Why we said ‘No’ to A.I.D. (1977)

In 1977, Congress authorized the expenditure of one million dollars for “the preparation of a comprehensive analysis of development needs of southern Africa to enable the Congress to determine what contribution United States foreign assistance can make.” AID was instructed to present specific proposals on how to spend this one million dollars. AID seems to have approached several groups of scholars heretofore critical of U.S. policy in southern Africa on the possibility of serving as “consultants” to draft this analysis. AID in late November approached the four of us as scholars in contact with persons knowledgeable about the region (and not ostensibly because of our links to the Association of Concerned African Scholars)** to meet with them to discuss what kind of work ought to be done, could be done, and might be done by us. We agreed to meet with them in December in Washington.

The project was presented to us as one on “Constraints to development of greater self reliance within and among the economies of the independent states in the southern Africa region.” AID said it wished to identify and analyze these constraints in such a way as “to permit derivation of action policies and projects.” AID said it wished a genuinely new approach which utilized African and Africanist scholars to articulate African aspirations. In this connection, they said they were discussing a proposal to develop a consortium of universities and scholars in the majority-ruled states of southern Africa as the major locus of such research.

We discovered in talking with some of them that there were, however, some constraints imposed on how one cou1d discuss constraints. One could not “politicize the analysis” (although one could “recognize the political context”). One could not discuss policymaking or policy goals of the U.S. or other governments towards the evolution of southern Africa. One was supposed to assume a majority rule government in Zimbabwe and Namibia, however that were achieved, and of whatever political groups that might be composed. One was not supposed to talk about the role of trans-national corporations, but only about the flow of factors of production.

In the course of the presentation by AID, we learned that it is likely that during an anticipated interim government, but prior to elections, a large World Bank mission will be sent to Rhodesia to prepare a plan to be implemented by the “transition government” and presumably afterwards by the government of a majority-ruled Zimbabwe. We were told that our task would be to present an analysis of “development needs” for the entire region that was so persuasive that whoever was in power (in southern Africa or in the U.S.) would wish to adopt an action program based on this analysis, and that this would be a major contribution to an ongoing dialogue and debate within the U.S. government.

We rejected the proposal categorically on the following grounds:

1. We could see no way of discussing “development needs” in the absence of discussing the political arrangements that are probable and preferable.

2. As far as we could tell, present U.S. government policy in the National Security Council and the State Department was moving in a direction contrary to the aspirations of the liberation movements, and we could not work within such policy assumptions.

3. We felt we were far more likely to affect U.S. policy along lines we favored by laying bare its premises and mobilizing opinion than by “working from within”, a fortiori since we doubted that any AID analysis would affect policy decisions at the level of the National Security Council; and that “working from within” wou1d hamper our credibility as fundamental critics of present U.S. policy.

4. We rejected any effort to conceal the nature of the debate by pretending to “de-politicize” it.

5. We rejected the assumption that development aid was necessarily per se a good thing, and that more aid is always better than less aid.

6. We rejected the assumption that the United States should be planning strategies of development for southern Africa, even if the parties concerned were not making such plans, since it might be for good reason (but of course we believed the leaders of the Patriotic Front and SWAPO were indeed making plans in the light of their own political perspectives).

Let us elaborate briefly on each of these points:

1. We asserted our view that the political economy is an integrated whole and that it was absurd to discuss development strategies, especially for the entire region, in the absence of political premises and choices. We cited an elementary example. The present Rhodesian government has an open border with South Africa and a closed one with Mozambique. How can anyone analyze what a Zimbabwe government could or could not do unless we had some idea if the borders were to remain as is, or if both borders are to be open, or if the situation will be inverted (open with Mozambique and closed with South Africa)? In short, it is not plausible to make an analysis (not to speak of its not being desirable) without knowing if we are talking of a Patriotic Front government, or a government arrived at by “internal settlement” (and presumably still coping with the offensives of the liberation movements).

We further said that we could not possibly leave out the role of the trans-national corporations (TNC’s) from an analysis of the “causes” of underdevelopment (as was suggested) when we believed that the TNC’S were one of the prime causes. We said that inviting the World Bank to make proposals was itself a political decision of the greatest importance, since the World Bank represented a particular (and highly contested) view of political economy. And how could one discuss solutions to southern African economic dilemmas, including Mozambique and Angola, in the face of present Congressional strictures on U.S. aid to these two countries? In short, we felt it was not true that there were technological analyses that were ideologically “neutral”. We were not neutral, nor could AID be, nor did we think it had ever been.

2. We emphatically did not believe the U.S. government was presently being neutral. We were in fact appalled by the recent developments in U.S. policy towards southern Africa. We saw the U.S. government as breaking away from its prior commitments to the front line states to support the Patriotic Front. We saw the U.S. government as acquiescing in, if not taking a lead in, the creation of the so-called “internal settlement.” We saw the U.S. as preoccupied by the creation of “moderate” regimes, the criterion of moderation being primarily how little such a regime proposed to tamper with the status quo. We saw the U.S. as having failed to take any serious measures against U.S. corporations (like Mobil and Union Carbide) that have systematically violated the Rhodesian embargo. We noted that the U.S. was taking no serious measures against the enrollment of U.S. citizens as mercenaries for Ian Smith. We were deeply concerned with the recently-confirmed transfer of Cessnas to Rhodesia from France, as well as their continued sale to South Africa. This was the type of U.S.-origin, dual-use, strategic material President Carter precisely promised would no longer be delivered, directly or via third parties. In short, the political context which we saw for this study was one of a U.S. effort not to promote the well-being of southern Africa as represented in the aspirations of the liberation movements of southern Africa. We remembered all too well the creeping involvement of the U.S. in Vietnam and we chose not to be party to repeating a similar kind of involvement in southern Africa.

3. We were told, in response, that we could best affect policy by doing such a report. It was implied we were letting down those who agreed with us within the Executive Branch or in Congress. We felt, however, that we could not in any way lend support to present policy objectives, and it seemed quite clear that consulting with AID in such a con-text would in fact do this. We could see no way in which our report would affect real policy: instead it might simply provide window dressing for continuation of current directions. We were not impressed by the receptivity of the Administration to critical views. Earlier in 1977, a petition concerning U.S. southern African policy signed by 600 African scholars had been presented to officials of the State Department and the National Security Council. Thus far, there has not even been the courtesy of a substantive response. Nor has there been a significant change in policy: if anything, U.S. policy has deteriorated since.

4. The proposed emphasis of the consultative study was to be on the regional plans for development of southern Africa, and on economic and social constraints within each nation, without reference to either the nature or the constitution of these governments or the goals they set or will set for development. We were warned that if we insisted on “politicizing” the discussion on southern African aid, there were others equally eager to “politicize” it, but in ways we would not like. It was implied that groups like those opposed to ratifying the Panama Canal Treaty were sympathetic to Rhodesian white settlers as people who had “built up” their country. We said that we were very aware of such views and that the very best thing for all of us was to move the discussion out into the open, with the options clearly drawn. At the present, the discussion is often clouded in Aesopian language. A “depoliticized” discussion of development is inevitably Aesopian. Hence if we wrote a report in this form, it would only assist those within government who wished to push U.S. policy in the direction of maximally maintaining the status quo to get away with it.

5. We were told that it was the friends of Africa who had sought, and with some difficulty, to increase the size of aid to southern Africa, and that if ways to spend this money were not forthcoming, it might be reduced. Here we took the position that spending money on aid is not a virtue in itself, and that badly-spent money is far worse than unspent money.

6. Finally, we said, if there is to be planning for the future of southern Africa, obviously southern Africans should do it. It was one thing for the U.S. to respond to the requests of independent majority-rule governments like Mozambique and Angola (and we noted the U.S. is precisely failing to do this), and quite another for the U.S. to make plans for not-yet-created majority-rule governments in Zimbabwe and Namibia. It was our view that the liberation movements would probably reject the whole idea of pre-planning by outsiders, not only on the grounds that it was a diversion, but even more strongly on the grounds that it was a negative political act. (At this point, we were astonished to be told that this was more or less what one of the AID planners had recently heard from Tanzanian officials about this very same project.) We also discovered that the plan to involve southern African scholars through a consortium of African universities was no longer being actively pursued. We said that nonetheless, if appropriate groups of African scholars associated with the liberation movements and the front line states were to engage in such a study, and thought our help might be in any way useful, we would be ready to do what we could. But to presume that this analysis should be done for them, for their own good, was part of the dangerous atmosphere that had infected U.S. policy since the second World War. We did not think it was morally or intellectually tenable.

We concluded by saying that we were very concerned with the well-being of southern Africa and with the lack of fit between U.S. foreign policy and the aspirations of the liberation movements. We would continue to do research on southern Africa, and continue to speak publicly in criticism of present U.S. policy, and in support of the liberation movements. That, it seemed to us, was the most relevant immediate contribution we could make.

—12/17/77

** There was a fifth person approached who was unable to attend the meetings.

Reprinted in ACAS Bulletin 81

Southern Africa and Liberal Interventionism (1977)

The Carter administration has been asserting of late that it is seeking to bring about majority rule in southern Africa. It has put forward an image of liberal interventionism-on the side of the Africans. Yet Joshua Nkomo and Sam Nujoma have insisted that all they want is for the US not to help the white regimes. Liberal interventionism stands forward as the most dangerous enemy of African liberation movements in southern Africa, and the Africans know it.

Geopolitically, southern Africa has become, and promises to remain for some time, a world node of acute political conflict. The ending of the war in Vietnam brought into being a relatively stable situation in that region. The Middle Eastern conflicts seem to be winding their way, however slowly, to an arrangement that may or may not turn out to be stable. But southern Africa promises most clearly to be a center of increasing, not decreasing, armed conflict.

The difficult years for African liberation (1965-74) were precisely the years of intensive US involvement in Vietnam. The United States clearly felt that it could not “afford” another major trouble zone and threw its weight behind the status quo. After the coup in Portugal in 1974 the downward thrust of African liberation was resumed. The response taken by Henry Kissinger was to drop the status quo option represented by NSSM 39 and to replace it with the liberal interventionism initiated hesitatingly under Eisenhower, then pursued with a flourish under Kennedy. At that time the US had encouraged the European powers to ‘decolonize’, provided the resulting African regimes were pro-Western or at least ‘non-aligned’, and provided –even more important -that economic links with the West were not cut. Basically Kissinger sought to revive the earlier US option of a ‘deal’ of decolonization and apply it to southern Africa in 1976.

Thus when Andrew Young or Walter Mondale or David Owen speaks of a ‘last chance’ for a ‘peaceful transition’ he means it is a last chance to install relatively tame African governments in Zimbabwe and Namibia, governments that would hold their own radicals in check and would continue to permit the same steady flow of products and profits as historically has been the case. Of course the ‘deal’ would provide a cut for local politicians and businessmen. But this is no skin off the back of the large corporations. The ‘cut’ for African cadres would simply substitute for the ‘cut’ now taken by the white settlers.

Excerpts from an address by Immanuel Wallerstein to the first meeting of the Association of Concerned African Scholars (ACAS) Houston, Texas, November 3, 1977. Originally published in ACAS Newsletter 1 (1977), p. 3.

Reprinted in ACAS Bulletin 81

Draft Statement of Principles (1977)

This statement of principles is presented in draft form for the consideration of ACAS members.

‘We are a grouping of scholars interested in Africa and concerned with moving U.S. policy toward Africa in directions more sympathetic to African interests. For political and practical reasons, our emphasis for the foreseeable future will be on southern Africa.’

We are encouraged by the overall direction of events in southern Africa, but we remain skeptical of U.S. government intentions in the area. We remember the crusading rhetoric with which the U.S. began its intervention in Indochina and the liberal image of the Kennedy administration during the time that intervention was expanded. We both recall and continue to be conscious of U.S. overt and covert intervention in Angola, of U.S. assistance to support Morocco’s aid to Zaire, and of the legacy of U.S. and NATO support for Portugal in its former colonies. We note the de facto support provided for the system of white supremacy in South Africa by United States economic, military and nuclear ties.

The people of southern Africa have in recent years taken enormous strides in their struggles to liberate themselves. There is real danger, however, that the U.S. corporate and government involvement will hamper their full attainment of their goals. We as scholars have both the possibility of, and the responsibility for, preventing this danger from materializing. We particularly feel the need for emphasizing the long-term interests of the African and American peoples, and for clearly distinguishing these interests from those of the transnational corporations and the U.S. government.

WE WILL ACT:

1. To promote scholarly analysis and opinion vis-à-vis the process of national and international policy formulation.

2. To formulate and communicate alternatives to U.S. Africa policies to the peoples of the U.S. and Africa.

3. To develop a communication network among concerned African scholars in order to (a) mobilize support on important current issues; (b) provide local sponsors for public education programs; (c) stimulate research on policy-oriented issues and to disseminate findings; (d) to inform and update members on important international policy developments.

