The Tanzanian National Electoral Commission (NEC) announced this week that general elections will take place on 14 December following the postponement of a 30 October poll due to the death of a presidential running mate. Elections did take place 30 October on Tanzania's semi-autonomous island of Zanzibar, with the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (Party for the Revolution) winning the elections. The vote was marred by clashes between security forces and opposition supporters. Issa Shivj assesses the choices available for Tanzanian voters.

‘So my prayer to the socialist god is to get to have the American one-party system in Tanzania. ... So my hope is that you can have another party; you can have two parties in Tanzania, both believing in the essentials of the Arusha Declaration. Then try to see which is going to be more efficient in implementing it. But one socialist party, one capitalist party well, theoretically yes, but I don’t know how it can work.’

Julius Nyerere said this fifteen years ago when the debate on multi-party democracy had just begun and the Nyalali commission (The Justice Francis Nyalali Commission in the early 1990s found that only 20 per cent of Tanzanians wanted to revert to the multiparty political system) was making the rounds of the country to get people’s views. Nyerere went on to draw an analogy with the American system where, he said, there were two parties; ‘but they’re really one party!’ ‘Both parties agree on the basic national objectives. Internally, both of them are highly capitalist. Externally, both of them are imperialist.’ Elsewhere, Nyerere expressed the hope that the ruling party Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) would split and that you would get two strong parties, both socialist and both nationalist.

The socialist god, fortunately for a few, unfortunately for the many, did not answer any of Nyerere’s prayers. Instead of the CCM splitting into two strong parties, it buried the Arusha Declaration itself, and with it both nationalism and socialism.

Today we have some 18 or so parties with perhaps two or three credible ones. But there is hardly any great difference in their vision, outlook or major policies. All are donor-dependent; all are driven by the neo-liberal policies of liberalisation, privatisation and the enrichment of the minority; the so-called “Washington consensus”; and none has a credible vision of constructing a national, democratic economy and polity in the interest of the large majority. So, when Tanzanians went to the polls in a third multi-party election last weekend, what was there to choose from? For the purposes of discussion we may cluster the choices into three types: the common sense, the pragmatic and the rational. Theoretically, there is also the fourth, the principled choice, based on principles and policies of a party. But this, as I said, was not available. The fourth choice did not exist.

The common sense choice dictates to err on the side of caution. This is best expressed in the old adage, ‘better the devil you know, than the devil you don’t know’. Common sense, however, is not always good sense. If you continue to strengthen the devil you know, there is a likelihood that he may be further emboldened to become even more devilish. These overwhelming electoral victories or what are called “ushindi wa kishindo”, or with an even more ominous connotation, “ushindi wa tsunami”, have their consequences. Few parties, and still fewer individuals, who have got into the political seat with 70-80 per cent vote, can resist the arrogance of power. Self-control in the exercise of power is a rare phenomenon.

The second type of choice is a pragmatic one. Here the voter is moved neither by instinct nor by principles and much less by reason. The motive force is either immediate self-interest - bribes and favours - or a racial, regional, religious or gender prejudice and bias. In our current political scenario, as a matter of fact, the pragmatic choice reigns supreme. We have already seen it in the internal nomination processes of the parties and should prepare ourselves to see more of it during the elections. Supposedly, there are watch dogs like the electoral commissions who are supposed to check such practices. But who watches the watch dogs?

Then there is the third set of choices, which we call a rational choice. In absence of the availability of a principled choice, the most rational choice would be for a political configuration which assures some stability, security, basic freedoms and checks on gross abuse and misuse of power. In our situation, theoretically, it means a union parliament which would have a strong presence of the opposition, over, say, 40 per cent of the seats. As for the presidency, ideally, the winning candidate should end up with slightly over 50 per cent of the votes. In other words, “ushindi wa kishindo: should disappear from our political scene.

Since we are a two-government union, the rational choice would be that different political parties are elected to run the two governments. The constant threat and fear whipped up by some ruling circles and their spokespersons that any party other than CCM forming the Zanzibar government would spell disaster for the union is a political scarecrow. No politician, even with a modicum of political sense, would advocate, and much less attempt, complete independence for Zanzibar. The union question is, in my view, not about secession; it is really about greater autonomy. And as I have always maintained, the union question should be contextualized, discussed and debated within the larger question of the grassroots democratisation of our politics. No people can have democracy for themselves if they are denying democracy to others.

The rational choice is not necessarily a principled choice. One only hopes, that the scenario painted here would create necessary conditions and open up space for the people to discuss and determine the vision and organise themselves to realise that vision. In other words, the rational choice would create an enabling environment for a principled choice.

But the rational choice pre-supposes certain pre-conditions. One is that the elections should be free and fair; free of corruption, rigging and other malpractices. On the part of the ruling party, it means “ushindi wa kishindo” should remain an aspiration. It should not become a coded message for “ushindi wa kishindo” by any means, fair or foul!

On the part of the opposition parties, it means not only to place on offer more democratic political governance, but also, a serious, critical and persuasive analysis of the promises and performance of the incumbent government over the last ten years. It is a telling comment on the opposition parties that so far they have not even been able to tell us what has happened to our society over the last ten years and yet, we feel it in our bones that this country has undergone fundamental changes, not only in its political and economic direction but in its social character. A good political leader is one who can explain systematically what people feel confusedly.

One cannot obviously expect such an analysis from the ruling party. Self-criticism is not, and has never been, a credo of bourgeois parties. They would only provide a score-board with ticks on achievements. It is the opposition which has the duty to raise, at least, question marks. If they fail to do so, then this time around, people would be justified in raising a big question mark against the very system of multi-party politics in Africa.

© Issa Shivji. Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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Is the concept of agrarian revolution a serious proposition or a vote-catching gimmick? Issa Shivji examines what a real agrarian revolution would look like and lays down some of the fundamental transformations that would have to take place. Central would be a shift away from export crops to primary food crops.

In the current political campaigns, unlike during the last ten years of the third phase government, there is some talk about the transformation of agriculture. Even catching phrases like ‘agrarian revolution’ are being thrown around. What does this really imply? Let us see.

Tanzania is a text-book case of what is described in political economy as an extraverted economy, dependent on export of primary agricultural commodities. Agriculture contributes around 50 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product. Tanzania is a large country with a massive petty (largely middle and poor) peasantry which is firmly integrated in the world commodity market. Export agriculture is our mainstay. Our food production for domestic consumption is inversely related to that of export crop production and directly dependent on the vagaries of weather. This means that when export production is promoted, food production falls. Historically, the classical case is that of cotton growing in Mwanza region in the 1950s. As peasants concentrated their labour on producing cotton they spent less time on food. Not only that but the variety of food crops which provided balanced and adequate nutrition was also reduced as they concentrated on growing starchy cassava which requires less labour.

One recent study shows that in 1993/94, there were 3.7 million agricultural households on mainland Tanzania, amounting to a population of 20 million. The number of agricultural households had increased to 4.4 million in 1997/98, with a population of 23 million, an increase of 19 per cent in households and almost 16 per cent in population. The proportion of female-headed households is almost one-fifth. 90 per cent of farmers cultivated less than 2.0 hectares while large scale farmers cultivated only 14 per cent of arable land. Tanzania is thus a country of smallholders par excellence, the population directly dependent on smallholder agriculture being over 75 per cent.

In spite of the peasant production being small-scale and backward, it is the peasant who is most exploited. Exploitation means that the peasant does not get a return commensurate with his/her labour. The excess, that is the surplus, is drained away from rural areas to towns and international metropolis through unequal terms of trade to support non-producing classes and their luxury consumption. It would be different if the majority of this surplus was ploughed back into agriculture. It is not. The caricature of a bourgeoisie that we have is not capable of long-term investment in agriculture to spearhead a real agrarian revolution.

Our bourgeoisie looks to make quick profits. At best, it indulges in building and buses and guest houses. Its greatest aspiration is to become absentee landlords, or own land and offer it to so-called foreign investors in dubious deals euphemistically called joint ventures or just become commission agents for foreign firms. This is the bourgeoisie which in political economy is called a comprador, as opposed to a national, bourgeoisie.

So what does an agrarian revolution in these circumstances mean? First and foremost, it means that the agriculture sector must undergo a fundamental structural transformation which can only be done in the context of transforming the extraverted colonial-type economy to a nationally integrated economy. This implies a number of very important shifts in policy.

First, it means to shift away from concentrating on a few export crops to primarily food crops and other agricultural inputs for the domestic market.

Secondly, it means shifting from the hoe-based, rain-fed agriculture to the mechanized and chemicalized, irrigation-based agriculture. Agrarian transformation requires that other sectors of the economy – industrial, financial, energy, and transport and communication – should be integrated with and support the agriculture sector. For example, local industries must provide machines and other inputs, including fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides etc. to agriculture. The manufacturing industry must provide incentive goods - textiles, radios, bicycles, etc. – to peasants. The agrarian revolution cannot be sustained if the necessary industrial inputs are all imported. They have to be manufactured locally.

Thirdly, it means that the energy sector should shift to provide, for example, electricity to rural areas at affordable tariffs. This in turn means that we have to move away from oil-based generation of electricity to hydro-electricity on the one hand, and from large-scale hydro-electricity plants, to small-scale generation which can be maintained by local rural based technicians.

Fourthly, it means that our transport system must facilitate movement of agriculture commodities primarily within the country. This means building a network of transport routes and networks joining villages and towns and regions, joining agricultural farmlands with industrial areas. This cannot easily be done if we rely on building tarmac highways in a large country like Tanzania. It is expensive to build and very expensive to maintain. The emphasis has to be on rail and sea transport joining main centres across the country to which villages can be joined by a network of feeder roads. (The boast about building highways joining cities and towns while letting the railway system go to the dogs is clearly misplaced!)

The financial sector too has to be reoriented to give necessary cheap credit to agriculture. Clearly, no commercial bank would consider giving credit to a farmer cultivating maize, tomatoes, onions or citrus fruit on a 20-acre farm, let alone the majority who hardly own more than 3-4 acres. It is simply not viable. And this has nothing to do with the peasants in Tanzania not having land titles to use it as collateral. This business of collateral, which is the backbone of the multimillion programme on formalizing property and business, is a red herring. Which commercial Bank would give a loan to a farmer simply because he holds a land title on a 2 or 20-acre farm? Everywhere in the world, a serious credit system for the smallholder is always organised by the state, not by the private sector.

These are only broad sketches to highlight what an agrarian revolution means and implies, if it is meant to be a serious proposition and not simply a vote-catching gimmick? There are many issues that need to be discussed and debated if one sincerely has a vision of an agrarian revolution. There are such issues as the source of initial capital: Such a transformation would of course require initial capital. Where would it come from? From donors – no way; from the World Bank – hardly! It will have to come from domestic sources. Do we have such sources?

What will be the appropriate institution to provide an enabling environment for such a transformation, the state or the market? Thirdly, what will be the social agency to effect such a revolution? Foreign capital, settler farmers, ex-Zimbabwe, ex-South Africa, or our own peasants? Thirdly, what kind of political force and configuration will have the will and capacity to oversee such a revolution?

© Issa Shivji. Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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In the colonial language, land robbery carried out with the assistance of the state was called land alienation. In the neo-liberal era, the language, forms and mechanisms of land expropriation revolve around promoting efficient commercial agriculture and attracting foreign investment. Issa Shivji examines new forms of dispossession.

Robbery of land, labour and resources was the basis of primitive accumulation by colonial capital. Land was alienated from indigenous users and given to white settlers and colonial companies in the colonies, particularly settler colonies like Kenya, Zimbabwe and Zambia. The common pattern was to alienate most fertile and productive land to the settlers leaving behind rocky and most unsuitable land for the Africans.

By the end of the colonial period, some 4,000 white farmers had the monopoly of some 16,500 square miles of the so-called White Highlands which contained 30 percent of all good land in Kenya while over five million Africans were bundled into reserves consisting of the worst lands. Under the Land Apportionment Act of Northern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), some 178,000 Whites got 75,000 square miles of land while 2,290,000 Africans were left with 63,000 square miles.

Although huge areas of good land were reserved for the settlers, only small portions of these were actually cultivated. The aim was not only to provide land to the Whites but also to create landlessness among the Blacks so that the Africans had no alternative but to work for European plantations, mines and other enterprises at very low wages. Creation of cheap labour was a deliberate policy of the colonial state.

The system of poll or head tax, under which every adult African male had to pay a fixed amount of tax, whether or not he earned any income, was meant to force the Africans to go and work for European farms and mines.

European agriculture was given further advantages such as better infrastructure, prices, state subsidies and monopolies to ward off competition from African peasants. It is under such circumstances that European capital was accumulated. Everywhere under the colonial situation it has been proved again and again that the so-called efficiency of capitalist agriculture as opposed to inefficient and unproductive peasant agriculture is a function of state support and subsidies.

Two characteristics stand out in the colonial form of primitive accumulation. One, the use of extra-economic force, whether justified by law or not, to enable expropriation of resources and exploitation of labour. Two, strategic state intervention to create necessary conditions for capital to reap super-profits. Thus the talk about leaving the economy to the market is so much balderdash. The state always intervenes in the economy; the question is in whose interest.

Under the current conditions, the language, the justification, the mechanisms and forms of capital accumulation may have changed but the processes of accumulation by foreign capital in Africa share these two characteristics - the use of extra-economic force and the intervention of the state - and therefore I call it the primitive accumulation of capital. Let us take the example of land again.

In the colonial language, land robbery carried out with the assistance of the state was called land alienation. In the neo-liberal era, the language, forms and mechanisms of land expropriation revolve around promoting efficient commercial agriculture and attracting foreign investment.

The Tanzania Investment Centre (TIC), for example, is reported to have identified some four million hectares of land under its Land Bank scheme. This scheme has nothing to do with banks, more to do with lands. TIC writes to regional commissioners, who in turn write to District Authorities, who in turn order village executive officers to identify suitable lands in their villages and report back within 11 days. Thus TIC accumulates 4 million hectares in its land bank. Says Mr. Ole Naika, TIC’s Director of Investment:

“Over 2.5 million hectares of land in Tanzania have been surveyed and found suitable for investment. The figure constitutes some 62.5 per cent of over 4 million hectares managed under the Tanzania Investment Centre (TIC). The remainder is categorised as land that is potential for investment where additional surveying or infrastructure is required” (The Citizen, 10/09/2004.

An investor, say a farmer from South Africa, who is interested in investing in commercial agriculture, would apply to TIC. Once the investor has chosen his preferred X thousand hectares he would be allocated land under a derivative title - a kind of lease - under the new land laws. The sale of this land would be done under terms which even the members of parliament would not be able to know because these are supposed to be contractual secrets. Going by previous experiences and what has happened in other countries, we know that land is “sold” to investors at dirt-cheap prices. In the mid-90s sisal estates were sold to businessmen at less than 50 US cents per acre.

