Introduction

Africa is in danger of being discarded as “the Fourth World,” irrelevant to the global economy, and of being abandoned as hopelessly mired in insoluble problems. The continent has been utterly marginalized on the U.S. policy agenda by the end of the Cold War and by a new domestic fixation in the U.S. electorate. Yet Africa’s human needs are real and its problems are not isolated. Rather they are linked to the world economic recession, a global glut in many African agricultural commodities, and the effects of years of regional militarization.

Never before have the peoples of Africa so strongly needed the support of their friends in the West, and especially in the United States. Food aid is urgently needed in the face of drought and famine. More important is the rebuilding of an indigenous agenda for development beginning with basic human needs, setting aside the simplistic formulae of the modernization models and the Cold War tolerance of minority and repressive regimes. Such an agenda cannot succeed without changes by the wealthy governors of the world economy.

The Clinton Administration does offer opportunities for a fresh dialogue about U.S. policy toward African nations. Despite virtually no attention to Africa during the campaign, the principles of Clinton’s Africa statements merit support: attention to human rights and democratization, reform of development assistance, strengthening of UN peacekeeping efforts, and retaining sanctions pressure on South Africa. It is important to grasp these opportunities in order to respond to the remnants of 30 years of U.S. Cold War policy in Africa including — the rejection of democratic elections by U.S. client Jonas Savimbi, the continued South African ploys to avoid democracy and to foment ethnic strife, the banditry residual from the U.S. and USSR arming of Somalia, the continued support of Mobutu in Zaire and the failure to provide necessary international support to contain the disastrous conflicts in Mozambique, Angola, and Liberia (and its neighbors).

Thus, there is an urgent need for a more articulate and powerful voice in the United States advocating a larger, more compassionate, and serious policy focus on Africa. U.S. citizens must muster support for the future of this sub-continent from which so many of our peoples and so much of our American culture, heritage, and products have been drawn.

This paper calls on U.S. Africanist scholars to mobilize more effectively as part of a broader constituency dedicated to these ends. The Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS) has begun a number of new policy discussions to broaden and deepen the attention of U.S. Africanist scholars beyond Southern Africa to the entire continent. Organizationally, ACAS is expanding and re-organizing to respond to the new situation. We hope that these new directions will interest more Africanist scholars in participating in ACAS.

The African Crises and the World System

Like many Third World economies, most of Africa is in trouble. African countries are besieged by debt, further collapse of commodity prices (simultaneous with significant Won in the price of needed industrial goods from the North), devaluation, inflation, unemployment, political upheaval, some bad political leadership, erosion of the environment and infrastructure, food shortages, and massive health problems (the public health diseases of cholera, hepatitis, and meningitis; HIV; and the resurgent six WHO-targeted tropical diseases, especially malaria).

These burgeoning crises are occurring in the context of major structural reorganization of the global system, its economy, polity, and military power. Because of the relaxing of East-West tensions, most of the nations of the South -both government leaders and various political movements within them -can no longer automatically use the Cold War polarities to gain access to aid and support from the big powers of the North. The Eastern European powers have turned to their own crises, and the wealthier West has become largely disinterested, excepting those rare cases such as Somalia in which there is an apparent congruence of public outcry against the famine and the disorder and of U.S. politicos to find a new role for the military.

Despite this geopolitical reorientation away from Africa, we believe that Africa actually is deserving of more, not less, attention. In the 1990s, we have comprehended more than ever before the depth of human heritage and culture that is owed to Africa, especially in the culture of the U.S. and the Americas. We also are more attentive to the many products from Africa which enrich the consumption and quality of life of America.

In recent years, economic attention to Africa has been limited mostly to pressure from the World Bank, IMF, and U.S. for the many aspects of economic structural adjustment and for democratization. These changes can correct some of the distortions of prices, the lack of economic incentives, the high cost of centralized bureaucracies, and the lad of popular participation in some African nations; however, many believe they do not hold the key to — and may even block — addressing the depth and breadth of African economic problems. A large number of African states that are politically fragile have acceded to these pressures.

Even while dealing with these economic pressures, many African nations are offering internal political trans- formations. Democratic elections, multi-party rule, new leadership, and a priority on the basic human needs of the population are taking hold in many places throughout the continent. Despite both these economic and political changes, little foreign assistance or serious political attention from the West has been forthcoming.