This new organization is not intended to be in competition with other groups and organizations working on southern Africa but rather complementary to them. There is an important and distinct role that scholars can play in terms of research and analysis.

The scholarly community is both a forum for substantial debate and a constituency for action. And scholars’ very position in their community permits them to add credibility and legitimacy to particular analyses and policy positions.

Why Scholars Ought to be More Directly Involved

As students of Africa, we have a responsibility to Africa. That responsibility requires that we be particularly sensitive to, and provide support for, African aspirations. Whatever our disciplines and areas of research interest, we ought by now to be clear about the nature and causes of injustice, oppression, and exploitation in southern Africa. We also ought to be clear that peoples throughout Africa give high priority to the ending of white rule in southern Africa. Since the U.S. government and corporations are contributing to the perpetuation of white domination and underdevelopment of Africa, we must act consciously to challenge them.

This is a critical time. In the current verbiage about the reassessment of U.S. policy toward southern Africa, there may be some potential for new directions, or at least an opening to challenge a reaffirmation of the long-standing commitment to neocolonial relationships. We need to organize and act while we can have most effect.

This is also a critical time because black South Africans have once again reminded us of the vitality of their struggle. Their actions have once again exposed as myths the notions of African acquiescence and of the invulnerability of apartheid. Zimbabweans and Namibians are on the verge of genuine independence. We need to do what we can to remove the obstacles to their liberation.

Though our vision is broad, we do not expect to be able, quickly and by ourselves, to change the nature of world capitalism, or to initiate an entirely new U.S. foreign policy, or to overcome centuries of underdevelopment and racism. We do believe that on specific issues, at particular moments, we can employ our knowledge to exercise a positive influence. And we think that neither those issues nor our influence is inconsequential.

The image of a humane, peaceful, and just world, however distant, haunts and strengthens us; it clarifies what we have in common with the peoples of Africa. To have an effect at all, we must organize our strengths.

Originally from ACAS Newsletter 1 (1977), p. 2.

Reprinted in ACAS Bulletin 81

Summary of the Founding Meeting of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars, Houston, Texas, November 3, 1977

The meeting was chaired by Prof. Edris Makward, University of Wisconsin, Madison, who introduced the two main speakers: Prof. Immanuel Wallerstein and Mr. Edgar Lockwood, who spoke concerning “American Scholars and the Political Economy of Southern Africa” and “The Carter Administration and Southern Africa an Overview,” respectively. (See summaries elsewhere in newsletter.) A motion was made, seconded, and passed unanimously to establish the Association of Concerned African Scholars (ACAS) as an organization to achieve the following goals:

1. To facilitate the articulation of scholarly analysis and opinion with the process of national and international policy formulation with special focus on the policy of the United States government.

2. To formulate and communicate alternatives to U.S. Africa policies to the peoples of the United States and Africa.

3. To develop a communication network among concerned Africanist scholars in order to (a) mobilize support on important current issues, (b) provide local sponsors for public education programs, (c) stimulate research on policy-oriented issues and to disseminate findings, and (d) to inform and update members on important international policy developments.

4. To coordinate activities with other national and local organizations in order to facilitate each other’s work and not to compete.

A motion was made to elect officers of ACAS for a period of one year, beginning with the completion of the officer slate at the New York Spring Meeting, 1978. Co-chairpersons were to be elected, one at this meeting and one at the Spring Meeting in New York. The offices and persons elected as the first co-officer in each case were:

Co-Chairperson: Prof. Immanuel Wallerstein, SUNY-Binghamton

Co-Chair, Committee for Research: Prof. Ann Seidman, U. Massachusetts

Co-Chair, Committee for Political Education and Action: Prof. Willard Johnson, MIT

Co-Chair, Committee for Membership: Prof. George Shepherd, Univ. of Denver

Co-Treasurer: Prof. Tom Shick, Vniv. of Wisconsin, Madison

Co-Newsletter Editor: Prof. Michael Bratton, Michigan State Univ., on behalf of a group of persons at MSU who are cooperating.

An interim organizing membership fee of $5 was established, pending establishing regular activities and annual dues. Approximately 80 persons paid this fee and joined at the end of the meeting.

We made two decisions right at the start. One was that we would call ourselves “Africa scholars” and not “Africanists.” It was a moment of sensitivity about terminology. And the second was that we wanted ACAS somehow to bridge the split between ASA and AHSA. The way we would do that was twofold: We would hold our meetings neither during an ASA meeting nor during an AHSA meeting but separate from both. And we would have co-chairs at every level, in order that we could draw one person linked with each of the two organizations.

We did this for several years. It didn’t really work. First of all, it was expensive and difficult to hold a separate meeting, and not too many people could come. So, after several years, when the hostility between ASA and AHSA had cooled down, we decided to meet during the ASA meetings, and have been doing that ever since. We continued to have co-chairs, but it lost the element of balancing ASA and AHSA.

For a long time, ACAS concentrated on the issue of the liberation of southern Africa, which seemed the right priority. But once all that was finally accomplished, ACAS had to rethink its role and its activities, which was difficult at first, but has now, I think, been done.

Originally from ACAS Newsletter 1 (1977), p. 2

Reprinted in ACAS Bulletin 81

ACAS Puts Health on its Agenda

At the 1991 ASA meeting in St. Louis, ACAS members made a number of decisions designed to move the organization forward to a new level of activism in the decade of the 1990s. ACAS established thirteen issue working groups: US Aid and US Foreign Policy; Scholar Activists; Academic Freedom in Education; Regional and Pan-African Linkages; Why Africa has fallen off the Policy Map; US Support for Authoritarian Regimes; Democratization: a Guise for Destabilization; Environment; Africa’s Economic Crisis; South Africa’s transition; Post-apartheid Development in Southern Africa; and the Financial Intellectual Complex. Doe Mayer and I coordinated group number 8, “Health: Whose Agenda?” (see ACAS Bulletin 35). Issue Working Group papers (including ours) appeared in Bulletin 38/39, “Proposed agendas for scholars of Africa” in 1993.

In 1995 I edited a special double issue of the Bulletin on Health and Africa (number 44/45), with significant African input on issues ranging from female genital mutilation to World Bank and World Health Organization policies for African health care. In 1998, a second bulletin devoted to health appeared, “Health and Political Violence” (number 50/51); based in part on panels at ASA in 1997, this issue covered events in Mozambique, Rwanda, South Africa and Sudan.

Since then there has been a steady contribution of articles on health issues to the ACAS Bulletin and, in 2006, a special issue devoted to AIDS (number 74). I feel satisfied that this issue is now an established part of ACAS debates and permanently on the ACAS agenda. I want to extend my personal thanks to all editors, guest editors and contributors: ACAS Bulletins are great teaching tools, and in the era before the internet the Bulletin was able to get topical material into circulation much faster than academic journals.

As Bill Martin notes in the overview (this issue), the work on health helped ACAS reach beyond the southern Africa solidarity model and changed the makeup of the ACAS Executive, Board, etc., bringing in new people with different expertise and interests. The work on health led and reflected changes in ACAS and the scholar-activist world more generally. With the consolidation of ACOA and the Africa Fund into Africa Action, Salih Booker undertook a major push to reorient US government policy on aid to the AIDS epidemic, and Bill Minter has maintained our interest with regular bulletins from Africa Focus excerpting policy documents on AIDS in Africa.

An interesting byproduct of the health issues, or so it seems to me, is the introduction of women’s issues. In 1999, Ousseina Alidou and I edited a double issue on women and war (number 55/56). It remains the only ACAS Bulletin devoted to women’s issues, although occasional articles have appeared (viz. numbers 62/63, 68). It is ten years since ACAS published a double issue on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (number 53/54). Since 1998 over 5 million people have died in what some have described as Africa’s first international war. An epidemic of rape has been reported—but not in the pages of the Bulletin. The issue on Africa’s resources (number 75/76) does not link the plundering of Congo’s mineral wealth to the vicious assaults on women. (For anyone interested in the connection, see The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (www.thegreatestsilence.org). It is my hope that in the coming decades ACAS will include an analysis of/by women in every special issue, whether the theme is Africa’s resources, new politics, race, debt reduction, or . . .

About the Author

Meredth Turshen is a professor in the the School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University

Origins of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS) as a pro-Africa voice among American Scholars

The major U.S. scholarly caucuses for “Third World” regions emerged on the national stage in the 1960s and 1970s at the height of the Cold War. Under the cover of a liberal ideology of “democracy and freedom,” the hidden, and sometimes not so disguised, hand of U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies eventually was comprehended by the scholarly community. The result was significant movements to mobilize scholarly opinion and action with the work of area specialists to oppose much of U.S. Cold War foreign policy toward Latin and Central America, Asia, the Middle East, and, beginning in 1977, Africa.

Founded in 1977-78, the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS) was the fourth and last of the pro-Third World movements of scholars specific to world regions. Born in the scholarly and broader progressive social movements of the U.S. of the 1960s and 1970s ACAS sought to end to U.S. support for apartheid and minority rule in Southern Africa and then for a more pro-Africa U.S. foreign policy more broadly. ACAS represented the scholarly side of the most successful people’s movement in the U.S. that achieved a change in the foreign policy of a U.S. President, marked in 1986 by the passage over the Reagan veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 signalling the end of U.S. support of white South Africa.

Founded in 1977, the ACAS is a group of scholars and students of Africa dedicated to formulating alternative analyses of U.S. government policy toward Africa. ACAS seeks to develop communication and action networks between the peoples and scholars in Africa and the United States and to mobilize support in the United States on critical, current issues related to Africa.[1]

Stirred by the leak in 1976 of the National Security Memorandum (NSSM) #39 of 1969, ACAS organized to support extant African activist organizations (especially the American Committee on Africa, Africa Fund, Washington Office on Africa, and Africa News) and to mobilize scholars, students, and the public to oppose the U.S. support of apartheid and racist governments in Africa.[2]

NACLA, CCAS, and MERIP

In the post-WW II era, the U.S. left Africa largely to the rule and interests of the Western European colonial powers, especially as NATO allies, while stronger U.S. commercial and military interests were being pursued more avidly in the “U.S. sphere of influence” in Central and South America.

North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA)

In 1946, the U.S. Army School of the Americas opened in Panama as a hemisphere-wide military academy to “control internal subversion” as well as the 1957 Office of Public Safety. That doctrine of fending off communist organization and presence in Latin America was pursued in Costa Rica in 1948, Guatemala in the 1950s, Cuba in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as providing support for the dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Chile, and Central America, often with support or guidance from the CIA and the Green Berets. Perhaps the most open symbol of that U.S. policy was in the support of the dictatorship of the Somosas in Nicaragua. In that context in 1967, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) was organized by “a contemporary group of civil rights, antiwar and labor activists who came together to challenge elite conceptions of the ‘national interest’ as fundamentally opposed to the real interests of the majority of the American people.“ NACLA activists sought “…a world in which the nations and peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean are free from oppression and injustice, and enjoy a relationship with the United States based on mutual respect, free from economic and political subordination.” Like so many of these pro-Third World scholarly movements, in a period of a great vacuum in media coverage of the region, the initial focus was on “information” through a newsletter that viewed policy and events “through a Latin American lens.”[3]

“…our mission is to provide information and analysis on the region, and on its complex and changing relationship with the United States, as tools for education and advocacy – to foster knowledge beyond borders.”[4]

NACLA has flourished in the intervening years with a bi-monthly magazine, an active website, and a continuing flow of analysis and campaigns for justice in Latin and Central America. Currently, these include a focus in Latin America on “Guns: The Small Arms Trade in the Americas,” HIV/AIDS, “Immigrants and the Homeland Security State,” and a new campaign on “Not Just Change, But Justice: Taking on Policy in the Obama Era,” seeking specific foreign policy changes beginning with the taking on the economic blockade and political isolation of Cuba, the U.S.-sponsored drug war, border security, and the continued functioning of the re-named School of the Americas at Ft. Benning in Georgia.

The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS)

CCAS was first organized in 1967 and formalized with an annual meeting in 1969 in response to the U.S. presence in Southeast Asia. With headquarters first at University of California-Berkeley, CCAS had affiliated chapters in 16 universities and four outside the U.S. with participation by Asianist scholars especially in the large Title VI National Resource Centers for East, South, and Southeast Asian Studies. The CCAS quickly focused on identifying U.S. AID and State Department initiatives on campuses in support of the Vietnam war as well as publications such as the substantial and peer-reviewed Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars and monographs and reports such as The Indochina Story (1970) and China! Inside the People’s Republic (1972). Some were activist publications such as the Indochina War Information Packet, prepared by CCAS Committee at Cornell University in 1970.