Armed with his title, the investor gets a loan from, perhaps, a South African bank in Tanzania which holds deposits from Tanzanian workers and peasants, and NGOs, and the Government, and the aid money from donors. Thus the Tanzanian poor provide both land and capital to the investor.

Under an appropriate certificate from TIC, the investor would also have the usual tax holidays and tax exemption under which he would import - most probably second hand - tractors and machinery from South Africa. He would perhaps also have a permit to import his skilled foremen, to supervise his Tanzanian workers, and squatters and share-croppers, the former owners of “his” land.

The state has to provide him with the necessary infrastructure - roads and electricity and water - and an export subsidy so that he may export and earn foreign exchange in the interest of the country. Thus the Tanzanian taxpayer subsidizes the investor.

It is often said that the land given to investors is idle land. Under the colonial language, alienated village lands used to be called uninhabited or un-owned land; now they are idle lands. In practice, these lands are usually prime lands already used by peasants which means when they are alienated the inevitable eviction occurs giving rise to perpetual land disputes. To guarantee protection, safety and stability, the state has inevitably to use force to reassure the investor and keep the recalcitrant peasant at bay. Thus the Tanzanian State shields the foreign landowner from the wrath of the Tanzanian landless.

How is this process fundamentally different from the land expropriations of the colonial era? Primitive accumulation in popular language is nothing but reaping without sowing.

© Issa Shivji. Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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Regular contributor Issa Shivji tackles the history of the development discourse in Africa, discussing its changing meanings from the colonial period to post-independence rule and the onset of structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s – Africa’s lost decade. The new development discourse of neo-liberalism (otherwise known as globalization) continues historical forms of dispossession, Shivji notes, but there is also hope in the fact that Africa’s history is not only of slavery, exploitation and colonialism. It is also a story of struggle, as Julius Nyerere wrote, against these evils, and of battles won after many setbacks and much suffering.

Introduction

‘From development to poverty reduction,’ sums up the trajectory of the development discourse in Africa over the last four decades since independence. This development marks significant shifts, not only in economic approaches and policies, but also in academic theories and political ideologies underpinning the discourse. In this article, my aim is to reflect on broad trends in the changing discourse unencumbered by details and empirical data.

I will organise my reflections around four aspects of the discourse: first the institutional and social agency of development; second, its ideological rationalization or justification; third, the theories underlying the discourse and, fourth, its politics. The contextual theme running through the discourse is Africa’s place and role in the global political economy and its relationship with the developed North, or, more correctly, the imperial factor.

Although my subject is not really the history of the development discourse, some periodisation is necessary to highlight the breaks and continuities in the ideas on development. The first two decades after independence, roughly the 1960s and 1970s, may be called the ‘age of developmentalism’. The next decade, that is the 1980s, has been characterised as Africa’s lost decade. This is the period which spawned various structural adjustment programmes or SAPs under the tutelage of the IMF and the World Bank. SAPs prepared the ground for and dovetailed into the next, or the current period, which may be characterised as the ‘age of globalisation’.

The Age of Developmentalism

The struggle for independence in Africa was first and foremost an assertion of the humanness of the African people after five centuries of domination and humiliation of the slave trade and colonialism. In the words of Tom Mboya, the struggle for independence was the ‘rediscovery of Africa by Africans’ while Amilcar Cabral described it as the ‘re-Africanisation of minds’ or ‘rebecoming Africans’. National development became the passion of politicians and the ‘great expectation’ of the people. In the vision of the more articulate nationalist leaders like Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, the independent state had a double task, that of building the nation and developing the economy. The state in Africa, Nyerere argued, preceded the nation, rather than the other way round. Thus the national project was from the start, top-down, and statist.

The colonial economy and society were anything but national. In the scramble for Africa, the colonial powers had divided the continent into mini-countries where boundaries cut through cultural, ethnic and economic affinities. This was made worse by the policy of divide and rule, leaving behind uneven development in an extreme form. Some regions were more developed than others. Some ethnic groups were labelled martial, providing a recruiting ground for soldiers; others were turned into labour reservoirs; some were characterised as “intelligent” and moderately entrepreneurial as opposed to the rest who were inherently indolent and lazy. All were of course uncivilized, uncultured, undisciplined pagans whose souls needed to be saved and whose skins needed to be thrashed.
The colonial economy was typically disarticulated, almost tailor-made, for exploitation by colonial capital, linked to the metropolitan trade and capital circuits. Extractive industries like mining predominated. Plantation agriculture existed side by side with subsistence peasant cultivation, all concentrating on one or a couple of crops for export according to the needs of the metropolitan economy.

Different colonial powers left behind different forms and traditions of public administration, culture, cuisine, dance and education, elementary as it was, all concentrated in towns. The urban and the rural were literally two countries within one; one alien, modern, a metropolitan transplant barred to the native – while the other stagnating and frozen in the so-called tradition or custom. But neither the modern nor the traditional were organically so. Both were colonial constructs.

No other continent suffered as much destruction of its social fabric through foreign imperial domination as did Africa.

I have traced these initial conditions on the eve of independence for two reasons. Firstly, to underline the fact that the nationalist project faced a formidable task on the morrow of independence. Secondly, to highlight an even more formidable reality, which was that the state that was supposed to carry out the twin tasks of nation-building and economic development was itself a colonial heritage. The colonial state was a despotic state, a metropolitan police and military outpost, in which powers were concentrated and centralized and where law was an unmediated instrument of force and where administrative fiat was more a rule, than the rule of law.

The nationalist vision thus called for a revolutionary transformation not only of the economy and society but also the state. A few nationalist visionaries attempted, but none succeeded. The post-independence international context was no more propitious than the colonial. Independence found Africa in the midst of Cold War and the rising imperial power, the United States, for whom any assertion of national self-determination was “communism”, to be hounded and destroyed, by force if necessary, by manipulation and deception, if possible. The early story of the gruesome assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah, and the continuing story of military coups, assassinations, and resistance to national liberation wars and civil strife in Africa, in most of which imperialism had a hand, bear testimony to what the former colonial powers and the rising imperial power could do to retain their collective global hegemony.

These where then the initial conditions, so to speak, within which African nationalists had to realise their dream of nation-building and economic development and to answer their people’s ‘great expectations’. Invariably, the agency of change was the state since there was virtually no social class which could shoulder the task of national development.
Nor was foreign capital obliging in spite of various protective laws and incentive schemes put in place by the African governments. Invariably, nationalist politicians turned to the state. African governments of all ideological hues – from capitalist Kenyans through socialist Tanzanians to Marxists of various inclinations– all resorted to the state for their economic programmes. The post-independence economic programmes, contrary to the current propaganda from the West, were designed by the erstwhile World Bank. In effect it involved intensification of the monoculture agriculture for export; some enclaves of import-substitution industrialization and throwing open of the extractive and resource based industries to transnational corporations.

The state had to be manned. The colonial bureaucracy was almost exclusively White at the top and immigrant in the middle. The education and health infrastructure had to be expanded, both for pragmatic as well as political reasons. Africanisation of the civil service could not be resisted nor could the basic welfare demands of the population. Provision of basic services by the state as a matter of fact also served to legitimise the otherwise authoritarian rule of the political elite. The state bureaucracy grew by leaps and bounds.
Nationalism thus resolved itself into various ideologies of developmentalism. ‘We should run while others walk’, politicians declared. The academia was dominated from the North. Post-independence economies were typically dual economies. There was the traditional sector, rural, unproductive, backward, lacking entrepreneurial spirit and governed by ascription or the ‘economy of affection’. Development consisted in modernizing the traditional society.

The dominance of modernization paradigm was challenged by young academics coming out of post-independence universities. Where there was relatively a freer space, as in Tanzania of the 60s and 70s, intense debates raged between modernizers and radical nationalists calling themselves African socialists or Ujamaaists or Marxists. African progressives placed history of the development of underdevelopment and the role of imperialism as the process of worldwide accumulation, at the centre of their analysis and understanding. The traditional, they argued, was not quite traditional, nor the modern quite modern; rather both belonged to the system of international capitalism which reproduced development in the metropoles and underdevelopment in the peripheries. Development therefore was not a process of changing ‘pattern variables’ or looking for modernizing elites but rather a process of class struggle.

Meanwhile, the state became both the site of power struggles as well as accumulation. Radical nationalists, who showed any vision of transforming their societies, were routed through military coups or assassinations. A few who survived compromised themselves and became compradors or tolerated imperial arrogance for pragmatic reasons. Everywhere, politics became authoritarian, whether in the form of one-party states or outright military dictatorships. Liberal constitutional orders imposed by the departing colonial states did not survive as the underlying logic of the colonial despotic state reasserted itself.

State positions opened up opportunities for seeking rents. Conspicuous consumption at home, a little investment in unproductive activities to make quick profits and a lot of stashing of funds in foreign bank accounts was, and perhaps still is, the typical characteristic of this class. Thus very little serious domestic private accumulation took place. Whatever investment that did take place was public, by the state.

During the first one-and-half decade of independence the African economies showed modest growth rates; modest in comparison to other continents but impressive given the initial conditions at the time of independence. Investment and savings ranged between 15 to 20 per cent of the GDP. Primary and secondary school enrolment was expanded. Tertiary education, which in many countries literally did not exist during colonial times, was introduced. Medical and health statistics also showed improvement. But this growth and development was unsustainable. It was predicated on the reinforcement of colonial foundations.

Growth in agriculture production was based on extensive cultivation rather than a rise in productivity through chemicalization, mechanization and irrigation. It depended heavily on exports of a few primary commodities traded on a hostile and adverse international market. The growth in the manufacturing industry was heavily of the import-substitution type with little internal linkages and dependent on import of intermediary inputs. Investment was largely public while domestic private capital was stashed away in foreign countries. One estimate has it that by 1990, 37 per cent of Africa’s wealth had flown outside the continent. (Mkandawire & Soludo 1999:11) To top it all, foreign capital concentrated in extractive industries which simply hemorrhaged the economy rather than contribute to its development.

During this period, the developmental state also borrowed heavily whether for productive or prestigious projects. Petro-dollars accumulated by international banks during the 1973 oil crisis were off-loaded in the form of cheap loans to developing countries. By the end of 1970s, cheap loans turned into heavy debt burdens. By this time, the limits of the early growth were also reached and the economic shocks of the late seventies plunged African economies into deep crisis. Numbers fell, growth rates became negative, debt repayments became unsustainable, fiscal imbalances went out of control, and so did inflation. Social services declined, infrastructure deteriorated and one after another African governments found themselves at the door of IMF and the Paris Club pleading for mercy.

1980s, described by economists as Africa’s ‘lost decade’, was also the transition decade which marked the beginning of the decline of developmentalism and the rise of neo-liberalism, euphemistically called, globalisation.

The crisis, the lost decade and the specter of marginalisation

In 1981 the World Bank published its notorious report, ‘Accelerated development for Africa: an Agenda for Africa’. It was certainly an agenda for Africa set by the erstwhile Bretton Woods institutions with the backing of Western countries but it had little to do with development, accelerated or otherwise. The report and the subsequent structural adjustment programmes concentrated on stabilization measures: getting rid of budget deficits, bringing down rates of inflation, getting prices right, unleashing the market and liberalising trade. According to the World Bank, the villain of the declining economic performance in Africa was the state, it was corrupt and dictatorial, it had no capacity to manage the economy and allocate resources rationally, it was bloated with bureaucracy, and nepotism was its mode of operation. The BWIs would not bail out the crisis ridden economies unless the governments adopted structural adjustment programmes to get stabilization fundamentals right.

Balancing budgets involved cutting out subsidies to agriculture and spending on social programmes, including education and health. Unleashing the market meant doing away with protection of infant industries and rolling back the state from economic activity. The results of SAPs were devastating as many studies by researchers have shown. Social indicators like education, medical care, health, nutrition, rates of literacy and life expectancy all declined. Deindustrialization set in. Redundancies followed. In short, even some of the modest achievements of the nationalist or developmentalist period were lost or undermined.

As the international situation changed with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western imperialist powers regained their ideological initiative. The neo-liberal package of marketisation, privatisation and liberalisation now became the policy for, but not of the African states. Good performers would be praised and rewarded with more aid while the insubordinate and recalcitrant would be parodied and left to its own wit. While aid had always come with strings, now there was no attempt to disguise it. Political conditionalities were added to economic conditionalities. Policy making slipped out of the hands of the African state as Western financed policy consultants in their thousands jetted all over the continent with blue prints of policy on Poverty Reduction Strategies and manuals on good governance on their computers, gobbling up some 4 billion dollars annually. In 1985, to give just one example, foreign experts resident in Equatorial Guinea were paid an amount three times the total government wage bill of the public sector.[Mkandawire & Soludo ibid.:137]

National liberation ideologies have been rubbished and national self-determination itself has been declared passé. Africa is told, it has only one choice: either to get integrated fully into the globalised world or be marginalised.

African leaders are left with little options: ‘you are either with globalisation or doomed!’ They have fallen in line one after another even if it means disowning their own past. Blair’s Commission for Africa report, which consisted of prominent Africans including one president and one prime minister, castigates the whole of the last three decades, which virtually means the whole of post-independence period, as “lost decades”. The primary responsibility is placed on the African state for bad governance and lack of accountability, totally ignoring the role of imperialism in both the exploitation of African resources and supporting of non-democratic states when it suited their interests. Africans are told they have no capacity to think and African states are told they have no capacity to make correct policies.

The age of globalisation and the Pan-Africanist resistance

Globalisation expresses itself in Africa as neo-liberalism. These are a set of policies around stabilization of monetary and fiscal fundamentals on the one hand, and marketisation, liberalisation and privatisation of the economy, on the other. The failures of earlier SAPs and their unrelenting critique by African intellectuals saw some modification of the programmes in the 1990s.

In short, the underlying thrust of the neo-liberal and globalised development “discourse”, which centres on policy-making, is deeper integration of African economies into the global capital and market circuits without fundamental transformation. It is predicated on private capital, which in Africa translates into foreign private capital, as the ‘engine of growth’. It centres on economic growth without asking whether growth necessarily translates into development. It banishes the issues of equality and equity to the realm of rights, not development. ‘Human-centered and people-driven’ development which were the kingpin of African alternatives, such as the Lagos Plan of Action, are pooh-poohed into non-existence as the African people are reduced to ‘the chronically poor’ who are the subject matter of papers on strategies for poverty reduction rather than the authors and drivers of development. It villainises African states and demonizes African bureaucracies as corrupt, incapable and unable to learn. They need globalised foreign advisors and consultants, who are now termed development practitioners, to monitor and oversee them.

