It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The liberation of the African continent from imperial rule was always going to be a complex process and not necessarily one that would bring meaningful freedom and democracy to the peoples of the continent. But those of us on the left, after the initial disappointments of Ghana and Guinea, saw emerging possibilities for genuine socialist liberation in Tanzania, Mozambique and, most crucially for the future of the continent, South Africa. Among those has been John Saul, who has devoted much of his writing and political activity to supporting this meaningful liberation, but also has been a consistent critic of those African regimes which promised much, but succumbed to the siren call of Capital, and if unwillingly so, in the belief that there was no choice. A flawed freedom brings together a set of Saul’s published essays covering the liberation and post-liberation paths of Tanzania, where his African experience began, of Mozambique, where he spent periods of time first, in the liberated areas of northern Mozambique and then later in independent Mozambique; and finally, of South Africa, where he taught, and worked with local activists. South Africa – the present as history (hereafter South Africa) is a collaboration with another scholar-activist, Patrick Bond. A compelling account of that country’s complex and painful history, it explains in much greater depth how this history has limited its own meaningful liberation.
In A flawed freedom, Saul surveys the post-independence history of these three countries. He argues that the false decolonisation analyses of Fanon and Cabral were borne out, in spite of the initial promise of liberation. The petty bourgeoisie, the inheritors of colonial rule, did not align themselves with the struggles of peasants and workers, but instead cemented their position as a privileged elite. Now it is the global corporates of finance, mineral extraction and manufacturing that have replaced the different national capitals that previously ruled the imperial roost, co-opting these elites to ensure local state support for their activities.
From 1967 to 1972, Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania, with the Arusha Declaration (TANU 1967) and the governing party TANU’s Guidelines (TANU 1979), seemed be heading for real decolonisation: tendencies towards elitism and class formation would be suppressed, and foreign capital would serve the country. However, just when it looked like serious steps were being taken to effect a real decolonisation, Nyerere appeared to step back, either unwilling to go the distance, or unable to take the majority of the leadership with him. Saul describes a key moment when the University of Dar es Salaam students took seriously the Guidelines’ strictures to hold leaders to account, by trying to confront the Vice-Chancellor and his colleagues about the way they ran the university. The resulting appearance of the Police Field Force Unit on the campus with bayonets fixed, and the expulsion of the students’ president from the building and his deportation to his country, Kenya, together with a similar heavy-handed action later against workers in a rubber factory who also followed the guidelines (Mihyo 1975), was a shock to those of us, both Tanzanian and immigrant, who had enthusiastically embraced Nyerere’s Ujamaa as a programme of real decolonisation. Was this Nyerere choosing the petty bourgeois route or recognising the limits of what was politically possible? Saul clearly takes the former view stressing, with convincing evidence, the authoritarianism of Nyerere himself and its transmission through the one-party-state structure – leadership from the top downwards rather than an alliance with workers and peasants and leadership from the bottom upwards.
While Tanzania was disappointing, it seemed that the struggles against the Portuguese colonial regimes of Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau were taking a very clearly revolutionary decolonising track, with especially the promise of building a Mozambique of a clearer socialist hue than ever Nyerere’s Tanzania was likely to do. Yet it wasn’t long before Mozambique embraced the neoliberal path laid out for it by the World Bank, and the new elite enriched itself while poverty grew. High growth rates there were, but that growth did not feed into an economic and social programme characteristic of even a developmental state, let alone a socialist one. Saul takes issue with those who see this enriched elite as a progressive bourgeoisie using its wealth for a wider development purpose. Rather, and this is a theme running through both books, he points instead to a mounting popular opposition through strikes and other protests leading to a potentially different future. As Saul notes, whether this undercurrent of opposition can be translated into a broad mass movement for transformation is another question.
And then we come to South Africa. While recognising the huge achievement of the overthrow of apartheid, Saul sees white minority rule with its exploitative and repressive practices now replaced by the neoliberal dictates of the ‘Empire of Capital’. As a consequence, while some sections of the black political and business elite have closed the income and wealth gaps with the whites, the mass of the black population has seen the gap with the rich and the upper-middle class get even wider. Saul draws on the writings of Steve Biko who, in the 1970s, argued that it would be possible for white capital to maintain its dominance by effectively co-opting and nourishing a black capitalist class to achieve a Fanonist false colonisation. Saul shows how this was eventually done, how the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) was effectively subordinated to the African National Congress (ANC), and how the United Democratic Front (UDF) ended up dissolving itself, leaving the ANC’s leadership undisputed.
