secure his monopoly on power as a privileged interlocuteur of the West through opportunistic advances to various parties. Denis Sassou Nguesso easily succeeded in uniting behind him the army and public opinion, undoubtedly tired of Lissouba’s megalomania, but at the price of thousands of civilian victims.

Benin

The 1970s and 1980s in Benin were characterized by an attempt to “do something.” In the unanimous opinion of Beninese analysts, whether favorable to or critical of President Mathieu Kérékou’s government, the 1960s had been a real farce: a non-state, in fact, a bad colonial administration that had survived the proclamation of independence. This was an administration managed by politicians in the most vulgar sense of the term—their names: Apithy, Zinsou, and Maga—for their personal profit and that of their small, microregional supporters. It is not surprising, then, that in these conditions, the populist project of the army and its leader, Kérékou, had a real and immediate resonance with the people of the country, even if—with some perceptiveness and maybe a little sectarianism—the Marxists of the Communist Party of Dahomey had quite quickly seen the contradictions and limitations of this project.

At the beginning of this period, in 1975, the IDEP organized a large seminar in Cotonou with really ambitious objectives defined in cooperation with the state’s economic management institutions (that our friend Justin Gnidéhou coordinated) and academics—to contribute to the definition of the social project, the identification of the difficulties it would confront, and the elaboration of a phased approach to push the program forward. I believe that this seminar has remained an important date in the country’s history in the memory of all participants. Not that the responses given to the initial questions were in any way final ones. Far from it. But a full, serious, even contentious debate had tackled them all head on. President Kérékou came himself to close the seminar, not with a formal speech, but as a direct participant in the concluding debate. He then agreed to respond to questions put to him, without knowing those questions in advance. Say what you want, but I have not known too many presidents—in Africa or elsewhere—who would have accepted a challenge of this type. Although the atmosphere was somewhat tense—which proves that the debate was real and serious—I believe that this confrontation was not negative and useless, even if what happened after in practice did not have the desired positive effects.

Personally, I do not criticize the project for not having been “truly socialist”—besides, there still needs to be some agreement on the meaning of this label. A national popular project seemed to me to be the best that could be achieved in the conditions of this small, vulnerable country. Of course, we need to understand that “national popular” is more than populism because, faced with the predictable attacks from the enemy, there are not, in my opinion, any better ramparts than the autonomous and democratic organization of the working/popular classes. The system remained populist and even slid gradually toward authoritarianism. But it was not terrorist. The Western media, once again, presented a distorted image of the country during this time. The Benin government did not commit criminal acts of repression like its neighbor Togo, which, under the Gnassingbé Eyadéma dictatorship, commonly carried out such acts. Kérékou was presented as a bloodthirsty monster—since he said he was a Marxist-Leninist—while the “liberal” (that is, someone who allows the compradors and multinationals to do what they want) Eyadéma’s continual crimes were passed over in silence.