Indeed, foreign aid to African countries has been minuscule. In 1990-91, total U.S. economic assistance for the 47 nations of Sub-Saharan Africa only barely exceeds that of Nicaragua and Panama together and totals less than one-tenth of the combined assistance to Israel and Egypt. In the early 1990s, the period of Africa’s most pressing crises, less than five percent ($800 million) went to Africa of the $17 billion total U.S. foreign development aid.

The Waning of Advocacy for Africa in the United States

Africa’s political transformations should create new possibilities for calling on the U.S. to truly support the democratic principles it purportedly seeks in Africa, as was not possible under the Cold War ethos. Nevertheless, at this time of potential new opportunities, interest in Africa has fallen among diverse U.S. publics — mass and elite.

The interest of U.S. politicians has been eroded by Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, the broad perception that apartheid is bound for the rubbish heap of history, and the “donor fatigue” at the seemingly endless parade of new African problems. Distracted by pressing domestic issues of jobs, housing, health, education, and racism on which few victories are being won, even the traditional friends of Africa in the Congress and the Congressional Black Caucus have failed to mobilize effectively on Africa’s behalf, including on emergency humanitarian assistance and conflict resolution. Even some of the liberal politicians elected to the 1993 Congress campaigned on an isolationist platform to “bring our dollars home” to bolster the U.S. economy.

The attention of the Western and Japanese corporate and investment communities has shifted to new opportunities in the Pacific and Europe as U.S. investments and trade with Africa declined since the 1970s. The U.S. foreign policy-making elites, likewise, are riveted to global competition among the economic powers and the transformation of the Eastern Bloc.

For masses in the U.S., attention is focused on declining job and economic opportunities. The concentration of wealth in the Northern Hemisphere. Indeed this decline is paralleled by the greatest concentration of wealth in U.S. history. Many people in this wealthy nation are caught in a new experience of impoverishment, decline in standard of living and quality of life, and the prospect of downward mobility. Ethnic and racial antagonisms are on the rise. As in Europe, this experience of personal insecurity accentuates national chauvinism and myths about the threats of foreign peoples.

The media coverage of Africa available to the mass “viewing market” continues to demonstrate gross disinterest in Africa (with the obvious exception of the images of anchormen — in the midst of U.S. military operations in Somalia). Images of starving African refugees flow into U.S. living rooms, leading most to conclude that Africa is but a caricature of endless problems, bad government, and incompetence — an undesirable continent with which to link and identify. This translates into an inadequate market for good educational and media materials on the continent, small enrollments in many college classes concerning Africa, and the continuing dissemination of gross racial and social stereotypes of the peoples and cultures of Africa.

Most of Africa’s U.S. supporters have failed to mount any effective action on the pressing problems of the continent. Africa’s friends have become demobilized on a broad front — among churches and unions, on the campuses, and even among some Africa-focused organizations. The national organizations with which activist scholars have cooperated on legislative and pressure campaigns (Washington Office on Africa, American Committee on Africa, TransAfrica, and others) are suffering financially and organizationally in varying degrees in the post-Mandela release period. Simultaneously, while many major funders have focused even more of their resources on projects inside Africa, they offer little support for initiatives to build a constituency with a greater voice for Africa in the U.S.

The present political demobilization on behalf of Africa is particularly striking in juxtaposition to the success of the friends of Africa not so long ago. For 30years, key African- American, student/faculty, church, labor, and liberal groups mobilized against apartheid, achieving one of the most remarkable changes in U.S. foreign policy of the century. Building from campus, local, and statewide actions, the divestiture and sanctions movement eventually overwhelmed the President, the State Department, and a great majority within the foreign policy establishment with the Congress’ adoption of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986. But after this important national victory, most Africanists and other friends of Africa have failed to maintain their activism on South Africa.

The Role of Africanist Scholars

Where do Africanist scholars fit into this picture? In the domain of mass education and culture, centers of African and African-American studies and teachers in African-American communities are making important efforts to give new attention to Africa’s complex histories and cultures. The resources available for this task from African studies centers are very limited. Probably only four or five percent of the total U.S. public and private budget for foreign language and area studies is spent in research funding for the study of one-fifth of the global landmass with more nations, cultures, and languages than any other world region.

