African Struggles Today. Peter Dwyer
should be assessed through empirical research—as we seek to do in this volume.
Transformative moments in African history
Although social movement authors such as Goodwin do not write directly about Africa, their concerns and assertions have direct relevance to the continent. Goodwin, like most other observers, sees revolutionary struggles on the wane. Today the battles are more modest ones for democratization. Accordingly, social movements remain an active feature of the modern world, but their role is limited to Tilly’s notions of pressure group influence within an otherwise relatively stable liberal democracy. Whether this is true or untrue in the Western world, the evidence presented in chapters 4, 5, and 6 demonstrates the continuing instability of liberal democracies in Africa and, in particular, that efforts by elites (both indigenous and Western) to achieve their vision of liberal democracy have often involved authoritarian initiatives that have themselves generated opposition from below. Such opposition is by no means limited to demands for particular policy reforms, but challenges the very assumptions on which those societies have been based.
It is evidently true, of course, that not every protest (in Africa or elsewhere) is a social movement, and not every social movement is a revolution-in-waiting. A useful way of interpreting the periods of social movement radicalization and direct action examined in chapter 3 is as “protest cycles,” which can be regarded as successive periods of intensified (and less intense) struggle. Sidney Tarrow sees protest cycles as periods of intensified conflict across society, operating as “crucibles” in which a “repertoire” of collective action can expand.11 Protest cycles pull in new layers of society which have not been active before, or reenergize those battered by earlier experiences of defeat. New organizations emerge, or older ones are regenerated by activists and new members. It is within the cycle of protest that new forms of organizing society emerge, and fresh organizations, movements, and parties develop. The central experience of these protest cycles is the transformation in people’s ideas of what is possible. Old authorities are questioned, new forms of decision-making emerge, and fresh layers of younger activists are drawn into a widening repertoire of mass action.12 New movements then interact with established political forces (parties, for example, or more formally constituted civil society organizations) and, as noted above, often form coalitions of interests to bring about change of a greater or lesser extent. Understanding these cycles—and how they have unfolded in practice in recent sub-Saharan African history—requires understanding that such coalitions, in which the participation of classes is an element, contain within themselves an ongoing battle for political hegemony between competing social forces, the outcome of which is never certain and which depends on (among other factors): the extent of mass involvement in their activities and organizations; the openness of their internal debates; and the permanent contest for hegemony between different forces. Social movements have the potential in such circumstances to construct, from their struggles, new institutions and democratic practices that can become the basis for alternative forms of power. Their capacity to do this, however, depends on the extent to which popular and working-class forces are able to challenge elites, who will generally seek a more limited level of social transformation.
In Africa, the leadership of the struggles for independence and post-independence political movements has of course not generally rested in the hands of the working class or popular forces. Other groups assumed control, leading, frustrating, and in some cases subverting the potential militancy of these movements. This reality illustrated a twin problem. One was the inherent limitation of nationalist politics that sought freedom from colonial tyranny, but that limited political change to the establishment of nation-states inherently constrained by the preexisting domination of the globe by powerful Western states and the forces of the global economy they largely controlled. The second problem was the weaknesses of the African working class, its organizations, leadership, and (more recently) its damaging reconfiguration on the anvil of economic liberalization.
This book identifies three major cycles of protest in recent African history, when social movements played a vital role in challenging injustice and exploitation and raised the possibility of radical social change. The first was the movement for political independence in post–World War II Africa, which led to the establishment of new nation-states across most of the continent by the 1960s. The second was triggered by the first wave of structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF and World Bank but often implemented “voluntarily” by African governments from the late 1970s onwards. By the late 1980s, this wave developed into a third protest cycle across the continent that was more explicitly oppositional, pulling in new and old social forces alike. The third wave, which extended into the late 1990s, broadened economic grievances into political ones and can be credited with the most thorough political transformation of the continent since the 1960s independence movements. The first and third wave of protests contained within them the potential for revolutionary change, involving a process in which mass movements overthrow an old power (rather than seizing existing state machinery) and implement democratic institutions that have the potential to become the foundations of a new society.13 We explore the dynamics of each of these cycles of protest in much greater detail in chapter 3.
The cage of independence: Nationalism and social movements
The popular struggle for African independence, often understood as unified movements to establish self-rule of nation-states, consisted in fact of diverse social forces that achieved temporary unity under the banner of nationalism, but that also had particular social and economic aims their supporters believed could be realized through the achievement of an independent nation-state. African elites had long appealed for colonial reforms that would deliver improvements for the tiny minority of “educated” or “civilized” Africans, with little success. Only with the emergence of mass African movements in the post–World War II period was the capacity of colonial authorities to govern their territories effectively undermined to the point that the process of substantial reform, ultimately leading to self-rule, could begin. The popular expression of economic and social grievances, particularly in the forms of strike action and rural unrest, was crucial in accelerating the process of decolonization in virtually every African colony.
This was widely recognized during the nationalist period itself. Thomas Hodgkin, in his famous book of 1956, made the point that the very term “African nationalism” “tends to conceal the ‘mixed-up’ character of African political movements. . . . Most of these various types of organisation possessed links, formal or informal, with one another. Many of them were not concerned, overtly or primarily, with achieving national independence or stimulating a sense of . . . nationhood.”14 However, there has ever since been a tendency to see such movements as essentially “parochial” in relation to the wider aim of the nation-state. This, as Frederick Cooper has argued, distracted attention from the full extent and significance of these popular mobilizations, which were primarily anti-colonial, rather than essentially nationalist in character:
It is tempting to read the history of the period from 1945 to 1960 as the inevitable triumph of nationalism and to see each social movement taking place within a colony—be it by peasants, women, by workers, or by religious groups—as another piece to be integrated into the coming together of a nation. What is lost in such a reading are the ways in which different groups within colonies mobilized for concrete ends. . . . Whether such efforts fed into the attempts of nationalist parties to build anti-colonial coalitions needs to be investigated, not assumed.15
What is most important to stress here, however, is that this period of mass nationalism depended on the belief among large sections of the African population that achieving independence would lead in short order to the improvement of their material conditions and measures to address their grievances. Nationalist politicians made promises to their supporters that implied a transformative post-independence project. In the Congo, for example, Asse Lilombo remembers independence as “a big feast, a party of liberation. We had been liberated from slavery. The women were dressed up. There was goat and beer. The party lasted days. . . . We would be responsible for ourselves. We would manage our country ourselves.”16 Notwithstanding the extent to which these promises were dismissed by outside observers as “unrealistic,” they crucially informed the positions adopted by social movements in the run-up to and in the aftermath