In this “discourse” the developmental role of the state is declared dead and buried. Instead, it is assigned the role of a “chief” to supervise the globalisation project under the tutelage of imperialism, now called, development partners. The irony of the recent Commission for Africa was that it was convened, constituted and chaired by a British Prime Minister, while an African president and a prime minister sat on it as members. This symbolizes the nature of the so-called “new partnership”. The message is clear: African “co-partners” in African development are neither equal nor in the driver’s seat.
But the neo-liberal project in Africa has not been without resistance. As Nyerere observed in his Preface to a book by African scholars significantly sub-titled, ‘Beyond Dispossession and dependence”:

Africa’s history is not only one of slavery, exploitation and colonialism’ it is also a story of struggle against these evils, and of battles won after many setbacks and much suffering. (Adedeji ed. 1993:xv)

There have been struggles against SAPs and globalisation in the streets and in lecture halls of Africa. I will only confine myself to intellectual resistance. African scholars have severely critiqued structural adjustment programmes and indicated alternatives. Even African states and bureaucracies have not surrendered without some fight. There have been attempts to provide alternative frameworks and plans and programmes such as the Lagos Plan of Action, (1980); The African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programme for Socio-economic Recovery and Transformation (1989) and the African Charter for Popular Participation and Development (1990).

These alternative frameworks have underlined the need for a holistic approach to Africa’s development; called for a continental programme of regional integration and collective self-reliance; cajoled African states not to surrender their developmental role, and sovereignty in policy-making; and have attempted to develop a vision of a human-centered and people-driven development for the future of the continent. These African initiatives have been invariably dismissed by the erstwhile Bretton Woods institutions and the so-called “development partners”. Wielding the threat of marginalisation and dangling the carrot of aid, the so-called development partners have, persistently and dogmatically, pushed through their own agendas, which invariably prioritize the geo-political and strategic needs of the global hegemons and the voracious appetites of corporate capital for resources and profits.

The African ‘state of art’ on development

I will quickly summarize the new development perspectives that are emerging in the debates of African scholars and intellectuals.

Firstly, African scholars are agreed that there is a clear need to go beyond stabilization fundamentals to developmental fundamentals. While stabilization policies and measures may be necessary, they are not sufficient. They have to be conceived within the larger context of building a self-sustaining economy rather than as short-term shock therapies.
Secondly, approaches and concerns of political economy on state and society have to be brought back in the discourse on development. A critical assessment and appreciation of the developmental discourses of the nationalist period is essential.

Thirdly, the state must reassert its developmental role, not so much as an executive or a regulatory agency, but as an organised force with a vision and an operational programme. It must both protect nascent sources of domestic capital, as well as take account of, and provide for, the basic needs of the population as a whole. The role of the South-East Asian states in this regard, particularly in the development of human capital, is often cited in support.

In sum, the state must play a lead role in the long-term planning so as to place the economy on the developmental path towards an integrated economy.

But, fourthly, the state itself has to be reformed and restructured. The despotic colonial and the authoritarian post-colonial state cannot play a popular developmental role. Its limits have been reached. The reformed state must have its roots in the people and must seek legitimacy from the people. It must seek a new social consensus and build its legitimacy not only on the economic terrain – development – but also on the political and legal terrain of popular participation, freedoms, rights and stable constitutional orders.

Some African intellectuals, not without evidence, have questioned the suitability and viability of the liberal democratic model for Africa. They have forcefully argued that Africa has to go beyond liberal to social democracy which would address not only the question of formal equality but that of social justice and equity as well.

Formal democracy with multiparty and five-year elections too has come under scrutiny. The experience of the liberalisation of the state over the last couple of decades does not inspire confidence or hope. Popular democracy, grassroots democracy, local democracy, new democracy, etc. are the new concepts being discussed and debated.

Fifthly, African scholars are revisiting the nationalist period and the aborted national project. There is renewed interest in the Pan-Africanist vision. There is no way, it is argued, Africa can truly develop in the face of the threat of marginalisation by the new imperialist assault called globalisation, unless it unites. This time around, Africa has to go beyond regional integration and free trade agreements and work towards political unity, a Federation of African States. The nationalism and national liberation of the globalisation age is Pan-Africanism, it is asserted.

In this respect African intellectuals have severely criticized and exposed the limits of the apparent “African” initiative, the New Economic Partnership for African Development or NEPAD. NEPAD is another form of donor-dependent program seeking more aid and assistance and predicated on further integration in the unequal global structures. Calling it a ‘feudo-imperial partnership’ Adebayo Adedeji says, the objective of NEPAD is ‘for the African canoe to be firmly tied to the North’s neo-liberal ship on the waters of globalisation’ (Nyong’o et. al. eds, 2002:36).

Sixthly, the debate on the vexed question of agency continues unabated. Is there an African national bourgeoisie capable of leading a genuine capitalist development or do we just have comprador bourgeoisies serving the needs of foreign capital? Is state-centred socialist development, based on popular forces, the only alternative? In any case, is a socialist alternative feasible in the light of the unipolar hegemony of imperialism? Or is it even desirable in the light of the experience of the former Soviet-bloc countries? Or, shall we develop a transitional ‘model’, called ‘new democracy’, based on what Samir Amin calls ‘national popular forces’?

Whatever be the case, progressive and concerned African intellectuals seem to agree that a ‘national or a new democratic revolution’ on a Pan-African scale is on the agenda, both as a form of resistance and as an alternative framework for ‘reconstruction’.

All in all, the development discourse in Africa among African intellectuals is alive, kicking, mentally refreshing and intellectually formidable, notwithstanding declarations of World Bank technicians, called consultants, proclaiming ‘the end of development’.
Africans are reclaiming their right to think for themselves.

* Issa G. Shivji is Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania ([email protected])

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Selected references

Adedeji, A., ed. 1993, Africa within the World: Beyond Dispossession and Dependence, London: Zed books.
Amin, S. 1994, ‘The Issue of Democracy in the Contemporary Third World, in Himmelstrand, U. et. al. eds. Op. cit.
Bond, P., ed. 2002, Fanon’s Warning: a Civil Society Reader on the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, New Jersey: Africa World Press.
Cabral, A., 1980, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings, London: Heinemann.
Chole, E. & Jibrin Ibrahim, eds. 1995, Democratisation Processes in Africa: Problems and Prospects, Dakar: CODESRIA.
Fanon, F., 1963, The Wretched of the Earth, London: Penguin.
Furedi, F., 1994, The New Ideology of Imperialism, London: Pluto.
Campbell, H., & H. Stein, eds., 1991, The IMF and Tanzania, Harare: SAPES.
Himmelstrand, U. et. al. eds., 1994, African Perspectives on Development, London: James Currey.
Hyden, G., 1980, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania: Underdevelopment and an Uncaptured Peasantry, Berkely & Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Landsberg, C. & F. Kornegey, 1998, ‘The African Renaissance: a quest for Pax Africana and Pan-Africanism’, in Foundation for Global Dialogue, South Africa and Africa: Reflections on the African Renaissance, FGD Occasional paper No. 17.
Legum, L., 1965, Pan-Africanism: A short political guide, (Revised edition) London: Pall Mall Press.
Luthuli, A. et. al, 1964, Africa’s Freedom, London: Unwin Books.
Mafeje, A., 2002, ‘Democratic governance and new democracy in Africa: Agenda for the Future, in Nyong’o, Ghirmazion & Lamba, eds.
Mahjoub, A. (ed.) 1990, Adjustment or De-linking? (London: Zed/UNU).
Mahmood, M., 1996, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Pinceton: Princeton.
Mboya, T., Freedom and After, 1963, London: Andre Deutsch.
Mkandawire, T. & C. C. Soludo, eds., 1999, Our Continent, Our Future”: African perspectives on structural adjustment, Dakar: CODESRIA.
Nkrumah, K. 1965, Neo-colonialism: the last stage of Imperialism, London: Heinemann.
Nyerere, J. K. 1963b, ‘The Second Scramble’, reprinted in Nyerere op. cit. 1967.
Nyerere, J. K. 1968, Freedom and Socialism, London: OUP.
Nyerere, J. K., 1967, Freedom and Unity: a selection from writings and speeches, Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press.
Nyerere, J. K, 1963a, ‘A United States of Africa’, Journal of Modern African Studies, January 1963, Cambridge reprinted in Nyerere op. cit. 1967..
Nyerere, J.K. 1966, ‘’The Dilemma of the Pan-Africanist,’ in J. K. Nyerere, op. cit. 1968.
Nyerere, J.K. 1997, ‘Africa Must Unite’, edited excerpts from a public lecture delivered in Accra to mark Ghana’s fortieth Independence Day anniversary celebrations, United New Africa Global Network website: http://www.unitednewafrica.com/Africa%20Unite.htm
Nyongo, P.A. ed., 1989, La Politica Africana Y La Crisis del Desarrallo, Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico.
Nyong’o, Ghirmazion & Lamba, eds. 2002, New Partnership for Africa’s Development, NEPAD: A New Path? Nairobi: Heinrich Boll Foundation.
Rodney, W. 1972, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publsihing House.
Semboja, J., Juma, Mwapachu & Eduard Jansen eds., 2002. Local Perspectives on Globalisation: The African Case, Dar es Salaam: REPOA &Mkuki na Nyota.
Shivji, I. G., ed. 1991 State and Constitutionalism: An African Debate on Democracy, Harare: SAPES.
Shivji, I. G. 2000, Critical Elements of a New Democratic Consensus in Africa" in Haroub Othman (ed.) Reflections on Leadership in Africa: Essays in Honour of Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere, (Belgium: VUB University Press).
Shivji, I. G. 2005, ‘The Rise, the Fall and the Insurrection of Nationalism in Africa’, in Felicia Arudo Yieke ed. op.cit.
South Commission, the, 1990, The Challenge to the South: The Report of the South Commission, London: Oxford University Press.
Tandon, Y., 1982, University of Dar es Salaam: debate on class, state & imperialism, Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House.
Toussaint, E. 1999, Your Money or Your Life!, the tyranny of global finance, London: Pluto Press.
Yieke, F. A. ed. 2005, East Africa: In Search of National and Regional Renewal, Dakar: CODESRIA.

“You have to be a genius to make a loss in a beer business,” writes Issa Shivji as he critiques the false logic behind privatization on the African continent. The first entities to face privatization were those that were most successful, he notes, with the subsequent argument for further privatization pushing the line that privatization led to a quick turnaround in the fortunes of ailing state enterprises.

The privatisation mania has gripped us like an unpreventable plague. The privatisation list is being expanded inexorably. Whether we admit it or not, and whatever the language we may use to rationalise it, the fact remains that privatisation is thrust down the throats of African governments by the BWIs (Bretton Woods Institutions) and the dominant Western powers. Even the so-called debt relief by the G8 is predicated on privatisation as one of the conditionalities. And the BWIs have a peculiar way of arguing.

The failures of privatisation are used to argue for more privatisation of more resources. The argument goes, “if you don’t privatise enough, you cannot reap its benefits”. And, of course, the success of privatisation per force calls for more privatisation. Either way, the argument is self-fulfilling.

The first rationale was that loss-making parastatals were a burden on the taxpayer. Privatisation would ensure that they were turned into efficient, tax paying enterprises. Yet, of course, the first parastatals to be privatised, like the breweries, were not loss making. You have to be a genius to make a loss in a beer business. Their “quick successes” in terms of turnover and tax revenues were used to justify other privatisations.

Obviously, no private investor would want to buy a loss making enterprise. So they have to be sold at dirt-cheap prices without liabilities and losses. Liabilities have to be taken over by the state, which means the very taxpayer who was supposed to be rescued from the loss making parastatal in the first place. Invariably, one of the first casualties of privatisation is workers, thousands of whom are made redundant. The new owners refuse to pay retrenchment benefits. The government has to do it, if at all. So the taxpayer assumes another liability while at the same time some of the tax payers fall out of the tax payers list as they join the queues of job-seekers.

No private profiteer would want to put in his capital unless he makes profit, and, not just profits, but high rates of profit. Africa today offers very high rates of return on capital, what with its rich resources and dependent governments. As Mwalimu (Julius Nyere) once said, Africa attracts only missionaries and mercenaries: missionaries to console its poor, and mercenaries to oversee its pillage.

But profit-making assumes certain minimum conditions. It is the state which has to take on the burden of creating the enabling environment for capital to make profits: build the infrastructure and supply water and electricity and telecommunications at cheap rates; control recalcitrant workers; maintain law and order and facilitate various service providers - from the entertainment industry to catering to security companies - to service the new “community of expatriates”. It is believed that Africa today has more expatriates than at the time of independence.

But then our water and electricity and telephone parastatals are not efficient. Their tariffs are high. Our markets are below standard; our meat is not hygienic and our tomatoes and onions and oranges do not meet the minimum size. So utilities too have to be denationalized, if not by outright sale, then via leasing and management contracts. Squatters have to be cleared to make way for supermarkets and expatriate villages to supply roasted meat from South Africa and cereals from Switzerland.

But it is not easy to turn around utilities into profit making ventures. Their plants and machinery are outdated. Their billing systems have lots of leakages. Since profits or commissions depend on revenue, more efficient water meters and electric meters have to be imported. Once again the state is called upon to provide enabling finance for rehabilitation. It is obliged to take loans from the World Bank and elsewhere to help the investor to import the necessary machinery. Of course, the loans have to be serviced and repaid from the taxpayer’s money – whether the existent or yet-to-be-born. While public debts mount private profits rocket, all in the name of development.

But corporate profit making has to look for new terrains constantly. From producing commodities to turning pubic goods into commodities, the corporate capital moves from manufacturing to public services, education and health and water and energy and from commoditizing land to privatising forests.

Privatisation and commercialisation of forest products is the new trend. A recent story in Tanzanian newspapers reported the deal to lease out the Longuza Teak Plantation to Kilombero Valley Teak Company (KVTC) and is only a tip of the iceberg. Forests have become important to corporate capital not only for timber resources but for bio-resources. By the same token, the implication of delivering forests to corporate capital go beyond the issues of deforestation, as corporate capital turns them into producers of raw material for their veritable workshops of genetic engineering.

Privatisation of forests and forest products has elicited a lot of resistance in Latin America and Asia and even some developed countries including Canada and the United States. The implication and effects of privatising forests are far reaching. These have been debated and discussed in other countries.

We need to learn from the experience of others and re-assess our own. Let the Longuza incidence open up a wide ranging debate on the issues of privatisation generally, but more particularly, the implications of privatising – in whatever form – one of the most important resource and heritage, our forests.

Let us not deliver our future livelihoods into the hands of corporate pirates.

©Issa Shivji. Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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Simply joining the throb to make poverty history will never be sufficient to banish injustice, writes Issa Shivji. Rather, in order to make poverty history, the history of poverty must be understood.

The GG8 (Geldof & Group of 8) fanfare in Gleneagles, Scotland is over. Its slogan was `Make Poverty History`. Originally this was the slogan of well-meaning NGOs and concerned young people who could not stomach the outrageous poverty of millions in the South existing side by side with the filthy wealth of a tiny minority on this planet.

