Protest from the late 1980s and into the 1990s involved far greater political orchestration and direction (Dwyer and Seddon, 2002; Dwyer and Zeilig, 2002; Zeilig & Seddon, 2002) and was increasingly aimed at governments and even regimes, as much as at economic policies. The charge that national governments had broken the implicit social contract to safeguard not only the material welfare of the people, but also their political rights, led to growing demands for democracy and political change. This local dynamic coincided with the increasing deployment by international agencies and major capitalist states of a discourse of ‘democratisation’ and of ‘good governance’ as prerequisites for economic and social development. This apparent new ‘concern’ for democracy in the developing world, on the part of institutions and states that had previously accommodated dictators and autocrats, was, however, abandoned where local regimes and political processes threatened their interests, in which case more direct forms of intervention better characterised as a new ‘colonial’ imperialism were initiated.
The ‘new world order’, pronounced in the early 1990s but increasingly manifest through the decade, was widely seen in Africa, Asia and Latin America as a triumphalist US-dominated imperialism. This provoked a ‘third’ wave of protest and dissent – this time with a much greater degree of international organisation. On the one hand, a social movement with a distinctive ‘anti-capitalist’ politics and perspective emerged, increasingly articulate, coordinated and global, first in the countries of North America (at Seattle) and Europe (Genoa etc.), but then spreading to Latin America (Porto Allegre), Asia and Africa (Callinicos, 2003; Cliffe, Bujra and Szeftel, 2004). On the other hand, an oppositional movement of a darker and more threatening kind appeared, based on deep-seated angers and frustrations, prepared to use violence to achieve its objectives. In the Middle East, and throughout the so-called Muslim world (including parts of Africa), a network of radical Islamist groups and movements, associated in many cases (but not always) with al-Qa'ida (originally established to provide support for Arabs fighting with the mujahidin in Afghanistan), emerged to directly challenge both local regimes and the interests of the imperialist powers, notably the USA (Ali, 2002). Alongside these developments has come a resurgence of armed struggle by leftist and populist movements in South Asia (India, Bangladesh and Nepal) deploying the rhetoric and strategy of Maoism in their efforts to overthrow local regimes and resist imperialism. Strikingly similar indigenous movements, albeit with different political ideologies and often drawing on ethnic and indigenista affiliations, developed elsewhere in Asia and in Latin America during the 1990s. The variety and complexity of these different – and yet comparable and often inter-linked – ‘anti-systemic’ movements (as Wallerstein (1989) calls them) worldwide is enormous and requires more analysis.
The focus here, however, is on Africa. In line with the reformulation of ROAPE's priorities (Editorial, 102), we reassert the salience of class analysis and renew an analytical concern with working class and popular protest that has for too long been marginalised. Whilst aware of the dangers of Africa-wide generalisation, we believe a broad picture of its political and economic transformation is both possible and necessary. We agree with Gavin Williams (2004) when he argues that there is no substitute for the careful inter-disciplinary study of specific African realities, but believe complementary efforts at comparison, synthesis and generalisation are in order. In effect a critique of the ways in which protest, resistance and class struggle in Africa have been theorised, our argument will be underpinned by the conception of successive ‘waves’ of popular protest since the 1970s, as an integral part of the process of global capitalist re-structuring. In our analysis, we situate ongoing popular democratic struggles at the centre of Africa's political and economic trajectory over the last forty years. We ask a connected set of questions about these struggles by ordinary people – workers, peasants and the ‘middle classes’ – for more power. First, given the transformation of Africa's political economy through ‘global re-adjustment’, how widespread are these waves of popular protest and what is their social composition? Also, what is the relevance of the postmodernist critique for the contemporary analysis of popular struggles? Finally, what is the relationship between these waves of protest in Africa and the emergent anti-globalisation movement. Our conclusions indicate a need for those on the left to distance themselves from the 1990s ‘miserabilism’ (frequently described as ‘African pessimism’) that had African studies in a postmodern stranglehold.