As Mark Selden, professor of Asian Studies at SUNY Binghamton noted,

“For Asianists of my generation, the Vietnam War was the decisive moment defining the context of Asian scholarship and, for some, of American politics, at least until 9 /11 and the Iraq War. Questioning the relationship between thought and action led me to interrogate dominant state ideologies as reflected in scholarship. It also led me to aspire to find ways to stop illegitimate violence and contribute to social justice.”[5]

The presence of the Vietnam conflict daily on the evening news and the pressure on campus and on college students of the draft and draft resistance across the country increased the urgency for scholarly response in 1967. As with ACAS, the first arena for action of CCAS was the annual meeting of the regional scholarly association in 1968 (Ibid., p. 251). In 2009, the major presence of the CCAS is through the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars.

Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP)

The third of the pro-Third World scholarly organizations was the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), which produced copious publications in its MERIP Reports serial. Begun in 1971 by anti-Vietnam activists, the project, like NACLA, initially sought to provide information and critical analysis on the Middle East that would be picked up by the existing media.[6] Substantively, MERIP sought “to connect U.S. policy of Southeast Asia with U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.” (Ibid.) MERIP has remained highly critical of those U.S. foreign policies.

“US foreign policy exacerbates the disastrous state of affairs in the contemporary Middle East. Although the political contours of the world have changed radically since the collapse of the USSR and the Gulf War of 1991, US goals in the region have remained remarkable consistent: to control the flow of oil, to prevent the growth of Arab nationalist and leftist movements and to protect Israel.”[7]

Over the years 1971-85, MERIP Reports (later MERIP Middle East Report 1986-88, then Middle East Report 1988-) gained authority, though establishment representatives saw it as too pro-Palestine. MERIP remained committed “to provide the most considered and accurate information and analysis on the Middle East and US policy there…”[8] By 1981, it had published 100 issues over 10 years and became widely used and acclaimed in the Middle East where, West Bank Palestinians, for instance, said it was their only reliable source of information on Iran.

In 2009, MERIP maintains a very active program with a lively website of MERIP Reports Online, an program of placing op-eds in many U.S. newspapers, and the Middle East Report, and a print quarterly with recent topics of Empire’s Eastern Reach (2008), Displaced (2007), The War Economy of Iraq (2007), and The Shi‘a in the Arab World (2007).

The Africa-focused Precursors of ACAS

The context for the formation of ACAS was quite different from its three predecessors with the development in the 1950s to 1970s of other organizations mobilizing support and publishing on African justice and democracy issues. By 1953, only five years after formal apartheid was established, George Houser[9] and other civil rights activists from the Congress of Racial Equality and Fellowship of Reconciliation had formed the American Committee on Africa (ACOA) in New York among a collection of blacks and whites who sought to support the Defiance Campaign in South Africa. They were able to build on the earlier mobilization of the International Committee on African Affairs (formed in 1937 and later renamed the Council on African Affairs). In the late 1950s, ACOA brought a number of young African leaders, e.g. Kenneth Kaunda from Zambia, to the United Nations and U.S. in preparation for African independence in the 1960s. ACOA also built cooperation with the U.N. Unit on Apartheid and with the Southern African liberation movements. In the 1960s-1980s, ACOA, and the Africa Fund after 1966, became the main organizing agency for the anti-apartheid movement in the U.S., providing focus on apartheid policies in South Africa and Nambia, on Rhodesia, and on the Portuguese territories of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea Bissau.

During the 1970s, the Washington Office on Africa (WOA) and the WOA Education Fund (later changed to the Africa Policy Information Center (APIC in the mid-1990s) were founded in Washington, DC to lobby Congress on African issues and to produce research, analysis, and education materials on the U.S. role in Africa and on a variety of African issues, including global and African economic policy, HIV/AIDS and treatment, democracy and elections in various countries, trade wars, oil, human rights, and peacekeeping.

Beginning in the late 1960s, the University Christian Movement’s magazine in New York, Southern Africa, provided news and organizing bulletins for the growing anti-apartheid movement across the U.S. News about Africa and struggles for independence on the continent increasingly were provided by Africa News, initiated in 1972 in Durham, NC and now incorporated into allAfrica.com. (By the late 1990s, allAfrica.com was posting more than 1,000 stories daily from 130 African news organizations with an online archive of more than 900,000 articles.) These and other African liberation initiatives were supported by various civil rights and global justice agencies from the Presbyterian, United Church of Christ, Disciples, Lutheran, and Methodist churches and the National and World Councils of Churches. Many of the founders of these initiatives came from overseas experience in Africa supported by these churches and from the Peace Corps. The latter were organized in the Committee of Return Volunteers, which was quite active in protesting the Vietnam War in 1967 and 1970s.

Also in the 1960s and 1970s, a number of anti-apartheid committees and organizations were being founded across the country in Madison, East Lansing, Ann Arbor, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Amherst, Boston, Princeton, Chapel Hill, as well as in churches, unions, and state and local governments. A number of the founders of ACAS had organized or participated in these local Southern Africa-focused organizations and movements for sanctions and divestiture. These committees actively drew on the research and publications of ACOA, WOA, and the International Defense and Aid Fund (IDAFSA) based in London.

The combination of these African activist national news and information sources created a very different context for the formation of ACAS in the late 1970s because a broad national source of news on Africa and on activism on U.S. Africa policy was not needed so urgently as for Latin America and the Middle East. What was needed was critical content and analysis on the issues from legitimate scholars, which ACAS sought to provide.

Finally, a number of the Africanists who formed ACAS were participating in a marked change in the theories of area studies. Rather than ethnographic studies that were confined to a particular language or ethnic group, beginning in the late 1960s, younger scholars brought a new conceptualization of Africa as part of the “political economy of the world system.” Such a perspective naturally looked at the global parameters of economic systems and world politics as the context for understanding Africa, for which U.S. and other Western foreign policies were a major force.

ACAS and U.S. Policy in the 1970s

In addition to these national and local African activist and anti-apartheid organizations of the 1960s and 1970s, three other developments shaped the beginnings of ACAS in 1977-78: 1) the mounting protest and violent armed struggle in Southern Africa, 2) the racial cleavages in the U.S. African studies community which made collaboration among scholars across racial lines difficult, and 3) the mounting role of U.S. security agencies in U.S. foreign policy toward Africa.

First, the Western support for the Southern African regimes was juxtaposed with the mounting uprisings in South Africa, the apartheid state’s repression, and the armed struggle in Southern Rhodesia, Namibia, South Africa, and Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique. In 1976 a non-violent march by 15,000 students in Soweto, resulted in days of rioting. The apartheid police opened fire on the crowd and killed 566 children, an event resounding around the world. Then in 1977 anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko was killed in police custody. With the mounting news of turbulence across the region and with the growing armed struggle via the military wings of ANC, SWAPO, ZANU, and ZAPU, the possibility of major race conflict across Southern Africa escalated.

In this context, the arguments that a “liberalized South Africa” and the U.S. companies there could ameliorate raw apartheid rang hollow; it was not a moment of ambiguity but of clarity about conflict across the region. In this context, the publishing of the NSSM #39 of 1969, which was not made public until 1976, with Kissinger’s clear siding with the whites and the defining the African liberation movements as the communist enemy, there remained little middle room for Africanists liberals. Simultaneously, the U.S. corporate sector was banding together to resist both sanctions against South Africa and divestiture from their corporate stock funds by universities, churches, and unions. Already by 1978, two major universities and one college had begun divestment from U.S. companies operating in South Africa,[10] and the companies were mobilizing more actively to offer the Sullivan Principles as a means to reduce segregation in the work place, improve worker relations, and, thereby, to justify the corporations remaining in South Africa. The combination of corporate mobilization and the increasing violent repression in South Africa seemed to offer few opportunities for a peaceful transition.
Second, the severe racial cleavages in U.S. African Studies had been given voice in the protest at the joint Africans Studies Association (ASA) and Canadian African Studies Association meeting in Montreal in October 1969. Many Black students and scholars disrupted the meeting protesting the exclusion of Black leadership from the association and from the resources and funding of African studies in general. In addition, the protestors also complained that many of the leaders of the ASA were deeply engaged with the U.S. government in the Cold War manipulation of African governments and leaders. Some of the ASA scholars had CIA connections, they alleged, and these were inimical to impartial scholarship and were aimed to undercut African autonomy and independence. (The African Research Group made a similar analysis at that time in its charges about the “U.S. imperialist penetration of Africa.”

The early leadership of ACAS was committed both to bridging this racial gap in African studies and including African and African-descended researchers in ACAS as well as to advocate strenuously that studies by Africanists no longer should be used to oppress Africans and African states. As a result, ACAS made certain that its Board was inclusive and that one co-chair of the organization always was African-American. Originally, the ACAS leadership planned either to hold all ACAS meetings outside of the ASA or, alternatively, at the annual meetings of both the ASA and the African Heritage Studies Association (AHSA). The AHSA was seeking to revive the earlier strong African American study of Africa in the International Committee on African Affairs (formed in 1937 and later renamed the Council on African Affairs), the Association of Negro Life and History, and other organizations and journals of the Black community. These organizations had disseminated information on Africa, provided scholarships to African students, and lobbied for colonial reform.[12] In addition, TransAfrica was formed in 1977 “after the Black Leadership Conference convened by the Congressional Black Caucus … concluded that the conspicuous absence of African Americans in high-level international affairs positions, and the general neglect of African and Caribbean priorities.” With several leading African American scholars on its Board of Directors, building this organizational voice for African American advocacy on U.S. Africa policy became a large priority. Holding meetings in both ASA and AHSA proved to be a great challenge, given little enthusiasm on the AHSA side, and ACAS meetings reverted to being held only at ASA annual meetings; however, the principle of multiracial leadership has continued throughout the life of ACAS.

The third major force shaping ACAS was the steadily increasing role of the Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Defense in U.S. relations with Africa during the Cold War, an issue that was to dominate much of the political action within ACAS for its history. As many African nations became independent in the early 1960s, John Kennedy’s U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, G. Mennen Williams (former Governor of Michigan 1948-60), made speeches in Africa about the U.S. siding with Africa, that “Africa was for the Africans,” and that the U.S. was the “first new and anti-colonial nation” and identified with Africa’s aspirations for independence and democracy. Many promises were made for supporting African development with experts, education, and U.S. economic assistance. Simultaneously, Western and Israeli intelligence agencies became more active in subverting African leaders and governments. In the mid-1970s, just before ACAS was organized, President Nixon (1969-74) and Secretary of State Kissinger (1969-77) with strong conservative support brought the U.S. to side with and arm Portugal with planes, herbicides, and napalm to use against the liberation movements in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique. When the Portuguese colonial government collapsed in 1974, the CIA, provided active support for the FNLA and UNITA through Zaire (D.R.Congo) while South Africa, China, and Israel worked in various ways to support a civil war against the MPLA government in Luanda led by Agostinho Neto and the Cuban allies. Also clear was the direct attempt to subvert ZANU and ZAPU from coming to power in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the delaying of the independence of Namibia from South Africa, and the covert support by government and corporations for South Africa itself.

The founding of ACAS

In this tumultuous period in spring 1977, a number of scholars met for two conferences on Southern Africa at Michigan State University (MSU) and University of Minnesota. The combined conference papers, published as Southern Africa: Society, Economy and Liberation,[14] voiced the support of scholars for the liberation struggle in Southern Africa and provided the raison d’etre for founding ACAS. Many of those attending the conferences were the first members of ACAS, beginning with an informal assembly at the MSU Kellogg Center following the conference in April 1977, where the organization of ACAS was proposed. The formalization of ACAS as an organization then followed at the annual meeting of the ASA in November, 1978 at Houston, TX.

Over the years, ACAS dealt with dozens of political issues in its ACAS Newsletter (later becoming the ACAS Bulletin), supplemented in recent years with the ACAS website. In the first decade, the focus was almost exclusively on Southern Africa issues. Afterwards, the Political Action Committee and officers pursued: U.S. foreign policy across Africa, health, women’s issues especially women and war, AIDS, the debate over U.S. aid to Africa, the problems of Zimbabwe and Kenya, defending intellectual freedom and individual scholars under attack, children under apartheid, the geopolitics of oil, divestment and other sanctions on South Africa, the “ghettoization of African studies” debate, U.S. corporations and African economies, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, cancellation of African debt, political agendas for U.S. scholars of Africa, drought and water issues, democratization and civil society, World Bank and IMF policies, and civil conflict across Africa.

