As this issue was being planned, news came of ‘Operation Serval’, by which French forces intervened in Mali in order to expel Al-Qaeda sympathisers, who had brought widespread violence, destruction and fear to the northern half of the country. As we shall see presently, military intervention is only one feature of imperialist strategy in Africa. Indeed, direct military intervention is not the main modus operandi of imperialist strategy in Africa. Imperialist subjugation of the continent in the post-colonial era has been less overt, occurring through the sphere of market subjugation, transfer pricing, profits repatriation and asymmetrical economic partnership agreements leading to deep integration, which may become too restrictive for African government. Nkrumah has referred to these forms of capital and surplus labour transfer as ‘neo-colonialism: the last stage of imperialism’ (Nkrumah 1965).
In a recent article, Jeremy Keenan (2013) has argued that both the Bush and Bouteflika (in Algeria) administrations ‘needed “a little more terrorism” in the region’; in the case of Algeria, this was to satisfy the need for modern weaponry. In the case of the Bush administration, Keenan has suggested that such terrorism may act as ‘justification for launching a new Saharan front in the Global War on Terror’. Furthermore, Keenan maintains that a ‘second front’ would legitimise America's increased militarisation of Africa, in order to better secure the continent's natural resources, in particular oil, a concern, which in 2008 led to the setting up of AFRICOM, the United States Africa Command. Imperialist military intervention has taken several forms in Africa, including: raids to release hostages (Israel in Uganda), invasion to remove leaders who would not serve the demands of imperialism (Patrice Lumumba in the current Democratic Republic of Congo), and intervention designed to protect protégés, such as various French forays into Zaire to protect a kleptocratic ruler, Mobutu Sese Seko. In 1978, there was a joint Franco-Moroccan expedition to save Mobutu from his people.
There are three main epochs of Imperialist intrusion in Africa.1 First, the period Harvey has referred to as ‘the rise of bourgeois imperialism’, 1875–1945 (2005, 42). This was characterised by monopoly capital and the outflow of capital from the capitalist centres to open up the interior of Africa to trade, through the construction of railways, harbours, roads and mines for manufacturing interests at the imperialist centre. Kemp observes that trade at this time was characterised by plunder and the use of force in order to subordinate pre-capitalist formations ‘into the circuit of exchange dominated by merchant capital’ (1967, 19). This period was also marked by formal control of African territories, in order to minimise inter-imperialist rivalry.
The end of World War II ushered in a new dawn (Harvey 2005), with rising African nationalism and a shift of the imperialist centre from Britain to the US, leading to the phenomenon of ‘imperialism without colonies’ (Magdof 1972). This new epoch lasted until the triumph of neoliberalism in late 1980s and the institutionalisation of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) in virtually all African economies in the 1980s and 1990s. This period was one of continuity in change, with the essential features of the previous epoch intensified as capital increasingly became globalised with the proliferation of multinational corporations; and in Africa there were green shoots of industrial capitalism (Zack-Williams 1985), though sparsely distributed across the continent. The emergence of African sovereign states did not affect the ability and audacity of the imperialist powers to intervene in African domestic affairs. For many imperialist powers, African sovereignty was a sham, to be trampled upon when their interests were threatened. France, apart from her military bases on the continent, has intervened in Africa on more than 50 occasions since 1960,2 in areas as far apart as Comoros Islands, Djibouti, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Libya, Chad, Central African Republic, Côte d'Ivoire and Gabon. Apart from the dominance of the French currency in francophone Africa, France's overdependence on nuclear energy (for 80% of her electricity) has created special interest for France in her former colonies such as Mali and Niger, both major exporters of uranium (Global Research 2013). No surprise, then, that criticism of ‘Operation Serval’ was muted as French troops flew into Bamako, the Malian capital, at the invitation of the Malian government. William Hague, the British Foreign Secretary, conceded in a broadcast over BBC Radio that West Africa was a job for the French in their sphere of influence. He insisted that there would be no British troops on the ground, though logistical support would be provided. East Africa, specifically Kenya and Somalia, were treated as a British military concern because of historical connections. One wonders how he sees Nigeria, a member of the Commonwealth, where another radical Islamist group, Boko Haram, has brought misery to millions of Nigerians by suicide bombings, amputation and decapitation. That the French action drew little criticism can be partly explained by the ‘business as usual’ factor for the French, as they answered the call for help from a member of the ‘French Commonwealth’. It seems that a post-Cold War nouvelle entente cordiale has emerged among the major powers, as epitomised by Prime Minister Tony Blair's interventions in Sierra Leone's civil war to support the ‘good guys’ against the dishonourable Revolutionary United Front. In their view, failed states provide fertile ground for terrorism and a threat to Western interests and world peace. As Ellis (2011) has argued, most observers of the African scene have been slow to link state fragility with a wider problem of international governance of an ageing system that emerged in the immediate post-World War II years. However, ‘it was the realisation that small conflicts could spread that led the United Kingdom to send troops to Sierra Leone in 2000 and afterwards to maintain political and financial support for a restored government’ (Ibid., 162)
The third phase of imperialist intervention is marked by the advent of the New World Order announced by President George Bush in 1990: one in which American military superiority is unchallenged, in what became known as a ‘unipolar world’. Economically, there was the rise of China, a new economic player in Africa, but with little or no concern about human rights, giving comfort and succour to Africa's dictators, who now find themselves (in what Henning Melber [2009] has called multi-polarity) unburdened by human rights concerns in dealing with the opposition forces. To many African leaders, China presents an alternative to Western diktats when it comes to the value of African resources and sources of loans for investments. While China's arrival offers African leaders new opportunities and alternatives to Western aid, yet Ovadia (in this volume) has warned in the case of Angola that: ‘China represents a potential solution to many of Angola's most pressing needs while it reinforces some of the most objectionable practices of its elites’.