Global re-structuring & ‘New’ patterns of class struggle
Decolonisation had been a ‘bargaining process with co-operative African elites … and … the careerist heirs to independence preoccupied themselves with an ‘Africanization’ of the administration' (First, 1970:57-8). The ‘socialist project’, much-heralded by those on the left, fell away as ‘African socialism’ was implemented as a framework for the development of state capitalism at best, and as a means to personal and ‘crony’ enrichment at worst. Leys' Underdevelopment in Kenya (1975) initiated a debate about the possibility of indigenous private capitalist development in Africa, based on the Kenyan case, which was immediately taken up by other commentators (Kitching, 1977; Swainson, 1977) and later extended to Ghana (Kennedy, 1977), Nigeria (Osoba, 1978) and Tanzania (von Freyhold, 1977). Most analysts concluded that a ‘real’ national bourgeoisie had not emerged anywhere in Africa, and that, consequently, ‘real’ capitalist development had not taken place. Some disagreed; for example, Kennedy argued that ‘a local industrial capitalist class has emerged in Ghana over the last 30 years’ (1977:37), while Warren argued more generally that ‘the illusion of underdevelopment’ had obscured real progress (1973, 1980). Others pointed out – pertinently from our perspective – that Leys’ analysis had generally neglected the struggles of ‘oppressed classes’ (Lamb, 1975). Yet others observed more generally that ‘while analyses of the relationships between national and international capital are in abundant supply’, ‘detailed analyses of the nature and focus of existing class struggles are few and far between’ (Phillips, 1977:20). The search for an elusive national bourgeoisie continued to be a focus of academic debate into the 1980s (Beckman, 1980, 1981; Bernstein and Campbell, 1985; Sender and Smith, 1986).
If ‘neo-Marxists’ were dubious regarding capitalist development in Africa, there were others, whom one might call ‘neo-classical Marxists’, who argued that capitalist development had in fact begun to unfold in the preceding decades of the century, demonstrated by the emergence of a working class, a process of capitalist exploitation, and the development of the productive forces (Warren, 1973, 1980). A ‘fundamental structural change has occurred, involving the development of a labour market, a ‘free’ wage labour force, and a new, capitalist mode of appropriation of surplus labour’ (Sender and Smith, 1986:35). Imperialism had proved the ‘pioneer of capitalism’ in Africa, and it was demonstrably possible – particularly if the false ideology of ‘African socialism’ were abandoned – for the conditions for capital accumulation to emerge, if the state were to intervene to strengthen the national economy. State capitalism would do, for the time being, while a national bourgeoisie constituted itself and a national working class gained ground and muscle (Sender and Smith, 1986).
Generally missing from these debates was serious consideration of the relationship between the social forces representing the interests of capital (whether international or national) and those – which we call the popular classes – that opposed and resisted the actual pattern of development in Africa (whether capitalist, socialist or other). By the 1970s, class relations in African states were undergoing major transformation in the context of global re-structuring. The project of global adjustment pre-empted the state in Africa, Asia and Latin America from playing a developmental role and subjected it to reform that would facilitate foreign capital investment and easier access to raw materials and markets. This project was implemented, often with the collusion of sections of the ruling elites, but sometimes against their will. African social structures, already profoundly affected by conflict and ‘complex political emergencies’ exacerbated or provoked by structural adjustment, were also, from the mid-1980s onwards, increasingly devastated by the spread of HIV/AIDS (one effect of structural adjustment was to devastate already rudimentary health provision) and the often perverse effects of pervasive NGO-isation.
Popular forces & ‘the working class’
The nature of ‘the African working class’ and its capacity for progressive collective action has long been debated on the left – key issues were whether bonds of solidarity and consciousness within the working class as a whole were limited by the existence of an ‘aristocracy of labour’ or conversely by archaic links to the rural economy and society? Ruth First argued that African patterns of development had created a hybrid class (the peasantariat), founded on a linked rural and urban identity (1983). In fact, it is indeed the case that a combination of rural and urban in the formation of the working class has characterised the process of ‘proletarianisation’ in most parts of Africa in the 19th and 20th century – from migrant labour in the mines in southern Africa from the 1900s, to labour in oil extraction and processing in the Niger Delta from the 1970s (Iliffe, 1983).
Let us consider the composition of those ‘popular forces’ to which we allude in our discussion of class struggle in contemporary Africa. They may include not only the urban and rural working classes (consisting of those who have little or no control or ownership of the means of production and only their labour to sell, whether in the formal or the informal sector) but also other categories, including on the one hand those whom Marx refers to as ‘paupers’ and on the other small peasants and tenant farmers, ‘independent’ craftsmen and artisans, small retailers and petty commodity producers, and members of the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ (sometimes called ‘the new middle classes’) generally including the lower echelons of the public sector). Not only do these various social categories constitute, in effect, the relative surplus population which may be characterised as a reserve army of labour, they often share a consciousness of their interdependency and common vulnerability.
The ‘informalisation’ of the African political economy, noted from the 1970s, has been exacerbated by the dismantling of corporatist states on the grounds that they were overgrown and ineffective. Restructuring the state required the retrenchments of the 1980s and 1990s. Barchiesi (1996) observed how in Nigeria those in employment were initially forced to enter the informal economy to supplement their salaries, whilst widespread unemployment among former public sector workers led to the collapse of previously solid class identities forged in the context of state corporatism. Harrison concludes that:
One can see the decline of corporatism and the increasing informalisation of the urban economy not as a sign of the decay of the urban working class, but rather the reformulation of its political identities into a realm of fiscal austerity and speculation (2002:114).