One issue moved to the center of ACAS concern in its first decade – the disorganization of African post-independence societies by foreign military and intelligence agencies. In a series of developments, ACAS learned early about the insinuation of the CIA and DOD into U.S. foreign policy toward Africa. The first of these cases, appearing in the first issue of the newsletter as “Why We Said No to U.S. AID” was authored by several of the inaugural leaders of ACAS, explaining how they had been invited to prepare for Zimbabwean independence by another ACAS member who had been appointed as head of U.S. AID’s Africa Desk in the Carter Administration. After they began to plan to participate, they discovered that the U.S. AID plan was being used by the CIA to engineer an Ian Smith government with Methodist Bishop Abel Muzorewa, an “internal settlement” that would bypass the ZANU and ZAPU liberation movements.[15] In addition, the U.S. intelligence operations in Africa included the CIA-organized civil war in Angola,[16] the revelations in Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa,[17] the U.S. intelligence identifying Nelson Mandela’s hiding place to the apartheid police,[18] and the more open U.S. linkages with South Africa under the “Constructive Engagement” policy articulated by Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Chester Crocker after the Reagan election in the1980s.[19] Previously in the 1960s, both the CIA involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and installation of Gen. Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire/Congo had been evident, as was the support for the Israeli installation of Idi Amin in Uganda, displacing President Milton Obote, and a later-revealed attempt to unseat and assassinate Ghana President Kwame Nkrumah.[20] After Reagan’s election in 1980, the U.S. opposition to the African liberation movements (including their representatives in the U.S.) was clear. ACAS had pushed through the ASA’s Committee on Current Issues, several of whose chairpersons had been ACAS member, to give a platform in the ASA annual meetings to the representatives of the ANC, PAC, FRELIMO, SWAPO, MPLA, ZANU, and ZAPU; representatives of COREMO and RENAMO in Mozambique and SWANU and FNLA had also come to meetings. In addition in 1984, Chester Crocker was greeted with a hostile reception by many in ACAS when he spoke at the ASA annual meeting. Since its founding, therefore, ACAS opposed the militarization of U.S. policy and the engagement of the CIA in operations against the independence and autonomy of African governments.

In this context, ACAS put a great deal of effort into building a consensus in the African studies community to oppose military and intelligence funding and sponsorship in any activities of African studies. In 1982, several officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) approached four Title VI African centers to explore their willingness to receive large annual budget supplements in exchange for being “on call” to develop unspecified reports and undefined services. The directors of the four centers, including several ACAS members, consulted and agreed to not accept the funding and that they should consult with the wider Africanist community about these policies. After that consultation, they concluded that it was not in U.S. interests to link with the DIA which could compromise their partnership collaborations and linkages in Africa with African institutions and scholars as well as potentially provide scholarly legitimacy to the broader CIA/DIA/DOD/NSA hostilities to progressive African governments. ACAS concurred with the decision and since then has opposed any mixing of military or intelligence funding with African studies. In 2001, the Title VI African center directors reaffirmed that stand:

…to oppose the application for and acceptance of military and intelligence funding of area and language programs, projects, and research in African studies. … We believe that the long-term interests of the people of the United States are best served by this separation between academic and military and defense establishments. Indeed, in the climate of the post-Cold War years in Africa and the security concerns after September 11, 2001, we believe that it is a patriotic policy to make this separation.[21]

With a number of ACAS members and directors in the Association of African Studies Programs (AASP), that organization of more than 50 African programs in universities and colleges across the country also passed motions in the 1980s, which in 1993 and 2002 reaffirmed,

… our conviction that scholars and programs conducting research in Africa, teaching about Africa, and conducting exchange programs with Africa should not accept research, fellowship, travel, programmatic, and other funding from military and intelligence agencies or their contractual representatives – for work in the United States or abroad.[22]

In 2006 and 2008, the AASP membership decided not to reconsider or change those policies. Finally, after substantial ACAS lobbying within the African Studies Association (ASA), the Board of Directors of the Association voted to support the stance of the Title VI directors and the AASP with a resolution renewed in 2001 and 2009.

In 1991, continuing this renewed national security focus on area studies, the Congress, with leadership from Senator David Boren (R-OK), passed the David L. Boren National Security Education Act of 1991 (NSEA, Title VIII of P.L. 102-183) establishing the National Security Education Program (NSEP), providing “…aid for international education and foreign language studies by American undergraduate and graduate students, plus grants to institutions of higher education.” Most of the area studies and several scholarly associations, including the Social Science Research Council, immediately objected to this mixture of military and intelligence programs with academic area studies and urged that federal support for language and area studies be routed through the U.S. Department of Education and its Title VI Higher Education Act programs. In the end, this alternative failed, and Congress adopted the Act to provide DOD Defense Intelligence Agency funding for a) students to study languages abroad with a federal agency service requirement afterwards, b) projects to build U.S. educational competence in international affairs, and, in recent years, c) “language flagship” centers to advance U.S. students’ study of designated “strategic” less commonly taught languages to the level of advanced proficiency.

After Congress authorized the Act, ACAS led a vigorous campaign to review and oppose the Boren funding, with articles, web announcements, leaflets, and panels at ASA. Africanists, alone among area studies scholars, have continued to decline these fellowships, now administered through the Institute for International Education. A number of university administrators made clear to the African center directors that they disagreed with the Africanist policy and regarded this as bad decision-making to decline federal funding for student overseas study. In one case, an African center director was fired by his university president for joining this consensus position. (Later, he was returned to his position when the university president resigned.) In addition, African centers have been vigorously attacked in Congress by right wing congressmen and by conservative journalists, for their lack of patriotism and using federal funding such as “…some centers plowed the money into bogus ‘outreach’ — university-based programs that siphoned taxpayer money to off-campus radicals, who used it to propagandize K-12 teachers.”[23]

In 2008-09, ACAS faces a new struggle to reduce U.S. military and intelligence programs focused on Africa with the establishment in October of the Africa Command (AFRICOM) in Stuttgart. AFRICOM has almost 1400 employees pursuing U.S. military policy and planning for Africa, in addition to the military personnel stationed at embassies in Africa, in DOD Africa posts in the U.S., and stationed at the U.S. Camp Lemonier Base in Djibouti. This compares with the less than 250 members of the State Department focused on Africa. In articles and panels, various ACAS members have made it clear that the ACAS focus on AFRICOM is based on the great potential for the further militarization of Africa after a century of colonial and Cold War militarization of African societies and a belief that Africa urgently needs a demilitarization, including de-mining and reducing arms sales in Africa, effective peacekeeping in several areas of continuing instability, as well as economic assistance to clean up the wreckage of civil societies destroyed by the proxy wars of the Cold War era.

Undoubtedly, unless the Obama Administration makes a 180° turn away from a foreign policy focused on the Global War on Terror in Africa and the securing of African oil, this focus on U.S. foreign security policy will remain at the center of ACAS concerns for the decade ahead.

From ACAS Bulletin 81

About the Author

David Wiley is Professor of Sociology at Michigan State University, where he was African Studies Center director 1977-2008. Previously, he was co-chairperson of ACAS and president of the African Studies Association.

End Notes

1. See the current website https://concernedafricascholars.org

2. El-Khawas, Mohamed A. and Barry Cohen, eds. The Kissinger Study of Southern Africa: National Security Study Memorandum 39 (Secret), Westport, Conn., Lawrence Hill & Company, 1976; and Lake, Anthony, The ‘Tar Baby’ Option: American policy toward Southern Rhodesia by New York, Columbia University Press, 1976.

3. http://nacla.org/history, Accessed 2/1/2009

4. http://nacla.org/history, Accessed 2/2/2009

5. Tani E. Barlow, (“Responsibility and Politics: An Interview with Mark Selden,” Positions 12:1, 2004, Duke University Press, p 249.

6. http://www.merip.org/misc/about.html, Accessed 2/2/2009

7. Middle East Report. http://web.archive.org/web/19981206091952/http://www.merip.org/, Accessed 2/2/2009.

8. Johnson, Peter and Joe Stork, MERIP Reports, No. 100/101, Special Anniversary Issue (Oct. – Dec., 1981), p 55 , Published by: Middle East Research and Information Project, Accessed 2.2.2009, http://www.jstor.org/pss/3012380

9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Houser

10. Michigan State University Board of Trustees in East Lansing and Hampshire College trustees in Amherst, MA voted for and accomplished full divestiture in 1977. University of Wisconsin-Madison followed after the State Attorney General advised on the possible illegality of investments in discriminatory corporations abroad.

11. Sullivan, Rev. Leon. The Sullivan Principles, http://muweb.marshall.edu/revleonsullivan/principled/principles.htm Accessed February 9, 2009.

12. Horne, Gerald and Mary Young, eds. W.E.B. Du Bois: an encyclopedia, Abingdon, UK: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001.

13. “TransAfrica Forum: Our History” http://www.transafricaforum.org/about-us/our-history, consulted 3/10/2009.

14. Wiley, David and Isaacman, Allen, eds. Southern Africa: Society, Economy, and Liberation, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1981.

15. See Gervasi, Sean, Ann Seidman, Immanuel Wallerstein, David Wiley, “Why We Said ‘No’ to U.S. A.I.D,” ACAS Newsletter, No. 1, 1978, p.7-9.

16. Stockwell, John. In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story, NY: W.W. Norton, 1978.

17. Ray, Ellen, et al, eds. Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa, Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, c1979.

18. South African History Online, “Nelson Mandela,” http://www.sahistory.org.za/pages/people/special projects/mandela/bio_4.htm, consulted 3/3/2009.

19. Bell. Coral “The Reagan Paradox” Edward Elgar publishing page 117 (1989); Crocker, Chester A., An update of constructive engagement in South Africa, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of State, Bureau of Public Affairs, Office of Public Communication, Editorial Division, [September 26, 1984.]; Davies, J.E., Constructive Engagement?: Chester Crocker & American Policy in South Africa, Namibia & Angola, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007.

20. Curtis, Adam, “Interview with John Stockwell on ‘Black Power,’” BBC Two Series, “Pandora’s Box,” (22 June 1992); and Gaines, Kevin American Africans in Ghana, Black expatriates and the Civil Rights Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006.

21. Text of Resolution by the Directors of Title VI Africa National Resource Centers, (Passed unanimously November 17, 2001, African Studies Association, Houston, Texas) in “The Africanist Positions on Military and Intelligence Funding and Service in the National Interest in African Research, Service, and Studies,” undated, circa 2008.

22. Text of Resolution by the Association of African Studies Programs (1993), in “The Africanist Positions on Military and Intelligence Funding and Service in the National Interest in African Research, Service, and Studies,” undated circa 2008.

23. Kramer, Martin, “Title VI: Let the games begin!,” posted Tuesday, 14 February 2006, http://www.martinkramer.org/, Consulted 3/10/2009. Stanley Kurtz also commented on the Title VI program that “clearly the program isn’t working, and sad to say, some of this is intentional. Many radical professors actually boycott national security related scholarship programs. Thus, some of the very same academics who benefit from Title VI subsidies are actively trying to undermine the core purpose of the program.” “Taking Sides on Title VI: Middle East Studies reform goes partisan.” By Stanley Kurtz, National Review Online, December 12, 2007 7:00 AM, http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzI2ZTJjZjk4MjZkZDMwMDhlOWZiMWMzNDZhZTgyZTg=, consulted 3/10/2009.

A Brief Note on the Beginnings of ACAS

As I recall, it was David Wiley’s idea to convene a group of us at a meeting of the African Studies Association (ASA) in, I believe, Houston to discuss what we could do to promote an activist position on African questions. The context was double. On the one hand, the situation in Africa was difficult: deteriorating politics of the countries that had achieved independence (military coups, etc.); and blockage of liberation in southern Africa, aided and abetted by the U.S. government. On the other hand, there had just been the 1968-inspired split among Africanists, with the crisis at the 1969 Montreal meeting of ASA, and the creation of the African Heritage Studies Association (AHSA).

We made two decisions right at the start. One was that we would call ourselves “Africa scholars” and not “Africanists.” It was a moment of sensitivity about terminology. And the second was that we wanted ACAS somehow to bridge the split between ASA and AHSA. The way we would do that was twofold: We would hold our meetings neither during an ASA meeting nor during an AHSA meeting but separate from both. And we would have co-chairs at every level, in order that we could draw one person linked with each of the two organizations.

We did this for several years. It didn’t really work. First of all, it was expensive and difficult to hold a separate meeting, and not too many people could come. So, after several years, when the hostility between ASA and AHSA had cooled down, we decided to meet during the ASA meetings, and have been doing that ever since. We continued to have co-chairs, but it lost the element of balancing ASA and AHSA.

For a long time, ACAS concentrated on the issue of the liberation of southern Africa, which seemed the right priority. But once all that was finally accomplished, ACAS had to rethink its role and its activities, which was difficult at first, but has now, I think, been done.

