African Struggles Today. Peter Dwyer
there were individuals, trade unionists, militants, and occasionally organizations that tried to drive the movements to the left, these were ultimately unable to lead and grow sufficiently to counter the politics and “ideological tools” of a recycled elite. For much of the continent’s recent history, that politics has been dominated by a hegemonic nationalism, linked inextricably to the interests and parties of a particular social group but claiming to speak for the whole of society.
Understanding the faces of nationalism
Historically, nationalism tends to be the chosen ideology (and the state the central political focus) of members of a specific social group seeking to govern a politically defined nation. The political manifestation of this social group is often embodied in the leadership of the dominant hegemonic organization that provides intellectual and moral leadership in a national liberation movement and expresses particular material interests. However, leaders of a national movement do not always recognize themselves as a specific social group, expressing themselves instead as a national liberation movement speaking for all the people.
Colonial oppression, by subjugating people on a racialized basis, had the unintended consequence of uniting the subjugated peoples within particular colonial territories. The broad political objective of national liberation movements was therefore to secure the independence of their “country” from foreign domination—“national oppression.” Revolutionary national liberation movements were composed of different social groups temporarily united under the banner of national liberation. Indeed, the term “movement” implies an amalgam of groups—political, economic, social, and cultural—working more or less collectively to bring about the goal of national liberation. While such movements develop in differing contexts, it is still possible to identify common characteristics they embody. One of these is that there is usually a group of people—often sharing similar material interests—in “leadership” positions with a specific, if not fixed, political strategy that, although seldom unchallenged, becomes hegemonic and leads a movement that strategically draws on different social groups. Consequently, it is important to interrogate the character of national liberation by defining nationalism as a particular set of ideas and by examining how, as a distinct political ideology, nationalism expresses particular material interests.
It is worth examining these arguments in more detail. Colonial oppression creates material incentives for resistance among all members of the oppressed nationality, but it also violates the particular material interests of various classes and strata in different ways. The material injuries that are experienced by all members of the oppressed nationality may actually constitute a relatively narrow band of common grievances against the colonial occupiers, while the most consistent and most particularly felt oppression—and thereby the oppression that motivates the sharpest resistance—may be particular to each social class or stratum.
For example, peasants may experience grievances against colonial landlords that can be successfully articulated within a “national” framework, but also against local landlords which cannot—as they did in India, where Gandhi approved rent strikes against the British landlords but not their Indian equivalents, the zamindars. Both classes, peasant and landlord, may be anti-colonial, but for different reasons. The unity of people who share a common enemy is essentially a “negative” quality—they both seek to remove the colonial regime, but disagree on what they would want from a successor regime. Therefore, we could say that classes diverge on their positive social goals.15 Through such divergences, the “material basis” for a national liberation movement is thus fragmented into multiple material bases, which need to be fully analyzed if such movements are to be adequately understood.
Nationalists generally fail, unsurprisingly, to interrogate the material and historical bases of their own movements. Nationalists do not deny that other conflicts or forms of oppression exist, but maintain that they are secondary to the shared identity of all the peoples of a nation, irrespective of their gender, religion, and so on. The implication is that nationalism has no specific material and social basis. Nationalism, especially non-Western nationalism, is popularly understood as an essentially “natural” response by oppressed peoples to their oppression by an external force, for example colonial settlers. The corollary is nationalism understood as a distinct political force, disconnected from any particular social group or specific material conditions.
The “nationalist project” in sub-Saharan Africa has been historically tied to the role played by what we term the “student-intelligentsia.” Often described as a petit bourgeoisie, at independence this class was without its own capital and sought national liberation and state power as a way of securing control of such capital. They presented themselves as above class antagonism, portrayed colonialism as the sole initiator of class divisions inherently foreign to African society, and developed political ideas—African socialism and African unity—that sought to justify the goal of a liberated nation, free of class division. Their project, however, was driven by their own interests, and they succeeded in constraining wider demands for political and economic transformation. In the period after independence the intelligentsia continued to play a leading role, often in the context of the political weaknesses of other social groups. A more detailed exploration of the postcolonial period is provided in chapter 3.
Social movements and NGOism
In the last twenty years, the capacity of the postcolonial state to ensure the interests of this elite and to manage the demands of the wider populace has been seriously weakened by the impact of economic liberalization. In this context, a plethora of civil society organizations (CSOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), have emerged to fill the gaps created by the negative impact of structural adjustment and neoliberalism on state-provided social services, often using the language of “empowerment” and “community participation.” The general result has been the massive distortion of social resistance by the introduction of “donor syndrome,” the distribution of donor money to activist groups and NGOs.
This phenomenon is linked to the political disillusionment of the left in the 1980s and 1990s. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc led many radically minded civil society activists to retreat from the notion of a confrontation with global capitalism, and to turn instead to single-issue campaigns and substitute the voluntarist provision of welfare services for demands on the state. This explains the proclivity of single-issue campaigns among NGO activists, who saw new possibilities of “empowering” communities through donor funds. In this context, NGO approaches and donor funding ingratiated themselves into some of the social movements and campaigns that we describe in the book. As John Bomba, a Zimbabwean activist, commented, NGO funds can “disarm the movement that was emerging from the ground and shift people’s focus from the real battles to some very fantastical arenas.”16
Indeed, one of the underlying tensions within the social movements analyzed in this book is that between an activist orientation and a tendency towards NGO-ization and a focus on the provision of welfare-oriented services that might otherwise be provided by the state. We do not, however, dismiss any organization engaged in service provision as an NGO that can easily be counterposed to more activist-oriented social movements. Rather, social movements exist on a spectrum of orientations; any single movement may contain diverse (and even contradictory) elements of bureaucratization and activism. This issue is explored in more detail in chapter 2.
The structure of this book
While this is a study of social movements, it is based on the authors’ understanding that no history is complete if its focus is solely on the movements from below. As subsequent chapters will show, the relationship between popular politics, organizations, and leadership is extremely complex, involving a dialectical connection that draws forces together in particular times and places. Central to this analysis, therefore, is the relationship between classes and movements, and the tensions between leadership and organizations that shape social change. This requires both the assertion of the agency of the poor and the detailed empirical investigation of the politics of both “below” and “above.” Yet this interaction does not take place in a vacuum that can be freshly made by each generation. Agency is constrained (and facilitated) by structures that are inherited or born into.