African awakening: the emerging revolutions, edited by Firoze Manji and Sokari Ekine, Oxford, Pambazuka Press, 2012, x + 314 pp., £17.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780857490216
When Nigeria's government attempted to eliminate fuel subsidies in January 2012 it unwittingly ignited unprecedented protests among workers and youth, culminating in a week-long, nationwide general strike. After months tracking revolt in North Africa, media pundits invariably looked south in search of a sequel. Were we witnessing a ‘Nigerian Spring’? Might there be a new wave of revolutions, this time south of the Sahara?
In making this comparison, few seemed to realise they were issuing an implicit challenge to much received wisdom. The conventional narrative of the Arab Spring accords primacy to a technology-savvy middle class pursuing liberal virtues – not trade unionists defying market reforms. Indeed, structural adjustment and globalisation were supposed to underwrite a golden era of comparative stability in sub-Saharan Africa, unleashing the entrepreneurial spirits of a burgeoning middle class and enriching millions. The very possibility of a ‘Nigerian Spring’ seems to call into question prevailing assumptions about the geographical boundaries and social dynamics of African revolt. This underlines the importance of African awakening, a spirited collection of essays originally published in Pambazuka News during the first six months of 2011, when the Arab Spring was at high tide. Pambazuka News, ‘a platform for progressive Pan-African perspectives’ is an online weekly which justly boasts of providing probably the most comprehensive coverage of African struggles for ‘dignity, self-determination and emancipation’ (p. 17). By bringing a selection of this coverage to a broader audience, African awakening issues a trenchant and timely challenge to the widespread assumption that the Arab Spring can be understood in isolation from the rest of Africa.
In the two introductory chapters, editors Firoze Manji and Sokari Ekine sketch a bold portrait of a continent gripped by revolutionary ferment. Events in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and the Middle East dominated headlines last year, but the tide of revolt extended far beyond the Arab-speaking world. Demonstrations, strikes and other expressions of mass discontent shook ruling classes in every corner of the African continent, from Malawi to Madagascar, South Africa to Sudan. The movements animating these protests are hardly homogenous. Yet each is responding to a common experience of social, economic, and political dispossession engendered by three decades of neoliberalism in the Global South, and further exacerbated by the current capitalist crisis. If their basic demands for justice and popular self-determination are to be fulfilled, nothing less than a thorough ‘social transformation’ is required (p. 13). What we are witnessing, the editors conclude, is not an Arab Spring but an African Awakening: emerging revolutions on a continental and even world scale, whose fate will be determined in years and decades to come.
Unfortunately the rest of the volume never quite succeeds in bringing this pan-African picture into clear focus. After debating whether to group the essays thematically or geographically, the editors ultimately decided that a chronological presentation would ‘give a sense of the growing excitement of catching history on its wings’ (p. 16). This perhaps makes a virtue out of necessity. Most of the essays in African awakening are in fact extended news reports, blog posts, and eyewitness accounts – the type of journalistic pieces which undoubtedly made for exciting reading in an online weekly journal, but which lose pertinence many months after the event.
Taken together, the short, journalistic essays nevertheless do cast a welcome light on social struggles that have otherwise received lamentably little attention, ranging across Côte d'Ivoire, Gabon, Cameroon, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Swaziland, Morocco and Algeria. Yet overall coverage remains surprisingly uneven for a book devoted to Africa's ‘emerging revolutions’. South Africa is discussed in only four pages, Nigeria and Kenya are missed out altogether, while the struggles in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya between them form the focus of 18 of the 32 chapters. The more substantive analytical and comparative pieces are mostly situated at the end of the book – and each, without exception, is devoted to North Africa. These critical reassessments of the Arab Spring provide some of the strongest analysis in the collection, written by some of the keenest observers of African political economy. Adam Hanieh, Patrick Bond and Samir Amin uncover the class dynamics behind the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. Mass protests targeted not just the idiosyncratic abuses of Mubarak and Ben-Ali, but the brutal social logic of neoliberal capitalism – which Washington and dominant classes now seek to maintain under the rubric of ‘orderly transition’. Mahmood Mamdani, Charles Abugre and Yash Tandon extend this critical gaze to Libya, exposing the hypocrisy, cynicism and outright lies underlying the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's ‘humanitarian’ intervention. In their telling, the Western powers sought regime change from the start. Whether this was done to test a new generation of weapons (as Mamdani suggests offhandedly) or to secure oil and other economic resources (as Tandon and Abugre more convincingly claim), all three authors agree that the intervention illustrates inherent dangers in the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine.
Without similarly detailed analyses of uprisings south of the Sahara, African awakening cannot fully deliver on the promise of its title. Yet this collection deserves to be read, if not for the breadth of its coverage then for the novelty of its perspective. By encouraging reassessment of social movements across the continent in terms of their common political–economic dynamics, the book offers a sound and necessary framework for future inquiry. Certainly, any ‘Nigerian Spring’ will not be intelligible without it.