The richest 225 people in the world own a combined wealth equal to the annual income of almost half the population of the earth. 1.2 billion of humanity exists in subhuman conditions at less than a dollar a day when 4 per cent of the wealth of these filthy rich 225 persons would be sufficient to pay the additional costs to achieve and maintain universal access to basic education, health care, maternity care, adequate food, safe water and sanitation for the whole human race.

The statistics are not new. They have been well known. Now even the perpetrators of the system which produces and reproduces this inhuman system quote them – of course for their own purpose.

But as these things go, the politicians of the system (euphemistically called globalisation) co-opted the slogan. The fun-idols of the well-meaning but naïve, privileged youth of the North were accommodated as the likes of Geldof were knighted by the queen and appointed to Blair’s Africa Commission to rub shoulders with the presidents of the African poor.

The point is that while it is necessary to campaign to Make Poverty History and shame the shameless classes of exploiters and oppressors and win over the uncommitted, it is not sufficient. To make poverty history, we must understand the history of poverty.

Poverty is neither our fate nor God-given. It did not and has not existed from time immemorial. It was not invented by the West either. It was created by them, who invaded our countries and imposed their system which continues to siphon off resources from the continent.

The history of the plunder and pillage of the African continent through the slave trade and colonialism; neo-colonialism and imperialism is known - although these days not taught in our schools since they have become “international” academies. If this was only history, we could have perhaps forgiven, although, not forgotten. But it is not just history. It is our present. New forms of slavery and colonialism and imperialism packaged and labelled in different forms continue unabated.

The mainstream media and politicians including our globalisation-friendly presidents and prime ministers continue to beg for forgiveness of debt and go round with a begging bowl to alleviate poverty. Yes, indeed, even preparation of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) comes as a condition of aid. And as a further condition of aid we hire 1000-dollar a day consultants to help us draft those papers, all part of “aid”.

Meanwhile, we shower praises and send congratulatory messages to Mr Tony Blair for taking upon himself to chit-chat with his fellow G8’s on African poverty.

What is in there for the Blairs, Browns and Bushes of this world at this time to Brownwash (courtesy World Development Movement, WDM) African aid, debt and poverty? As I said, there are many a well-intentioned people in the North who have been campaigning to Make Poverty History. But also there are those – who are usually painted by the mainstream media with the brush of anti-this or anti-that minority “bent on violence” - who have and are going beyond it to understand the history and politics of poverty.

Martin Curtis, the head of WDM and a well-known British historian, says that the British Government has a political and an economic goal behind taking up the question of African poverty. The political goal is to maintain a big power status for Britain. “This boils down to invading a country from time to time, retaining nuclear weapons to make sure we can obliterate most of the world several times over, and professing our total support for US foreign policy.”

“The economic goal is to organise the global economy, and particular regions, so that the Middle East, southern Africa and South East Asia work in the interests of Western and British corporations.” Only ignoramuses would challenge this analysis.

The neo-liberal policies thrust upon African countries are clearly to integrate the continent further in the web of exploitative relationships and thus profit from the enormous resources of the continent. The US has now significantly moved its attention to Africa’s oil, as Middle East sources become more unstable due to the political resistance of the Arab masses which continue to simmer to a boiling point.

Britain’s interest is to develop African markets not only to dump its goods but also to sell services, the so-called invisibles. It thus firmly supports the privatisation and commoditization of water, energy, heath care, education, and land. We have had a taste of what this means for the “poor” in Tanzania.

A British secret Foreign Office file from 1968 says: “We should bend our energies to help produce a world economic climate in which our external trade, our income from invisibles and our balance of payments can prosper.”

In effect therefore it should not come as a surprise to anybody when Blair wields the carrot of aid and debt relief with one hand, while using the stick of World Bank-IMF-WTO rules and conditionality on liberalising and privatising the economy, with the other.

The Geldof-type Live Aid Bands and musical shows assuage the conscience of the wealthy inhabitants of the North while giving political legitimacy to the military interventions and political interferences of Western leaders in the lives and affairs of the African people – ninety per cent of whom have now been labelled “poor” and therefore disabled to resist and fight for their own salvation.

No need to cite another string of statistics. Just one may suffice. The 2002 Human Development Report of UNDP computes that developing countries lose more than twice in debt servicing what they get in net foreign investment, aid and grants to NGOs combined.

The Bob Geldofs of this world need to pay heed to their fellow campaigners like Martin Curtis when they say:

“We should not only be ratcheting up campaigning on individual issues. We also need to unite in a campaign to fundamentally change the system.”

Our own media and NGOs and the angry youth need to understand this message even more and not simply get subsumed in the globalisation mania in return for a few “trinkets” thrown on our NGO tables.

* © Issa Shivji. Issa Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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Capitalism came into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”, writes Issa Shivji. And the bottom line which drives capitalism in Africa is profits and accumulation. Africa offers both with relative ease and apparently little resistance.

The Asian Tsunami was a great human tragedy; so was the invasion of Iraq. In both cases, the US-led financial capitalism found a great opportunity. The opportunity was to “reconstruct” these far flung societies in the image of a neo-conservative ideological world-view: total hegemony of capitalism under the supremacy of the United States, euphemistically called globalization. Condoleeza Rice, the American Secretary of State, unashamedly described tsunami as “a wonderful opportunity” that “has paid great dividends for us.” What was this opportunity?

The answer is given by a group called Thailand Tsunami Survivors and Supporters which says for “businessmen-politicians, the tsunami was the answer to their prayers, since it literally wiped these coastal areas clean of the communities which had previously stood in the way of their plans for resorts, hotels, casinos and shrimp farms. To them, all these coastal areas are now open land!”

Some 80 per cent of the victims of tsunami were small fishing communities. Little has been done to restore their lives and communities. Instead, the likes of the World Bank, now headed by a neo-con called Paul Wolfowitz, is pushing for the expansion of tourism and industrial fish farms. Herman Kumara, head of the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement in Sri Lanka, warns that his country was now facing “a second tsunami of corporate globalization and militarization.” He says: “We see this as a plan of action amidst the tsunami crisis to hand over the sea and the coast to foreign corporations and tourism, with military assistance from the US Marines.”

Mr. Wolfowitz was the US Deputy Secretary of State when Iraq was reduced to rubbles and Iraqis to corpses by the “coalition” forces. Bodies had been hardly buried before consulting firms started rewriting Iraq’s investment laws and selling off public companies. One of the corporations which bagged big “reconstruction” contracts, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, another country under “reconstruction”, was Halliburton. Halliburton is a giant oil-service company which has been awarded, under dubious circumstances, billions of dollars worth of military, defense and so-called reconstruction contracts by the US government. The US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, is the former Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton.

The transition from the bi-polar world, where we had two super-powers and two competing world views, socialism and capitalism, to the uni-polar world where monotheism (the single god being the god of capitalism, Profit) prevails, has been strewn with wars, conflicts, destruction, death and crass ideological propaganda, double-speak, double standards and blatant lies. Seen from a historical standpoint, this should not come as a surprise. After all, the transition from Britain’s imperial hegemony in the first half of the last century to that of the US itself involved the Great Crash of the 1930s, the rise of racist fascism, and two World Wars. From the ashes of WWII emerged the bi-polar world in which the US established its supremacy of the capitalist camp bringing Japan and Europe firmly under its wing. There too followed “reconstruction” which gave a new lease of life to capitalism. (By the way, US assistance for reconstruction was confined to Europe only. Both Japan and the then Soviet Union reconstructed through their own resources and efforts.)

In Europe, the Soviets and the US carved out their respective spheres of armed control while restricting their disputes and conflicts to the ‘war of ideas’ called the Cold War. In the rest of the world, they fought, directly or by proxy, hot wars to assert their spheres of influence. Between 1944 and 2004 there were at least 21 hot conflicts in which the US was directly involved; of these, 11 after the end of the Cold War. These include the gruesome Vietnam War in which hundreds of thousand were literally burnt to death by napalm and the two Gulf wars (still ongoing). In the Vietnam War, US forces sprayed some 21 million gallons of dioxin herbicides, including 800 pounds of Agent Orange, to destroy the foliage so as to flush out guerrillas. The Vietnamese and American troops are still suffering from the after effects of that deadly herbicide.

In the first Gulf War, the “coalition” forces rained bombs on Iraq equivalent of some 11 Hiroshimas. In the second Iraqi war no doubt even more bombs were thrust into the heart and soil of Iraq.

Capitalism came into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” Witness the first genocide ever of the Native Americans and the vicious slave trade which destroyed the social fabric of African empires and depopulated the continent. It has since maintained itself by wars, death and destruction. It brought the peoples and the resources of the tri-continent (Asia, Africa and Latin America) under its hegemony through colonialism, neo-colonialism and imperialism whose newest edition is christened globalization.

Imperialism is inherent in capitalism just as war is inherent in imperialism. Just as the economic crash of South East Asia in the late 1990s was used by American corporations to hive off the assets of South Korean conglomerates and re-establish their control of the Asian economies, so the tsunami disaster has been used to globalize their coastal and water resources.

In Africa, the so-called aid and debt have been used both as a carrot and a stick. You switch them on and off as necessary. A nationalist African or third world government determined to retain its resources for its people would be threatened with cutting-off of aid and would certainly not find itself among the beneficiaries of debt cancellation, while a pliant and obedient state would get more aid and its debt may just be cancelled. Of course, nothing of this happens without strings attached. Debt cancellation goes hand in hand with more loans (since one is now credit-worthy) and aid is invariably used to create markets and an enabling environment for the multinationals which have a voracious appetite for Africa’s copper, cobalt, oil, timber, diamonds and gold and bio-resources and of course cheap labour.

The bottom line which drives capitalism is profits and accumulation and Africa offers both with relative ease and apparently little resistance. We are good converts to the religion of globalization. Colonialism was enabled by converting us to Christianity to save our souls and steal our resources; globalization teaches us to commoditize, marketise, and privatize to save our skins from poverty. In the process, the majority of us end up being deprived of both souls and skins while a few among us adorn “imported” souls and alien skins. Fanon called it Black skins, White masks.

Whoever said, ‘capitalism with a human face’! Yes, capitalists surely have a human face like the rest of us; a few may even be humane. But capitalism is faceless and colourless. It is defined by a drive; an insatiable drive for profits. “Accumulate, accumulate! That is the Moses and the prophets!” of capitalism.

© Issa Shivji. Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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Since the defeat of apartheid, South African capital has begun a brutal march northwards that is reminiscent of a “Second Great Boer Trek”. South African supermarket chains have sprung up across Africa, as have cell phone companies, mining groups and even South African style water front developments. The next big sector being eyed by Afrikaner farmers is land, writes Issa Shivji.

Nature did not create a group of people with capital on one side and another group with only muscle-power but no capital on the other side. Political economists tell us that this great division of the human race, what we call the system of capitalism, is the result of a long historical process. In this historical process, the original capital was acquired through a gruesome process of plunder, expropriation, looting, wars, invasions, slavery, indentured labour and colonialism and imperialism. Political economists call this process of acquiring original capital ‘primitive accumulation’.

Even after capitalism has established itself and capital more or less follows the laws of the market to accumulate more capital through profits, the processes of primitive accumulation continue side by side in different areas and under different circumstances. Under today’s system of international capitalism called globalisation the processes of primitive accumulation are most intense on the African continent. Let us palaver on one example which is close to this part of the world and which concerns us directly. This is the inflow of South African capital into neighbouring countries after the fall of apartheid.

Apartheid itself was the great human invention to enable primitive accumulation in South Africa. The 1913 Native Land Act declared that the whole of South African lands belonged to white South Africans with a small print provision which stipulated that 13 per cent of the land will be “scheduled areas” held in trust for the welfare and benefit of “natives”. Thus the whites came to own 87 per cent of land while the majority blacks were bundled into the remaining 13 per cent, the reserves.

On this system of segregation was built the whole edifice of South African capitalism in which the state – not the market – played the pivotal role. Migrant labour from the reserves and homelands in South Africa and from neighbouring countries, including Tanganyika, provided the muscle-power to exploit the land and minerals of the southern tip of the continent. Thus was built the modern South Africa in which the Whites created and lived the ‘heaven on earth’ leaving the Blacks to burn out in the man-made hell of apartheid.

The 1913 Land Act was the turning point in the First Primitive Accumulation of the South African capital. The turning point in the Second Primitive Accumulation is the fall of apartheid enabling South African capital to move out into the rest of the African continent. The process is still unfolding whose end result cannot be predicted but certain interesting trends are taking shape.

Africa is the third largest export market for South Africa. Africa’s share of the South African exports rose from 4 per cent in 1991 to 12 per cent in 2001. Much of this export goes to SADC countries. Today we see South African onions and potatoes and oranges and, of course, wines and beers and spirits and steaks and dried meats in “our” supermarkets and restaurants and hotels called Shoprites and Steers and Debonairs and Protea. Shoprite has branches in 15 African counties and is in the process of expanding in other countries.

Then there is the South African investment, both from parastatals as well as private. Over the five years (1997-2001) South African investments in Africa increased by 300 per cent. It stood at 77 billion Rand in 2001. Almost half of this was direct investment and 80 per cent was in SADC countries. South African capital went into strategic sectors: mining, banking, insurance and finance and telecommunications, airline and railways.

The beer industry, which is trumpeted as a success story in this country (Tanzania), is only a showcase. The jugular vein lies in the strategic sectors. The South African AngloGold, now merged with Ashanti Goldfileds, and Randgold control our gold. Vodacom is dominant in cell phones; ABSA, through NBC, and Stanbic dominate banking; Networks “manages” TANESCO; and South African Airways (SAA) have taken over the national airline ATC with a view to create an East African hub for SAA. SAA wanted to create a similar West African hub through taking over Nigeria’s national airline but the deal has apparently fallen through because Nigerians demanded 10 per cent equity in SAA which the South African government refused.

Escom Enterprises, a giant South African electrical corporation, has presence in 33 African countries. It has utility management contracts in Malawi, Mali, Uganda and Nigeria. It would not be surprising if eventually TANESCO falls in Escom’s laps.

Then there is a South African company called V&A Waterfront which has contracts in Mauritius, Gabon and Nigeria to construct waterfront complexes. A similar project is afoot in our ‘Heaven of Peace’ in which, sooner than later, heavens will line the ocean leaving behind “hell-holes” of slums in Kariakoo, Manzese and even the city centre and Upanga.

The next big sector awaiting South African “investment” and keenly eyed by Afrikaner farmers is land; as one South African official put it: “For the Boers, land is next to God and the Bible”. As South Africa attempts land redistribution to redress the wrongs of the apartheid period, it has to find a place for its white farmers. Mozambique has already given 50 year concessions of thousands of acres of land to South Africa’s Boers who are busy recreating apartheid-like settlements.

