African Struggles Today. Peter Dwyer
does this relate to the social movements described in this book? Fanon’s critique and the practice advocated by Cabral were important attempts to grapple with the realities of the postcolonial world and the challenge of constructing emancipatory alternatives that could challenge the failures of independence. The social movements celebrated in this book do not display Patrick Chabal’s “illusions of civil society,” but are in fact real movements that demonstrate the vibrancy of a politics from below.26 However, they certainly do illustrate the tensions and contradictions inherent in social movements. Nevertheless, the traditions of radical political alternatives on the continent are important to study, because they raised and sought to address questions that are still of fundamental importance to African social movement activists today.
Global downturn, globalization, and resistance
By the time Cabral issued his warning about the nature of the African state, the assumptions underlying state-led developmental nationalism were being undermined by the onset of the global recession of the mid-1970s. The recession, which affected the world unevenly, was most severe in the recently independent countries of the Third World. The sudden rise in the price of oil hit most African economies hard, as did the collapse of international commodity prices. Most of sub-Saharan Africa was, as a legacy of colonialism, economically dependent on the export of raw materials, cash crops, and the production of single minerals. The price of such goods was determined by Western institutions such as the London Metal Exchange, and the collapse in the value of commodities devastated the earning power of many African states. For example, the collapse in the price of copper halved the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Zambia in the space of a few years. This decisively exposed national developmentalism as largely dependent on international factors beyond the control of supposedly sovereign African states. Many governments dealt with this problem by short-term borrowing, creating the long-term debt burden that, notwithstanding the real achievements of the Jubilee movement, is still with us today.
The period saw a major shift to what we describe today as neoliberalism. For governments and policy makers, neoliberalism was an important ideological challenge to the supremacy of the state in decision-making. Many now argued that “the time had come for the state to play a less important role in shaping the economy, that the private sector should play a very much larger part in economic policy-making, and that the market should be left to operate as freely as possible.”27 The move toward neoliberalism affected every corner of the continent. Even in South Africa, the continent’s largest economy, P. W. Botha took over from John Vorster as leader of the ruling National Party in September 1978, promising to revitalize the free-market economy and transfer resources from the state to the private sector. He pushed through policies to reduce the colossal state spending that had grown by an average of 10 percent per year between 1973 and 1976.
From the late 1970s onwards, indebted African states were no longer in a position to borrow commercially and were forced on the mercies of the IMF, World Bank, and Western governments. Donors used increasingly severe conditions on loans to impose economic reforms on African governments. In particular, governments seeking to borrow money were forced to remove price controls on basic foodstuffs, a measure which disproportionately affected the growing urban population—the millions of poor Africans who had migrated to the cities in the decade after independence. As detailed in chapter 3, the removal of these controls prompted a series of revolts in the late 1970s and early 1980s against donor-imposed increases in basic food prices.
These protests brought the urban African poor onto the streets, often informally led by the working classes; street protests were often supplemented by strike action, sometimes organized by trade union leaders but more usually initiated by rank-and-file union members or shop stewards. These were not simply revolts of the “urban crowd”; in Zambia, for example, local union officials on the Copperbelt helped shape the direction of the uprisings in 1986, reflecting the verbal criticisms by national union leaders of the removal of subsidies. The protestors looted state-owned stores, but also targeted government and ruling party offices.28 This wave of revolts, initially relatively disorganized, began to germinate ideas of more organized resistance towards incumbent regimes (leading, for example, to the overthrow of Sudanese President Nimeiri in 1985) and notions of social justice deployed against the regimes’ complicity with IMF loan conditions.
Some analysts nevertheless referred to such actions as “desperate IMF riots” taking place in “wretched Third World cities,” suggesting an absence of organization, politics, and democratic traditions.29 Others unhelpfully contrasted “workers’ struggles” with “populist forms of socio-political movement.”30 A few years later, others claimed that the distinct weaknesses of African civil society made it impossible for it to lead the type of movements that had transformed Eastern Europe in 1989. Chabal argued at the time that there was little “scope in contemporary Africa for the type of civil society that, as happened in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, could play a decisive role in the substantive transformation of the political system.”31 The tendency to label these events “IMF riots,” “food riots,” or illustrative of the “illusions of civil society” significantly understates the extent of social movement coordination and organization involved.
The organizers of such protests, through their actions, gained a clearer sense of the very limited sovereignty of their countries, which were peripheral to the global economy and dependent on international factors. This had real consequences for social movement strategies. Activists were increasingly aware that their actions and protests needed to be directed toward both national governments and the international bodies that significantly influenced government policies. African movements, it can be argued, thus experienced globalization and the need to respond to it at an earlier stage than their Western counterparts. From this time, trade unions, church groups, and women’s organizations sought to strengthen their coordination with international counterparts, both in Africa and more widely. In the repressive context of one-party states and military regimes, there were significant restrictions on the practicality of such linkages. Nevertheless, the failure of the national development model had significant consequences: it led to the reversal of the limited social and economic gains of postcolonial states, increasing popular unrest against African governments, and it exposed the hollowness of the supposed hegemonic authority of those states, encouraging popular debate regarding the link between economic justice and political accountability. The internationalization of protest movements and the complex relationship between social movements, states, and international organizations is explored further in chapter 7.
Democracy and new social movements
The link between economic grievances of the type discussed above and the need for a return to democratic political systems grew increasingly urgent in the late 1980s. Whereas earlier economic protests had often avoided questioning the political legitimacy of African regimes, now the right of those regimes to govern came more strongly under question, as different social forces converged around the linked questions of economic and political rights. Previously distinct groups struggling against sectionally specific cuts began to identify a commonality in the diverse protests. Student movements played a particular role in this regard. Previously privileged student bodies experienced drastic reductions in their living standards and the quality of their education as IMF-imposed public sector spending cuts threatened the very survival of higher education in many African countries. Student bodies, no longer an isolated elite, now linked their activism to wider social change.32
As chapter 3 details, between 1990 and 1994, popular protest movements and strikes brought down more than thirty African regimes, with multi-party elections held for the first time in a generation. This period saw the convergence of social movements, frequently drawn together by the organizing strength and militancy of organized labor. As one observer remarked shortly after this period, trade unions “sought not simply to protect the work-place interests of their members but have endeavoured to bring about a restructuring of the political system.”33 This was arguably the most important show of collective and organizational power in the history of the continent’s social movements, in general, and of trade unions in particular.
There were nevertheless significant problems with the opposition movements that emerged and the processes of democratic transition they initiated.