From ACAS Bulletin 81

ACAS Thirty Years On

In 2008 the ACAS Bulletin celebrated its thirtieth birthday. ACAS emerged at a moment when radical African movements were capturing international headlines, inspiring activists around the world, and were firmly opposed by the US government. As national liberation movements in the early and mid-1970s scored signficant victories against white minority and colonial rule, US overt and covert intervention across Africa accelerated. Blocked by traditional academic organizations from supporting and mobilizing on behalf of these struggles for majority rule, progressive scholars of Africa came together to form ACAS.

There were models for such work. ACAS’ origins and early actions followed in the wake of other scholar-activist organizations which had emerged out of the long 1960s wave of anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements. The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), for example, was founded in 1966 in response to the April 1965 U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic. The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars was similarly established in 1967 as part of the upwelling of protest against US expansion into Vietnam.

Founded in 1977, ACAS was thus a late arrival to the scene of organized scholar-activism. By celebrating its thirtieth birthday ACAS stands out, however, as one of the few surviving scholar-activist organizations, and one of the few surviving Africa solidarity organizations. Most local Africa-related groups have long since disappeared, while national organizations focused on other world areas have long ago narrowed their work to scholarly analysis and journal production–as in the transition of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars to today’s Critical Asian Studies journal.

To re-read the early years of the ACAS Bulletin is to encounter an exciting period, when the possibility of a new and liberated Africa, and a transformed US relationship with Africa, engaged scholars’ imaginations. ACAS’ aims were stated in the first sentence of its founding 1977 “Draft Statement of Principles”: “We are a grouping of scholars interested in Africa and concerned with moving U.S. policy toward Africa in directions more sympathetic to African interests.” The same first issue of the ACAS Newsletter (later Bulletin) advanced an agenda to promote scholarly analysis of US policy, develop alternative policy proposals, construct a communication network among progressive Africanist scholars, and coordinate with other national and local solidarity organizations.

These goals remained central to ACAS work over three decades. How they have been carried out has, however, changed over the years as three different generations of activists have grappled with US-African relations. The first generation’s focus was openly stated in ACAS’ 1977 “draft principles” statement: “For political and practical reasons, our emphasis for the foreseeable future will be on southern Africa.” This reflected the strength of the southern African movements and the problems they posed for the US government in the preceding few years: Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau had just won independence in 1975 after long guerrilla wars; battles for independence were heating up in Zimbabwe and Namibia; and the 1976 Soweto rebellion presaged a resurgence of resistance inside South Africa and the strengthening of the ANC in exile.

At the same time President Jimmy Carter was moving to impose a solution in Zimbabwe and Namibia that would secure white interests. The first issue of the ACAS Newsletter led the charge against these efforts. As Co-chair Immanuel Wallerstein asked, “What can be done by Americans who think that African liberation in southern is part of human liberation?” The answer: “They can demand that their own government cease supporting the white regimes. But above all they can avoid being lured into the trap of supporting liberal interventionism.” Four senior Africanists and ACAS members (Sean Gervasi, Ann Seidman, Immanuel Wallerstein and David Wiley) jointly penned an article on ” Why We Said ‘No’ to A.I.D,” rejecting a large project designed to support conservative policies on southern Africa. Co-Chair Willard Johnson, in laying out more practical steps for activists in the same issue, nevertheless put quite sweeping goals on the agenda: “We wish to have our foreign relations promote respect for the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to advance the liberation of oppressed peoples, and to achieve a more nearly equal distribution of power, productivity and wealth among the peoples of the world.”

These were radical aims indeed and remain so. They reflected the times—and lived experiences. Many founding members of ACAS had been active in and carried forward the sentiments of the 1960s North American and African movements; these were now married to the expectation that Africa’s national liberation movements could deliver a more radical solution to the process of decolonization, neocolonialism, and resistance to US imperial power. Many ACAS leaders had or would teach and work in southern Africa, as would their students who often became, twenty years later, ACAS’ second generation members, co-chairs and executive board members.

Throughout its first two decades of work ACAS remained solidly focused on southern Africa. Members–through the ACAS Bulletin, their own published work, and activity on their many local campuses and communities—sought to unearth US cooperation with white rule while building support for southern African movements. This included, as it had for NACLA, Concerned Asian Scholars, and other anti-imperialist groups, tackling US multinational corporations’ support for repressive regimes, covert US intelligence agencies’ operations, US counter-insurgency and military interventions. It also led to long-term support for radical regimes opposed to apartheid, particularly Mozambique. This research and educational work did not take place in a welcoming climate given the reemergence of Cold War “globalist” foreign policy analysts under Carter, and then policies of “constructive engagement” with white power and structural adjustment that accompanied Reagan’s rise to power.

Offsetting these harsh conditions in the United States in the 1980s were actions inside South Africa which served to boost and expand antiapartheid activity across the US. ACAS members were particularly active on local campuses, where divestment and sanctions campaigns gained ground in the late 1970s and 1980s as revealed in successive issues of the Bulletin. New national campaigns emerged in the early 1980s, led variously by the Africa Fund/the American Committee on Africa, the American Friends Service Committee, the Africa Policy Information Center, the Washington Office on Africa, and TransAfrica (itself founded in the same year as ACAS).

The years surrounding 1984-1986, marked as they were by escalating rebellions inside South Africa, were the high-water mark for the US and worldwide anti-apartheid movement. By 1986 a national network of activists had built such pressure on Congress that it passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act—something long opposed by both the Democratic and Republican parties. It was Reagan’s most significant foreign policy defeat. ACAS and the entire antiapartheid movement felt victory was near, as was well evoked by Co-Chair Jean Sindab in the Bulletin at the time: “This is quite an exciting time for those of us who have struggled so hard, for so long, to bring an end to apartheid and U.S. support for that racist system.” (Bulletin No. 16, Winter 1986:21).

1986 would prove in many ways to be the zenith of the anti-apartheid movement. By the late 1980s ACAS members sensed major, uncertain challenges were coming. Mozambique’s difficult accommodation with apartheid South Africa in the wake of destabilization, the Nkomati Accord (1984), and Samora Machel’s death (1986), along with the region’s and continent’s accommodation with the IMF, signaled that new challenges lie ahead. In a series on “ACAS—Ten Years On” in Bulletin No. 23 (Spring 1988), Co-Chair Immanuel Wallerstein flagged “present ambiguities” and “dilemmas” in the wake of successful divestment and sanctions; John Saul, founding member of the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa, noted the smashing of the “high hopes” surrounding the 1975 victories against Portuguese colonialism, most notably in Mozambique; and James Mittelman pinpointed the challenge of moving beyond targeting individual states and single-issue campaigns. While all called for greater commitment and more rigorous intellectual analysis, a period of difficulty for scholarly-activist work was clearly ahead.

Mandela’s release and the unbanning of the ANC, PAC, and CP in 1990 and the ANC’s electoral victory in 1994 opened up this new era as exiles went home and the ANC took over the reigns of state power. This transformation was propelled further on this side of the Atlantic by the election of Clinton in 1992, and a seemingly much more prominent position for Africa-America and even Africa. Still, as might have been expected, civic and community-based antiapartheid organizations in both South Africa and the US declined. Meanwhile both the ANC and the Clinton administration came to aggressively embrace neoliberal policies.

ACAS itself changed. In November 1992 ACAS reorganized with new Co-Chairs (Jean Sindab and David Wiley), moved from southern Africa to work on the entire continent, and launched a continuing presence in Washington with a paid staff member for the first time (Lisa Alfred). Thirteen “Issue Working Groups” were formed to chart a new vision for ACAS, and a national meeting of solidarity organizations was organized under ACAS auspices (see Bulletins 35, Spring 1992 and 38-39, Winter 1993).

The difficulties were starkly stated in Co-Chair Wiley’s own assessment of the near future (Bulletin 38/39:9-13): geopolitically Africa was falling off the Washington policy map, while economically Africa became subject to unrelenting pressure from the IMF, World Bank and the US. Aid from Northern governments was falling and attention of Western and Japanese economic interests declining. Meanwhile most academic Africanists, Wiley noted, remained “professionally dispassionate, and focused on occupational productivity and advancement, mirroring the turn to self-interest by many Americans in these insecure times” (11). If Africanists had failed so far address the continent’s new realities, ACAS, Wiley argued, should try to do so: “Our major tasks in this period are to struggle understand the new situation in Africa and globally, to explore both those policy issues in Africa that merit our attention in this new period and what needs to be said about them to U.S. policymakers, and to redirect ACAS to become a more effective instrument of change.”

Over the course of the next decade much of the agenda set out in the early to mid-1990s was pushed forward, which stood in stark relief to the collapse of most groups that focused on southern Africa and apartheid. Coverage of continental Africa rapidly expanded, featuring special issues on progressive approaches and debates on democratization, human rights, academic freedom, militarization, and conflict resolution. Coverage of key crisis areas grew as well, from the Congo to Nigeria, from Somalia to Africa/Iraq. Far greater attention was paid to health, women, and political violence, an effort led by Meredeth Turshen who became a Co-Chair in 2001. Greater coordination with Washington groups also took place, and the board and membership became more diverse and somewhat younger.

Amidst all these changes there are also continuities as well with previous periods. One of these was the continuing struggle over the relationship of scholars and the U.S. government, particularly scholars’ work with US intelligence agencies. Another concerned the balance between activism and traditional scholarship. And another challenge continually arose on the reverse side of this equation: between scholar activists and social movements, particularly as movements changed over time.

No issue was more persistent from ACAS’ first days than scholars who worked for or otherwise cooperated with US military and intelligence agencies. By the time of ACAS’s formation, covert and highly repressive intervention by the CIA in Ghana (against Nkrumah), Zaire (against Lumumba and for Mobutu), Ethiopia (to reinforce the Selassie monarchy) and especially southern Africa (Zambia, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa) were widely known. Here ACAS really made a difference, leading efforts throughout the 1980s and 1990s to constrain academic cooperation with military/intelligence agencies and counterinsurgency research. Successive Bulletin items and ACAS campaigns followed an early article by Dave Wiley in Bulletin No. 6 (February 1982).

In the early 1990s the Boren Bill, which later morphed into the National Education Security Program, led to another wave of work to secure African studies centers’ and programs’ adherence to a rejection of intelligence funding. ACAS members provided leadership in spreading and coordinating this effort with other area studies associations. This effort got much harder to sustain after 9/11 and the vast expansion of military and intelligence programs under Bush, when individual researchers and a few programs began to serve rapidly growing military and intelligence programs in Africa. But for more than 20 years ACAS has been a leader, and a successful one, in this area.

ACAS’s relationship with academic associations has proved to be another source of continuing debate. In its earliest years ACAS struggled to maintain its independence from the African Studies Association which had continually distanced itself from any support for African movements or radical critiques of US foreign policy, and had correspondingly come under serious attack from black scholar-activists. Indeed much of the original impetus and continuing support for ACAS was due to its being the home for engaged scholarship and support for African movements and activistsAs the 1980s turned into the 1990s, the balance between scholarship and activist work became more difficult to sustain.

Direct support for African movements such as ANC, ZANU-PF, and FRELIMO waned, while the lure of more professional, dispassionate, and moderate work with government agencies grew. Alternative and more conservative organizations that would alongside the U.S. government and neoliberal agencies also emerged. The most notable was the National Summit for Africa, founded in 2001 through funding from the Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation and widely endorsed by leaders of the African Studies Association. Yet premised as it was on greater liberal and US government commitments to Africa, efforts like the Summit had little long-term success in attracting a base membership or effecting policy.

If the demise of the antiapartheid and African nationalist movements stilled activist scholarship and work, new movements in both the US and Africa nevertheless continued to fitfully emerge in the 1990s and the new century. The Afrocentric movement in the US in the late 1990s, resulting in the 1995 Million Man and 1997 Million Women Marches—the largest black nationalist and Panafricanist demonstrations ever held in the United States—renewed interest in Africa on US campuses and communities. One result was the creation of new organizations, such as the Black Radical Congress. The evolution of the ACAS board during this time reflected the emergence of a younger, more diverse generation involved in post-national liberation movement issues, movements and campaigns.

For Africanist scholars the black nationalist renewal was especially notable. It reopened the issue of black representation and support for African liberation in the largely white African studies community, an issue that split the ASA in 1969, and indirectly led to the formation of ACAS itself given the ASA’s adamant refusal to denounce US intervention in Africa and directly support national liberation movements. In its early years ACAS alternated its meetings between the annual conferences of the ASA and the alternative, post-1969 formation of the African Heritage Studies Association. ACAS has also maintained a continual succession of black co-chairs over the years (Willard Johnson, James Turner, Jean Sindab, Al Green, Merle Bowen, Michael West). When white scholars charged in the late 1990s that Africanist academic posts were closed to white applicants, and black scholars protested, it was members of ACAS that organized an open forum at an annual ASA meeting and published the presentations and dialogue in the ACAS Bulletin under the title of the “The ‘Ghettoization’ Debate” (no. 46, Winter 1996).