Most academic Africanists, however, remain professionally dispassionate, and focused on occupational productivity and advancement, mirroring the turn to self-interest by many Americans in these insecure times. Younger scholars in many disciplines face more difficult roads to academic advancement than did the previous generation of Africanists. While scholars by and large decry the broad disinterest in Africa, they have not raised an effective voice to demand a U.S. response to Africa’s crises. Even those scholars who are politically engaged are largely geographically isolated and racially divided.

Why has Africanist activism waned? As with other segments of the constituency for Africa in the U.S., it is partly due to the loss of apartheid as a relatively simple target of U.S. support. Issues facing South Africa have become more complex and multi-faceted — democracy, ethnicity, jobs, affirmative action for correcting the discriminatory past, food production, and pent-up demand for social services and economic opportunity. These issues are similar to those confronted by the continent as a whole, and Africanists so far have failed to broaden their perspective or develop any strategy for addressing these multiple issues effectively.

Africanist scholars should be particularly suited for assisting the broader U.S. constituency for Africa to make the transition from focusing on apartheid to the various critical issues facing the continent. Many U.S. academic specialists on Africa have strong sympathies with the particular countries and people they know from their research and collegial relationships. They understand the impoverishment and fragility of the continent caught in a marginal position in the global system. The historic ambivalence in the scholarly community toward economic assistance should be translated into a cogent critique of those programs that hamper development for the majority of the people and strong support for humanitarian and longer-term aid that can be helpful. Scholars with experience in Africa’s environmental issues and problems should nurture the nascent environmental movements and groups in Africa. U.S. scholars should create opportunities for African experts to speak for themselves about the solutions to Africa’s problems and should assist these scholars to acquire the resources they need for their research and communication.

A New Agenda for ACAS

The Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS) has embarked on a plan to refocus the political attention of Africanist scholars, particularly among its own membership. Our major tasks in this period are to struggle to 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. policy-makers, and to redirect ACAS to become a more effective instrument of change.

ACAS has identified a number of policy issues to explore and has established Issue Working Groups (IWG) on each to address the problems and to recommend policies to advocate. Several of the IWGs have developed draft papers on their topic, which are published for the first time in this issue of the ACAS Bulletin. Earlier drafts and ideas were discussed at a Consultation held in Washington, D.C. in May 1992and at a one-day ACAS Conference in November 1992. We now encourage discussion and comments from all ACAS members or prospective members as we seek to set our organizational policy course for the months ahead. (Send your comments to the Research Committee listed on the back cover).

In addition, we suggest the following policy priorities for ACAS efforts in the months ahead:

• Support for just and stable terms of economic exchange between Africa and the industrial nations

• Support for sustainable forms of majority rule and democracy in Africa

• Financial and political support for the peace-enforcing, peace-keeping, and peace-making (conflict resolution) activities of a genuinely representative UN, OAU, and other multilateral agencies

• Support for appropriate development that gives primacy to the needs of children, women, and those who are socially and economically displaced

• Continued attention to achieving both non-racial democracy in South Africa and across the continent as well as peace and reconstruction in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, and the conflict- and drought-damaged SADCC states

• Increased U.S. attention (research and assistance) to the health crises in Africa (public health, HIV, malaria, infant death, etc.) and the background nutrition problems in Africa

• Debt relief and investment capital for appropriate development work which serves the needs and interests of the common peoples of Africa

• Partnership with Africa to achieve environmental sustainability, based on an integrated social and economic development that does not harm the planet

• More attention to the increasing erosion of academic institutions and the academic capabilities and work of our colleagues in African universities under the assault of structural adjustment programs

• Support for individual African colleagues under attack by repressive regimes

• Proactively building linkages and coalitions with African peoples, especially African academic colleagues, who work for progressive change in the economy, government, and society at all levels of their societies

• As a means of affecting U.S. policy, collaborating with a broad spectrum of North Americans to build a more enduring and effective constituency in support of all African peoples and oriented especially toward the Congress and U.S. foreign policy-makers. To accomplish this, ACAS must address and join the wider U.S. constituency for Africa and especially African-American constituencies.

The Means for Achieving Our Goals

ACAS was formed in 1977 to activate scholars to use their academic skills to analyze U.S. policy toward Africa, to mobilize public critical commentary, and to provide scholarly knowledge and legitimacy for criticism and the alternative policies. ACAS was constructed as well to bridge the separation of scholars working in the African Studies Association (ASA) and the African Heritage Studies Association (AHSA).