Capitalism would not be capitalism if the proletariat pur sang were not surrounded by a large number of exceedingly motley types intermediate between the proletarian and the semi-proletarian (who earns his livelihood in part by the sale of his labour power), between the semi-proletarian and the small peasant (and petty artisan, handicraft worker, and small master in general), between the small peasant and the middle peasant, and so on, and if the proletariat itself were not divided … according to territorial origin, trade, sometimes according to religion …
others have come to realise that the lot of the workers determines their own lot and that indeed they have a common interest. When workers are not paid or are poorly paid the poor peasant farmers and the poor petty traders (mainly women) know from their own experiences that their sales suffer. In an age of increasing unemployment, there are several dependants on the worker, and they have come to appreciate that their interests and that of the worker (who sustains their survival) are the same (2002:96).
In fact, the ways in which these different ‘exceedingly motley types’ relate to ‘the working class’ cannot be identified and understood, except in the dynamic ‘course of events’ – that is, in their historical context. If we are to understand and to explain the process of class formation (and transformation) in the context of capitalist development (such as it is in Africa), we need to look to the wider arena of popular struggle as manifested in protest and resistance.
Theory & resistance in Sub-Saharan Africa
Class analysis, and the study of popular resistance, is recognised as having fallen on hard times (Cliffe, Bujra, and Szeftel 2004). It became almost de rigeur for academics (even many leftists) to maintain that African political movements could not be ‘fitted’ into the narrow constraints of class, particularly when that concept appeared part of an alien narrative. In its place some instead privileged – as more real or ‘authentic’ – the supposedly indigenous and subjective (the ‘emic’). Emphasising the crucial role of language and discourse and the complex inter-play of identities, they often claim ethnic, gender, youth or religious identities to be more ‘valid’ categories for analysis than ‘etic’ categories such as class (Mbembe, 1991, 2001; Bayart, 1991, 1993). As part of a broader epistemological challenge not only to Marxism but also to other modernist traditions, post-structuralism and postmodernism have swamped African studies with an emphasis on identity, indeterminacy, complexity and performance (for example Werbner, 1996; Wordy, 1998; Mbembe, 1991; Manor, 1991). The ‘deconstruction’ of such concepts as nation, class and state, in favour of discourse, language and symbolism, means that exploitation, class formation and struggle cease to be analytical constructs, let alone objective realities.
By the early 1990s, it looked to many as though the postmodernists had triumphed. In a foundational text Manor (1991:2) summarises the main criticism of the ‘old’ theories:
With their teleological biases, they tend to begin their studies with the script already half-written. The old paradigms were ideologies as much as they were modes of analysis. They tended towards monopolistic claims of truth for their own world-view. We make no such claim and this means that our map of the discipline of politics looks rather different to theirs.
We are not interested here in influencing the countries that we are studying. We do not even intend these studies to advance the cause of democracy in the Third World, even though we all wish it well (2001:2).
Eschewing large-scale comparison, these theorists privilege detailed case studies which allow the researcher to delve into the localised complexity of social formations, and through anthropological and cultural enquiry to expose the symbolic and linguistic significance of social practice. There is strength in this focus on the grass roots, which at first sight offers a valuable counter to larger-scale, structuralist studies which postmodernists regard with scepticism. Bayart (1991, 1993) is an important representative of these trends. Labelling the old structuralist categories as a ‘paradigm of the yoke’ for their representation of Africa as eternal victim to extraneous forces, Bayart dispenses with the conceptual language that supports them: class, imperialism, the state. For example:
The social groups involved in the invention of politics in Africa … have their own historicity, which should prevent them from being assimilated too hastily into categories evolving from Western experiences of inequality, even when they do qualify for the category of ‘social class’. Thus the working class in sub-Saharan Africa is run through with divisions from traditional societies, especially the cleavages between elders and juniors or between nobles and inferiors (Bayart, 1991:57-8).
homo africanus is trapped in a web of social relations, which are simultaneously sensory and affective, that s/he prefers to ‘eat’ rather than to produce. In conclusion, analysis of African … societies must no longer ignore the multiple procedures whereby states are individually created, and through which the state is a link between fear and hope, suffering and joy, life and death (Bayart, 1991:68).
the process of criminalisation … has become the dominant trait of a sub-continent in which the state has literally imploded under the combined effects of economic crisis, neo-liberal programs of structural adjustment and the loss of legitimacy of political institutions (1999:19).