Mozambique, which is being hailed in the Western, especially the American, official circles as a success story, is almost a text-book case of South African investments. Almost half of South Africa’s corporate investment in Africa is in Mozambique. South Africa has become the single largest investor in Mozambique, Between 1997-2001 some 250 South African companies opened operations in Mozambique.

It is ironical that the land of Samora Machel which was in the forefront of the struggle against makaburu should be the first to fall in the “Second Great Boer Trek”, this time around to the North of the continent. The first Boer Trek was in the mid 19th century when Boer farmers ran away from the British into the interior opening up new lands, in the process decimating African communities. This is how the Boer republics of Free Orange State and Transvaal were created. Tanzanians may do well to study the Mozambiquen experience as they may be next in the path of the “Second Great Boer Trek”.

© Issa Shivji. Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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Issa Shivji examines the possibility of Federation of the Great Lakes Region consisting of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and the DRC. Such a federation, he states, would boost a genuine Pan-Africanism and contribute towards peace in the region.

The East African Federation is again on the horizon. The timetable is out. The Federation that was much talked about over forty years ago by the nationalist leaders may just come to fruition but under very different conditions. All the peoples of East Africa must debate these new conditions. This time around we should not leave it simply to the states and politicians to unite us. Only if we unite as a people, can we ensure a sustained unity. And as a people we have to widen our horizons to take into account new conditions and possibilities.

There are two new conditions that I would like to raise. First, the original four countries – Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika and Zanzibar – which were supposed to be part of the Federation in the early 1960s have contracted to three as Tanganyika and Zanzibar are now Tanzania. As we know, the Union question itself has been a subject of much discussion among us. Do we need to resolve this issue as we enter the Federation?

Secondly, the number of potential members of the Federation has expanded to five. Rwanda and Burundi have not only shown interest but want very much to be part of the process right from the beginning. This is a welcome sign. But we have to go beyond.

We have to think in terms of a Federation of Great Lakes Region (FGLR). The Federation of Great Lakes Region would include the Democratic Republic of Congo. There are many very good reasons why we should think in terms of a greater federation.

The DRC shares longest borders with at least four East African countries, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. It is the richest country in Africa holding the world’s biggest deposits of copper, cobalt and cadmium. DRC has seen no peace as its riches are coveted by imperial powers. Even neighbouring countries like Uganda and Rwanda did not spare DRC. The wars in DRC invariably spill over to the neighbouring East African countries whether this is in the form of hundreds of thousands of refugees as in Tanzania or armed conflicts as in Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda.

Both peace and prosperity in this part of the world depend strategically on peace, stability and prosperity in the DRC. It is not possible to secure peace without the DRC being part of a larger political entity.

Within the FGLR, Tanzania can play a stabilizing role while at the same time helping to curb what looks like territorial ambitions on the part of Rwanda. The Great Lakes Region is becoming one of the most militarized zones in Africa as Western powers (including, unfortunately, South Africa) continue to pump arms into the region. Within a larger political grouping, it is perhaps easier and more feasible to control civil wars which have been transformed into border wars between countries.

Within the FGLR, given different sizes and resources of the countries concerned, co-operation is likely to be complementary rather than competitive. First, no single country within FGLR has the potential of becoming a political or economic hegemon, unlike, for example, if DRC were to be sucked into the Southern African orbit. Secondly, culturally we can build on the common linguistic foundation of Swahili as the language is widely spoken in the Great Lakes Region. Thirdly, the uneven industrial development among the potential members of FGLR is not as intense as to pose a threat to a mutually advantageous development. Fourthly, the great lakes, the railways and the harbours on the Eastern seaboard provide an excellent web of transport both within the region and with the outside world. Finally, at this stage, a larger federation which includes DRC is to the mutual advantage of both the East African countries, as traditionally categorized, and the DRC.

As a matter of fact, such a project resulting in peace in this region of Africa would dramatically boost genuine Pan-Africanism and bring the dream of African Unity closer.

Finally, the FGLR would be formidable enough to protect itself from the ravages of imperial exploitation while at the same time pausing no expansionist or military threat to its neighbours.

Conversely, an East African Federation as presently conceived with Rwanda-Burundi in and DRC out, has the potential of dragging in the relatively peaceful East African countries into DRC/Rwanda/Burundi conflicts, in the process weakening both East Africa and DRC. Truly, history has not left us much choice: we either federate and create hopes for peace and prosperity or consume ourselves in incessant fratricidal wars.

The vision of FGLR is feasible. Will our leaders rise to the occasion?

* © Issa Shivji. Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

From colonial resource exploitation to the negative impact of rampaging neo-liberalism, Africa has always followed behind the experience of Latin America. With general elections due to take place in late October in Tanzania, Issa Shivji asks why the candidates aren’t talking about how the country is going to avoid recent Latin American experiences with the Washington Consensus?

Latin America in the third world is a good barometer of what follows and what to expect in Africa, particularly in relation to economic policies. Being in the backyard of a superpower, Latin America’s experience tends to be more severe and so is the anti-imperial resistance of its people. The experience of imperialist-generated military coups that we had in Africa during the first two decades of independence was preceded by a similar wave of militarism in Latin America. US-supported Mobutus and UK-Israel supported Idi Amins, were pale shadows of the suppression, torture, and disappearances of the CIA-installed Pinochets.

The pillage of the resources of the DRC, the former Congo-Zaire, is a mirror image of the century old pillage of the timber, oil, mineral and other natural resources of Latin America by imperialism. Now that imperial powers have turned their attention to the African oil in West Africa, Sudan and possibly the Eastern seaboard, we may well be on the way to repeat that tragic episode in Latin American history. God forbid.

In Africa, our leaders tend to cower before our imperial paymasters. Somehow we seem to be so impervious to lessons of history, both our own and others’, that we tragically repeat it. Important substitution industrialization was tried out in Latin America long before we experimented with it. It failed. Yet we didn’t learn from Latin America’s failure. The free market and privatisation policies worked out by the IMF, the World Bank and US Treasury called the “Washington consensus” has been on in Latin America for some time now. The policy prescriptions of the IFIs (International Financial Institutions) for Africa were virtually carbon-copies of those imposed in Latin America.

I once downloaded some of the IFI-generated policy papers for Argentina and found that they were so similar to those for Tanzania; you only had to change the country name and currency denomination!

Argentina became the star of the Washington consensus. The IMF held it up as a showpiece. Water, electricity, telecommunications, gas, post office, the national airline and many other state companies were cut up and sold off within years. Foreign investment flowed in at the rate of US$800 million a month. The GDP grew by 10 per cent. Ten years into the reforms, Menem, once a populist president of Argentina, now wholly taken in by the “Washington Consensus”, went to the US declaring that his country had pulled off an economic miracle: hyperinflation had been brought under control, corruption was reduced and everybody was happy. The Argentinian middle class deposited their pesos in dollar accounts, thanks to easy convertibility.

Then came the great crash in 2001 as banks could no longer honour deposits and billions of dollars flowed out at a faster rate than they had flowed in. Within 5 days in July (2002) alone, 2.6 billion dollars left the country. By 2002 the GDP had fallen by 21 per cent, a performance similar to the depression years of the 1930s. Even middle class professionals, including engineers and bankers and white collar workers found themselves with begging bowls in the street. Some attempted to commit suicide while, once passive, society-women were out demonstrating in the streets banging their fancy, but empty, pots and pans. Governments changed every week. The ‘Washington’ baby collapsed like a pack of cards. Argentina threatened to default on its $141 billion foreign debt. The IMF pumped in more billions which came through the door and left through the window in the form of capital flight and debt servicing.

The rise and fall of the neo-liberal experiment in Argentina, which reduced a once prosperous country to economic ruins, thanks to the “Washington consensus”, made a great impression on the South American continent. A wave of backlash against the free market and privatisation set in. Left presidents have been elected in a number of countries through popular vote, the best example of which is Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. The American-backed attempt to overthrow him did not survive. He was out of the state house for two days but was literally reinstalled by massive demonstrations of the poor – the “wretched of the earth” - from the slums of Caracas. But the rich and middle classes did not give up. The imperialist media kept instigating and middle class opposition was mobilized to call for a referendum to overthrow Chavez. In August 2004, Richard Gott reported:

“To the dismay of opposition groups in Venezuela, and to the surprise of international observers gathering in Caracas, President Hugo Chavez is about to secure a stunning victory on August 15, in a referendum designed to lead to his overthrow. First elected in 1998 as a barely known colonel, armed with little more than revolutionary rhetoric and a moderate social-democratic programme, Chavez has become the leader of the emerging opposition in Latin America to the neo-liberal hegemony of the United States.”

In a recent speech Chavez finally declared.

"I am convinced, at this stage of my life - I am now 50 years old - after six years as a president, after nearly 30 years of political struggle, since 1997, when I had the idea of taking an oath from a small group of fellow countrymen, soldiers, to create the first nucleus - there were only about 5 of us then - of what later became the MBR-200 [Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement 200] ... after many readings, debates, discussions and many travels around the world, etc., I am convinced, and I think that this conviction will be for the rest of my life, that the path to a new, better and possible world, is not capitalism, the path is socialism, that is the path: socialism, socialism…Capitalism leads us straight to hell.”

The experiences of Latin America are passing us by in Africa. Our intellectuals and leaders continue swearing by the “Washington consensus” whereas we should be learning from history.

In this election year, we should be taking stock of the last twenty, particularly the last ten, years of neo-liberal reforms. In taking stock we should not only critically examine our own experience but also the experience of other continents which have gone through a very similar process. Regrettably none of this is happening. The so-called free media does not even report of such experiences like Argentina. Instead, editorial writers are busy positioning themselves to curry favours from the establishment. Some of them are more establishment-minded then the establishment itself.

Our aspirants for “serving the people” , for that is the cliché politicians use during the election season, are talking little of ‘service’ or ‘people’, and more about preserving “the good” done by the third phase government. But why don’t we also learn from the bad of the first, the second and the third phase and, indeed, from the effects of the global hegemony of neo-liberalism elsewhere?

Aren’t Argentina and Venezuela relevant to our people? Shouldn’t our aspirants be telling us what they have learnt from those experiences and how do they propose to avoid the Argentinisation of Tanzania?

© Issa Shivji. Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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Neo-liberalism has had a devastating impact on higher education in Africa, writes Issa Shivji in our lead editorial this week. "The public intellectual, whose vocation is to comment, protest, caricaturize, satirize, analyse, and publicize the life around him or her is rapidly becoming history, which history, by the way, has no historian to record," states Shivji as he charts the history of East African discourse and the impact of neo-liberalism on intellectual life.

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The purpose of this short intervention is to review the state of interaction between our universities in East Africa so far as intellectual debate is concerned. If in the process I refer somewhat passionately to the debates of the 60s and 70s, it is not out of nostalgia but to draw inspiration. And we need this inspiration given the state of intellectual inertia and marketisation of academia that has set in with the invasion of neo-liberal agenda in our universities.

The Nationalist Period

Sketches of the political context

With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that the immediate post-independence period was one of great expectations and equally great political turmoil. The anti-colonial struggles that picked up after World War II came to fruition in Africa in the sixties. Ghana got its independence in 1957 and Nkrumah picked up the flag of Pan-Africanism in his great passion for African Unity. Born in the midst of cold war, signs of any autonomous nationalism by independent states attracted the wrath of super-powers. Western intervention in the running and changing of regimes in Africa was rampant. The assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the open military intervention of the US left an indelible impression on the East African leaders and made them very vulnerable. Radical nationalism had a very hard time keeping afloat.

The Zanzibar revolution of 1964 and the subsequent army mutinies in all the three East African countries threatened to derail nationalism in this part of the world. The extent of the influence and intervention of the former colonial power, Britain, in these events can only be appreciated now when we have the opportunity to peruse diplomatic papers of the sixties and seventies recently opened in the Public Records Office. Relatively more independent nationalists like Nyerere found it extremely difficult to keep the former colonial power at bay. Embarrassing though it may have been, Nyerere had to call in British troops to quell his riotous soldiers. But the nationalist in him could not countenance British troops on the Tanganyikan soil. He had the Nigerian troops look after the defense of the country while the new Tanzanian army was being trained.

In what he called an “undiplomatically frank” letter to Harold Wilson, the then Prime Minister of Britain, Nyerere narrated his fears and entreated the Prime Minister to understand his position.

“These are only a few of the reasons why we cannot be expected to be so confident of American non-interference in our affairs as British feel in relation to her own country. For the whole of this past year we have been subjected to pressures from the United States – and from Britain too before the change of Government – in relation to events in this country, particularly in relation to the post-revolutionary period in Zanzibar.

And finally, I am sure you will realise that there has been a reaction against the complacency with which we viewed our security questions before the mutiny of January this year. It may be that in consequence we see dangers where none exist, but if so this is a fault on the right side under the circumstances. Africa is going through an extremely difficult period of transition, and coup d’etats are not things in which any African Government can afford to take a merely academic interest.” (Letter from Nyerere to Wilson, 27/11/64)

Kenyatta had thrown in his lot with the West while Obote was struggling with his kingdoms. Nyerere continued agonizing over where he stood. His anti-colonial nationalism began to draw him to take non-alignment more and more seriously. The liberation wars in southern Africa, which were inevitably, and for obvious reasons, supported by the Soviet bloc and, which found a home and consistent support in Nyerere, no doubt, also had a radical influence on Mwalimu.

There were other events on the continent which also played a role in the political thought and discourse in this region. Nkrumah had moved radically to the left. His Pan-Africanism went hand in hand with anti-imperialism. Unlike Nyerere’s anti-colonialism, which was politically and diplomatically much more astute, but lacked a profound understanding and appreciation of imperialism, Nkrumah’s anti-imperialism was thoroughly rooted in political economy. His ‘Neo-Colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism’ (1965) published in October 1965, elicited an immediate protest from the US Government which promptly cancelled a $35 million aid to Ghana. Four months later Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown in a CIA-backed military coup (Blum: 1986:223). The CIA had been planning the coup with Ghanaian military officers for a year (Blum 2001:141).

Five months later, one of the architects of the coup Colonel A. A. Afrifa wrote a book on the coup (Afrifa 1966) which could have been easily penned by a CIA scribe. In the book, the author vilifies Nkrumah’s Pan-African dreams and support for national liberation in the Congo and elsewhere and demonstrates his unreserved flunkeyism towards the West.

“At the attainment of independence, the British handed over to us a decent system of Government in which everyone had a say. …. Organization of African unity or no Organization of African unity, I will claim my citizenship of Ghana and of the Commonwealth in any part of the world. I have been trained in the United Kingdom as a soldier, and I am ever prepared to fight alongside my friends in the United Kingdom in the same way as Canadians and Australians will do.” (quoted in the introduction, Afrifa 1966:11)

Reading Afrifa’s book may send a chill down our patriotic spines. But I should say only some spines! In this age of globalization, not very dissimilar things are being said by our own leaders. One East African president is credited with having castigated his own people as ignorant, envious and lazy for not understanding the demands of globalization while another has dramatically disowned his own radical past as he embraces the imperialist US.