ACAS has used several means toward this end. ACAS members have testified before Congressional committees and the organization has initiated legislative campaigns on issues including a broad array of Southern Africa concerns, harmful U.S. interventions in Africa (particular1y CIA intervention in Angola), emergency assistance for victims of African drought and famine, protection of individual scholars in Africa, dislodging foreign interests in the Western Sahara, and funding through U.S. military and intelligence agencies—for African studies programs and research. Like many Africa-focused organizations, our focus in the 1970s and 80s was on the southern part of the continent

ACAS members have received regular commentary, information, and action-relevant articles, status summaries of key legislation, and news of the anti-apartheid movement in the ACAS Bulletin. The publications and network provided by ACAS has also given indirect guidance or resources to individual Africanists working on their campuses, Africanist programs and administrators seeking to be supportive of political change, and even administrators inside the government arguing for more progressive policies toward Africa.

The primary arena for communication with the broader Africanist community has been several panels organized by ACAS at the annual meetings of the ASA and twice at the AHSA. The panels, which have regularly been well-attended and well-received, have been on key topics concerning Southern Africa, human rights, repression against African scholars, other struggles in the Horn and across the continent, and the potential uses of defense and intelligence agency funding in African studies. In the 1970s and 1980s, the panels often had liberation movement representatives.

The Issue Working Groups (IWG’s) are a new mechanism to bring several ACAS members together to develop analysis and recommendations on policy issues that we have not previously addressed.

A Strategic Action Plan for ACAS at this Juncture

In light of the growing crises in Africa and the radically altered global parameters, the membership of ACAS made a commitment at its 1991 and 1992annual meetings to seek to achieve a greater impact on U.S. policy-making in Washington by increasing our organizational capacity and our program and by expanding our membership.

ACAS has always been bedeviled by the lack of infrastructure to coordinate its willing membership in mobilizing to influence U.S. policy-makers. Until now, we have operated on a shoestring, partly by our intentional decision not to compete with the Africa lobbying organizations on which we and others rely. Now, when we need to diversify our political foci, we have decided that we cannot make an effective contribution without greater resources and staffing and that we must have an organizational presence in Washington, D.C.

Therefore, we have hired a part-time executive secretary in Washington, D.C., with the hope of eventually enlarging that position to full-time. A new staff person does not substitute for a network of active and informed members, but nor can scholars scattered across the country be effective without consistent information and mobilization.

ACAS has also established a closer working relationship with the African Policy Information Center (APIC), formerly the Washington office on Africa Educational Fund. We will also be coordinating ACAS activities more closely with pro-Africa organizations in Washington, including the Washington Office on Africa, TransAfrica, and other groups such as Africare, Bread for the World. Development Gap, and Africa Development Foundation, and with the American Committee on Africa in New York. We plan to organize several seminars and colloquia on issues of current policy, possibly in conjunction with other actors in Washington. And we will continue to inform and mobilize ACAS members on selected current policy debates in the Congress. In all of these efforts, we will work to expand our capacity to address more diverse political and economic issues of the entire African continent.

In 1993, with new opportunity for Africa in Washington, we invite the wider Africanist community to join us in our effort to transform and expand ACAS. Scholars have a special role to play — in explaining African realities, developing policy recommendations and critique, and adding a certain academic legitimacy to Africa’s constituency in the U.S. We believe that the new direction taken by ACAS in the past 18 months and the commitment of ACAS members to greater participation and financial support have positioned ACAS to more effectively assist scholars to make their unique contribution in the political arena. The problems of Africa which will be solved will be managed by the African peoples and institutions themselves; however, the pressing needs and challenges facing those people of Africa in a radically altered global system surely give us cause to seek a greater impact on U.S. policy.

The author acknowledges the contributing comments and suggestions of Christine Root and William Martin.