How does this relate to the subject of resistance, activism and struggle? The cynicism expressed by the post-modernists towards political change extends to political activism and particularly the concept of ‘liberation’. In the post-modernist conception and in the ‘post-colony’ (a construct that resists specificity but seems to be applied particularly to Africa), power no longer denotes coercion and oppression, resistance and struggle; it becomes a fluid, pervasive yet contingent force derived from the interplay of different discourses. There is a reluctance to engage with narratives of struggle and liberation, condemning them as both ‘truthful and false’. In a situation where the old categories (and certainties) are dissolved, the responsibility of the social researcher is to delve behind the appearance of things to discover their ‘sorcery’. Mbembe (2002) explores the concept of the post-colony:
… the usual categories of political economy are unable to highlight its complexities. In this kind of power formation, reality is each time erased, recreated, and duplicated. It is this power of proliferation (and its ability to obliterate the distinctions between truth and falsehood, the visible and the occult) that turns domination and subjection into a magical song, at that point where the originally arbitrariness produces terror and hilarity.
official discourse made use of the necessary means to maintain the fiction of a society devoid of conflict … the unity of all people, among whom no divisions could be allowed to exist (1991:167).
In the post-colonial historical trajectory, the authoritarian mode can no longer be interpreted solely in terms of ‘control’, ‘surveillance’ and the ‘politics of coercion’. [Instead] … an intimate tyranny links together the dominant and the dominated. If subjection is increased it is also because the subjects themselves have internalised the part of the system they blame, to such a degree that they end up reproducing it as if it was their own.
In our view, Marx's dictum that ‘men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please, they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves’ remains pertinent, and means that while there are certain ‘structural’ conditions that shape the cultural and social forms in society they are not necessarily the determining ones at any particular point in time. Some scepticism towards Marxism – and particularly its African varieties – is justifiable, given a tendency to force diverse and heterogeneous political forms and processes into a rigid and over-determined analysis in which class relations were simply ‘read off’ from the inherent structural contradictions of particular modes of production. However the reaction to these theoretical shortcomings has been equally flawed, and the supplanting of Marx by Foucault has resolved none of the real political dilemmas of contemporary Africa. Meanwhile, as these debates were taking place, extraordinary protests – ‘magical songs’ – were erupting across the continent.
The first wave: Global adjustment & political transition
The first ‘wave’ of popular struggles occurred in the period from the second half of the 1970s into the 1980s, when most paths of ‘autonomous national development’ adopted by African regimes were undermined, the global economic crisis deepened and mounting debts drove governments to seek external flows of capital, usually under more stringent conditions of lending. The austerity policies that followed economic liberalisation fell disproportionately on the ‘popular classes’. During this period loans turned into debts and, as the process of global adjustment and restructuring required by the international capitalist crisis proceeded, more and more African states found their options severely restricted and their macro-economic policies shaped by the conditions imposed by the IFIs, the bilateral lending agencies and the private banks. With the election of the free market governments of Thatcher and Reagan, policies that gave increasing priority to market forces and the private sector were formulated with the IMF and World Bank as the central players. As the World Bank reported at the time,
Africa needs not just less government – [but] government that concentrates its efforts less on direct intervention and more on enabling others to be productive (cited in Sandbrook, 1993:2).
Starting in Egypt in 1977, when the government's decision to raise food and petrol prices as part of a programme of financial stringency under the auspices of the IMF provoked fierce rioting in major cities across the country, the wave of popular protest also involved four out of the five countries of the Arab Maghreb Union – Morocco, Mauritania, Algeria and Tunisia – drawing in virtually all of north Africa. Throughout the same period a wave of popular protest against similar austerity measures was noted across the sub-continent; this resistance was often characterised as ‘bread riots’. It was experienced not just in Africa, but across many countries in the developed world subject to economic constraint. In all of the African countries where it took place, popular protest had a political impact – frequently producing a reversal of cuts in subsidies and a far greater awareness of the political limits to rapid structural adjustment. In some cases it resulted in political change (as in Sudan in 1985, when the regime of President Numeiry was overthrown as a direct result of mounting popular unrest), or a brief phase of greater political openness (as in Algeria, for example, between 1989 and 1992). The ‘focus’ of these protests was often the international financial agencies (particularly the IMF), but governments which adopted the austerity policies and big corporations (foreign and national) that benefited from ‘liberalisation’ were also targets. Some have thereby argued that these struggles were a precursor to the contemporary phenomenon of ‘the antiglobalisation movement’ (Dwyer and Zeilig, 2002); others are more sceptical, seeing them as merely localised expressions of anger and outrage.