So to the ANC itself and the deal that resulted in the end of apartheid and the coming to office of a movement which, unlike the UDF, operated not as a democratic and participatory mass movement from below, but as a democratic centralist vanguard; unavoidable perhaps in the conditions of exile and armed struggle, but not justifiable in liberated democratic conditions. Saul examines the explanations as to why the UDF allowed the ANC to exert hegemony of the later period of the struggle for liberation and then in its aftermath. Among such compelling explanations are those that place the ANC and its partner organisations, as well as its imprisoned leadership, as the authentic voice of liberation, embedded in popular memory, with Nelson Mandela as the unassailable leader of the rainbow nation. Of course this cannot explain the deal that was made after all those years of talks between the ANC and the representatives of the white regime and white capital, a deal that resulted in a deracialisation of the economy with the capture of what spoils were available by a minority of the black population.
So Capital won again. For Saul makes it very clear how sections of South African capital saw apartheid as an obstacle to their profit accumulation, limiting the domestic markets, deterring investment from overseas and worsening labour market rigidities, as well as creating a political climate of potentially revolutionary proportions. The talks that took place throughout the 1980s to 1994 saw Capital winning its battle to dismantle apartheid and the ANC winning its battle to achieve universal suffrage and, in effect, one-party majority rule. In doing so the ANC lost any struggle it might have had with Capital to effect meaningful liberation, though Saul doubts this was, by the 1980s, still its objective. Was that because the ANC was outmanoeuvred or because it had switched sides? Or simply that such compromise was the only way to end apartheid: ‘civil talks or civil war’ (Pahad 2016), a strategy of deracialisation first and then ‘normal’ politics in a ‘normal’ capitalist society. Although, as Saul notes, there was between 1990 and 1994 a bloody, though limited, civil war being waged principally by Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha, and serving the interests of those white South Africans opposed to a deal, and themselves threatening an armed uprising. Not surprising then the belief among both ANC and National Party (NP) leaders that without ‘civil talks’ and a compromise it could have been a lot worse.
So where is all this going? As Saul suggests in a fascinating discussion of class, the workers are fragmented, with those at the upper end allying their interests with Capital, while the middle and lower end is occupied by skilled and unskilled labour, both white collar and manual in public services and private enterprises, fragmented or replaced by robots. Beneath this more traditional labour force is the ‘precariat’, with one or multiple part-time jobs, poorly paid, or on zero-hours contracts. From where will come organised resistance to the onward march of Capital? Saul sees some coalescence of organisations of the ‘traditional working class’ – mainly the trades unions – with the new community organisations of the precariat, which together might form the basis of a different, but also revolutionary politics, as exemplified by the formation of the Democratic Left Forum in South Africa. Although, as he recognises, such a precariat along with the lower-paid end of the formally employed can also be exploited by movements of the far right, as we are currently witnessing around the world.
The book concludes, first, with a moving tribute to Ruth First for the 30th anniversary of her assassination, inter alia imagining what she would have made of post-liberation South Africa, and, second, with reflections on South Africa after the passing of Nelson Mandela, continuing many of the book’s critical themes and seeing Mandela’s departure as weakening the ANC, enabling new movements to grow and move South Africa in a direction envisaged by the old ANC.
South Africa was completed against the backdrop of the shooting of the Marikana miners in 2012, recalling as it did the apartheid era and the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. State violence employed at Marikana to protect Capital’s interests, against some of the very people whom the 1994 liberation was meant to serve, raised serious questions about how to stop the ANC government becoming another version of the oppressive apartheid state. After a scene-setting introduction by Saul and Bond, they track and explain how South Africa got to this point. Saul in the three chapters of the first part of the book, and with breath-taking scholarship, covers a wide range of the historical literature, tracing the history of the country from Mrs Ples, the hominoid skull found in what is now Gauteng, through to 1994 and the end of apartheid. As E. H. Carr famously argued, the historian’s task in writing about the past is to ‘master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present’ but also to ‘view the past and achieve our understanding of the past, only through the eyes of the present’ (Carr 1961, 19–20). This historical account does all of this admirably.