Originally published in ACAS Bulletin 38-39 (1993), pp. 9-13

Reprinted in ACAS Bulletin 81

What should Western-based movements do to facilitate African liberation? There are several important measures. One is opposition to military build-ups. Another is lobbying for the conversion of armaments expenditure to investment in genuine development efforts. Similarly, pressure on Western governments to adopt a non-interventionist policy in countries undergoing fundamental structural change is essential. But policy makers do not usually act against the interests of the groups that put them in power. To ask capitalists to refrain from expansionism is to ask them to cease being capitalists. This is not to suggest that tactical decisions are predetermined. Surely the anti-war movement influenced the U.S. decision to withdraw from Vietnam. Nonetheless, it is not enough to stop Western states from interfering in Africa.

Basic change must come about within African countries themselves. In this process, Western support for realigning the domestic divisions of labor in Africa should be linked more closely to the internal situations within the advanced capitalist countries. Just as production is increasingly international, struggles in various parts of the global political economy must be interwoven. As the struggles intensify, moralizing about the evils of exploitation should not replace thoroughgoing analysis of the crisis.

Equally important to contemplate is the question of what has not been done adequately at all. Although state actions must be continually challenged, it is wrong to allow those who hold the reins of power to set the agenda. Unfortunately, many opponents of their government’s policies in Africa have largely been reactive, their strategies crisis-oriented. Typically, critics have formed single-issue movements: anti-apartheid, nuclear freeze, pro-Sandinistas, and so on. What is required is an interlinking of movements that mobilize constituencies across such diverse issues as militarism, feminism, and intervention in different parts of the world. It is essential to bring home to workers, community groups, and intellectuals precisely how individuals are personally involved in Third World struggles.

Surely there is a long road to travel before liberation is achieved. Setting aside the exaggerated optimism of the early post-colonial period and the ensuing pessimism about Africa’s prospects for development, it is a truism to say that massive struggles in earlier historical epochs, such as the passage from feudalism to capitalism, a transition which engulfed the entire globe, have spawned fundamental transformations. It is out of the crucible of crises and from hard-fought struggles that new social forces emerge and invent creative solutions to deeply embedded problems. Improvements do not come steadily; there are traps and confusions, followed by sudden breakthroughs. And even then it can be hard to measure progress.

If liberation requires a monumental feat, one can say that the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars has contributed modestly to the struggle. Political work and research by Africanist scholars over the last decade have helped to reformulate questions and provide vital information for educators. Now we must continue to expand our membership, form coalitions with like-minded groups, consider the merits of a broader publications program, seek new ways to alter U.S. foreign policy, and open additional channels for assisting the liberation movements. The task is no less than devising novel ways to abolish the grim conditions in which the majority of humankind has been condemned to live and charting strategies for the course ahead.

Originally published in ACAS 10 years On – Now, ACAS Bulletin 23 (1988), pp. 35-40.

Reprinted in ACAS Bulletin 81

I remember vividly a conversation with the late FRELIMO President Samora Machel in my garden in Dar es Salaam in 1972. I had done a variety of odd-jobs for the Mozambican liberation movement during the seven years of my teaching tenure in Tanzania and a few weeks earlier Machel had arranged for me to accompany FRELIMO guerrillas on a trip into the liberated areas of Tete province. Now he had com to bid me and my family goodbye as we packed to leave Tanzania.

“You have now seen something of our struggle”, he said. “But for most Canadians their knowledge of it is at point zero. You must try to do something about that when you return home.” It was not an order exactly, yet I could literally feel his will galvanizing me into action, communicating to me personally the kind of drive and purpose I have seen him communicate to Mozambicans, singly and in large gatherings, both before and since that day. It was no accident that on my return to Canada I would soon find myself working with others to launch the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Portugal’s African Colonies, TCLPAC (which, as the since renamed Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa, TCLSAC, celebrated its fifteenth anniversary in 1987). No accident, either, that this kind of experience was to have a profound impact on my scientific work.

Like so many other “activist scholars concerned with Africa”, I thus discovered my vocation for political work around African issues — and, in my case, specifically around Southern African issues — in Africa itself. And certainly, “in the last decade (or so)”, those of us who have followed this path have been privileged to accompany a remarkable upsurge of popular assertion in the region — the overthrow of the Portuguese colonial presence, the downfall of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, the revitalization of the resistance movement in South Africa. Self-evidently, the struggle for liberation which we now seek both to interpret and to facilitate is at a very different level than it was in the dark days of the 1960s when South Africa’s first Emergency crushed hopes for significant changes for a decade and reduced the anti-apartheid constituency in western countries to a debilitating posture of mere moralizing about a seemingly static situation.