Many ACAS members also participated in new international movements that grew in surrounding debt, AIDS, the IMF/World Bank, fair trade, and Darfur. None of these revived, however, the degree of interest and coalitions that had existed in the 1970s and 1980s. Even the emergence of new local movements in South Africa in the late 1990s, as elsewhere around the continent, failed to stimulate broad and successful campaigns to link US and African activists. South Africa’s most successful new movement, the Treatment Action Campaign, had many admirers in the North, but few sustained and wide relations with northern scholar activists. In all these areas ACAS members nevertheless worked assiduously to support African colleagues, as successive Bulletins reveal. Still, ACAS’a attempt to seize the opportunities offered by the new movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have been partial at best.

ACAS has not been alone in facing these difficulties. As the long-time activists and editors of No Easy Victories, African Liberation and American Activists Over a Half Century, 1950-2000 argue in the conclusion of their volume (225-28), support for activist work now faces severe constraints as Africa has been increasingly marginalized in the media, Congress, foreign policy circles, and the world-economy. Beyond access to oil and the militarization of US-African ties as part of the “war on terror,” African-US work has often been narrowed to appeals for charity and humanitarian intervention. Africans in these campaigns are all too easily reduced to hapless, bewitched victims, predatory victimizers, or tribal warriors. For many long-term activists it does indeed seem–despite much current work on individual issues and states–that deepening the support for scholar-activism remains much more difficult than at any time in the past three decades.

Such a bleak assessment should not obscure real achievements and future possibilities. Looking back we can justly celebrate the major contributions scholar activists have made in the struggles against colonialism and apartheid. Looking forward, it may well be the case that too many anomalies exist to hope for–as is so common when old activists meet–a revival of the past paradigm for scholarly-activist work on Africa. The potential for and public visibility of activist work on Africa may not have simply declined; it may have indeed shifted elsewhere. Here in the United States, developments in both the academic and activist worlds may have undercut the principles and frameworks upon which past activity depended.

On the academic side, the scholarly enterprise known as area studies and its Africanist component has increasingly shrunk and fragmented amidst the rise of diaspora, Africana, ethnic, and global studies programs and degrees. This has undercut the potential for continental, Africanist-centered activism. Much higher levels of migration from Africa, including into the higher reaches of US academia, have also served to dissolve the secular missionary role that most white, mainstream Africanists played as interpreters of Africa for the American public. Multiculturalism, Afrocentric student activism in the 1990s, and neo-racist responses to these developments have further shattered the cohesion of the past African studies matrix—as has been so visible in recent years in the emergence of black and continental African directors at major African studies programs and centers (e.g. Berkeley, Boston, Columbia, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan State, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Yale).

On the activist side, new movements have also undercut the divide between the US and Africa upon which old alliances were created. In part this is the success of the anti-neoliberal debt and structural adjustment movements of the 1990s, which exerted such strong influence in, and have so transformed, what is now tellingly termed the “Global South.” In Latin America and Asia it is clear that the hold of the US and international financial institutions has markedly declined, and that new land, indigenous, and social justice movements are increasingly networked through new technologies across regions, states and continents.

The local expressions of these movements in Africa, including most notably in South Africa, have been equally marked. But as in the rest of the Global South, they have not evolved along the lines of past North-South solidarity, anti-colonial, panafrican or anti-apartheid models. Today’s movements are far more interlinked across the South and have far less visibility and political impact in the North—at least so far. Personal experience and networks remain no less key to transnational organizing of course, but for today’s growing movements these are often constructed outside the North/South lines upon which past solidarity movements flowed.

As ACAS moves toward its third generation, these changes promise to call forth different models of organizing, utilizing new technologies for the dissemination of educational materials and calls for action. ACAS’ new Co-Chairs in 2006, Sean Jacobs and Chris Patterson, have been confronting and undertaking these tasks now, as can be seen in the new web site (https://concernedafricascholars.org), new and action alert items, and recent Bulletins. As these activities show, what has not changed is the need for a continuing radical critique of US policy and of the US’s historic relation with Africa and its diasporas.

There are few signs that an Obama presidency will foster any substantive change in Africa policy given the appointment of Clinton-era veterans such as Susan Rice and Hilary Clinton, who have in the recent past and in their appointment hearings continued to promote Africa’s forced “integration” into the world-economy, the war on terror and Islam, and a priority for military links with Africa through the US military command for Africa, AFRICOM. If there is a new element on the horizon, it is likely to be enhanced charity and the funding of liberal, humanitarian intervention by other forces—in large part a response to their embarrassment in failing to act in Rwanda.

These developments point to the very real need for more and not less activist work by scholars in the coming generation. Over the long run, significant dangers will arise as US financial, commercial, and political power declines, and US power may too easily come to rely upon the ultimate pillar of hegemony–military power. Yet resistance is likely to open up new opportunities as well. As activists in Africa, the Americas, and Asia already know quite well, policies based on neoliberalism and the projection of US power have been everywhere rejected. In the coming conjuncture, this reality will lead to alternative policies and centers of power. For those of us in the United States, these developments are likely to make progressive mobilization more possible and certainly more imperative. The struggle for liberation, for a post-imperial future, remains, as it was in the early days of ACAS, before us.

About the author

William Martin is a past co-Chair of ACAS and currently teaches at Binghamton University.

From ACAS Bulletin 81

Zimbabwe: MDC Had to Get In Or Change Course

I was not surprised to see the MDC joining the Government of National Unity. In fact, I concluded so the moment that party president Morgan Tsvangirai decided to go home from Botswana earlier in the month.

When an opposition party takes the option of armed struggle off the table and vests all its energies in an internal solution after all nonviolent strategies have failed, there is indeed no choice other than to participate in the GNU or sink into oblivion.

The MDC National Council’s decision to participate in the GNU—whether an elopement with Zanu (PF) or traditional marriage where the festivities of a church ceremony are not the main issue but paying lobola—was merely a coup de grace.

My verdict is that Mugabe had already tactically and strategically outwitted the opposition, from the very moment that the MDC agreed to participate in the talks. When you plunge into a crocodile-infested pool, make sure you know how to swim.

The script had become predictable the moment the MDC signed without looking. If it had decided to reject SADC’s verdict, the MDC would have appealed to the African Union (AU). Ten months have elapsed since the March 29 plebiscite and Mugabe is almost one year into his ‘arbitrary’ term.

The AU process would have dragged on for at least one more year—or two since its membership is four times bigger than SADC. Then AU, at long last, would have referred the matter back to SADC. It reminds me of my rural childhood: you always knew that the next meal would be sadza and vegetables, no meat.

Meanwhile, the clock would be ticking, and before we knew it, five years would have passed and it would be time for another fraud of an election. We would have had even more meetings and resolutions deliberately designed to leave the MDC ‘unsatisfied’ so that another meeting would be set up about the previous meeting.

All the while, more abductions of opposition and human rights activists to feed narratives of MDC rebels training in Botswana to topple the ‘government’. The opposition would be forced on the defensive so that it loses its offensive edge as the appellant whose electoral ‘victory’ was robbed. And while at it, the regime would create new hurdles upon which to grant ‘concessions’ to the MDC at the next AU or SADC summit.

When such an indaba at last arrived, Zanu (PF) would go on the attack, its spokesmen struggling under the weight of thousands of pages, photos, and videos documenting MDC’s unholy alliance with the Batswana. This would be their new negotiating position: the MDC must first renounce violence as a condition for releasing the abductees and getting a couple of governors appointed from its ranks.

It does not need one from the former planet Pluto—now downgraded—to see that SADC was deliberately overlooking Zanu (PF)’s constantly shifting goalposts while dragooning the MDC into the GNU.

Had the MDC continued its ‘stayaway’ from the talks, it was going to still leave Zimbabweans at the mercy of a pan-continental body still struggling with understanding what Zimbabweans are fighting for. What do we do as a people when the majority of the region and the continent are not yet ready to accept our legitimate quest for democracy, one that challenges a godfather of the ‘liberation’ struggle?

It is imperative to understand that the core of the country’s problem is not just a struggle against Mugabe to reclaim individual freedoms that national freedom (from colonial rule) has taken away.

It is a struggle to redefine what true freedom really is: that a people who sacrificed their very blood and lives for genuine freedom by enabling guerrillas to fight with their guns against Rhodesian rule must now be held hostage by the very same politicians for whom the people and frontline guerrillas toiled? At what point does the rhetoric of liberation become freedom which people can live and experience in their own lifetime?

I must spend time on this issue because it is why I had my reservations about going to the AU.

At issue are two generations of struggle: the 20th century struggle of my father and mother against Rhodesian minority rule which I lived through traumatically as a child, and my own 21st century struggle for democracy that my children will live which neither their grandparents nor their parents ever tasted. Freedom that was promised in the name of black majority rule, but which has become black minority rule—our corruption-soaked politicians being what Franz Fanon called “black skin, white mask”.

Much of SADC and Africa is ruled by those who saw, endured, and overturned the 20th century oppression of the white colonialist, men who are easily roused to anger when Mugabe says the MDC has white members and sympathies. In the eyes of these Africans Zimbabweans are insane: the worst sign of this madness is the mere act of criticizing Mugabe—the guy who ‘ended white minority rule’ and ‘gave us land’. What an abomination!

Most of Africa does not see—let alone feel—Mugabe using land, pan-Africanism, anti-colonialism, and blackness as weapons of mass camouflage to create an alibi designed to turn his critics into stooges of the West. When Mugabe says that the British and Americans deliberately contaminated our water systems with cholera, he is playing to this audience, which is not just one of simpletons but also Africa’s best intellectuals—as Mahmood Mamdani’s recent article in the London Review of Books shows. Mugabe is doing something to these academics: without them knowing, they have become megaphones for the very people whose histories they write about. That is my anxiety about how Africa is being written as ‘palace narrative’.

Of course, the problem that Mugabe’s defenders will not explain off is how come Zimbabwe is ruled by an 85 year old—the only ruler the country has ever known since ‘independence’ when their own countries have seen countless, younger leaders retire gracefully.

That matters nothing to Africa; all it sees is land. The people of Zimbabwe are invisible to African leaders. They are dead to them. If given a choice between land and citizens, Africa chooses land. The people can have another life in heaven. They won’t need hell because they live it everyday; it is the renewable energy that feeds dictatorship.

Zimbabweans must understand this if they are to see their own position in the community of African nations and how the type of freedom they seek appears too utopian to deserve any attention at all from the continent.

Of course, Africa is various and these differences would have reflected upon the adjudication of the Zimbabwe issue. But the outcome was even more predictable than SADC.

There is an Africa where the old nationalist parties are still in power. They see opposition to Mugabe much like Christians would an anti-Christ or Muslims anybody who draws a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. Opposition parties are seen as “reactionaries”.

There is a part of Africa which is under military rule, where somebody in uniform just wakes up, rides up to State House in tanks and armored cars, seizes the microphone and announces: ‘I am taking over as the newly elected head of state’. Call it self-election. These juntas quickly promise fresh elections which they either rig, contest as single candidates or never hold.

There are countries where tanks and AK-47 rifles are now old-fashioned ways of coups d’etat. The ballot has become the smart way of waging a coup: the pen in front, your hands around the pen barrel scribbling an X on the ballot, a cold gun barrel pressed against one’s back, reminding you that your vote is your life. It’s called ‘voting wisely’. The election is always held on time, almost to the minute. There will be only one result.

There is an Africa still ruled by kings. At least, in a continent where those elected through the ballot behave like kings, monarchs like King Mswati must be credited for their patriarchal honesty. I mean, when Mswati exercises authoritarianism, you know he is a king. That is how they must behave. The downside is not only that their majesties have no clue about the purpose, conduct or meaning of democratic elections. Whether they are held, rigged, or the results ignored, the sun still rises, shines, and sets.

There is also an Africa ruled by those whom the old nationalist parties reluctantly surrendered power to after a ballot, but who went on to become even worse dictators than the old nationalists. They know the limits and dangers of a ballot and cannot hazard encouraging opposition parties to succeed. They have ‘joined the club’.

Then, at the tail-end of many other types of African governments, there is an Africa whose leaders believe that only when rulers become accountable to their citizens—as opposed to citizens being sacrificed so that their blood nourishes their power and elevates them into gods—can Africa tap into the immense wealth of talent in the heads of their own citizens and the wealth underneath the feet. This is where one would find Ghana, Botswana, Kenya, Liberia, and (perhaps) Senegal.

The odds are that AU would have been worse than SADC. The Zimbabwean crisis is the stinking carcass in the backyard; that’s why SADC cares. The further one goes from the carrion, the less the smell; pan-Africanism becomes a more powerful force than cholera.

