People creating change in Africa

I was asked to provide an overview of where Africa stands as many countries celebrate their 50th anniversary of independence. I wanted to begin with putting that task into context so that you, and particularly my African comrades, will excuse the gross generalisations and omissions where there are any.

In the 50 years since the decolonisation of Africa (I am not sure that we have yet achieved independence) we have seen a diversity of experiences: of advances, such as the toppling of the apartheid regime in South Africa, and of grave setbacks such as the political situation in Sudan. Today, throughout our continent, the struggle for the democratic aspirations of African peoples continues, and as we speak, the people of Africa are organising to claim these aspirations in magnitude and scope unparalleled since the struggle for decolonisation.

Meanwhile, in the West, the contradictions of liberal democracy and capitalism are manifesting economically, politically and socially, creating a scramble for reordering and reconsolidation. With this has come a call for alliance: ‘You are either with us or against us’, went the threat from the most militarised global power. Perhaps rather than alliance, it was a demand for renewed pledges of allegiance. And, many of our African leaders indeed joined and continue to participate in the ‘coalition of the willing’.

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This is not the first time, and will likely not be the last, that capitalism is in crisis, nor that the losses of the elite have been socialised while their profits remain capitalised at the expense of the workers and the economically marginalised across the globe. But it is critical that the movement for social justice in Africa and the global South seizes this moment in order to make gains towards the realisation of just and equitable alternatives. While the 1990s saw the consolidation of democratic gains and the growth of civil society in many African states, such as in Kenya, it has become clear that the ever-expanding NGO–industrial complex that operates in a framework of poverty reduction (as though reduction is the bounds of our aspirations), separating and depoliticising service and advocacy, has devastating implications on the privatisation and sub-contracting of state service whether or not this be to ‘not-for-profit’ organisations, and has limited impact on the realities of economically oppressed Africans. I say ‘economically oppressed’ rather than ‘poor’ because poverty implies a permanent condition with no agency. Economic oppression has a survivor and a perpetration, the systems that maintain this oppression are intentional, institutionalised and structurally entrenched.

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The ripple effect of the ‘global’ financial crisis threatens to worsen still the socio-economic conditions of vulnerable communities in Africa. Further, the reduction of Western aid, induced by the crisis, will challenge the perceived dependency between the global North and Africa. I say ‘perceived’, because as we all know, any greater look at aid, trade and development consistently shows that our Northern ‘partners’’ gains far outweigh our own in most developmental exchanges.

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Yet with the rise of the economic and political clout of China, India, Brazil and South Africa, and the shift in global power from West to East, Africa in this era, as in many others, is in a globally strategic economic and political position. What is yet to be decided is whether the continent will be a pawn or a player, achieving gains for its people or merely for the elite.

An ever-increasing militarisation on the continent, notably with the expansion of US ‘counterterrorism’ programmes and AFRICOM (African Command), also continues to serve and collude with a repressive and short-sighted elite in many African states. We are indeed here to focus on issues of peace and security in Africa. I am not certain that we have experienced real peace on the continent to date. In some states, like the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) and Sudan, as my colleagues will address later, we have seen the violence of war and pillage. In others that purport a semblance of peace, we experience the violence of corrupt ‘security’ services against the people in the interest of capital or the state, maintaining a state of fear and repression. And, certainly in all of Africa, the violence of economic oppression continues to ravage our societies.

These states of violence are further compounded by the stirring and manipulation of ‘popular’ fundamentalisms – be they ethnic, religious or cultural – that oppress all, while particularly seeking to control, among others, sexuality and reproduction, maintaining patriarchal dominance and the war on our bodies.