Of course, the situation in Southern Africa remains framed by the larger development crisis in Africa as a whole: no-one can now pretend, if ever they did, to have any very ready answers to the problems which confront the continent. More immediately, the regional conjuncture is marked by the continuing vitality of the apartheid state itself. This is a state contested in new ways — in ways that the more recent and on-going Emergency can only forestall although not, this time, crush — but it is strong nonetheless. Strong enough, unfortunately, to smash by means of its destabilization strategy the high hopes that accompanied Samora Machel and his colleagues into power in 1975. And strong enough, at least in the short-run, to stalemate the euphoria and the momentum which characterized the South African resistance movement’s advances of the period 1984 to 1986. No-one can doubt that there is unfinished business in Southern Africa and if, as is obvious, the main protagonists of renewed advance must be Southern Africans themselves, there is also more than enough unfinished business for “activist scholars” to be getting on with.

But what is our “business”? We should not underestimate the extent to which it is, in fact, scholarship, scholarship shaped by our activism and our commitment to the struggle in Southern Africa, but scholarship nonetheless. Not that we need apologize for twinning the terms “activism” and “scholarship”. Quite the contrary, since scholarly preoccupations — the questions asked — do not spring spontaneously from the data but are themselves shaped by an on-going process of “ideological class struggle”. As it happens, there are few fields of scholarly endeavour where radical intellectual work has had such a profound impact as in African Studies. This is precisely because an impressive level of engagement has encouraged as many “Africanists” as it has to ask the hard and searching questions that a more conservative and passive scholarship would obscure.

Engagement can only take us so far, of course. Once those “hard and searching questions” have been posed, adequate answers to them can only be found by doing full justice to the highest scholarly-cum-scientific canons — in elaborating arguments, pursuing data and weighing evidence. Needless to say, there will always be the danger of shaping our analyses to fit our preconceptions. We must work to keep each other honest as we continue to walk the tightrope of understanding regarding Southern Africa: scrutinizing carefully the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the various post-colonial and socialist projects in the region, for example, while never losing sight of the broader context of South African destabilization, the crippling impact of which so profoundly blights all development efforts there; evaluating the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the resistance movement in South Africa itself while never losing sight of the shifting mix of repression and pseudo-reform which defines the powerful drag of apartheid state and racial capital upon the drive for liberation.

Let me emphasize that something more than mere intellectual honesty for its own sake is at stake here. Analytical rigor is actually of direct and profound importance to the anti-apartheid movement itself. For an anti-apartheid movement built on mere enthusiasm and apolitical moralizing cannot easily survive the cruel vicissitudes inevitable in so difficult a struggle as the one for Southern Africa; those who stay the course, experience attests, are those who are least naive. Of course, the most salient voice itemizing those vicissitudes must be that of Southern Africans themselves. Yet the analyses we have produced as “scholar-activists” have, in western countries, percolated usefully through the profession, through the anti-apartheid movement broadly-defined and even into the public arena, where – rather against the odds and without overstating the case –we can at least presume to assert (with Brecht) that “our rulers would have slept more comfortably without us”!

Engagement and scholarship, then. But a warning: militant sentiments manifested exclusively in the privacy of one’s own study are unlikely to sustain themselves or to retain their relevance. At the very least we must be better publicists, forcing the pace of the percolation process just referred to by self-consciously developing, each and every one of us, additional kinds of communications skills crafted to reach a wider range of potential audiences. Even more importantly, we must sustain our involvement, alongside others approaching the Southern Africa issue from different angles and different life experiences, within the anti-apartheid movement itself.

This is essential, as I have suggested, because activism — including such apparent “shit-work” as licking stamps and pounding the pavements! — is not merely good for the scholar’s soul but also for his or her brain. Self-evidently such activity is equally important for its more immediate and tangible impact on the struggle itself. Certainly, those of us who have been involved in the sanctions campaign — on-campus or off — have been active on a key front for both weakening the South African regime over time and for expanding the anti-apartheid constituency. At least as crucial, and rather less developed as an action front, is the building of direct support for the beleaguered progressive governments of Southern Africa (Angola and Mozambique, in particular) and for the progressive movements for change in South Africa and Namibia (the ANC-UDF-COSATU alliance and SWAPO, in particular).

