Category: ACAS Review (Bulletin)

ACAS Review (previously: Bulletin)

Mar 16, 2009

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Re: Lessons of Zimbabwe (Timothy Scarnecchia, Jocelyn Alexander, et. al.)

For a number of scholars, Mahmood Mamdani’s ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’ requires a further response, given Mamdani’s stature as a scholar and public intellectual. Some aspects of his argument are uncontroversial: there was a real demand for land redistribution — even the World Bank was calling for it in the late 1990s as the best way forward in Zimbabwe — and some of the Western powers’ original pronouncements and actions were hypocritical. There is a real danger, however, in simplifying the lessons of Zimbabwe. It isn’t just a matter of stark ethnic dichotomies, the urban-rural divide, or the part played by ‘the West’.

One of the more difficult tasks for scholars working on Zimbabwe is to convince peers working on other areas of Africa to look more deeply at the crisis and not to be fooled by Mugabe’s rhetoric of imperialist victimisation. Mamdani has, unfortunately, fallen in with this rhetoric by characterising Zimbabwean history and politics as fundamentally a battle between what he sees as an urban-based opposition, supported by the West, and a peasant-based ruling party besieged by external forces. This flight of fantasy portrays Mugabe and his Zanu-PF cronies as heroes of a landless peasantry (which is how they see themselves) and the state — backed up by the paramilitary violence of war veterans and others — as the vanguard of a peasant revolution. We suggest that Mamdani acquaint himself with the large body of Zimbabwean scholarship, which is easily available, rather than selectively using the arguments of scholars such as Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros on land reform, and Gideon Gono, Mugabe’s Reserve Bank governor, as his source on sanctions. Citing Gono is rather like using Milton Obote’s writings as a source for conditions in Uganda in the 1960s and 1970s. A starting point for more informed scholarship is the recent Bulletin of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars.

Mamdani’s portrayal of Zimbabwe’s opposition politics is insulting to those who continue to endure so much in their struggle to build a better Zimbabwe. He argues that urban trade unions have always been marginal to the nationalist movement because of their supposed ‘Ndebele leadership’, and that the current opposition follows in this ‘weak’ trade-union tradition as well as being in thrall to Western interests. What he doesn’t mention is the trade unions’ hard-fought battle against repression before and after 1980. There were many challenges to overcome, among which ethnic politics was hardly the most prominent. That leaders such as Morgan Tsvangirai managed to reshape the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) from what had been a pro-Zanu organisation into a viable political opposition by the early 1990s reflects an Africa-wide and Africa-based phenomenon that Mamdani apparently missed. By accepting Zanu-PF’s argument that the MDC is primarily limited to urban areas and is the product of the West, Mamdani’s account loses credibility.

Mamdani has also sugar-coated his portrayal of political violence in Zimbabwe. He fails even to mention that many ‘peasants’ in Shona-speaking Zanu-PF strongholds turned against Mugabe and major Zanu-PF leaders in the March 2008 elections. It was this reversal that sparked a new round of state-sponsored violence against the same Shona peasantry that Mamdani cites as the beneficiaries of Mugabe’s benevolent dictatorship. In addition, during the months preceding the run-off election (April-June 2008), food relief was denied to rural areas, leaving the World Food Programme and other groups to scramble to re-establish supply to the Zimbabwean peasantry Mamdani suggests are at the centre of Zanu-PF’s concern. Repressive legislation and actions by Zanu-PF activists are magically transformed by Mamdani into acts of generosity to outsiders. After noting discrimination against farm workers in gaining access to land on the grounds they or ‘their elders’ came from another country, Mamdani adds that ‘some were given citizenship.’ Yet he omits the fact that just before the 2002 presidential election the Zanu-PF government removed citizenship from many farm workers and other Zimbabweans whose parents or grandparents had non-Zimbabwean citizenship rights. The disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of perceived opposition supporters disappears in Mamdani’s analysis.

Mamdani’s contention that the West, not Mugabe and the Zanu-PF government, is responsible for the current crisis is as dangerous as it is wrong. By selectively citing instances over the past eight years when the West has cancelled donor funding, Mamdani gives the impression that the West has not been involved in sustaining life in Zimbabwe. The reality is that there are whole sections of the Zimbabwean population that the Zanu-PF leadership would rather punish with starvation than allow to support the opposition. ‘We would be better off with only six million people, with our own [ruling party] people who supported the liberation struggle,’ Didymus Mutasa, one of the key insiders in Zanu-PF, said in 2002, when drought again threatened to kill thousands of rural Zimbabweans. ‘We don’t want all these extra people.’ Western food aid has been a lifeline for ‘these extra people’ — when the state has allowed access.

Sanctions cannot excuse the callous disregard for human life Mugabe and his associates have shown, dating back to the Gukurahundi between 1983 and 1986 (which Mamdani glosses over as a brief bout of violence following from the tension between Zanu-PF and the ‘Ndebele unions’ in 1986), or the repeated land seizures which have been going on since the 1980s, the forced removals, violent reprisals, and the withholding of food aid. Furthermore, Mamdani’s suggestion that the fall in direct investment in Zimbabwe is the result of sanctions is dishonest. There are no sanctions against direct investment in Zimbabwe, as shown by Anglo American’s willingness to invest $400 million in Zimbabwe during the summer of 2008 to protect access to platinum mines. There have been large investments from South Africa, India and China, as Mugabe has bartered away the nation’s resources for short-term interests. It is the kleptocracy and violence fostered by Mugabe and Co that has scared off other investors, not sanctions.

At a time when thousands of people in Zimbabwe are threatened by a cholera epidemic — in part at least as a consequence of Zanu-PF’s decision to replace MDC municipal officials with Zanu-PF ‘urban governors’ — and international donors are scrambling to help deal with the collapse of the health sector and widespread hunger, intellectuals such as Mamdani should display more responsibility and less posturing in their attempts to draw meaningful lessons from Zimbabwe.