The East African Academic Discourse

Nyerere’s radical nationalism eventually led him to ‘socialism and self-reliance’ while at the same time he continued to nurture a pretty consistent aversion to both the, then, super-powers. Only a few months before the Arusha Declaration, the University students had demonstrated against the introduction of compulsory national service and mandatory contributions from their salary. One of the placards read; ‘Colonialism was better’. Nyerere could not stomach it. He dismissed the students, some three hundred of them, and used the occasion to lambaste the accumulative tendencies of his own coterie of leaders. He slashed their salaries by twenty per cent. That became a precursor to the leadership code of the Arusha Declaration.

‘Every TANU and Government leader must be either a peasant or a worker, and should in no way be associated with the practices of capitalism or feudalism. No TANU or Government leader should hold shares in any company … or hold directorships in any privately owned enterprise … or receive two or more salaries … or own houses which he rents to others.’ (Nyerere 1968:249), thundered the Arusha Declaration. University students thus became the historical harbinger of the Leadership Code, if not the Arusha Declaration, albeit unintentionally.

The Arusha Declaration heralded an unprecedented intellectual activity on the Campus of the University College at Dar es Salaam. But this activity was not only a Tanzanian one. It involved East Africans. It will be remembered that this was the time of the University of East Africa. Makerere sent out doctors, Nairobi engineers and architects and Dar es Salaam, lawyers. My own class of 1967-70 boasted almost half non-Tanzanians among whom were the leading lights of, what later became, Museveni’s guerrilla force and first cabinet.

Student leaders, Faculty members and administrators, came from the three East African countries. The subject-matter of study was East African. In the Law Faculty, for example, we studied and taught the laws of all the three East African countries. The first interdisciplinary course introduced in the Faculty of Law in the wake of the Arusha Declaration, and with the intention of breaking down compartmentalization of knowledge, was called ‘Social and Economic Problems of East Africa.’ Later on, the Faculty of Arts and Social Science introduced a similar course called ‘East African Society and Environment’ known by its acronym EASE.

Student struggles, protests, debates and intellectual discourse in and outside the classroom was East African. In their Second Memorandum, the Vigilance Committee which spearheaded and led the student protest against a new curriculum clearly used the East African vantage point:

“As it was stated in our first memorandum, the real issue at stake is a fundamental one concerning the ownership of this University College: whether the College will ultimately belong to the people of Tanzania and East Africa or to imperialism.” (Quoted in Shivji 1993:40)

East African students were also very prominent in the militant student organisation like the University Students’ African Revolutionary Front (USARF). Its chair was a gentleman called Yoweri Kaguta Museveni. Among its members and activists were many East Africans who later on became prominent in various fields of life in the countries concerned. East Africans prominently participated in what we used to call then ideological struggles or debates.
Prominent East Africans, including academics, were invited to exchange views with the students and the Faculty of the University College. No East African, or African, event passed without there being a discussion and a “surgical” analysis of whether it was in the interest of the people or the petty bourgeoisie and/or imperialism.

Although this was a period of intense debates and radical discourse on the Dar Campus it had its reverberation on the other two Campuses as well. When Obote declared his ‘Move to the Left’, among the first places outside Uganda that his intellectual supporters visited was the Dar Campus. I remember Professor Yash Tandon fervently defending Obote’s ‘Move to the Left’ before a very cynical, but well-grounded and articulate, USARF militants. The then chairman of USARF, Museveni, sardonically snubbed Tandon arguing that the ‘Move to the Left’ was not a traffic question!

I frequently joke that in the Left we had a neat division of labour between the three East African countries. Dar excelled in ideologising but it only ideologised. As Mao said of Trostky: He, Trostsky, took a correct stand but he only stood. Nairobi organised, took to the streets and philosophized later, while Kampala took to the ‘bush’, gun in hand and power in head.

No doubt, the prominent discourse was radical. Although garbed in the language of Marxism, I think, it was grounded much more in ‘radical nationalism’ than ‘Marxism-Leninism’. The mainstream academic discourse too was nationalist, albeit inconsistent and wavering, but the point is that there was a discourse, a debate, a critical examination of our history and politics, culture and economy, past and present. It was a vibrant intellectual community with a home-grown debate, concerned about not only seeking the truth – the traditional vocation of a university – but also asking, ‘truth for what and in whose interest’. Interestingly, with the benefit of hindsight I might even venture to say that although at the time the gap between the mainstream nationalism and radical nationalism appeared wide and unbridgeable in the then young militant minds, they had a common point of departure and, perhaps, even a common vision.

The nationalist mainstream too contributed in a “strange” way to the East African discourse, whether it was in the form of nationalist histories narrated by Temu and Kimambo or anti-colonial art embedded in the poems of Okot p’Bitek or the early novels of Ngugi wa Thiong’o or Ebrahim Hussein’s plays. I say, in a strange way, because at the time we saw mainstream nationalists as essentially reactionary yet we engaged with them and that is precisely the basis of a critical discourse. With relish, we cited p’Bitek’s anti-European poems and his biting caricature of the Europeanized African elites. Listen to this which first appeared in 1967 in the ‘Transition’ coming out of Kampala and was later reproduced in the volume ‘Socialism in Tanzania’ edited by Lionel Cliffe and John Saul:

“The students in our University are not revolutionary. They are committed and conservative. They have vested interests. They look forward to graduation, the circumcision ceremony before joining the “big car” tribesmen. Our university and schools are nests in which black exploiters are hatched and bred, at the expense of the tax payers, or perhaps heartpayers.

And when they have fallen into things
They eat the meat from the chest of bulls
And their wives grow larger buttocks
And their skins shine with health,
They throw themselves into soft beds
But the hip bones of the voters
Grow painful sleeping on the same earth
They slept before Uhuru.” (Saul and Cliffe 1973, vol.2:293)

No doubt there is some truth about what Okot p’Bitek is saying about the students then, but today, it is the whole truth about our neo-liberalized universities; yet we do not have p’Biteks to agonize over it.

There was another, more formal, interaction and academic input into the East African discourse. Under the aegis of the Inter-University Council (IUC), there used to be an annual East African Social Science Conference whose venue rotated between the three Campuses. These conferences were great events. Faculty were accommodated in student dormitories. Research papers and field reports were presented. Current events were discussed. Some of the conferences became big occasions provoking intense dialogue. I remember that when my ‘Silent Class Struggles’ was ‘published’ in the then USARF’s journal, ‘Cheche’, (September 1970) it was presented at a subsequent Conference by a comrade since I was away in London doing my LL.M. I am told there was very interesting discussion.

On another occasion, I think it was in mid-seventies, there was a very heated debate on Angola. This must have been sometime in mid-70s, just about the time that the tradition somehow fizzled out, like many other East African forums.

Two things happened in 1971, which directly or indirectly, were responsible for heralding the disintegration of the East African discourse, at least its formal organizational forms. One was the overthrow of Obote and the other was the dissolution of the East African University. While playing a delicate political game, Nyerere, unlike his friend Obote, managed to avoid Nkrumah’s fate. After his palace coups in which he got rid of his kings, Obote took the road to the Left. But his move to the left in a highly differentiated Ugandan society not only attracted opposition within but also the imperial wrath without. In a coup by Iddi Amin Dada, backed by the Israelis and the British, Obote was overthrown in 1971 heralding in a new phase in the disintegration of whatever was left of East Africanness in the region. The Amin coup drove out many Ugandan intellectuals to various countries abroad. A good number ended up in Dar es Salaam where they became part of the academic and intellectual discourse.

Some Ugandans became members of the Faculty while others found jobs in the city. All of them were invariably involved, openly at the University, or more privately in town, in study groups, contributing to the ongoing discourse. But otherwise, each of the three East African countries went its own way, politically, economically and intellectually. The University of East Africa which had incorporated the three Campuses of Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and Makerere became separate universities. Although the three national universities did not have formal links, it is interesting that they informally knew and took interest in each other’s debates and discourses during much of the ‘70s and eighties.

For instance, Dar es Salaam was very aware of the ‘agrarian debate’ among Kenyans carried in the ‘Review of African Political Economy’ (originally abbreviated to RAPE and later changed to ROAPE) published in England. Its editors were the former lecturers from the North who had participated in East Africa. To an extent, therefore, ROAPE illustrates the spill over of the East African discourse. Interestingly, there were other spillovers. For example, those who had taught law in Dar played a prominent role in directing the Department of Law at the newly established University of Warwick in England where law was taught from an interdisciplinary approach or ‘law in context’. Courses like Law in Development carried on the tradition established at Dar.

Just as the Ugandan exiles physically participated in Dar debates and organised from there to liberate their country from the clutches of Iddi Amin, Kenyan militants drew inspiration from Dar. Although numbers began to dwindle, a significant number of Kenyan students managed to find their way to the Hill. But they faced increasing obstacles. For example, the then Attorney General, Mr. Njonjo, who put on airs of an English gentleman, would not accept Dar law graduates unless they had done another year in the Kenya Law School, presumably to debrief them of Dar es Salaam ‘school’.

Formal links between the three campuses suffered even more. Although we continued to visit each other’s Campuses as external examiners, this was not conducive to developing a coherent discourse. But even separately, as we approached the eighties, intellectual and academic climate on the three campuses began to decline as the socio-political context entered the period of Structural Adjustment Programmes and increasingly aggressive imperial policies orchestrated through the IFIs.

To the academic doldrums of neo-liberalism, we now turn.

The Neo-liberal Intervention

Neo-liberalism made its entry into our countries through various Structural SAPs of the early eighties. These programmes were nothing more than the further integration of our economies and resources into the world market circuits (liberalisation of trade); the withdrawal of budget allocations from social services to repay loans (cost-sharing and balancing of the budget); the deliverance of natural resources to multinational capital, but, more important, to take away the sovereign decision-making right of the African nations. Cost-sharing and user fees destroyed whatever little “welfare” state was established in the wake of independence.

Universities came under severe attack. The World Bank suggested that Africa had no need for universities, Universities were ‘white elephants’ which devoured more than what they produced (Zeleza & Olukoshi eds. 2004, 2). The content of what the Universities taught was not suitable for the market. It would be cheaper to train our kids in Northern universities. Our politicians and university administrators slavishly bought into these. We embarked on the so-called transformations of our universities from sites of generating knowledge to kiosks for selling “education wares”. Our courses these days are modularized and semesterized. In effect it simply means cutting up courses into bits and pieces, regardless of whether it makes pedagogical sense, to enable fee-paying students to collect necessary units to pass. It is not good business to fail students; that would draw out university business from the market. What our colleague, Professor Chachage, said in an external examiner’s report sums up the tragedy of the commodification and marketisation of higher education.

“The number of unit courses, as it is clear from many of the papers I went through, is a result of the way semesterization has been undertaken, whereby whole years courses from the previously three-term system have been simply broken into two separate courses to satisfy the requirement of the process. This has been done without any regard to the coherence of the programmes, and how the process of building blocks of knowledge through thorough exploration of themes is affected. The end result is what is important for a student is to simply collect enough units to get a diploma or a degree. In this regard, what has been created is a situation whereby a student looks for an easy way to obtain a degree and not knowledge.”

The debates and intellectual discourse which is the life-line of any vibrant university community has virtually disappeared. There is no time as time is a commodity subject to ‘opportunity cost’. In a competition between consultancy and panel discussion, the rational economic choice is of course consultancy, particularly when panel discussions and intellectual debates have virtually no value and are actively discouraged by our new-university mandarins. A couple of years, ago one of our lecturers received a letter of reprimand for organizing a panel discussion on the Afghanistan war during “office hours”! (For that can only be the appropriate word these days for teaching time).

The public intellectual, whose vocation is to comment, protest, caricaturize, satirize, analyse, and publicize the life around him or her is rapidly becoming history, which history, by the way, has no historian to record. (The historian is busy taking American tourists on a tour of the Bagamoyo slave market.)

I am of course exaggerating, but I am exaggerating the truth. Many of us, who may nod our heads in the Senate and laugh at silly jokes cracked by the university mandarins, agonize in corridors and in private. The committed intellectual in us refuses to go away, if not in all, at least in some. And I believe, or want to believe, that those few constitute a critical mass which we need to nurture and revitalize consciously, deliberately, and patiently.

Dying craftsmen broke the machines in protest. That cannot be expected of petty bourgeois intellectuals. We cannot perhaps stop the commercialization of our universities, but we can at least think of university co-operatives. We must be able to revive our craft in new conditions. We cannot and need not repeat the discourses of the nationalist decades but we need to reinvent an Eastern African discourse, maybe, this time around, rooted in genuine Pan-Africanism. We have to engage and take issue with the Pan-Africanism of the States, the NEPAD-ist one rooted in globalization ad domination, and pose an alternative Pan-Africanism of the People, rooted in anti-imperialism and liberation. In other words, the nationalism of the twenty-first century is Pan-Africanism rooted in anti-imperialism (for the development of some of these ideas see Shivji 2005) . This is not a proposal. It is only an illustration of reconstructing an Easter African, not only East African, discourse. By Eastern African, I mean the inclusion of Rwanda, Burundi, DRC besides Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

Needless to say no discourse is uncontentious. The essence of any serious discourse is precisely contention of ideas. Pan-Africanism and anti-imperialism are very contentious issues depending on the social stand-point one takes. I am not taking a position. I am only arguing for a discourse in which we can, and should take positions. Our major social responsibility is to discourse and expose the ills of society, to hold up the mirror, so to speak.

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* Issa Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

References

Afrifa, A. A., 1966, The Ghana Coup, 24th February 1966, London: Frank Cass.
Blum, William, 1986, The CIA: a forgotten story, Lonodn: Zed Books.
Blum, William, 2001, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s only Superpower, London; Zed Books.
Nkrumah, K. 1965, Neo-colonialism, the last stage of imperialism, London: Heinemann.
Nyerere, J. K. 1968, Freedom and Socialism, London: OUP.
Saul, J. & Lionel Cliffe eds. 1973, Socialism in Tanzania, vol. 2, Nairobi: East African Publishing House.
Shivji, I. G.1993, Intellectuals at the Hill, Dar es salaam: DUP.
Shivji, I. G., 2005, ‘The Rise, the Fall and the Insurrection of Nationalism in Africa’, in Felicia Arudo Yieke ed. East Africa: In Search of National and Regional Renewal, Dakar: CODESRIA
Zeleza, P. T. & Adebayo Olukoshi eds. 2004, African Universities in the Twenty-First Century, vol 1, Dakar: CODESRIA.