A brief overview of the linguistic and cultural diversity of African settlement prior to the first European landing at the Cape in 1652 is followed by the story of European conquest, African resistance and acquiescence to that conquest, and the relentless assertion of white superiority. Saul traces the creation of the labour reserve for the cheap (black) labour mining economy; the emergence of racial capitalism – the mutually reinforcing system of racial oppression and company profits together with the racial segregation embodied in the 1913 Native Land Act and job reservation colour bar; the rise of the National Party to election victory in 1948; and the institutional formalisation of the apartheid that had effectively existed for decades. The story continues with the emergence of organised resistance: from the cautious ‘constitutional’ approach of the ANC and the Coloured and Indian movements, culminating in the Freedom Charter, to the adoption of the armed struggle as all attempts to pursue non-white rights through peaceful means failed. The 1960s ‘apartheid boom’ resulting from rapidly increasing foreign investment attracted by the suppression of opposition and the imprisonment of the ANC leadership on Robben Island produced the darkest days of the struggle against white supremacy, when the prospect of a black majority government appeared to be very distant.
But in the 1970s, the impregnability of the apartheid state began to be seriously challenged: the Durban strikes of 1972–73, the 1976 Soweto uprising, and the rise of the new, and later formally recognised unions, most, eventually, under the umbrella of COSATU, and later the formation of the UDF. Then in the 1980s the informal talks between the ANC and representatives of Capital and the State began, as skill shortages started to breach the job colour bar, and disinvestment and the recession in the global economy led to economic stagnation. The story as presented here highlights the dilemmas for the new organisations of risking co-option, within an amended racial capitalism, or rejecting the path of state recognition and continuing resistance. In a fascinating passage, Saul recalls the potentially more important tension within the union movement between the ‘populists’ who aligned with the ANC’s version of the ‘national democratic revolution’ and the shop-floor-based ‘workerists’ who prioritised class struggle at the workplace and a strong shop steward union structure, a tension which continued after COSATU joined the ‘triple alliance’ through to the ANC governments after 1994.
And so we are taken to four years between Mandela’s release and the unbanning of the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP), a period of violence perpetrated by the state, the Afrikaner right and the Zulu Inkatha movement, all of which threatened peaceful negotiations. Recalling A flawed freedom, Saul and Bond both see the eventual deal between Capital and the ANC taking South Africa down that well-trodden road of the neoliberal Washington consensus. This again raises the question of whether the ANC had any choice. And if not, did they push the boundaries of what they could do as far as was possible or did they simply settle for the easier option of going with the capitalist flow, or even actively pushing that flow? As Saul and Bond make clear, Marikana suggests the last, as even union leaders were inclined to blame the victims of the massacre and endorse state power.
In the second part of the book, Bond’s two chapters cover the period since 1994, focusing on the detail of South Africa’s political economy and the contradictions that have unfolded in the choice of the neoliberal capitalist path. For, as with Saul throughout A flawed freedom, both he and Bond regard this as a choice that was made over one which would mobilise the people’s energies and enthusiasm and invest the economic surplus in productive activity, infrastructure and services that would benefit the poor. The acceptance by the ANC–NP transitional executive of a large International Monetary Fund loan in 1993 put South Africa well on the way to crafting a neoliberal strategy for the economy after the ANC took office in 1994. The policy switch from the Keynesian Reconstruction and Development Programme to the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy in 1996 further aligned the State with Capital. Racial apartheid may have been abolished, but a ‘class apartheid’ replaced it with the white elite now sharing wealth with the new black elite, all at the expense of the, mainly black, poor. Bond shows how all the promises in the area of health, education, water provision, housing and other service delivery were at best diluted and, at worst, not kept.