Such support work for liberation is in many ways even more difficult to carry out than sanctions-related activity. Several factors produce a much less responsive and united audience for it in North America. There is, in the first instance, the prevailing 1980s’ atmosphere of Reagan/Thatcher-style global red-baiting and, linked to it, the promiscuous use in public discussion of the emotive charge of “terrorism”. There is the sincere but too often misleading, selective and overly comfortable predilection for “non-violence”. And there are the tensions and confusions still generated within the anti-apartheid movement itself by the manipulation of oversimplified “black consciousness” formulations. Yet in light of the intransigence of the South African regime and the consequent inevitability of escalating conflict, there will be an even greater necessity in future to support the on-going popular struggle — including armed struggle — in South Africa. We must, as activists and as scholars, move to comprehend and seek to legitimate that struggle even more successfully than we have done to date.

I began this brief note by invoking the name of Samora Machel, so important in shaping my own commitment and that of many others touched by the Mozambican experience. Let me close by invoking another name, that of Ruth First, friend and former colleague at the University of Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique, and a formidable exemplar of the “activist-scholar” role if ever there was one. Her substantial contributions to both the hands-on struggle in South Africa and to progressive Africanist scholarship are well known. But note something else. She was assassinated in 1982 when, as Director of Research at the university’s Center of African Studies, she was using her formidable skills to design research and training programs extremely helpful to the Mozambican development effort. Moreover, only days before her death she had helped host a meeting of scholars drawn from all of the Frontline States of Southern Africa, a meeting designed to coordinate and focus research efforts the better to service the region-wide struggle against South African hegemony. There seems little doubt that her success in thus putting scholarship at the service of the Southern African revolution was the chief reason why the South Africans felt compelled to kill her.

Of course, few of us are as close to the front-line, either physically or spiritually, as was Ruth First –n or are we ever likely to be quite so dramatically at risk. Yet the urgency of the present situation in Southern Africa surely dictates that he attempt to be as committed as she was — and even that we be prepared to take a few risks. In short, her spirit is something that, as aspirant “scholar-activists”, we must seek to emulate.

Originally published in ACAS 10 years On – Now, ACAS Bulletin 23 (1988), pp. 35-40.

Reprinted in ACAS Bulletin 81

It seems that, at least since 1945, every decade has been “fast moving” in Africa. The period since 1975 has not been less so. We must first appreciate it by reference to the previous decade. 1965-66 was in fact a bad year for Africa: the rash of coups which toppled Nkrumah, Modibo Keita, Ben Bella (the stalwarts of the old “Casablanca” powers), the closing-out (at least momentarily) of Congolese social revolution with the coup by Mobutu, the Unilateral Declaration of Independence of the Rhodesian white settlers.

The bloom was off. The rosy optimism of 1960–”Africa’s Year of Independence”–was over. The euphoria of the founding of the OAU in 1963 was now a memory. And Africa settled into the realities of enormous economic difficulties, political repression (including massively in South Africa after the Rivonia trial), and neo-colonialism seemingly triumphant. The main “action” was in the Portuguese colonies, where the movements had launched their wars for national liberation.

The Portuguese African struggles paid off, as we know. The Portuguese collapsed internally, and suddenly in 1975, all the former Portuguese colonies were independent states. We know too the further developments: independence of Zimbabwe in 1980, the increased struggle of SWAPO, and the reemergence of a popular political struggle in South Africa coupled with an intensified pressure from ANC: the Durban strike, the founding of COSATU, Soweto, the mergence of the UDF, the Dakar meting, etc. We know also the other side of this coin: “destabilization” everywhere, beginning with the march on Luanda in 1975.

Yet we of course should not miss the difference between 1965-75 and 1975-87. Today South Africa tries to destabilize and forbids TV coverage of African funeral marches. Then they ruled with an iron hand. Today the U.S. Congress votes sanctions. Today they are compelled to release Govan Mbeki. Today they “merely” destabilize. Today they are clearly on the defensive.

The transformation is the result of African political organization, particularly in southern Africa. What role have outside solidarity organizations played in this? An important one. We should neither minimize it nor exaggerate it. The outside solidarity work has affected in important ways the constraints within which the U.S. and west European governments operate. This in turn affects the constraints within which the South African government operates. It is vital to tighten (and sometimes to alter) these constraints. And this has been done.

