African Struggles Today. Peter Dwyer
that humans make “their own history, but do not make it just as they please, they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”17 These un-chosen circumstances are not simply the existing institutions, government systems, and the judiciary, but also the experiences of previous struggles and movement and the successes, defeats, and memories of political action transmitted from the past.
These concerns, which form the backbone of our study, demand a direct connection with real events. These theoretical issues describe a relationship between movements, levels of political action, and leadership that operate within directly encountered circumstances. Any relationship can only be examined in its movement and development, as it evolves through the course of events. In Thompson’s words, “like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomize its structure . . . the relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context.”18 In this context, we seek to elaborate the particular way in which we understand the social movement concept and how we apply it to complex African realities in chapter 2.
Chapter 3 sets out the historical background to more recent struggles. In our view, it is necessary to examine the history of protest and resistance over the last six decades—as manifested in strikes, marches, demonstrations, and riots—if we are to understand and be able to explain the process of struggle and popular politics in Africa, both to celebrate its successes and to understand its failures and limitations. While the primary focus of the book is the most recent period of protest and political action since the democratic revolutions of the early 1990s, our story properly starts in 1945. As already indicated, the awakening of national consciousness in the third quarter of the twentieth century was not a singular event, but one which enabled—despite the ultimate success of nationalist leadership and the consequent limits placed on social reforms—the economic and social grievances of ordinary Africans to be articulated. The promise of “independence” was not simply one in which European rulers were replaced with indigenous ones. For most involved, it implicitly or explicitly necessitated a radical reorganization of the political and economic order in ways that would improve the political rights and living standards of the mass of ordinary Africans. The process of decolonization involved a dialectical interaction of forces in which the nationalist leadership often promoted struggle by the colonial poor while also seeking to direct and constrain them. Despite these efforts, however, the overthrow of colonialism continued to carry expectations of transformative change for the wider populace. Asse Lilombo, a Congolese activist, depicts what decolonization in 1960 meant to him: “It was not only a party of independence; it was a party of liberation.”19
When such transformation did not occur in the years after formal independence, social movements engaged in activities designed to ensure that their dreams of a more just and equal society were realized. Although independent labor and civil organizations were repressed and incorporated during the rise of one-party states and military regimes, grassroots activists continued to challenge the betrayal of their dreams of independence, albeit in deeply problematic circumstances.
Most African countries emerged from colonialism with their economies dependent on the export of one or two primary products. Independent African countries could grow, and even promote certain reforms, as long as there was a steady market and price for their commodities. The postwar boom, which established a seemingly permanent international consensus in support of state-led models of development, began to break up in the late 1960s. By the mid-1970s, commodity prices were collapsing and pulling into the vortex those newly independent states that had a precarious dependence on cotton, groundnuts, copper, or a number of other primary products. The crisis of postwar Keynesian capitalism, the rise in oil prices, the collapse in commodity prices, and the debt crisis that followed destroyed the state-led developmental project implemented by postcolonial African regimes. By the late 1970s, the global economic downturn had radically altered the terrain of grassroots contestation. Increasing international competition compelled many African rulers to enforce budgetary restraints, call for austerity, and eventually abolish what were now deplored as “restrictive” protectionist practices.
The economic status of most Africans worsened significantly, but the attempts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to make Africans pay the price for a crisis that was not of their making led to a new wave of resistance, taking the concrete form of “food riots” that were in fact just the tip of an iceberg of social and economic discontent. These protests have been described as the “first wave” of resistance to structural adjustment: expressing early and unorganized (to a certain extent) fury at the devastating cuts and attacks to state provisions.20 When some apparently hegemonic African states proved vulnerable to such pressures, delaying and even reversing the economic reforms demanded by the international financial institutions (IFIs), popular resistance was emboldened and began to take a more proactive form in the 1980s. Economic discontent combined with political demands, finding expression in labor organizations, churches, and less organizationally specific expressions of protest. In the late 1980s and early 1990s a second wave of protests was born. Inspired in part by the political changes in Eastern Europe, Africa experienced a new political revolution. This wave was more explicitly and organizationally political. One-party states were swept away by popular movements often led by trade unions and national conferences, so that by the mid-1990s, most of the continent had returned to democratic forms of government. However, just as in the movement for independence thirty years earlier, the unity of the pro-democracy movements masked profound differences over the future orientation of the new political system. In the context of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, models which linked political liberalization to economic liberalization were hegemonic—and the ongoing debt crisis left African governments with little choice but to implement more radical versions of the economic liberalization programs that had helped generate the movements that led to the removal of their predecessors.
As already mentioned, the main focus of this book is the subsequent period of nearly two decades, up to the present day. Chapter 4 is devoted to the particular experience of social movements in South Africa. While the literature on South Africa is well developed, it is striking, in comparison, how little primary research has been carried out on the activities and perspectives of social movements in the rest of the continent. This study aims to help fill that gap. Chapter 5 examines the experience of social movements in countries that achieved at least a limited form of democracy by the 1990s, and chapter 6 looks at others that have experienced a relapse into dictatorship or, with the repression of pro-democracy movements, remain highly undemocratic systems. In these three chapters, we explore in detail the experiences of social movements and civil society organizations as they have sought to achieve goals of greater social and economic justice and more effective forms of political accountability and democracy. Each chapter is based on a detailed analysis of the situation of the countries under study, drawing on relevant literature and, in chapters 5 and 6, interviews with dozens of civil society organizers and social movement activists. Key themes in these chapters are relations between social movements and African states; the ways in which social movements have been able to resist the implementation of economic liberalization programs; the extent to which such civil society organizations are themselves representative of the masses they claim to speak for; and to what extent they are themselves subject to the influence of Western donor agencies and NGOs that have at times provided a significant part of their funding.
Chapter 7 explores the anticapitalist movement that hit the headlines after the November demonstrations at the Seattle World Trade Organization meeting in November 1999. This was, until the revolutions in North Africa (the “Arab Spring” that began in January 2011), the most important development in international “politics from below” in the last fifteen years. This movement of movements began to challenge the gross inequities of the neoliberal Western-dominated capitalism that has been largely hegemonic since the end of the Cold War. It also presented profound challenges to older left and radical analyses of the nature of capitalism, of how progressive change is to be achieved, and, in particular, the structures necessary to do so. In this context it was a courageous attempt to generate political alternatives, even if these efforts have not been successful. Still, a generation of activists have been inspired and educated politically through involvement in the anticapitalist movement. In its organizational form—the Social