The positive features of ANC government presented here are few. Houses for the poor there were, but smaller than planned, poorly constructed and perpetuating the geography of apartheid housing. The victory against Big Pharma to import generic drugs, and of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in forcing the government to make generic drugs widely available to treat HIV/AIDS, are also highlighted as major positives. Bond’s discussion of the government’s – and especially President Thabo Mbeki’s – handling of this issue shines some light on why rolling out of antiretrovirals was resisted for so long and perhaps also offers some explanation of the ‘peculiarities of the President’, as Bond puts it (164). The TAC’s victory may, as Bond suggests, demonstrate that the continued pursuit of the neoliberal path by the ANC government has unwittingly stimulated the development of a strong civil society as people organise to resist and oppose what the government is doing, and demand new policies. And, echoing Saul, this opposition was not to be found in the traditional working class, but in the urban social movements, based in the precariat who are not in the kind of employment or economic activity that has traditionally been the territory of the unions.
Bond’s second chapter continues the story until the 2012 Marikana shootings. Corruption, mass unemployment and the persistence of the ‘minerals–energy complex’ are laid at the door of the neoliberal strategy accepted by the ANC governments. ‘Tokenistic welfarism’ (176), such as the policies of free basic services of water and electricity, suffered from failures to deliver or from the small free allowances being paid for by higher charges for additional consumption, and disconnection for those unable to pay. The financialisation of everything caused more household debt to bridge the gap between incomes and necessary expenditure, and led to financial and property price bubbles fuelled by easy credit. Nor does South Africa’s role outside the country avoid severe criticism, with Mbeki’s continued public defence of Mugabe, the failed New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) project and South Africa’s support at the UN in 2011 for an invasion of Libya. The chapter ends with a long quotation from Fanon concluding that ‘[t]he single party is the modern form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’ (210) and placing the ANC as another example of a liberation movement-turned-party that fits that description.
In the third part of the book, Bond’s final chapter, the first of two separate conclusions by each author, revisits the Marikana killings and the implications of that horrific moment for South Africa’s future. Marikana and its aftermath highlighted the way in which the State, Capital and the main union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), had formed an alliance in which the interests of each combined to oppress the very people the ANC was meant to liberate and the NUM was meant to protect. No accident that the former NUM leader, Cyril Ramaphosa, turned millionaire businessman, then deputy president, is now in line to become the next state President. His intervention, urging action against the Marikana protesters, is a perfect example of the trajectory of many former militants of the struggle against apartheid who are enjoying the fruits of co-option.
Bond’s and Saul’s conclusions both search for the alternative, not only in terms of a movement or party that might eventually challenge the ANC and of the policies around which such a movement would coalesce: effective public services, redistribution, employment creation, gender equality and the environment, but also as an economic strategy built around production for domestic need, rather than the needs of the empire of global capital. Both concluding chapters examine in some detail the possibilities of fissures within the unions and the ANC that might bring a reconfigured political landscape in which a left movement based in all the areas of current struggles can mobilise public support and give hope to the millions who have been failed by successive post-liberation governments. Although the electors who do vote, as Saul observes, still return the ANC with a dominating majority, how long this will continue, with cracks beginning to open in ANC support as evidenced by the local elections in 2016, is another intriguing question.
It is difficult not to agree with the main thesis of the authors. They are justifiably critical of the ANC and its leaders who allowed the political and business elite to prosper and the poor to remain poor, if not get poorer. They are also critical of those commentators who seek to exonerate the ANC and blame globalisation, and regret the ‘limits of the possible’. Yet there is something of a contradiction here, for South Africa presents an explanation of the present rooted in the history of the country and thus suggests that the limits of the possible may have been reached. In other words, rather than globalisation making them do it, it was history. And in writing of the ‘Empire of Capital’, as Saul does in both books, it is as part of a history in which Capital always wins, especially by subverting any attempts elsewhere in the world to tread a different path, as with all attempts to build socialism in one country. But we can derive some optimism from the cases in these books. For while explaining how and why Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa took the paths they did, the authors do identify the possibilities for a meaningful future progressive change coming from the growth of popular (and socialist) movements from below which become powerful enough to force change on governments, and indeed to control governments of their own. The lesson of these cases is that change has to come through movements from below and the movement has to be global if it is to mount a serious challenge to the hegemony of the empire of global capital. And that struggle will continue for quite some time.