The campaign for disinvestment began in the late 1950s. It is today at last more or less successful. This is a very positive achievement. On the other hand, it points to the limitations of our possibilities. Disinvestment is more complicated in its consequences than we pretended, which is what our conservative opponents always predicted. As a result, everyone is “thinking” about it–the legal movements inside South Africa, the ANC, the Frontline States, the solidarity organizations. In a sense this shouldn’t have been so. We should have anticipated the present ambiguities and have had a strategy ready.

It is of course not too late. And we will solve this one, with a little effort. But are there other such “pitfalls” or dilemmas awaiting us? The struggle in Southern Africa will still be long. We should look ahead.

Originally published in ACAS 10 years On – Now, ACAS Bulletin 23 (1988), pp. 35-40.

Reprinted in ACAS Bulletin 81

I feel quite privileged and very honored to be asked to serve as the co-chair of ACAS. It is an organization which I have long admired and whose members have been particularly important in my intellectual, professional and personal development. Their commitment to the cause of peace and justice in southern Africa has been particularly heartening and encouraging to me and so many others over the years.

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. Last year, we saw a tremendous leap forward, both in the struggle inside South Africa and in this country. With the Free South Africa Movement building on years of anti-apartheid grassroots activity, it became the catalyst for igniting the spark of mass opposition to apartheid which has swept this country. Those loud protests succeeded in raising the visibility of the apartheid issue to force the international community to intensify its opposition to the Botha regime. Here in the U.S. we have dealt a death blow to the policy of constructive engagement by forcing Reagan to sign the Executive Order – no matter how weak – imposing sanctions on South Africa. Clearly, it is not enough, and we must go much, much further. Because of our success, our enemies have recognized our strength and our power and they are fighting back.

In fact, they are fighting back harder than ever.

However, the coming year offers us some of the best opportunities to keep the apartheid issue before the public despite attempts to put it on the back burner. Several important anniversaries will be observed this year: the 10th anniversary of the Soweto massacre, in which close to a thousand school children were murdered, the 20th anniversary of South Africa’s illegal control over Namibia and the 25th anniversary of the launching of the armed struggle by the African National Congress (ANC). We must use these anniversaries to further mobilize and educate the American people.

This also promises to be a very significant year for the struggle in southern Africa for other reasons as well. If 1985 was a pivotal time for South Africa, then 1986 will he even more of a watershed year. The formation of the Congress of South Africa Trade Unions (COSATU) is an exciting development which will precipitate important events. Already the new federation has announced that it will call for the burning of pass-books in the middle of this year. Bishop Tutu also has announced that the churches will call for an economic boycott. What this means, of course, is that the struggle will intensify even further.

When these events happen, we must be prepared to take immediate action in support of our brothers and sisters in South Africa. This is where an organization like ACAS can make a valuable contribution. One of the major tactics the racist regime and their U.S. allies will attempt is to obfuscate the real issues in the southern Africa region in order to gain support for apartheid. The activist-scholar community can play a critical role in providing the information necessary to refute the South African propaganda machine. We must be in the vanguard of exposing the lies and misinformation that will be presented to the American public.

We must take the lead in focusing attention on how apartheid is affecting the entire southern Africa region. We must expose the continued exploitation and oppression in Namibia, the hunger in southern Africa and the activities of the “contras” in Angola and Mozambique. Most importantly, we must help shift the focus in this country back to apartheid terrorism as opposed to Soviet expansionism as the root cause for problems in southern Africa.

Jonas Savimbi’s visit to the U.S. leaves us with a task to be done. We must intensify our lobbying efforts to defeat congressional bills to fund UNITA and to prevent covert aid as well. Our campaign cry must be “funding for UNITA is funding for South Africa.” We must lobby for the passage of the Namibia bill introduced by Pat Schroeder and we must go back to push for stronger sanctions against South Africa. A comprehensive economic sanctions bill is the only viable option given the present level of the struggle inside South Africa.

We must seize this historic moment to make our contribution to the final phase of the struggle for justice in South Africa. The time is now. The task is at hand. The challenge is ours and I know that we will not fail. Onward to victory!

Dated February 5, 1986

About the Author

In 1986, Dr Jean Sindab of the Washington Office on Africa was Co-Chair of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars.

From ACAS Bulletin 81