If China's arrival on the African scene offers new opportunities for African leaders, then the rise of radical Islam and the accompanying Global War on Terror presents them with major security challenges, especially for those African leaders, who treat their citizens as subjects without rights and a voice. Given the fact that Islam is a major religion in most African states and we have seen above how easy it is to link local disputes to this global religion, it is imperative on African leadership to pay attention to the specific issue of rights of citizenship. African leaders with few exceptions have failed to mobilise the people for the task of nation building. Indeed, their spurious attachment to the Westphalia project (nation state without citizens) fosters further instability, alienation and anomie leading to widespread instability and conflicts. Fanon's Manichaeism is no longer an artefact of colonial social structures; the failure to extend rights of citizenship to the mass of the people has transformed postcolonial states in Africa into decentralised despotism (Mamdani 1996). ‘Citizens’ who are not protected by the state, who do not have usufructuary right to land outside of their villages, who can work only in the district of their birth and are treated as foreigners in the rest of the country, are subjects, not citizens. Given this state of mass abandonment, the African masses are now predisposed to centrifugal ideologies, which provide fertile ground for social movements threatening national unity and progress. In many of Africa's conflicts, it is not difficult to identify links from the local (the concern and legitimate grievances of the people) to the global, including primordial loyalties with roots that are external to the society, such as religion, diasporan politics and irredentism. In no time, the local legitimate grievance is subsumed into the global concerns as external groups hijack the cause as theirs.
Articles in this issue
There are seven main articles in this volume dealing with various issues, such as China's new engagement with Africa and the lessons to be learnt from such cooperations (Ovadia); and North–South relations, the case of the EU and South Africa (Claar and Nölke). Gray's article is an analysis of state-led industrialisation in Tanzania, and Cross examines labour migration in Senegal. Both Yeros and Rizzo chronicle labour struggles in Zimbabwe and Tanzania respectively, and Oya's contribution addresses the issue of the absence of wages in the study of rural economic life in Africa.
The first article, by Hazel Gray, examines Tanzania's post-independence industrial experience, in particular the assertion that the higher growth in manufacturing since 1996 has been a vindication of neoliberal policies of market liberalisation. In their haste to decry dirigisme, neoliberals have failed to see how critical aspects of the country's political settlement relate to state–capital relations and the distribution of power between contending factions of intermediate classes within the state. She draws attention to the fact that the initial ‘socialist’ measures of nationalisation led to the collapse of manufacturing and severe deindustrialisation. However, by 1996 there was a return to growth and expansion in manufacturing. She argues that this conclusion stems from the fact that the neoliberal accounts tend to understate the historical role of the state in industrial development in the country by ignoring critical aspects of the legacy of socialist industrial policy. Gray goes on to argue that: ‘by rolling back the state and conflating an industrial strategy with trade liberalisation, industrial policy under liberalisation failed to address the critical political constraints on industrialisation’. She goes on to challenge a number of theses about the developmental state in Africa, including the claim that neo-patrimonial politics will engulf industrial policy in clientelistic redistribution relations, thereby reducing industrial efficiency. In rejecting this assertion Gray points to the fact that neo-patrimonialism in Asia has not inhibited industrialisation, and warns that this superficial analysis of state institutions does not take into consideration the wider distribution of state power.
In a thought-provoking article, Hannah Cross has reminded us of the fate of thousands of would-be African migrants who aim for household survival by working in southern Europe, risking their lives at sea or on the equally arduous route through the Sahara to North African ports. She recalls the destructive effects of SAPs on the Senegalese governing classes, driving them to ‘abandon their ambition for development’, with the result that the youth of that country fossilised in the informal sector were impelled ‘increasingly to head abroad’. By atrophying development in Senegal, SAPS destabilised the pre-existing migration strategies upon which communities were already dependent, only to be confronted by ‘Fortress Europe’ beyond the Mediterranean Sea. Cross is able to show how emigration was triggered by the crisis in the local fishing industry caused by agreements signed between European fishing companies and the Senegalese government, which meant that fishing was no longer profitable for artisans. She identifies the crisis in pelagic resources as the product of an asymmetrical agreement with the EU and the rising cost of SAPs as a result of devaluation. These effects impelled migration, as families sold their possessions to fund the perilous voyage to Europe, where these workers (as illegal immigrants) are remunerated well below the minimum wage, leaving the sending communities to struggle to eke a living.