The strength and effectiveness of the first wave of struggle was based on wide coalitions of the popular classes, though the working class in a narrow sense was usually centrally involved through the trade union movement. The impact of unrest depended on the participation of the wider ‘African crowd’, including the lumpenproletariat of the shanty towns, unemployed youth, elements of the new petty bourgeoisie and university students (see also Gwisai, 2002). Generally ‘spontaneous’ and directed predominantly towards current economic reforms and austerity measures, they also contained elements of a critique of regime legitimacy and deployed notions of social justice (Zeilig and Seddon, 2002). Given their limited degree of political organisation, these movements generally had a restricted political effect, but in some cases, they took on the character of a political opposition, challenging policies and changing the prevailing political configuration. In mostcases they served to redefine the terrain of class struggle and to provide the basis for the emergence at a later stage of political movements aimed at changing governments rather than just policies.
It is essential not to romanticise these popular protest movements, but it appears misleading and patronising to characterise them, as some on the left have done, simply as ‘desperate IMF riots’, taking place in ‘wretched Third World cities … where organization and democratic traditions of struggle are simply lacking’ (Bond and Mayakiso, 1996:6). It is also unhelpful and unrealistic to divide, as inherently distinct and effectively antagonistic, ‘workers struggles’ and ‘populist forms of sociopolitical movement’ (Petras and Engbarth, 1988). As Seddon (2002:24) has argued:
Eurocentric preconceptions as to what ‘should be’ … the progressive forms of class struggle in Africa … must be set aside to enable us to consider the actual history of capitalist development and class formation in Africa, both of which have been the result of popular struggle as well of changes in the material conditions within which these struggles took place.
The second wave: Political transition in the 1990s
Until 1989, East and West were bound up in the Cold War, played out to horrifying effect in Africa (Harman, 1990); after 1989, the rapid collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’ in eastern Europe and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union allowed global capitalism and the First World (dominated by the USA) to emerge triumphant in the African geopolitical arena. Following the collapse of East European regimes, the long-standing (and no doubt fearful) president of Gabon, Omar Bongo is reported to have exclaimed that ‘the winds from the East are shaking the coconut trees.’ (cited in Wiseman, 1996: 70). Some on the left proclaimed a new faith in the market after the collapse of ‘Marxism-Leninism’. Frank (1989) asserted that these events resulted in ‘enormous strides in the … economic and political direction’ of the Third World (cited in Harman 1990: 79). Harris, who had argued in 1987 that The End of the Third World was nigh, saw in further globalisation the prospect – beyond the development of global capitalism – of an international socialism. Harris provides us with an unadulterated celebration of neo-liberalism in The Return of Cosmopolitan Capitalism (2003).
In the 1990s, however, a second wave of popular protest swept through Africa, more explicitly political and with more far-reaching aims and objectives (Walton and Seddon, 1994) – and again associated with powerful forces from outside. The deployment of a discourse of ‘democracy’ and ‘good governance’ by the international lending agencies and the major capitalist states, coincided with what was undoubtedly also a movement inside Africa for ‘democracy’ and legitimate government. Although there was little doubt about the scale or impact of emerging endogenous movements for political change, there were questions about their authenticity and effectiveness.
Sudan had provided an early example of the political power of orchestrated popular protest with the 1985 overthrow of President Numeiry and the establishment of a multi-party system, which lasted until 1989 when a military coup d'etat brought al-Bashir to power. In Algeria the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) regime, which had brutally repressed mass protests the previous year, undertook a dramatic political liberalisation in 1989. This allowed the formation of many new parties, including Islamist groupings like the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), and proposed municipal and national elections over the subsequent two years. Mass demonstrations at the time of the Gulf crisis and the first US-led intervention in Iraq (in 1990-91) involved huge support for the Islamists, who called not only for solidarity with their Iraqi brethren but also for the establishment of an Islamic state in Algeria. In 1990, the FIS dominated the municipal elections and towards the end of 1991 appeared poised to gain electoral success in the national elections on the basis of a massive growth of popular support. The FLN government, unprepared to accept the popular will, imposed a state of emergency, and banned the FIS.
Elsewhere in the Maghreb, in Tunisia and Morocco, there were also mass demonstrations in support of the Iraqi people and against US and Western imperialism during 1990 and 1991. Many of those demonstrating were also calling for political liberalisation at home. In Egypt, massive support for the Iraqi people and against Western imperialism during 1990 and 1991 encouraged the further expansion of support for militant Islamist groups, already prepared to act violently (e.g. the assassination of President Sadat in 1981), but now boosted by the rising tide of Islamism throughout the Middle East. Even in Mauritania, growing pressure led Colonel Ould Taya, head of the military central council since 1984, to allow the legal formation of political parties. The rising tide of protest against repressive regimes in north Africa, which the Islamist movements were increasingly able to orchestrate and channel into legal political opposition, represented the pent-up frustration and anger of the popular classes. But the ‘window’ of opportunity for the legitimate expression of popular concerns was brief indeed. In Tunisia, the response of the regime was to tighten security and increase repression; in Morocco, where the formal multi-party system already provided the illusion of a ‘bourgeois democracy’, heavier repression of the Islamist opposition, and the cooption of most ‘moderate’ opposition leaders into the government, which remained strongly controlled by the king. In Egypt, the government clamped down heavily on the Islamists and on popular politics.