Let me give as an example here, Uganda. For some time, the Ugandan executive had been trying to push through repressive counterterrorism legislation, which was rejected by parliament. That is, until the September 11th acts of terrorism in the United States, when Uganda joined the coalition of the willing, enabling it nationally to justify sweeping measures that would violate press freedom and give the executive wide ‘discretion’ in determining who is a terrorist and how to act on suspicion of terrorism. Later, in 2005, the president made the highly unpopular decision to amend the constitution in order to scrap term limits. With the arrest (and eventual release) of the main opposition leader and the wide claims of rigging, the ensuing election process was largely criticised within and outside of the country. As the president’s fourth election approaches in 2011, religious fundamentalist fervour, supported by the Christian right in the US, provided another scapegoat to the president and his men as they drafted an anti-homosexuality bill.

The implications would have been a further deepening of control by the state on the people, with language in the bill that mirrored the most repressive of counterterrorism legislation, including arrest for ‘suspicion’ of homosexuality, internet and media censorship, and the encouragement of popular vigilante-ism. This time, having manipulated our own fundamentalisms, popular pressure against the bill was muffled. The infamous ‘Bahati bill’ eventually did not pass, according to the president because of Western pressure – a reason that did nothing to counter the preposterous argument that homosexuality is ‘un-African’.

What the president intentionally failed to acknowledge was the coalition of diverse organisations across Uganda who rallied together to fight the bill, understanding its undemocratic potential for all, and the support to the coalition from organisations and movements across Africa. While the bill was not passed, the government did not have to wait long until it was able to pass the Regulation of Interception of Communication bill, just three days after the July bombings in Kampala. The bill gives the state power to intercept communications whenever it is believed a life-threatening felony could be committed or information concerning threats to public safety, national security or national economic interest would be at issue. Most recently, Mbogua Mureithi, advocate of the High Court of Kenya and Al-Amin Kimathi, executive director of the Muslim Human Rights Forum, visited Kampala as human rights defenders and legal counsel to observe the trials of four of the nine Kenyans illegally renditioned to Uganda in relation to the 11 July bombings. Both Kimathi and Mureithi were entrapped and detained by Uganda’s Rapid Response Unit (RRU) following their arrival in Kampala on 18 September. They were held incommunicado and interrogated as to their alleged links with Al Qaeda and Al Shabaab by Kenyan, Ugandan and American interrogators. Mureithi was released and deported back to Kenya whereas Kimathi was held incommunicado until being charged with terrorism on 21 September, well after the 48-hour legal detention period. Again, relying this time on spreading Islamophobia, violations of the rights of African human rights defenders are silenced by fear. Kimathi and the Muslim Human Rights Forum are well known for their work trying to ensure that counterterrorism efforts are conducted within the boundaries of international and regional human rights standards, and Kenyan law.

The Ugandan example I give is just one to highlight the three walls African people find themselves trapped within – the first being repression by state apparatus whose interests are political and economic power at the expense of the people (often supported by foreign allies); the second being our own fundamentalisms, stirred at will by the state to ensure oppression has a semblance of consent (these fundamentalisms too are often resourced by outside agents); and the third being the interests of capital, multinational corporations and foreign governments that seek to exploit the resources of Africa and her peoples. A rock and a hard place, and an even harder place!

Indeed, the militarisation of the continent is not the only colonialisation that threatens Africa’s self-determination. A creeping, less ostentatious colonialisation of our lands, through land grabbing, as well as our natural resources, including our biodiversity, is sweeping the continent as global resources shrink with the effects of climate change and environmental degradation. The food and financial crises ignited a massive round of ‘land grabbing’, with agribusinesses leasing and buying large tracts of land to produce both food and fuel crops for export. As the attempt to frame these grabs as ‘developmental opportunities’ spreads, we are reminded of the colonial adage of ‘terra nullius’: well, there was nobody there, so it couldn’t have been stealing – ignoring the massive displacement of farmers and pastoralists and the effect of export food production on the urban poor. This insidious colonisation is common to both Western and Eastern powers.