Paris Yeros' article, which is the first of a two-part contribution on the trade union movement in post-independence Zimbabwe, draws attention to the impact of neoliberalism on the workers' movement. The implementation of structural adjustment programmes demands an authoritarian political environment as political leaders have to confront organised labour whose members have to cope with increasing unemployment and deterioration in their standard of living. In Zimbabwe, Yeros points out that though the programme was home-grown, yet the labour movement remained voiceless, and that the lack of consultation created a climate of adversarial industrial relations forcing the then union leader Morgan Tsvangirai (now Mugabe's prime minister) to describe structural adjustment as: ‘an offensive recolonisation of Zimbabwe, rolling back the spirit and achievement of our liberation’. In his view:
Political independence is a shallow victory when one's own economy cannot serve the fundamental interests of the population. World Bank SAP's do not build economies that serve the interests of African people. They build economies that pay and service debt.
Ovadia's paper looks at Africa (specifically Angola) at the most recent stage of imperialist strategy with the rise of China. Ovadia wants to ascertain ‘whether or not the theorised “Beijing Consensus” can produce different outcomes for Africa than the neoliberal orthodoxy of the Washington Consensus’. Using Angola as a case study, Ovadia concludes that China's arrival in Africa represents both a new imperialism and a new model for development, that the Beijing model constitutes a project of ‘recolonisation and appropriation of surplus’. Nonetheless, it offers African states a compromise and ‘the prospect for sustained economic growth and improvement to the quality of everyday life’. There is a clear warning to African policy-makers: ‘China's actions in Africa are in general no different from what western countries have done and are doing, though there may be potentially more advantages to China's relations with Africa’.
Carlos Oya's paper draws attention to an important symptom of the crisis of citizenship in Africa, namely the neglect of the rural areas and in particular the dearth of linkages between poverty and employment dynamics in rural communities, in particular that of wage employment. The rural sector is often bereft of social citizenship with the majority of welfare provisions concentrated in the urban areas, the habitat of the governing classes. Oya goes on to analyse some of the methodological reasons for this neglect of wage employment in studies of rural employment in Africa.
The article by Simone Claar and Andreas Nölke examines North–South trade relations, in particular the relationship between South Africa and the European Union. They are concerned with looking at what they call ‘Deep Integration’ or ‘behind the border trade restrictions’, which they warn have the potential to become ‘a dangerous restriction for the economic policy space of the South African government’. According to the authors, Deep Integration goes beyond the removal of border barriers to include the removal of restrictions on trade that hinder investment across borders, and more recently, the focus has moved towards harmonisation of national economic regulation to accelerate Deep Integration and trade services. For Claar and Nölke, the worrying point from South Africa's point of view is that the Deep Trade agenda goes beyond normal tariff reduction to include political practices embedded in multilateral trading system with firms and states in the South having to adopt norms of the US and the EU in order to be able to gain access the markets of these Northern giants.
In conclusion, Claar and Nölke warn that Deep Integration may lead to problems of ‘severe compatibility conflicts in South Africa and in other Southern economies’ because the domestic institutions could not be adequately protected. Furthermore, Claar and Nölke observe that the situation is exacerbated because ‘Northern economies frequently use Deep Integration to implement Anglo-Saxon forms of capitalism in the Global South, while the supporting institutions framework is often absent’.
Finally, Matteo Rizzo's article examines the struggle to unionise informal transport workers in the Tanzania capital Dar es Salaam. The article challenges the view that trade unionism and workplace labourism are antithetical to workers' aspirations. He goes on to argue that in order to make sense of the workers' struggle, it is imperative to utilise a political economy approach, by ‘locating workers within their economic structure and understanding their relationship to capital’. The paper offers a structure of the public transport sector and a history of the workers' struggle since 1995, drawing attention to their partial victory at unionising their members, in the face of stiff opposition from bus owners. In conclusion, Rizzo, drawing on the work of Wright (2000), identified four important theoretical concepts that could determine the outcome of an industrial conflict: marketplace bargaining power, meaning ‘power that workers command due to conditions in the labour market across economic industries’; ‘workplace bargaining power’ – power that may be realised from specific location of workers; structural power, which is derived from the specific vantage position within the economic system. However, for structural power to be realised, it is argued that this will depend on another source, associational power, which in turn is derived from the political organisation of workers alongside trades union or other institutional forms.