Zimbabwe is SADC’s dead and putrefying carcass, but there are even worse carrions for Africa. What urgency would Zimbabwe have compared to Somalia, where the Ethiopians have beaten a very hasty retreat after going in like cowhands to ‘round up the herd’ of Islamic rebels?

We are talking of 3,000 deaths from cholera, but are we going to make sense when nearly 300,000 have died in Darfur and millions in eastern DR Congo?

In Africa, while some heads of state might concede that Mugabe is not a good guy, there will be many who will see Zimbabweans as spoiled brats crying for a luxury toy called ‘democracy’ (incited by the former ‘colonial masters’), while other citizens of Sudan, Darfur, and Somalia do not even have dictatorships strong enough to keep them safe, alive, and fed.

Of course, going to the AU would probably have removed SADC’s current legitimacy to obstruct any country or ‘coalition of the willing’ from acting unilaterally to end the humanitarian catastrophe Zimbabwe has become. Such action has never required, or even asked for, the authorization of the AU or the UN, let alone regional bodies. Nigeria did that in Sierra Leone, en route to cunningly arresting Liberian tyrant Charles Taylor under the pretext of giving ‘asylum’ before handing him over to the War Crimes Tribunal. It worked: today Liberia is at peace. But that was not a big decision taken by the AU.

The latest example of such ‘horse-trading’ is Rwanda’s joint operations with DR Congo and Paul Kagame’s arrest of former rebel ally Laurent Nkunda. Before that we saw Ethiopia get into Somalia, South Africa into Lesotho, Zimbabwe into Mozambique before tag-teaming with Angola and Namibia in DR Congo. Decades earlier Tanzania had chased Idi Amin into Uganda and then to Saudi Arabian exile. All such decision were undertaken by neighbors in the proximity based on national security or economic interests.

My point is that in real terms, the UN, AU and any other bodies are completely powerless to prevent unilateral action. They will froth at the corners of the mouth and shout hoarse, but they never act.

Mugabe calculated that no such unilateral action to remove him would happen. The West is in financial crisis, America in transition and public opinion dead-set against any war no matter how noble the objective. Obama is not George Bush; he won’t ride shotgun for anybody.

Those Africans making noises for military intervention had no executive power to even swat flies. Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga made some sounds, but the head of state is Mwai Kibaki, who maintained a stoic silence knowing his own circumstances. How was he to say anything without self-indictment? The rest were men of the cloth and academics who might shoot from the pulpit and laptop, but not much else.

Therefore, Mugabe was spot-on when he dared Africa to come and get him. Nobody had the stomach for it. If Africa could be so scared of Mugabe at a distance, imagine what would happen face-to-face! That or the national security imperative for member states to act against Mugabe—beyond him being an embarrassment to pan-Africanism—was absent.

To return to my opening argument, if the MDC had played hardball and decided not to ‘go in’ and form a government with Mugabe, what was Plan C besides the AU route?

Plan A was mass action. It was decisively crushed precisely because those planning it rendered it too predictable to the target of their chagrin. Amidst a blaze of publicity, the opposition would set a date for the mass action, outline the strategy completely with route plans, and set their watches. That gave ample time for the state to get ready with all its might, match the planned strategy point-for-point, and ride the storm.

The workers would go on strike Wednesday, religiously checking at their watches as the union or party leaders would have said. The clock started ticking. Friday morning, with the two-day strike over as announced, the workers would get on the road, squeeze into the kombi, Zupco commuter bus, or the back of a truck, and report to work at exactly eight o’clock. The state, quite rightly, got used to this routine.

Of course, for most Zimbabweans, only two instruments of democratic expression remained: to vote with one’s feet and to use one’s educational skills to migrate out of reach of an abusive state and a lethargic opposition. The other choice would have been to take up guns and confront their tormentor, but the MDC did not have the stomach to lead it—or, as it claims, it has always believed in a non-violent change. The litmus test on this positive and welcome philosophy will be seen in how the GNU succeeds or fails.

If we succeed, we will have shown Africa that civil wars are totally unnecessary. If that philosophy prevails and spreads, Africa is headed for a genuine renaissance.

This ‘linguistic turn’ did not happen overnight. Once the MDC took the armed option off the table, there was very little latitude to maneuver outside talks. It meant that the MDC would not do what Zapu and Zanu did after the détente talks in 1974-5.

Realizing that the stoic reluctance of Prime Minister Ian Smith to compromise on political power was a “What will you do to me if I don’t?” question, the military elements from both parties undertook to provide an answer on the battlefield. By 1979, they could answer Smith like this: “If you do not compromise we will take power militarily.”

The MDC had no such plans or capacity; in fact by Tsvangirai’s departure for Harare from Gaborone, it made the bold statement to its critics that the time to change course was before signing the September 15 agreement, not afterwards.

Under the current circumstances, the MDC only had two key instruments that substituted for guns and troops. First, they had the financial and diplomatic ear of the West, without which Mugabe could set up a government, but would never govern. From bad, things would get worse, especially as the downstream effects of the global recession kicked in. It is not wise to exaggerate this as an ace in the MDC’s pack in light of the turbulent global financial situation: how sure is the MDC that western countries will have money to spare when their own citizens and taxpayers are losing jobs?

The second weapon was that the MDC had the numbers: Zimbabweans at home and abroad are solidly behind them. Period. Deep down in their hearts, and in conversations, Zanu (PF) people will tell you that they have lost the people’s support.

Plan B—the party’s participation in the talks—was a go-for-broke strategy born out of previous mistakes whereby the MDC had stayed out and Mugabe had still finished his term. But it’s a decision that weakened, distracted and diverted the MDC from attending to the coordination of these two raw materials—the international and domestic support—into one compact network for change. All eggs, not just MDC’s but Zimbabweans’, we now in one basket: the talks.

The recent stirrings of outrage in South Africa, as well as growing consultations in the US, Canada and UK to use the 2010 soccer world cup as a pressure point to force Pretoria to act were spontaneous actions independent of the MDC. The sanctions were leaking precisely because of a failure to supply actionable information for enforcement.

This diversionary nature of dialogue suggests Zanu (PF) must declare a strategic victory: a party that lost the parliamentary and first round of the presidential election and then conned the opposition into signing a ‘sin’ of a document must surely reward anybody in its ranks who thought up the idea of talks.

Plan B was ‘sinful’ because it disarmed the broad-based civic society action and isolated power over change to a few politicians from Zanu (PF) and MDC to decide the future of 12 million souls. That is where Zanu (PF) triumphed: behind the drawn curtain, with Mbeki very partisan at that, it could command the agenda and play pacemaker to the dialogue process.

Zanu (PF) played ‘deverangwena’ (follow the crocodile into the pool) with the MDC. Knowing that its powers on land were limited, the party strategists said ‘no, let us ensnare the MDC into the deep pool, where we will use water to our advantage, knowing the adversary can’t swim. The MDC might flail and froth, but it cannot get out of the pool’.

If MDC got out of the talks, Mugabe knew the worst could not happen: MDC would never take up arms as Zanu and Zapu did. I cannot put the possibility that Botswana contemplated rear bases and training for MDC past Ian Khama. I suspect that Tsvangirai’s insistence on achieving a non-violent revolution, for reason of lack or latitude, convinced Khama to mellow his tone at the SADC meeting all of a sudden. That, or there was a secret assurance from Mugabe that this time he meant what he said.

Tsvangirai had the option to form a government in exile but opted to go and form a government at home. We will never know whether the issue came up for discussion while Tsvangirai was in Gaborone, or how far it would have helped.

Of one thing Zimbabweans can be certain. By going home, Tsvangirai laid one matter to rest: the road to a solution for him lay inside Zimbabwe, not outside going in. If the MDC avoids being swallowed and the GNU is implemented as publicized, the party will have pulled off a major shift in paradigm in Zimbabwean politics: the possibility of change without recourse to war.

We hear this talk about Tendai Biti and Morgan Tsvangirai not seeing with one eye on the way forward—which Biti dismissed. It’s okay, let him deny it. He knows where the truth lies and who was on the wrong riverbank of opinion within the National Council. If I were him I would actually publicly admit it, so that all of us confirm the MDC’s democratic culture, where it’s okay and humane to disagree and still move on. I would worry if such an important decision was unanimous; we expect leaders to exhaust all options through rational due process before committing ‘sinning’ us into the future.

Among the militant base, opposition to getting into government offered the possibility of leadership renewal and shift of strategy. That is a powder keg that won’t go away: if the GNU turns out to be a wild goose chase, this opposition, and those who opposed, will be used as a point of reference. That those who opposed the entry into the GNU did not go beyond constructive debate to split as what happened in 2005 is a sign of maturity.

Otherwise if that had happened and Zanu (PF) went on to honor its end of the bargain and the GNU succeeded, such revolt had as much potential to be “the Judas Iscariot moment” that split Zapu in 1963 and the 1974-5 détente that led to Ndabaningi Sithole’s ouster. The reverse is true; if this thing fails, those who pushed for it will be held responsible.

One warning: let’s not go into this vindictively hoping it fails. Let us give it due diligence and fair criticism.

More on Clapperton Mavhunga

Zimbabwe: What does the GNU hold for the MDC?

(Preface: Mavhunga wrote the piece (below) for The Zimbabwe Times on the eve of the Movement for Democratic Change’s National Council decision to participate in the Government of National Unity (GNU) on Friday 30th January. Since then, the MDC council has endorsed party president Morgan Tsvangirai’s decision to participate in the GNU. The author wishes to maintain his main argument–that when an opposition party takes the option of armed struggle off the table and vests all its energies in an internal solution, there is indeed no choice other than to participate in the GNU or sink into oblivion. He argues that Mugabe has tactically and strategically outwitted the opposition, from the very moment that the MDC agreed to participate in the talks. When you plunge into a crocodile-infested pool, make sure you know how to swim.)

There was no surprise from the SADC meeting, as Zimbabwe’s public had predicted. It was the same old song: the complainant appeals to a judge, who turns out to be the accused.

We know where the script is heading: from SADC, the MDC is expected to appeal to the African Union. Are you aware that one year is almost gone and March 29 is almost upon us? Happy anniversary Zimbabwe. Read that as one year into Mugabe’s term. The AU process will probably take one more year—or two since its membership four times bigger than SADC. Then AU may, at long last, refer the matter back to SADC. This is, after all, an ‘African problem’ requiring an ‘African solution’ (There is no hurry in Africa, remember?). It’s not proper to take it to the United Nations, now is it?

Another predictable menu.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, and before we know it, five years have passed and it is another election. We shall have more meetings and resolutions deliberately designed to leave the MDC ‘unsatisfied’ so that we can set up another meeting about the previous meeting. In the interim, kidnap some opposition and human rights activists and create stories about the MDC trying to invade Zimbabwe. Put the opposition on the defensive so that it loses its offensive edge as the appellant whose electoral ‘victory’ was robbed. And while at it, create new hurdles so that you can have something to give concessions on at the next SADC summit.

The meeting arrives. Strategy? Dig your heels in on these new accusations about MDC banditry in Botswana, bring a thick dossier to accuse both Khama and Tsvangirai and dare them to take the case further. Then afterwards, make mild compromises, not on the original MDC grievances, but on your latest atrocities. That way, you obfuscate the original demands and change the subject—as well as luring SADC to your side by your ‘concessions’. You become the voice of reason; they become the voice of violent banditry and regime change.

Enough!

SADC cannot tell Zimbabweans that it is not seeing that Mugabe is shifting goal posts like this. SADC is aiding and abating Mugabe.

That’s not all.

The regional body is also bullying the MDC into a coalition government. Hear Kgalema Motlanthe’s bold declaration: “Yes, of course [MDC] will ensure that the Amendment 19 is enacted and will present themselves on the said date for the swearing-in ceremony.” That’s right—“present themselves”!

Or else?

The biggest problem for Zimbabweans is this: What do they do as a people when the majority of the region and the continent is not yet ready to accept their legitimate quest for democracy, one that challenges a godfather of the ‘liberation’ struggle?

I ask because the core of the country’s problem is not just a struggle against Mugabe to reclaim individual freedoms that national freedom (from colonial rule) has taken away. It is a struggle to redefine what true freedom really is: that a people who sacrificed their very blood and lives for genuine freedom by enabling guerrillas to fight with their guns must now be held hostage by the very same politicians for whom the people and frontline guerrillas toiled? At which point does the rhetoric of liberation become freedom which people are told exists, but never experience?

At issue are two generations of struggle: the 20th century struggle of my father and mother against Rhodesian minority rule which I lived through traumatically as a child, and my own 21st century struggle for democracy that my children will live knowing that neither their grandparents nor their parents ever tasted it. Freedom that was promised in the name of black majority rule, but which has become black minority rule.