In regards to natural resources, Canada is itself a superpower in the African mining sector. While Canada’s mining presence is relatively new in Africa, only South Africa is just ahead of Canada in the African mining industry. The value of Canadian mining assets in Africa has grown from US$233 million in 1989 to US$14.7 billion in 2007. While Canada has endorsed the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative, voluntary codes of conduct and self-regulation need be made mandatory through national legislation to ensure internationally recognised standards for Canadian companies operating in Africa. In particular, we must demand recognition of communities’ rights to free, prior and informed consent.

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Amidst these conditions, Africa has seen unequalled levels of civil resistance in the last five years from Egypt to Senegal, Guinea, Kenya and Zimbabwe. There is a line in a song I enjoy by a North American artist named Ani Di Franco that says: ‘Growing up during the plague of Reagan and Bush, watching capitalism gun down democracy, had this funny effect on me, I guess.’ Indeed, my generation and younger of Africans, who grew up during structural adjustment programmes that have turned our universities into private extensions of the corporate job market, who have only known the plagues of Hosni Mubarak and Robert Mugabe, from north to south, and who see no alternative in Morgan Tsvangirai, who have witnessed genocides, both political and economic, and indeed watched capitalism gun down democracy, well, it has had this ‘funny effect on us, I guess’. People-centred progressive movements are spreading across Africa and provide an important platform for the voices of the most marginalised to express their interests, provide services and create alternatives. These movements are key to entrenching democratic principles and provide one of the few viable avenues for participatory democracy, to hold states and governments accountable to the needs and demands of African peoples. Indeed, meaningful change in Africa has never occurred without the active participation of peoples movements. We have seen charismatic and visionary leaders, but Kwame Nkrumah would not have achieved independence without the market women of Ghana, nor Amílcar Cabral without the peasants of Guinea-Bissau or Julius Nyerere without the youth of Tanzania.

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Today, African social movements are often deliberately marginalised from participation in key national and continental processes. They lack the resources, information and platforms to effectively drive processes of change. They face state repression – often violently – and are disparate geographically and/or by the issues they seek to address, and are unable to create networks across these lines thus lacking solidarity and access to learning. Notably, the generation of social movements emerging from Africa at this time have also been deliberately removed from the historic and theoretical frameworks and lessons that would strengthen the struggle for peace, justice, equity and accountability.

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Through all of the challenges that we face as a globe and suffer most deeply in Africa, we must stop believing that a single solution, a silver bullet, will fix all. We must be willing to experiment and not simply keep implementing the same programmes or projects that we have for decades and expect a different result (I believe the Chinese call that madness). We must also remember, as Cabral said, that ‘nobody has yet made a successful revolution without a revolutionary theory’ (‘The Weapon of Theory’, Cabral, 1966). And so we must re-inject political theory into activism, not only relying on a dichotomous paradigm of left and right, socialist and capitalist, but embracing complexity and challenging ourselves to develop new political thought that is grounded in African practice and responds to our needs. We need to create long-term strategies that will dismantle from the crux the structures of power and privilege and transform our societies, from the individual to the state, putting at the centre of all decisions the economically, socially and politically oppressed peoples of Africa: farmers, women, workers, informal workers, queers, people living with disabilities. Together, we must end corporate control over production and consumption and support our small-scale farmers to create alternatives that will enable food sovereignty, meet the needs of low-income consumers and respect the rights of Mother Earth, as our Latin American comrades coined.

Long gone are the days that Africans believe that there are friends without interests at the state level or have hope in grandiose promises. However, perhaps together we can reignite the light of genuine solidarity between the peoples of Africa and Canada, solidarity based on the understanding of mutual gain from sharing and transferring knowledge, experience, resources – be it between our farmers, our indigenous peoples’ movements, our feminist movements, our movements for the earth. A true ally in any movement is always asked to do the work first within their own communities, and I believe this is what many of you here are doing – challenging Canadian policy to be fair and equitable. I am honoured to be part of the conversation and look forward to contributing to strengthening our solidarity.

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I would like to end with the words of Thomas Sankara who said: ‘You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future.’ Let us have the courage to invent the future.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Hakima Abbas is Fahamu’s deputy director.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.