Many of us came to southern Africa from the starting point of support for the peoples there who were struggling, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, against the white minority/colonial regimes that dominated them and shaped so negatively their life chances. And, in this respect, there was of course to be a record of enormous achievement, one realised against great odds and especially so when that achievement is measured against the stunted expectations that many around the world had when the 30-year war for southern African liberation first announced itself in the early 1960s. Victory in southern Africa? Here, surely, was a dramatic African achievement to celebrate.
Well, yes and no. In fact, many in the worldwide liberation support/anti-apartheid movement, seduced perhaps by the bold promises of the liberation movements themselves, had come to understand that defining liberation merely in terms of national liberation from white colonial dominance told, at best, half the story (Saul 2007, 2011). Important as it was to overcome apartheid and similar racist structures in southern Africa, it was easy to see that people in southern Africa were also seeking to liberate themselves from class and corporate oppression, from structures of male domination, and from authoritarian political practices. These goals came readily to seem to be at least as important to any true liberation as was national self-assertion. Nonetheless, the fact is that these attendant goals were to fall by the wayside; indeed now, some decades after the fall of the most visible forms of colonial and racial domination, it has become ever more apparent just how narrow the definition of ‘liberation’ has been permitted to become (Saul 2010).
For liberation in any expansive sense is, quite simply, something that has not occurred in southern Africa. How to explain this? There has been, for example, the global fall of socialism (at least in its Soviet form) and the consequent loss of that particular point of reference and support. There is, as well, the extreme nature of ‘historical backwardness’ (in terms of shortfalls in economic capacity and in the scarcity of requisite kinds of expertise amongst the hitherto subject populations) that was bequeathed as the legacy of the region's various ruthless colonialisms. And there has been the vulnerability of the new indigenous elites (not least from the ranks of the liberation movements themselves) to a too-easy seduction into the ranks of privilege and self-interested power. And this in spite of the fact that, in the period of the initial struggle for liberation, the ostensible aims of liberation movements were defined in terms of much more transformative, even socialist, ends. In contrast with such ‘promises’, the prevalence of starkly neo-colonial outcomes has been sobering.
Or think of it instead as having been a recolonisation, one imposed by a new ‘Empire of Capital’. Such a conceptualisation arises from the fact that it is now much less easy than it was previously to disaggregate global capital into national capitals and to see any specific capital as being primarily attendant upon some nationally based imperialism and its colonialism. No, coming from the Global North and West (as it has done historically) but also now from the East (Japan, China and India), this new empire of linked capitals (competitive but interactive and fused together in novel ways as part of a global network of economic power) is what is currently recolonising Africa (Saul 2008). Nation-states (of both the North and the East) still have an independent role with diverse raisons d'état that also play into the imperial equation. Nonetheless the globalisation of capital has introduced something new to the workings of imperialism – principally a ‘colonisation’ of a novel type by a new empire (of capital), a recolonisation of much of the global South in fact. True, such recolonisation has been accomplished with the overt connivance of indigenous leaders/elites – those who have inherited power with the demise of ‘white rule’ but who, in doing so, have also manifested a far greater commitment to the interests of their own privileged class-in-creation than to those of the mass of their own people. But this merely reinforces the fact that this brave new world is far from being a happy one for the vast mass of southern African citizens – despite the freedom that they had seemed to have won.
A victory of sorts then. And now in 2010 we celebrate it, 2010 being a date that falls precisely fifty years after the launching, in 1960, of the ‘thirty years war (1960–1990) for southern African liberation’, 35 years after the year of Angola's and Mozambique's independence, more or less 30 years after the day of independence in Zimbabwe, and a full 20 years after both Namibia's inaugural day and the release from prison of Nelson Mandela that marked so clearly the first of the very last days of apartheid (days of transition that would culminate in Mandela's election as president in 1994). Something to celebrate then, yet it is a sad fact that one also feels forced to ask the question, as I have recently done, as to just who actually won the struggle for southern African liberation. As I then continued:
We know who lost, of course: the white minorities in positions of formal political power (whether colonially in the Portuguese colonies or quasi-independently in South Africa and perhaps in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe). And thank fortune, and hard and brave work, for that. But who, in contrast, has won, at least for the time being: global capitalism, the West and the IFIs [international financial institutions], and local elites of state and private sectors, both white and black. But how about the mass of southern African populations, both urban and rural and largely black? Not so obviously the winners, I would suggest, and certainly not in any very expansive sense. Has it not been a kind of defeat for them too? (Saul 2009a, 2009b)
Much valuable research (by the likes of Terreblanche [2002], McDonald [2006] and Nattrass and Seekings [2005]) documents this harsh fact – and other similarly sobering facts – and its stark implications. But note also the intervention several months ago by a leading South African prelate, Rev. Fuleni Mzukisi, who charged that poverty in South Africa is now worse than apartheid and is, in fact, ‘a terrible disease’. As he said: ‘Apartheid was a deep crime against humanity. It left people with deep scars, but I can assure you that poverty is worse than that … People do not eat human rights; they want food on the table.’1
This outcome is the result, most generally, of the grim overall inequalities between the global North and the global South that, as in many other regions, mark southern Africa. But, more specifically, it also reflects the choice of economic strategies in this latter region that can now imagine only elite enrichment and the presumed ‘trickle down benefits’ of unchecked capitalism as being the way in which the lot of the poorest of the poor might be improved there. How far a cry this is from the populist, even socialist, hopes for more effective and egalitarian outcomes that originally seemed to define the development dreams of all the liberation movements. Indeed, what is especially disconcerting about the present recolonisation of the region under the flag of capitalism is that it has been driven by precisely the same movements (at least in name) that led their countries to independence in the long years of overt regional struggle. But just why this should have occurred, how inevitable it was, is something we will consider in the essays that follow.
To be sure, the record varies somewhat from country to country. Thus, Mozambique under Frelimo, once the most forthrightly socialist of all the region's countries, has had to abandon that claim. True, it has also abandoned its initial brand of developmental dictatorship in favour of a formal democratisation that has stabilised the country – albeit without markedly empowering the mass of its people or improving their socio-economic lot. Indeed, a recent textbook by Bauer and Taylor on southern Africa (a book of sympathetic though not notably radical predisposition) notes that the election to the presidency of Armando Guebuza who is the ‘holder of an expansive business empire and one of the richest men in Mozambique hardly signals that Frelimo will attempt to run anything but a globalist, neo-liberal agenda – regardless of the abject poverty suffered by most of the electorate’ (Bauer and Taylor 2005, p. 135; also Hanlon and Smart, 2008).
As for Angola it has, until quite recently, experienced a much greater and more dramatic degree of divisive fragmentation than Mozambique – although its antidote to that, since the death of Savimbi, has had as little to do with popular empowerment and broad-based development as have the present policies of its fellow ex-Portuguese colony, Mozambique. In fact, it has been argued that it is only a handful of progressive international initiatives (Human Rights Watch, Global Witness and the like) that have had some success in holding the feet of exploitative corporations and of Angola's own government to the fire of critical scrutiny. For unfortunately, as David Sogge argues in his essay on Angola in the present collection, the country's own population, battle-scarred and battle-weary, has been rather slower to find effective means to exert their own claims. Yet, as the same Bauer and Taylor volume quoted above feels forced to conclude of Angola, oil money and corruption have merely ‘exacerbated the already glaring discrepancies between rich and poor’ and have, ‘quite simply, threatened the country's recovery and future development’ (2005, p. 163).
Meanwhile Zimbabwe, in the brutal thrall of Mugabe and ZANU, has witnessed an even greater deterioration of national circumstances than either of these two countries. There, say Bauer and Taylor, ‘the ZANU-PF's stewardship of the economy [has] been an unmitigated disaster’ (2005, p. 197; also Raftopoulos and Mlambo, 2009) while its politics, through years of overt and enormously costly dictatorial practices, have produced a situation, as Richard Saunders details in his own essay here, that is proving enormously difficult both to displace and to move beyond.
The results in both Namibia (Melber 2003) and South Africa, even if not quite so bloody as those produced by Renamo's war, the prolonged sparring of Savimbi with the MPLA and Mugabe's depredations, are not much more inspiring in terms of effective mass empowerment and broad-gauged human betterment – as we will see in the articles by Henning Melber and Patrick Bond. Thus, a long-time and firmly loyal African National Congress (ANC) cadre (Ben Turok) has himself, in a recent book entitled The evolution of ANC economic policy, acknowledged both the contribution of ANC policies to growing inequality in his country while reaching ‘the irresistible conclusion that the ANC government has lost a great deal of its earlier focus on the fundamental transformation of the inherited social system’ (Turok 2008, p. 263)!
In sum, South Africa, like the other ‘liberated’ locales of the region, has become, in the sober phrase with which Neville Alexander (Alexander 2002; see also Gumede 2008) has titled a book of his own on South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy, merely ‘an ordinary country’ – despite the rather finer future that many, both in southern Africa and beyond, had hoped would prove to be the outcome of the long years of liberation struggle themselves. But Alexander's characterisation could be said to apply to all of the countries in the region: what we now have, instead of a liberated southern Africa that is vibrant, humane and just, is a region of a very different sort indeed.
Moreover, not only is there deepening inequality within countries but, in the region taken as a whole, there is also – to take one glaring example – a situation in which South Africa's capitalist economic power now merely complements global capitalist power in holding the impoverished people of southern Africa in quasi-colonial thrall (as a recent series of articles in Africafiles' Ezine on South Africa in the southern Africa region recently documented)2 – while doing disturbingly little to better the lot of such people, the vast majority both in South Africa and elsewhere. Or take the Southern African Development Community (SADC): it has become (albeit with a few honourable exceptions) primarily a club of presidents that reveal itself to be – as the sad case of its kid-gloves treatment of Zimbabwe and its backing of an otherwise deservedly embattled Mugabe amply demonstrates – more a source of tacit support for the status quo than a force for facilitating any kind of just transition to effective democracy in Zimbabwe.
In truth, it is now often said by people of a Left persuasion that the current global situation offers no real alternatives, no real hope, for Africa (including southern Africa). It cannot, they say, count on any plausible socialist alternative (see Gabriel Kolko's deeply unsettling After socialism [2006]). Moreover, a seasoned observer like Giovanni Arrighi can only urge Africa to look to a relatively benign China (a doubtful haven of hope, one fears) and/or to the kinder and gentler practices of its own elites in order to realise even a marginal adjustment to its desperate plight (Arrighi 2002, Saul 2009c). Others fall back on the equally unlikely prospect of a revolutionary transformation of the exploitative West to then lift many of the key barriers to a brighter future. Thus, as one friend has recently written to me: ‘I don't see how the South can ever liberate itself in the absence of a new socialist project becoming powerful in the North.’ Yet he feels forced to add that ‘I don't see that happening until people are hurting and see no prospect of meeting their personal needs under globalized neoliberalism, and until a new left movement with a serious attitude to organization and democracy.’ But this is a faint hope too, my correspondent – who confesses to feeling ‘very pessimistic’ – obviously fears.
Failing a revolution in the global capitalist centres, however, what are the actual prospects for some dramatic change occurring within the region itself, one, necessarily, driven from below? The present author has called elsewhere for ‘a next liberation struggle’ (Saul 2005) in southern Africa for precisely this reason, a struggle, like the one that is currently afoot in several places in Latin America for example, that seeks to at least neutralise the intervention of imperialist forces from the North while also facilitating the empowerment of its own people in political and economic terms.
And there are – as will be surveyed on a country-by-country basis in the articles that follow – localised and grassroots resistances in the region in a wide variety of settings and on a broad range of policy fronts that seek to make headway and even to begin to add up to potential hegemonic alternatives to the failed liberation movements that we still see in power. Moreover, some attempts to so resist – the initial rise of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in opposition to Mugabe, for example, and the removal of the brazen Thabo Mbeki from South Africa's presidency before the end of his term; the dramatic grass-roots resistance, especially in South Africa, to the AIDS pandemic that stalks the entire region; and the signs of a resurgent economic nationalism that threatens to renegotiate contracts with the private sector and even to reverse certain privatisations – do begin to so promise: promise, that is, to ‘add up’, even if, to this point, ‘not quite’ and certainly ‘not yet’!
So the question remains: how might one hope, even expect, that the diverse instances of resistance that are visible could come to pose hegemonic alternatives in southern Africa to the recolonisation that has been the fate of that part of the continent in the wake of its seeming ‘liberation’? What might Africans on the ground in the region have to do next, and how can they best be supported from outside in doing so? Equally importantly, how might residents of the global North organise themselves in order – with respect to any ‘next liberation support struggle’ – to best assist them: staying the hand of our own governments and corporations on the one hand and speaking out clearly and effectively on behalf of such movements for genuine liberation on the ground on the other? One thing is clear: the liberation struggle continues. We cannot live in the (recent) past. We must act to shape the future.
The liberation of southern Africa, then. And its aftermath. A story full of heroism, but also, in many ways, a grim tale, even if the right people – the arrogant white elites who once dominated, in racist terms, southern Africa – had lost. But, in the longer run, these articles ask, who really won? Not, visibly and in any very expansive sense, the vast mass of the southern Africa people. Instead, the spoils of victory have mainly gone to ‘global capitalism’ on the one hand and to the thin stratum of black elites who have since arrogated to themselves whatever power and privilege global capital has left to them on the other.
The authors of the various essays in this section, are well aware, of course, that ‘the struggle continues’ – although the forces who actively wage it may be still fragmented and relatively weak. Indeed, the extent to which most southern African governments, through SADC, have closed ranks behind the villainous Mugabe is a sobering index of the challenge that continues to confront the people of southern Africa. For, as these articles clearly demonstrate, the realities of Zimbabwe are duplicated (albeit in somewhat less graphic terms) on each of the erstwhile fronts of liberation struggle that we explore here.
Yet we know that there are also seeds of resentment and of resistance throughout the region. Moreover, some of us remember quite vividly just how bleak the prospect for redress of racist rule in the region seemed in the 1960s. Nonetheless, the apartheid regime, and its cancerous ilk of racist hierarchies located throughout the sub-continent, fell. And now it is again just possible to catch a glimpse of often impressive stirrings of popular resistance that continue to disrupt the overweening pretensions of the temporary ‘winners’. Perhaps it is too early to say that ‘vitoria e certa’ – over and against such ‘winners’ and as envisaged by such challengers to their present hegemony – but it is certainly not presumptuous to say, with reference to all the emergent bearers of a fresh liberation struggle, ‘a luta continua’.
Note on contributor
John S. Saul, Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Science at York University, Toronto, has also taught, over the years, at the University of Dar es Salaam, University of Eduardo Mondlane (Mozambique) and the University of the Witwatersrand (SA). A liberation supporter and anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist activist for some 50 years, he is the author of 20 books on East and Southern Africa and on development theory, most recently Revolutionary traveller: freeze-frames from a life (Arbeiter Ring 2009) and Liberation lite: the roots of recolonization in Southern Africa (African World Press 2011).