African Struggles Today. Peter Dwyer
Despite this, the solutions put forward by trade union–led movements were general and amorphous, speaking ubiquitously of “change”: for example, in French, changement politique; in Senegalese Wolof, sopi; and in Zimbabwean Shona, chinja. Such slogans helped pull together the disparate cords of opposition forces, but they did not express the widespread demand for economic and social redress that provided much of the popular impetus for “change.”
As the movements converged and grew into powerful opposition forces, other changes of global significance were taking place. The East European revolutions in 1989–90 brought a paradoxical wave of hope and despair. They showed that one-party states could be toppled by popular democratic movements from below, but also that “communism” no longer constituted a meaningful political alternative to global capitalism.35 A generation of students, trade union militants, and intellectuals across the world and in Africa lost their ideological moorings.36 Thus, the struggles fought on the continent against both repressive one-party regimes and the IMF and World Bank policies they had implemented failed to construct programmatic alternatives. The street demand for “change” could easily become a useful but vacuous basis for middle class–dominated opposition movements to gain or regain power amid the disarray or absence of radical alternatives. New governments were elected and, in the context of the enduring debt burden, usually followed the same policy prescriptions dictated by international agencies. We explore the impact of such policies, and social movement responses to them, in the remainder of this volume. It will suffice to state here that, amid the brief international hegemony of neoliberalism in the 1990s, social movements in general and trade unions in particular failed to articulate any ideological alternative to such policies. Their capacity to respond effectively to new waves of economic liberalization was hampered both by this and by the significant decline in trade union membership and formal-sector employment that was the result of the implementation of these policies.
This supposed “end of history” ended with the emergence of the international antiglobalization movement, its birth marked by the “Battle of Seattle” against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in November 1999.37 This movement attempted to express an alternative global politics, often simply by stating that an “alternative” was possible. It had impressive advocates and a diversity of political ideas.38 It developed unevenly in the global north, achieving its high points in regional mobilizations against international organizations and in bringing activists together at World Social Forums. In Africa, however, “anticapitalism” was both more deeply rooted—in long-standing revolts against international agencies and national governments—and less developed, in the sense that there was less explicit emphasis on politics and a lack of political ideas that could be labeled anticapitalist. The antiglobalization movement nevertheless provided a great opportunity for African social movements: a new way of constructing alternatives to neoliberalism and a new form of international activism that, in stressing local agency and diversity, was a step forward from the restrictive Stalinism and state capitalism (presented as “African socialism”) that most Africans had previously experienced. However, as chapter 7 will explore, this “movement of movements” contained its own contradictions, hierarchies, and inequalities, especially from an African perspective.
Modernism and postmodernism in African scholarship
There are many reasons why an alternative politics struggled to emerge even after Seattle and particularly in Africa. The capacity of social movements to develop independent analysis and a critique of the IFIs and national development models was crippled both by the retreat of the left internationally and by the intellectual predominance of postmodernism. If neoliberalism was the policy prescription of restructuring in the developing world, postmodernism was its philosophical bedfellow. While the shift away from more structural and deterministic approaches to the role of class in society practiced in the 1970s (for example, the “labor aristocracy” argument or the reification of the peasantry as the predetermined vanguard class) was a positive development, there evolved a tendency (which is still significant today) to focus instead on “multiple identities,” claiming ethnic, youth, and religious identities as categories for analysis without seeking to situate them in a wider political economy.39
The effects of postmodernism and the consequent reduction in class-based analysis thoroughly permeated research on African social realities. Recent academic writing on Africa has stressed that political movements cannot fit into the “narrow” constraints of class, stressing in its place such multiple identities. This focus on “identity,” “indeterminacy,” “complexity,” and “performance,” in which the “discourse” or “symbolism” of social movements becomes the primary frame of analysis, leads inexorably to neglecting the content of those movements.40 Much writing in this area, indeed, eschews any interest in or commitment to progressive political and social change.41 There is, in the use of the term “postcolony” and the (in many ways sensible) rejection of earlier projects of “modernization” and “development,” a widespread skepticism about any attempt to improve the lives of ordinary Africans through progressive politics.42 As Graham Harrison summarizes, “attention is paid . . . to the ways in which social power is constructed rather than structured. Here, African states are seen as decentralised forms of authority which permeate local social relations, producing an almost subterranean power which is not invested in formal state institutions as much as constructed by local élites and chieftaincies.”43
Jean-François Bayart is one of the most important representatives of these trends. His work rightly rejects analysis of Africa through models of development and dependency and opposes older structuralist categories that saw African people as the victims of extraneous forces beyond their control. In so doing, however, Bayart dispenses with useful universal frames of analysis, such as class, imperialism, and the state:44
The social groups involved in the invention of politics in Africa . . . have their own historicity, which should prevent them from being assimilated too hastily into categories evolving from Western experiences of inequality, even when they do qualify for the category of “social class.” Thus the working class in sub-Saharan Africa is run through with divisions from traditional societies, especially the cleavages between elders and juniors or between nobles and inferiors.45
Many poststructural studies describe important cultural processes and reveal the complexity and intricacies of locally constructed relations and social forms. It is certainly the case that the particular dynamics of class in African societies (as in all others) need to be properly researched and examined, not assumed; class has in practice always interacted with other categories and divisions in society that are equally worthy of analysis. However, it is equally important to avoid a different form of reductionism in which all societies are believed to be so culturally particular that no adequate comparative analysis can be made between human experience in Africa and elsewhere. The interaction between global structures and local African specificities is at the heart of the approach adopted to study social movements in this volume.
From a different perspective, Achille Mbembe utilizes diffuse and Foucaultian conceptions of power to analyze the complex “composite” nature of the postcolony.46 He demonstrates that the cultural expression of Cameroonian protest, in the forms of lampooning, “irony,” and the playing of games is performative, a theatrical event that ultimately enables the repetition of subordination; an unchallenged institutional structure leaves the people, having internalized the system they blame for their ills, to “protest its loyalty and confirm the existence of an undoubted institution.”47 Yet Mbembe’s analysis disregards the genuinely subversive power of such linguistic forms of protest. For example, Pascal Bianchini describes how students at the University of Dakar have created their own linguistic tools for describing their predicament: cartouchard is a term used by students to describe a student who has exhausted his or her chances (literally “cartridges”), forcing him or her to succeed in end-of-year exams or face expulsion from the university.48 Frequently, slogans are recast to ridicule dominant political and economic policies: in South Africa, the Growth and Employment and Redistribution Programme (GEAR) was widely referred to as “reverse GEAR.”49 In Cameroon, student activists at the University of Yaoundé adopt inventive and intentionally ironic nicknames such as Savimbi, Fidel Castro, and Thatcher50 as forms of cultural and linguistic resistance—commonly produced as part of the concrete experience