Category: 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