Jocelyn Alexander, Linacre College, Oxford
Andrea Arrington, University of Arkansas
Michael Bratton, Michigan State University
Bill Derman, Michigan State University
William J. Dewey, The University of Tennessee
Matthew Engelke, London School of Economics
Linda Freeman, Carleton University
Petina Gappah, Zimbabwean writer and lawyer
Kenneth Good, RMIT University Melbourne
David Gordon, Bowdoin College
Amanda Hammar, Nordic Africa Institute
David McDermott Hughes, Rutgers University
Diana Jeater, University of the West of England
Tony King, University of the West of England
Bill Kinsey, University of Zimbabwe
Norma Kriger, Cornell University
Todd Leedy, University of Florida
JoAnn McGregor, University College London
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Showers Mawowa, University of KwaZulu Natal
David Maxwell, Keele University
Donald Mead, Michigan State University
John Metzler, Michigan State University
David Moore, University of Johannesburg
Shylock Muyengwa, University of Florida
Blair Rutherford, Carleton University
John S. Saul, York University
Richard Saunders, York University
Timothy Scarnecchia, Kent State University, Ohio
Anne Schneller, Michigan State University
Marja Spierenburg, Vrije University of Amsterdam
Colin Stoneman, JSAS Editorial Coordinator
Blessing-Miles Tendi, Oxford University
Wendy Urban-Mead, Bard College
Elaine Windrich, Stanford University

This letter originally appeared in the London Review of Books 31, n.1 (December 1, 2009) in response to Mamdani’s ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’. It is republished here with the kind permission of the LRB editors.

Mar 16, 2009

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Re: Lessons of Zimbabwe (Terence Ranger)

Mahmood Mamdani is correct to stress that Robert Mugabe is not just a crazed dictator or a corrupt thug but that he promotes a programme and an ideology that are attractive to many in Africa and to some in Zimbabwe itself. Mamdani takes care to balance this by recognising Mugabe’s propensity for violence. Yet this balance is hard to maintain and towards the end of his article Mamdani lets it slip.

‘Western countries,’ he writes, ‘brought their influence to bear on key Southern African Development Community (SADC) members — Botswana and Zambia — to split the organisation. Ian Khama, the president of Botswana, went so far as to announce publicly that he would not recognise the results of the 2008 elections.’ But Khama needed no Western influence to realise that the June presidential rerun in Zimbabwe was illegitimate. Every African observer mission — Botswana’s own, the Pan-African Parliament’s, SADC’s — pronounced that Mugabe’s victory was vitiated by the violence that went on right up until the polls, which the observers saw with their own eyes, and of which some of them were the victims. The problem is rather to explain why so many SADC states have continued to accept Mugabe as the legitimate president despite the first-hand reports of their own emissaries.

This isn’t a minor flaw in Mamdani’s article since it bears on his principal analytical point. He stresses the opposition between urban workers and rural peasants, the latter supporting Mugabe because of land restitution. Yet the violence between March and June this year took place overwhelmingly in the rural areas. It would not have been necessary had the peasantry of Mashonaland and Manicaland solidly supported the regime. The March election showed that they did not, despite land re-distribution. The regime lost virtually all the Manicaland seats and there were solid votes for the opposition even in Mashonaland constituencies which Zanu-PF had previously taken for granted. Indeed it was in such constituencies that the violence was concentrated.

Zimbabwean peasants confront hunger, disease, repression; they have no inputs of seeds, fertiliser and draught power. The redistribution of land has been conducted in a way that makes a mockery of the potentials of peasant production. Mugabe’s policy may be an inspiration to those in South Africa who want to redress gross inequalities in landholding. But it should also be a warning of how not to go about it.

This letter originally appeared in the London Review of Books 30, n.24 (December 18, 2008) in response to Mamdani’s ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’. It is republished here with the kind permission of the LRB editors.

Mar 16, 2009

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Lessons of Zimbabwe: Mugabe in Context

It is hard to think of a figure more reviled in the West than Robert Mugabe. Liberal and conservative commentators alike portray him as a brutal dictator, and blame him for Zimbabwe’s descent into hyperinflation and poverty. The seizure of white-owned farms by his black supporters has been depicted as a form of thuggery, and as a cause of the country’s declining production, as if these lands were doomed by black ownership. Sanctions have been imposed, and opposition groups funded with the explicit aim of unseating him.

There is no denying Mugabe’s authoritarianism, or his willingness to tolerate and even encourage the violent behaviour of his supporters. His policies have helped lay waste the country’s economy, though sanctions have played no small part, while his refusal to share power with the country’s growing opposition movement, much of it based in the trade unions, has led to a bitter impasse. This view of Zimbabwe’s crisis can be found everywhere, from the Economist and the Financial Times to the Guardian and the New Statesman, but it gives us little sense of how Mugabe has managed to survive. For he has ruled not only by coercion but by consent, and his land reform measures, however harsh, have won him considerable popularity, not just in Zimbabwe but throughout southern Africa. In any case, the preoccupation with his character does little to illuminate the socio-historical issues involved.

Many have compared Mugabe to Idi Amin and the land expropriation in Zimbabwe to the Asian expulsion in Uganda. The comparison isn’t entirely off the mark. I was one of the 70,000 people of South Asian descent booted out by Idi Amin in 1972; I returned to Uganda in 1979. My abiding recollection of my first few months back is that no one I met opposed Amin’s expulsion of ‘Asians’. Most merely said: ‘It was bad the way he did it.’ The same is likely to be said of the land transfers in Zimbabwe.

What distinguishes Mugabe and Amin from other authoritarian rulers is not their demagoguery but the fact that they projected themselves as champions of mass justice and successfully rallied those to whom justice had been denied by the colonial system. Not surprisingly, the justice dispensed by these demagogues mirrored the racialised injustice of the colonial system. In 1979 I began to realise that whatever they made of Amin’s brutality, the Ugandan people experienced the Asian expulsion of 1972 — and not the formal handover in 1962 — as the dawn of true independence. The people of Zimbabwe are likely to remember 2000-3 as the end of the settler colonial era. Any assessment of contemporary Zimbabwe needs to begin with this sobering fact.

Though widespread grievance over the theft of land — a process begun in 1889 and completed in the 1950s — fuelled the guerrilla struggle against the regime of Ian Smith, whose Rhodesian Front opposed black majority rule, the matter was never properly addressed when Britain came back into the picture to effect a constitutional transition to independence under majority rule. Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980, but the social realities of the newly independent state remained embedded in an earlier historical period: some six thousand white farmers owned 15.5 million hectares of prime land, 39 per cent of the land in the country, while about 4.5 million farmers (a million households) in ‘communal areas’ were left to subsist on 16.4 million hectares of the most arid land, to which they’d been removed or confined by a century of colonial rule. In the middle were 8500 small-scale black farmers on about 1.4 million hectares of land.

This was not a sustainable arrangement in a country whose independence had been secured at the end of a long armed struggle supported by a land-hungry population. But the agreement that Britain drafted at Lancaster House in 1979 — and that the settlers eagerly backed — didn’t seem to take into account the kind of transition that would be necessary to secure a stable social order. Two of its provisions, one economic and the other political, reflected this short-termism: one called for land transfers on a ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ basis, with the British funding the scheme; the other reserved 20 per cent of seats in the House of Assembly for whites — 3 per cent of the population — giving the settler community an effective veto over any amendment to the Lancaster House terms. This was qualified majority rule at best. Both provisions had a time limit: 1990 for land transfers based on the market principle, and 1987 for the settler minority to set limits on majority rule. The deal sustained illusions among the settlers that what they had failed to achieve by UDI — Smith’s 1965 declaration of independence from the UK — and force of arms, they could now achieve through support from a government of ‘kith and kin’ (as Smith called it) in Britain. In reality, however, the agreement drew a line under settler privilege.

The inadequacy of the Lancaster House provisions for the decolonisation of land ensured that it remained the focus of politics in independent Zimbabwe. The course of land relations and land reform in Zimbabwe has over the years been meticulously documented by Sam Moyo, a professor who directs the African Institute of Agrarian Studies in Harare. Transfers during the first decade of independence were so minimal that they increased rather than appeased land hunger. The new regime in Harare, installed in 1980 and led by Mugabe and his party, Zanu, called for the purchase of eight million hectares to resettle 162,000 land-poor farming households from communal areas. But the ban on compulsory purchase drove up land prices and encouraged white farmers to sell only the worst land. As the decade drew to a close, only 58,000 families had been resettled on three million hectares of land. No more than 19 per cent of the land acquired between 1980 and 1992 was of prime agricultural value.

As the 1980s wore on, land transfers actually declined, dropping from 430,000 hectares per annum during the first half of the decade to 75,000 hectares during the second. The greater land hunger became, the more often invasions were mounted; in response, Mugabe created local ‘squatter control’ units in 1985, and they were soon evicting squatters in droves. At this point Zimbabwean law still defined a squatter in racial terms, as ‘an African whose house happens to be situated in an area which has been declared European or is set apart for some other reason’. By 1990, 40 per cent of the rural population was said to be landless or affected by the landlessness of dependent relations.

When the Lancaster House Agreement’s rules on land transfer expired in 1990, the pressure to take direct action was intensified by two very different developments: an IMF Structural Adjustment Programme and recurrent drought. Peasant production, which had been a meagre 8 per cent of marketed output at independence in 1980, and had shot up to 45 per cent by 1985, declined as a result of the programme. Trade-union analysts pointed out that employment growth also fell from 2.4 per cent in the late 1980s to 1.55 per cent in the period 1991-97. The percentage of households living in poverty throughout the country increased by 14 per cent in five years. There was now widespread squatting on all types of land, from communal areas to state land, commercial farms (mainly growing tobacco), resettlement areas and urban sites.

The demand for land reform came from two powerful groups at extreme ends of the social spectrum yet both firmly in Mugabe’s camp: the veterans of the liberation war and the small but growing number of indigenous businesses, hitherto the main beneficiaries of independence under majority rule. At the end of the liberation war in 1980, 20,000 guerrillas had been incorporated into the national army and other state organisations, and the rest — about 45,000 — had had to fend for themselves. They found it difficult to survive without land or a job, which is why land occupations began in the countryside soon after independence.

Mugabe and the Zanu leaders tended at first to dismiss complaints from veterans as expressions of resentment on the part of the rival liberation movement, Joshua Nkomo’s Zapu, which had been marginalised in 1980. But after Zanu and Zapu signed a unity accord in 1987, former fighters from both groups became involved in land agitation. Their most significant joint initiative was to form a welfare organisation, the Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association (ZNLWVA) in 1988, which called for pensions to be paid and land redistributed. It soon gained a large membership drawn from most sections of Zimbabwean society and from the two ethnic groups — the Shona majority and the Ndebele — which had defined Zanu and Zapu respectively. Its members, about 200,000 of them, came from a variety of classes, employed and unemployed, urban and rural, with positions in different branches of the state and party and the private sector. Although their strength lay in the countryside, the war vets formed the only alliance that was both independent of Mugabe and Zanu-PF, and could claim to have national support, giving them a decisive advantage over the better organised but urban-based trade-union federation in the power struggle that would shortly tear the country apart.

War vets were among the first targets of Structural Adjustment, when its effects began to be felt in 1991. Entire departments and ministries that had been heavily staffed by ex-combatants were disbanded and the stage set for a series of high-profile confrontations between veterans and government. Mugabe accused the vets of being ‘armchair critics’ at the inaugural conference of the ZNLWVA in April 1992; they went on to organise street demonstrations, lock top government and party officials in their offices, interrupt Mugabe’s Heroes’ Day speech in 1997, intervene in court sessions and besiege the State House.

After the Lancaster House Agreement had expired, the government tried to occupy the middle ground by shifting from the ‘willing buyer, willing seller’ formula with a new law, the Land Acquisition Act of 1992, which gave the state powers of compulsory purchase, though landowners retained the right to challenge the price set and to receive prompt compensation. By the late 1990s, market-led land transfers had dwindled to a trickle. So had British contributions to the fund set up to pay landowners, with a mere £44 million paid out between 1980 and 1992, much less than anticipated at Lancaster House. When New Labour took over in 1997, Clare Short, the minister for international development, claimed that since neither she nor her colleagues came from the landed class in Britain — ‘my own origins are Irish and as you know we were colonised not colonisers,’ she wrote to the Zimbabwean minister of agriculture and land — they could not be held responsible for what Britain had done in colonial Rhodesia.

This effective default coincided with a rise inside Zimbabwe of demands for compulsory acquisition. Veterans led land occupations at Svosve and Goromonzi in 1997, clashing with Mugabe and Zanu-PF. They were joined by local chiefs and party leaders, peasants and spirit mediums (who had played a key role in the liberation war against Ian Smith). The next year, a wave of co-ordinated land occupations swept across the country, with veterans receiving critical support from the Indigenous Business Development Centre (IBDC), an affirmative action lobby set up in 1988 by members of the new black bourgeoisie. From now on, two very different elements huddled under the war vets’ banner: the landless victims of settler colonialism and the elite beneficiaries of the end of settler rule.

It was largely for his own purposes, but also as a response to pressure from squatters, occupiers and their local leaders, as well as from sections of the new black elite, that in 1999 Mugabe decided to revise the constitution drafted at Lancaster House. Two major changes were envisaged: one would allow him to stay in power for two more terms and would ensure immunity from prosecution for political and military leaders accused of committing crimes while in office; the other would empower the government to seize land from white farmers without compensation, which was held to be the responsibility of Britain. The proposals were put to a referendum in February 2000 and defeated: 45.3 per cent of voters were in favour. But only a little more than 20 per cent of the electorate had cast a vote. The urban centres of Harare and Bulawayo were three to one against adoption; voting in the countryside was marked by large-scale abstentions. Post-colonial Zimbabwe had reached a turning point.

Very early on, the colonial bureaucracy had translated the ethnic mosaic of the country into an administrative map in such a way as to allow minimum co-operation and maximum competition between different ethnic groups and areas, ensuring among other things that labour for mining, manufacture and service was not recruited from areas where peasants were needed on large farms or plantations. These areas, as it happened, were mainly Shona and so, unsurprisingly, when the trade-union movement developed in Rhodesia, its leaders were mostly Ndebele, and had few links with the Shona leadership of the peasant-based liberation movement (Mugabe belongs to the Shona majority). I remember listening to the minister of labour in Harare in 1981 complain that workers had failed to support the nationalist movement. When I suggested that it might be useful to turn the proposition around and ask why the nationalist movement had failed to organise support among workers, there was silence.

The Shona-Ndebele divide so conspicuous in the two guerrilla movements produced great tension after independence between the mainly Shona government and the mainly Ndebele labour movement, with Mugabe’s ferocious repression in Ndebele areas in 1986 remaining the bloodiest phase in post-independence Zimbabwean history. The slaughter in Matabeleland was followed by a ‘reconciliation’ that paved the way for a unity government in 1987, but Zanu-PF leaders thereafter suspected all protest — from whatever source — of concealing an Ndebele agenda.

The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, formed in 1981 with the blessing of the government, had by the end of the decade distanced itself from its Zanu patrons, purged internal corruption and elected an independent leadership. In the 1990s it spearheaded the national agitation against Structural Adjustment and the one-party state that acquiesced in it. Yet its organisation in the countryside was confined to workers on commercial farms. The ZCTU had at first been an umbrella body for private sector unions. The spectacular growth of ZCTU, its organisation of public sector workers, has been written about by two Zimbabwean social historians, Brian Raftapolous and Ian Phimister. After independence, workers in the rapidly Africanised public sector had retained close links to the government. But this began to change when the Structural Adjustment Programme led to public sector job losses and many African workers — especially veterans — were dismissed. When government workers came out on strike in 1996, the ZCTU was able to establish a base in the public sector. A general strike in 1997 and mass stay-aways the following year set the trade unions against the government. Civil servants — including teachers and health workers — who had declared allegiance to the ruling party and the state now began to affiliate to the ZCTU. In 1998, it organised a National Constituent Assembly, with the participation of civic, NGO and church groups.

By the time Mugabe put forward amendments to the Lancaster House constitution, an impressive alliance of forces — not only trade unions, churches, civic and NGO groups, but white farmers and Western governments — was arrayed for battle. The Movement for Democratic Change was formed a few months before the 2000 referendum, to campaign for a ‘no’ vote. The coalition was diverse, containing, on the one hand, public sector workers trying to roll back the tide of Structural Adjustment; on the other, uncompromising free-marketeers such as Eddie Cross, the MDC secretary of economic affairs and a senior figure in the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries, who was intent on privatising almost everything, including education.

The veterans reacted to the defeat of the constitutional proposals by launching land occupations in Masvingo province. This prompted a split in the ruling party. With Mugabe out of the country, the acting president, Joseph Msika, told the police to torch the new squatter shacks. This was consistent with Zanu-PF policy: in the early days, Mugabe had been praised as a ‘conciliator’ by the international community for ensuring the security and property of those whites who remained in Zimbabwe, and evicting black squatters. Two decades later the position had changed: the support of the whites was no longer so important to Mugabe, and he was under enormous pressure from the veterans. With much to gain from casting his lot in with the rural insurgency, he returned from his trip and announced that there would be no government evictions. As land occupations spread to every province — 800 farms were occupied at the height of the protests — the split in the government and party hierarchy deepened. Inevitable tension between the executive and the judiciary undermined the rule of law; the executive sacked a number of judges, replacing them with others more sympathetic to land reform, and enacted pro-squatter legislation.

‘Fast-track’ land reform was now underway. The types of land that would be acquired compulsorily were specified by the government: unused or underutilised land, land owned by absentees or people with several farms; land above a certain area (determined by region) and land contiguous with communal areas. The white owners of around 2900 commercial farms listed for compulsory acquisition and redistribution were given 90 days to move out. Government directives specified that ‘owners of farms marked for redistribution will be compensated for improvements made on the land, but not for the land itself, as this land was stolen from the original owners in the colonial era.’

The closing date for ‘fast-track’ land acquisition — August 2002 — came and went, but occupations continued unimpeded until mid-2003, and on a diminished scale for a year or so after that. Chiefs fought for land for their constituents and for themselves, and so did their counterparts in the state bureaucracy and the private sector. In Matabeleland, a minority of pro-MDC chiefs were sceptical of land reform, but later submitted claims. The black elite made a brazen land grab in direct contravention of the ‘one person, one farm’ policy, provoking a hue and cry in society at large and within the ruling party; the government set up a presidential commission to determine the facts. Crucially, in 2005 the government passed an amendment declaring all agricultural land to be state land. Land was seized from nearly 4000 white farmers and redistributed: 72,000 large farmers received 2.19 million hectares and 127,000 smallholders received 4.23 million hectares.

What land reform has meant or may come to mean for Zimbabwe’s economy is still hotly disputed. Recently there have been signs that scholarly opinion is shifting. A study by Ian Scoones of Sussex University’s Institute of Development Studies — in collaboration with the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape — challenges some of the conventional wisdom in media and academic circles within and beyond Zimbabwe. The problem with this wisdom is that certain highly destructive aspects of reform — coercion; corruption and incompetence; cronyism in the redistribution of land; lack of funds and an absence of agricultural activity — have come to stand for the whole process. In particular, Scoones identifies five myths: that land reform has been a total failure; that its beneficiaries have been largely political cronies; that there is no new investment in the new settlements; that agriculture is in ruins; and that the rural economy has collapsed. Researchers at PLAAS have been quick to point out that over the past eight years small-scale farmers ‘have been particularly robust in weathering Zimbabwe’s political and economic turmoil, as well as drought’. Ben Cousins, the director of PLAAS and one of the most astute South African analysts of agrarian change — who had previously argued that the land reform would destroy agricultural production — now says that the future of Zimbabwe lies in providing small farmers with subsidies so that food security can be achieved. According to researchers at the African Institute for Agrarian Studies in Harare, new farms need to receive subsidised maize seed and fertiliser for a few seasons before achieving full production. Some might give up during this period, but not many — partly because the land tenure system doesn’t allow land sales; only land permits or leases can be acquired.

Zimbabwe has seen the greatest transfer of property in southern Africa since colonisation and it has all happened extremely rapidly. Eighty per cent of the 4000 white farmers were expropriated; most of them stayed in Zimbabwe. Redistribution revolutionised property-holding, adding more than a hundred thousand small owners to the base of the property pyramid. In social and economic — if not political — terms, this was a democratic revolution. But there was a heavy price to pay.

The first casualty was the rule of law, already tenuous by 1986. When international donors pressured the regime in the run-up to the parliamentary elections of 2000 by suspending aid and loans — a boycott favoured by the MDC and the unions — the government simply fixed the result in its favour. In the violence that followed, more than a hundred people died, including six white farmers and 11 black farm labourers. Some of the violence was government-sponsored and most of it state-sanctioned. The judiciary was reshaped, local institutions in rural areas narrowly politicised, and laws were passed which granted local agencies the powers necessary to crush opponents of land reform. Denouncing his adversaries in the trade unions and NGOs as servants of the old white ruling class, Mugabe authorised the militias and state security agencies to hound down opposition, as repression and reform went hand in hand. In 2003, the leading independent newspaper, the Daily News, was shut down. While jubilant government supporters applauded the sweep of the revolution in agrarian areas, the opposition denounced the repression that accompanied it. Land reform had been ruthless, but in 2004, the violence began to abate. There was noticeably less violence surrounding the parliamentary elections of 2005.

In retrospect, it is striking how little turmoil accompanied this massive social change. The explanation lies in the participation of key rural figures in ad hoc but officially sanctioned land committees. When first introduced in 1996, these committees had mixed fortunes, some not functioning at all, others becoming instruments of this or that group of squatters. But a radical change occurred in 2000, when the committees were expanded to include centrally appointed security officials, ruling party representatives and local government personnel, as well as local veterans and traditional leaders. Charged with implementing fast-track land reform, these committees sidelined the old local administrative structures. They also had a national impact, since they reported to similarly constituted provincial committees, which in turn reported to the Ministry of Local Government. It was the infusion of veterans that gave the new semi-bureaucratic committees the edge over their wholly bureaucratic counterparts. Local committees usually comprised between 15 and 30 members. The veterans formed ‘base camps’ represented by ‘committees of seven’ which took the lead in identifying land for acquisition as well as finding prospective beneficiaries (mostly from veterans’ waiting lists and rosters in former ‘communal areas’). They also judged disputes, punished petty criminals and allocated farm equipment, seeds and so on. In a word, the committees co-ordinated everything, thus constituting new centres of power.

The second casualty of the reform was farm labourers. There were about 300,000 in all, around half of them part-time. Fast-track reform resulted in a massive displacement of these workers, who were traditionally drawn from migrant labour. Nearly a fifth came from neighbouring states and were regarded with suspicion by peasants in communal areas; even if they’d been born locally, they were often seen as foreigners and denied citizenship rights. Migrants and women (many employed as casual labour) were the weakest links in the rural mobilisation for land reform. Many were thought to have been encouraged by landowners to vote against the government’s constitutional proposals, and the anti-land-reform lobby certainly tried to organise farm workers, ostensibly to protect their jobs, but really to protect the white ownership of farms. When the workers rallied by the MDC, civil society activists and white farmers clashed with veteran-led occupiers, they came off badly. Occupiers held meetings to explain to workers what was at stake and eventually came themselves to distinguish between white farms, not only on the basis of size, proximity to communal areas, and the amount of unused land, but also on the basis of the farmer’s attitudes, particularly on race and towards his workers, and whether he had participated in the counter-insurgency during the independence struggle.

Some of the 150,000 full-time farm workers threw in their lot with the occupiers, though usually not on the farms where they had been employed. About 90,000 kept their jobs on sugar and tea estates, and on new or already established tobacco and horticulture farms. About 8000 were granted land, but most were denied it on the grounds that they or their elders had come from foreign countries, though some were given citizenship. Many went from steady employment to contract or casual work; many others were forced to supplement their meagre incomes through fishing, petty trading, theft and prostitution.

The best publicised casualties of the land reform movement were the urban poor who hoped to benefit from extending land invasions to urban areas. The veterans spearheaded occupations of urban residential land in 2000-1. Housing co-operatives and other associations followed their lead and set up ‘illegal’ residential or business sites. But the state feared that it would lose control over towns to the MDC if the land reform movement was allowed to spread and met these occupations with stiff repression, including Operation Restore Order/ Murambatsvina, a surprise military-style intervention in 2005 in which tens of thousands of families were evicted. Not surprisingly, those who opposed land reform in rural areas were the strongest critics of government efforts to stifle occupations in urban areas.

The final casualty was food production: Zimbabwe, once a food surplus country, is today deficient in both foreign exchange and food. In 2002-3, half the population depended on food aid: this was a drought year and the figures improved in 2004-5. The UN now estimates that nearly half the country’s 13.3 million inhabitants will once again be dependent on food aid in 2009, after another drought year. A million of these are poor, urban residents who can’t afford imported food. The rest are peasants, most of them hit by drought. Climate change is clearly a factor here, its role most obvious in marginal land: the communal areas worked by millions of small farmers. A 2002 World Food Programme study noted that there had been three droughts in Zimbabwe since 1982 and that the 2002 drought, which also affected several neighbouring countries in Southern Africa, was the worst in 20 years. The WFP estimated that 12.8 million people in the region would require assistance as a result of that drought and that in Zimbabwe alone, overall production would decline by 25 per cent, with cereal production down 57 per cent and maize, the staple in the diet of ordinary Zimbabweans, down by a devastating two-thirds.

To separate out the effect of drought and that of reform — and thus to understand how land reform has hit production — one needs first to distinguish between three groups of agricultural producer: local white farmers, who were the target of the land reform; peasants with farms in communal areas; and foreign corporations, whose large farms (except for small tracts of unused land) remain intact. Harry Oppenheimer, for example, lost most of his private land, but his firm, Anglo American, kept its sugar estates, which it then sold to Tongaat Hulett, a South African firm with 15,000 hectares in Zimbabwe. In a nutshell, white commercial farmers focused on export crops, whereas communal farmers were the major source of food security. The production of tobacco, hitherto the main source of foreign exchange, is concentrated in large-scale commercial farms; it has seen the most severe decline, almost entirely as a result of land reform. Maize and cotton are peasant crops and have not really been directly affected by land reform, but have suffered badly from prolonged drought — maize production was down by 90 per cent between 2000 and 2003. In contrast, the production of crops — sugar, tea, coffee — grown mainly by the large corporate plantations has remained steady.

Besides drought and reform, there is a third cause of declining production: the targeted donor boycott. Zimbabwe has been the target of Western sanctions twice in the last 50 years: once after UDI in 1965 (very ‘soft’ sanctions, which did not stop the country becoming the second most industrialised in sub-Saharan Africa by the mid-1970s) and again after Zimbabwe’s entry into the Congo war in August 1998. Zimbabwe’s involvement in the war was not well received in the West. Participants in the donor conference for Zimbabwe that year were decidedly lukewarm about committing funds. Britain announced a review of arms sales to Zimbabwe and, after the conference, again disclaimed any responsibility for funding land reform. The following year the IMF suspended lending to Zimbabwe, while the US and the UK decided to fund the labour movement, led by the ZCTU, first to oppose constitutional change and then to launch the MDC as a full-fledged opposition party. Its enemies have claimed that, by the late 1990s, the ZCTU was dependent on foreign sources for two-thirds of its income. Once ‘fast-track’ land reform began in 2000, the Western donor community shut the door on Zimbabwe.

The sanctions regime, led by the US and Britain, was elaborate, tested during the first Iraq war and then against Iran. In 2001 Jesse Helms, previously a supporter of UDI, sponsored the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery bill (another sponsor was Hillary Clinton) and it became law in December that year. Part of the act was a formal injunction on US officials in international financial institutions to ‘oppose and vote against any extension by the respective institution of any loan, credit or guarantee to the government of Zimbabwe’. In autumn 2001 the IMF had declared Zimbabwe ‘ineligible to use the general resources of the IMF’ and removed it from the list of countries that could borrow from its Poverty and Growth Facility. In 2002, it issued a formal declaration of non-co-operation with Zimbabwe and suspended all technical assistance. The US legislation also authorised Bush to fund ‘an independent and free press and electronic media in Zimbabwe’ and to allocate six million dollars for ‘democracy and governance programmes’. This was fighting talk, Cold War vintage. The normative language of sanctions focuses less on the issues that prompted them in the first place — Zimbabwe’s intervention in the Congo war and the introduction of fast-track reform — than on the need for ‘good governance’. In citing the absence of this as a reason for its imposition of sanctions in 2002, the EU violated Article 98 of the Cotonou Agreement, which requires that disputes between African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries and the EU be resolved by the joint EU-ACP Council of Ministers.

Clearly, the old paradigm of sanctions — isolation — has given way to a more interventionist model, which combines punishment of the regime with subsidies for the opposition. So-called ‘smart’ sanctions are intended to target the government and its key supporters. In 2002, the US, Britain and the EU began freezing the assets of state officials and imposing travel bans. Only four days after the EU imposed sanctions, the US expanded the list of targeted individuals to include prominent businessmen and even church leaders, such as the pro-regime Anglican bishop, Nolbert Kunonga.

Nonetheless, sanctions mainly affect the lives of ordinary people. Gideon Gono, governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, wrote recently that the country’s foreign exchange reserves had declined from $830 million, representing three months’ import cover in 1996, to less than one month’s cover by 2006. Total foreign payments arrears increased from $109 million at the end of 1999 to $2.5 billion at the end of 2006. Foreign direct investment had shrunk from $444.3 million in 1998 to $50 million in 2006. Donor support, even to sectors vital to popular welfare, such as health and education, was at an all-time low. Danish support for the health sector, $29.7 million in 2000, was suspended. Swedish support for education was also suspended. The US issued travel warnings, blocked food aid during the heyday of land reform and opposed Zimbabwe’s application to the Global Fund to Fight Aids — the country has the fourth highest infection rate in the world. Though it was renewed in 2005, the Zimbabwe grant is meagre. Agriculture has been affected too: scale matters, but no one disputes that subsidies are vital for agriculture to be sustainable, and sanctions have made it more difficult to put a proper credit regime in place.

Despite the EU’s imposition of sanctions in the run-up to the parliamentary elections of 2002, Mugabe polled 56.2 per cent of the vote against Morgan Tsvangirai of the MDC’s 42 per cent. There were widespread allegations of Zanu-PF violence and last-minute gerrymandering, with polling stations in urban areas — Tsvangirai’s electoral base — closing early and extra stations being set up in rural areas, where Mugabe’s support was assured. Nonetheless, it was clear that support for Zanu-PF was higher than in the pre-fast-track elections of 2000. Bush and Blair refused to recognise the outcome, but Namibia, Nigeria and the South African observer team, which had monitored the elections, concluded that the result was legitimate. Whatever the truth of the matter, the Africans could do little in the face of mounting Western pressure, from Britain especially: a three-member panel of Commonwealth countries — Australia, Nigeria and South Africa — was convened to consider the question of Zimbabwe. There were reports of intense pressure from Tony Blair on Thabo Mbeki. The panel suspended Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth for a year. Zimbabwe withdrew from the organisation.

The experience of land reform in Zimbabwe has set alarm bells ringing in South Africa and all the former settler colonies where land shortage is still an issue. In South Africa especially, the upheaval and bitterness felt in Zimbabwe seems to suggest that the ‘Malaysian path’ to peaceful redistribution and development is not inevitable. An anxious South Africa and less powerful members of the Southern Africa Development Community tend to feel that sanctions, along with other destabilising policies pursued by the West against Zimbabwe, have only made matters worse. SADC states have long tried to reconcile the need to resist Western influence with the fact that they serve as a bridge between Africa and the wealthy Western economies, but South Africa’s non-confrontational policy vis-à-vis Mugabe — which Mbeki pursued despite mounting criticism from the ANC and the unions in South Africa — along with its provision of fuel and electricity to its northern neighbour, set it at odds with Western governments. South Africa and the SADC states describe their approach as one of ‘non- interference’, ‘stabilisation’ and ‘quiet diplomacy’, but the West sees it as a deliberate effort to undermine sanctions, and critics in South Africa — most recently Mandela — have found the Mbeki line much too conciliatory.

In 2007, SADC called for an end to sanctions against Zimbabwe and international support for a post-land-reform recovery programme, but earlier this year Western countries brought their influence to bear on key SADC members — Botswana and Zambia — to split the organisation. Ian Khama, the president of Botswana, went so far as to announce publicly that he would not recognise the results of the 2008 elections. The pressure on SADC came not only from Western countries, but from trade-union movements in the region, in particular Cosatu of South Africa, which has strong links with the ZCTU. Here is another striking aspect of the current Zimbabwe crisis: it is not just Western and pro- Western governments that have joined the sanctions regime, but many activists and intellectuals, for the most part progressives, have aligned themselves with distant or long-standing enemies in an effort to dislodge an authoritarian government clinging to power on the basis of historic grievances about the colonial theft of land. Symbolic of this was the refusal by Cosatu-affiliated unions to unload a cargo of Chinese arms destined for Zimbabwe when the An Yue Jiang sailed into Durban in April.

The arguments, which are not new, turn on questions of nationalism and democracy, pitting champions of national sovereignty and state nationalism against advocates of civil society and internationalism. One group accuses the other of authoritarianism and self-righteous intolerance; it replies that its critics are wallowing in donor largesse. Nationalists speak of a historical racism that has merely migrated from government to civil society with the end of colonial rule, while civil society activists speak of an ‘exhausted’ nationalism, determined to feed on old injustices. This fierce disagreement is symptomatic of the deep divide between urban and rural Zimbabwe. Nationalists have been able to withstand civil society-based opposition, reinforced by Western sanctions, because they are supported by large numbers of peasants. The tussle between these groups has even greater poignancy in former settler colonies than it had a generation earlier in former colonies north of the Limpopo, for the simple reason that the central legacy of settler colonialism — the land question — remained unresolved and explosive after independence. Southern African leaders have tried, with some success, to put out the fires in Zimbabwe before they spread beyond its borders. It is worth noting that the agreement between Zanu-PF and the MDC signed in September and brokered by Mbeki accepts land redistribution as irreversible and registers disagreement only over how it was carried out; it also holds Britain responsible for compensating white farmers. In the wake of Mbeki’s resignation as president of South Africa it is vital that this agreement remains in place. Few doubt that this is the hour of reckoning for former settler colonies. The increasing number of land invasions in KwaZulu Natal, and the violence that has accompanied them, indicate that the clock is ticking.

Bibliographical Note

Moyo, Sam & Paris Yeros (2005b), ‘Land Occupations and Land Reform in Zimbabwe: Towards the National Democratic Revolution’, in Reclaiming the Land, edited by Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, London: Zed Books; Moyo, Sam and Paris Yeros (2007), ‘The Radicalised State: Zimbabwe’s Interrupted Revolution’, Review of African Political Economy, 111; Moyo, Sam & Paris Yeros (forthcoming), ‘After Zimbabwe: State, Nation and Region in Africa’, in S. Moyo, P. Yeros & J. Vadell (eds.), The National Question Today: The Crisis of Sovereignty in Africa, Asia and Latin America; Chambati, W. and S. Moyo, Fast Track Land Reform and the Political Economy of Farm Workers in Zimbabwe, Harare: AIAS Monograph Series, forthcoming For a critical point of view, see, Lloyd Sachikonye, “The Land is the Economy: Revisiting the Land Question,” African Security Review 14(3), 2005; and, Raftopoulos, Brian & Ian Phimister (2004), ‘Zimbabwe Now: The Political Economy of Crisis and Coercion’, Historical Materialism, 12: 4; Patrick Bond and Masimba Manyanya, Zimbabwe’s Plunge — Exhausted Nationalism, Neoliberalism and the Search for Social Justice, Merlin Press, 2002; Henry Bernstein, ‘Land reform in Southern Africa in World Historical Perspective,’ ROAPE 96, 2003

On the non-Zimbabwean debate on the land reform, see, http://www.lalr.org.za/news/a-new-start-for-zimbabwe-by-ian-scoones.html (accessed on 27 September, 2008); IRIN, “Small Scale Farming Seen As the Only Alternative to Food Insecurity,” 22 September 2008. For a contrary point of view, see, Henry Bernstein, ‘Land reform in Southern Africa in World Historical Perspective,’ Review of African Political Economy 96, 2003

On war veterans, see, Sadomba, W (2006) War veterans and the land occupation movement in Zimbabwe, forthcoming, Harare;

On climate change and the impact of drought, see, C.H. Matarira, J.M. Makadho, F.C. Mwamuka, “Zimbabwe: Climate Change Impacts on Maize Production and Adaptive Measures for the Agricultural Sector,” Interim Report on Climate Change Country Studies, 1995, http://www.gcrio.org;

On sanctions, see, Gregory Elich, ‘Zimbabwe Under Siege,’ Swans Commentary Zimbabwe Under Seige,
http://www.swans.com/library/art8/elich004.html; Dr. Gideon Gono: How sanctions are ruining Zimbabwe, opinion piece, African Business, 2007.

On the debate among progressive intellectuals in Zimbabwe, see, Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros, ‘The Zimbabwe Question and the Two Lefts.’ Forthcoming in Historical Materialism, vol. 14, no. 4, 2007.

Mar 16, 2009

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Reflections on Mahmood Mamdani’s ‘Lessons of Zimbabwe’

Mahmood Mamdani, a university professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City remains one of the pre-eminent scholars of African Studies in the West. He also remains prolific, often taking the lead in unpacking controversial debates. For example, this month he has a new book out on the Darfur crisis, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (Knopf, 2009). And few can disagree about the impact of his previous two books. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (Pantheon, 2004) certainly contributed—especially in popular media—to our understanding of the historical roots of the “War on Terror”: to the United States’ engagement in proxy wars in Southern Africa, Latin America and Afghanistan and the antecedents of “collateral damage.” A decade earlier, his Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, 1996) became a must-read in universities.

So when, in early December 2008, the London Review of Books (hereafter LRB) published a long essay by Mamdani on the ongoing political and economic crises (at least for a decade now) in Zimbabwe, it was inevitable that it would provoke debate. As one critic of Mamdani’s concedes in this issue, “…whatever Mamdani writes he is always brilliant and provocative.”

In his LRB essay, Mamdani writes that “… it is hard to think of a figure more reviled in the West than Robert Mugabe,” but also that a pre-occupation with Mugabe’s character “… does little to illuminate the socio-historical issues involved,” or give any sense of how the Zimbabwean leader and his party, ZANU-PF, has managed to survive.

Mamdani then goes on to argue that Mugabe has not just ruled by coercion, but also by consent. That the land issue is at the crux of the crisis and that the “… the people of Zimbabwe are likely to remember 2000-3 as the end of the settler colonial era” (this is the period of intense political violence, invasion and settlement of white-owned farms in Zimbabwe following Mugabe’s loss of referendum vote and parliamentary elections). For Mamdani the political split in Zimbabwe is largely rural-urban, respectively in support of, or opposition to, Mugabe and ZANU-PF. Furthermore, an ethnic split characterizes Mugabe supporters on the one hand against that of the alliance of the Movement for Democratic Change and the Zimbabwean Congress of Trade Unions. Mamdani concluded his piece with a warning to neighboring South Africa:

Few doubt that this is the hour of reckoning for former settler colonies. The increasing number of land invasions in KwaZulu Natal (province in South Africa), and the violence that has accompanied them, indicate that the clock is ticking.

Not surprisingly Mamdani’s piece provoked wide response. Not only did it reflect the importance attached to his writings, but it also pointed to the passions that the Zimbabwe situation arouses.

The responses were quick and fast. For example, the distinguished Africanist Terence Ranger, of Oxford University, wrote in his letter to the LRB:

Mahmood Mamdani is correct to stress that Robert Mugabe is not just a crazed dictator or a corrupt thug but that he promotes a program and an ideology that are attractive to many in Africa and to some in Zimbabwe itself. Mamdani takes care to balance this by recognizing Mugabe’s propensity for violence. Yet this balance is hard to maintain and towards the end of his article Mamdani lets it slip.

Another early response came from 35 academics, who wrote a collective letter to the LRB. We publish that letter in full here, as well as Mamdani’s response to his critics in the LRB.

But it was not long after that the debate about the article extended beyond the pages of the LRB. Horace Campbell, author of Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation (Africa World Press, 2003) wrote an opinion piece for Pambazuka News. Sam Moyo (based at the Africa Institute for Agrarian Studies) and Paris Yeros (Catholic University of Minas Gerais) wrote a piece for Monthly Review’s Zine website. We reproduce those articles here.

A number of other academics, researchers and commentators have written commentaries on Mamdani’s original LRB piece since then and are published in this issue of ACAS Bulletin too: Patrick Bond (director of the Center for Civil Society at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa), Amanda Hammar (program coordinator at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala in Sweden), Elaine Windrich (Stanford University), David Moore (University of Johannesburg) and the former Zimbabwean liberation war Senior Commander and leader in the Zimbabwe Liberation Veterans Forum, Wilfred Mhanda.

Apart from Moyo and Yeros, this issue also includes contributions from two other scholars cited by Mamdani in his original essay: Ben Cousins, director of the Program on Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa — described by Mamdani as “… one of the most astute South African analysts of agrarian change” — as well as Brian Raftopoulos, one of Zimbabwe’s leading intellectuals. Raftopoulos is a former associate professor of the Institute for Development at the University of Zimbabwe and now director for Research and Policy at the Solidarity Peace Trust in South Africa.

The contributions of so many politically engaged scholars demonstrate how the debate over the Zimbabwe situation of the past nine years has never been simply an “academic” debate. At the same time, Mamdani’s contribution has helped to bring the more specific Zimbabwean debate to the attention of a wider audience.

While some may suggest that the frame of the debate has shifted since the formation of the unity government in Zimbabwe in February of 2009, it is important to fully consider how the fault lines in this debate will continue to shape domestic and international responses to the ongoing crises in Zimbabwe. How best to rebuild the economy and carry out sustainable land reforms, for example, or to locate sufficient international and regional support to end the cholera epidemic and restore much needed health services, are all questions that, in one way or another, must deal with the fundamental issues raised by the scholars included in this Bulletin.

This issue — like the last two [1 and 2]on the crises in Zimbabwe — reflects ACAS’s new focus to intervene publicly — and timely — as well as to disseminate widely key debates about contemporary African affairs, especially on-line.

A few final notes: We retained the British spelling and quotation style from the LRB and Pambazuka. We want to thank the editors of the London Review of Books, The Monthly Review Zine, and Pambazuka News for allowing us to reprint articles and letters here.

Finally, I’d like to thank Jacob Mundy, Bulletin co-editor, for layout and design of the issue, Wendy Urban-Mead and Blair Rutherford for their edits and ideas, Amanda Hammar and David Moore for coordinating and facilitating contributions to this issue from other key Zimbabwe experts, and most importantly, Timothy Scarnecchia, for collaborating on the idea for the special issue back in December, for cajoling people to write, and for coordinating collection of the articles.

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Feb 01, 2009

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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

Feb 01, 2009

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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

Feb 01, 2009

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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

Feb 01, 2009

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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

Feb 01, 2009

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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

Feb 01, 2009

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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.