In sub-Saharan Africa there had been approximately twenty annual recorded incidents of political unrest in the 1980s; in 1991 alone 86 major protest movements had taken place across 30 countries (Zeilig and Seddon, 2002:16). By 1992 many African governments had been forced to introduce political reforms and in 1993 fourteen countries held democratic elections. In a four-year period, from 1990-4, a total of thirty-five regimes had been swept away by a combination of street demonstrations, mass strikes and other forms of protest, and by presidential and legislative elections that were often the first held for a generation. The speed with which these changes took place surprised many commentators:
Compared with the recent experiences of Poland and Brazil … African regime transitions seemed frantically hurried (Bratton, 1997:5).
In Ivory Coast, severely affected by falls in the international price of cocoa and coffee, violent unrest between March and May 1990 threatened the government's austerity programme agreed with the World Bank and IMF and designed to fill a £236 million gap in the budget. Shaken by three weeks of protests and strikes by workers in allsectors, the regime was forced to delay tax increases and cuts to public sector salaries. The army was brought in to suppress the protests whilst the President rejected growing demands for a multi-party state. When salary reductions and tax increases were imposed, together with price cuts aimed at softening the blow, demonstrations continued, and businesses resisted the proposed price reductions. Soldiers used tear gas to disperse more than 1,000 people protesting in the centre of Abidjan in support of a group of women who had staged a sit-down protest on Abidjan's main street. Doctors voted for an indefinite strike and withdrew emergency cover in protest at mass arrests of demonstrators. Public protest and political pressure (which came from France as well as from within) forced a review of government policy, and in April the austerity measures were suspended. In May, lower ranks in the army started a series of demonstrations, culminating in their taking temporary control of the main airport, in support of demands for better pay and conditions (Seddon, 2002).
In Ghana, growing opposition to the Rawlings regime began in the 1980s. Increasing pressure for the restoration of multi-party democracy was generated by concern on the left regarding the government's economic reform programme and its subordination to IMF aid conditionality, combined with pressure on the right from more traditional conservative forces opposed to the ‘Rawlings’ experiment' (Riley and Parfitt 1994). In August 1990, the Movement for Freedom and Justice (MFJ) was founded. Support came from various quarters, including the TUC as well as professional and church groups. The pressure for democratisation from within the country was complemented by pressure from the US and other Western states, and by the World Bank. In 1992, parliamentary and presidential elections were held in Ghana, and Rawlings was voted back into the Presidency, but only until 2001, when he was defeated.
In Zimbabwe, students spearheaded the resistance. In 1989 a student leaflet denounced the Investment Code
as a further entrenchment of capitalism in Zimbabwe … an acquiescence to the IMF and World Bank sponsored programmes … and incompatible with the doctrine of socialism (cited in Tengenende, 1994:389-92).
The use of force which was exercised on doctors while they were airing their clear, legitimate grievances is really an authoritarian and neo-fascist tendency and hence it has to be condemned.
Popular struggle in South Africa was always explicitly political and directed at the structure of the state itself, ever since the late 1940s when the Nationalists came to power, whilst the labour movement and particularly the free trade unions had always provided a core of opposition. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the rising tide of opposition to the apartheid regime grew to the point where the white ruling class was obliged to concede major ground. There is no space here to detail the culmination of that long struggle, but we would argue that, distinctive though the political dynamics of South Africa may be, they have also been in phase with wider movements across Africa as a whole.
In short, during the 1990s in most parts of Africa, profound changes have taken place as long-standing repressive regimes have been effectively challenged and overthrown or replaced. The outcome has not always been a strengthening of the formal structures of democracy, but the changes have almost always been associated with a broadening and deepening of popular involvement in the political process. This is acknowledged by Saul and Leys, who despite writing despairingly of ‘the tragedy of Africa’, recognise that, in addition to the ‘thousands of activist groups’ that constitute a vibrant civil society in Africa today, ‘there are also resistances directed more broadly and self-consciously against the kind of parasitic governments that attempt to ride the African crisis to their own advantage’ (1999:25). It can be argued that the second part of the decade saw a deepening and widening of democracy, if not within the formal institutions of party politics then in the informal arenas of urban politics, in the slums and shanty towns, in the workplace, in the schools and colleges, and in the public spaces and streets of the major cities (Saul and Leys, 1999).
