African Struggles Today. Peter Dwyer
though they have been, have not ultimately coalesced into a sustained force for social change akin to the labor movements of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century western Europe, which permanently transformed the lives of that continent’s working class. Africans, in contrast, have seen their living standards decline and many of their societies deteriorate into political repression and, in some cases, virtual anarchy.
As well as celebrating the successes of these movements, much of the book therefore asks the implicit question “What went wrong?” If social protest has been at the heart of Africa’s politics, then why is much of the continent so resolutely undemocratic, authoritarian, and poor? How have vibrant movements of the sort analyzed here failed to develop into broader political forces for radical social and political change? Why have their achievements been so consistently hijacked by economic and political elites, both Western and indigenous? Answering this question certainly necessitates a critique of the politics of African nationalism and the nature of postcolonial African elites. It also requires a critical analysis of the politics and composition of social movements themselves. By addressing these concerns, it is the authors’ hope that this book will make a modest contribution to strengthening the activists and movements currently active on the continent
This analysis is rooted in the authors’ extensive research on the continent, particularly in southern and central Africa. It draws on dozens of interviews with social movement activists and a decade of observation and participation in the debates and activities of movements and organizations that are themselves grappling with many of the questions raised above. The resultant analysis shows the experience of African social movements to be varied, complex, and often contradictory. They have often sought to utilize the democratic “space” they have helped win, only to find their activities hampered by elected governments that replicate the authoritarianism of their predecessors. Their efforts to speak for the “masses” or the “people” are limited by the profound inequalities (of resources, power, and social capital) that pervade their structures. They seek to operate in a global context, but their local grievances are subordinated to the liberal agenda of Western civil society, even in parts of the anticapitalist movement (which is the focus of chapter 7). In portraying the difficult relationships between the African poor and working class and the organizations that seek to represent them, we reject both the tendency to reify these movements as authentically “of the people” and the equal tendency to reject such movements as the puppets of their Western funders. These issues are further elaborated in chapter 2.
The view from below
Our orientation in this book is toward social forces that frequently lie hidden in the official historical accounts that dominate both academic studies and the media. We seek to understand historical and political change in a way that reflects the aspirations, grievances, and worldview of the majority of the African people. Social change, we argue, is created in the popular resistance of which social movements are increasingly an important element. This approach to a “politics from below” is of course not particularly original, nor particular to Africa. The model of political transformation in this book is developed from an approach to historical writing forged in the 1950s and 1960s. E. P. Thompson’s famous study The Making of the English Working Class wrote consciously “against the weight of prevailing orthodoxies” which “tend to obscure the agency of working people, the degree to which they contributed by conscious efforts, to the making of history. . . . Only the successful . . . are remembered. The blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves are forgotten.”3
History from below is not a new phenomenon in Africa. This approach to Africa’s past, present, and future was popularized in the annual History Workshop at South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand. Drawing on the work of Thompson, these studies emphasized the importance of the agency of the “poors” and stressed the vibrancy of the experiences of popular classes.4 In the 1970s, pioneering labor studies were carried out across the continent, employing an empirical “change from below” perspective to shed light on the consciousness of workers in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Zambia, among other countries.5 Some more recent studies of Zimbabwe have continued this pioneering work.6 More generally, however, there has been a shift away from agency-oriented studies of social movements; political change in Africa tends to be interpreted primarily in terms of the machinations of elites and their interactions with international institutions. Politics is reduced to “governance” and social movements to “civil society.” The “masses,” in such analyses, are passive electoral fodder, easily manipulated by appeals to narrow ethnic solidarities and/or the trickle down of neo-patrimonial recompense.
This book is, then, an attempt to restore the agency of social movements to the center of democratic transformation and change on the continent. It is a sustained attempt against forgetting, for example, the general strikes that gave birth to mass nationalist politics in Senegal and Zimbabwe, or the demonstrations more than forty years later by students at the University of Lubumbashi that helped to trigger the “democratic transition” and the period of Congo’s “second revolution.”7 These histories are told against a frequently hostile and seemingly unbending social world. The ideological tools (organizations, initiatives, and leadership) that social movements used in the democratic transitions were one of the ways they were able to exercise agency and achieve successful transformation.
Ideological tools
These ideas are linked explicitly to central concerns of this book. It should be clear that the “activism” to which we refer is not simply a topic of research, but an important element in social and economic transformation. Political change without the intervention of ideological and social struggle (political activism) can lead to stagnation or worse: “the common ruin of struggling classes.”8 Therefore to make and remake history requires, in Chris Harman’s words, a social group with “its own ideas, its own organization and eventually its own . . . leadership. Where its most determined elements managed to create such things, the new society took root. Where it failed . . . stagnation and decay were the result.”9
Harman stressed in 2004 the centrality of political and ideological structures in the historical process: “Economic development never took place on its own, in a vacuum. It was carried forward by human beings, living in certain societies whose political and ideological structures had an impact on their actions.”10 In turn, these structures were the products of a confrontation between social groups.
Social transformation is therefore propelled by ideological and political conflict between rival social groups, not simply economics. The resolution of these conflicts “is never resolved in advance, but depends upon initiative, organization, and leadership,”11 the raw material through which human beings are able to make history, but not on a level playing field (or in a vacuum). We do not choose the circumstances in which these struggles take place.12
Historical progress proceeds in these unchosen circumstances. Samir Amin argued in 1990 that it was the economic backwardness of western Europe that gave it an advantage in the development of capitalism. Other Eurasian and African societies had experienced similar developments in production, but these were ultimately suffocated by existing state structures. The Chinese empire—the most economically advanced in the “Middle Ages”—was able to block these developments, while in the least advanced areas of western Europe the social forces unleashed by these changes could break down the old superstructures.13 The capacity to “break down” old institutions was not simply a matter of economics, but crucially of politics and ideology. It was not only a question of struggling against the economic control by old social groups but also the prevailing worldview. Where the social forces associated to the new forms of production were unsuccessful, or too closely connected to the old states and institutions, “they were defeated and the old orders hung on for a few more centuries until the battleships and cheap goods of Europe’s capitalists brought it tumbling down.”14
In the democratic transitions examined in this book a multitude of organizations and “social groups” generated their own programs and ideas for the “transition,” but the “initiative, organization, and leadership” that came to dominate these movements hailed from NGOs, now-excluded members of the previous ruling class, and trade union bureaucrats who