Tony Blair urges his people to show the same compassion to the African victims of, what he calls, ‘man-made disaster’, that they have shown to Asian victims of natural disaster.

The small question though is: which man has been responsible for Africa’s man-made disaster? We shall not go too far back into history. Let’s just look at the last two decades and only two major wars – economic and military – which have devastated the continent.

The continent is the most war-torn region in the world. In the last decade, there were 12 wars taking place in 10 countries on the continent. Eleven were supported by the US through arms sales or military training. Many of these wars were offshoots of the Cold War years. According to one estimate, during the Cold War years (1950-1989) US sent some US$1.5 billion in arms and training to Africa. And this trend has not stopped in the post-Cold War period. Africa has yet to reap the so-called peace dividend.

From 1991-1995, 50 of Africa’s 53 countries received military assistance from the US. US arms sales and military training to Africa totaled more than $227 million. And US’s junior partner, UK, follows suit. British arms sales to Africa rocketed from ?52 million in 1998 to ?125 million in 2000 and topped ?200 million in 2001 after the deals with Tanzania to sell ?28 million military air defence and ?100 million to sell Hawk jets to South Africa. Under Tony Blair’s new labour government, military sales to Africa increased from 1.6 per cent of all sales to the Third World to 19 per cent.

Gordon Brown’s compassionate offer to pay 10 per cent of Tanzania’s debt to the World Bank and the Africa Development Bank amounting to some $40 million over the next ten years sits rather awkwardly with $40 million that was spent a couple of years ago to get the radar from a British company with Blair’s support. At the time one British MP, Tony Worthington, commented in the House of Commons: ‘The idea of going to Dar es Salaam to negotiate debt reduction and then agreeing to something that adds $40 million to that debt does not sound like prudence, does it?’ Well, in the imperial mindset, it does.

Arms trade is “good” business. It is “good” economics and “good” politics. It creates jobs, increases profits and ensures a safe continent for Western multinationals to continue siphoning off resources and expatriating super-profits which keep the capitalist engine running. And as a bonus, the military-industrial complex of the West keeps reproducing the dependency syndrome in Africa, caricatured in the African child with a begging bowl.

The aid-dependency syndrome in Africa, which is deployed variously – for domination, for compassion, for humiliation, for intimidation – is an important plank in the relationship between the West and Africa. While we are pilloried with ‘aid-fatigue’ in response to our begging bowl, Western rulers get very angry when some countries (very few indeed and none in Africa) try to extricate themselves from the world wide aid net.

It is revealing that when India refused to accept any aid from the West for tsunami victims, the Western world was outraged. Journalists ridiculed and questioned India’s motives – ambitions of a regional super-power, seeking a seat in the Security Council, acting big brother to neighbouring countries. These are the same people who hardly ever question the motives of Western aid. No, Western aid is out of altruism and human compassion.

Mwalimu (Julius Nyerere) was hated by the West more for preaching self-reliance rather than socialism. If he survived the wrath of the CIAs of this world (unlike Nkrumah) it was perhaps because we never practiced self-reliance and Mwalimu never wrote a book, ‘Self-reliance, the First Stage of Liberation’, the way Nkrumah did, ‘Neo-colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism’.

Anyway, so much for the military war. What about the economic war?

For the last two decades beginning with structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) of the 1980s, Africa has been involved in implementing neo-liberal policies handed down by the West through their so-called multilateral institutions. SAPs have devastated the continent. Since 1980 African debt has increased 500%. 313 million Africans lived in absolute poverty in 2001 compared to 200 million in 1994.

Life expectancy has dropped by 15%; literacy rates have fallen. More than 140 million young Africans are illiterate. In ten years, between 1986 and 1996, education spending per capita in Africa has fallen by 0.7% a year. Primary and secondary school enrollment has gone down as parents cannot afford cost-sharing imposed on them. University students have rioted as they find themselves without employment and therefore unable to repay loans. In Tanzania, non-payment of educational loans has been criminalized!

Mr. Blair need not ask which men are behind Africa’s man-made disaster? But can Africa’s men and women swallow the rhetoric of compassion and forget the reality of exploitation?

© Issa Shivji. Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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In his speech to a seminar of political leaders held in Zanzibar on 19th February this year, President Mkapa made a very fundamental point which needs to be deeply thought over and widely debated. In his view, the whole Tanzanian society and people need a muafaka or national consensus. He expressed his apprehension that the political and economic reforms that have taken place over the last twenty years have loosened national ties, unity and brotherhood/sisterhood (udugu) in our society and country. 'I earnestly urge,' he said, 'that the market or free economy, together with political freedoms and freedom of the press should not be the beginning of the weakening of our unity, national solidarity, or should not dilute our nationalism, union and udugu.' (translation from the original Kiswahili mine).

He continued: 'The market economy will result in some of us becoming richer than others. Political freedom has brought many parties and their many honourable leaders. But this should not be a reason for some to feel better than others. We, Tanzanians, should remain ndugu.' He went on to say that it is our udugu which makes us equal human beings, with equal dignity, equal rights and equal basic needs. 'Our udugu,' he emphasised, 'is not ideological; rather it is embedded in our African culture.'

Given the emphasis on udugu, a little digression on the political origin of the term 'ndugu' in Tanzania is appropriate. It was first used by trade unionists to express class (social) solidarity. Later, in particular after the adoption of the policy of socialism and self-reliance, the term became prominent in the party and political vocabulary. It expressed nationalism and the policy of ujamaa. In both cases, therefore, 'ndugu' was explicitly an expression of ideology. Be that as it may, let us return to the core question raised by the President.

In my view, there are three points in the President's submission which, with respect, are indisputable. One, that over the last two decades the national consensus in our society has begun to disintegrate pausing a veritable threat to national unity and social solidarity. Two, that the adoption of neo-liberal policies and orientations has begun to polarize our society. The emergence of the filthy rich and pathetically poor in our country is undeniable. Three, that there is a need to reconstruct national consensus and concord.

The central question is: what would be the basis of the new national consensus? To being to answer, let us examine our recent history.

The struggle for independence was a mass movement. The consensus of the large majority was based on the nationalist ideology, or the right of self-determination. Immediately after independence the nationalist consensus began to show cracks with the rise of the wabenzi, whose ambition was simply to step into the shoes of the colonial masters. The University students demonstrated against National Service in October 1966 accusing the politicians of drawing fat salaries while they were being asked to make sacrifices. Responding angrily, Mwalimu thundered:

'You are right when you talk about salaries. Our salaries are too high. … Do you know what my salary is? Five thousand damned shillings a month. Five thousand damned shillings in a poor country. The poor man who gets two hundred shillings a month – do you know how long it's going to take him to earn my damned salary? Twenty-five years! … The damned salaries! These are the salaries which build this kind of attitude in the educated people, all of them. Me and you. We belong to a class of exploiters. I belong to your class. … You are right, salaries are too high. Everybody in this country is demanding a pound of flesh. Everbody except the poor peasant. How can he demand it? He doesn't know the language. … What kind of country are we building?'

Three months later came the Arusha Declaration which declared that we wanted to build a socialist society, a society where every one is a worker or a peasant, where no one exploits another, where a genuine leader does not live off the sweat of another man. The building of a socialist and self-reliant society was the new national consensus. It mobilized the masses and inspired the youth.

The ujamaa consensus lasted almost a decade before the economic crisis of the late seventies and early eighties undermined it. Both the nationalist and the ujamaa consensus were ideologically based. Both were national visions to build a society based on equality. The socialist vision specifically addressed the cracks in the nationalist ideology which began to appear in the post-independence period with the rise of the self-enriching wabenzi.

Twenty years of neo-liberal policies have not generated any new national vision which can mobilize and inspire. The national consensus has been undermined by the market economy as ethnic, racial, religious, class and gender fault-lines have resurfaced. The rhetoric of political pluralism and economic liberalism cannot cover the deepening divide between the haves and have-nots, between the walalahoi, walalahai and walalaheri, that is, the poor, the middle and the rich.

Under the circumstances, what would be the basis for a new consensus? That is what we need to debate. While it may not be possible to say what it should be based on, we can certainly say what it cannot be based on. National consensus, by definition, cannot be built on some metaphysical values of cultural brotherhood when the underlying material reality is characterised by extreme class and social divisions.

We are fast slipping down the road of what the nineteenth century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli called 'two nations', the nation of the rich and the nation of the poor 'between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.'

Nor can national consensus be constructed on the basis of imported or imposed metapolitical values of political pluralism and hedonistic individualism.

With President Mkapa, we need first to admit that the old consensus has broken down and with Mwalimu, as in 1966, we need to ask: What kind of country are we building? Do we want to build a country of Two Nations?

© Issa Shivji. Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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The Argument

We have become so used to the rhetoric of the “global village” that talking about African nationalism sounds anachronistic and outdated. But that is exactly what I wish to address. In this paper, I will explore the “National Question” in Africa and its erstwhile expression, nationalism, in three sections. First, I will discuss the rise of post-Second World War nationalism and its true essence, if you like. Then, I will address the debunking of nationalism in the post-cold war period under the apparent hegemony of neo-liberalism and so-called globalisation. Finally, still holding high the Gramscian adage, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” I anticipate the insurrection of a second nationalism.

Post-War Nationalism
The Essence of Nationalism

Introducing his book Freedom and After, Tom Mboya remembers what he calls the “proudest day of my life.” That was December 6, 1958, the opening day of the All Africa Peoples Conference in Accra, Ghana. Earlier in the same year, there had been a conference of independent African states, of which only eight existed at the time. “These two conferences,” says Mboya, “marked the rediscovery of Africa by Africans.”

"This rediscovery of Africa by Africans was ‘in complete contrast to the discovery of Africa by Europeans in the nineteenth century.’ The Conference of Independent African States had marked the birth of the African personality, and the delegates had all agreed on the need for Africa to rise and be heard at all the councils of the world affairs. "

The conference was attended by some five hundred delegates from political parties, trade unions, and organisations involved in the great awakening that was African nationalism. Patrice Lumumba and Roberto Holden were there, so was Dr. Kamuzu Banda. The nationalist upsurge in the post-war period in Africa was a great moment for a people that had been denied humanity by centuries of slavery and colonialism. Ideologies centered on Kwame Nkrumah’s “African Personality” or Leopold Senghor’s “Negritude” or Kenneth Kaunda’s “Humanism” or even Mwalimu Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa expressed one central theme, nationalism.

The quintessence of nationalism was, and is, anti-imperialism. It was a demand and struggle against, rather than for, something. It was an expression of a struggle against denial – denial of humanity, denial of respect and dignity, denial of the Africanness of the African. It was the struggle for the “re-Africanisation of minds” or to “rebecome Africans,” as Amilcar Cabral put it. Archie Mafeje sums up the period well:

"It was the historical experience of racial humiliation, economic exploitation, political oppression, and cultural domination under European and American slavery, colonialism, and imperialism that gave rise to theories of ‘African personality’ and ‘Negritude.’ At the centre of these theories was the question of the liberation of the Black man – his identity or the meaning of ‘being-Black-in-the-world.’ It was a philosophical or moral justification for action, for a rebellion which gave rise to African nationalism and to independence. The latter was the greatest political achievement by Africans. It was an unprecedented collective fulfillment."

Early African nationalism should not be confused with the traditional discourse on the expression and development of nations in the womb of capitalism in nineteenth century Europe. Rather, it was an expression of a people that was an antidote to White supremacist rule. In a sense, it is correct to say that nationalism was the process, a process of struggle, in the formation of nations. In that sense, perhaps, nationalism preceded nations. Militant nationalists grasped this to some extent although they did not express it as consistently nor did they wholly appreciate the defining characteristic of nationalism, that is, anti-imperialism. In explaining the objectives of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) to the UN Trusteeship Council in 1955, Nyerere said:

"Another objective of the Union is to build up a national consciousness among the African peoples in Tanganyika. It has been said – and this is quite right – that Tanganyika is tribal, and we realise that we need to break up this tribal consciousness among the people and to build up a national consciousness. That is one of our main objectives towards self-government."

This formulation is no doubt problematic. It lends itself to the reactionary side of bourgeois nationalism, or what later came to be called “nation-building theories.” Let us look at another formulation; this time, from a leading member of a national liberation movement and an avowed Marxist – Marcelino dos Santos, then a leading member of FRELIMO. In an interview with Joe Slovo of the South African Communist Party, Dos Santos analyses the tension between tribe and nation:

"The main conditions for [the] successful rejection [of tribalism] are present. On the general point of whether we have already moulded a nation in the true sense of the word, I want to say that a nation is based on concrete realities. And the most important reality in the present stage in Mocambique is the fight against Portuguese colonialism…It is our common fight against our common oppressor, which plays an outstanding role in creating a national bond between all the diverse groups and cultures…Of course, a nation is a product of history and its formation goes through different phases. In this sense, the work for the final achievement of nationhood will continue even after independence, although the fundamental elements of nationhood are already in existence and in the process of being further developed in Mocambique. "

Dos Santos’ conception of nation formation does not differ fundamentally from Nyerere’s presentation of “nation-building,” although their points of departure appear different. Dos Santos, like Slovo, takes as his starting point the Marxist theory of nation (this, presumably, is “the true sense of the word”), which, in its Stalinist version, emphasises the European conception of a nation – common territory, language, culture, and economy. If these ingredients are not present, or not present to a sufficient degree, you have a tribe at worst or a nation in the process of being formed at best. Implied in the European conception of nation also is the idea of voluntarism, that is, forming or building a nation from the top. Perhaps the point to underline in Dos Santos’ exposition is that the anti-colonial struggle is an important ingredient of nationalism. The problem with Dos Santos- and Nyerere-type formulations is that the nationalist petty bourgeoisie, when it rose to power, wavered on anti-imperialism and ended up with top-down statist notions of “nation-building.”

I find Amilcar Cabral’s propositions more fruitful. They contain a germ of great potential in understanding the historicity and specificity of the National Question in Africa. Cabral suggests that post-war African nationalism was a struggle not only to reclaim history but also to assert the right of the African people to make history: “The foundation of national liberation lies in the inalienable right of every people to have their own history.”

Cabral also makes the point that “so long as imperialism is in existence, an independent African state must be a liberation movement in power, or it will not be independent.” These are profound insights. First, nationalism is constituted by the struggle of the people against imperialism, thus anti-imperialism defines African nationalism. Second, nationalism, as an expression of struggle, continues so long as imperialism exists. Third, the National Question in Africa, whose expression is nationalism, remains unresolved as long as there is imperialist domination.

Archie Mafeje builds on these insights, observing that “all the struggles in Africa and most of the Third World centre on the National Question.” He perceives nationalism as the common denominator underlying the different interpretations and connotations of the National Question. Furthermore, he says, nationalism is always a reaction against something. In African history, nationalism has been a reaction to imperialist domination. As proto-nationalism, the reaction was against the colonial phase of imperialism, or political domination by aliens. Since independence, meta-nationalism has been coping with the changing modalities of imperialist domination.