Although Saul has become less sceptical about these waves of popular protest and political opposition (2003), he still continues to highlight some of the undoubted weaknesses of these movements. While accepting that the waves of protest prized open space for civil society to operate, he sees the developments as benefiting essentially the ‘middle classes’ – and the neo-liberal agenda – rather than ‘popular interests’; they achieve ‘liberal democracy’ rather than genuine ‘popular democracy’. He is disparaging of the ‘democratic transition’; suggesting that, in most cases, it has done ‘little more than … stabilise property-threatening situations by a momentary recirculation of elites’ (Leys and Saul, 1999:26). We would argue that a distinction be made between those sections of the ‘middle classes’/‘new petty bourgeoisie’ who joined and played a role in the leadership of these popular movements, and the property-owning classes and political elites. The involvement of different class fractions and elements in African popular movements has also given rise to serious misgivings about the extent of their ‘progressiveness’ among leftist commentators. Another concern is where ethnicity or religious ideology (Muslim or Christian) is an important mobilising force.
For example, the ‘great turn’ towards militant Islam in the 1990s constituted a major development in northern Africa as the popular classes discovered an ‘authentic’ voice in which to express their profound disillusionment with capitalist development and with the corrupt and authoritarian regimes which presided over such ‘development’. The possibility that these Islamist movements were also themselves corrupted by populist authoritarianism and might aim to establish even more oppressive and sectarian regimes greatly pre-occupied the left. Mesmerised all too often by the terrorist violence of the most extreme militant Islamists, the very considerable variation between the different Islamist and Islamic groups and movements, and the extent of popular support for the broader-based, more ‘moderate’ groups, has all too often been missed, and the possibility of accommodation, complementarity and even fusion of popular working class movements and Islamic revolutionary traditions (Hodgson, 1980) underestimated.
In the 1990s much left commentary on African political economy drew attention to the undoubted set backs experienced in many parts of the continent; yet there are also many places where popular protest and working class struggles have evolved into more organised and effective political opposition, with significant political consequences. Although there is justification for scepticism regarding the real meaning of the rapid move towards multi-partyism in Africa or its longer term impact, greater political openness has generally enlarged the space for civil society and renewed the challenge to develop genuinely popular democratic politics.
Of course, there are real constraints on democratic advance under conditions of ‘structural adjustment’ and ‘globalisation’. Abrahamsen (2000) offers a penetrating critique of the shallow rhetoric of ‘good governance’ by the international community. She rightly identifies the way in which popular resistance, although directed frequently against the policies of the IMF and World Bank, can be appropriated by them in its drive for neo-liberalism. The imperialist powers and their agents only fear popular mobilisation and protest if it cannot be contained and/or diverted to threaten particularly corrupt or ‘intransigent’ governments that refuse to implement programmes of economic liberalisation or challenge the ‘new world order’ (e.g. Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Cuba). Only when they demand real alternatives and broad-based democratic development are popular protest and political resistance threatening. Local governments can usually be relied on to suppress such radical movements of their own accord, supported where necessary by their Western patrons.
Abrahamsen correctly identifies the liberalisation of African economies as a crucial constraint on the strengthening of democracy, rather than as a pre-requisite for it (2000:135-6). Nevertheless, the liberalisation she describes has had a contradictory effect. While ‘democracy’ weakened the capacity of states to control oppositional political movements, economic liberalism directly generated the resistance that has given rise to many of the ‘democratic transitions’. Among activists (students and trade unionists) it created what many have criticised as ‘bread and butter’ unionism, but which has the capacity to extend beyond immediate issues and take up broader political matters.
‘A third wave’? Protest & resistance in the 21st century
Global dissent framed explicitly as ‘anti-capitalism’ is a very recent phenomenon, even though it has its roots in earlier waves of protests across the world against the restructuring of the world economy. Increasingly, popular protest and dissent is not merely national and ‘international’ (in the sense of occurring in many places simultaneously across the world) but transnational and potentially global. As the process of ‘globalisation’ continues to dissolve and break apart the flimsy structures of national capitalism in favour of global capital and its agents and parasites, the popular classes have resisted this process.
Popular protest against illegitimate and undemocratic regimes, and against antisocial policies, continues to take place. Whilst ‘bread riots’ and forms of protest reminiscent of the ‘first wave’ (of the 1970s and 80s) continue to erupt, there is still unfinished business as regards the replacement of illegitimate regimes in many countries. The establishment of more representative governments is still likely to represent the immediate objective of popular movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America, as it did in the ‘second wave’ of the 1990s. But there is now emerging a cluster of movements and groupings which are explicitly – ideologically and politically – linked to similar movements of protest elsewhere in the world and which draw strength and vitality from international links to form the beginnings of a truly global movement of dissent against the dominant form of global capitalism – specifically US and more generally ‘Western’ imperialism.
