Roger Southall starts his book Liberation Movements in Power with an important observation. Southern African decolonisation was going to be unlike the earlier wave of national liberation: it was not going to make the same mistakes, ‘southern African NLMs [National Liberation Movements] were widely deemed to have special qualities, whether those related to ideological sophistication, representativeness of advanced class formation or simply commitment to high-minded principles’ (4). The regimes, so the argument went, that would emerge from these more ‘sophisticated’ liberation struggles would be unlike their predecessors that had emerged from the first period of decolonisation. In place of flag independence, real (and even socialist) transformation would take place, as he writes towards the end of the book: ‘The NLMs of southern Africa all expressed the intention to escape the fate reserved for the postcolonial national bourgeoisie of Fanon's unflattering description’ (274).
Southall's volume focuses on three case studies: the liberation movements of South Africa – the African National Congress (ANC); Namibia – the South West African People's Organisation (SWAPO); and Zimbabwe – the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), but his question ‘so what has gone wrong?’ (5) applies equally to the ex-Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique. Southall continues, ‘today the reality of NLMs as governments has given rise to widespread feelings of disappointment … They have become authoritarian, intolerant, careless if not actively abusive of human rights’ (4).
To answer these disappointments Southall's extremely thorough book looks in detail at the origins of national liberation in his case studies, charting their path to political maturity, armed struggle and negotiated settlements that resulted in independence (in the case of Namibia and Zimbabwe) and multiparty election (in South Africa) and then to their experience in power. He uses the notion of ‘party machine’ to explain the degeneration when NLMs come to power. Such a machine is ‘a vehicle for the upward mobility of party elites and for material accumulation justified ideologically by reference to the historical rightness of transformation’ (247).
The book examines the global dimension of national liberation, noting early on that the ideological shift (that had a decisive effect on many NLMs on the continent) among an important band of communist activists in South Africa was the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in 1928 (not 1927 as it appears in Southall's book). James la Guma, representing the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), was present when the Congress resolved (in an abrupt volte-face from previous positions) that the national question was the ‘foundation of the revolution’. From this point the CPSA (later SACP)1 would work, together with the ANC, towards ‘an independent native South African republic’.
In the 1950s and 1960s NLMs in southern Africa began to focus increasingly on the armed struggle. Southall charts the brutality of SWAPO, the ANC/SACP and ZANU-PF during the liberation struggles, each guilty of the assassination of internal opponents, and the mass arrest and murder of their own combatants. Much of this brutality came from the militarisation of these movements whether supported by the Chinese, Cubans or Soviets: ‘a reason for the closing down of political alternatives and for the establishment of political monopolies by exiled leaderships’ (57). Perhaps the worst violations were committed by the ANC/SACP's armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) when they crushed the ‘mutiny’ in 1984 of their forces in Kagandale in Angola; the revolt spread to include ‘a 90% majority among the whole trained forces of MK in Angola’ (59). In the suppression of this rebellion the ANC was assisted by the Angolan army but also, in other periods of internal dissent, by the ‘socialist’ government in Tanzania. Southall concludes:
Whether in Maoist or Soviet variants, emphasis was laid upon the party merging with the people … those who disagreed with it were misguided, disloyal or malevolently intentioned. This in turn implied that the exiled revolutionary movement had authority over popular forces, such as trade unions, civics and oppositional political parties at home. (60)
This book is encyclopaedic in detail and scope, elegantly written and carefully analysed, and makes a convincing and nuanced argument for the degeneration of NLMs. Southall may have benefited from a deeper analysis of an earlier wave of continental independence in the 1960s. What does the decay of these ‘party machines’ tell us about the crucial element in each NLM?
Frequently NLMs were brutal popular fronts incorporating a vast array of contradictory forces; as Southall writes about South Africa, ‘there was a significant class element within the ANC which was distinctly pro-capitalist’ (92). The black middle class was ‘disproportionately’ influential within NLMs, and sought accommodation with national and international capital. Failure of national liberation once the levers of state power were transferred to an independent government flowed directly from this dominating ‘class element’ within NLMs.
Alternatives to the National Democratic Revolution were present in the period of decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s, but particularly in the 1970s and 1980s in southern Africa. These alternatives (and most internal opposition within NLMs) were systematically shut down. One reason for this was what Fanon described as the lack of ideology – an alternative politics to the ‘curse’ of independence – which was, he argued in 1960, the greatest danger facing Africa. On these questions there is also a tendency in the book to confuse Stalinist ‘Marxism–Leninism’ with a richer, emancipatory Marxism represented by the South African historian and critic of NLMs, Baruch Hirson (247).
Southall's important volume should become essential reading to anyone hoping to unpick the failures of liberation in southern Africa, and from the ashes develop a radical and far-reaching way out of the poverty and underdevelopment that continues to blight the region.