The dominant discourse on the National Question has run along different lines, however. In both the political right and left, the central debate has been over whether Africa has nations and nationalities or tribes and ethnic groups. In the Eurocentric worldview, nations represent a higher level in the evolution of social and political formations than tribes. Fed on Stalin’s rather schematic formula, and therefore unable to find nations within the territorial units called African countries, even radical Marxists, like Slovo, have found it difficult to theorise adequately about the National Question. In the hands of rightwing pundits, it has been worse. The so-called lack of nations has been used to debunk and delegitimise African nationalist movements and their achievements. With the current hegemony of neo-liberalism and the imperialist comeback, the spokespersons of imperialism have been quick to condemn nationalism as nothing more than an expression of ethnicity and tribalism.

Note this typical sample from an editorial in US News and World Report:

"In the Third World, there had been grand ideas of new states and social contracts among the communities, post-colonial dreams of what men and women could do on their own. There were exalted notions of Indian nationalism, Pan-Arabism, and the like. Ethnicity hid, draped in the colours of modern nationalism, hoping to keep the ancestors – and the troubles – at bay. But the delusions would not last. What was India? The India of its secular founders – or the ‘Hindu Raj’ of the militant fundamentalists? What exactly did the compact communities of Iraq – the Kurds, the Sunnis, and the Shia – have in common? The masks have fallen, the tribes have stepped to the fore."

This type of denigration strikes at the heart of nationalism, that is, at anti-imperialism. Be that as it may, let us look more closely at the various aspects and expressions of nationalism.

* This is an extract from a paper 'The Rise, The Fall and The Insurrection of Nationalism in Africa' by Issa G. Shivji, Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam Tanzania. The paper is from Keynote Address to the CODESRIA East African Regional Conference held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, October 29-31, 2003. To read the full paper, please click on the URL below.

Human rights are often presented as claims or entitlements. It is also said that rights belong to individuals. Both these ideas arise from a philosophical perspective, which assumes that human beings exist as isolated individuals who make claims or possess entitlements in isolation.

An exactly opposite philosophical perspective tells us that human beings are social beings, not individual beings. Society is a web of relations - social, economic, cultural and political - which have been constructed historically as different interests in society interact, clash and contradict and give birth to new sets of relations. Social struggles, therefore, are the base from which social relations develop. […]

The modern human rights debate - or discourse - is constructed on the philosophical foundation of the human being as an individual, and not as a social being. This lies at the centre of many of the controversies in human rights discourse. […]

The values and principles that underlie the human rights discourse have been constructed historically in the course of social struggles. Therefore, human rights is a contentious discourse in which different, and often contradictory, perspectives representing different interests in national and international society, seek dominance or hegemony.

Just as dominant and dominating interests may employ the ideology of human rights to justify and rationalise their dominance, so also the forces that seek to resist dominance may deploy human rights to mobilise their resistance. Human rights, as we know them today, were born in a period of contention. They were born in the context of the Cold War between the socialist and the capitalist system on the one hand, and in the context of the wars of national liberation from imperial/colonial domination, on the other. This context has had a major impact on the debates within, and about, human rights. […]

Human Rights as Contentious Discourse

The most celebrated document in the history of human rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), was adopted in 1948 when the world had just emerged from one of the most devastating wars. There were only 56 member states of the United Nations with only three from Africa, including apartheid South Africa, which adopted the UDHR.

But the world was a long way from recognising the universal human being. More than two-thirds of the world's peoples were colonised and referred to as natives. They were not thought to be human enough to have human rights! President Roosevelt's four freedoms – freedom of speech and expression, freedom to worship 'god' in your own way, freedom from want and freedom from fear (no wars between states) – which are supposed to have provided the building blocks of the UDHR did not include the freedom most central to the colonised peoples: 'freedom from colonial oppression' or the right to national self-determination. […]

The human rights ideology was incubated in the crucible of the Cold War (1945-90) and reflected the political, ideological and military disagreements and struggles underlying it. While the Cold War was cold in Europe, it was very hot in the Third World, Africa included. There was not a single year from 1945 to 1990 when there was not conflict somewhere in the world. […]

During much of the Cold War and to this day, the USA presented, and continues to present, itself as the champion of freedom, democracy and individual rights, despite the fact that it was at the same time trampling on the basic rights of Third World peoples - their rights to life and self-determination - as it propelled and fuelled wars and supported dictators. […]

The double-standards in human rights discourse, and the unequal power relations which underlie it, is not fully appreciated if human rights are presented as apolitical, asocial and ahistorical values inherent in us all because we are human beings. The setting of human rights standards through international conventions and declarations is itself a very contentious political process which demonstrates the gross inequalities of the world capitalist and imperial system. […]

Thus the way human rights are prioritised and categorised is itself open to debate, demonstrating the ideological nature of human rights discourse. Like all ideological discourses, half-truths and untruths are presented as absolute truths and whole truths. We should be wary therefore of a perspective on human rights which does not treat human rights in the context of history and social struggles.

Wherever there is oppression and injustice, there is bound to be resistance and struggle. In this process, the oppressors justify and rationalise their oppression in ideologies of domination, just as the oppressed mobilise and articulate their resistance in the ideologies of struggle and resistance.

In the present era, as globalisation is touted as the universal human good, we are also witnessing unprecedented inequalities, injustices, oppression, and levels of poverty and deprivation, which make mockery of our basic humanity, let alone human rights. […]

What Africa pays in debt-servicing and through loss of terms of trade every year would be more than enough to provide decent health, education and safe drinking water to every man, woman and child on the continent. Meanwhile, for the last 10 to 15 years, Africa has been subjected to unprecedented dictation from the international financial organisations and the so-called donor community. The neo-liberal policies adopted as a result have plunged the continent deeper into poverty with little prospect of improvement as its resources are pillaged by multinational corporations and its politics increasingly entrapped in the game of musical chairs for the minuscule urban elites. […]

Human Rights as Resistance

- The rights of peoples to self-determination

As we saw, the UDHR did not include the right of nations and peoples to self-determination although the declaration was born in the midst of a world in which more than two-thirds of the human race lived under colonial or semi-colonial conditions. […]

In the context of the rising national liberation movements and new forms of imperial domination, a number of liberation movements, trade unions and activist intellectuals meeting in Algiers in 1976 adopted the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples, known as the Algiers Declaration. ( ). The Algiers Declaration is a fine example of the reconceptualisation of the rights ideology by civil society to legitimise the struggle of peoples. The Algiers Declaration does not pretend to set any standards nor freeze these standards as enforceable rights of individuals to stabilise the status quo, but rather it consciously sums up people's struggles so as to legitimise them.

By further rethinking the right to self-determination and giving the term 'people' a contextual meaning, this right also has the potential to capture the current struggle of the African people for democracy from below and genuine participation in governance.

The right to self-determination, it can be argued, includes the right of the people to be consulted on all matters that affect their lives. Just as an individual has a right to be heard before any adverse action is taken against him/her, so the people have a right to be consulted before decisions are made affecting them. […]

The right to self-determination has been a major weapon used by various NGOs to argue and articulate the case against the ruinous economic policies the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have imposed on African and other developing countries. In February 2002, a number of NGOs campaigning against Third World debts convened a People's Tribunal in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil to hear evidence and adjudicate upon the legality and legitimacy of the debts. The 'verdict' ( ) deploys with great effect the language of human rights generally, and particularly the language of the right to self-determination, in order to show that Third World debts are illegitimate and that the people of the South are fully justified in resisting payment of these debts.

- Right to Life

The right to life is considered a basic right. As a matter of fact, the right of peoples to self-determination and right to life together may be justifiably called the mother of all rights.

In the mainstream interpretations, the right to life is given a narrow meaning of the right to existence. Various campaigns against capital punishment and torture have been anchored in this right. But Third World jurists and human rights activists, faced with extreme poverty and inhuman existence in their societies, have imaginatively expanded the meaning of the right to life to include the right to livelihood, right to shelter, right to land and right to food. […]

In this way, the language of rights is deployed to articulate the most pressing concerns of the large majority of people while at the same time providing the language of resistance against, and changing of, the existing conditions. It is important, therefore, that activist NGOs and other human rights advocates are conscious of the different perspectives on human rights, so that they know what to promote, in whose interest and in which direction.

* See for the Algiers Declaration and the verdict of the People's Tribunal on Debt.

*Would you like to respond to this editorial? Send your views to [email protected] and we will publish them in our Letters and Comments section next week.

The 60s and 70s were the age of liberation and revolution in Africa. It was the age of the late Abdulrahman Babu, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney and many others. For us in Dar es Salaam and many other areas of the world, it was a time of intellectual ferment, and insurrection of ideas.

But things have changed. Today, many academics have metamorphosed from intellectual researchers of yesterday to policy consultants of today. The truth of course is that we are neither consulted nor recommend policy. Policy is set elsewhere by those who hold the purse string while, we the local counter-parts, as we are called, mount stage shows organising national workshops of stake-holders;. No one pretends that consultancies generate knowledge, much less that the consultant is an organic intellectual. We all know, and admit it in private, that we are neither organic to anything nor intellectuals. We are simply paid juniors, euphemistically called counterparts, of Western consultants paid by the West, leaving us little time to care about the rest. In this game of euphemisms, Western paymasters are called development partners; consultancy, whose only source of scientific data is rapid rural appraisals and other consultancy reports, is called development work, which development work is dutifully executed by a Western team leader called development practitioner.

It is this amazing double-speak of imperial consultants and propagandists which has been at the heart of decimating the body of intellectual thought that provided the theoretical foundation and ideological inspiration for the age of liberation and revolution. The double-speak is aimed at three targets.

One, at rehabilitating imperialism morally by demonising Third World nationalism and delegitimising Third World states (particularly Africa) as no more than a coterie of ethnic groups out to loot poor, ignorant populations who need to be saved from their own rulers by the humanitarian interventions of the international community. Humanitarian interventions to save the Third World people from themselves, then is presented as the motif of numerous military and economic interventions by the international community from Serbia to Somalia. These interventions are not only begged for by our political leaders themselves but also justified by our intellectuals. In the post-cold war period we do not have any clashes of idea or ideological struggles but the clash of civilisations, as Samuel Huntington, the intellectual think-tank of the US state department, proclaims. The clash is supposedly between the Western civilisation and Islamic and Confucian civilisations, between the Good and Evil, between the Values of the Free World, and the prejudices of the Rest, between People and non-people.

Of course, the clash of civilisations had to be invented. How else would one justify the expanding military machine of imperialism while at the same time proclaim end of ideology after the Cold War?

The second big onslaught has been to make the ideology of human rights, and its related offshoots such as rule of law, good governance, poverty alleviation etc. Again human rights is of course not presented as an ideology but an immortal, all time truth. Its unquestioning pervasiveness and acceptance among our own intellectuals is remarkable. When I wrote my The Concept of Human Rights in Africa arguing that it was an ideology of domination and that we needed to re-conceptualise it and turn it on its head to make it an ideology of resistance, it was simply ignored and brushed aside as demagogic.

In our part of the world, human rights ideology, in short, has been pretty effective in displacing grand social theories and vision of human emancipation. Human rights discourse has succeeded in marginalising concrete analysis of our society. Human rights ideology is the ideology of the status quo, not change. Documentation of human rights abuses, although important in its own right, by itself does not help us to understand the social and political relations in our society. Given the absence of political economy context and theoretical framework, much of our writings on human rights, rule of law, constitution, etc., uncritically reiterate or assume neo-liberal precepts. Human rights is not a theoretical tool of understanding social political relations. At best it can only be a means of exposing a form of oppression and, therefore, perhaps an ideology of resistance. If not carefully handled, it cannot even serve that purpose.

The third target of imperial ideological onslaught has been the organisational expression of people’s struggles. Traditional and historically well-tested forms of organisation like parties, trade unions and mass movements are placed on the same footing as non-governmental organisations. As a matter of fact, it is the various human rights NGOs which occupy the centre stage because they are best funded by the donor community and whose importance is blown out of all proportion to their real capacity for change.

The very concept of NGO has drained the people of the organisational expression of their struggle. NGOs are supposed to be non-political, non-partisan and non-membership, formed by activists, usually from outside the social group that they are advocating for, without any constituency, accountable only to themselves and the funder. Their function, as they see it themselves, is awareness raising and advocacy in which people themselves are passive, ignorant subjects or victims, incapable of struggling for their rights. Under the demagogic precept of action not words, even well intentioned individuals in NGOs willy-nilly end up supporting the status quo because they have no theoretical tools or ideological stand to guide them. In the world of NGOs, theory and ideology are swear words. They are despised. In other words, we are told to act, not to think.

In the 60s and 70s, the radical intellectual did not make a distinction between political and civil, between nongovernmental and governmental but rather preached and practised the dictum that Politics is the concentrated form of economics and that the state is the table of contents of civil society and class struggles.

Today, the world is presented as a global village which is being inexorably villagised by the forces of globalisation. It consists of the international community and others. The composition of the international community is flexible but rogue-states are definitely not part of it. No one, we are told, has control over the processes of globalisation because it is controlled by the invisible hand of the market, which incidentally, is a very competent distributor of resources. We, in the Third World do not have much of a choice in this globalised world. The globalisation experts tell us, and our political leaders repeat it parrot-like, that globalisation offers opportunities and challenges. To be able to make use of these opportunities, among other things, we need to behave ourselves; enforce the civilisation values of freedom, individualism, good governance, and human rights. We must of course put in place an enabling environment to attract development funds by making available at no cost our state sovereignty, land, labour, minerals, water and air and space to investors. For this we need appropriate sectoral policies and the international community would always consider our applications for funds to hire consultants to draft such policies for us.

We all know that there is no community of interest in the international community; that globalisation is just another name for imperialism; that the global village embodies in it global pillage; that all cards are staked on one side in stake-holders workshops; that good governance is another name for legitimising economically despotic system, for governance is not a question of morality but a contest of power. Yet, it is amazing how this farce is re-enacted and the most we can allow ourselves is to make a few sarcastic remarks, which is good entertainment, while business continues as usual.

It needs hardly to be said that we are in the trough of the world revolution but I do not believe all is lost. The forces of progress may have been defeated but certainly not destroyed. Wherever there is oppression, there is bound to be resistance. There is a silver lining and we are already witnessing it: Seattle, Prague, Gothenburg, Genoa are dress rehearsals. As Abdulrahman Babu would have said, Comrades. Do not fritter away this opening. Use it.

Edited extract of a keynote address at the International Conference to celebrate the life of Adulrahman Mohamed Babu, Dar es Salaam, September 2001

* Issa Shivji, Professor of Law, University of Dar es Salaam