This is happening in many parts of Africa. In North Africa, popular movements of opposition now largely identify with one or other of various Islamist tendencies – some of them (takfirists and salafists) taking extreme positions both with regard to local regimes and to the ‘globalisation’ project of ‘Western imperialism’ (which is characterised as a new form of ‘crusaderism’, mixing aggressive religious interventionism, ‘Western’ cultural values and unrestrained capitalism) but all of them espousing an ‘alternative’ and ‘authentic’ path of development compatible with local values and objectives. Many of the Islamist groups and networks operate internationally and at least one, Al Qa'ida, operates globally – representing itself, rightly or wrongly, as the vehicle for an alternative ‘new world order’.
Perhaps the most novel developments in political protest on the continent are taking place in South Africa. Although largely in the form of urban community-based protest movements, over the last few years a new generation has emerged in the struggle against the government’s essentially neo-liberal agenda. In Johannesburg, relatively disparate ‘actions’ have fallen under the organising umbrella of the Anti-Privatisation Forum. Most notable of these is the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee that has campaigned successfully against disconnections by the electricity supplier, Eskom, that were occurring at a rate of 20,000 per month in 2001 (Ngwane, 2003). Actions include marches, meetings and sit-ins as well as the ‘illegal’ reconnection of electricity by militants of the SECC. The Anti-Eviction Campaign in Cape Town tells a similar story. Activists have fought against evictions by forcibly ‘reoccupying’ the homes of evicted families, after they were ‘right-sized’ into smaller dwellings.
A new generation of activists and militants has emerged together with these ‘new social movements', many of them identifying explicitly with the ‘anti-capitalist’ movement in the north and elsewhere in the south. Nevertheless vital questions remain over the organising capacity of the ‘working class’ in South Africa. Desai and Pithouse (2003:25) make a familiar argument:
in a context where full-time employment is part of the everyday life of just one third of the African labour force, and with unemployment estimated as high as 45% … the forms of solidarity that had once translated insertion in waged employment into popular expectations for citizenship and democracy are facing a slow and dramatic decline.
My concern is … that the ideology of no leadership means, by default, the principle of ‘self-selection’ and thus encourages a lack of accountability. There is also the danger of some social movements ‘drowning in their own militancy’ because of the failure or the refusal to develop long-term political projects in favour of immediate short-term militant actions.
One of the most positive developments in the last two years has been the emergence of the Zimbabwe Social Forum. In 2004 the event was not simply an NGO jamboree, but included many activists who made direct links between their struggles and the international anti-globalisation movement. Sessions were held on AIDS, debt, youth politics and local government. A publication produced after the event – Zim Forum Speaks (2004) – makes these connections clear:
The ZSF was able to claim space for deeper solidarity and push the Zimbabwean civic movement towards a more definite struggle against social, economic and political injustice. The active participation by more than a thousand activists visibly enriched the motivation and confidence among those groups.
Conclusion
Though a ‘third wave’ of popular protest is yet clearly to emerge in Africa, the future success of social protest as the basis for far-reaching progressive social, economic and political change will depend on serious re-engagement by activists and political movements in Africa in both analysis and action at the grass roots. This will encompass both the practical and strategic needs of ordinary people and exploration with them/by them of new forms of active engagement in the determination of their own futures, as well as with the debates and discussions of the ‘anti-capitalist movement’ in its other manifestations. South Africa has demonstrated some of the ways that this dual engagement is possible.
In acknowledging the political significance of popular protest against particularly oppressive forms of capital accumulation in Africa, it is vital to recognise the reality not only of an African ‘working class’ – as an evolving and heterogeneous configuration of fractions and strata – but also the reality of class struggle, which has involved, over the last 25 years (Patel, 2002), a permanently fluctuating configuration of different elements of the popular classes combined on occasion with elements of the ‘middle classes', including students, public sector workers and members of the petty bourgeoisie working in the informal economy. This constantly ‘shifting constellation’ of popular forces has often relied on the organisational capacity and political hegemony of the more ‘classical’ African working class, that has itself been transformed along with the political economy of Africa but is by no means ‘defeated’ or rendered obsolete. In such a context, there is a synergy between ‘economic’ and ‘political’ struggles, and between ‘working class’ and ‘popular’ struggles.
Although questions remain about the pattern of resistance and the nature of working class struggles in Africa, we have a sense that the debates that preoccupied so many people in the 1980s and 1990s – about a new diffuse post-colonial identity that had displaced class, resistance and liberation – have finally been shown to be somewhat beside the point. As Callinicos writes, this is ‘less because of some decisive theoretical refutation of postmodernism (the most damaging philosophical critiques were produced during its heyday and seemed to have little effect on its influence) than because the world-wide rebellion against capitalist globalisation has changed the intellectual agenda’ (2003:13). Those who would promote that ‘world-wide rebellion’ can learn from the experience of protest and resistance in Africa, just as the African movements draw on experiences elsewhere across the world.