Much of SADC and Africa is ruled by those who saw, endured, and overturned the 20th century oppression of the white colonialist, men who are easily roused to anger when Mugabe says the MDC has white members and sympathies. In the eyes of these Africans Zimbabweans are insane: the worst symptoms are the mere act of criticizing Mugabe. For how does one criticize a man who fought colonialism with the fiercest of rhetoric and seized white land and redistributed it (never mind to his party faithful and bigwigs with “degrees in violence)?” It is an abomination.

Indeed, land, pan-Africanism, anti-colonialism, and blackness have become the weapons of mass camouflage the regime wears to destroy not only the opposition or country, but—through cholera contagion arising out of obsession with political power—the entire region as well. The problem is not Zanu (PF) in toto; as one journalist friend suggested to me recently, how come Mugabe has been in power for 29 years if the issue is land? Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan came. They went. Next John Major and George Bush the father came. They went. So too did Mandela. He came, he rocked, he went. Next Tony Blair and Bill Clinton came. They went. So too did George Bush the son and Thabo Mbeki. They came, they went. Is it to say then that Zanu (PF) was so short of leadership material that the party could not dig from its own humus to find a tenderer worm to catch the public imagination and hunger for change?

But of course, all that Africa sees is land. The people of Zimbabwe are invisible to African leaders. They are dead to them. If given a choice between land and citizens, Africa chooses land. The people can have another life in heaven. They won’t need hell because they live it everyday; it is the renewable energy that feeds dictatorship.

Zimbabweans must understand this if they are to see their own position in the community of African nations and how the type of freedom they seek appears too utopian to deserve any attention at all from the continent.

Of course, Africa is various.

There is an Africa where the old nationalist parties are still in power. They see opposition to Mugabe much like Christians would an anti-Christ or Muslims anybody who draws a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. Opposition parties are seen as “reactionaries”.

There is a part of Africa which is under military rule, where somebody in uniform just wakes up, rides to State House in tanks and armored cars, seizes the microphone and announces: ‘I am taking over as the newly elected head of state’. Call it self-election. These juntas quickly promise fresh elections which they either rig, contest as single candidates or never hold.

There are countries where tanks and AK-47 rifles are now old-fashioned ways of coups d’etat. The ballot has become the smart way of waging a coup: the pen in front, your hands scribbling an X on the ballot, a cold barrel pressed against one’s back, reminding you that your vote is your life. It’s called ‘voting wisely’. The election is always held on time, almost to the minute. There will be only one result.

There is an Africa still ruled by kings. At least, in a continent where those elected through the ballot behave like kings, monarchs like King Mswati must be credited for their patriarchal honesty. I mean, when Mswati exercises authoritarianism, you know he is a king. That is how they must behave. The downside is not only that their majesties have no clue about the purpose, conduct or meaning of democratic elections. Whether they are held, rigged, or the results ignored, the sun still rises, shines, and sets.

There is also an Africa ruled by those whom the old nationalist parties reluctantly surrendered power to after a ballot, but who went on to become even worse dictators than the old nationalists. They know the limits and dangers of a ballot and cannot hazard encouraging opposition parties to succeed. They have ‘joined the club’.

Then, at the tail-end of many other types of African governments, there is an Africa whose leaders believe that only when rulers become accountable to their citizens—as opposed to citizens being sacrificed so that their blood nourishes their power and elevates them into gods—can Africa tap into the immense wealth of talent in the heads of their own citizens and the wealth underneath the feet.

Point? So that we don’t expect miracles when the Zimbabwe issue goes before the AU. The Zimbabwean crisis is the stinking carcass in the backyard; that’s why SADC cares. We are cholera on two legs as well as the incubator of bugs and refugees. The further one goes from the decomposing carcass, the less the smell. Pan-Africanism—as intangible as it may sound to SADC citizens who must deal with floods of Zimbabwean refugees on a minute-by-minute basis—becomes a more powerful force than cholera. What urgency would Zimbabwe have compared to Somalia, where the Ethiopians have beaten a very hasty retreat after going in like cowhands to ‘round up the herd’ of Islamic rebels? We are talking of 3000 deaths from cholera, but are we going to make sense when nearly 300,000 have died in Darfur and millions in eastern DR Congo? In Africa, while some heads of state might concede that Mugabe is not a good guy, there will be many who will take Zimbabweans as children who cry for an electronic toy when he already has a plastic one, even as others have not even food in the stomach.

There is only one hope if the issue goes to Africa as a whole: it recuses SADC from preventing unilateral, small-group or individual action by any country from acting in any decisive form to end the humanitarian catastrophe Zimbabwe has become. Such action has never required, or even asked for, the authorization of the AU or the UN, let alone regional bodies. Nigeria did that in Sierra Leone, en route to cunningly giving the Liberian tyrant Charles Taylor ‘asylum’ and bodyguards, which turned out to be house arrest. Taylor was then handed over to the War Crimes Tribunal, and today Liberia is the first country to have a woman president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

The latest example of such ‘horse-trading’ is Rwanda’s joint operations with DR Congo and the arrest of former rebel Laurent Nkunda. Before that we had seen Ethiopia get into Somalia, South Africa into Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Angola, and Namibia into DR Congo, and Tanzania into Uganda.

In real terms, the UN, AU and any other bodies are completely powerless to prevent unilateral action. They will forth at the corners of the mouth and shout hoarse, but they never act.

At this moment, I do not see it coming. I won’t encourage false optimism. The west is neck-deep with the financial crisis. It’s too early to tell what exactly Obama will do differently, even though his overtures towards the Sino-Soviet and African ‘allies’ Mugabe used to spite the West with might actually work effectively to isolate Mugabe.

At the moment, I do not see any decibels raised for direct intervention achieving anything—most of African rulers acquired political power through spilling blood, not preventing its spillage. We have heard Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga saying some choice things about an African force intervening. However, the head of state in Kenya, Mwai Kibaki, has not said so: he sits comfortably in the club of African rulers who came to power by defeating the old nationalist party before behaving like them.

Mugabe was spot-on when he dared Africa to come and get him. Nobody had the stomach for it. So much then for African solutions for African problems.

The question is also that, in the even that the MDC plays hardball and decides not to ‘go in’ and form a government with Mugabe, what is Plan C?

Plan A was mass action. It was decisively crushed precisely because those planning it rendered it too predictable to the target of their chagrin. Amidst a blaze of publicity, the opposition would set a date for the mass action, outline the strategy completely with route plans, and set their watches. That gave ample time for the state to get ready with all its might, match the planned strategy point-for-point, and ride the storm. The workers would go on strike Wednesday, religiously checking at their watches as the union or party leaders would have said. The clock started ticking. Friday morning, with the two-day strike over as announced, the workers would get on the road, squeeze into the kombi, Zupco commuter bus, or the back of a truck, and report to work at exactly eight o’clock. The state, quite rightly, got used to this routine.

Of course, for most Zimbabweans, only two instruments of democratic expression remained: to vote with one’s feet and to use one’s educational skills to migrate out of reach of an abusive state and a lethargic opposition. The other choice would have been to take up guns and confront the tormentor, but the MDC did not have the stomach to lead it—or, as it claims, it believes in a non-violent change.

It is a position that Tsvangirai himself enunciated recently in response to the state’s allegations that the MDC is training ‘terrorists’ in Botswana. In saying so, he set a definitive bar beyond which the quest for democracy in Zimbabwe would not go under his leadership.

Once you do that, there is very little latitude to maneuver outside talks. It means that the MDC will not do what Zapu and Zanu did after the détente talks in 1974-5. Realizing that the stoic reluctance of Prime Minister Ian Smith to compromise on political power was a “What will you do to me if I don’t?” question, the military elements from both parties undertook to provide an answer on the battlefield. By 1979, they could answer Smith like this: “If you do not compromise we will take power militarily.” The MDC has no such plans or capacity

Under the current circumstances, the MDC only has two key instruments that have substituted for having an army of their own. First, they have the financial and diplomatic ear of the West, without which Mugabe may set up a government, but will never govern. From bad, things will get worse, especially as the downstream effects of the global recession kick in. The second weapon is that the MDC has the people of Zimbabwe—at home and abroad—solidly behind them.

What has been missing is to connect these two elements to finish off the regime. I suggest that Plan B—the party’s participation in the talks—has distracted and diverted the MDC from attending to the coordination of these two raw materials for change. Such a diversion would suggest that Zanu (PF) must declare a strategic victory: a party that lost the parliamentary and first round of the presidential election and then conned the opposition into signing a ‘sin’ of a document must surely reward anybody in its ranks who thought up the idea of talks.

Plan B was ‘sinful’ because it mortgaged an entire country to the whims of politicians, lifting the energy from an all-inclusive coalition of civic society that had started building up and investing the power over change to a few politicians from Zanu (PF) and MDC to decide the future of 12 million souls. That is where Zanu (PF) triumphed: behind the drawn curtain, with Mbeki advising here and there, it could command the agenda and play pacemaker to the dialogue process.

Zanu (PF) played Deverangwena (follow the crocodile into the pool) with the MDC. Knowing that its powers on land (elections) were limited, the party strategists said ‘no, let us ensnare the MDC into the deep pool (SADC), where we will use water to our advantage, knowing the adversary can’t swim. The MDC might flail and froth, but it cannot get out of the pool (talks)’.

If it gets out of the talks, Mugabe knows the worst cannot happen: MDC will not do what Zanu and Zapu did—to take up arms. Possibly realizing how hopeless the party is, Botswana is now seemingly recanting on its earlier robust stance. An analytic reading of its combative positive in the last couple of months suggests that it was waiting for the MDC to propose stronger cough medicine to the Zimbabwean cold. It did not, so Ian Khama could say: “If you can’t change course, and you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you must accept the status quo of the pool where the crocodiles swim’.

It does not seem to me that Khama had any bases set up, nor was he seriously contemplating taking on Zimbabwe for the sake of the MDC or to push back the wave of refugees flocking into his country. Rather, I think he was waiting for direction from the MDC on how it wished to proceed. One option—which Tsvangirai completely eliminated by going home—was a government in exile. We will never know whether it came up for discussion while Tsvangirai was in Gaborone, or how far it would have helped.

Of one thing Zimbabweans can be certain. By going home, Tsvangirai laid one matter to rest: the road to a solution for him lies inside Zimbabwe, not inside coming in.

Politics is a very crazy thing. We sit here as ordinary Jim and Jack while the politicians do deals, and then voila! A deal is announced.

Inevitably, the aura of a patriarch who listens to the majority view of his peers in SADC, and, like a true patriarch, completely ignores the opinions and decisions of his own children will raise emotions inside and outside the opposition’s top echelons alike.

For this reason, it is without surprise that there may be disagreements within the MDC over whether they will join in (un)holy matrimony with Mugabe or become runaway brides. Zimbabweans care about the reported and purported disagreements within the MDC because most (by their March 29 vote) identify themselves among the bride’s relatives (hama dzemukadzi).

This anxiety is the price people pay for their over-reliance on the MDC: a split in its ranks has collateral damage. It will defeat the will of the people and play straight into the Zanu (PF) strategy of ensnaring MDC into talks. The whole purpose is to encourage dissension and then cut a deal with one faction (Mutambara’s) and the one (who will be called a ‘sellout’) from MDC-Tsvangirai that enters the talks. The dissenter (who will be called a ‘warmonger’) can rot in jail for what it’s worth. This name-calling is a part of one overall ‘leaching strategy’: to strength Zanu (PF) through talking, time management, and defections. It is a strategy that has been well-thought, which demands careful response.

We hear this talk about Tendai Biti and Morgan Tsvangirai not seeing with one eye on the way forward. Among the militant base opposition to getting into government offers the possibility of leadership renewal and shift of strategy. Yet it has as much potential to be “the Judas Iscariot moment” that split Zapu in 1963 and led to Ndabaningi Sithole’s ostracization. It is also coin-tossing the fate of 12 million lives—tails you win heads you lose.

Since runaway brides often do so because they fear commitment and might in fact run away to another man to escape the would-be groom, those in MDC who do not want to get into the government must tell us exactly what alternative they see outside matrimony. Otherwise if they want to continue to flail and gasp for air in the pool (talks) until they get a solution, we are headed for a predictable AU process.

Some runaway brides flee a potential ‘horror marriage’, bide their time and eventually find ‘Mr. Right’ to come up, and find happiness. Others will run away and scuttle what could have been a ‘paradise marriage’. Still, the decision to go in or stay out should not be a blind one or secretive like the first decision to engage, lest the bride marries a philanderer and an abusive husband. If the decision is to go in, it has to be strategic beyond personal office, otherwise people will very quickly turn against those who took it and give support to those who opposed.

If the MDC decides to go in, it must not do so blindfolded, otherwise it will seal its own fate. If it stays out, it must change course.

Clapperton Mavhunga, a Zimbabwean national, is Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and Society (STS) at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology.